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Title: The Willing Horse: A Novel

Creator: Ian Hay

Release date: August 9, 2014 [eBook #46549]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILLING HORSE: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Al Haines.




                           THE WILLING HORSE

                               _A Novel_


                                   BY

                                IAN HAY

     AUTHOR OF "A MAN’S MAN," "A SAFETY MATCH," "THE RIGHT STUFF,"
                   "THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND," ETC.



                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press Cambridge
                                  1921




                   COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY IAN HAY BEITH

                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




                                   TO

                                H. M. B.




                            *TO THE READER*


One is informed that novels touching upon the war are no longer read.
This, if true, reduces the novelist to the following alternatives:

(1) Writing a novel of some period of the world’s history antecedent to
the year nineteen-fourteen.  This is undoubtedly a wide field—the
Christian era alone covers twenty centuries—but it has been cultivated
by several writers already.

(2) Writing a post-war novel in which it is assumed that the war never
happened.  This would make it rather difficult to know what to do with
the graves of our dead.

(3) Writing a post-war novel about people who took no part in the war.
This would restrict one’s choice of hero, heroine, and characters
generally to Certified Lunatics, Convicts in residence, and
Conscientious Objectors.

I have therefore decided to take a chance.  The tale which follows is
based:

(_a_) Upon a frank admission that there has been a war.

(_b_) Upon a humble belief that the people chiefly worth writing about
in these days are those who gave body, soul—everything—to win that war.

That explains my choice of title.




                               *CONTENTS*

      I. The Valleys Stand so Thick with Corn
     II. Rebellious Marjorie
    III. Der Tag
     IV. A Tryst
      V. The Inevitable
     VI. Solo
    VII. Duet
   VIII. Chorus
     IX. The Book of the Words
      X. Discipline!  Discipline!  Discipline!
     XI. Enfin!
    XII. Tom Birnie
   XIII. Albert Clegg
    XIV. Two Sparrows
     XV. The Explorer
    XVI. The Great Pretend
   XVII. The Undefeated
  XVIII. The Old Order
    XIX. The Last Throw
     XX. Fountain Keep
    XXI. Identities
   XXII. The Mills of God
  XXIII. The Soul of Eric Bethune
   XXIV. Through




                          *THE WILLING HORSE*



                              *CHAPTER I*

                 *THE VALLEYS STAND SO THICK WITH CORN*


                                  *I*


A Sunday at Baronrigg is a chastening experience.  It is not exactly a
day of wrath—though one feels that it might easily become one—but it is
a time of tribulation for people who do not want to go to church—or, if
the worst happens, prefer their religious exercises to be brief and
dilute.

But neither brevity nor dilution makes any appeal to my friend Tom
Birnie.

"I am a member," he announces, as soon as a quorum has assembled at
Sunday breakfast, "of the old Kirk of Scotland; and I propose to attend
service at Doctor Chirnside’s at eleven o’clock.  If any of you would
care"—he addresses a suddenly presented perspective of immaculate
partings, bald spots and permanent waves—"to accompany me, a conveyance
will leave here at ten-forty."

"Well, we can’t _all_ get in, that’s plain," chirps Miss Joan Dexter
hopefully.  (The table is laid for fourteen.)

"The conveyance," continues the inexorable Tom, "holds twelve inside and
four out, not counting the coachman."

"It’s no good, Joan, old fruit," observes Master Roy Birnie.  "We keep a
pantechnicon!"

"I suppose there’s not a Church of England service within reach?" asks
little Mrs. Pomeroy, rather ingeniously.  "One’s own Church makes an
appeal to one which no other denomination cannot—can—adequately—doesn’t
it?" she concludes, a little uncertain both of her syntax and her host.
This is her first visit to Baronrigg.

"Now she’s done for herself!" whispers Master Roy into my left ear.

"I agree with you.  There is an Episcopal Church—Scottish Episcopal, of
course—at Fiddrie, three miles from here.  I shall be happy to send you
over there this evening at half-past six.  This morning, I know, you
will put up with our barbaric Northern rites!" replies Tom, with what he
imagines to be an indulgent smile.  "I like to see the Baronrigg pew
full."

And full it is.

The longer I know Tom Birnie, the more I marvel that Diana Carrick
married him.  That sentiment is shared by a good many people, but on
more abstract grounds than mine.  Tom is a just and considerate
landlord, an adequate sportsman, and a good specimen of that class by
whose voluntary service this country gets most of its local government
done, admirably, for nothing.  But there are certain things against Tom.

In the first place—to quote old Lady Christina Bethune, of Buckholm—"no
one knows who the creature is, or where he came from."  This implies
nothing worse than that since Tom represents the first generation of
Birnies born in this county, his forbears must have been born somewhere
else.  In other words—still quoting the same distinguished
authority—"they never existed at all."  As a matter of fact and common
knowledge, Tom’s grandfather was a minister of the Kirk, somewhere in
Perthshire, and his father an enormously successful member of the
Scottish Bar, who bought the derelict little estate of Strawick, hard by
here, and settled there in the late sixties with the presumptuous, but,
I think, excusable, intention of founding a family. Naturally a family
which has resided in our county for only forty-seven years can hardly be
expected to have drifted, as yet, within the range of Lady Christina’s
lorgnette.

Secondly, Tom is a Radical.  We are broad-minded people in this county,
and are quite indulgent to persons who disapprove of the leasehold
system (which does not obtain in Scotland), or who make excuses for the
late Mr. Gladstone, or who are inclined to criticise pheasant
preserving. That is the kind of Radicalism which we understand, and are
prepared to tolerate.  That was the sort of person Tom’s father was.
That is how Tom began.  But of late, it must be confessed, Tom has been
going it.  He supports the present Government; he is for reducing the
Army and Navy; he has recently helped to abolish our Second Chamber.
(That was no great calamity; but he and his friends have omitted to
provide us with a substitute.)  He has openly applauded the efforts of a
person named George to break up the foundations of our well-tried Social
System; while the courses which he advocates with regard to the taxation
of Land Values and the treatment of loyal Ulster, surpass belief.  That
is what the county has against Tom.

But I am neither a laird nor a farmer, and my indictment against Tom is
based on more personal and less venial grounds.  Firstly, he is not
human. He is a calculating machine, with about as much passion as a
parish pump.  Secondly, he is absolutely destitute of all sense of
humour.  And yet Diana married him!  Her own beautiful person exhaled
humanity and humour in equal proportions. In all her short life I never
knew her fail to understand a fellow-creature, or miss a humorous
situation.  Yet she married Tom Birnie. She married Tom Birnie, and she
broke off her engagement with Eric Bethune to do it.  I am a
humble-minded person, and I never professed to understand any woman—not
even my own wife, Diana’s sister—but I wonder, even now, how any girl
could have resisted Eric Bethune as he was twenty years ago, or, having
got him, have relinquished him in favour of Tom Birnie.  There was
something pretty big and tragic behind that broken-off engagement.  My
Eve knew what it was—I suppose Diana told her about it—but when I asked
for the explanation I was tersely instructed not to be an inquisitive
old busybody. As for Eric, he never mentioned the matter to me.  He
simply informed me that my services as best man would not be required
after all, and that he would be gratified if I would refrain from asking
damn silly questions.  (Not that I had asked any.)  Also, that he looked
to me to prevent other persons from doing so.

And now Tom Birnie is a baronet and a widower, with a son eighteen years
old, and Eric Bethune is still an eligible bachelor of forty-three. And
how he hates Tom Birnie!  However, I will introduce Eric presently.
First of all, I must get our party to church.



                                  *II*


The ancestral hereditary omnibus of the house of Baronrigg deposited us
at the kirk door at ten fifty-five precisely, and by the time that the
Reverend Doctor Chirnside’s Bible and hymn-book had been set out upon
the red velvet cushion of the pulpit by a bulbous old friend of mine
named James Dunshie—an octogenarian of austere piety, an infallible
authority on dry-fly fishing, and a methodical but impervious drinker—we
were all boxed into our places in the private gallery of Baronrigg.  It
is less of a gallery than a balcony, and juts out curiously from the
side of the little church, with the public gallery running across the
end wall on its right, and the minister on its left.  It recedes into a
deep alcove, and at the back is a fireplace, in which a fire is always
kept burning upon wintry Sundays.  The Baronrigg pew—and, indeed,
Baronrigg itself—came into the family from Diana’s side of the house:
she brought them to Tom on her marriage. The pew is rich in Carrick
associations.  It is reported of old Neil Carrick, the grandfather of
Diana and my Eve, that whenever he found himself dissatisfied—a not
infrequent occurrence—with the discourse of Doctor Chirnside’s
predecessor, it was his habit to rise from his red rep chair in the
forefront of the gallery, retire to the back, make up the fire with much
clatter of fire-irons, and slumber peacefully before the resulting blaze
with his back to the rest of the congregation. But no such licence was
permitted to us.  We sat austerely in two rows, gazing solemnly at the
blank wall opposite us, while Doctor Chirnside worked his will upon his
flock.  Doctor Chirnside is a tall, silver-haired, and pugnacious old
gentleman of about seventy.  He fears God, and exhibits considerable
deference towards Tom Birnie; but he regards the rest of his
congregation as dirt.  (At least, that is how we feel in his presence.)
This morning he entered the pulpit precisely on the stroke of eleven, in
deference to the Laird’s well-known prejudices on the subject of
punctuality—besides, I happened to know that he was coming on to lunch
at Baronrigg after service—and, having been securely locked in by James
Dunshie, adjusted his spectacles and gazed fiercely at some late comers.
Then he gave out the opening psalm.

In Craigfoot Parish Church we always sing the opening psalm
unaccompanied.  It is true that we possess a small organ, but that
instrument is still regarded with such deep suspicion by some of the
older members of the congregation that we only employ it to accompany
hymns—which, as is well known, have little effect one way or the other
upon one’s ultimate salvation.  But we take no risks with the Psalms of
David.  These are offered without meretricious trimmings of any kind,
save that furnished by the tuning-fork of Andrew Kilninver, our esteemed
auctioneer, estate agent, and precentor.

Accordingly, when Doctor Chirnside took up his psalter, the young lady
at the organ leaned back nonchalantly; Andrew Kilninver stirred
importantly in his seat, tuning-fork in hand; and the choir—highly
scented shop-girls and farmers’ daughters, assisted by overheated young
men in Sunday "blacks" and choker collars—braced themselves with the air
of people upon whose shoulders the credit, and maybe redemption, of a
whole parish rests.

There is something peculiarly majestic about the manner in which Doctor
Chirnside opens his morning service.  I believe that, in his view, the
unaccompanied psalm is the one relic of pure orthodoxy preserved by him
against the modern passion for hymns, organs, printed prayers, anthems,
and "brighter worship" generally. That graceless young ruffian, Roy
Birnie, gives an imitation of his performance which is celebrated
throughout the parish.  It runs something like this:

"Ha-humm!  Brethren, we will commence the public worrship of God, this
Lord’s Day, by singing to His praise part of the Seven Hundred and
Forty-Ninth Psalm.  Psalm Seven Hundred and Forty-Nine.  Ha-humm!  The
Church is full cold.  Will Mr. John Buncle, of Sandpits, kindly rise in
his pew and adjust the open window west of him?  (_Imitation of Mr. John
Buncle, petrified with confusion, adjusting the window._)  We will
commence at verrse One Hundred and Seventy-Nine:

    _I, like a bottle, have been_
    _With Thy great maircy filled,_
    _Oh, hold me up, hold Thou me up,_
    _That I may not be spilled!_

And so on until the end of the Psalm.  Psalm Seven Hundred and
Forty-Nine.  The Seven Hundred and Forty-Ninth Psalm.  _Ping_!  _Ping_!
_Ping_!  (_The last is supposed to be Kilninver getting to work with his
tuning-fork._)  Tune, Winchester, ’_I, like a bottle..._’"

I am a devout person, but I am afraid it does sound something like that.

However, one feels less inclined to smile when the actual singing of the
psalm commences. The Metrical Psalms, sung in unison, without
accompaniment, and with strong, rugged voices predominating, are
Scottish history.  They bring back the days when people did not sing
them in churches, but on hillsides in remote fastnesses, at services
conducted by a man with a price on his head, guarded by sentries lying
prone upon the skyline, on the look-out for Claverhouse and his
troopers.  That is why I, coming of the stock I do, like to hear the
opening psalm at Craigfoot.

The start, as a rule, is not all what it might be, for the Scots are a
slow-moving race; and naturally it takes a little time to catch up with
Andrew Kilninver and his comparatively nimble crew. But about the middle
of the second verse we draw together, and the unsophisticated rhymes,
firmly welded now with the grand old melody, go rolling upwards and
outwards through the open door and windows, over one of the fairest and
richest farming districts in the world:

    _They drop upon the pastures wide,_
      _That do in deserts lie;_
    _The little hills on every side_
      _Rejoice right pleasantly._
    _With flocks the pastures clothed be,_
      _The vales with corn are clad;_
    _And now they shout and sing to Thee,_
      _For Thou hast made them glad._


I am a soldier, and have been a soldier all my life, so when I encounter
an assemblage of my fellow countrymen, I naturally scrutinise them from
a recruiting sergeant’s point of view.  (At least, Eve always said I
did.)  And what a sight that congregation presented!  I have encountered
many types in the course of my duty.  I know our own Highlanders; I know
the French Zouave regiments; a year or two ago—in nineteen-eleven I
think it was—I saw the Prussian Guard march past the Emperor during
Grand Manoeuvres; I have ridden with the Canadian North-West Mounted
Police; I have seen a Zulu impi on the move in South Africa.  All have
their own particular incomparabilities—dash, endurance, resource,
initiative—but for sheer physical solidity and fighting possibilities,
commend me to the peaceful yeoman-farming stock of the Lowlands of
Scotland.  My own regiment is mainly recruited from this district, so
perhaps I am prejudiced.  Still, if ever the present era of
international restlessness crystallises into something definite; if ever
The Day, about which we hear so much and know so little, really
arrives—well, I fancy that that heavily-built, round-shouldered throng
down there, with their shy, self-conscious faces and their uncomfortable
Sunday clothes, will give an account of themselves of which their sonsy,
red-cheeked wives and daughters will have no cause to feel ashamed.



                                 *III*


After the psalm we settle down to the Doctor’s first prayer.  There are
two of these, separated by an entire chapter of the Old Testament—a
fairly heavy sandwich, sometimes.  The first prayer lasts a quarter of
an hour, the second, eight minutes.  The first prayer takes the form of
an interview between Doctor Chirnside and his Maker—an interview so
confidential in character and of a theological atmosphere so rarefied
that few of us are able to attain to it.  So our attention occasionally
drops to lower altitudes.  The second prayer is more adapted to humble
intellects. The Doctor refers to it as the Prayer of Intercession. In it
he prays for everything and everybody, beginning with the British Empire
and ending with the Dorcas Society.  Under the cloak of Intercession,
too, he is accustomed, very ingeniously, to introduce, and comment upon,
topics of current interest.  Occasionally he springs upon us a genuine
and delightful surprise.  The parish still remembers the Sunday morning
in eighteen-ninety-four upon which the Doctor, in his customary
intercession for the Royal Family, got in twenty-four hours ahead of
Monday’s _Scotsman_ by concluding his orison: "And we invoke Thy special
blessing, O Lord, upon the infant son (and ultimate heir to the Throne
of this country) born, _as Thou knowest, Lord_, to Her Majesty’s
grandchildren, the Duke and Duchess of York, at an early hour this
morning!"

But the first prayer, as already indicated, holds no surprises.  I am
therefore accustomed to devote this period to a detailed inspection of
the congregation below—an occupation which has the special merit of
being compatible with an attitude of profound devotion.

Perhaps I ought to explain how it is that I, a mere visitor, should take
such a deep interest in Craigfoot and its associations.  The fact is, I
am no visitor.  I was born here, not ten miles away, at The Heughs, a
little manor among the foothills, where my brother Walter and his lusty
family still flourish.  As a younger son I was destined from birth for
the Army; but by the time I had passed into Sandhurst, and on to the
lordly exile of our Army in India, I knew every acre of the district.  I
had tumbled into burns and been kicked off ponies all over the county.
I knew everybody who lived there, from our local overlord, the Earl of
Eskerley, down to Bob Reid, the signal porter at the railway
station—who, being well aware that I went fishing every Wednesday at
Burling, two stations up the line, was accustomed on those occasions to
refuse right of way to the morning train, palpitating for its connection
with the junction ten miles distant, until my tardy bicycle swept round
the curve of the road and deposited me panting on the platform.

Inevitably, the day came when I fell in love—with Eve.  That was no
novelty for Eve; for she and her elder sister, Diana, had most of us on
a string in those days.  Baronrigg was the lodestone of every young
spark in the county, except during those dismal months in summer when
our twin divinities were spirited away to London for the season.  Some
were able to follow them there; but I was not.  Neither was Eric
Bethune. Regimental duty forbade, though we did what we could with the
generous leave available in the early nineties.

Ultimately, I was taken and Eric was left. Why Eve took me I have never
known.  I was only an infantry subaltern, and a younger son into the
bargain.  But she picked me out from the crowd, and waited for me, bless
her! for seven years.  My theory was, and is, that a woman only marries
a man for one of two reasons—either because he gives her "a thrill," or
because she thinks he requires taking care of.  There was no doubting
Eve’s reason for marrying me.  She took care of me for one rapturous
year; and then she left me, and took her baby with her.  To-day both lie
in the private burial-ground of Baronrigg. That is why I always accept
Tom’s annual invitation to stay there at Easter, rather than go to my
brother Walter’s cheery but distracting establishment at The Heughs.

That is enough about me.  Now let us get back to the congregation.

It was a representative throng, yet not entirely representative.  For
one thing, our chief territorial and social luminary, Lord Eskerley, is
a member of the Church of England; and when he goes to church at
all—which is usually just after a heart-attack, or just before a General
Election—he goes to Fiddrie.  For another, no Scottish assemblage can be
counted truly representative which takes no account of the adherents of
Holy Church—as a peep into Father Kirkpatrick’s tightly-packed
conventicle on the other side of the glen would tell us.  But when all
is said, the parish church is still the focus of Scottish rural life,
and I was well content with the selection of friends who filled the pews
below me.

There was old General Bothwell, of Springburn, a Mutiny and Crimean
veteran—altogether quite a celebrity among a generation which knows
nothing of actual warfare.  (After all, the South African affair touched
our civil community very lightly.)  Beside the General sits his son
Jack, home on leave from India.  He commands a company in a Pathan
regiment.  The General is trying hard not to look proud of Jack.

Just behind the Bothwells sit the Graemes, of Burling—Sir Alistair, his
Lady, and their three tall daughters, known and celebrated throughout
the county as "The Three Grenadiers."  Across the aisle sits old Couper,
of Abbottrigg—the largest farmer in the district, and one of the best
curlers in Scotland—with his wife.  The old couple are alone now, for
all their sons and daughters are married.  However, a good many of them
are present in other parts of the church, holding a fidgety third
generation down in its seat.

Just in front of the Coupers I observe Mr. Gillespie, manager of our
branch of the Bank of Scotland, a man of immense discretion and many
secrets.  With him, Mrs. Gillespie.  Also the two Misses Gillespie,
locally and affectionately renowned as "Spot" and "Plain."  I notice
that their son, Robert, who is studying for the Ministry in distant
Edinburgh, is with them for the week-end.

Farther back, at the end of a long pew, just under the public gallery,
sits Galbraith, our chemist and druggist, a small man with a heavy
cavalry moustache and—the not uncommon accompaniment of a small man—a
large wife and twelve children.  The children fall into two groups,
separated by an interval of seven years. The first group—four in number,
and somewhat wizened in appearance—were born and reared upon the slender
profits of a retail business in tooth-brushes, patent medicines, and
dog-soap. The other eight—fat and well-liking—began to appear serially
after Mr. Galbraith had amassed a sudden and unexpected fortune out of a
patent sheep-dip of his own invention, which has made the name of
Galbraith celebrated as far away as Australia.

Over the way from Galbraith, in a side pew, sits Shanks, the joiner.  He
is a poor creature, lacking in ability either to ply his trade or invent
reasons for not doing so.  Eve used to say that Shanks never by any
chance acceded to a professional summons, and that his excuses were
three in number, and were employed in monotonous rotation—firstly, that
he had swallowed some tacks; secondly, that he had had to bury "a
relation of the wife’s"; thirdly, that one of his numerous offspring had
been overtaken by a fit.

Behind Shanks sit the Misses Peabody.  They are the daughters of a
retired merchant of Leith, who died many years ago.  They inhabit a
villa on the outskirts of our little town, live on an annuity, and exist
precariously in that narrow social borderland which divides town-folk
from gentry.

Passing on, I note that Mr. Menzies, Lord Eskerley’s factor, has at last
provided himself with a wife—a stranger to me.  Well, Menzies is well
connected and has an excellent house; so, doubtless, the lady will be
comfortable.  But I wish he had not gone so far afield.  There is
nothing wrong with the girls in this district, Menzies!  _Experto
crede_!

My eye wanders on over the bowed heads. Finally it reaches the third pew
from the front, and I am aware of the handsome presence of my friend
Eric Bethune, of Buckholm.  Beside him, bolt upright, with a critical
eye fixed upon Doctor Chirnside, sits his eccentric lady mother.  Eric’s
attitude is more devout, but I observe that his head is turned sideways,
and that he is grinning sympathetically at Tommy Milroy over the way,
whose little nose is being relentlessly pressed to the book-board by an
iron maternal hand encased in a hot black kid glove.

Eric, although he is as old as myself, is still very much of a boy—or
perhaps I ought, in strict candour, to say a child.  He was a child at
school—in his exuberant vitality, his sudden friendships, his petulance.
He was a child at Sandhurst; he was a child as a subaltern—at times,
almost a baby.  But he has been my friend all my life, and I admire him
more than any man I know; perhaps because he possesses all the qualities
which I lack.  He is tall and debonair; I am—well, neither.  He is
impulsive, frank, and popular; I am cautious, reticent and regarded as a
little difficult.  (This is not true really, only there is no Eve now to
tell me what to say to people.)

But, above all, Eric is a soldier.  In the South African War he was
Adjutant of our Second Battalion.  They were sent out rather late, and
only got to work after Paardeburg.  I was with the other battalion, and
saw nothing of Eric, but his Colonel considered him the smartest
Adjutant in the Division, and recommended him for the D.S.O.  He got it,
but always declared that he had had no chance to earn it, except by
instructing the men very thoroughly in what is vulgarly known as the art
of "Spit and Polish."  Certainly they were the best turned-out crowd I
have ever seen, when they marched through the streets of Edinburgh on
their return.

Directly after that we both went back to India. We were anxious to go.
Eve had died just before I sailed for South Africa; Diana had broken off
her engagement with Eric and married Tom Birnie three years earlier.
But I did not stay in India very long.  I was restless for home again;
and, having decided that the Regular Army could now get along without my
services, I sent in my papers and settled in London.  When Roy was nine
years old his mother followed her sister. She had survived Eve only six
years, for the same lung trouble had marked them down long ago. After
that Eric felt that he could come back to Buckholm.  So he came, and
they gave him command of the Regimental Depot, with the rank of Major.
The Depot is not far away from here, and he is able to join his mother
at Buckholm for much of the time.  He is quite his old self now, and he
has made the Third Battalion a marvel of smartness and efficiency.  But
there is one house which he never visits—Baronrigg.  I do not blame him.
His memories there are not like mine.  Moreover, besides hating Tom
Birnie, he dislikes Roy.  I am surprised at this, because the boy is the
image of his mother.  Still, I suppose a man may be forgiven for
disliking a boy who should have been his own son, but is not. Anyhow, I
know I shall not meet Eric during my stay at Baronrigg, so I have
arranged to lunch at Buckholm after church to-day.

That covers the congregation, I think.  (Doctor Chirnside is working up
to his peroration, and in a few minutes we shall be erect again.)  I
look over them once more.  Altogether, a sturdy, satisfactory
assemblage, from laird to ploughman. We have not changed much in the
last two hundred years, nor will during the next two hundred, so far as
I can see.  We are Conservatives of Conservatives, although we return a
Liberal.  We shall go on tilling the fat soil, and raising fat cattle,
and marrying young, and having big families, and sending a few of the
boys into the Army, and a few to the Colonies, and keep the rest at home
to marry strapping girls and have more big families, until the end of
time.

We are a little disturbed, to be sure, at the present state of the world
outside.  A street-bred Government, with both eyes on the industrial
vote, has recently compelled us, even us, to disburse our hard-earned
pennies upon stamps, to be stuck at frequent intervals upon an
objectionable card.  We are informed that this wasteful and uncongenial
exercise is designed to bestow upon us the benefits of insurance against
sickness—upon us, who are never either sick or sorry; and if ever we
are, are taken care of (under an unwritten compact of immemorial
antiquity) by the employers who have known us and ours for generations
back.  Other political upheavals are agitating the country, but they
leave us cold in comparison with this superfluous imposition of
benevolence.

But still, politicians are always with us, and must be endured; so what
matter?  Our valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing,
and even with Income Tax at one and twopence in the pound, things might
be worse.  After all, we have our health, and perhaps it is our duty to
contribute to the insurance of those sickly city folk.  A few stamps are
not a very high price to pay for peace and prosperity and sleepy
contentment in the heart of the British Empire.



                                 *IV.*


... I think I must have begun to nod a little. It was a warm morning,
and the sunshine and the songs of the birds without, and the
confidential rumblings of Doctor Chirnside within, had exercised a
soporific effect.  But I opened my eyes with a jerk, and observed that
the Netherby pew was occupied.

Netherby has stood empty so long that it is quite a shock to see its pew
inhabited at all.  It is a conspicuous pew, in the corner of the church,
to the left of the pulpit, and my unregenerate nephews and nieces call
it "The Loose Box."  It is built in the form of a hollow square, and is
surrounded by dingy red rep curtains, which enable its occupants to gaze
upon the officiating clergy without themselves being gazed upon by the
congregation.  However, the pew is overlooked by the Baronrigg gallery.

This morning the Netherby pew contained seven occupants, humped devoutly
round the square table in the centre.  Upon the table reposed a
gentleman’s silk hat, or topper.  Now, in this part of the country,
gentlemen do not wear silk hats on Sunday.  They wear bowlers, or
Homburg hats, or even motoring caps.  Neither do they wear frock-coats,
like the obvious proprietor of "The Loose Box."  He was a squarely-built
man, and from what I could see of his face, he wore mutton-chop
whiskers.  There was also a middle-aged lady in a rather unsuitable hat.
There were two boys of nineteen or twenty. There were two or three small
children, constrained and restless.  There was an elderly man with a
beard like a goat’s, gazing upwards at Doctor Chirnside with an air
which struck me as critical.  One felt that he would have taken the
Doctor’s place without any pressing whatsoever. I put him down for a
visitor of some kind.

And there was a girl.  At least, there was a hat—a big black tulle
hat—and I assumed that there was a girl underneath it.  I could see her
frock, which was white.  So were her gloves, which extended above her
elbows.  Her hands were long and slim.  I began to feel curious to see
her face.

Suddenly I realised that I was not alone in this ambition.  On my left,
that young rascal Roy was hanging outward and downward at a dangerous
and indecorous angle, in a characteristically thorough attempt to look
under the brim of the black tulle hat.  Needless to say, in romantic
enterprises of this kind, competition, especially with the young, makes
one feel merely foolish, so I resumed my normal position and closed my
eyes with an air of severe reproof.

Almost directly afterwards the First Prayer came to a conclusion, and we
all sat up.  Simultaneously the girl in the hat lifted her head.  The
Parish Church is small and the range was comparatively short.  For a
moment her face was upturned in our direction.  I heard Roy give a gasp
of admiration.

"Let us read together," suggested the indefatigable Doctor Chirnside,
"in the Fifty-Fifth Chapter of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. Chapter
Fifty-Five.  The first verse.  _Ho, every one that thirsteth..._"

But I am afraid I was not listening.  I was watching the girl’s face—as
well I might, for it was the face of a flower.  She leaned back in her
seat against the wall, and composed herself for the Fifty-Fifth Chapter
of Isaiah.  Suddenly, for some reason, she lifted her head again.  This
time her eyes encountered Master Roy’s honest and rapturous gaze.  They
fell immediately, but up from the open throat of her white Sunday frock,
over her face, and right into the roots of her abundant fair hair, ran a
vivid burning blush.

I looked at Roy.  He was crimson too.

Spring!  Spring!  Spring!




                              *CHAPTER II*

                         *REBELLIOUS MARJORIE*


                                  *I*


While Sunday at Baronrigg was a day of mild tribulation, Sunday at
Netherby was a day of wrath.  It was a direct survival of the darkest
period of the Victorian era.

Albert Clegg—or, rather, Mr. Albert Clegg—believed in taking no risks
with his immortal soul, or with those of his family.  He also believed
in being master in his own house.  Accordingly, when he bade his
household remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, the household, as
they say in the Navy, "made it so."  The necessary standard of sanctity
was attained, firstly, by the removal on Saturday night to locked
cupboards of everything in the shape of frivolous or worldly literature;
in place of which there appeared a few "Sunday" books—the latest record,
mayhap, of missionary endeavour, together with one or two godly romances
of a rather distressing character.  Periodical literature was
represented by _The Sunday at Home_, while unsecular comment on current
events was furnished by that brilliantly ingenious combination of broad
religion and literary entertainment, _The British Weekly_.

The necessary atmosphere having been duly created, those two powerful
engines, Prayer and Fasting, were now set in motion.  The latter, to be
just, was of little account: its operation merely involved the omission
of afternoon tea and the substitution of cold supper for ordinary
dinner. But the devotional programme of the Clegg Sunday was an exacting
business.  It opened with family prayers at eight-thirty a.m., including
an extemporary supplication by the master of the house.  Catechism came
at nine-thirty, Church at eleven o’clock.  The household were conveyed
thither in the Rolls-Royce.  In the course of time, as the glory of that
extremely new vehicle faded, and the task of making an impression upon
the neighbourhood accomplished itself, the young Cleggs gloomily foresaw
a still further extension of Sabbath observance, in the direction of
pedestrian exercise.  Meanwhile, they covered the three miles to church
in the car, and were thankful for small mercies.

After one o’clock dinner, the family sang hymns.  Marjorie
accompanied—not very convincingly, owing to the presence of a
surreptitious novel or volume of poetry propped upon the music-rest
beside the hymn-book.  You cannot engage in psalmody and mental culture
simultaneously with any degree of plausibility.  The younger children
sang a shrill soprano; brothers Amos and Joe growled self-consciously an
octave—sometimes two octaves—lower.  Sister Amy—a plain but intensely
pious child of fourteen—offered a windy and unmelodious contribution
which she termed "seconds."  Mrs. Clegg sang—as she did everything
else—dutifully, and slightly apologetically.  Mr. Clegg sang what he had
imagined for more than thirty years to be tenor, inciting his
fellow-choristers to continued effort by beating time with his
hymn-book, until post-prandial drowsiness intervened, and he retired to
bed, with all his clothes on, for his Sabbath nap.  During this interval
the family enjoyed a slight respite from Sabbath observance—all, that
is, but the younger members, who received instructions in Biblical
history from two small and not uninteresting manuals, entitled _Peep of
Day_ and _Line Upon Line_, with maternal additions and elucidations of a
somewhat surprising character.

At six o’clock the chauffeur was once more called upon to observe the
Sabbath by conveying the family to evening service at the parish church.
The small fry, in consideration of _Peep of Day_ and _Line Upon Line_,
were permitted to go to bed.

After cold supper at eight-thirty, the devotional exercises of the day
petered out with a second instalment of family prayers, including what
brother Joe (Marjorie’s accomplice and pet) was wont to describe as "a
final solo from Pa."  After that, the exhausted household retired to
rest, leaving the master to relax himself from the spiritual tension of
the day with weak whisky-and-water.

Albert Clegg had bought Netherby a year previously.  He came from the
North of England, and was deeply interested in Tyneside shipping. His
father had been a small tradesman in Gateshead. Albert’s initial
opportunities had not been too great, but he possessed two priceless
natural assets—superb business capacity and a sincere dislike for
recreation or amusement of any kind. At twenty-one he was a clerk in a
rather moribund shipping business.  At twenty-five he was managing
clerk.  In that capacity he took it upon himself, unofficially, to
investigate the books of the firm—he was the sort of young man who would
joyfully devote a series of fine Saturday afternoons to such an
enterprise—and was ultimately able to expose a leakage of profits which
had kept the venerable and esteemed cashier of the office in
considerably greater comfort than his employers for the past ten years.
Needless to say, Albert was the next cashier.  At thirty he was junior
partner and practically dictator.  A few years later his exhausted
seniors gave up the struggle, and allowed themselves to be bought out.
Albert promptly called in his younger brother Fred, who, up to date, had
been dividing his undoubted talents fairly evenly between jerry-building
and revivalist preaching—a combination of occupations which enabled him
to

    _Compound for sins he was inclined to,_
    _By damning those he had no mind to—_

thus marking himself down as an ultimate and inevitable ornament of our
National Legislature. Fred was taken into partnership.  From that day
the firm of Clegg Brothers went from strength to strength.

Albert Clegg’s first wife was what Lady Christina would have described
as "a young person of his own station in life."  She had died a few
years after the birth of Master Amos.  The present Mrs. Clegg was a
member of an aristocratic but impoverished family named Higgie, of
Tynemouth, and she came to Albert just at a time when his rising
fortunes called for a helpmeet possessed of the social accomplishments
which he himself so entirely lacked.  On his second marriage, he removed
from Gateshead to a large house in the pleasant suburb of Jesmond, and
lived there for twenty years, while the Clegg firm prospered and the
Clegg family multiplied.  As already foreshadowed, brother Fred’s
combined reputations as a captain of industry and a silver-tongued
orator presently wafted him into Parliament, where he established a
reputation for verbosity and irrelevance remarkable even in that
eclectic assembly.

That is all that need be said about Mr. Albert Clegg for the present.
The main purpose of this brief summary of his character and achievements
is to provide the reader with some sort of key—in so far as keys are of
any use at all where feminine locks are concerned—to the character of
that rather unexpected young person, his daughter Marjorie.  For it was
from her father, most undoubtedly, that Marjorie derived her initiative
and determination.  From her mother she seemed to have inherited
nothing, except her Christian name and her naturally waved hair.
Everything else—her superb body, her absolute honesty, her lively sense
of humour, her critical attitude towards certain existing things, and,
above all, her warm, impulsive young heart—came from that one supreme
gift of God which is entirely our own—set high out of reach of those
twin busybodies, Heredity and Environment—Personality.



                                  *II*


On the particular spring morning with which we are already concerned,
Marjorie made a bad start.  She missed prayers altogether, and was late
for breakfast into the bargain.  To crown her iniquity, she entered the
dining-room whistling a secular air, with her arms full of daffodils.

Whistling is at all times an unladylike accomplishment, even though one
whistle like a mavis. Moreover, it was Sunday.  Furthermore, Uncle Fred
was present on a visit, and one has to keep up appearances before
relations, however despicable.

"I am not at all satisfied with Doctor Chirnside," Mr. Clegg was
remarking.  "But we must employ such instruments as lie to our hands."

"That is very true," remarked Uncle Fred, making a mental note of this
apt expression. Uncle Fred was an industrious gleaner of other people’s
impromptus, with a view to parliamentary requirements.

"As you know," continued Mr. Clegg, "our own Body is not represented in
this county. The nearest United Free Church—which conforms most closely
to our own beliefs—is fifteen miles away.  In any case, I consider that
a household should, as far as possible, worship in its own district."

"Quite right," said Uncle Fred.  "Like a constituency."

"Besides, we would not get to know people any other way," interposed
Mrs. Clegg timidly.

"My dear," said Mr. Clegg severely, "we cannot worship God and Mammon.
And I will thank you for another cup of tea.  John, my boy, eat up that
crust; I know of many a poor lad that would be glad of it.  The only
other places of worship within easy reach," he continued, "besides the
parish church (Established, of course), are a Papist Chapel, Burling
way, which I do not go to very often"—Mr. Clegg paused and assumed a
wintry smile, to indicate that he spoke sarcastically—"and the English
Episcopal Church at Fiddrie—where I would as soon see any belongings of
mine trying to disport themselves as in the Church of Rome itself."

Mr. Clegg paused, and Uncle Fred laughed sardonically.  Mrs. Clegg, who
all her life had hankered after the comfortable consolations of Anglican
ritual and the social cachet of an Anglican connection, smothered a
sigh, for she knew to what address her husband’s remark was directed.

At this moment, as related, Marjorie tramped in, whistling, with her
daffodils.

"Hallo! am I late?" she inquired.  "I am so sorry: I was out gathering
these.  Good morning, everybody!"

She sat down amid a deathly silence.

"What were you all talking about?" Marjorie rattled on.  "Church, wasn’t
it?  I wonder how many hours old Chirnside will preach to-day? Oh, that
awful children’s sermon!  I don’t think it’s sportsmanlike to make you
listen to two sermons in one morning.  My idea is that during the
grown-ups’ sermon the children should be allowed to go out and play, and
that during the children’s sermon the grown-ups should have their choice
of going out too, or lying right down in the pews and having a nap!"
She gazed out of the window, over the sunny landscape.  "I know which I
should choose!"

"My girl," interposed Mr. Clegg, "if you talk in that strain I shall
regret more than ever that I allowed your mother to send you to that
school in Paris."

Marjorie had been "finished"—which means "begun"—at Neuilly.  It is
difficult to understand why her father had sent her there, except that
it was expensive.  Mr. Clegg had long transferred the blame for this
lapse of judgment to his wife.

During those two quickening years, Marjorie, though hedged about by
every preventive device known to the scholastic hierarchy, had fairly
wallowed in Life—Life as opposed to Existence. She had sucked in Life
through her pores; she had scrutinised Life through her shrewd blue
eyes; she had masticated Life with her vigorous young teeth.  Life in
Paris, even as viewed from the ranks of a governess-guided "crocodile"
in the Bois de Boulogne, or a processional excursion to the Tuileries,
is a stimulating and disturbing compound, especially to unemancipated
seventeen. At any rate, Marjorie had returned to her home possessing
certain characteristics which had not been apparent when she left it.
These were, roughly, three in number:

Firstly, a passionate interest in the world and its contents.  She was
ablaze with enthusiasm for all mankind.  She wanted to do something—to
be a hospital nurse, a journalist, a chorus girl, a barmaid—anything, in
fact, that would bring her into contact with her fellow-creatures and,
if possible, enable her to make herself uncomfortable on their behalf.
She was a Giver, through and through.

Secondly, an entire lack of sentimentality. Young men made no appeal to
her.  She had never flirted in her life: she did not know how. She made
friendships at a rush—many of them with boys of her own age—but if any
young man flattered himself that he had made a tender impression, he was
soon woefully undeceived. Marjorie was purely maternal.  If she was kind
to a young man it was because she felt sorry for him—sorry for his
adorable clumsiness, his transparency, his helplessness, his lack of
finesse. Young men, as a class, never gave her a thrill. She loved her
own sex too, especially the self-conscious and foolish.  Marjorie’s main
instinct at that time, and indeed through all her life, was to interpose
her own beautiful and vigorous young personality between the weaker
vessels of her acquaintance and the hard knocks of this world.

Thirdly, a strongly critical attitude towards the theory that children
owe a debt of gratitude to their parents for the mere fact of having
been brought by them into existence.  Loyal she was, because it was her
nature.  Dutiful she was prepared to be.  She was impulsively
affectionate always; but her inborn sense of equity was strong.
Moreover, for two years she had associated with new companions—members
of another world than her own—either young girls of the English upper
class, who were accustomed to regard their parents as amiable but
unsophisticated accomplices in misdemeanour, or maidens from New York
and Philadelphia, who appeared to entertain no opinion of their parents,
as such, at all.  This association had shaken to its foundation the law
of her childhood—that children existed entirely for the convenience of
their parents, and must expect no consideration, no indulgence, and,
above all, no _camaraderie_ from those aloof and exalted beings.  In the
spring of nineteen-fourteen Youth had not yet been called in to rescue
Age from extinction.

Such was Marjorie at eighteen—a dangerous mixture, particularly liable
to explode under compression.

She had risen early this Sunday morning in order to ramble through the
woods and compose her turbulent spirit.  The previous evening had
witnessed a sleep-destroying interview between her father and herself.
After prayers, while Mr. Clegg, according to his custom, was setting the
markers in the great family Bible for the following morning’s devotions,
Marjorie had seated herself beside him at the head of the library table,
with the air of one determined upon a plunge. She waited until the
servants had filed out and the rest of the family were dispersed.  Then
she came to the attack with characteristic promptness.

"Father," she said, "may I go and be trained as a hospital nurse?"

"No," replied Mr. Clegg, without hesitation or heat; "you may not."

"May I learn shorthand and typewriting, then?"

"No."

"May I go and take training in some profession? Any kind," she added
eagerly, "as long as it is useful."

"No," said Mr. Clegg for the third time.  Then with the air of a just
person patient under importunity:

"Why?"

"For two reasons," said the girl.  "I want to be useful, and I want to
be independent."

For answer, Mr. Clegg reopened the Bible, and with the accuracy of long
practice came almost immediately upon what he wanted—certain illuminated
manuscript pages occurring between the Old and New Testaments.  There
were six of these pages.  Two were allotted to the Births, two to the
Marriages, and two to the Deaths of the house of Clegg.  Albert Clegg
turned to the Births, and ran his finger down the list.  There were
quite a number of names, for the Bible was a family inheritance.

Presently he found what he wanted.  A line in red ink had been drawn
right across the page under the name of his youngest brother, Uncle
Fred, to indicate the end of a generation.  Below this line was written,
in his own neat business hand:

                  _Children of Albert and Mary Clegg._


This title-heading had erred on the side of plurality, for beneath it
came but one entry—that of the birth of Albert’s eldest son, Amos, at
Gateshead, upon the tenth of March, Eighteen Ninety-two.  A second
heading followed immediately:

                _Children of Albert and Marjorie Clegg._


After this came quite a satisfying list.  First, Joe’s name—it proved to
be Joshua, in full—recorded upon the twelfth of August, Eighteen
Ninety-four.  Then came the entry he was seeking:

_Marjorie; born at "The Laburnums," Jesmond, April twenty-fourth,
Eighteen Ninety-Six_.

Albert Clegg surveyed his daughter over the top of his spectacles, which
had been assumed for purposes of perusal, and performed a small exercise
in mental arithmetic.

"That makes you eighteen," he observed.

Marjorie nodded.  At this point, to her intense annoyance, the egregious
Uncle Fred re-entered the room and joined the Board.

"Girls of eighteen—" began her father.

"Young ladies of eighteen," amended the Member of Parliament.

"—have no call to be independent," continued Albert Clegg; "and if they
want to be of some use they can stay at home and help their mothers, as
God meant them to."

"Mother," riposted Marjorie, "has more servants than she knows what to
do with, and she hates interference with her house management, anyway.
I have been home now for three months, honestly trying to help, and
there isn’t a single thing for me to do.  There are hundreds of things I
can do away from here.  I do not ask to go out and do them now, but I do
ask to be trained in something useful, so that when the time comes—"

"When what time comes?" asked her father quickly.

"The time when it will be a living impossibility for me to stick it out
any longer," said Marjorie frankly.  "Do you think I can sit here for
ever"—with one comprehensive gesture she summarised Netherby, with its
stodgy gentility, its squirrel-cage routine, and its cast-iron
piety—"twiddling my thumbs?  Every girl has a _right_ to make herself
efficient, nowadays."

"What comes before our rights," said Albert Clegg, "is our duty—our
grateful duty to the parents that brought us up."

"_Honour thy father and thy mother_," chaunted the apposite Uncle Fred,
"_that thy days—_"

Marjorie sat up.

"I hope I do honour my father and mother," she said.  "I am fond of them
both: they have been kind to me all my life.  But I do not see why I
should be particularly grateful to them for bringing me up.  After
all"—turning to her father—"you _had_ to, hadn’t you?  You were
responsible for my being here, weren’t you?  It seems to me that parents
owe a debt to their children—not children to their parents!"

This amazingly audacious deliverance—and one had to be familiar with the
Clegg tradition to realise how audacious it was—produced a stunning
silence.  Uncle Fred, fumbling in his repertoire for something really
commensurate, breathed alarmingly.  Presently Albert Clegg’s heavy voice
broke in:

"A debt?  You mean I owe _you_ a—a debt of gratitude?"

"Not gratitude," replied Marjorie.  "Something bigger—honour.  I think
that parents owe it to their children, having brought them into the
world—and all that sort of thing," she added a little shyly, "to give
them a chance to live the sort of life that appeals to them."

Uncle Fred was ready now.

"The French," he announced, "are a giddy and godless race!"

But neither Albert Clegg nor his daughter took any notice.  Wide apart
as their natures lay, they had one point in common—inflexible
determination. Clegg surveyed Marjorie’s curving lips and hot blue eyes
for a moment, and asked:

"So you want to live your own life, eh?"

Marjorie nodded.

"Yes," she said.  "At least, I don’t want to rush off and live it right
away; but I do think I ought to be given sufficient—" she hesitated for
a word.

"Equipment?" suggested her father.

"Rope?" amended Uncle Fred.

Marjorie nodded to her father again.

"Yes," she said, "sufficient equipment.  A girl ought to be capable of
doing something.  I have told you some of the things a girl might learn
to do, but there are lots of others.  Even if she could support herself
on the Stage it would be something."

"_The Stage?_"

Marjorie had exploded a bombshell this time. Uncle Fred’s goat-beard
dropped upon his shirt front, and waggled helplessly.  Albert Clegg
gazed at his daughter long and fixedly.  Then he pulled the Bible
towards him again, and turned back a page or two in the family record.
He twisted the great volume round, and pushed it in his daughter’s
direction and pointed.

"Look at that," he said.

Marjorie looked.  Upon the page of births, near the bottom of the list
of her father’s brothers and sisters, she saw a horizontal black
strip—perhaps a quarter of an inch high—extending the full width of the
page, where an entry in the record had been crossed out again, and
again, and again, by a thick quill pen.  She had seen it before, and had
asked what it meant—without success. Now apparently she was to know.

"That," said Albert Clegg, "was my youngest sister."

"Your Aunt Eliza," added Uncle Fred.

"When she was nineteen," continued Clegg, "she ran away from home—to go
on the Stage."

"Hoo!  Where?" asked Marjorie, intensely interested.

"London, my father thought; but he never enquired."

"He never—?  You mean—?"

"He blotted her name out of the Book, and it was never mentioned in our
home again."

"And not one of you ever tried to find what had become of her?"

"Certainly not."

Marjorie looked up at her father and drew a long and indignant breath.

"Well—!" she began.

"And now," explained Uncle Fred, "it’s coming out in you, my girl."

What was coming out Marjorie did not trouble him to explain.  It is
doubtful if she heard him at all.

"You mean to say," she said hotly to her father, "that your father let
his own daughter go right out of sight and mind, just like that?"

"He did.  And I want to say to you, my daughter, that I think he was
right.  This life is a preparation for the next.  As we live now, so
shall we be rewarded hereafter.  A few years’ empty pleasure and
excitement are a poor exchange for an eternity of punishment."

"That’s right!  Take no risks!" recommended the sage at the other end of
the table.  "Safety first!"

"The wisest life," concluded Mr. Clegg, "is the safe life.  The safe
life is the Christian life, and the sure foundation of the Christian
life is family life—united, wisely controlled, family life.  So you will
stay at home and live that life; and some day you will be grateful.  Now
go to bed. I appreciate your honesty in telling me what is in your mind,
but my advice to you is forget all about it.  Good-night!"

"Don’t forget your prayers!" added Uncle Fred.



                                 *III*


Marjorie finished her breakfast without further flippancy, and in due
course the family set out for church in the Rolls-Royce.  That is to
say, Mr. and Mrs. Clegg, Uncle Fred, Marjorie, and the younger
children—Miss Amy, already mentioned, and Masters James and John, aged
ten and eight—were packed into that spacious vehicle and driven into
Craigfoot, with meticulous observation of the speed limit and all the
windows up. Amos and Joe followed in the two-seater.  The servants had
the waggonette.

The parish kirk at Craigfoot has already been described in some detail,
but it may be worth while to record a few observations made from a
different angle.

From her seat against the wall in the high-curtained Netherby pew
Marjorie could see nothing but the last few rows of the public gallery
and the Baronrigg balcony.  The latter fascinated her, for it was always
full—usually of interesting, and always of different, people.  Sir
Thomas Birnie himself was a permanent figure.  He sat in the left-hand
corner of the balcony, at the end nearest the pulpit.  Consequently, his
severe gaze, concentrated upon the preacher, was averted from the other
occupants of the pew—a circumstance particularly agreeable to some of
the younger members of his numerous house parties.  What fun they seemed
to have among themselves!  How they giggled and whispered!  Marjorie
longed and longed to be with them and of them, especially the girls of
her own age.  They were so pretty, so overflowing with life, and dressed
so exactly right. For three months, ever since she came back from Paris
to find her family at Netherby, and the comfortable hospitality of a
Newcastle suburb exchanged for the frigid waiting-list of a county
society where one knew either everybody or nobody, she had taken weekly
notes of the ever-changing kaleidoscope in the Baronrigg pew—studying
faces, studying frocks, studying characters, and weaving histories round
each.

Some of the faces were quite familiar.  This morning, for instance, in
the right-hand corner of the front row, sat Major Laing.  He was a
frequent visitor at Baronrigg, and was a widower. Marjorie knew that his
wife had been a twin-sister of the late Lady Birnie.  Then there were
Captain and Mrs. Roper.  Captain Roper owned horses, and was here—in
fact, the whole house-party was here—for the Castleton Races, the
largest meeting on this side of the Border.  They were constant
visitors.  Then there was a pretty little woman in a big hat—Mrs.
Pomeroy, really—of which Marjorie took mental and quite unsabbatical
note.  There was Arthur Langley, one of the best-known gentlemen riders
in England.  There was a tall girl with fair hair—not unlike Marjorie
herself.  Marjorie decided that this girl was dressed not quite right.
She would have been better placed in a fashionable West-end church in
London than in this grey, prim, Presbyterian conventicle.  Probably her
first visit, Marjorie decided.  She would know better next time.

Her shrewd gaze passed on.

And then, for the first time in her life, she saw Roy Birnie, home after
four months of toil and tribulation at an army crammer’s.  He had been
plucked out of Eton at Christmas to that end, Eton having decided that
it was a case for desperate measures.  Three months of intensive
brain-culture had not affected his appearance, which was healthy, nor
his snub nose, nor his cheerful grin, nor the slight curl in his hair,
of which his mother had once been so proud and of which he was still so
ashamed.  He sat on the left of Major Laing, his chin resting on the pew
ledge, his grey eyes devoutly closed, and his ebullient spirits
throttled down until it should please Doctor Chirnside to conclude the
first prayer.  He was exactly like hundreds of other clean-run Public
School boys of eighteen.  Marjorie had observed a dozen such in that
very pew during the past three months.  But, as already noted, she had
never seen Roy.

That usually dependable organ, her heart, missed a couple of beats, and
she lowered her head quickly.

Presently, impelled by a power greater than herself (or, indeed, than
any of us), she lifted her head and looked up—only to find that Roy was
gazing straight down upon her.

For the moment her eyes were interlocked with his.  Then suddenly she
became aware of the expression upon his face.  The result has already
been described.

That evening, after prayers, her father motioned to her to stay behind.
When they were alone, he said:

"I hope you have given up that idea of yours about going away."

"Well," replied his daughter pleasantly, "I have postponed it, anyhow,
father."

"You have decided wisely for yourself," said Mr. Clegg.

Marjorie felt inclined to agree.  But it is just possible that the
matter had been decided for her.




                             *CHAPTER III*

                               *DER TAG*


                                  *I*



I suppose I may be forgiven for having felt a trifle preoccupied upon
the first of August, nineteen-fourteen.  Most people did.  But the
European situation, desperate though it was, was not sufficiently
desperate to excuse me for forgetting that the first Saturday in August
is the inexorable date of Lady Christina’s annual garden party at
Buckholm.  So I blundered right into it.

I am a methodical person, and I like to do the same things at the same
seasons.  When it comes to revisiting the place of my birth, marriage
and, I hope, interment, I make a practice of going to Baronrigg for
Easter, Buckholm for the August cricket week, and The Heughs for the
woodcock. On this particular occasion I had travelled from King’s Cross
by the early morning express—it leaves at five o’clock, and is the best
train in the day, if only people knew about it—with the result that by
four o’clock in the afternoon I found myself rumbling along in the
Craigfoot station fly, in lovely, summer weather, _en route_ for the
Buckholm cricket week.  Lady Christina, whose foes—and their name is
legion, for they are many—accuse her of parsimony, does not usually send
the motor to the station to meet unencumbered males. She expects such
guests to cover the last stage of the journey at their own charges and,
in addition, to share the conveyance with such parcels and oddments as
may be lying in the station office consigned to Buckholm.

On this occasion Mr. Turnbull, the station master, apologetically packed
me into the fly in company with half a sheep and three bright new zinc
buckets, freshly arrived from the stores in Edinburgh.

In addition to my personal luggage, I was laden with a limp, damp
package, smelling to heaven of fish, which had borne me noisome company
all the way from my flat in Jermyn Street, having been delivered there
by an accomplice of Lady Christina’s the night before my departure, with
the information that her ladyship had signified my willingness to convey
it to Buckholm.

But things might have been worse.  Lady Christina had played this fish
trick upon me last year as well.  (It is one of her most cherished
economies.)  On that occasion the fish was delivered at my flat five
minutes after I had left for Scotland. It was marked "Very Important";
so the lift boy, a conscientious but unimaginative youth, sent for the
pass-key and carefully deposited the package in my hall cupboard.  I
found it there, quite safe, when I returned from Scotland, three weeks
later.

The first warning that all was not well came to me when my equipage drew
up, to a symphonic accompaniment of rattling buckets, at the lodge gates
of Buckholm.  These were held, like the bridge across the Tiber upon a
famous occasion, by a resolute trio composed of Mackellar, the
under-gardener, and Mesdames Elspeth and Maggie Mackellar, Mackellar’s
daughters, aged about fourteen.  Horatius Codes (Mackellar) informed me
that by her ladyship’s orders it was "hauf-a-croon to get in," adding
(quite incomprehensibly at the moment) that it was "on account of the
Feet for Charity."

My contention that, as a guest, I was entitled to exemption, or, at
least, abatement of entrance fee, was overruled by a dour but respectful
majority of three to one.  I handed Horatius Codes a reluctant
half-crown; Herminius and Spurius Lartius threw open the gates, and the
experienced animal between the shafts, unusually braced by the eerie
combination of sounds and smells conveyed to his senses by a following
breeze, delivered me at the front door, with much spurting of gravel,
four minutes later.

My worst fears were realised.  Dotted about the wide lawns stood
bazaar-stalls, under striped awnings.  The band of our Third Battalion
from the Depot was making music on the terrace, and fair women and brave
men drifted here and there, shying nervously at the stalls.  Too late, I
understood Mackellar’s reference to the "Feet for Charity."  I had heard
from afar of the existence of this recurrent and gruesome festival for
many years.  No one knew why it was held, or to what charity Lady
Christina devoted the proceeds.  I once asked Lord Eskerley if he could
tell me.  He replied that so far as he was aware it was a charity which
was not puffed up, and began at home.  But Lord Eskerley is a cynical
old gentleman, and has been at war with Lady Christina for forty years.

A sympathetic butler received me and showed me my room.  The ceremony
was purely formal: I knew the room almost as well as I knew him.

"It will go on until ten o’clock, sir," he announced mournfully, in
reply to my anxious query.  "The present company will leave about seven;
but the townspeople begin to arrive then, when the admission fee is
reduced to sixpence. Are we going to have a flare-up, sir?"

"No.  What’s the use?  We shall take it lying down, Bates, as usual.
You know Lady Christina!"

"I was referring, sir, to the European situation."

"Oh, sorry!  Yes, it looks like it.  If Germany joins Austria against
Russia, France is bound to come in on the side of Russia; and if France
comes in I fancy we shall all come in.  And then God knows what will
happen!  Is there much excitement down here?"

"Very little at present, sir—less than when the South African War was
imminent.  But I understand that all the officers at the Depot are being
recalled from leave.  You will find several of them here, sir."

"Mr. Eric is here, of course?"

"For the afternoon, sir, yes.  But he sleeps at the Depot now.  He is
very busy.  You will change into flannels, I suppose?"

"Yes."

"It will fill out the time a bit, sir, before you need go outside.  Her
Ladyship is not aware of your arrival.  Shall I bring you a whisky and
soda?"

"Please."

By judicious dawdling I staved off the moment of my entrance into the
"Feet" for another half-hour.  Then, fortified by Bates’s timely
refreshment, I went downstairs to search for my hostess.

The garden was full of people—sirens in lace caps proffering useless
articles of merchandise; officers from the Depot; boys and girls just
home for the holidays; local dames talking scandal in deck-chairs.  Upon
the distant croquet lawn I beheld my hostess engaged in battle.  I could
hear her quite easily, shouting: "Now then—no treachery, no treachery!"
to her partner, a nervous subaltern who was furtively offering advice to
a pretty opponent.  I remembered Bates’s hint, also a maxim to the
effect that what is not missed is not mourned.  Perhaps it would be
wiser—

"Yes, I would if I were you," remarked a raven’s voice at my elbow.
"She hasn’t seen you yet!"

Lord Eskerley is a very remarkable old gentleman, with certain
pronounced and rather alarming characteristics.  In the first place, he
has an uncanny knack of reading one’s thoughts, which enables him to
begin a conversation without wasting time over preliminaries, which he
hates. Secondly, he has a peculiar habit of side-tracking a subject
right in the middle of a sentence, sometimes because he is overtaken by
a reverie, sometimes because another subject occurs to him—to return
sooner or later, but always without warning, to the original topic—like
brackets in algebra.  I once met him coming out of Brooks’s Club, and
accompanied him down St. James’s Street.

"Just been to a funeral," he announced; and forthwith subsided into a
brown study.

I offered a few appropriate observations regarding the uncertainty of
human life, and then proceeded to the political situation.  He replied
with his usual incisiveness.  Ten minutes later, as we passed through
the Horse Guards into Whitehall, he stopped abruptly, shook me by the
hand, and said:

"Good-bye!  At Woking.  We cremated him. Very interesting!"—and set off
at a brisk walk in the direction of the Houses of Parliament.

These conversational acrobatics call for considerable agility on the
part of the listener.  The strain is increased by the circumstance that,
owing to his uncanny powers of memory, Lord Eskerley is able (and
usually proceeds) to take up a conversation with you exactly where he
left it off, sometimes after an interval of months.  I was once walking
in the Park on Sunday morning with Lady Christina, whom I had
encountered for my sins after church.  Near the Achilles statue I was
aware of Lord Eskerley, plunged in profound meditation.  Suddenly he
looked up and saw me. He hurried forward and shook hands, utterly
ignoring Lady Christina.

"Courvoisier," he said, "not Martell!"—and departed towards Stanhope
Gate.

"What does the demented creature mean?" inquired Lady Christina.

I was able to explain that His Lordship had merely been unburdening
himself of a name which he had been unable to recall at the time of our
last conversation.  Criminology is one of his numerous hobbies, and on
this occasion he had been trying to tell me the name of one of the last
murderers publicly hanged in England. (Thackeray went to see it.)  All
he could recall, however, was that the murderer had been a valet in Park
Lane, and that his name had suggested liqueur brandy.

Decidedly he is a character.  But he is a Pillar of State for all that,
and, unlike some Pillars of State, he has done the State some service.
He likes me, because I catch his references more quickly than most
people.

"Well," I rejoined, "suppose you assist me to find cover?"

"Certainly!" he replied.  "By the way"—extending a hand—"how do you do?
Wonderful day!  Now come and find a seat, and we will smoke."

We doubled a promontory of rhododendrons and sat down on a rustic bench,
somewhat apart from the turmoil.  The only person in sight was a girl,
with very good ankles.  (Eve always reproved me for beginning at that
end.)  She was standing fifty yards away from us, under the dappled
shade of a copper-beech, surveying the scene—a little disconsolately, I
thought.  My companion, as usual, was ready with an appropriate but
elliptic comment.

"Doesn’t know he’s here!" he observed.

"Why don’t you tell her?" I asked.

"No need.  They’ll find one another all right."

"Who is she?  And he?"

The question partly answered itself, for at that moment the girl turned
in our direction, and I recognised her as the unexpected young beauty of
the Netherby pew.  Aware that two inquisitive dotards were leering at
her, she withdrew out of sight.  Lord Eskerley did not answer the rest
of my question, because his thoughts had run ahead of the situation.

"There is something particularly cruel and brutal," he said, "about
British snobbery.  If this had been America, her hostess would have
introduced her to every one in sight.  (If she had not been prepared to
do so, she would not have invited her at all.)  On the Continent, young
men would have led one another up, and clicked their heels together, and
announced their names, with a view to a fair exchange.  But here—well,
she knows nobody, and every woman in the county will see to it that she
continues to know nobody.  Practically, that was why she was invited
here.  Tantalus, and so on!"

"I have often wondered," I said, "why we never go in for introducing.
It would save much discomfort to rustic persons like myself."

"I’ll tell you.  Roughly, our attitude is this. There are only a certain
number of people in this world who are anybody—Us, in fact.  You are
either one of Us, or you are not.  If you are, obviously there is no
need to introduce you.  If you are not—well, an introduction would imply
that you are not one of Us!  So it is almost more insulting to introduce
people than to ignore them. Very ingenious system: I wonder what woman
invented it!  Still, _she’s_ all right."  (Apparently His Lordship had
switched back to the girl again.)  "She and her mother only get invited
to Gather-’em-Alls and Charity Sales-of-Work, but most of the boys have
managed to scrape acquaintance with her by this time.  She fairly bowled
them over at the Third Battalion Gymkhana a few weeks ago.  Looked a
picture; won first prize for the motor obstacle race; and fairly had to
keep subalterns off with a stick!  _And_ at least one field officer!"

"You seem to have taken considerable notice of her," I observed.

"I take considerable notice of most things," replied the old gentleman
complacently, "even pretty girls.  By the way, we are going to fight
them."

"The girls?"

"God forbid!  Germany!"

"Oh!"

"Yes.  I go back to town to-night.  There seems little doubt now that we
shall come in.  We can’t leave France in the lurch.  For one thing, we
should be skunks if we did"—Pillars of State can be surprisingly
colloquial in private life—"and for another, Germany means to gobble the
whole of Europe this time, including this pacific little island of ours.
It would be playing Germany’s game to allow her to take us on one after
another, instead of all together.  Of course, the peace-at-any-price
crowd are yowling; but—if we don’t back our friends on this occasion, we
can never hold up our heads again.  It is just possible that the Germans
may be fools enough to invade Belgium, in which case even the Cocoa
Eaters and the Intellectuals will have to stop supporting them.  But I
think we shall fight anyhow.  It will be a short war, but it will be the
bloodiest war ever fought."

"Why do you think it will be short?"

"Because it will be so expensive in money and men that no country will
be able to stand the racket for longer than a few months.  Modern
weapons are so destructive, and modern warfare costs so much, that
before we know where we are one side will all be dead and the other side
bankrupt; so we shall _have_ to stop!  The South African affair cost us
a quarter of a million a day, while it lasted.  This enterprise may run
us into two, or even three millions.  Think of that!  Twenty millions a
week!  A thousand millions a year!  We can’t do it!  Neither can France!
Neither can Germany!  No, it will be a short war.  I am bound to admit
K. of K. doesn’t agree with me.  He puts it at three years.  I lunched
with him two days ago.  He was getting ready to go back to Egypt
then—sorely against the grain, naturally; but it did not seem to have
occurred to anybody to tell him to hold back for a week or two.  We
can’t allow him to go out of the country at present; the thing’s
preposterous!  Let me see, where was I?"

"Lunching with K."

"Oh, yes.  He said three years.  I asked why, and he replied that before
this war finished every single able-bodied man of the combatant nations
would be fighting in a national army, and it would take three years for
this country to put its full strength into the field.  But of course K.
doesn’t understand economic conditions.  He’s our greatest soldier, but
not an economist.  Still, that’s K.’s view.  I don’t agree with it, but
it’s K.’s view. And if we go to war, K. will probably lead us; so we
must expect to provide for war on K.’s scale."

All this was sufficiently stunning and bewildering in its suddenness and
immensity; but it aroused my professional instincts.

"How is K. going to set about creating such an army?" I asked.  "Raise
supplementary Regular battalions; expand the Territorial establishment;
or what?"

"I don’t think he knows himself.  In fact, he said so, quite frankly.
In the first place, he hasn’t been invited to help, as yet.  In the
second, he has been absent from England for the best part of fourteen
years, and has not been able to keep himself conversant with the recent
orgy of Army reform.  He knew that the old Militia had been scrapped,
but I found he was not sure whether its place had been taken by the
Special Reserve or the National Reserve.  And, of course, like all
Regulars, he regards the Territorials with the utmost distrust.  I think
he shares the general soldier-man’s opinion that the ’Terriers’ are the
old Saturday afternoon crowd with a new label. His idea seems to be to
take no risks with amateur organisations, but to create a _pukka_ new
professional army on regular lines.  He’s wrong.  He should take the
present Territorial Army as a nucleus, and expand from that.  The
Territorial Associations are a most capable lot, and would build up big
units for him in no time.  Still, whatever way he does it, he will do it
well; he’s our great man.  And he will need all his greatness. Germany
means to smash us this time.  She has been calling up her reservists, on
the quiet, for the last six months.  Her intelligence people have told
her that we are all so tied up with the Suffragettes and Ireland that we
_can’t_ come in, and that if we do, we cannot put up anything of a
fight.  I am almost tempted to believe Germany is right.  I don’t
suppose we have a thousand spare rifles in the country.  As for
artillery—it takes three _years_ to make a gunner!  How on earth—"

"Now, then, what are you two absurd creatures conspiring about?"  Our
hostess was upon us brandishing a croquet-mallet.  We rose hurriedly.
"Alan Laing, how do you do?  Why didn’t you come and tell me you had
arrived?  As for you, Eskerley, I think you are getting into your second
childhood.  What’s all this nonsense I hear about war with Germany?
Why, I have a signed photograph of the Emperor in my drawing-room!  How
can one make war on people like that?  And yet there you sit, talking
about the thing as if it were really possible, and disorganising my
_fête champêtre_ by mobilising all my young men!  Come and play
croquet!"

Croquet with Lady Christina resembles nothing so much as croquet with
the Queen in "Alice in Wonderland."  It is true that she does not order
our heads to be chopped off, but one sometimes wishes she would, and be
done with it.  Her success at the game—and she is invariably
successful—is due partly to the nervous paralysis of her opponents, and
partly to the uncanny property possessed by her ball of removing itself,
while its owner is engaged in altercation, to a position exactly
opposite its hoop.  I bent my steps dutifully towards the lawn, leaving
Lord Eskerley, who fears no one, not even Lady Christina, to fight a
spirited rearguard action with that worthy opponent.

On the way I encountered Eric Bethune, my friend.  It always thrills me,
even at my sober age, to encounter Eric suddenly.  I have never got over
my boyish tendency to hero-worship.  We shook hands.

"Come along the Green Walk with me," he said.  "My car is waiting at the
West Lodge; I have to fly back to my orderly room."

"We seem to be fairly for it, this time," I said, as we strode along the
avenue of grass.

Eric threw up his handsome head exultantly. The sloping sunlight caught
his clean-cut profile and sinewy throat.

"Yes," he said; "we’re for it!  The Fleet has been ordered not to
disperse after Manoeuvres. The Army is mobilising.  We are going to have
at them at last!  It’s ’Der Tag,’ all right!  You are coming back to us,
I suppose, Alan?"

"If they will have me," I said.

"Have you?  They’ll jump at you!  They’ll give you a battalion!  We
shall all get battalions! Brigades, perhaps!"  He laughed joyfully, like
a schoolboy who sees his first eleven colours ahead. "There will be
promotions all round—"

"In a month or two," I said soberly, "there will be a lot more."

"Oh, I don’t know," replied Eric.  "We may finish Fritz off in one big
battle.  The German soldier is a machine: so is his officer.  The whole
German Army is a machine."

"A damned efficient machine, too!" I observed.

"Yes, boy; but cumbrous, cumbrous!  If we let it get into its swing, it
will be hard to stop. But we won’t.  The little British Army—and mind
you, as a result of its South African lessons, it is the best trained,
the best led, and the finest body of men that we have ever put into the
field in all our history—will get the first move on, and it will chuck
itself, like a flinty little pebble, plumb in the middle of the German
machinery, and put all its gadgets out of gear!  After that, the German,
with his entire lack of initiative, will go to pieces, and we’ll eat him
up!"

Eric’s old Scottish nurse was accustomed to say of him that he was "aye
up in the cloods or doon in the midden."  There was no mistaking his
whereabouts to-day.  I began to feel the thrill too.

"Are you going back to the First Battalion?" I asked.

"No word of it as yet.  My orders are to stay here and perfect
mobilisation arrangements.  The moment the word goes out from the jolly
old War Office, we shall be swamped with reservists: we may have to
start a recruiting station as well. Great work!  Great work!  So long,
old son!  Run home and polish your buttons!"

He leaped into his car, and disappeared in a cloud of dust—a most
characteristic embodiment of the spirit that was flaming in the hearts
of all the youth of England and Scotland during that hectic,
unforgettable, blissfully ignorant week.

I walked slowly back down the Green Walk, prepared to serve my sentence
on the croquet lawn.  It was a perfect summer evening.  Not a leaf
stirred: not a bird chirruped.  The shadow of my somewhat square and
stocky person preceded me, flatteringly elongated and attenuated by the
rays of the setting sun.  Deep and abiding peace seemed to brood upon
the land.  Yet all the land, I knew, was making ready for battle.  Well,
for my part, I was satisfied.  I was a soldier, a widow man, and a
childless man.  I had no farewells to make, no last embraces—

From among the trees on my right I was conscious of a flutter of white,
and a murmur of voices.  A man and a woman—no, no, in those days one
still talked of boys and girls—were seated side by side on a fallen
tree-trunk, with their backs to me.  They did not appear to be
concerning themselves with war, or strife, or hostilities of any kind.
Their present relation, though decorous enough, appeared to be one of
most cordial agreement.  I recognised them both, and passed on
discreetly, silently acknowledging the prescience of that aged but
perspicacious student of humanity, my Lord of Eskerley.

"They appear to have found one another all right!" I said to myself.




                              *CHAPTER IV*

                               *A TRYST*


                                  *I*


Marjorie lay prone among the bracken in Craigfoot Wood, with her chin
resting on her hands, and her insteps drumming restlessly upon the cool
earth.  Below her ran the road.  To her left, beyond the wooded ridge
which gave its name to Baronrigg, lay Craigfoot, nestling, like most
small Lowland townships, in its own private valley.  To her right, out
of sight a mile away, ran the branch line of the railway which served
that district, and which had furnished material to local humourists for
a generation.

By the roadside, on the edge of the wood, stood the two-seater car which
was accustomed to carry the overflow of the Clegg family to church on
Sundays, and which Marjorie liked to pretend was her own special
property.  She was never so happy as when her arms were up to the elbows
in gear-box grease.  There was a good deal of the elemental small boy
about Miss Marjorie.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the month was once more
August.  The war which was to have been over in a few furious weeks had
now been in progress for twelve months.  The memory of the nightmare
campaign of the first winter in Flanders had crystallised into a
national epic.  And now Kitchener’s Army, having characteristically
survived that chaotic but inevitable experiment in improvisation, its
preliminary training at home during one of the worst and wettest winters
ever known in England, had gone abroad.  Here it had graduated, with
first class honours in endurance and cheerfulness, during a season of
trench warfare on the Western Front; and was now bracing itself, with
incorrigible optimism, for that heroic mess afterwards known as the
Battle of Loos.  Everywhere the war was consolidating its position.  On
land the Boche, in a determined effort to recoup himself for his losses
on the Western swings by a profitable exploitation of the Eastern
roundabouts, had just captured Warsaw; and Hindenburg and Ludendorff
were gloriously smashing their way through Russian armies in which
perhaps one man in ten possessed a rifle.  At sea, the battles of the
Falkland Islands and the Dogger Bank had confirmed the German High Seas
Fleet in a policy of watchful waiting—not to be broken, save for the
disconcerting experiment of Jutland, until the final abject excursion of
surrender more than three years later.  Submarines and Zeppelins were
beginning to function.  Yarmouth and Lowestoft had been bombed, with
_éclat_.  The _Lusitania_ had gone down, with eleven hundred souls; and
a certain giant in the Far West was beginning to come out of the ether
administered by Teutonic anæsthetists.

At home, the country had settled into its stride; and everyone, in camp,
tube, train, and tram, argued—Heavens! how they did argue!—by a simple
exercise in simple proportion, that if a mere handful of British
soldiers could hold back overwhelmingly superior numbers for a whole
winter, what wouldn’t we do to Germany when the new British Army found
their feet and got busy with the big push which everybody—friend and
foe, be it said—knew was coming in September?  (The possibility that the
enemy might have been unsportsmanlike enough to raise a few new armies
of his own did not appear to have occurred to anybody in particular.)
The life of the citizen was still fairly normal.  Taxicabs were
plentiful: theatrical business was booming.  One could still buy
practically all that the heart desired, provided one had the price.  The
days when everybody would have money, but there would be nothing to buy,
were yet to come.

Marjorie’s predominant emotion during the first six months of the war
had been that of fierce resentment against having been born a girl.  She
felt helpless; and whenever Marjorie felt helpless it made her angry.
(That was why she was so frequently angry with her father.)  All round
her the youth of her country were on fire, both boys and girls.  Yet the
boys were able to stream away to fight, while Marjorie, who was quite as
brave, quite as vigorous, and infinitely more capable of leadership than
many young men, was debarred by the accident of her sex from doing
anything at all.  In the year nineteen-fifteen the great conflict was
still regarded as a man’s war: the inevitability of mobilised womanhood
had not yet been recognised.  The accepted theory was that men must work
and women must weep—for the duration.

The countryside was full of soldiers, in all stages of growth.  Marjorie
used to encounter whole columns of them, route marching—strange
creatures, clothed in apparel which by no stretch of imagination could
be described as uniform. But for all their fantastic blends of khaki and
tweed, glengarry and billycock, Marjorie’s heart warmed to them.  They
were so boisterous, so childlike, so absolutely certain of what was
going to happen to the Boche when they got "oot there."

At their head, as often as not, rode Major Bethune.  He and Marjorie had
become acquainted under circumstances which will be recorded hereafter,
and his punctilious salute never failed to thrill her.  He was an
inspiring figure, and conspicuously solitary in his present _entourage_.
He alone was left of all the cheery, careless brotherhood who had
pursued the unexacting peace-time existence of a regular soldier at the
depot of the Royal Covenanters—the prop and mainstay of every
covert-shoot and tennis-party in the county.  They were all in France
now. Many of them would never come back.  But Eric Bethune remained, to
lick recruits into shape—with astonishing speed and efficiency, be it
said—and send them out, draft after draft, to stiffen the ever-thinning
ranks of the First and Second Battalions.  He hated being kept at home,
and said so.  Marjorie sympathised with him deeply, for she knew exactly
how he felt.  One day she told him so.  After that, Eric took
considerable notice of her.  He had the simple vanity of a spoiled
child, and reacted promptly to all those who took especially deferential
notice of him.

The pair met here and there—at Buckholm, whither Marjorie was sometimes
bidden with her mother to war relief committee meetings; at
entertainments organised for the recruits; at crossroads, where
Marjorie’s two-seater was frequently hung up by columns of marching men.
On these occasions they exchanged greetings—even confidences.  Eric was
more than twenty years Marjorie’s senior—a circumstance which, if
anything, heightened their attraction for one another.  It gratified
Eric hugely to find himself frankly admired by a young girl; while
Marjorie, born hero-worshipper that she was, felt pleasantly thrilled at
attracting the appreciative attention of a man so distinguished in his
record and so much more important than herself.  Also, Eric’s great
age—and to twenty, forty-three and infinity are very much the same
thing—made him "safe."  Fortunately for Eric’s self-esteem, he did not
know this.

They had small chance to become really intimate.  There were few
opportunities for social amenity in those days, and such as survived
hardly covered Netherby at all.  In that bleak household itself opinion
on the war was sharply divided. Albert Clegg came of a stock which had
been educated to regard war as a luxury of the upper classes.  He
believed that all wars were started by collusion between the "military
oligarchy" and the armament firms.  He maintained that no war had ever
been fought which could not have been avoided.  The sight of a uniform
filled him with horror.  He was eloquent—though not quite so fluent as
Uncle Fred—upon the iniquity of placing what he called a "musket" upon
the shoulder of a growing boy, and setting him for a period of three
years to strengthen his body by martial exercises, when he might have
been earning dividends for somebody.  Finally, he said that the Germans
were an industrious, peace-loving, musical nation, and that it was
sinful to attack—by which it is to be presumed he meant resist—an army
which was merely the involuntary instrument of despotism.

So when the British nation declined, by acclamation, to break faith with
France and Belgium, Albert Clegg was sincerely depressed.  Moreover,
being deeply interested in shipping, he foresaw ruin for the overseas
trade of the country.  Even when the unforeseen happened; when, as the
submarines began to take toll, the market value of tramp steamers shot
up a thousand per cent., and freights soared out of sight altogether, he
was not entirely comforted.  According to his lights he was an honest
man, and it was with a twinge of conscience that he found the war
accumulating for him profits on a scale which not even a swelling
income-tax could altogether moderate.  But he compounded with his
conscience in the end.  He drew his profits, but he drew them under
formal protest every time.  As Pooh Bah once explained, "It revolts me,
but I do it!"

Of the rest of the household, Mrs. Clegg for her part found the war
almost pleasantly exhilarating. None of her kith and kin were
participating in hostilities, which relieved her from such trifling
cares as beset old Mrs. Couper, who was interested in the matter to the
extent of five sons and fourteen grandsons; or Mrs. Gillespie, the
banker’s wife, who had contributed all she had, the _ci-devant_ student
of divinity, to the cause; or General Bothwell, whose son Jack had
arrived in Flanders from India with his Pathans in early December, and
had already met the almost inevitable end of a white officer who
undertakes the conspicuous task of leading dusky troops into action
under modern conditions; or Lord Eskerley, both of whose sons had died
at Le Cateau.  Bobby Laing, of The Heughs, nephew of our
autobiographical Major, had been killed in the landing of the King’s Own
Scottish Borderers at Gallipoli. Neither of Mrs. Clegg’s sons had
exhibited any leaning towards what their father described as "this
fashionable military nonsense," so Mrs. Clegg’s mind was at rest.  She
left everything, quite cheerfully—like too many of her kind—to the
Willing Horse.

Of course, she admitted, there was little going on socially.  Still, it
was gratifying to roll bandages or pack comfort-bags in company with
countesses; and though there were flies in the ointment—in the shape of
common persons like Mrs. Galbraith, the chemist’s wife, and the Misses
Peabody, included in the same gathering by the caste-destroying
processes of wartime—there were consolations.  Netherby itself, with its
spacious accommodation for meetings and committees, was a card which
only great social strongholds like Buckholm and Baronrigg could
overtrump.

It has been noted that Amos and Joshua Clegg had betrayed no disposition
to join up.  But while Amos in this matter followed his undoubted
inclinations, Joe was restrained only by the bonds of parental
discipline.  For one thing, Joe was a Public-School boy, and Amos was
not.  Joe’s school had only been a small establishment in the North of
England, but in nineteen-fourteen its little Officers’ Training Corps
had contributed its full quota of young men.  To Amos, Public Schools
(to quote his father) were places where boys learned "to take care of
their H’s and despise their parents": to his younger brother the
Public-School tradition was the ark and covenant, not to be lightly
profaned by parental sneers or fraternal failure to understand.  So Joe
kept his own counsel, and ate his dour young Northumbrian heart out for
twelve sickening months.

The climax had come that very morning, with the arrival, for Joe, of a
circular from his old school, requesting that he would "be so kind as to
fill up the enclosed form" with certain specific information regarding
his military service, for inclusion in the School Roll of Honour—his
rank, his unit, mentions in dispatches, and the like. There was no
alternative column to fill in; no comfortable loophole labelled
"Civilian war work of national importance"—nothing of that kind at all:
nothing but a stark request for poor Joe’s military status and record.
It had not occurred to the editors that any Old Boy could, in these
days, be elsewhere than in khaki.

Consequently, Marjorie had found Joe after breakfast, with his head in
his arms, crying like a child in a corner of the unfrequented and
cheerless Netherby smoking-room.  (Albert Clegg did not smoke.)  After
comforting him in the only fashion she knew—and a very acceptable
fashion any young man but a brother would have considered it—she made up
her mind on the spot to accept a certain sentimental invitation somewhat
shyly offered by Roy Birnie, and laughingly refused by herself, two days
previously.  That was why she was now lying in the bracken on the edge
of Craigfoot Wood, gazing up the road to Baronrigg.



                                  *II*


It was Roy’s last day at home.  At the outbreak of war, to his own
intense indignation, he had been refused a commission.  Many of his
young friends, common civilians no older than himself, had been endowed
with what they described as ’one pip’ and set to command platoons all
over the country. But Roy, as a prospective regular, had been
despatched—the victim of a conspiracy in which he traced the hand of
every person but the right one—to Sandhurst, where he was compelled to
undergo an intensive education in the science of warfare, speculating
grimly meanwhile as to the kind of mess his amateur supplanters were
making of the British Expeditionary Force. Sometimes he woke at night in
a cold sweat, having dreamed, as he had sometimes dreamed before a house
match, that the war had come to an end before he had had his innings.

Now, at last, he was emancipated.  He was a second lieutenant.  He could
wear a Sam Browne belt and look an A.P.M. right in the face—instead of
hurriedly plunging down side streets to avoid that suspicious official’s
eye, as he had frequently done when up in London on leave with a crony,
the pair of them decked in borrowed trappings to which a cadet’s rank
did not entitle them. He was an officer, holding the King’s Commission;
and, best of all, had been gazetted to the Second Battalion of the old
regiment, of which his uncle, "Leathery Laing," was now
second-in-command.  He had completed his draft leave, and was to report
at the Depot at six o’clock this Sunday evening, to take charge of a
contingent bound overseas to reënforce the battalion at a point on the
Western Front as yet unrevealed.

He had made his farewells—in the offhand, jocular fashion affected by
our race in cases where the probability of return is more than doubtful.
His father had shaken hands with him, and shaken his own head at the
same time.  Tom Birnie’s heart was not in the war: he persisted in his
belief that it was started by the Jingoes.

His friends—and Roy had friends in every walk of life—had loaded him
with messages to fathers, brothers and sweethearts who were gone before
into the pillar of cloud.  Mr. Gillespie, the bank manager, entrusted
him with a small package (on behalf of Mesdames Spot and Plain),
containing mysterious comforts for son Robert. Jamie Leslie, the
organ-blower of the parish church, buttonholed him in the street.

"Mr. Roy," he said wistfully, "you’ll tell the boys oot there that I
have tried, and _tried_, for to get ower; but they winna hae me!  It’s
because I’m no quite richt in the heid," he added, with a candour which
might well have been imitated by others occupying more exalted official
positions than his own.  "You’ll tell them?  I wouldna like them for tae
think—"

Roy supplied the necessary assurance, and passed on to receive a message
from old Mrs. Rorison, whose son John, a giant of six feet four inches,
had abandoned the service of the post office in order to join the Scots
Guards.

"Tell oor John," said the old lady—it was universally assumed that Roy
would encounter the entire Craigfoot contingent, regardless of rank or
unit, immediately upon landing—"tae keep his heid doon in they trenches.
I ken him! And dinna go keeking ower the top yourself, Mr. Roy!"  This,
on the whole, was the most practical valediction that Roy received.

Lord Eskerley’s farewell was quite characteristic.

"Good-bye!  Don’t give away any military news when you write to her.  It
has done a lot of harm already."

There was no one left now to say good-bye to but Marjorie.  Like the
young sentimentalist that he was, Roy was reserving her for the last.
He wanted to bid her farewell at the very final moment—and, if possible,
clandestinely.  There existed no obstacle whatever to his driving openly
to Netherby and delivering his farewell speech on the hearthrug in the
library, or among the raspberry-canes in the kitchen garden.  But war
sharpens our romantic appetites to a surprising degree.  At the most
ordinary times lovers are accustomed to bid one another good night with
an expenditure of time and intensity which takes no account of the fact
that they are going to meet again directly after breakfast to-morrow
morning.  How much more pardonable and ecstatic, then, must that
exercise be when it really is good night—when it is more than probable
that before the time for reunion comes round again, one of the
participants may have blown out his little candle for good.

Roy’s preference for surreptitious love-making was natural enough, for
another reason.  He was a member of the shyest and most self-conscious
brotherhood in the world—the tribe of the less-than-twenty-one’s.  By
rights he should not have been in love—matrimonially—at all.  A healthy
English Public-School boy of nineteen is not entitled to such emotions
as inspired Master Roy and his friends in the year of grace
nineteen-fifteen.  His mind should be set—and in normal times almost
invariably is set—upon his biceps muscle, or his first salmon, or his
college rowing colours, or (at moments of periodic festivity) the
acquisition of souvenirs, like policemen’s helmets or door-knockers.
Permanent association with one of the softer sex should be to him, for
several years yet, a delightful unattainability.  He matures late, does
our young Briton, and premature responsibility as husband and father
usually prevents him from ever developing into the man he was meant to
be.  But wise old Nature is always ready to modify her own laws in an
emergency.  In nineteen-fifteen people, especially young people, found
their perspectives considerably foreshortened.  It is no use taking long
views about life at a time when life promises to be more than usually
short.  There is just one thing to do, and that is to reach out with
both hands after such of life’s gifts as are normally reserved,
especially in this country of ours, for those of riper years.

So, engaged couples who in nineteen-fourteen had taken it as a matter of
course that their wedding must be postponed until after the war,
suddenly realised that there might be no after the war for one of them,
and incontinently got married.  Boys and girls whose sentimental
exercises in normal times would have been limited to sitting out dances
behind a screen in the Christmas holidays not only became engaged, but
usually plunged into matrimony a few weeks later.  They were governed by
forces which they did not entirely comprehend, and which few of them
would have been capable of resisting if they had.  They had no idea how
they were going to live after the war; but they married all the same.
It was essentially a case where the morrow must take thought for itself.
They capitalised all their stock, both of money and of youth, these
happy young gamblers, and lived ecstatically on that capital, stoically
resigned to the probability that before it was exhausted their little
partnership would have been dissolved.  And in too many cases, poor
souls, they were justified in their expectations.  But who shall say
that they were wrong, or improvident, to do as they did?  Prudence,
perhaps; commonsense, possibly.  But not nature, nor patriotism, nor
romance, nor the spirit of adventure.

It is not to be supposed that our impetuous Roy had reasoned out these
matters with any degree of profundity.  All he knew was that he had
loved that glorious girl, Marjorie Clegg, from the moment he had first
seen her in Craigfoot parish church a year and a half ago; and that now
he was called upon to go away and relinquish even his present scanty
opportunities of seeing her.  Moreover, his battalion had got through
twenty-three second lieutenants in the last ten months.  One, obvious,
course was indicated; but it was a big step for a reserved schoolboy of
nineteen.  To tell Marjorie, _tout court_, that he loved her frightened
him—far more than any statistics about second lieutenants.  If it had
been peace-time he would have followed the natural path of a boy who
falls in love with a girl of his own age. He would have decided to grow
up, and become an eligible _parti_ at the earliest possible moment. He
might, possibly, have declared himself, and invited his beloved to "wait
for him."  It is within the bounds of probability that the damsel would
have promised to do so.  The _affaire_ would then have proceeded on its
innocuous course—spasmodically enough, owing to the interposition of
such things as University terms, regimental duties, or vulgar office
hours—to its normal end. That is to say, the girl would probably have
met and married some one really eligible a few years older than herself,
leaving it to the hand of Time to heal the wounds of her late cavalier
and unite him in due course to another really eligible girl some years
younger than himself, recently the property of a shaveling of nineteen.

But this was not peace-time.  The country was at war, and for reasons
already indicated waiting and seeing had gone out of fashion.  The
watchword of the moment, whether applied to munitions or matrimony, was,
"Do It Now!"  No wonder that Roy felt his heart leap to his throat as
the Baronrigg car, conveying him to the Depot seven miles away,
surmounted the last crest on the undulating road, and revealed to him
Marjorie’s two-seater standing in the hollow below, under the lee of
Craigfoot Wood.  For all her preliminary refusal and offhand acceptance,
Marjorie had kept tryst.




                              *CHAPTER V*

                            *THE INEVITABLE*


Marjorie stood on the bank above the road, knee-deep in bracken.  The
Baronrigg chauffeur, an elderly gentleman with that perfect repose of
manner which is given only to such members of the tribe as are promoted
coachmen, drew up beside the two-seater.  Roy jumped out and saluted
with great smartness.  He was in uniform, and was hung about with that
warlike paraphernalia professionally known as "the whole Christmas
Tree."  Having disencumbered himself of this, he threw it into the car,
climbed the bank, and joined his lady.  His heart bumped.

"You do look nice," said Marjorie.  "But what is the matter with your
buttons?"

"I have painted them with some black stuff," replied Roy.  "Quite the
thing—not swank!  It is always done on active service: otherwise my
twinkling little buttons might attract the eye of vigilant Boche."  He
took her arm, a little feverishly. "What about a stroll in the shades of
the forest?  What about it, what?"

This was not the way in which Roy had intended to begin the interview.
Upon such occasions of stress no man knows what humiliating tricks
self-consciousness may not play upon him. But Marjorie, of the superior
sex, appeared quite unruffled.

"All right," she said cheerfully; "come along! I am so glad you are
here."

"Are you, Marjorie?" exclaimed Roy, much encouraged.

"Yes.  I want to consult you about something."

Roy drew back an overhanging branch.

"Step inside the consulting room!" he suggested.

Marjorie seated herself upon a ledge of rock in the snug nook which the
branch had concealed. Roy lay down on the grass at her feet.  There was
silence.  At last Marjorie said:

"When must you be at the Depot?"

"Six."  Roy glanced at his new, luminous, dust-proof, non-breakable
wrist-watch.  "That gives me twenty minutes.  What did you want to talk
to me about, Marjorie?"

"About Joe."

"Oh!"  There was a certain lack of enthusiasm about the interjection,
but Marjorie did not notice it.  Roy looked up at her.  Her brow was
puckered, and her eyes were troubled.  She was very fond of brother Joe.
Roy, resolutely disengaging his attention from the high lights in her
hair, said gently:

"Tell me."

Marjorie blazed out suddenly.

"He can’t stand it any longer!  He has done his best to be patient, and
obedient to father, and all that; but it’s breaking his heart.  Why,
only this morning—"

She related the pitiful incident of the school circular and the Roll of
Honour.  There were tears in her eyes when she had finished.

"So," she concluded, "he has made up his mind to join up."

"Good egg!" observed Roy.  "Is he going to apply for a commission, or
what?"

"That was what I wanted to consult you about," said Marjorie.  "You are
so clever about these things, Roy."

"Fire away!" replied Roy, much inflated.

"Commissions," asked Marjorie—"can you get them easily?"

"Not so easily now.  The authorities are beginning to sit up and take
notice.  The first lot of officers in the new armies were mostly all
right. They didn’t know much, but they were sahibs, who played the game
and handled their men properly.  Now they are getting used up, and some
pretty strange fish have been given commissions lately.  The voice of
the T.G. is heard in the land.  Here is a letter from my uncle, Alan
Laing—our second-in-command.  You know him?"

"No, but I have seen him."

Roy chuckled.

"Yes," he said, "and he has seen you; and you fairly knocked him flat!
But never mind Uncle Alan now.  He’s a wicked old man, anyhow.  About
this T.G. business.  Uncle Alan wrote to me the other day.  He said that
some of the officers lately sent out were about the stickiest crowd he
had yet handled.  Here’s the letter."


_Of course, among ourselves in the Mess, he read, we make allowances,
and try to get the best out of them; for after all, most of them are
plucky enough and efficient enough.  Unfortunately, the rank-and-file,
with the true British passion for inequality, do not share our
democratic sentiments.  They say, in effect: "This blankety blighter is
no better than we are.  Why should we salute him, or obey him, or follow
him?"  The T.G. too often confirms his own sentence; I caught one of my
subalterns trying to stand a corporal a drink the other day.  I hear
they are going to start officers’ schools soon.  The sooner the better!_


"Of course," said Marjorie, flying, woman-like, to the personal
application of the subject, "Joe wouldn’t behave like that."

"Good Lord, no!  Of course he wouldn’t," said Roy.

"Amos probably would, though," added honest Marjorie.  "He has never
been to a proper school, so he has had no chance to have his Clegg
manners improved.  But we aren’t troubling about Amos: it’s Joe.  Would
they take him into a Cadet Officers’ School, do you think?"

"I am sure they would," said Roy confidently. "Only, it might require a
little time, you know."

"That’s a drawback," replied Marjorie. "Once father knows what Joe is
trying to do, his life at home won’t be worth living.  It’ll be a fight
all day long: he will be lectured, and badgered, and prayed over.  I
shouldn’t wonder if they sent for Uncle Fred!"

A thought struck Roy.

"I say," he enquired, "how old is Joe?"

"Twenty."

"That hangs the crape on Joseph!" announced Roy—"for a year, at any
rate.  They won’t give a commission to a minor without his father’s
consent."  He wriggled.  "Don’t I know it!  If they did, I’d have been
in the show a year ago."

"In that case," said Marjorie, "we must fall back on our second plan."

"We?"

"I mean Joe and I."

"Oh, sorry.  I was hoping you meant you and me!  What is the plan?"

"It’s a secret just now," said Marjorie. "Perhaps I’ll tell you about
it, when I write."

Roy looked up eagerly.

"You _will_ write to me?" he said.  "Often?"

"Of course I will!" said the girl.  "It will be wonderful!"

What she meant was that it would be wonderful to have, in future, a
personal interest in the British Expeditionary Force.  As already
indicated, the circle in which Marjorie had been born and bred was not
very heavily represented in France—nor would be until conscription came.
But now Roy would be there.  She would have a personal outlet for her
imagination, and a peg to hang her prayers on.  Women hate abstract
patriotism, as they hate all abstractions. Roy would supply the human,
personal element, upon which a woman’s visions must always be founded.
Male orators might volley and thunder about the common cause and the
redemption of civilization; but to most women the Great War and its
issues were usually embodied in the person of a single undistinguished
individual in a tin bowler.

Roy, of course, did not understand.

"How glorious of you to say that, Marjorie!" he exclaimed.

"You do not know," continued Marjorie rapturously, "how I have longed
and longed to have some one to write to, and send parcels to, and
everything—some one I really knew!—instead of a bundle of things to be
distributed among a whole platoon!"

"And you are going to make me that particular person?" said Roy,
joyfully.

"Rather!  You see," explained Marjorie with fatal frankness, "I don’t
know anyone else.  At least, I shan’t, until Joe—"

Roy’s face fell.  "I thought there was a catch about it!" he said
woefully.

"About what?"

"About what you said.  I didn’t understand that all you wanted was some
one to write to; and any old thing would do—even me!  I did hope, for a
minute—"

Marjorie was all repentance at once.

"Oh!" she cried.  "How hateful of me!  Roy, I didn’t mean it!  What must
you think of me? I must seem like a common little war-flapper. But I’m
not, am I?  Roy, you _know_ I’m not! Will you forgive me?"  She extended
a hand impetuously.

It fired the train.  Next moment Roy had caught it in both of his, and
was kissing it rapturously.

"Marjorie—dear!" he murmured.  He was kneeling before her now, with his
arms crossed upon her knees.  He looked up into her face, and suddenly
realised what he was leaving behind. A great sob shook him.  Perhaps the
thought of the twenty-three second lieutenants had something to do with
it.  After all, he was only nineteen, and love and life were very sweet.
His head sank on to his arms; his shoulders heaved.

There followed a brief interval of silence—perhaps three minutes.  But
within that interval something happened to Marjorie.

Presently a slim hand removed Roy’s glengarry bonnet, and began to
stroke his obstinately curly hair.  Next, Roy was conscious of a warm
splash, somewhere behind his right ear—followed by another, and another.
Marjorie was shaking now.  Roy looked up at her again, and the sight of
her wet face suddenly braced him against his own weakness.  He sprang
up.

"You poor, poor, poor!" he said.  "Let me—"

He produced a khaki handkerchief from his sleeve, and dried her eyes,
Marjorie meekly submitting.  After that, inevitably, he kissed her. It
was not a very successful kiss: first kisses seldom are.  Then he sat
down upon the grass again with his head against her knee, and her hand
against his cheek.  He sighed, long and rapturously.  Marjorie stroked
his hair with her free hand.  Children both, they were living through a
moment for which others, less fortunate, have sometimes waited a
lifetime, and which in no case ever comes to man or maid a second time.

Presently they began to talk, employing the two inevitable topics of the
newly-betrothed—"When did it begin?" and, "Do you remember?"

They recalled their first glimpse of one another—that May morning in
church, more than a year ago.

"Uncle Alan was very witty on the subject," said Master Roy.  "Oh, most
diverting!  It’s my belief the old ruffian was having a good
one-time-look-see at you himself, and that was why he caught me at it.
Well, I can’t say I blame him!"

They wandered on to the second subject.  Here they had much ground to
cover.

They had not actually met until three weeks after the glimpse.  During
those weeks Roy religiously attended dances, tea-parties, political
meetings, even a church soirée, in the hope of encountering his
divinity; but in vain.  Once he bought three numbered and reserved seats
for an amateur theatrical entertainment in the Town Hall, and sent two
of these to Netherby, "With the compliments of the committee."  But Mrs.
Clegg, knowing that her husband did not hold with theatrical
entertainments, and that under no circumstances would she or the family
be permitted to attend this one, had passed the tickets on to a more
emancipated quarter, with the result that Roy witnessed the performance
in the giggling company of two Netherby housemaids.  He told the story
to Marjorie now, and was rewarded with tears and laughter.

But they had met at last—at the local Hunt Steeplechases.  Marjorie was
present, privily, in the two-seater, with brother Joe.  Roy had spied
the pair from the regimental enclosure.  He was due back at his
crammer’s in two days’ time, and was a desperate man.  Summoning his
entire stock of audacity—it was considerable, but he needed it all—he
left the enclosure, pushed his way through the crowd, and addressed
himself to the male member of the rather forlorn couple standing by the
rails.

"I say, sir, aren’t you Mr. Clegg, of Netherby?"

Joe, quite unequal to the situation, murmured something inarticulate;
but Marjorie came to the rescue.

"How do you do?" she said.  "You are Mr. Birnie, aren’t you?"

"Yes.  We are your next-door neighbours—your nearest little playmates,
in fact," replied Master Roy.  (Netherby is some four or five miles from
Baronrigg; but no matter.)  "My father has been meaning to shoot cards
on you for a long time.  Meanwhile, would you care to come into the
enclosure?  Bracing air!  Gravel soil!  Commands a distant prospect of
the Cheviot Hills, and so on!  Highly recommended! Do come!"  He waited
breathlessly for her reply, fearful of having gone too far.  But the
invitation was accepted.


"What a moment!" he said.  "_What_ a moment!"  He looked up at Marjorie
again.  "I was afraid you would turn me down, for cheek. You hesitated a
bit, didn’t you?"

Marjorie laughed, joyously.

"My dear, that was for manners!  I wouldn’t have let you go at that
moment for anything in the world!" She played a gentle arpeggio on the
brown cheek under her hand.

"By gum, I wish I had known that!" observed Roy, with sincerity.


Once inside the enclosure Marjorie created a profound sensation.  It is
true that not many of her own sex addressed themselves to her, but this
omission was more than balanced by the _empressement_ of the gentlemen.

First of all, naturally, she was introduced to the senior officer
present—Major Eric Bethune, who, in the secret view of his subordinates,
proceeded to take an unsportsmanlike and unduly prolonged advantage of
his superior rank.  Duty called him at last to the side of a lady of
riper years.  Thereafter, Marjorie, almost invisible for second
lieutenants, was escorted about the course, shown the jumps, plied with
tea, and invited to back horses at other people’s expense.  She had
driven home in a dream, with her exhausted relative slumbering beside
her.

After that a few mothers and sisters, hounded thereto by clamorous
menkind, had left cards at Netherby.  The calls had been duly returned,
with the result that some of the sisters added themselves, quite
voluntarily, to the ranks of the brothers.  Marjorie possessed the
supreme quality in a woman of being attractive to her own sex. Mrs.
Clegg and her daughter began to be seen at subscription balls and the
more comprehensive garden parties; presently at more intimate
entertainments.  In the end, Netherby usually received a card for any
function that was going, always excepting such—formal dinner parties and
the like—as necessitated inviting Albert Clegg.

"The girl is a peach," was the local verdict, "and mother does her best;
but the old man merely suggests eternal punishment!"

And wherever Marjorie appeared—at ball, function, fête, bazaar,
gymkhana, or tea-fight, Master Roy Birnie, home for good from the
crammer’s, was usually visible in respectful attendance.

Not that she had not other adherents.  Even Major Bethune himself, the
handsomest man and the most eligible _parti_ in the county, did not
consider it beneath his dignity to sit out a dance or two with the
daughter of Albert Clegg.  But Roy’s devotion was marked by its
unflagging and conscientious continuity.  He was a regular visitor at
Netherby.  It was his habit to ride over every morning—usually about
eleven, when the master of the house was engaged in transacting business
in the library, mostly over the telephone to Newcastle—where he would
play tennis, perform tricks on the billiard table, give the children
riding-lessons, pick roses for Mrs. Clegg—do anything, in fact, which
afforded him a reasonable excuse for remaining on the premises.  Being
British, and only eighteen, his passion had not declared itself in
words; nor would have for many a day, but for the quickening influences
already indicated.  Even when the coming of war suddenly laid a man’s
responsibilities upon his young shoulders, and removed most of his
rivals, real and imaginary, _en masse_, to the other side of the
Channel, he did not look higher, for the present, than the foot of
Marjorie’s pedestal.  His intention was to leave his lady perched upon
the summit thereof for the duration; and then, if and when he returned
safe and whole from castigating the Boche, to invite her to step down to
earth and start, under his escort, upon the adventure of life.  To do
more at present struck him as unsportsmanlike.  He would be forcing her
hand unfairly; he would be taking a sentimental advantage of the
military situation.  But the last ten minutes had entirely upset his
plan of operations.  He had kissed Marjorie; Marjorie had indubitably
kissed him back; and now they were sitting side by side in Craigfoot
Wood, in an attitude which twelve months ago would have outraged both
his susceptibilities and his sense of humour, facing the prospect of
indefinite separation.  What was the next step?  What about it, what?
Pending a decision, he saluted his lady afresh.


From the road below them came a respectful toot from the horn of the
Craigfoot motor, suggestive of a faithful attendant coughing a discreet
reminder behind his hand.  Roy glanced at his watch, and rose to his
feet with a heartrending sigh.

"Time to go!" he groaned.

He held out his hands to Marjorie, and raised her up.  For a moment
those two young people looked one another bravely in the face—for the
last time, for aught they knew.  They were very much of a height; Roy
had the advantage of perhaps an inch.  Then that direct young maiden,
Marjorie, put both arms round Roy’s neck.

"Good-bye, dear," she said.  "Take care of yourself, and come back safe
to me!"

"I’ll come back," replied Roy stoutly, forgetting all about the
twenty-three second lieutenants. He had no doubts about anything now.
Then:

"Marjorie," he asked, "when will you marry me?  As soon as the war is
over?"  He waited, expectant.

Marjorie’s answer took the rather puzzling form of a little choking
laugh, accompanied by two large tears.

"As soon as that?" she asked.

The young of the male species possesses no intuition.

"Yes," replied Roy earnestly, "just as soon! Or"—with the air of one
conceding a point—"pretty soon after."  He came closer.  "Marjorie—will
you?"

This time Marjorie smiled without any tears at all—a purely maternal
smile.

"Leave it to me, little man!" she said.

Then she kissed him again, and sent him off to fight for her.


That night Joe Clegg crept downstairs, out of the house, and thence (per
two-seater) to the railway junction twelve miles away.  Here he caught
the early morning train to London, where it was his intention to enlist.
He was accompanied by his sister Marjorie, who, after a final and
tempestuous debate with her father upon the subject of filial duty and
feminine usefulness in war-time, had decided to burn her boats too, and
enlist in the gallant sisterhood of those who were Really Trying to
Help.




                              *CHAPTER VI*

                                 *SOLO*


The lights sank low again, and a flickering announcement appeared upon
the screen, to the effect that the next picture would be a further
instalment of that absorbing serial, _The Marvels of Natural
History_—upon this occasion, _Still Life in the Frog Pond_.  The
majority of the audience took the hint, rose to their feet, and shuffled
out.  But Marjorie stayed on.  Some of us go to the pictures to see
pictures, others to hold hands, others to sit down and rest.  Marjorie
belonged to the third class.  Not even the prospect of a
quarter-of-an-hour in a frog pond could induce her to concede to the
management the chance of selling her seat once more before closing time.
She sat on, in a tired reverie.


Marjorie had arrived in London three months ago, to find that
overcrowded metropolis fairly evenly divided between two classes—the
people who had taken up war work, and the people who were doing it.  The
chief difficulty of the latter was to push their way through the
unyielding ranks of the former.  Things righted themselves later, under
the unsentimental _régime_ of necessity; but in November,
nineteen-fifteen, the road to victory was blocked with good intentions.

Having invaded London, Marjorie and Joe devoted two days to exploration.
Marjorie had been in London twice before—going to and returning from
school in Paris—her stay upon each occasion being limited to a single
extremely domestic evening at Uncle Fred’s house in Dulwich.  This
experience naturally qualified Marjorie (being Marjorie) for the role of
guide and courier to that unsophisticated yokel, brother Joe.  They put
up at the Grand Hotel, because Marjorie considered Trafalgar Square a
good _point d’appui_, and a difficult place to lose altogether even in
the howling wilderness of Central London.  They pooled their money.
Marjorie had drawn the whole of the savings of her dress allowance—about
one hundred pounds—from the custody of Mr. Gillespie shortly before the
day of her departure, and Joe had a quarter’s salary intact.  They
dined, went to the play, sat in the Park, lunched at the Carlton, and
generally had their fling (but not of) a world composed entirely of
elegantly dressed females and uniformed officers of every grade.

After keeping carnival for forty-eight hours, Marjorie conducted her
brother to a recruiting office, where the authorities were unfeignedly
glad to see him, business at that period being lamentably slack.  There,
having kissed him, she left him and returned to the Grand Hotel.  At the
end of half-an-hour she rose from her bed, dabbed her eyes with a cold
sponge, sent for her bill, paid it with a bright smile, and removed
herself and her effects to a self-contained flat near the Brompton Road.
There she sat down to make a plan.  She had several sketched out, but
her choice depended, like so many other choices in this life, upon
sordid financial considerations.  If her allowance were continued, she
could afford to do war work for love.  If not, she must perforce do war
work for money.  So she wrote to her father, telling him frankly why she
and Joe had left home, giving her new address, and concluding her
letter:


_So now you know where I am.  If I don’t hear from you I shall know that
you don’t intend to have anything more to do with me.  But I hope I
shall hear from you. Love.  Marjorie._


Upon the question of her father’s financial intentions she refrained
from inquiry, for she knew full well what the result of such directness
would be.  Her intention was to hold on until the September quarter, and
then try the experiment of a cheque to her own order on Mr. Gillespie’s
bank. Her hope was that the allowance would continue automatically, as
it might not occur to her father to stop it—presuming he wished to do
so.

"If he does," she said to herself, "I must just go and work in an
ammunition factory, or something—that’s all!  Still, I don’t believe he
will. Father’s a hard man, but he does try to be just. He can’t punish
me for simply wanting to work now, of all times!"

In this she did her father no less, and as it ultimately proved, no more
than justice; for a _ballon d’essai_ despatched northward to Mr.
Gillespie at the end of September was received by him with the honour
due to a credit balance.

But September was a long way off.  Marjorie methodically reviewed all
the avenues of occupation open to her.  Nursing attracted her most; but
she knew herself to be pathetically ignorant of the elements of the
craft, and furthermore doubted (rightly) if her combative nature would
endure the complete subservience to the professional element inevitable
in the life of that plucky, much-enduring, self-effacing Cinderella, the
V.A.D.  Stenography and typewriting were unknown to her.
Munition-making at this time was but an infant industry—as the occupants
of the trenches had continuous occasion to note, with characteristic
comment.  There were a number of minor Red Cross activities open to
her—bandage-rolling, parcel-packing, and the like—but these pursuits
were too sedentary for ebullient Marjorie.  Other forms of war activity,
such as selling programmes at charity _matinées_, or pestering total
strangers in ’buses and tube-trains to purchase flags to relieve the
contingent wants of hypothetical Allied babies, were pushed
contemptuously aside as war work _pour rire_.  It was not too easy,
either, to know where to apply, with adequate results.  Upon the Olympus
whence the country was being directed to victory, the Organisation of
Womanhood still lay in the tray—much the biggest tray on Olympus—marked
"Pending."  Those quaint but proud expressions, "Wren," "Waac," and
"Wraf" had not yet been added to the English language.

Marjorie finally decided to try canteen work. Vicarious service had no
attraction for her; to get as close as possible to the human side of an
enterprise was all her aim.  At the canteen she would see and wait upon
the most human member of the human family, one Thomas Atkins.  A single
fear made her hesitate.  She wanted to spend herself utterly upon the
Cause.  Might not this canteen business prove just a little too trivial;
a little too like playing at work?

She tried it for a week.  After carrying tea-urns from the kitchen to
the counter for eight consecutive hours she decided, without any
hesitation whatever, that her apprehensions were groundless.

Month by month, Marjorie bent her giant’s spirit and her straight young
back to her task. The Canteen, near Waterloo Station, was never closed,
and was full at practically every hour of the day and night.  But,
day-shift or night-shift, fair weather or foul, good news or bad,
nothing made any difference to Marjorie.  She was always on time, always
cheerful, always perfectly ready to perform tasks left undone by the
Undertakers of War Work.  She set herself a standard of endurance and
privation approximately as nearly as possible to that which she
understood prevailed on the Western Front.  This seemed to her the least
that a stay-at-home person like herself could do, in consideration of
the fact that no bodily risk attached to her duties.  (As yet, Zeppelin
frightfulness was merely one of London’s gratuitous entertainments.)
Consequently, after six months’ unceasing drudgery, Marjorie was
beginning to feel very tired, and just a little despondent.

The spirit of despondency stalked abroad in those days: it was the
natural reaction from the wave of enthusiasm which had carried the
country so highheartedly through the anxieties and uncertainties of the
first twelve months.  It was becoming increasingly obvious that "K" was
right; that the war was going to last for a term of years; and that the
country could not reach the goal on its first wind.  Pending the arrival
of the second, a slump in martial enthusiasm was inevitable.  Tubes and
omnibuses no longer carried men in uniform for nothing.  Civilians no
longer offered their seats to soldiers and sailors.  Patriotic flappers
no longer presented white feathers to wounded officers in mufti.  It was
no longer considered _de rigueur_ for the orchestra in public
restaurants to bring a docile public to its feet by periodical
excursions into patriotic melody. The Battle of Loos had demonstrated
once more that the young British soldier never fights better than in his
first battle; also, alas! that when a nation goes to war free from the
taint of "militarism," soldiers must die that Staffs may learn.
Gallipoli had been evacuated, when with a little luck and good
management the evacuation might have taken place at the other end.
Bulgaria had recently joined our enemies, and it was felt that with more
skilful handling she would have come down upon our side of the hedge.
Early in December figures to date of British casualties in all theatres
of war were officially announced for the first time: they reached a
total more than five times as great as the numbers of the original
Expeditionary Force.  A shortage of men was becoming apparent: although
nearly four million had joined the Colours, the cry was still for more.
The Voluntary system was at its last gasp. Despite the honest and
ingenious Derby scheme for a more even distribution of the burden, it
was plain that an intolerable and increasing weight was being borne by
The Willing Horse. Conscription, long overdue, was clearly on the way,
with the result that the voice of the Conscientious Objector was now
heard in the land. On the top of all this the No-Treating Order had come
into force, and another injustice was inflicted upon that section of the
community which preferred that its refreshment should be paid for, as
its battles were being fought, by some one else. Even Marjorie’s spirits
sagged a little during that black winter.  Her sense of oppression was
increased by two potent factors.  In the first place, she was underfed.
It was entirely her own fault, or, rather, that of her first parent,
Eve. In their hearts, all women cherish a profound contempt for what men
call good food.  Formal meals, consumed at leisure and with comfortable
ritual, are to them a mere pandering to gross male standards of
self-indulgence.  A woman hates sitting at a dinner-table through a meal
of thoughtfully varied courses.  To her the perfect repast is, was, and
always will be an egg on a tray, on a chair, in any room but the
dining-room.

Marjorie was not exempt from this failing. Too often her principal meal
of the day was eaten in a tea-shop, and consisted of food that satisfied
quickly and nourished not at all.  The meals at Netherby had been
irksome, but they were at least wholesome.  Furthermore, in her desire
to emulate the soldier’s lot, she imposed upon herself a voluntary
rationing scheme—which if applied in military circles would have
undoubtedly produced a mutiny.  She had the zealot spirit, too.  After
the twelfth of October, the day upon which Edith Cavell died, Marjorie
ate neither butter nor jam for a fortnight.  Less sincere tributes have
been paid to our great dead.

But, above all, she was desperately lonely.  If it is not good for man
to be alone, it is far worse for woman.  And Marjorie was very much
alone. It is surprising what a small acquaintance most of us really
possess.  Such as are occupied every day in earning a living—and who is
not in these times?—are almost entirely dependent for human
companionship upon the people with whom they work and the people with
whom they share a home.  Of course, there is a certain type which makes
sociability its life work; which is eternally busy with visiting-cards
and engagement-book; scraping acquaintance here, exchanging addresses
there—the type, in fact, which entertains a not altogether unreasonable
dread of being left alone with itself.  But if you possess neither the
inclination nor the leisure for these amenities, and do not live at
home, and do not happen to work in company with a throng of your
fellow-creatures, you can be a very lonely individual indeed, especially
in a great city.

Marjorie, fortunately, had the canteen.  She formed acquaintanceships
quickly, as all attractive people do.  Some of these, owing to her
natural discrimination, were short-lived, and none made an abiding
impression.  Marjorie was more interested in things than people in those
days. But the soldiers appreciated her.  Sometimes their appreciation
took the form of tips.  One Canadian presented her with half a crown,
and commanded her to buy "candy" with it; but the majority of her
patrons furtively thrust a penny or twopence—and twopence meant a good
deal to Tommy in those shilling-a-day times—under the saucer, adjusted
cap, and said awkwardly, "Well, so-long, miss!" hurrying out before the
delinquency was discovered.  Many of them sent her post cards, from
Flanders, or Egypt, or India, addressed as often as not, if they had
lacked the courage to ask her name beforehand, to the "Young Lady with
the Tea Urns."

But Marjorie’s leisure hours were not exhilarating.  That moment at the
end of the day’s work, when every member of the human family ought to be
provided by law with some one or something to go home to, was the worst.
Still, it was all part of the game, and she played up sturdily.  She
invented amusements for herself—such as could be indulged in by one
person, gifted with imagination and a sense of humour. London itself was
her playground.  Most of the picture galleries and museums were closed
by this time; but London’s real attractions are ever in the street.
Walking home on a fine morning from night duty, Marjorie would
frequently look in at St. James’s Palace to see that the Guard was
properly changed.  Sometimes she trudged as far as Buckingham Palace
with the relief.  She bought a little book which dealt with London
landmarks, and sought out for her own amusement the Old Curiosity Shop,
London Wall, the site of Tyburn Tree, and the birthplaces of numerous
historical celebrities.  She acquired a store of useless but pleasant
knowledge: for instance, that the wooden slab with iron legs, which
stands by the railings of the Green Park in Piccadilly, was originally
set up to enable ticket-porters to rest their bundles for a moment
before breasting the gradient—more perceptible to a ticket-porter than a
modern taxi—that leads to Hyde Park Corner.

The great railway stations were a perpetual feast to her, especially
Victoria and Waterloo. Many an evening found her at the barrier at
Victoria as the leave train drew up at the platform, to disgorge a wave
of bronzed, boisterous, mud-caked, unshaven children into the arms of
demonstrative relatives.  Sometimes, too, in the early morning, she
attended this same train’s departure, upon the shortest run in the
world—the run in the opposite direction was the longest—the journey
between London and Folkestone. With swelling heart and tightening lips
she watched the crowd of returners to duty—all curiously silent, and all
smiling in the most unanimous and resolute manner for the benefit of
those who had come to see them off.  The silence and the resolution
broke sometimes when the warning whistle sounded—perhaps for ten
seconds.  As soon as the train began to move, Marjorie always turned and
walked rapidly away before the women came wandering aimlessly back from
the empty platform.  She could bear most things, but not that.

There were few amusements upon which she could afford to spend money.
The theatre generally was beyond her reach, but the cinema was an
abiding boon to herself and countless others—a fact to which the
attention of intellectual despisers of common pleasures is respectfully
directed.  The cinema was always open; one could go in when one had
time, and come out when one had had enough.  One could go there alone
without looking or feeling conspicuously alone, which is not possible in
the ordinary theatre; there were no waits, and no noise; and the
darkened auditorium, whether one regarded the screen or not, was a
rest-cure in itself.

Then there was the recreation of correspondence. Marjorie wrote to Roy
every day, and Joe once a week.  She had received no letter from
Netherby in answer to her own; so she decided to make no present attempt
to repair the rupture of diplomatic relations in that quarter.  Joe was
now a private in the Royal Engineers, undergoing intensive training in
the north of England.  She had not seen him since his enlistment, nor
expected to, for leave was difficult.  Moreover, Joe referred frequently
and appreciatively in his letters to local hospitality.  Marjorie
scented a romance, but Joe gave nothing away.

And there were Roy’s letters.  They arrived with amazing regularity—the
postal service of the British Expeditionary Force was one of the
unadvertised marvels of the war—written in pencil upon the thin
blue-squared sheets of a field dispatch-book, with the censor’s
triangular stamp in one corner of the envelope and Roy’s own name
scribbled on the other.  They contained little military information, and
a surprising amount of irrelevant foolishness.  Roy told Marjorie about
life in billets.  He reported upon his progress with the French tongue.
He told her of Madame _la fermière_, in whose loft he slept, and with
whom he practised elegant conversation, but who was unfortunately only
intelligible upon Sunday, that being the one day in the week when her
false teeth were in actual use.  For the rest of the week they reposed
thriftily in a drawer.  He told her how he visited a French Field
Hospital, and had committed the solecism of addressing the nurse—an
elderly Sister of Charity—as "Mademoiselle Nourrice."  He wrote, as a
schoolboy might, of some extra good "blow-out" at an _estaminet_; of his
small amusements; of his small grievances. He wrote, as a lover does, of
his lady, and how much he loved and missed her, and how greatly the
thought of her inspired him.  But of tactical operations, or the joy of
battle—and there is such a thing—or the privations and horrors of war,
there was nothing.  The whole aim of the man in the trenches at this
time appears to have been to maintain the morale of the people at home.
It was during this very month that Forain, the French cartoonist,
epitomised the psychology of the entire war in a single drawing—two
gaunt, mud-caked _poilus_, crouching waist-deep in the water of a
devastated trench during an intensive bombardment, gasping anxiously to
one another: "_Si les civils tiennent!_"

Of Roy’s whereabouts Marjorie knew little. He had come safely through
the Battle of Loos—more fortunate than the majority of his colleagues.
He had served in Belgium for a space; after that the Division had been
transferred to France again.  He was fond of indicating his position on
the map by cryptograms insoluble by friend or foe, or codes which not
even their author could decipher the day after their invention.  But
occasionally he succeeded:


_Of course we are not permitted to say where we are, but it would be
harmful to blub about it._


The latter half of this sentence sounded so more than usually idiotic
that Marjorie felt sure it conveyed some subtle message.  But though she
applied every solution known to the amateur detective, she could make
nothing of it.  It was not for many weeks that it occurred to her,
during the night watches, to cease probing for key-words or transposing
vowels, and to try paraphrasing the sense of the text.  By this means
she reached the conclusion that there was "harm in tears"—and a "buried
town" immediately sprang to view. But more often she was trapped in the
pitfalls of ambiguity.

"_This is a pleasant old-world spot_," Roy had remarked in a recent
letter.  "_You would love the Vicar._"

"The Vicar!  The Vicar?  The Vicar of what?"  Marjorie spent half an
hour poring over the _Daily Mail_ map of the Western Front which
decorated the greater part of her bedroom wall, in a vain search for a
place called Wakefield, or anything like it.  She wrote back:


_By the way, the Vicar you are so enthusiastic about is an entire
stranger to me._


To-night another letter had come, conveying enlightenment:


_Sorry you don’t like the Vicar.  He used to be a good chap.  An
up-river man, and some singer in his day._


Two minutes later, Marjorie’s pencil was on the map, underlining
Bray-sur-Somme.  Dear Roy!  She leaned back in her cheap little stall in
the darkness, and chuckled softly to herself.  How wonderfully these
foolish trifles lubricated the grinding wheels.  But oh—!

Spots and splashes appeared upon the film, and it began to rain ink—an
infallible sign in the world of moving-picture romance of the less
expensive kind that the end of the tale is approaching. Marjorie rose to
her feet, pulled on her hat, and felt her way out into the Earl’s Court
Road.  She was sufficiently well known to the asthmatic Admiral of the
Fleet—at least he looked like that—who guarded the portals of the
Electric Palace to receive from him a gracious good night.

"O reevoyer, miss!  I ’ope to see you on Thursday.  We shall ’ave a
fresh picture then—Charlie Chaplin, the new screen comedian. Everybody’s
talking about ’im.  Very comical, ’e is!"

Not far from Earl’s Court Station, in the obscurity of the discreetly
darkened street, Marjorie came upon a motor-car.  A girl chauffeur was
endeavouring to jack up the off-hind wheel. Marjorie ranged up alongside
at once.

"Let me help you," she said.

"Thanks," gasped the girl.  Together they wrestled with the stiff jack.

"A puncture?" inquired Marjorie.

"Yes.  Rotten luck!  I am only a mile from home, and this old tyre has
gone on the blink.  I must put on the spare rim."

"I know this kind," said Marjorie, fired with characteristic enthusiasm
at the prospect of a thoroughly irksome job.  "Let me do it!"

"You’re welcome!" said the girl, who was white with fatigue.  "I don’t
mind the driving and the long hours," she continued sociably, settling
down on the running board while Marjorie deftly removed the
unserviceable rim; "but changing tyres, and oiling the engine, and
filling up grease-cups, and all those messy things—that’s what I can’t
stick!"

"Is this your—your work during the war?" asked Marjorie, suddenly
interested.

"Yes—The Women’s Legion.  We haven’t been started long.  It’s hard work
in all weathers; but it’s helping—a bit.  I’m trying to keep my
husband’s job open for him."

Ten minutes later, utterly exhausted, Marjorie let herself into her tiny
flat in a by-street off the Brompton Road.  It was half-past nine.  She
set the alarm clock for half-past five, and went to bed with Roy’s
letter under her pillow.  She dreamed that Roy had been
promoted—suddenly, but not unexpectedly—to the rank of
Commander-in-Chief, and that it was her privilege to drive him to battle
every morning at five-thirty, in a motor-car with the off-hind tyre
punctured.




                             *CHAPTER VII*

                                 *DUET*


                                  *I*


In one respect her dream came true.

Shortly after nine o’clock next morning, as the breakfast rush eased
off, Marjorie was aware of the flushed features of the lady
superintendent of the canteen, Miss Penny—"The Mouldy Old Copper," in
the unregenerate language of the junior staff—angrily visible through a
mephitic fog to which steaming tea, frying bacon, and moist humanity had
all contributed.  (Even in the crispest weather Tommy Atkins is a most
hygroscopic individual.)

"We are for it, my dear!" announced The Mouldy Old Copper.

"What—Zeppelins?" inquired Marjorie, setting her tenth urn in position.

"Worse!  Inspection!  They are coming at twelve.  The Government have
suddenly decided to inquire into the feasibility of making the Canteen
Service an official affair—a branch of the A.S.C., or the R.A.M.C., or
the Q.M.G., or some other futility.  So they are coming to inspect us,
as ’a typical example of a canteen maintained by voluntary effort and
service.’  I got it over the telephone just now."

"It was decent of them to warn you," said Marjorie.

"That’s just what they haven’t done!  I got the news by a side wind.
It’s to be a surprise inspection.  They want to see what a show run by
women is like when it’s off its guard.  I like their impudence!  What do
they expect to catch us doing, I wonder—arranging the tea-cups in the
wrong formation; or not keeping accounts in triplicate; or flirting with
the men; or what!"  The Mouldy Old Copper turned a bright bronze colour.
"I’ll jolly well talk to them, if they start any of their old—!"

"Don’t you think," suggested Marjorie, "that it would be a good plan to
telephone round at once to make sure that there are enough waitresses?
You know what a bear-garden this place is when the men can’t get
served."

Miss Penny considered.

"Yes, you are right," she said.  "At least, we will warn some of them.
Not all—oh dear no, not all!  There are women connected with this place
who haven’t allowed their so-called work here to interfere with a single
tea-fight or subaltern-hunt since they joined.  Of course they would
sell their souls to crush in to-day.  Well, they shan’t!  They shall
hear all about it to-morrow, instead!  I shall love telling
them—especially the Toplis girl, and Lady Adeline, and Mrs. Napoleon
Jones—or whatever the name of that horror with the pekineses is!  You
run along, dear, and telephone to about a dozen of the decent ones, and
tell them to be sure and turn up by ten-thirty."

The result was that at high noon, when the Olympians descended upon
Waterloo Road, they found the canteen crowded with happy warriors
partaking of nourishment from the hands of a bevy of attractive and
competent Hebes.  The Committee of Inspection consisted of a
much-beribboned Major-General, two or three lesser luminaries
proportionately decorated, and an elderly civilian in a shocking hat.

The Mouldy Old Copper conducted the procession round the canteen.  Here
and there a halt was called at a table, where the Major-General, having
made the diners thoroughly comfortable by commanding them straitly to
"sit at ease," inquired, in the voice of a Bengal tiger endeavouring to
coo like a dove, whether there were "any complaints."  There were none,
which was most gratifying, but not altogether surprising.

Marjorie, greatly diverted by the _sotto voce_ remarks which reached her
from tables in her neighbourhood, rested her tired arms upon the
speckless counter and looked demurely down her nose.  Upon her ear fell
a raven’s croak:

"Very good—with such a short time for rehearsal!  But these damsels must
come here _every_ day, you know!  By the way, does he write to you
regularly?  I told him to."

Marjorie turned, and gaped in the most unladylike manner.  The elderly
civilian in the bad hat had strayed away from his escort, and now stood
at her elbow—revealed as Lord Eskerley, to whom she had once been
presented at a regimental gymkhana at Craigfoot.  Apparently he was
aware that the Olympian deputation were being treated to a display of
"eyewash."  Apparently, also; he knew Marjorie.  Not only Marjorie, but
Marjorie’s most private affairs. Altogether, he seemed to know too much.

"By the way," continued his lordship characteristically, "how do you do?
I forgot."  They shook hands.  "Lovely day, isn’t it?  You look
overworked.  What are your hours here?"

Marjorie told him.

"What is your particular _métier_?"

Marjorie introduced the tea-urns.

"No woman, however young or muscular, should carry heavy things about,"
said Lord Eskerley.  "Razors to cut grindstones; as usual! Would you
like a change of occupation?"

"Indeed I should," replied Marjorie—"so long as it was helping things
along, you know."

"What can you do?"

Marjorie fingered the dimple on her chin dolefully.

"Not much, I’m afraid.  I don’t know anything about nursing, or
shorthand, or anything useful."

"You can drive a car, though."

"How do you know that?"

"How does the trembling fawn know that the wolf is not a vegetarian?"
The old gentleman glared at Marjorie over his spectacles.

"I expect its mother warns it," hazarded Marjorie, a little guiltily.

"Ah!  Possibly.  My mother, unfortunately, never saw you, though I am
sure that if she had she would have warned me.  But there are other
ways—instinct, to a certain extent; also experience.  You and your
two-seater once missed me by inches in the Craigfoot road.  You were on
your way to keep an appointment, I thought: I forbore to speculate with
whom.  But never mind that.  Now—my chauffeur very properly joined the
army to-day.  Would you care to step into his shoes?  He wears large
fourteens, and your appointment would probably wreck my prospects as an
eligible widower; but I think those are the only two objections.  Will
you give me a trial? Thank you very much!  Report this evening."



                                  *II*


Marjorie’s labours henceforth were as arduous as ever, but were mainly
performed in the open air—which to her meant all the difference between
work and play.  Each morning she drew up before Lord Eskerley’s gloomy
mansion in that aristocratic slum, Curzon Street, at nine o’clock sharp,
and conveyed her employer upon his daily round.  First to the Ministry
of Intelligence, an unobtrusive mansion in the purlieus of Whitehall
Gardens.  Then, about eleven, to Downing Street.  Then back to the
Ministry. About one, to Curzon Street, for a brief luncheon. In the
afternoon Marjorie ran errands: that is to say, she conveyed visitors to
the Ministry from all quarters of London—from other Ministries, from the
House of Commons, or from remote private addresses.  At seven she
conveyed his lordship home to Curzon Street, where, day in, day out, in
victory or defeat, he dined at seven forty-five precisely.

"Give your digestion fair play," he once suddenly advised his
chauffeuse, as she tucked him into the car on a bitter January
afternoon, "and the world is yours!"

Marjorie promised to do so.

"Have a clear understanding with your stomach in early life," his
lordship resumed, the moment Marjorie reopened the door of the car
twenty minutes later.  "Remember he _rules_ the rest of your internal
economy.  Socially, we never meet him, or speak of him; but he is the
whole show! And—he is as sensitive as an upper servant! Give him the
consideration due to his position; don’t ask him to work at unusual
times, or do things that are not part of his duty; and he will not only
serve you for a lifetime, but will keep your heart up to its work,
restrain your brain from more than usual foolishness, and put the fear
of death into the organs below stairs!  But treat him casually, or give
him odd jobs to do—and he will let you down, as sure as fate!  Call for
me at the usual time, please."

Marjorie’s duties did not end at dinner-time; for war knows nothing of
the eight-hour day, or early closing, or Sabbath observance.  Lord
Eskerley frequently went out about nine in the evening—sometimes to
Downing Street, occasionally to Buckingham Palace, not infrequently to
an unpretentious house in Dulwich, where he found it convenient to
interview persons whom it would have been undesirable to receive
officially at the Ministry or Curzon Street.  The house stood in the
same road as Uncle Fred’s.  The fact gave Marjorie, gliding past in the
wintry darkness, a pleasant sensation of escape from futility.

One bleak and muddy day in February she drove Lord Eskerley down to
Bramshott Camp, to assist at a review of two new divisions. Somewhere
outside Godalming the gears began to burr and slip.  Finally, Marjorie
pulled in at the side of the road and descended.

The window of the car was let down and Lord Eskerley’s head appeared.

"How long will it take?" he inquired, avoiding superfluous questions, as
usual.

"About ten minutes.  The lever has worked loose; I can’t get my gears in
properly," replied Marjorie.

"Do you want any help?  I have with me"—his lordship leaned back and
exhibited his fellow-passengers—"General Brough-Brough; his A.D.C.,
Captain Sparkes; and Mr. Meadows. The General and Captain Sparkes, as
you will observe, are all dressed up in review order, and I cannot have
them tarnished or made muddy, or I should be bringing contempt and
ridicule on the King’s uniform; also rendering aid and comfort to the
enemy, which is not allowed in war time.  So that disposes of them.  I
shall not insult a lady of your capabilities by offering my assistance.
That leaves Meadows.  Do you want him?"

"No, thank you," said Marjorie, swiftly removing the floor boards above
the gear box.  The window was drawn up again, and Mr. Meadows, Lord
Eskerley’s private secretary, a young man debarred from warlike
exercises by acute astigmatism and valvular murmurs, looked very much
relieved.

Ten minutes later, Marjorie, somewhat flushed and not a little oily,
resumed her place at the wheel, and deposited her passengers at the
stroke of the appointed hour at Divisional Headquarters at Bramshott.

Her employer, stepping out of the car, surveyed her grimy features
quizzically.

"Habakkuk!" he chuckled.

Six hours later, at the end of the return journey, he inquired:

"Do you read your Voltaire at all?  Probably not: I’ll send you his
’Life.’"

The volume reached her next morning.  Therein Marjorie discovered a
marked passage, in which it was recorded that Voltaire found Habakkuk
"_capable de tout_."  Thereafter, Lord Eskerley habitually addressed her
as Habakkuk.



                                 *III*


Still, Marjorie was not entirely happy.  As already stated, any form of
outdoor occupation was, in her view, play; and the present was
essentially a time for work.  She belonged to that zealous breed which
is never really contented unless it is uncomfortable—to whom congenial
occupation is merely idleness under another name. She enjoyed her
present employment so much that she felt ashamed: she felt that she was
not pulling her weight in the war.  Probably a short conversation with a
sensible person would have cured her of these illusions; but Marjorie
had no one with whom to converse.  She might have confided in her
employer; but she argued, with some reason, that he would merely make an
apposite and caustic reference to the gentleman who is reputed to have
painted himself black all over in order to play Othello.  It did not
occur to her to mention the matter to Roy in a letter. Roy, for the
present, belonged to his country, and was not to be diverted from his
duty by domestic or personal trifles.  What Marjorie needed and longed
for at this time was a confidant.

If we desire a thing urgently enough we usually get it.  Sometimes we
get more than we bargain for.

One day Lord Eskerley came down his front-door steps arm-in-arm with an
officer in uniform. His lordship’s _chauffeuse_, who prided herself upon
her soldierly restraint, did not look round from her wheel as the pair
entered the car, but she heard her employer say:

"You can drop me at the office, Eric, and the car will take you on to
the club."

Eric Bethune’s voice replied that this arrangement would suit its owner
top-hole.

When Lord Eskerley alighted at Whitehall Gardens he turned and addressed
Marjorie.

"Habakkuk," he announced, "inside the car I have left a D.S.O. on a
fortnight’s leave.  Please deposit him at the Army and Navy Club in Pall
Mall.  He is a Scotsman, so there will be no gratuities."

"Very good, my lord," replied Marjorie, looking rigidly to her front.
She and the old gentleman made quite a speciality of these solemn little
pleasantries.

The portals of the Ministry had hardly closed upon the Minister when his
guest emerged from within the interior of the car and climbed into the
front seat beside Marjorie.

"May I come and sit here?" asked Eric, shaking hands.  "I recognised
your back view through the front window-glass."

"It’s against regulations," replied Marjorie, smiling, "but I can’t
disobey a colonel.  Besides, I want to hear all about the Western Front.
How are the Royal Covenanters?"

"I am commanding the Second Battalion now," replied Eric.  "I have been
with them since October."

"Yes, I know," said Marjorie thoughtlessly.

"How did you know?" asked Eric, not altogether displeased.

Marjorie, carefully negotiating the cross-currents of Trafalgar Square,
bit her lip.  She was beginning to give herself away already.  But she
replied, looking steadily before her:

"I get letters sometimes."

"I hope your correspondents report favourably on me," said Eric lightly.
"Do you know many of my officers?"

"Not many—now.  Let me see."  Marjorie decided swiftly not to be
evasive, but to reply to Eric’s naïve inquisitiveness as naturally as
possible.  "Major Laing—I have met him once or twice.  Is he still with
you?"

"’Old Leathery’?  Yes.  He goes on for ever. Who else?"

"One hardly likes to ask these days, for fear—you know?"

"Yes, I know.  But we’ve been lucky lately. We are in a quiet sector of
the line.  We have had no officer casualties for two months.  Wait while
I touch wood!"  He tapped the mahogany dashboard.  "Do you know
Kilbride, my adjutant?"

"I don’t think so."

"He’s a stout fellow.  Let me see.  Do you know young Birnie?  He comes
from your part of the world, and mine."

"Yes, I know him," said Marjorie.  "Is he quite well?"  For the life of
her she could not help asking.

"Yes, he’s all right."  Eric gave Marjorie a sudden sidelong glance.  He
possessed the curiosity of a child, and not a little of a child’s
jealousy. He had certain things in mind—rumours, nods, innuendoes,
elephantine jests in the mess. Marjorie’s eyes were fixed steadily upon
the road ahead of her, and her face expressed nothing more than polite
interest.  But if Eric had been a really observant person—a woman, for
instance—he would have noticed that her hands were gripping the
steering-wheel until the nails were white.

"Whom else do you know?" he continued. "Garry—Balfour—Carruthers—little
Cowie?"

"No."  Marjorie knew none of these.  They were a later vintage.

"Laing and Birnie seem to be all of your friends that are left," said
Eric.  "Which of them is your correspondent?  Not old Leathery, surely?"

"No; Mr. Birnie.  We are quite old acquaintances," said Marjorie,
thoroughly annoyed at the unfair tactics which had isolated Roy.

"Well, all that I can say is that I am thoroughly jealous of Master
Birnie!" announced Eric, smiling.  "Now tell me all about yourself. What
are you doing here in London, driving a car?"

"Here is your club," said Marjorie, putting on her brake.

"Confound it!"  Eric’s annoyance was quite genuine.  "We had so much to
discuss.  Can’t you lunch with me somewhere?"

"I never know when I shall lunch.  It depends on Lord Eskerley."

"Well, can you dine?  Surely you don’t work all night as well!"

Marjorie hesitated.  As it happened, she was free that evening, for she
knew that two cabinet ministers were dining and conferring with her
employer.  There was no reason whatever why she should not accept Eric’s
invitation.  But for a moment some instinct held her back.  Then she
thought of the eternal solitude of the flat.

"Thank you very much," she said.  "I will."

They dined together and went to a play.  Eric made a charming host and a
decorative escort. For the rest of the week—he was spending six days of
his leave with Lord Eskerley—Marjorie saw him constantly.  She drove him
about London, and they went upon more than one exhilarating excursion
together.  By the time that Eric departed to Scotland to visit Buckholm
she knew all about the regiment—its exploits, its smartness, even its
private jokes.  Her general impression was that the regiment had
improved greatly since Colonel Bethune had taken command.

On the subject of Roy, both exhibited considerable reticence.  When Eric
mentioned his name, he did so in a manner which jarred—"Your little
friend Birnie"; "Cowie, Douglas, Birnie, and other riff-raff of the
mess."  Colonel Bethune might almost have been trying to belittle Roy
intentionally.  So Marjorie, afraid of losing her temper and giving away
the position, carefully avoided Roy as a topic—an omission which Eric
may or may not have noted, but made no attempt to correct.

But the week was soon over, and Colonel Bethune and cheery nights out
were no more. Marjorie fell back into the old routine with an inevitable
sense of reaction.  She realised next afternoon, as she sat waiting in
the rain at her wheel in Curzon Street, how improvident it is to accept
happiness or distraction from sources outside one’s normal environment.
She knew now that the only permanent happiness is the happiness that
comes from common things.  More than ever she yearned in her heart for a
regular companion—a crony, a confidant, a pal—as lively and as "safe" as
the companion she had just lost.

As noted above, it was raining—raining on a dismal afternoon in March.
It had been an anxious and busy week, for the Boche had fallen like an
avalanche upon Verdun, and the French resistance was in the preliminary
and uncertain stages of what was to prove one of the most heroic
defensive actions in history.  Allied Councils of War had been frequent,
and Lord Eskerley’s department had been heavily engaged.

Word had just been sent out to Marjorie that his lordship would be
detained another hour at least, and that Miss Clegg, if she pleased, was
at liberty to take the car back to the garage.  But Miss Clegg was
pleased to remain where she was. She sat on, with the rain dripping off
her peaked cap and down the bridge of her nose, sedulously nursing a
theory that in so doing she was getting a little nearer to the Western
Front.

It never rains but it pours.  Suddenly, from round the corner of Queen
Street, there came to Marjorie a new factor in her life—a humid but
quite alluring vision of attenuated skirt, black silk stockings, and
inadequate fur stole.  The rain was working its will upon the vision:
she had not even an umbrella.  But she pattered bravely along upon her
absurd heels, taking what shelter the lee of the houses afforded, and
keeping her head well down—presumably for reasons connected with her
dazzling complexion.

As she passed Marjorie she looked up, and Marjorie saw that she was
little more than a child, and a not very robust child at that.  With
Marjorie, to think was to act.

"I say!  Wait a minute!" she cried, and began to rummage under the
cushion of her seat, extracting ultimately a spare raincoat of her own.

"You must put this on," she announced to the girl: "you are soaking."
She bustled her new protégée into the garment without waiting for
permission.  Then another thought occurred to her.

"I have half an hour to spare," she said. "May I take you anywhere?
Nobody"—indicating her employer’s mausoleum-like residence—"will mind."

Appealing blue eyes looked up at her.  An enormous but attractive mouth
broke into a grateful smile.

"It’s jolly decent of you," said a voice of incredible childishness.
"Are you sure?"

"Rather!" said Marjorie.  "Will you get inside, or sit by me?"

"By you, please."

"All right!  Come along!"

Marjorie cranked her engine, and took her place at the wheel.  Her new
little friend snuggled down beside her.

"You _are_ strong!" she said admiringly.  "And yet you don’t look very
hefty.  Your hands are lovely.  How do you keep them so nice, doing this
kind of work?"

"They are my vanity!" laughed Marjorie. "I sit up half the night trying
to keep my nails in order.  I wonder if it’s worth while: I sometimes
feel inclined to let them rip—for the duration!  Where can I take you?"

"The Imperial Theatre, if you don’t mind.  I have a rehearsal at three,
and it’s after that now. I shall get a telling-off, as usual, I suppose.
Well, I’m not worrying: such is life!"

"Are you on the stage?" asked Marjorie, genuinely thrilled.

"Yes.  We open in about a month, with a new musical show."

"What’s it called?"

"I never can remember: they change the title about once a day.  Not that
it really matters. ’Too Many Girls’ is the latest; and pretty suitable,
too!  My dear, you simply can’t get men for the theatre nowadays!  The
good ones have all joined up, and the rotters daren’t walk on.  You
ought to see our chorus men!  They are all about seventy, or else they
have one lung, or one rib, or one ear, or something.  Still, we carry on
somehow.  Are you driving a car for war work?"

"Yes.  I don’t really feel that I ought to be doing it; it’s too much
like fun.  I was in a canteen at first, but I got rather run down and
hard up, and I was offered this job as a chauffeur, so I took it.  I
think I should go back to the canteen if I could afford it.  I never see
any soldiers now.  At the canteen one could do something for them, poor
things."

"They’re lambs!" agreed the passenger—"especially the young officers.
Are you engaged?"

Marjorie, very much occupied in negotiating Piccadilly Circus, nodded.

"An officer?"

Marjorie nodded again.

"My boy’s an officer, too.  What’s your name, by the way?"

"Marjorie Clegg."

"Mine’s Liss Lyle.  (It’s Elizabeth Leek really, but in the profession
one has to think of something better than that.)  There’s the Imperial
there.  Just shake me off at the front entrance, and I’ll slip round to
the stage door."

"Oh, but I want to drive you right up to the stage door!" said Marjorie
frankly.  "It will be wonderful!"

The little woman of the world at her side smiled indulgently.

"Very well then, dear, you shall!  Round that corner, and then round
again."

Marjorie set down her passenger with a genuine pang.  She was certain
now what was wrong in her life.  She had no one to gossip with.

The two girls shook hands.

"Thanks awfully!" said Liss.  "Also for Little Willie Waterproof."  She
took off the raincoat.

"Stick to it just now," said Marjorie: "it may be raining when you come
out."

"Can I?  I love you for that.  I’ll come round and leave it for you
somewhere, shall I?"

Marjorie dived impulsively into the opening offered.

"Come to-night!" she said.  "We might go and have some dinner somewhere.
I can always get off for an hour—sometimes for the whole evening.  I
have a lot of evenings to myself," she added.


Ultimately the pair dined together, _chez_ Lyons, and Marjorie spent her
happiest hour since her invasion of London.  She found her little friend
a characteristic medley of childishness and maturity—featherheaded,
affectionate, naïve, with far more worldly wisdom than herself, yet with
all a child’s dread of being laughed at for ignorance.

She came from Finchley—and apologised for doing so.  She had no mother,
and her father, overburdened, it seemed, with daughters, had raised no
particular objection to Miss Elizabeth’s theatrical predilections.  She
was at present living at a boarding-house near Paddington.  Did not like
it much.  Said so—apparently to every one, including the other boarders.
But nothing troubled her long.  Her thoughts, birdlike, hopped to
another twig, and her cheery little song of life was resumed.  She was
not deeply concerned with how and why.  She pecked carelessly here and
there at what fortune offered, without pausing to reason why or count
the cost; but so far appeared instinctively to have avoided what was
unwholesome.  Her chief passions were dress, gossip, and expensive
confectionery.  Her conversation was a blend of theatrical shop and
military slang—including many parrot-phrases which could have conveyed
no meaning to her whatever—and was chiefly remarkable for a certain
confiding frankness and a glorious contempt for what Mr. Mantalini would
have called "demnition details."

"You must meet my boy," she said to Marjorie, as they walked homeward.
"You’d love him. He’s a _pukka sahib_!"

"What is his name?" asked Marjorie.

"I am not quite sure of his name," replied Miss Lyle, with
characteristic candour; "but I think he’s in the Yeomanry.  His
Christian name’s Leonard.  I met him with two other fellows at a party,
and I got all their surnames mixed up—I always do—and I can never
remember which of the three is his."

"You will find out before you marry him?" suggested Marjorie
respectfully.

"Oh, rather!  But there’s plenty of time for that.  Besides, he’s going
out soon, and then it won’t matter."

"It won’t _matter_?"

"No.  We are not so potty about one another as all that.  I could see
the lad wanted to be engaged—after all, poor things, they can’t afford
to wait, these days—so I let him.  He’s nice, and clean, and it looks
well to be called for after rehearsal.  I shall miss him awfully when he
goes. It’s rotten to be by yourself in this world—isn’t it?"  A pair of
pathetic eyes were upturned to Marjorie’s.

Next moment Marjorie’s arm was round the waif’s shoulders.

"Liss, you shall come and live with me!" she said impulsively.

"Righto!" replied Liss.  "I was dying to be asked, but it seemed too
wonderful to be possible. I shall have to sponge on you for a bit,
though. I haven’t a bean until the show opens."

"That’s all right," said Marjorie.

"Now, where shall we have our dug-out?" asked Liss, becoming terribly
busy.

The pair spent a rapturous evening building castles in Kensington.




                             *CHAPTER VIII*

                                *CHORUS*


                                  *I*


Finally they found an eyrie—a flat, somewhere in the sky at the back of
Victoria Street, consisting of a big bedroom, a tiny sitting-room, a gas
stove, and a surprisingly modern bath.  They bought furniture at
unpretentious establishments in Tottenham Court Road, laying their own
carpets and hanging their own curtains.  (The latter were the only
really essential articles of domestic furniture in those days of aerial
visitation.)  Marjorie hung up a few reprints and photographs; Liss
contributed a portrait of her nebulous and anonymous fiancé, together
with seventeen picture post cards of stage celebrities; and the ideal
home was opened.

Still, Marjorie’s hunt for happiness was not yet complete.  There were
two crumpled rose-leaves. Firstly, her implacable conscience continued
to inform her that her war work was too easy. Secondly, her evenings
were as lonely as ever. As soon as rehearsals finished, and "Too Many
Girls" started upon its nightly and tumultuous presentation, Liss
disappeared regularly every evening about half-past six; to return,
sometimes exhilarated, sometimes gloomy, sometimes affectionate,
sometimes quarrelsome, but invariably hungry and inexorably talkative,
about midnight.  Supper was then served.  The two ladies rarely ate at a
table: as already noted, the keynote of a feminine meal is its
passionate avoidance of anything in the shape of ceremonial routine. As
often as not Marjorie would take her supper to bed with her, while Liss,
munching and babbling, plied back and forth between the sitting-room and
bedroom, in progressive stages of disrobement, bearing fresh supplies
and relating the experiences of the day—continuing long after she had
shed her flimsy garments over two rooms and a vestibule, arrayed herself
in night attire, and crawled into bed.

"My dear, we had the most wonderful house to-night.  Seven _legitimate_
calls after the first act!  What an audience these boys on leave make!
(Here are a couple of sardines: the bloater paste is nah-poo.)  They
gave Phyllis Lane such a reception!  She had to do the dance after ’Pull
Up your Socks!’ three times; (and if you want any more cocoa tell me,
because I am going to turn out the gas-ring.)  Her husband has been
mentioned in dispatches.  Leonard wasn’t in front to-night—selfish pig!
I’ll tell him off for that, to-morrow.  (Oh, you darling, did you put
this hot-water-bottle in my bed?  I must give you a kiss for that.
There!  No, it won’t hurt you, it’s only lip salve.)  Mr. Lee came
behind to-night, and spoke to us all.  Said the show was a credit to
everybody, and he was very pleased to hear how brave we all were during
the raid the other night.  Yes, he’s the managing director. (Have you
finished?  Very well, then!  Give me the tray.  Here’s a cigarette for
you.)  By the way, I was talking to Uncle Ga-Ga to-night.  Oh, didn’t I
tell you about him?  He’s one of the chorus gentlemen—about a hundred
years old, and simply mad to get into the war.  But they won’t take him.
He keeps changing his name, and dyeing his hair a fresh colour, and
trying again; but they turn him down every time. Seems queer, doesn’t
it, that when a man wants to go he can’t, while there are so many who
should and won’t?  (Can I use your cold cream, dear? I can’t find mine.)
Lee said they would probably put on a second edition about August: we
start rehearsing the new numbers next week.  Why don’t you come and get
a job in the chorus?  It wouldn’t interfere with your other work.
There’s two or three other girls doing the same as you, and Lee lets
them off with one _matinée_ a week.  He’s very patriotic.  A-a-a-h!
Oo-oo-oo!  Ee-ee-ee! What a _lovely_ warm bed!  Well, as I was
saying—Marjorie Clegg, what is the use of my wearing myself to a shadow
waiting on you at supper and then the moment I get into bed and begin to
chat for a couple of minutes before lights out you start snoring like a
grampus?  Very well, have it your own way.  Live and let live, _I_
say.... That’s all....  As for that little toad Leonard—!..."

Miss Lyle’s baby eyes closed, her small nose buried itself in the
pillow, and her little tongue was still for several hours.

But Marjorie was not asleep.  She lay awake thinking, while outside
London, shrouded in the blackest obscurity, snatched such slumber as
that endless, flaring, muttering line of outposts in Flanders could
guarantee.  For all her splendid vitality, Marjorie was a highly-strung
girl—with a conscience.  That morning Colonel Bethune, passing through
London from Scotland on his way back to the Western Front, had invited
her to a "farewell luncheon."  She had accepted, gladly—and had repented
ever since.  For behold, over the coffee, Colonel Bethune had asked her
to marry him!

He had asked her very charmingly, and with obvious confidence—a
combination which made it an ungrateful and difficult business to say no
without offence.  At first Marjorie had been too taken back to say
anything at all.  When her answer came its sincerity was unmistakable;
and poor, vain Eric was obviously and deeply mortified.  With a vague
idea of consoling him, she had mentioned that her affections were
already engaged.  He had asked her for no name, but she knew that it had
been written in her face, and that Eric had read it there.  Then a new
and disappointing characteristic of the man had cropped out.  He had
turned and reproached her—had told her that she had flirted with him,
and led him on—which was a base lie.  But for all that, she was filled
with remorse.  In her selfish desire for a good time she had been
thoughtlessly inconsiderate of Colonel Bethune, and almost disloyal to
Roy.

She and her host had parted miserably ten minutes later, each having
learned a bitter lesson—Eric, that in the field of love, especially
under stress of war, callow youth can be more than a match for dazzling
maturity; Marjorie, that where a pretty girl is concerned no man can be
regarded as ’safe’ until he is dead.

Well, she would expiate her fault in the only way she knew.  This
decided, she fell asleep.



                                  *II*


Next morning Marjorie, depositing her noble employer upon the steps of
the Ministry of Intelligence, inquired:

"May I speak to you for a moment, sometime, Lord Eskerley?"

"Twelve-twenty-five," was the prompt reply—"after Downing Street and
before signatures. But I will not exert my influence to have him made
Commander-in-Chief!"

At twelve-twenty Marjorie presented herself to Mr. Meadows, in the
secretary’s room, and was passed through double doors into the presence
of the minister.  His lordship looked up over his spectacles and
indicated a chair.

"Habakkuk!  Good!  Sit down.  Four-and-a-half minutes!  Well?"

"I want to say," announced Marjorie, plunging head foremost into her
confession, "that I can’t stay here any longer."

"Why?"

"I am not happy in my mind.  I must go away."

"Good gracious!  Don’t say Meadows has fallen in love with you!  I will
not permit my subordinates to encroach upon my prerogatives! No—not
that?  Proceed, then!"

"I think I ought to leave you," Marjorie continued, quite unmoved by her
employer’s senile quips, "because I am having too good a time.  I have
been feeling all along that I ought to be doing something else."

"So I have observed.  Well?"

"The only trouble is that if I go back to the canteen work (where they
want my help very badly), I shan’t get paid for it; and I can’t afford
to work without pay of some kind.  I have a small allowance from home,
but it doesn’t go far, and the girl I share a flat with was pretty hard
up when I first picked—became acquainted with her."

"Oh!  Ah!  So you keep a foundling hospital, too?"

"Only one!" explained Marjorie.  "She’s a dear," she added warmly.
"She’s on the stage. She was badly in debt before the new piece
started—they don’t get paid during rehearsals, you see—and she is only
just beginning to get on her feet again; so I can’t afford to work for
nothing during the day just now, unless—"

"Unless you go on the stage yourself at night? Is that it, O _Capable de
tout_?"

"I was thinking of it," confessed Marjorie; "but I don’t know how you
guessed."

"It’s the first thing every pretty girl thinks of when confronted with
the necessity of earning a living.  Go on."

"And I want to ask you: Is it playing the game to be on the stage _at
all_ in war time?  I mean, ought the men to be encouraged to go to
revues, and things like that, when they are on leave?  Is it all wrong,
and demoralising, and unpatriotic, as some people say?"

Lord Eskerley sat up, and took off his spectacles.

"Unpatriotic fiddlesticks!" he remarked with great vigour.  "In war time
there are just three things that matter.  The first is morale.  I have
forgotten the other two.  The maintenance of purely military morale can
safely be left in military hands; but civilian morale—and that includes
the morale of the men on leave of course, rests mainly on the triple
foundation of the Church, the Press, and the Stage; and, as things are
to-day, I am not sure that the Stage doesn’t have the biggest say in the
whole business. (Don’t tell Doctor Chirnside I said that, will you?)  So
you are thinking of joining your foundling behind the footlights.
Chorus, I presume?"

"Yes.  They would give me three pounds a week."

"They would get you cheap!  And you want me to satisfy your conscience
that the life of a galley-slave in a vitiated atmosphere all day,
followed by vocal and calisthenic exercises in an even more vitiated
atmosphere for three hours every night, is a sufficiently close approach
to hard work to exonerate you from all suspicion of lukewarmness with
regard to the war?"  The old man stood up and shook hands.  "Donna
Quixota Habakkuk, the certificate is granted!  I suppose you will stay
on for a week or two, until I find a successor—I won’t say a substitute?
Don’t forget me, altogether.  Come and see me sometimes.  I am less
busy, and more solitary, than you suppose.  You know when to come: you
are familiar with my goings out and comings in. And—good luck, my dear!"



                                 *III*


Life behind the scenes, as usual, falsified expectation.  Marjorie’s
first visit to the theatre was paid a few weeks after her interview with
Lord Eskerley.  They entered by the stage-door, Liss explaining to a
taciturn but benevolently disposed person in a glass box, whose name
appeared to be "Mac," that her companion had an appointment with Mr.
Lee.  Thereafter, Marjorie was conducted through an iron door, which
commanded the thoughtless, by stencilled legend, to close it gently;
through a mass of ghostly scenery, past whitewashed walls bearing
notices extolling the virtues of Silence; and out through another iron
door (marked, somewhat paradoxically, "_Not an exit_") into the
auditorium, rendered dimly visible by the overflow of light from an
economically-illuminated stage.

Liss turned back the holland covering from two stalls at the end of a
retired row.

"Sit there, dear," she said.  "I will grab hold of old Lee some time,
and tell him you are here. I can sit with you for a bit.  This rehearsal
is for principals; the chorus aren’t called until twelve."

The rehearsal of the principals consisted, for the moment, of an
altercation between a fat man, standing in the middle of the stage, and
the musical director, sitting at his desk in the orchestra.  It was a
most friendly—one might almost call it an affectionate—altercation.  No
epithet ever fell to a lower level of mutual esteem than "Old Boy!" or
"Old Man!"—or, under extreme provocation, a "Dear Old Boy!"  As is not
unusual in these cases, it was difficult for the casual outsider to
discover:

(_a_) What the argument was about.

(_b_) Which side of the argument was being sustained by whom.

In the front row of the stalls stood an ascetic-looking man in black
tortoise-shell spectacles, apparently acting as umpire.  Seated upon a
partially dismantled throne beside a step-ladder, up stage, sat a pretty
girl in a pink tam-o’-shanter, placidly perusing a crumpled
brown-paper-covered manuscript.  Other persons were dotted about the
auditorium—fat men, cadaverous men; men with tortoise-shell spectacles,
and men without; an occasional female.  All were conferring in monotone.
Round the bare walls of the stage, at present destitute of scenery, sat
the ladies of the chorus, most of them wearing rehearsal dresses of
unpretentious design—knitting socks of khaki, and occasionally
exchanging a guarded confidence.  Altogether the atmosphere struck
Marjorie as more domestic than theatrical—almost ecclesiastical in its
dullness and drowsiness.

"Who are these people sitting about in the stalls?" she asked Liss.

"Oh, just odds and ends!  The author, and the lyric writers, and extra
lyric writers, and costumiers, and photographers, and people like
that—all waiting to catch Mr. Lee, and start an argument with him about
something.  That’s Tubby Ames on the stage.  He’s having a row with Phil
Kay; he has about two a week.  I bet you he’s trying to get Phyllis
Lane’s song cut. (That’s her, in the pink tam; she’s sweet.)  It’s been
going too well lately.  Tubby was kept waiting for his entrance in the
Second Act last night while she did her third encore dance.  Trust Tubby
to step on other people’s fat!  Yes, I thought so."

The comedian’s voice was heard again.  The gist of the dispute was
emerging from a cloud of verbiage.

"Phil, dear old man," he exclaimed earnestly, "I should be the last
person in the world to interfere with a brother or sister artist; but
really, I am only saying what every one feels.  After all, we must all
pull together in these days, and I feel instinctively that unless the
way is kept _ab-so-lute-ly_ clear for that entrance of mine, the action
will drop—and flop goes your Second Act!  And where are you then?"  He
leaned right over the footlights.

The conductor, apparently a man of peace, flinched visibly.

"Old boy," he began, "it’s this way.  I quite see your point—"

The comedian pressed his advantage swiftly.

"I thought you would," he said.  "I have had a good many years’
experience in this sort of work—more than you, perhaps.  For instance,
when I was with Charles Wyndham—"

"It’s the Story of his Life!" whispered Liss despairingly.  "We get it
about every second rehearsal.  He’s out of pantomime, really.  It’s only
because there’s nobody else to be had that he’s here at all.  He has
varicose veins, and—"

But the ascetic referee in the stalls broke in upon the autobiographist.

"Mr. Ames," he commanded—his voice was strong and harsh, and was
obviously extensively employed in shouting down other discordant
noises—"talk sense!"

"That’s Mr. Lancaster," whispered Liss excitedly.  "He’s the producer.
We are all frightened to death of him.  He’s a wonder!"

"Miss Lane’s song cannot be cut," continued the wonder, "and it cannot
be transferred elsewhere; so you must lump it!  Now, Miss St. Leger,
come on, please, and try your ’Plum and Apple’ duet with Mr. Ames."

Miss St. Leger, the leading lady, was standing in the wings.  Her face
was round and childish; her eyes were brown and pathetic; her whole
appearance suggested timidity and helplessness. Hearing her name called,
she walked obediently down to the footlights, favoured the producer with
a dazzling smile, and began:

"Say, listen, Mr. Lancaster!  I got a kick coming too!  That duet I am
putting over with Mr. Ames in the Second Act of the present show is
practically a solo!  When we started in singing it, way back in last
fall, it was a duet, I’ll allow. But somehow I got a kind of crowded
feeling, now.  I don’t seem to belong in that duet when Mr. Ames is
around.  And I want to say right here that I am not going to stand for
that kind of rough stuff any more!"

By this time the languid chorus were sitting straight up on their
chairs.  The scattered figures in the auditorium had ceased their
muttered incantations, and were leaning forward, all ears. The pacific
Phil Kay was squirming in his seat. Marjorie and Liss gripped hands
ecstatically; the ecclesiastical atmosphere had evaporated.

"I understand team work," continued the ethereal Miss St. Leger, "as
well as any artist; and you won’t ever find me stepping on any other
folks’ laughs or business.  But one thing I will not do, and that is
feed fat to a dub comedian all the time—especially a guy that’s too fat
already!"

There was a roar of laughter from stage and stalls.  Even the austere
Lancaster grinned sardonically.  Mr. Tubby Ames, gaping like a stranded
fish, surrendered abjectly, as was his invariable custom when firmly
handled.

"All right," he said, with a pathetic smile. "Carry on!  Nobody loves a
fat man!  Chord, please!"

    _Said an Apple to a Plum;—_
    _"Seeing how this War has come,_
      _Join me in the stew-pan, do!"_


Miss St. Leger, flushed with victory, took her demoralised opponent in
an affectionate embrace, and replied:

    _Said the Plum, "I guess I will!_
    _I am fairly stony; still,_
      _I will do my bit, like you!"_


"There’s Mr. Lee now," said Liss—"just by the stalls entrance.  Let’s
catch him!"

Our two conspirators descended upon the great man.  He proved to be much
less formidable than Marjorie had feared.

"We can make room for you, girlie," he announced paternally, "and"—with
a glance at Marjorie’s face and figure—"a hundred more like you, _if_
they can be found, which I doubt!"  He patted her shoulder.  "Now—where
will you fit in?  Let me think!  You are too big to go prancing about
the stage with Baby Lyle, and the other little people.  Your life’s work
is to stand well down stage in a stunning frock, and fill the eye!  Take
her along to Mr. Lancaster, Baby, and say I sent you.  I must be off."

"I ought to tell you," said Marjorie, "that I may find matinées a
difficulty.  I am working at a canteen.  I have only one free afternoon
a week."

"That will do," said Mr. Lee.  "I believe in helping girls who are doing
war work.  I’m a special constable myself.  Not bad for an old man of
fifty-four, eh?  But we all try to do something here.  Now, run along to
Lancaster, girls!  I have to report for duty at Vine Street at three
o’clock."

With a gracious smile, Mr. Lee disappeared through the stalls entrance.
Liss squeezed Marjorie’s hand excitedly.

"My dear, you have made a _tremendous_ hit with him!  He can be horribly
grumpy when he likes.  Come and be introduced to Lancaster."

The producer was found dismissing the rehearsal of principals.  The plum
and apple had become jam in the last verse, so both romance and
patriotism were satisfied.

"Very good," he said.  "It all goes all right now, except the dance.
Mr. Kosky will take care of that."  He raised his voice.  "Principals,
same time to-morrow!  Good morning, Miss St. Leger!  Good morning,
Tubby, old man!"  His voice boomed louder.  "Now then, chorus ladies and
chorus gentlemen, please!"

The damosels round the stage laid down their khaki socks, hitched up
their own stockings, and gathered in groups in the wings.
Simultaneously a procession of six gentlemen appeared from the direction
of the stage-door, extinguishing cigarettes.

Liss hurriedly introduced Marjorie.  Lancaster shook hands.

"I think we can find a place for you in the show," he said, regarding
her with critical approval.  "Can you sing?"

Marjorie, with a sudden and incongruous recollection of the harmonium at
Netherby on Sunday afternoons, smiled, and replied that she could sing a
little.

"Mr. Kay will try your voice after rehearsal. No previous experience, I
suppose?"

"No."

"It doesn’t matter.  You had better sit and watch this rehearsal this
morning, and try to learn our language.  Baby, my dear, run along and
get into your place."

Liss, who appeared to be the _enfant gâté_ of the establishment,
scampered away, and presently appeared among the chattering throng on
the prompt side.  Mr. Lancaster clapped his hands. There was silence.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen," he explained, "we are going to try the
first new number in the Second Act—’Honolulu Lulu.’  Places, please, and
try to put some ginger in it this time!  You come on laughing and
chatting.  Now—_commence_!"  He clapped his hands again.  "For pity’s
sake, everybody, _desist_!  Gentlemen, gentlemen, remember that you are
happy South Sea Islanders, without a care in the world—not welshers
coming back from a dirty day at Kempton!  Again, please!  And ladies,
don’t come bolting on in that panic-stricken way.  You aren’t taking
shelter from an air raid; you are young village belles, come to
participate in the Annual Festival of the Sun!  You are joyful!  You are
glad!  You are going to sing about it!  For the Lord’s sake, _smile_!
Phil, old man, the symphony once more, if you please!  All come in at
the end of six bars.  La-la!  La-la!  La-la!  _Now_, all together!  No!
no! no! _no_!"  Mr. Lancaster clapped his hands and beat his breast
alternately. "Ladies, ladies, _ladies_!  Let me tell you, for the last
time, that it is a human impossibility to sing with the mouth shut!  It
can’t be done!  For generations and centuries people have been trying to
sing out of their noses, and their ears, and the back of their necks;
but no one has ever succeeded yet.  Open your little mouths!  Open them
wide!  And _keep_ them open, for the love of Mike!"

And so on, until a standard of approximate harmony was attained.



                                  *IV*


Next day Marjorie walked on at her first rehearsal, and practised the
new numbers with the rest.  Mr. Lancaster’s attitude towards her was the
same as Mr. Lee’s.  That is to say, he addressed her much as an old
gentleman of seventy might address a little girl of six.

"Now, dear, I know you are feeling nervous, and aren’t going to do
yourself justice, just at first—"

"I am not a bit nervous, thank you," said Marjorie.

"Oh, yes, you are," said Mr. Lancaster.  "But remember that I understand
about that, and am making allowances all the time.  So don’t be
frightened; but keep your head up, and sing out, that’s a good girl!"

"He’s a hard nut," remarked her next-door neighbour into her ear—"but he
never swears at you.  At least, if he does, he always apologises
afterwards.  He’s quite a gentleman."

In a few days Marjorie was admitted an accepted member of the choral
sisterhood.  She found her colleagues, for the most part, young,
friendly, talkative, excitable, and as improvident as grasshoppers.
Most of them possessed a "boy" of some kind—usually a callow subaltern
of the one-star brand, with a vocabulary largely composed of the
expressions "priceless" and "pathetic."  Some of them were married.  A
few had husbands actually out in France, or farther afield.  One or two
had babies, and talked about them a good deal.

Of the principals, Miss St. Leger, with her magnetic personality and
tough little Chicago voice, was a prime favourite with everybody. Her
hold over the audience was wonderful: she could galvanise a Wednesday
matinée into enthusiasm.  Compared with her, the second girl, Phyllis
Lane, was no more than an attractive amateur.  But both were kind to
their humbler sisters.  Indeed, nearly everybody was kind to everybody
in those days.  The theatrical profession is conspicuous for its big
generosities and petty jealousies.  In August, nineteen-sixteen, the
former had almost entirely obliterated the latter.  A huge daily
casualty-list is a very levelling—indeed, binding—influence, especially
in such a community; there was not a girl in the chorus at the Imperial
who had not an interest, actual or prospective, in that casualty-list.

The male members of the company, as was only natural at the time, were
remarkable neither for their youth nor their physical fitness.  In
addition to the phlebitic Ames, there were—Jack Hopeleigh, a
well-preserved hero with a light baritone—he was registered under the
Derby Scheme in group forty-three; Hubert Hartshorn, a comic manservant,
who owed his irresistible wheezy laugh to the fact that he had been
badly gassed at Ypres more than twelve months previously, and was now
discharged permanently unfit; and one Valentine Rigg, a stage lawyer,
who for forty years had earned a modest but steady income by arriving in
the Third Act with a black bag, and clearing up all misunderstandings
just before the clock struck eleven.

To the student of humanity the chorus gentlemen were really more
interesting than the principals.  There was a dismal individual named
Chivers, who now kept a stationer’s shop in Brixton, but had once been
in grand opera—Carl Rosa’s chorus.  He contributed a reedy tenor to the
ensemble.  There was a plump little man with a round face and little
tufts of white whisker, invaluable in scenes of revelry where guests of
the "jolly old uncle" type were required.  This was his first theatrical
engagement for fifteen years.  In the interim he had supported life with
invincible cheerfulness, as a bookmaker’s clerk, a traveller in
hymn-books, and head-waiter in an old-fashioned Brighton hotel.  There
was a discharged corporal of the Machine Gun Corps, with lungs of brass,
the D.C.M. ribbon on his waistcoat, and twenty-seven fragments of German
H.E. in his left leg.  There was an unpleasant-looking youth named
Mervyn, with bobbed hair and a patronising manner—debarred from
volunteering his services to his country by reason of a susceptibility
to chills upon the liver. Popular rumour located these elsewhere.

And there was Alf Spender—"Uncle Ga-Ga."  His age was a mystery.  His
own estimate, for war purposes, was forty-one.  The ladies of the chorus
put it among themselves at a hundred and fifty.  It was possibly
fifty-four, or thereabouts.  He was a frail creature, with a simple
soul, and what Americans call a "single-track" mind.  He had been a
super or chorus man ever since he could remember; and until the year
nineteen fourteen had never relinquished a humble ambition to achieve a
speaking part.  But now all that was cast to the winds.  His single
track was carrying other traffic.  Somewhere within his ill-nourished
frame burned the pure white flame of genuine patriotism.  His one desire
was to be admitted to the privilege of khaki, and to do his humble part
in "teaching those dirty Germans a lesson."  He never rested in his
efforts to qualify.  He dyed his scanty locks; he endeavoured, by daily
study of a manual of Swedish exercises, to school his feeble limbs and
sickly body to the requisite pitch of efficiency. He offered himself at
every recruiting station in London, giving a different name at each.
But all in vain; no one would accept him.  He could pass no physical
test; a big heart was not enough.

"Still, I haven’t given up hope," he confided to Marjorie.  "I have just
discovered a really admirable hair-tonic; and there’s a new
strengthening-food come on the market, which may help. Of course, the
chief difficulty is my teeth; an M.O. turns me down the moment he
examines them!  I haven’t many, you see, and what I have don’t fit
together very well; and good dentistry runs into money—a fiver, at
least.  But I don’t despair—not by any means.  They will want me in
time!  It seems inhuman to say so, but I do trust this battle that’s
just started on the Somme won’t finish the war right off.  I couldn’t
bear to see the troops coming back victorious, and feel that I did
nothing to help!"

Here was another Willing Horse.  Marjorie’s heart warmed to him; they
became friends. They shared a newspaper at rehearsals, discussing Sir
Douglas Haig’s daily bulletin word by word. They read between the lines,
and decided that, despite newspaper heroics to the contrary, the
gigantic offensive of July the First had only been partially successful.

"We never got through on the left at all," said Alf.  "Look at that
place on the map—Thiepval. We were meant to carry that bang off, and we
didn’t!  They don’t say so, but we didn’t!  We have broken their line
all right, but the trouble is that we have broken it on too narrow a
front—and I think it’s all because of that Thiepval place. We must widen
the gap, or the attack fails.  Shall I tell you what I would do if I
were head of the Army Council?"

"Yes—do," said Marjorie, eagerly.

"I would secretly construct some sort of contrivance that would protect
our troops as they dashed across No Man’s Land.  That’s the most
dangerous moment.  I’m not worrying about artillery fire, mind you!  You
may dodge that, or you may not; anyhow, there’s a sporting chance about
it.  It’s those machine guns!  The Germans have them fixed in such a way
that when they are all fired at once there is not a yard of ground that
isn’t a running river of bullets.  Now mark you, once we get across that
bullet zone, we have the Hun at our mercy.  We British"—Alf’s emaciated
frame stiffened exultantly—"can do _anything_ with the bayonet!  But we
must get across first!"

"But how?" Marjorie sighed despairingly.

"I don’t know: I haven’t enough technical knowledge.  But some sort of
armour-plated motor ’bus would be the idea.  I’ll bet old Kitchener
would have fixed it, if he’d been alive. Oh, dear!"  (The _Hampshire_
had gone down some six weeks previously.)  "By the way, have you heard
from Mr. Birnie of late?"

Then Marjorie would tell him all Roy’s news. Naturally it contained
little of military value, but our two enthusiasts read it—or rather,
approved portions thereof—with all the solemn deference due to the
Authority on the Spot.

"He may get home on leave some time soon," Marjorie said.  "He went out
last August, and it’s July now.  Leave is long over-due, but they
stopped it all for weeks before the battle.  His battalion was in the
opening attack, I think, but they are out now, refitting."

"It must have been an anxious time for you while they were in," said
Alf.  "Did you know?"

"Yes—at least, I knew a few weeks before that they were at
Bray-sur-Somme; so when the news of the attack came I felt pretty
certain."

Alf’s mild blue eyes flashed.

"I wish I had been with him," he said, "instead of"—he glanced
disparagingly downstage, to where Phil Kay, entrenched in the orchestra,
was resisting Tubby Ames’s bi-weekly offensive—"_this_!  It must be a
grand moment, coming back to rest, right out of a battle—all
mud-splashed, and exhausted, knowing you have made good!  Did he give
you any details when he wrote?"

"The only detail that mattered," said Marjorie with an unsteady little
laugh, "was this!"

She produced a field post card—muddy, crumpled, evidently dispatched by
the grimy hand of a stretcher-bearer or a ration orderly. On the back
were printed certain alternative statements, familiar enough by this
time, designed by the authorities to cover all the chances incident to
the life of a soldier in the field.  They were all deleted with a blunt
pencil, save the first:

_I am well_.

"That was the nicest letter I ever had from him!" said Marjorie.

"And I bet that’s saying a good deal!" replied Alf, with a stately
little bow.  "Now, touching this Delville Wood, on the right—"

But here the battle-call of Mr. Lancaster was heard in the stalls; and
our strategists turned reluctantly from the prosecution of the military
campaign to the maintenance of civilian morale.



                                  *V*


The Second Edition was produced in due course, with the success
inevitable in that enthusiastic, unsophisticated, _carpe diem_ period.
Marjorie appeared successively, and with distinction, as a Lady Guest at
the reception of a most unconvincing Duchess, where she flourished an
empty champagne glass painted yellow inside; as a Bird of Paradise in
the chorus of an ornithological ditty entitled, "If my Girl was a Bird,
I would Build Her a Nest," contributed by the well-preserved light
baritone aforementioned; as a damsel of the South Sea Islands,
participating, with somewhat improbable ritual, in the Annual Festival
of the Sun; and in other less exacting roles.  Her most distinguished
appearance was in the Finale (in a tableau of the Allied Nations), as
The Spirit of France.  In this she was entrusted with a separate
entrance, a solitary walk down stage, and the deliverance of a rhymed
couplet of a patriotic nature, in which General Joffre suffered the
indignity of rhyming with "Our hats we doff," "nasty cough."  She was
quite composed, and offered her outrageous contribution with such
_aplomb_ as to arouse frantic applause. Liss was a dancer, and her
activities were mostly linked with those of seven other little creatures
like herself.  She was whole-heartedly delighted with her friend’s
successful graduation.


Next morning the company were called at eleven, to be photographed.  The
morning after, Marjorie reported for duty at the canteen, and was
received with open arms by the Mouldy Old Copper.  With renewed
enthusiasm she settled down to the old drudgery.  She was supporting
herself; her long and dreary evenings were over; and, best of all, she
was really Doing Something to Help.



                                  *VI*


One morning a few weeks later Mrs. Clegg was deposited by the
Rolls-Royce at the front door of Buckholm, and was ushered by Mr. Bates
into the amber drawing-room.  She entered with the uneasy
self-consciousness of the visitor to a great house who has come, not to
pay an intimate call, but to attend a committee meeting.

"The other ladies have not yet arrived, madam," announced Bates; and
added, in stately reproof: "It is not quite eleven o’clock.  Her
ladyship will be down presently.  Will you please to be seated?"  He
deposited the flustered and untimely caller upon a sofa, handed her a
magazine, and left her alone.

Mrs. Clegg mechanically turned over the pages of the magazine.  It was
one of those periodicals which was doing its characteristic best at that
time to compensate our warriors in the field for compulsory severance
from domestic felicity by a weekly display, on a generous—nay,
prodigal—scale, of the forms and features of loved ones far
away—particularly of such as happened to be connected with the lighter
walks of the lyric drama.  Mrs. Clegg’s eye was caught by a photograph
on the middle page—of a tall, slender girl, draped from head to foot in
what looked like a flag, with the Cap of Liberty perched upon her fair
head.  The face seemed familiar.  Mrs. Clegg adjusted her tortoise-shell
lorgnette—at home, when reading, she wore simple spectacles—and examined
the photograph in greater detail.  Then she perused the journalistic
effusion underneath. It began:


One cannot have _Too Many Girls_ of This Kind, Can one?...


Mrs. Clegg was a dutiful wife.  On her way home she stopped at the
railway station and bought a copy of the magazine at the book-stall.
After dinner she showed the middle page to her husband.  It was a
courageous act, for no such literature had ever been introduced into
Netherby before.

That night, when the household had retired to bed, Albert Clegg reopened
the Family Bible, lying since prayers at the head of the dining-room
table; turned to the Births, Marriages, and Deaths and sent his
fountain-pen scouting down the first column.  Presently he came to the
name he wanted.  He scored it out—scored it, and scored it, to complete
obliteration.  When he had finished, Marjorie had joined Aunt Eliza in
the ranks of the Legion of the Lost.




                              *CHAPTER IX*

                        *THE BOOK OF THE WORDS*


We were due back in the line that night, and I was struggling, in
company with one humid orderly-room sergeant and several hundred
houseflies, to clean up the usual orderly-room mess—indents, returns,
and other nuisances which, in the absence of the adjutant, usually fall
upon the patient shoulders of that regimental tweeny, the
second-in-command.

I was seated at the kitchen table of a farm-house in Picardy.  The
weather had been wet and misty for weeks—the weather at critical moments
in this war was invariably pro-Boche—but this afternoon the sun had
reappeared and summer had come back with a rush.  Still, on the
overworked highway outside mud still lay deep.  At the farm-gate two
transport men were admonishing two mules, in the only way they knew, for
indicating reluctance (in the only way _they_ knew) to hauling the
headquarters company’s field-kitchen out of the oozy ruts where it had
reposed for ten days.  Through the open door, looking east, I could
descry the wrecked spire of Albert Church, with its golden Virgin and
Child projecting horizontally from the summit, like the flame of a
candle in a steady draught.

To my ears all the time, through the heavy summer air, came the
incessant muffled thunder of guns, and guns, and more guns—British guns,
new British guns; hundreds of them—informing Brother Boche that he, the
originator of massed artillery tactics, was "for it" himself at last.
The bombardment had begun systematically about the middle of the month,
all up and down the Western Front.  Last Saturday it had intensified in
the neighbourhood of the Somme and Ancre Valleys; I had lain awake in my
billet, listening, and recalling that summer afternoon, less than two
years ago, when Lord Eskerley had gloomily explained to me that it took
at least three years to make a British gunner.  This afternoon the whole
earth trembled; the final eruption could not be much longer delayed.

For Britain was ready to strike at last.  True, she had struck before,
both recently and frequently; but that had been mainly in self-defence,
or for experiment, or to create a diversion.  Now she was in a position
to strike home.  For nearly two years the Willing Horse had stood up
indomitably under the strain, while a nation, mainly willing, but
shamefully unready, was getting into condition.  To-day that nation was
ready; every man worth his salt was at last a trained soldier. Never
before in our history had such an army been gathered, and never again
would such an army be seen, as strained at the leash behind that
twenty-five mile front on the thirtieth of June, nineteen sixteen.
True, we launched greater armies, and won greater victories in the two
years that followed; but—the very flower of a race can bloom but once in
a generation.  The flower of our generation bloomed and perished during
the four months of the First Battle of the Somme. We shall not look upon
their like again.  It is to be doubted if any generation will—or any
race.

Sometimes, in these later days of reaction and uncertainty, we are
inclined to wonder whether that sacrifice was justified; whether it
would not have been better to wait just a little longer.  But in truth
we had waited long enough.  Strategy might advocate delay, but honour
could not. For four months Verdun had stood up like a rock against the
rolling tide of assault; it was time we took some weight off Verdun’s
shoulders.  For two years the half-equipped armies of Russia had
maintained a suicidal offensive on our account; even now fresh German
divisions were streaming away from the Western Front to the Eastern. It
was time we called them back.  Strategy or no strategy, we meant to
accomplish those two purposes.  And we did—with something over. Perhaps
the Flowers who sleep by the Somme to-day feel, on that account, that
what they perished for was worth while.  They kept the faith.

I had just dictated provisional Battalion Orders for the morrow; made
the usual mistakes in the weekly Strength Return; and was wrestling with
an incomprehensible document—highly prized by that section of the Round
Games Department which sees to it that wherever the British soldier
goes, whether singly or in battalions, his daily rations and weekly pay
are diverted from their normal course to meet him—when there came a
scuttering of hooves, and Master Roy Birnie, our esteemed sniping and
intelligence officer, came flying round the corner on a borrowed horse
(mine), as if all the Germans in Picardy were after him.  However, this
was merely Roy’s exuberant way of coming home for his tea.  He
descended, hitched his steed to the farm-pump, and came striding into
the kitchen with blood in his young eye.  I dismissed the sergeant in
quest of tea.  Roy favoured me with a formal salute, then sat down, and
began:

"Uncle Alan, I wonder why every battalion in the British Army (except
ours) is entirely composed of damn fools!"

"I have heard that speculation so often upon the lips of members of
other units of the British Army," I replied, "that I have given up
trying to find the answer.  Tell me your trouble."

Roy accepted the invitation at once.

"Well," he said, "I had a peach of an observation post up in the front
line.  It was an old derelict mill-wheel affair—one of those
contraptions you see on the end wall of every farm-house in this
country, with a poor brute of a mongrel dog inside, treadmilling away to
work a churn, or play the pianola, or something.  It lies out flat in
front of C Company’s sector, on top of a little rise, looking like
nothing at all.  You know it?"

"Yes," I said.  "It has been there for months; it is one of the accepted
features of the landscape by this time."

"That’s right; the Boche has never suspected it.  Well, I have been
using it as an O. Pip for six weeks.  There is a private covered sap
leading out to it, and once you’re inside you can stand in a pit, with
your little circular peep-show all round you.  Why, through one loophole
I can see right away to Beaumont Hamel!  Now, as you know, ten days ago
we handed over to the Late and Dirties.  This morning, when I went up
into the line to see about taking over again to-morrow, what do you
think I found—in my own special private O.P.?"

"I don’t know," I said.  "A hairpin?"

"Uncle Alan, for the Lord’s sake don’t play the fool!  I’ll _tell_ you
what I found; the whole floor of the post—_my_ post, mind you—was
covered with empty cartridge cases!  Some Late-and-Dirty perisher had
been in there with a rifle, firing volleys—no, _salvoes_—out of it!
With an oily barrel, too, I’ll bet!  Of course the Boche has the place
registered now; and next time there is any general unpleasantness
brewing, up it will go!  And I hope the Late-and-Dirty dog who gave it
away will be inside, that’s all!"

"It’s rotten luck, I admit, boy.  But in this case it doesn’t
particularly matter.  In a day or two, we hope, your observation post
will be far in rear of us.  Perhaps some clerkly gentleman from the base
will be making his nest therein."

Roy’s face brightened suddenly.

"When do we push off?" he asked eagerly.

"That is a secret known only to the powers above.  But I shouldn’t be
surprised if it were to-morrow, or the next day.  The Colonel is away at
a Brigade Conference now—the last, I dare say.  He will probably call an
officers’ meeting when he comes back."

"Is Kilbride with him?" asked Roy quickly.

"Yes.  Why?"

Roy smiled awkwardly.

"Well, _you_ know!" he said.  "Addressing you as Uncle Alan, and not as
second-in-command, it’s a little difficult sometimes for us Hoy Polloy
to gather from the C.O.’s account of the proceedings what really _is_
settled at these Brigade pow-wows.  That is why we find it so useful to
pump old Kilbride afterwards.  The Colonel is such a fire-eater that he
loathes all this chess-board warfare, as he calls it.  His idea of
fighting is to go over the parapet about a hundred yards ahead of his
men, rush straight at the nearest German, and bite him to death.  A
pretty sound plan too, in many ways.  The men would follow him
anywhere."

"You are right, Roy—they would.  And addressing you, not in your
official capacity, but as my nephew, that’s just what makes me anxious."

"You mean you are not sure where he _will_ lead them?"

"I am not sure where he _won’t_ lead them! However, we must not
criticise our superiors. Go and have your tea, you disrespectful young
hound, and then come and help your uncle to wrestle with B.213.  Hallo,
here is the Colonel!"

There came a fresh sound of hooves; a neigh of welcome from the bored
animal already tethered to the pump; and Eric Bethune and his adjutant
rode into the yard.

Eric had been sent to us after Loos—our first commander, Douglas Ogilvy,
having been killed in a bomb-fight near Hulluch.  (I remember the day
well.  The Germans were furnished with bombs which exploded on impact;
ours were of the Brock’s Benefit type, and had to be lit with a match.
Unfortunately, it was raining at the time.)

I need not say how joyfully the coming of Ogilvy’s successor was greeted
by the second-in-command.  Eric came to us with a reputation. For nearly
twelve months he had ruled an overcrowded and under-staffed depot at
home, containing never less than two thousand turbulent ex-militiamen,
and had licked into shape and self-respecting shape some of the toughest
material that our country produces.  After that, he had achieved his
heart’s desire and been sent out, to be second-in-command of our First
Battalion.  His first proceeding on arrival was to organise a successful
attack upon a valuable sector of the line lost by another unit ten days
previously.  He led the attack in person, and was mentioned in
Dispatches.

He came to us, inevitably, with a halo—or should it be nimbus?—and set
to work to make us the smartest battalion on the Western Front. Physical
fear appeared to be quite unknown to him.  For my part, I confess quite
frankly that I do not enjoy an intensive bombardment in the least.  I
really believe Eric did.  So, I think, in soberer fashion, did his
predecessor.  But we were soon conscious of the change of regime in
other directions.  Where Eric differed from Douglas Ogilvy was in his
passion for the spectacular side of soldiering—the pomp of ceremonial,
the clockwork discipline, the perfectly wheeling line, the immaculate
button in the midst of mud and blood.  Eric was at last in a position to
model a battalion on his own beliefs.  The result had been an ecstasy of
worship at the shrine of Spit and Polish.

"A dirty soldier," he was fond of telling his followers, "means a dirty
rifle; and a dirty rifle means, in the long run, a dead soldier.  Go and
shave, and save your life!"

And there was no doubt that, within limits, he was right.  That
mysterious and impalpable entity, which we call morale, is apt to
languish without the aid of soap and water, and a certain percentage of
officially fostered _bravura_.  The chief difficulty about this war was
to prevent it from degenerating into a troglodytic game of stalemate.
Everything that maintained morale and stimulated pride of Regiment was
welcome.

But there are other things; and if these be lacking, look out for
danger—especially under modern conditions.  And it was this fear which
possessed my slow-moving, uninspired mind as I took tea in that Picardy
farm-house that hot and fateful afternoon with my superior officer and
lifelong friend.

"Well," Eric began, filling his pipe, "we have had our last pow-wow,
thank God!  The Brigadier was in his element.  He had the whole affair
worked out in a little time-table—like a Jubilee Procession.  Salute of
twenty-one guns at dawn—procession to move off in an orderly manner at
six a.m.—buffet luncheon at noon—carriages at five-forty-five, and
everything!"

"Did old Kilbride take down a copy of the time-table?" I asked.

"I don’t know.  Probably he did: it’s the sort of thing he would do.  As
for me, the whole business nearly made me weep.  Why are we treated like
children, or amateurs in charge of a Territorial Field Day?  Don’t these
chuckle-headed Mandarins realise that we are fighting under conditions
of actual warfare, when at any moment things may happen which no
time-table can cover?  Don’t they understand that you _cannot_ control
the course of a battle by drawing up a niggling time-table any more than
you can control the weather by buying a barometer?  There are only two
things that count in a soldier.  The first is initiative in attack; the
second is a complete understanding with his officers.  Thank God, my men
have both.  Show them the objective; send them over the parapet; and
they will see to the rest of the business without any time-table or book
of the words whatever, thank you very much!  Discipline!  Discipline!
Discipline! That’s the only thing that matters!"

"Did you communicate your views to the meeting?" I asked.

"I took that liberty.  In fact, I have been taking it for the last three
weeks.  I fancy I am getting slightly unpopular among the higher forms
of animal life; but some one has to take the lead in these matters.
Most of the men are too newly promoted—too recently gazetted, for that
matter—to intrude their opinions.  Good fellows, but amateurs—and
diffident amateurs at that!  Of course they regard everything the
Brigadier says as gospel—and he did worry them so!  He explained over
and over again to each Battalion Commander the exact route by which he
was to lead his men to their objective, and what he was to do when he
got there.  He was to dig in, and consolidate, and mop up, and
re-establish communication—with Brigade Headquarters first and foremost,
of _course_!—make arrangements for a ration dump—fancy _thinking_ of
food at such a moment—!"

"’An army fights on its stomach.’  _N. Bonaparte_,’ I observed.

"Trust you to remember yours, old man! Then he told us a lot more
things, mainly about keeping touch with the Gunners, the
Machine-Gunners, and the Signallers, and the R.E., and the Ammunition
Column, and the Dry Canteen, and the Old Folks at Home—everybody, in
fact, except the enemy.  After that, a Gunner Brass-Hat stood up, and
spoke _his_ little piece.  He rubbed in the time-table business; said we
must adhere to its provisions _very_ carefully; otherwise his guns would
invariably be pooped off into the stern of the Brigade instead of the
bows of the Boche.  He didn’t put it quite so baldly as that, but he
waffled about the urgent necessity of observing the greatest exactitude,
especially when the Gunners proceeded from bombardment to barrage.  Then
the Brigadier pronounced a sort of benediction, and asked, as a kind of
after-thought, if there were any further points he could elucidate for
us."

"That, no doubt, was where you put your little oar in!"

"It was.  I asked him straight—and I could see half the fellows in the
room agreed with me—if he had considered the effect of such paralysing
exactitude upon _morale_?  Our tradition—at least the tradition of my
Regiment—was, and always had been, to seek out the enemy and destroy
him. My men had not had a Staff College education; they did not
understand or cotton on to this business of limited objectives, and
working to a time-table.  Their objective was Berlin, and their
time-table was the limit of physical endurance; in other words, they
were sufficiently disciplined to go until they dropped.  Wasn’t it
rather a pity to cramp their style, and so on?  I am afraid I rather
riled the Brigadier; for the moment I forgot he had been through the
Staff College himself."

"What did he say?"

"He mumbled something to the effect that my suggestions, if adopted,
would involve a radical rearrangement of the plan of operations of an
entire Army Corps; and that if my men didn’t understand the tactical
requirements of a modern battle it was my job to explain them to them.
He said that—to _me_!  Offensive old bounder!  But of course, discipline
is discipline, so I said no more.  One cannot humiliate these old boys
in the presence of long-eared subalterns; I remembered that."

"It’s a pity you didn’t remember it a bit sooner, old man!"  It was a
rash observation, but I was thoroughly alarmed.

Eric flushed a dusky red.

"Look here, Alan," he said, "I can’t take criticism from any officer of
mine, however old—"

"Sorry!" I replied.  "But do be careful, Eric!  You know what these
people are.  For God’s sake, don’t get sent home!"

Eric wheeled round upon me.

"What do you mean?" he snapped.  "What gossip have you been listening
to?"

I began to feel my own temper rising.

"I am not in the habit of listening to gossip," I said
stiffly—"especially about my Commanding Officer.  But the Brigade Major
dropped me a pretty broad hint the other day, to the effect that your
independent attitude was causing alarm and despondency among the Brass
Hats; and—well, I think it’s only fair to mention the fact to you."

But Eric was in no mood for sage counsel that day.  He smelt battle; he
was "up in the cloods."

"Pack of old women!" he exclaimed impatiently. "Wait till they see what
we do in the show to-morrow, compared with the notebook wallahs!"

Then he glanced at my troubled face, and the old boyish smile came
back—the smile which had held me captive for thirty years or more.  He
leaned over, and clapped me on the shoulder.

"Cheer up, Alan!" he said.  "It was good of you to warn me; but I _must_
use my own judgment in this matter—and I take full responsibility for
doing so."  He rose, and knocked out his pipe.  "Now, I suppose I must
have an officers’ meeting, and let old Kilbride read to them the
Brigadier’s impression of how this picnic is to be conducted.  They are
a very earnest band. They will take it all down—they’d take down the
multiplication table if you recited it to them—and read it to their
N.C.O.’s; and the N.C.O.’s will misquote it to the men; and to-morrow I
shall see my battalion, guide-book in hand, methodically advancing to
victory, chanting elegant extracts from Orders, to encourage themselves
and frighten the Germans!  It’s a mad war, this!  Now, where is the
orderly sergeant?"

"Sit down a minute," I said, "and listen to me."  I was imperilling the
foundations of an ancient friendship, but I could not leave matters like
this.  Eric dropped impatiently into his chair.

"Well, what about it?" he asked.

"Eric, old man," I began, "I was at Loos—the only show which we have put
up in any way comparable with to-morrow’s unpleasantness—and you were
not; so I am going to improve the occasion.  The great ones above us are
quite rightly trying to fight this battle on the basis of the lessons
taught us by Loos—and they were pretty considerable lessons.  May I give
you the experience of your own battalion?"

"Go ahead!" said Eric, resignedly filling his pipe again.

"We went off like a bull at a gate, and bundled the Boche out of his
front and second lines in a few hours.  I am only giving you our own
experience, mind you.  Other people weren’t so well placed, and got
practically wiped out crossing No Man’s Land.  On the other hand, a
Division farther along on our right went slap through everything, up
Hill Seventy and down the other side.  (They say a platoon of Camerons
penetrated right into Lens.  Of course they never came out again.)
Anyhow, by noon on the first day we were cock-a-hoop enough, right up in
the air on perfectly open ground behind the Boche reserve line, without
the foggiest notion where Brigade Headquarters was, where the next unit
was—as a matter of fact, the people on our immediate left were farther
ahead still, while the people on our right hadn’t got up, and never
did—where our artillery was, where our next meal was to come from, and
what we were going to do now!  We did all we could, which wasn’t much.
We tried to reverse the captured trenches, without tools.  The Sappers
turned up, as Sappers invariably do, just when they were wanted most,
and performed marvels in the way of improvising defences; but we were
still in a pretty precarious position.  For the next twenty-four hours
nothing in particular happened.  Then the Boche, who had been regularly
on the run, rallied, and came stealing back.  He found our victorious
line echeloned in the most ridiculous fashion all over the place,
without any semblance of co-ordination, full of gaps you could march a
battalion through. He made all the notes he wanted, called up his
reserves, and delivered an extremely well thought-out counter-attack.
Strung about as we were, he had us cold.  We couldn’t get up any
ammunition or bombs.  Special one-way communication trenches _had_ been
dug for the purpose, but they, of course, were jammed with traffic going
the wrong way—stretcher-parties, prisoners, and details of every kind.
(Fifty thousand wounded went back to Bethune in the first forty-eight
hours.)  We had nothing to hope for from the people farther back.  Our
gunners were there all right, ready and willing; but they didn’t know
where we were, and dare not fire for fear of hitting us.  Whole
Divisions of reinforcements were trying to get through, but the roads
were packed with transport.  In multiplying our artillery and machine
guns we had overlooked the fact that for every gun you put into the line
you add at least one limber or waggon to the general unwieldiness of the
Divisional Ammunition Column.  The country for miles behind the line was
like Epsom Downs on Derby Day; nothing could get through at all.  It was
forty-eight hours before a really adequate scheme of reinforcement could
be put into effect, and by that time we were practically back where we
started.  Up to a point, Loos was a well-conceived and splendidly
executed operation; but after the first rush everything got out of gear.
We had been told our final objective was Brussels!  With a little luck
and management we might have got Lille.  As things turned out we got one
pit-village.  Luckily we got a lesson too; and to-morrow’s show is going
to be fought on that lesson.  We are to advance to a fixed line and stay
there, so as to eliminate gaps; we are to work to a time-table, to
enable our gunners to fire with confidence; and we are to maintain
communication from front to rear by a very carefully prepared scheme of
one-way trenches and armoured telephone cables.  Hence all the pow-wows
and the little notebooks, Eric!"

But Eric was not convinced.  He was in his most childish mood.

"It won’t work!  It won’t work!" he reiterated. "It sounds all right at
the pow-wows, and reads all right in the book of the words, but you
can’t perform these chess-board antics of peace-time under actual war
conditions.  There is only one way to win big battles, and that is by
initiative, resting on perfect _discipline_—by having each separate unit
disciplined and disciplined to such a pitch that its commander can
handle a thousand rifles like a single pocket-pistol.  I am vain enough
to believe that my men are disciplined to that extent.  Some of the
other units are not; and not all the pow-wows and guide-books in the
world will help them!"

He rose, and began to buckle on his equipment, whistling through his
teeth.  I knew that sound, and I dropped the subject.

"Is the kick-off hour fixed?" I asked.

"Yes.  About three hours after dawn to-morrow; Kilbride has the details.
We are going in from our present sector.  I suppose the battalion are
all ready to move?"

"Yes; they are parading now.  They are timed to pass through Albert
after dark, and take over from the Mid-Mudshires just before midnight."

"Good!  They may as well know at once that they are going to attack, if
they haven’t guessed it already.  I shall say a word to them before they
move off.  Are they all going together?"

"No.  By companies, at twenty minutes interval."

"Well, let them parade together, anyhow. After I have spoken to them I
shall go on with the leading company, and take Kilbride with me.  I want
you to stay here and clean up.  Is another unit taking over this
billet?"

"Yes—the Mid-Mudshires; we are simply changing places with them.  I am
expecting their advance-party at any moment."

"All right.  When you have handed over, come along with the Orderly-room
staff and join me. Have you much left to do here?"

I glanced round the littered table.

"A fair amount.  You are taking Kilbride yourself?"

"Yes.  Do you want help?"

"If you could spare me an odd subaltern—"

Eric glanced out of the window, to where the Headquarters Company were
parading in the muddy road.  His eye fell upon Master Roy, who, a little
apart, was inspecting his own particular beloved command—a workmanlike
squad of snipers.  Eric swung round.

"If you want a really odd subaltern," he said, "take young Birnie!
Appoint him Assistant Adjutant for the occasion, and tell him to send
those pop-gun experts of his back to duty!"

I fairly gasped.

"You will break their hearts!" I said.  "Can’t you use them as scouts,
or—"

Eric blazed right out this time.

"For God’s sake, Laing, allow me to command my own battalion!" he cried.
Then—characteristically—"I’m sorry, old boy!  You mean well, I know; but
really I must do things my own way.  We don’t require Bisley specialists
in a hand-to-hand battle.  As for Roy Birnie, a little less sniping and
a little more intelligence won’t do him any harm at all.  Now I’m off to
harangue the battalion.  Sergeant, is my groom outside? I want my
horse."




                              *CHAPTER X*

                *DISCIPLINE!  DISCIPLINE!  DISCIPLINE!*


Exhortation before Action was a form of military ceremonial exactly to
our commander’s taste. I had heard him address his followers many a
time.  Nearly thirty years ago I had formed one of an audience of
fourteen—shivering in shorts and jerseys in an east wind at the back of
the school pavilion what time we were addressed by one Eric Bethune,
about to lead us into a Final House Match which, owing to the size,
speed and prestige of our opponents, could be regarded as little else
than a forlorn hope.  We won that Final House Match.  I decided then,
and have never departed from that belief, that no more gallant and
inspiring leader of a forlorn hope than that same Eric could have been
found among the manhood of our race.  And here we were again, eight
hundred strong this time, gathered in hollow square for the same
purpose.

Eric spoke to us for perhaps five minutes, sitting his horse like a
graven image, with the last rays of the setting sun glinting upon his
burnished equipment.  ("Protective dinginess" was anathema in Eric’s
battalion.)  Around him, steel-helmeted, perfectly aligned, motionless,
stood his men.  It was characteristic of their commander that he did not
preface his address with the order that they should stand at ease.  All
ranks remained rigidly at attention while he spoke.

I need not repeat his words.  It is enough to say that, having heard
them, I, for one, would willingly have followed the speaker anywhere he
chose to lead me, without a thought (for all my fundamental convictions
on the subject) of limited objectives, or artillery time-tables, or
other mechanical hindrances to free fighting.  He moved his men,
too—representatives of the dourest and most undemonstrative element of
the dourest and most undemonstrative nation in the world.  I could see
the effect of his words, in the glow of tanned faces, in the setting of
square jaws, in the further stiffening of sturdy, rigid bodies.  It was
hard to decide which to be most proud of—the leader, or the men.  I
glowed inwardly as my eye ran down the motionless ranks. Great hearts!
Great stuff!  And, above all, representative stuff—truly representative,
at last!  They were not of the Regular Army type, nor the Territorial
type, nor Kitchener’s Army type.  They were of the National Army—Britain
in Arms—voluntary Arms—The Willing Horse, reinforced and multiplied to
his most superlative degree.

Five minutes later A Company were streaming down the road in fours, Eric
striding at their head with the company commander and adjutant. He had
sent his horse back to the transport lines, and was "foot-slogging"
exultantly with his men. I returned to the farm kitchen.  I entered
rather suddenly.  Our newly-appointed assistant adjutant was sitting at
the table, with his head buried in his arms.  His back was to the door.

I tripped heavily upon the door-sill.  Roy sat up hurriedly, and busied
himself with the papers before him.

"Everything cleared up now?" I asked briskly, slipping off my heavy
marching equipment.

"Yes, sir," replied a muffled voice—"very nearly."

"In that case," I continued, with great heartiness, "we can get away
almost immediately.  I am expecting our relief here in five minutes."

I babbled on a little longer, to give him time to recover.  Presently he
turned upon me, and spoke. His face was flushed—absurdly like his
mother’s when something had roused her chivalrous indignation.

"Uncle Alan, it’s a rotten shame!  I had a wonderful scheme all mapped
out!  It was in Orders, too!  We had marked down all sorts of cushy
spots for sniping Boche machine guns from. I had an aeroplane map of our
sector, with Thiepval, and Beaumont Hamel, and everything! Now, my poor
chaps are all sent back to their companies, where they will be treated
like dirt; and—I am given a job as assistant office boy!"

It is impossible to furnish adequate comfort to a man who has been
deprived unexpectedly of his first independent command.  I merely patted
Roy’s shoulder, and said gruffly—

"Discipline, Discipline, Discipline, lad!  That’s the only thing that
matters!"

Roy sat up at once.  He was a soldier, through and through.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said.  "I am afraid I was mixing up Major
Laing with Uncle Alan!  That wasn’t the game, was it?  My error! It
shan’t occur again."  He smiled resolutely. "I think everything is in
order now.  Shall I hand these files over to the Orderly-room sergeant?"

"Righto!" I said.  "Was that a despatch rider I saw at the door just
now?"

"Yes—from Brigade Headquarters.  He left two messages."

"Did you give him a receipt for them?"

"No.  He slung them in and bolted off.  I expect Brigade Headquarters
are on the move, and he didn’t want to lose touch with them."

"Never mind!  See what they are about."

Roy opened the first envelope, and extracted a field despatch-form.  He
glanced at it, and grinned.

"It’s lucky we got this before going up into the line!" he observed; and
read aloud:

_The expression "Dud" must no longer be employed in Official
Correspondence._

"It’s a memo from Olympus," I explained: "They mean well, but their
sense of proportion is not what it might be.  And the next article?"

Roy did not reply.  I looked up.  His face was as white as chalk.  He
was breathing heavily through his nose, staring in a stupefied fashion
at the flimsy pink slip in his hand.

"My God!" he muttered; "My God!  It’ll break his heart."

"What on earth’s the matter, old man?" I leaned across the table.  Roy
thrust the despatch towards me.

"From Divisional Headquarters," he said, mechanically.  "The Brigade
Major has sent it on."

The message was quite brief:


_Lt.-Col. E. F. B. Bethune, D.S.O., commanding Second Battalion, Royal
Covenanters, will return home forthwith and report to War Office._


Pinned to the despatch was a hastily scrawled covering slip from the
Brigade Major:


_Passed to you, for immediate compliance, please._


The next thing that I remember was Roy’s voice:

"They’ve done it on him!  The dirty dogs! They’re sending him home!  Did
you—know?"

"No!  Yes!  Well, I was half afraid of it. I knew the people higher up
were getting a bit restive: in fact, I tried to warn him only this
afternoon.  But I never dreamed they would strike back at a moment like
this.  You are right, Roy—it will break his heart."  (It was the second
occasion upon which I had employed that phrase within the last hour.)

Another thought struck Roy.

"You are in command now!" he said.

"I suppose so; but not until this despatch is actually delivered to the
Colonel."

We were silent again.  We were both picturing the same scene, I fancy.
Presently Roy said:

"If only it had been delayed in some way!"

I nodded.

"Even for a day!—"

"Even for an hour!—"

"Even for ten minutes!  We should have been gone out of this place, and
they would not have got us until the show was over!"

Our eyes met, then dropped hurriedly.  We had read one another’s
thoughts.  Discipline, Discipline, Discipline!

Roy picked up the two despatches, folded them, and put them mechanically
into the pocket of his field despatch-book.  Then he cleared his throat
huskily.  I found myself doing the same.

"Look here!—" we began both at once.

A cheery voice interrupted us:

"Good evening, sir.  Is this Caterpillar Farm?"

We both jumped, like detected conspirators.

In the doorway stood a subaltern, saluting, with the totem of the Royal
Mid-Mudshire Regiment stencilled upon his tin bowler.

"Come in," I said.  "This is the place you want.  I presume you have
come to take over?"


About midnight, the Orderly-room Staff filed through the ghostly streets
of Albert, to the music of innumerable big guns working up to their
final spasm.  At their head marched a silent major and a preoccupied
assistant adjutant.

Next morning, just after dawn, the Second Royal Covenanters went raging
to the opening attack of the greatest battle yet fought in the history
of warfare.  We were led into action by our Commanding Officer, Eric
Bethune.




                              *CHAPTER XI*

                                *ENFIN!*


If those years brought unprecedented misery to the human family, they
had their compensating moments—especially for those most deeply
concerned.  Lovers, for instance—true lovers. When two people really
love one another, and are limited by inexorable circumstances to rare
and brief periods of companionship, each one of which may be the very
last—and each succeeding day of those four years saw some six hundred
British soldiers of all ranks go back from Leave never to return—their
love is lifted to heights, and breathes an atmosphere, of which ordinary
workaday lovers can know nothing.  Poor peace-time lovers—sitting
holding hands in a conservatory, or spooning on a golf course—what do
they know?  Faced by a future all their own (and the enervating
consciousness that there will probably be a good deal of it), what do
they know? What do they know of the blind rapture of Six Days’ Leave?


Roy’s telegram preceded him by exactly one hour, so Marjorie had little
time to get excited. She merely embraced Liss, changed her frock,
embraced Liss again, changed her frock again, and dashed off to
Victoria.  After that her recollection of events went out of focus a
little. She had watched the arrival of the Leave-train so often merely
as a benevolent spectator, that sudden and personal participation in
that function disarranged her perspectives.

She caught sight of Roy almost at once—singling out his glengarry from
among the flat caps and steel helmets.  He was politely resisting the
importunity of an elderly gentleman in a grey uniform and a red
brassard, bent on luring him to a free ride upon the Underground
Railway. Next moment, Marjorie had slipped her arm through his.  After
that, neither of them remembered anything much until they found
themselves sitting hand in hand in a taxi, gliding stealthily through
the darkened streets of London, both feeling a little constrained and
embarrassed. Re-united lovers, especially of our nation, do not always
spark immediately on contact.  We are a highly-insulated race.

"They keep this old place pretty dark," said Roy, peering out of the cab
window.  "Zeppelins, I suppose?"

"Yes.  We had some last week."

"Have you ever seen one?"

"Rather!"

Roy laughed, constrainedly.

"It’s funny you should have seen something in this war that I haven’t,"
he said.  "Where are we going?"

"To my flat."

Roy turned and surveyed Marjorie’s profile in the dim light of the cab.

"I shall be able to see you properly then," he announced with
satisfaction.  "It’s as dark as the inside of a cow here.  Have you
changed at all, I wonder?"

"You will find I am quite a big girl now," replied Marjorie, laughing
constrainedly.

Roy laughed too, and his face came closer to hers.  Her hair brushed his
lips.  Next moment their arms were about one another.

Five minutes later, they groped their way mechanically upstairs to
Marjorie’s landing, while a slightly incredulous taxi-driver, with one
of the newly-invented pound notes in his oily palm, drove hurriedly away
before somebody came out of the chloroform.

"You are thinner, dear, and older—much older," was Marjorie’s verdict
when they found themselves under the lamp by the sofa.  "You look more
like thirty than twenty.  I expect things have been pretty awful
sometimes, haven’t they?"

Roy nodded.  "Yes, sometimes," he said. "I’ll tell you about it one
day."  Then, suddenly and boyishly: "Dearest, you look wonderful!"

It was no more than the truth.  Marjorie had felt tired enough a couple
of hours ago; but now her cheeks were pink, and her eyes glowed.  Her
hair had suddenly recovered its lustre.  For the first time in six
months she looked what she was—twenty.  But she realised that the old
Roy could never come back to her.  Her smooth-cheeked schoolboy was
gone, and in his place she had a man—thin as a lath, healthily bronzed,
and curiously grave.  The Western Front lost no time in making a man in
those days—or breaking him.

They kissed again, with absolute lack of shyness this time.  Suddenly a
thought struck Marjorie.

"Good gracious!" she cried.  "What time is it?"

"Seven o’clock.  Why?"

"My dear—the theatre!  I’d forgotten all about it.  I am an honest
working girl, and the curtain goes up at eight-thirty!"

"By gum!" said Roy, who of course knew all about "Too Many Girls."
"_Absent from parade when warned for duty_, eh?  That will never do.
What about it?  Can’t you get a night off?"

"I might," said Marjorie doubtfully.  "Most of the girls send a doctor’s
certificate.  But I don’t think it’s the game.  They overdo it so."

"Quite right!" said that young disciplinarian, Lieutenant Birnie.  "But
it’s a bit rough, all the same."

A key rattled loudly and tactfully in the outer door, which then opened
with mature deliberation, and Liss appeared.

"I hadn’t meant to butt in," she explained, after introductions, "but I
just want to say that I have seen Lancaster, and he says you can have
the night off.  I told him about you," she explained to Roy, "and he
said you could have her this evening if you promised faithfully to send
her back for to-morrow’s show."

"I will bring her back myself," replied Roy, "and buy the whole front
row to watch her from!"

"Righto!  Good-bye, children!  Enjoy yourselves!" said Liss, and
vanished, like a diplomatic little wraith.

After that, Roy and Marjorie sat down to make plans.

"First of all," began Roy, "I must hop off to the club and order a bed
and have a hot bath—a real hot bath!  _Sah vah song dearie_, as we say
at the Quai D’Orsay.  My last one was in a little house somewhere behind
Albert, in a sort of zinc coffin in front of the kitchen stove, with the
family sitting tactfully in the scullery.  But I am digressing: let us
resume!  After that, we will go and dine somewhere.  By the way, I
suppose there is still plenty of food to be had in these days?"

"There is a shortage of potatoes at present, I am sorry to say," replied
Marjorie in her best canteen manner.  "But—"

"We can worry along without potatoes," said Roy.  "What I chiefly want
is to dine off a table covered with a white cloth instead of a
newspaper; and drink out of a glass instead of a tin cup.  I think the
Carlton will meet the case. Oh, my dear, my dear!  I can’t believe it
all yet! Are you _really_ here?" ...

At this rate of progress it was nine o’clock before they sat down to the
feast, which was served to them by an obsequious neutral in a corner of
the big restaurant.  It was a luxurious dinner for war time, though
bully beef and stewed tea would have served equally well.  Reunited
lovers are not, as a rule, fastidious.

They talked steadily now, unfolding reminiscence after reminiscence.
Roy had most to tell; for Marjorie’s adventures had been faithfully
recorded in her daily letters, while Roy, as previously noted, had
usually confined himself to breezy irrelevance.

"Uncle Alan is in command now," he said.  "I suppose you heard that the
Colonel had been knocked out?"

"Colonel Bethune?  Yes, I saw it in the paper."  To her own annoyance,
Marjorie felt her colour rising.  But Roy noticed nothing.

"Yes, he stopped a five-point-nine with his left arm on the second day
of the Somme show, and went home without it.  We were in a pretty tight
place at the time, and it was a bit of a job getting him away.  But I
hear he’s all right again now, though short of a fin.  Have you seen him
by any chance?"

"Not since April," said Marjorie.  "He was in London then, on leave."
She was feeling thoroughly self-conscious, and despised herself for it.

"They gave him a bar to his D.S.O.," continued Roy.  "He deserved it
too, for what he did."

"What did he do?" asked Marjorie jealously. She was a little critical of
a system which gave a decoration to a man for getting wounded and coming
home, and nothing to those who had to remain and carry on.

"We were right up in the air," explained Roy, "uncovered on both flanks.
We did not know where we were; Brigade Headquarters didn’t know where we
were, so couldn’t reinforce us; and the gunners didn’t know where we
were, so couldn’t fire for fear of hitting us.  The only person who
really knew where we were was the Boche—a well-informed little fellow,
the Boche!—and he gave it to us good and hard.  But the Colonel was
wonderful.  We had no cover in particular, beyond a kneeling-trench
which we had scooped out for ourselves.  There was no room for any
officer to pass up and down, so we all stayed where we found ourselves,
as ordered, and controlled our fire as well as possible.  But the
Colonel came walking to us across the open from Battalion
Headquarters—an old mine-crater about a hundred yards in rear of us—and
strolled right along our whole front from end to end, with Boche snipers
taking pot-shots at him all the time; looking as if he had just come out
of his tailor’s—he had _gloves_ on!—stopping here and there to talk to
the men, and telling them that no battalion of the Covenanters had ever
been known to go back, and that reinforcements were coming up, and how
pleased he was to see us so steady.  (We weren’t feeling a bit steady,
really.)  The trenches were full of wounded men whom we couldn’t get
away.  He stopped and spoke to them all—by name!—and gave them
cigarettes.  The result was that when the Boche attacked, our fellows
fought like tigers.  It was after the attack got round our undefended
flanks that the hard time began.  Finally, their gunners got our range,
and simply blew us out of the trench.  Even then the C.O. wouldn’t give
in. He stood on the parapet, giving fire orders as cool as you please,
and telling us how well we were doing.  Finally he was hit.  They
carried him away on a blanket, insensible, and Uncle Alan took command.
By this time we were surrounded on three sides—enfiladed, and
everything.  Uncle Alan passed word along that we were to fall back
slowly to our proper place in the line."

"Your proper place?"

"Yes.  I forgot to tell you about that.  We had overrun our objective,
it seemed.  Everybody else in the brigade was snugly dug in about half a
mile behind us, on a continuous line, except for a gap that we ought to
have been filling.  We got there at last, but it was a pretty awful
walk. We got all our wounded away, though."

"Were there many?"

"A good lot.  It was bad luck getting into that position at all.
However, we got a tremendous pat on the back from the Divisional
Commander afterwards.  Apparently there had been some misunderstanding
about orders.  Now let us talk about something else."

And that was as much as was ever told of the story of how Eric Bethune’s
lofty contempt for the "book of the words" led a fine battalion into a
skilfully baited death-trap.

After that they talked, as lovers will, of the present.  They even spoke
of the future—a subject upon which, in those days, few young people
cared to hazard conjecture in cold blood.  But to-night their blood ran
hot and high.  The world was theirs—for six days.

"To-morrow morning," continued Roy, with an air of immense authority, "I
shall take you out and buy you an engagement ring.  It is perfectly
scandalous your going about with me in this way without one!  (Still, I
suppose you will have to wear it round your neck on a string, anyway!)
After that, a little shopping!  I suppose there will be no harm if I buy
you some things—long gloves, and high-heel shoes, and silk stockings,
and things like that?  We’ll throw in a nice sensible umbrella, as a
chaperon!  Then in the evening we will dine early, so as to give you
plenty of time to get to your show."

Marjorie laid her slim fingers upon Roy’s brown paw.

"Darling," she said firmly, "to-morrow morning I am going to take you to
a railway station, and you are going to take the train to Scotland, to
see your father!"

Roy’s face fell ludicrously.  Then the smile he had inherited from his
mother came suddenly back.  He was all contrition.

"Good Heavens!  You had me there, dear. I own up!  For the last
twenty-four hours my noble parent has entirely escaped my memory. As
soon as they told me that I could go on leave I simply grabbed my
haversack, asked the Buzzers to send a wire, and then sprinted for the
railhead.  Poor old dad!  Of course you’re right.  I haven’t had a line
from him for six weeks, by the way.  I’ll send a telegram to Baronrigg
at once, and start to-morrow."  Then he added anxiously:

"How long must I stay?"

Marjorie considered.

"Your father doesn’t know anything about _me_, of course?" she said.

"No; nobody knows.  It’s our secret—ours, and no one else’s!"  The
impulsive pair squeezed hands upon the secret, instantly revealing it to
the obsequious neutral aforementioned.  "Still, perhaps it would be as
well if I told him, eh? Then he couldn’t object to my coming back here
pretty quick."

"Supposing he doesn’t approve?" said Marjorie doubtfully.  "He doesn’t
know me—nor my people, so far as I am aware.  Or perhaps he does, which
might be worse!"

"My old dad’s a white man," said Roy stoutly. "He’d understand.  He
knows what it is for a fellow to have to go without.  He once had to
endure seeing his girl—my mother—engaged to another man for several
months.  He’ll understand, all right!"

"I never knew that," said Marjorie.  "Who was the other man?"

"Colonel Bethune.  Of course he was only a subaltern then."

"_Who?_"  Marjorie was fairly startled out of herself this time.

"Eric Bethune, our C.O.  I thought that would surprise you!  I never
knew myself until a few months ago.  Uncle Alan told me.  The Colonel
has always been rather heavily down on me—I never knew why—and one day
when I was more than usually fed up with things in general, having just
been informed by my commanding officer that I was not fit to hold the
King’s Commission, old Uncle Alan told me all about it.  He explained
that the Colonel didn’t really think me a dud soldier; he was only
peeved at not being my father.  Fancy disliking a fellow for that!  It’s
a queer world!"

Queer indeed!  Marjorie, better informed than Roy, mused upon the
diabolical trick of fate which had caused a man to be baulked of the
only thing that really matters by two successive generations—first by
the father, then by the son. For the first time she felt a genuine pang
of pity for Eric Bethune.  But it passed, in a flash. Eric was "heavily
down on" Roy—her Roy! All her generous soul revolted at the pettiness of
such a revenge.

"I often wondered," continued Roy, "why my mother broke it off.  I don’t
believe Uncle Alan knew.  Why was it, do you think?"

"I don’t know," said Marjorie.  But she did.


Five minutes later they arrived at the theatre where the musical
comedy—or musical tragedy: you never know—of their choice was in
progress. The vestibule was deserted, but Roy held open the swing door
and ushered Marjorie into the darkened auditorium.  A blast of hot air
and a concerted feminine screech greeted them.

"The curtain’s up," said Roy.  "Come along! Our seats are in the back
row, on the gangway. Rotten, but convenient!"

They slipped unostentatiously into their places. The company were massed
upon the stage; the orchestra was in full cry; the young persons of the
Chorus were in a state of unwonted animation. In the centre, a lady of
ravishing beauty was melting into the arms of a distinguished-looking
individual just over military age.  Humourists supported either flank.

"This is going to be some show!" announced Roy, groping for Marjorie’s
hand, and surveying the chorus with all the appreciation of a Robinson
Crusoe of six months’ standing.  "I shouldn’t mind being Adjutant of
_that_ battalion!  Not that any of them could walk down the same street
with you!  Hallo, hallo!  What’s all this? The interval!  We must have
come in late."

The curtain fell, and the audience, with one accord, rose to their feet
and made for the doors. The band offered a hurried tribute to the Crown.
Roy looked at his watch, and turned to Marjorie with a comical grimace.

"Eleven o’clock!" he announced.  "We must have sat over dinner a bit
longer than we thought.  The show’s over!  Does it matter?"

"Nothing in the world matters—this week!" said Marjorie, taking his arm.




                             *CHAPTER XII*

                              *TOM BIRNIE*


                                  *I*


Roy was duly despatched to Scotland the following morning.

"When does your leave end?" Marjorie asked, as they waited for the
crowded train to start.

"Let me see—this is Friday.  I go back by the leave-train next Wednesday
afternoon—"

"Then travel back here on Sunday night," said Marjorie; "unless, of
course, you can persuade your father to come back with you at once."

Roy pondered.

"I don’t know," he said, "that it wouldn’t be better to stick the
week-end out at Baronrigg, and then come back alone, and have you all to
myself."

Your true lover is an uncompromising egotist. Marjorie at once
recognised the superiority of Roy’s view.

"All right," she said.  "There’s the whistle! Get into the train, little
man.  Send me a telegram when you arrive."

She watched the long train crawl out of sight, and went back to the flat
with a hungry heart. Six days!  And she had to give him up for three of
them!  Still, it was the game.

But she had not to wait so long.  Roy burst into the flat about noon the
very next day—to the entire _bouleversement_ of Liss, who was a dilatory
dresser.  Redirected by her (from behind the bathroom door) he sought
Marjorie at the canteen, dragged her almost forcibly out to lunch, and
communicated his news in a breath.

"Baronrigg is closed up tight!  Has been for six weeks!  Dad put all his
affairs into order at the beginning of last month, and disappeared!"

"Disappeared?  What do you mean?"

"Well, he simply shut up the house, gave what servants were left by the
war a year’s wages, walked to the station, and took the train for
London.  He hasn’t been heard of since."

"But where has he gone?"

"Nobody knows!"

"Was he ill, or anything?"

"No.  By all accounts he was as hard as nails and as fit as a fiddle."

"But didn’t he leave any message?" asked Marjorie, bewildered.

"Yes," replied Roy, unbuttoning his tunic pocket, "he did.  This letter,
for me.  I got it from old Gillespie at the Bank.  I expect Dad knew I’d
pop in there!"

"But doesn’t it explain?" asked Marjorie.

"I don’t know," said Roy calmly.  "I haven’t opened it yet."

"You have had it for a day and a night, and haven’t opened it?"

"No.  I wanted to wait until you and I could read it together."

"But weren’t you dying of curiosity?"

"I was, rather.  Still, I said to myself—"

Marjorie slipped her arm impulsively into his.

"Roy, dearest," she said, "_I_ could never have done that!"

It was the first and last time Marjorie ever admitted to Roy that her
sex was in any way inferior to his.  They returned to the flat and read
the letter together.  That is to say, Roy read it aloud to Marjorie:


_My dear Son,_

_You will remember that when the war broke out I was among those who
thought it might have been avoided. I was also numbered among those who
thought it would be a short war.  I was wrong in both views._

_My errors did not end there.  I was not in favour of the raising of a
great army.  My opinion was that we should limit our efforts to the
efficient policing of the seas, the supplying of munitions and equipment
to France and Russia, and the enforcement of a great commercial blockade
against the enemy.  Neither honour nor interest, I said, demanded more
of us.  When our young men left all and followed the Colours without, as
it seemed to me, pausing to reason why, I was inclined to regard them as
hysterical Jingoes._


"I remember him saying that," observed Roy. "We had quite a battle
before he would let me apply for a commission."


_The war has now been in progress for two years.  My first purpose in
writing to you is to acknowledge to you that in your conception of
national duty you, my son, were right and, I, your father, was wrong._


"It was decent of him to put in that," said Roy, looking up again.


_I realise now that not only was the war inevitable, but that unless we
make a superhuman effort as a nation we shall not win it.  That
realisation, unfortunately, is not universal in this district.  Most of
our people have done magnificently, and I shall always be proud to think
that my only son was among the first and the youngest to volunteer._


"This," commented Roy, "is darned embarrassing to read aloud."

"Go on!" commanded Marjorie: "I love it!"


_Indeed, the effort has been too great.  Too high a tax has been levied
on spontaneous loyalty.  The general enthusiasm of the country has not
been maintained. Consequently the best of our stock, both gentle and
simple, is bearing the burden alone, at a cost which is ruining the
future of the country._

_That brings me to the second thing I have to say to you.  In this very
neighbourhood there are many blind optimists, many drifters, many
irritating phrase-mongers, and a certain number of so-called
Conscientious Objectors to warfare._


"He must have met Amos!" said Marjorie.


_These latter are not dangerous: their very cowardice makes it easy to
deal with them.  Far more pernicious are the optimists, the drifters,
and the phrase-mongers. Yesterday, at a meeting of the Territorial
Association, I met a typical specimen—Mr. Sanders, of Braefoot. You may
know him._


"I do," said Roy, grinning.  "A celebrated captain of industry, now a
county magnate—Nineteen-Thirteen vintage!"


_This man said to me: "Sir Thomas, what I like about the situation is
the way we are all doing our bit. I, for instance, have been working
overtime on Government contracts for two years.  I have bought nearly
one hundred thousand pounds worth of War Bonds, and I have given seven
nephews to the Army.  Pretty good, eh?"  By what authority, or with
whose knowledge, he had presented other men’s sons to the Army he did
not explain._

_Roy, I am ashamed of such people.  But who am I to be ashamed of anyone
but myself for not realising sooner—as soon as you—that in this sacred
cause of ours there is only one thing that counts, and that is personal
service?  I am sound in wind and limb, and I have no helpless
dependents.  To-morrow I am going to London to join the Army.  As an
earnest of the fact that I do so in the spirit of humility and
contrition, and not from any desire to pose or advertise, I shall
communicate my intention to no one but yourself.  I shall enlist as a
private soldier, but in a unit where I am not likely to meet any one I
know; and I pray God that he will enable me to serve my country as
effectively as my own dear son._


Roy’s voice shook a little.  He had just made his father’s acquaintance.


_Should I not come back, you will find my affairs in perfect order, and
Baronrigg waiting for you.  Your trustees are Lord Eskerley and Alan
Laing.  Should neither of us come back—_


"Don’t read any more, dear," said Marjorie.

"All right!" replied Roy.  "That’s practically all now."  He folded the
letter and put it away in his tunic.

"I wish," he added thoughtfully—"I wish fathers and sons could get to
know one another a bit better while they have the chance!"  Then, "I
wonder what regiment he enlisted in!  I wonder if we shall ever meet out
there!  I’m sorry he didn’t see you before he went.  You’d have liked
him, I think."

"I like him now," said Marjorie, with shining eyes.  "I think he’s
splendid!  And"—she broke into a happy laugh—"I like him particularly at
this moment, because he has given you to me for four days more instead
of two!"

"Let’s go shopping!" said Roy, rising importantly.



                                  *II*


After a gloriously deliberate start, the six days, as usual, gathered
momentum.  The last forty-eight hours whizzed by like an
eighteen-pounder shell.

On Wednesday morning Roy, once more equipped in mud-stained khaki and
bristling with portable property, appeared at the flat for breakfast at
nine o’clock.  Marjorie was ready for him.  Liss joined the party a
little later.  For all her feather-head, she was no mean tactician.
Having conscientiously effaced herself throughout the week, instinct now
told her that her presence at the parting breakfast would be a good
thing.  So she uprooted herself from her beloved bed, and entered upon
the task of distracting the lovers from the contemplation of the
immediate future.

"I thought it was just time," she announced to Roy, "to bring myself to
your notice a little. I am here, you know!  I have been here most of the
week, only I don’t think you observed me very much."

"Oh, yes, I did," replied Roy gallantly.  "Who could help it?"

"Well, you could—and did!  I don’t much like being in the same room with
people who don’t know I’m there.  It’s not safe.  You walked straight
through me the other afternoon, when you called to collect Marjorie.
And the day before that, when I opened the door to you, you wiped your
feet on me!  I’ve had a wonderful week!"

With such blunt shafts of wit as these Miss Lyle ultimately provoked the
lovers to a smile.

"That’s better!" she said.  "Now, next time you come home on leave, give
us longer notice, and I will warn Leonard, or somebody, for duty. Then I
shan’t feel such an outsider."

Roy promised to do so.

"You will take care of Marjorie, won’t you?" he added.

Miss Lyle favoured him with a gaze of withering wonder.

"You have been trying to take care of her yourself most of this week,
haven’t you?" she demanded.

"I have been doing my best," admitted Roy, cautiously.

"Very well, then!  What happened?  How did it end?"

"It ended, I think," confessed Roy, "in her taking care of me!"

Liss nodded her bobbed head triumphantly. "That’s it," she said.
"That’s what always happens to people who try to take care of Marjie.
She grabs them by the neck, puts them in her pocket, and keeps them
there!  That’s what she’ll do to me again, when you’re gone.  It’s no
good my pretending I ever do anything for her."

"Nonsense!" said Marjorie.

"But I’ll tell you what," continued Liss: "I’ll see she doesn’t take
care of anybody else while you’re away—if I can.  That’s her trouble:
she’d take care of the whole army, and navy, and munition people, and
Red Cross, and everything, if she was let!  But I’ll watch her, and save
the leavings for you!"  She glanced at the clock, and rose.  "Now,
children, your Auntie Liss is going to leave you!  Tactful—that’s me!
When is your train, General?"

"Two o’clock," said Roy.  "I fancy we sail from Folkestone about six."

"Then," inquired Liss, playing a carefully hoarded ace of trumps, "why
not go down to Folkestone _now_, both of you, by the morning train?
That way you would have her until nearly six, instead of two.  It’s all
right; don’t thank me!" she concluded pathetically, as Marjorie, without
a word, dived into the bedroom for her hat, and Roy began to struggle
madly into his equipment.



                                 *III*


They spent the bleak November afternoon on the Leas at Folkestone.  At
their feet lay the Straits of Dover, across whose waters British
soldiers had come and gone for twenty-six months, and continued to come
and go for twenty-five more, without the loss of a single soldier’s
life. But they could not see their feet that afternoon: their heads were
in the clouds—private clouds, to which we will not presume to follow
them.

As the autumn darkness fell, they took an early dinner in an almost
empty hotel hard by the harbour, talking cheerfully of things that did
not matter.  Roy ordered champagne, and they drank a silent toast with a
fleeting glance over the rims of their glasses.

"When does my train start?" asked Marjorie at length.  "Don’t forget
that I have to be back for the evening performance."

Roy would inquire.

"Half-past five, from the Town station," he announced on returning.
"That’s some way from here.  I have ordered a car, and if we start now I
can go with you and see you off.  That will give me just time to hop
into the official leave-train coming down from London.  It stops at
Folkestone Town to turn round, and then backs right down to the boat."

Once more the parting was staved off.  However, one cannot go on
pilfering minutes eternally. This time it really was good-bye.  It was
half-past five; and they stood on the Town station platform.

"This is your train," said Roy, "standing here. Mine is due at the other
platform now.  There goes the signal!  I must skip across the bridge.
So—"

He drew Marjorie behind a friendly pile of luggage.

"It has been wonderful, Roy dear—wonderful!"  For a moment she laid her
head on Roy’s breast.  "But we did one stupid thing."

"What was that?"

"We ought to have got married!"

"I never thought of it," said Roy simply. "We were so happy, there
didn’t seem to be anything else."

"But we’ll remember next time!" said Marjorie.

"I will give the matter my personal attention!" Roy assured her.
"So-long, and take care of yourself!"




                             *CHAPTER XIII*

                             *ALBERT CLEGG*


In the early summer of Nineteen-Seventeen Uncle Fred paid a prolonged
visit to Netherby—ostensibly to renew family ties, in reality for
reasons not altogether unconnected with air-raids on London.

For the moment the fortunes of the war were back in the melting pot.
The Battle of the Somme had bundled Brother Boche right back to the
Siegfried Line, and enemy morale on the Western Front was low.  The
British army, fortified by twelve months of conscription, was blundering
forward in characteristic fashion upon many fronts.  The navy had
swelled to a size undreamed of by any, and known only to few. Over the
British coast alone nearly three thousand vessels of all sorts and
conditions were keeping watch.  The "Q" boat, too, with its crazy crew
of immortals, was abroad upon the face of the waters, and the hunter had
become the hunted.

But there was much to be set down upon the contra side.  The spring
offensive of the French army, after a brilliant beginning, had faltered,
then halted.  There had been recriminations, inquiries, resignations;
and Pétain, the saviour of Verdun, had succeeded the gallant Nivelle. To
keep the enemy from benefiting by the sudden relaxation of pressure on
the Chemin des Dames the British army had flung itself into the
premature Battle of Arras, and once more the casualty lists had shot up.

At home, the talk was mainly of Gothas—the Zeppelin was entirely
_démodé_—and ration cards.  The war was costing us six million pounds a
day.  Income tax at six shillings in the pound was teaching the man of
moderate means the meaning of war; super-tax and excess profits tax were
subjecting the capitalistic waistcoat to a not unsalutary reduction.
Labour—or rather what was left, now that all that was best and soundest
in Labour was away fighting—was going on strike periodically and with
invariable success for more adequate recognition of its efforts to
furnish the sinews of war to its wasteful and unproductive brothers in
the trenches.

In Russia the Empire, battered from without and all corroded within, had
collapsed upon itself; and an earnest but unpractical gentleman named
Kerensky was rapidly undermining what was left of Russian staying-power,
and, with the enthusiastic assistance of the German General Staff,
paving the way for those great twin brethren, Lenin and Trotsky.  One
jaw of the vice which had been crushing the Hun to death was relaxed for
good.

Still, there was no weakening on the Western Front.  The Messines Ridge
had recently "gone up," with a bang which had warmed the heart of every
schoolboy in that schoolboy army, the British Expeditionary Force.  The
Salient of Ypres, that graveyard of British soldiers and German hopes,
stood more inviolate than ever. Bagdad had been captured: Palestine was
being freed.  And in France, down in the Vosges, within the great
quadrilateral formed by Chaumont, Toul, Vittel, and Ligny-en-Barrois,
huge cantonments were being run up, and roads and railways laid down, by
long-legged, slim-hipped, slow-speaking, workmanlike young men from a
vast continent overseas—the forerunners of an army of indefinite
millions which had pledged itself to come and redress the final balance
at no very distant date.

But all this did not prevent London from being an extremely
uncomfortable, not to say unsafe, place of residence for a high official
of the noble army of Bomb-Dodgers.  Finally, after a Gotha raid over
London in broad daylight one bright morning in July, in which
fifty-seven people were killed, Uncle Fred decided that it was no longer
either just or prudent to risk a valuable life further, and went to
Netherby, where he succeeded without any difficulty whatever in
outstaying his welcome by a considerable margin.

Netherby itself was not over-cheerful, even though the master of the
house was absent a good deal.  Albert Clegg spent most of his time in
those days on Tyneside, making himself liable to excess profits tax.
Amos, his eldest son, who from early boyhood had cultivated the valuable
habit of keeping one ear to the ground, was by this time in Glasgow,
safely embedded in a convenient stronghold labelled "Civilian War Work
of National Importance."  Brother Joe was far away, as happy as a
sandboy—and living like one—assisting General Allenby to construct a
military railway from Beersheba to Dan.  The younger members of the
family were occupied in making unserviceable articles for the Red Cross,
and complaining of the shortage of sugar. Mrs. Clegg faithfully attended
committee meetings and gatherings where bandages were rolled and inside
information imparted.  Craigfoot lay remote from the tumult of war,
though Edinburgh to the north, and Tynemouth to the south, had each been
soundly bombed.  Still, there was no lack of military atmosphere.
Colonel Bethune himself—minus an arm, and with a bar to his D.S.O.—was
back in command of the depot, an object of respectful worship to the
entire community; and was always ready and willing to enlarge upon the
situation, whether to an attentive mess or to a casually encountered
ploughman. His august mother, Lady Christina, specialised upon the
crimes of the Government, and had it on reliable authority that the
counsels of the Cabinet were now entirely directed from Potsdam.  Men on
leave came and went, with tales of glory and gloom.  Many of the girls
were in London or in France; and there were countless letters to quote.
Mrs. Clegg sat and listened to the babble of rumour and conjecture,
shyly contributing here and there an excerpt from Palestine.  Joe had
never been home since his clandestine enlistment, but as the event had
proved that conscription would have claimed him in any case, his father
had decided to forgive him.

Marjorie’s name was never mentioned at Netherby, by decree of the master
of the house. With Mrs. Clegg—gentle, submissive, colourless—to yield in
act was to yield in opinion.  She possessed the faculty (recently
enjoined, with indifferent success, upon an entire nation) of being
"neutral even in thought."  She accepted Marjorie’s excommunication as
she would have accepted her death, or any other form of irrevocability.

It was the last day of Uncle Fred’s hegira.  On the morrow he was to
return, to face the dangers of Dulwich.  Evening prayers had been
concluded, and Albert Clegg was setting the markers in the Bible for
to-morrow morning’s exercises. Suddenly he looked up, and spoke:

"Fred!"

"Yes, Albert?"

"When you return to London I shall be obliged to you if you will make
inquiries about my daughter."

Uncle Fred sat up—his back perfectly straight for the first time for
many years. Mrs. Clegg’s knitting dropped from her fingers.  No one else
was present.  Only children remained at Netherby, and they had gone to
bed.

"I have been thinking matters over," announced Albert, in measured
tones.  "I try to be a just man in all my dealings.  It is one year
to-day since the news came to me that my daughter had taken to—her
present ways.  By this time her punishment has possibly begun.  It is
not my intention to intervene between her and her Maker; but I have
decided that there can be no harm in taking steps to ascertain what has
become of her."

Mrs. Clegg caught her breath.  Uncle Fred, utterly dazed, wagged his
beard weakly.

"That’s very handsome of you, Albert," he said respectfully.

"Handsomeness has nothing to do with it!" snapped Albert, among whose
rare and austere amusements none was more prized than that of keeping
his younger brother in his place.  "I am simply doing what I consider to
be right and just.  Now, when you return to London I want you to
institute inquiries as to where my daughter is to be found.  If you are
successful, I wish you to visit her.  I should not like to think that
she was actually destitute.  Of course, she can never return here, but I
can see that she is provided for."

There was silence.  Then Uncle Fred inquired, after the fashion of all
feeble folk:

"How should I set about finding her?  London is a big place.  I suppose
the police—"

"I will not have the police brought into the matter until absolutely
necessary," thundered Albert.  "You must search the theatres!"

It was a magnificent suggestion, but too daring for Albert’s
audience—certainly for Uncle Fred.

"I have never been inside a theatre in my life," he objected.

"Neither have I.  But you need not go inside. Enquire at the door
whether my daughter is employed there.  Demand to see the manager!"

"Do you think he will tell me?"

"Threaten him with the law if he won’t. These fellows are usually under
police observation, in any case.  They won’t dare to fight."

"Perhaps a word with the stage-door keeper—" suggested Mrs. Clegg
timidly.

"There’s no need for Fred to get mixed up with the dissolute crowd that
hangs round stage-doors," was the stern reply.  "He’ll go in by the
front!"

Uncle Fred, flattered on the whole at being still regarded as a
potential profligate, hastened to associate himself with this sentiment.
But at heart he felt a little ashamed.  There were elements of the
dare-devil about Uncle Fred.  Still, he reflected, he could take his own
line of action when he got back to London.  He propounded another
conundrum.

"Supposing she isn’t in one of the theatres—what then?  Would it be any
good trying the churches?  She may be attending some place of worship
regularly."

"If she is, it is bound to be Church of England; and I don’t intend to
be beholden to that body for _any_ help!" replied Albert firmly.  "You
might try the Salvation Army.  Their rescue work brings them in contact
with every walk of life—the West End restaurants and clubs, and haunts
of that kind."

The implied spectacle of Uncle Fred, assisted by a contingent of
Hallelujah Lasses, raiding the Athenæum or The Popular Café, for a lost
niece was not without its humour; but the paths of humour and
righteousness converge too seldom, to their mutual detriment.

"When you find her," concluded Albert, "ascertain quietly what her
circumstances are, and report to me.  I will then decide what it is best
for me to do."

Uncle Fred, duly uplifted, wagged his head with increased solemnity.

"I must say, Albert," he announced, "even though it angers you, that you
are acting in a very generous manner."

"Yes, father," added Mrs. Clegg wistfully.

In a watery way, her heart yearned over her daughter.

"Nothing of the kind!" said Clegg.  "I am merely acting as my conscience
directs me.  These are demoralising times for the best of us"—perhaps
Albert’s excess profits were pricking him—"and we must make certain
allowances.  Of course, having acted the way she has, after her
Christian upbringing, she can never expect forgiveness.  But—well, I
shall wait until I hear from you, Fred."




                             *CHAPTER XIV*

                             *TWO SPARROWS*


                                  *I*


Marjorie was one of those who were "able to proceed to their own homes
after receiving surgical aid."  Others were not so fortunate.  The
Mouldy Old Copper—badly wounded by splinters of glass, and excoriating
the entire Teutonic race with a failing tongue but unabated spirit—was
borne off to St. Thomas’s Hospital, followed by others.  The canteen had
been moderately full at the time, and more than one soldier home on
leave had had his leave indefinitely prolonged by the visitation.
Providentially, no one was killed; the bomb had fallen just too far down
the street.

The raid took place on a Sunday evening, during Marjorie’s one period of
night duty in the week.  (In this way, she gave herself one clear
weekday for fresh air and exercise.)  They kept her at the hospital
until she had breakfasted, then dispatched her homeward, with
instructions to return daily as an out-patient until further notice.

She walked across Westminster Bridge in the morning sunshine, feeling
badly shaken, but not a little proud.  Few of us ever outgrow a childish
thrill at finding our arm in a sling.  Not only was Marjorie’s arm in a
sling, but her right shoulder was bandaged.  ("Just missed your carotid
artery, my dear," had been the comment of the elderly house surgeon.)
She felt gloriously conspicuous.  A ’bus-load of convalescent soldiers
in hospital blue recognised her as one of the elect, and inquired
affectionately whether she had been out in a trench raid.  She waved her
sound arm in cordial acknowledgment of the pleasantry. Roy would be
interested to hear about this.  On second thoughts, no.  Roy never told
her when he had had an escape; she must maintain Roy’s standard of
reticence.

She walked jauntily into the flat, and sat down, a little suddenly, upon
the feet of Miss Elizabeth Lyle, who, as already noted, was usually
insensible until about eleven a.m.  Liss rolled over with a resigned
sigh, poked her _nez retroussé_ out from under the sheet, and remarked
meekly:

"All right!  Give me just five minutes more, and I promise—My goodness
gracious, Marjie, what _have_ you been doing to yourself?"

Marjorie described the raid.  She told the tale as lightly as she could,
with humorous touches here and there; for she had seen human blood flow
freely, and was feverishly conscious of a desire to get the picture out
of her mind. Gradually the narrative became more frivolous, the touches
more and more humorous.  Finally, the narratress grew so amused with the
recollection of her own experiences that she threw her head back and
laughed loud and long.

Liss slipped hurriedly out of bed, put both arms round her uproarious
friend, and laid her by main force in the place which she had just
vacated.

"You stay there, dearie," she said.  "They ought never to have let you
out."

"The hospital was so full!" Marjorie was shivering all over now, and
battling with an inclination to tears.  "They said that they were very
sorry—_very_ sorry—very sorry indeed—but—"

"That’s all right!" said little Liss soothingly, covering her up, and
patting her undamaged arm.  "I’ll make you a good, strong cup of tea,
and then you will have a nice sleep, and you’ll wake up as right as
ninepence!  I’ll slip round to the theatre and tell them they needn’t
expect to see you again for a week or two.  The show is going to close
soon, anyhow."

"I don’t care if it does!" murmured Marjorie, her head on Liss’s pillow.
She did not even trouble to cross the room to her own bed.  "I have
learnt one thing in the last year, and that is that I am not cut out for
the stage.  It bores me. I was meant to stay at home, and look after
little people like you—and Roy!  _That’s_ what I—"

She settled down like a tired child, and fell sound asleep.  Liss
snatched some apparel from a chair, padded out of the room in her bare
feet, and closed a door gently for about the first time in her life.



                                  *II*


Marjorie woke up in the afternoon—herself again, but stiff and bruised.
She rose, and entered the sitting-room.  Liss was lying on the sofa,
reading the _Daily Mirror_ and smoking a cigarette.  She sprang up on
seeing Marjorie, and flew to her, stopping just in time.

"Sorry, duckie!" she said.  "I must remember that arm of yours.  Are you
feeling all right again?"

"Splendid!" said Marjorie.  "What time is it?"

"About four."

"Let us have some tea then, and I’ll go round to the hospital and get my
arm dressed again. Hallo, it’s raining!"

"Yes; it has been pouring ever since eleven o’clock this morning," said
Liss; and coughed.

Marjorie turned upon her sharply.  Liss was one of those persons to whom
coughing is a forbidden luxury.

"Liss," she cried, "you’re soaking!  Every rag you have on is sticking
to you!  What’s the matter?"  She began to fumble at the back of the
child’s blouse.  "Here, undress yourself!  I have only one hand."

"I got a bit wet when I went out to the theatre," said Liss airily.

"But why on earth didn’t you—"  Marjorie glanced towards the bedroom
door, and stopped abruptly.  She understood.  "I see," she said, "you
didn’t want—?  Was that it?  How long have you been like this?"

"Oh, not long," Liss assured her; and coughed again.



                                 *III*


Marjorie, returning from her alternative role of out-patient to resume
that of head nurse, walked into the flat, and sat down heavily on Liss.

"How are you feeling this morning, Baby?" she inquired.

"Top-hole!" replied the invalid.

Three weeks had passed.  Liss was now convalescent; but congestion of
the lungs is not a malady to be taken lightly, especially by little
wraiths with weak chests.  Marjorie herself had nearly shaken off the
shock-effect of the raid. Her arm was still lightly bandaged.

"It’s a lovely day," she said.  "I will take you for a bus ride this
afternoon, if you’re good. Meanwhile, I want to have a pow-wow with
you."  Marjorie had picked up this expression from Roy, and was rather
proud of it.

"What about?"

"Well—have you any money?"

"I thought there’d be a catch about it," said Liss, reaching out to the
little table beside her bed for the bag in which the young woman of
to-day is reputed to keep everything but the kitchen stove.  "Let me
see!" she said.  She laid out on the counterpane a cigarette-case
bearing a regimental crest, a match-case bearing another, entirely
different, a long cigarette-holder, a powder-puff box, a lip-stick, and
a diminutive handkerchief.  "Now we’re getting down to business!" she
announced encouragingly. "Here’s a shilling—a threepenny bit—and four
pennies.  Wait a minute!  Here’s a crumpled up thing here that might be
a Bradbury. No, it’s a note from Reggie.  I suppose I oughtn’t to keep
that now!"

Liss tore up the _billet-doux_ with a sentimental sigh.  It may be noted
in passing that her engagement to Master Leonard had terminated some
months previously by mutual and violent consent.  A subsequent contract
of eternal fidelity to a young gentleman in the Royal Flying Corps—one
Reginald Bensham—had recently been dissolved, by unanimous vote.  At
present Miss Lyle’s affections were disengaged.

"One and sevenpence!" she announced. "You can search me for more!"

"That’s rather a blow," said Marjorie.

"Are we running short?" asked Liss.  "Of course we must be, both having
been out of a job for three weeks.  But I thought—"

"So did I," replied Marjorie.  "I thought we had a nest-egg in the bank
at my home in Scotland.  I haven’t touched it for a year, because I
wanted it to accumulate for a rainy day.  On Monday I came to the
conclusion that our present days were rainy enough—there’s the doctor’s
bill, for one thing—so I wrote to Mr. Gillespie, the manager, and asked
what my balance was. I got his answer this morning."

"I hate to ask—but what is the balance?"

Marjorie smiled dismally.

"That’s just it!  There isn’t any balance at all!  Just a few odd
shillings.  My father seems to have cut off my allowance about a year
ago. I wonder why?  At least, if he was going to do it at all I wonder
why he didn’t do it in the very beginning.  However, we won’t worry
about that.  The situation is, that you have one and sevenpence, and I
have about two pounds ten."

"Two pounds ten, and one and sevenpence—that’s about two pounds
fifteen," announced Liss, after a brief calculation.  "We can live for
weeks on that.  Before it’s gone we shall be back in a job again."

"I shan’t let you take a job again for a long time, my dear," said
Marjorie.  "They won’t have much use for me, either; I can’t lift my arm
above my shoulder at present.  How could I hold up the Torch of Liberty
in the last act?"

"We’ll rub along," announced the small optimist in the bed.  "If the
worst came to the worst, I could always get engaged again.  There’s a
perfectly sweet boy in the Tanks—"

But Marjorie’s hand was over Liss’s mouth. "Baby, remember you don’t get
engaged again without my permission!"

"All right!" mumbled Liss.  "Have it your own way!  But what about your
Roy?  Can’t you raise a small subscription out of him?  That would be
quite O.K., wouldn’t it?  You’re going to marry—"  Suddenly Liss sat up
in bed, for she had caught sight of Marjorie’s face.  "Why, what’s the
matter, dear?" she asked.

"I haven’t heard a word from him for five weeks," said Marjorie in a low
voice.  "I’m most awfully unhappy, Liss."

Liss forgot all about herself at once, and put both arms round her
protector.

"Think what a lot of letters must be lying waiting for you somewhere,"
she said.  "You’ll get a whole bunch one morning.  Now I’m going to get
up, and we’ll go on that bus ride."

They lunched frugally at an A.B.C. shop, and having boarded a Number
Nine bus sped westward along Piccadilly.  A communicative man with a
broken nose, wearing the silver badge of a discharged soldier, leaned
over their shoulders from the seat behind them.

"Sir Dougliss ’as done it again, ladies!" he announced importantly,
thrusting an evening paper before them.  "Look!  _Fifteen-mile
front—twelve villages—five thousand prisoners_! That’s the stuff to give
’em!"

The girls read the report eagerly.  It described the opening British
attack of the Third Battle of Ypres.  (In the first two, the attack had
come from the other side.)  Woods and villages, long familiar in daily
bulletins as German strongholds, were at last in British
hands—Hollebeke, Sanctuary Wood, Saint Julien, Hooge—and the advance was
still continuing.  Marjorie’s heart quickened—then faltered.  Great
victories mean big casualties—and she did not even know where Roy was.
When last heard of she had gathered that he was in a rest-area somewhere
behind Amiens.  But that had been five weeks ago.

"Do you know that district?" Liss was asking.

"Know it?  I should think I did, miss—like the back of me ’and!  I
copped a sweet one there in ’fifteen—near Cambray."

"But Cambrai is not in the Salient," observed Marjorie.

The communicative man conceded the point immediately.

"Neither it is, miss—not in that _Salient_.  My error!  They rushed us
up and down that Western Front so fast, no wonder a feller gets mixed! I
was hit in both places, though.  Well, ’ere we are in good old
’Ammersmiff.  This is where I ’ops off.  Good-day, ladies!  Keep the
paper, and welcome."

"It’s big news, isn’t it?" said Liss, continuing to skim through the
heavily leaded paragraph.

"I wonder why that man thought Cambrai was in the Salient," remarked
Marjorie.

"Swank, I expect," said Liss.  "Probably he hasn’t been out at all—_or_
wounded!"

"But he was wearing a silver badge," objected Marjorie, to whom all
military geese were swans.

"Perhaps he pinched it," suggested Miss Lyle, who harboured few
illusions concerning the male sex.

Her theory received entire corroboration a moment later.  On folding up
the newspaper before descending they discovered that Marjorie’s
vanity-bag, which was lying on the seat between them, had been neatly
slit open and its entire contents extracted.

The pair turned and regarded one another silently.  Liss was the first
to speak.

"That brings us down to one and sevenpence," she remarked.  "No wonder
he didn’t know where Cambrai was!"



                                  *IV*


"Luncheon is served," announced Liss.

"What is there?" asked Marjorie.

"The same as breakfast, with Willie and John thrown in.  Also the rest
of the day before yesterday’s loaf.  Pull up your chair, dear."

As breakfast had consisted of nothing at all, the prodigality of this
menu can be readily gauged.  Willie and John, by the way, were the last
two sardines in the tin.

"You take Willie," said Liss.  "Here’s your half of the bread.  Oh my,
but I’m hungry! Good-bye, John dear!  Marjorie, what are we going to do
next?"

Marjorie bent her brows judicially.

"Let me see," she said.  "I’ve tried the theatre, and they don’t begin
rehearsing the new piece for a fortnight.  It was no use trying the
canteen, because it isn’t there any more—at least, nothing worth
considering.  And as it happens, I don’t know anyone else in any other
canteen."

"We haven’t got an account at any shop," continued Liss, "because we’ve
always been to the cheap cash places.  I don’t know a living soul in
London, except my family; and if I go back to Finchley I know I’ll jolly
well have to stay there for the duration."

"And I," supplemented Marjorie, "know no one except Uncle Fred, in
Dulwich.  And I’d rather die than ask _him_ for help!"

"No one at all?" exclaimed Liss.  "Do you and I mean to sit here and
tell each other that we know no one in London, except the people at the
theatre, and the people at your canteen, and one or two dud relations?
Why not call on your old Lord Eskerley?"

Marjorie hesitated.

"I don’t think I can," she said.  "I have no particular claim—"

"No claim?  Didn’t you drive his silly old car in all weathers for
nearly a year?  Didn’t he tell you to come back and see him whenever you
had time?  It’s no use being modest when you’re starving.  If you don’t
go and see him, I shall."

"Then I may as well tell you, dear," announced Marjorie, "that I have
been already."

"Why didn’t you say so before?"

"I didn’t want to disappoint you."

"Why?  Were you chucked out?"

"No.  He’s away in Paris, on an indefinite mission.  The butler was very
nice about it, but he had no information as to when his lordship would
be back.  I hadn’t been entirely forgotten, though.  There was a message
for me.  It had been lying there for weeks."

"What did it say?"

"It was just a scribbled note in an envelope with my motor licence,
which I had left behind in the garage."  Marjorie crossed the room to
her little bureau.  "Here it is!  It says:



_My dear late lamented Habakkuk,—I enclose your licence, which you have
inadvertently left on my premises.  No doubt you will need it again some
day._

_With kind regards,_
       _Yours sincerely—_


There’s a postscript," she added:


_Apropos of motor licences, let me offer you a piece of advice.  Always
keep an adequate sum—say a pound or so—folded up and tucked away between
the covers of the licence itself.  This expedient, when you get held up
in a police-trap, and the minion of the law examines your credentials,
may obviate a public appearance before the local Beaks.  Verb, sap.!
Very useful.  Don’t say I told you._


Marjorie laid down this characteristic effusion, and laughed.

"I don’t think we are likely to tie up any capital in that way at
present!" she said, finishing the last crumb of her bread.  "We are down
to fourpence now.  We had better keep that for to-morrow, and go without
supper to-night.  No, we’ll spend threepence on biscuits, and have a
biscuit apiece at bed-time!"

"By golly, we do go it, don’t we!"  Liss looked round the room hungrily.
"Isn’t there _anything_ left that we can pop?"

"Nothing, I’m afraid.  My jewellery is all at Netherby.  I have my
engagement-ring, of course—"

"That stays!" announced Liss firmly.  "It was lucky," she went on with
more cheerfulness, "that my little Leonard did not want his back! Not
that we got much for it; I always _said_ he bought it at a stationer’s!
Now, if it had only been the one Reggie gave me, that would have been a
different story; his was a beauty.  But the little beast practically
grabbed it back from me.  Marjie, I _really_ think I’d better get
engaged again.  I could wire Toby, at—"

"You will do no such thing!" said Marjorie. "Besides, you can’t send a
wire for fourpence."

"I suppose," continued Liss (whose motto in life was "Anything Once!")
"it wouldn’t do to go and sit about in a restaurant somewhere, and get
taken out to dinner by an Australian, or somebody?  All right, I was
only joking!  Well, we must just hang on till Saturday; then there will
be lots of our nice boy friends in town for the week-end, and we can
make up for lost time. Meanwhile, let’s go round and see if we can’t get
a job directing envelopes, or something.  Carry on, partner!"



                                  *V*


Towards evening our two hungry sparrows forgathered again, footsore and
faint, but still smiling.  Liss, who ought by rights to have been in bed
consuming chicken-broth, was as white as wax.

"What luck?" she enquired.

"Nothing doing!" sighed Marjorie.  "They will take me on at an office in
Holborn as soon as my arm is well enough to write, but they wouldn’t
give me an advance of pay.  They just told me to report at nine o’clock
on Monday."

"And to-day’s Thursday!  Thank them for nothing!"

"Did you get anything?" asked Marjorie.

"No—except that I went round to the theatre again, and they are putting
on the new show a little sooner.  There’s a call for rehearsal on
Saturday.  That doesn’t mean any salary for a long while, but I ought to
be able to borrow a shilling or two from the girls.  Not that it will be
easy: they all need the money themselves these days, poor things!  I’m
cold.  Let’s have our biscuit and go to bed."

"I wonder what time it is?" said Marjorie, getting up from her chair.

"About eight, I should say."  (Watches had been hypothecated long
since.)  "It’s a bit early."

"_Qui dort, dine,_" quoted Marjorie.

"What does that mean?"

"It’s what Lord Eskerley used to say when he’d been to the House of
Lords.  Let’s go to bed; I’m comfortably tired.  London’s a big place to
get about in—when one hasn’t a bus fare!"

They shared Marjorie’s bed that night, for misery loves company.

"I say," suggested Liss suddenly, "couldn’t we go round and get a meal
from the Red Cross, or somebody?"

Marjorie, who was just dropping off to sleep, replied with great
firmness:

"The Red Cross can only assist people who have been wounded in action.
If they go beyond that, the Geneva Convention allows them to be fired
on; and then Roy might—No, we _can’t_ ask the Red Cross—unless we get
hit in another air-raid!" she added hopefully.

Having no more suggestions to offer, Liss dropped off to sleep in her
favourite attitude—with her head under the pillow.  Marjorie lay awake
for a long time, pondering many things in her heart—speculating mainly
as to whether she could last out until Baby’s flock of plutocratic
second lieutenants came to town on Saturday. She decided immediately
that she could, adding a mental rider condemning persons who, like
herself, worried about their own personal comforts when there was a war
on.  She also wondered, again and again, what had become of Roy.  She
wondered whether he were hungry too. Presumably not.  He had assured her
that the British Army on the Western Front were grossly overfed—in fact,
the inevitability with which the Army Service Corps got the rations up
and through bordered on the uncanny.  No, she need not worry about Roy’s
diet.  His safety was another matter.  Five weeks!  She dropped into a
troubled sleep.




                              *CHAPTER XV*

                             *THE EXPLORER*


Meanwhile, in a crowded street just off the Strand, in the fading light
of a July evening, an elderly gentleman with a goat’s beard, spectacles
on nose, was diligently examining the framed photographs exhibited
outside a very popular theatre.  His attention was particularly directed
to a large chorus group—an ensemble of attractive young women in
costumes attuned to the economical spirit of wartime.

Aware of a sudden interference with the not too abundant supply of
light, the elderly investigator turned round, a little guiltily, to find
that he was being assisted in his investigations by three hard-breathing
members of His Majesty’s Forces—an English Sapper, a Highlander, and a
Canadian of enormous bulk.

"And very nice, too!" observed the Sapper. "But Grandpa, not at your
time of life, you didn’t ought to—reelly!  ’Op it—there’s a good boy!"

"Awa’ hame!" added the Scot severely—"or I’ll tell on ye tae Grandmaw!"

Bitterly ashamed at having his motives thus misconstrued, Uncle Fred
hurried away.  His course now took him westward along the Strand, which
was packed from end to end with seekers after diversion—mostly soldiers
and their adherents.  He plodded steadily through the press, with the
air of a man who has a definite goal before him.  This was the second
week of his search for Marjorie, but he had considerably modified the
plan of action laid down for him by his elder brother.  His attempts to
call upon the theatrical managers of London, _seriatim_, for the purpose
of compelling them to disgorge his niece, had resulted in a sequence of
humiliating reverses at the hands of stunted but precocious children in
the outer office.  Uncle Fred had now evolved a plan of his own.  He had
observed that theatres were accustomed to stimulate the appetites of
their patrons by displaying samples of their wares—in the form of large
framed photographs—outside the entrance to the theatre. Good!  He would
resolve himself into an investigating committee of one, visit each
theatre in turn, and examine photographs until he had located Marjorie.
After that, the stronghold itself must be penetrated.  A somewhat
hazardous enterprise, he decided, but not without its romantic side.  As
already noted, there was the making of a man-about-town in Uncle Fred.

His self-imposed quest had been in progress for several evenings, and,
as yet, had borne no fruit.  Uncle Fred was not familiar with the life
of the West End—his knowledge of social life in London, like that of too
many Members of Parliament, was limited to the tea-room of the House of
Commons—and he had wasted a good deal of time hunting for photographs
outside establishments where chorus girls are not usually to be
found—Maskelyne and Cook’s, for instance, and the Polytechnic.  Also, it
required expert knowledge to distinguish the humble home of the Drama
from the palace of the Movie Queen.  But he was learning rapidly.
Assisted by the advertisements in the daily press and a District Railway
map of London, he had now charted out the whole of theatre-land, and had
very nearly completed a most methodical survey thereof.  He knew the
name of every revue and musical comedy in London, and could have given
points, in his familiarity with the features of professional beauty, to
the average Flying Corps subaltern.

He crossed Trafalgar Square, and headed for the Shaftesbury Avenue
district.  A hurried reference to the map, in a quiet corner behind the
National Gallery, confirmed him in his bearings.  Presently he found
himself before another theatre.  It was nearly nine o’clock; but, thanks
to the Summer Time Act, it was still daylight. The name of the current
attraction of the house, as stated on the bill-boards outside, was _Too
Many Girls_.  Diagonally across each bill-board was pasted a printed
slip which said, a little ambiguously, "_Last Week_."

"That’s a pity," mused Uncle Fred.  "But I can slip inside and find out
what they are doing this week and next.  There’s some sort of
entertainment going on: I can hear it."

Thrusting his beard well forward, Uncle Fred marched boldly into the
vestibule of the theatre. The framed photographs had been taken in for
the night, and were ranged round the wall on easels.  Uncle Fred set his
spectacles in position, and began his usual methodical tour of
inspection, at his regulation range of six inches.

A stout lady, confined in a gilded cage in one of the walls, engaged in
counting change, suspended operations to watch him.  She caught the eye
of the commissionnaire who stood at the swing-door leading to the
stalls, and coughed delicately.  Certainly Uncle Fred, in his
semi-ecclesiastical frock-coat and Heath Robinson tall hat, crouching
astride his umbrella in a strained endeavour to scrutinise the very
lowest row in a large photographic group of chorus girls, fairly invited
comment.

"Boys will be boys!" observed the commissionnaire, to no one in
particular; and the siren in the cage giggled.

Suddenly Uncle Fred came to a dead point opposite the very last
photograph in the last row. Feverishly reinforcing his spectacles with a
pair of eye-glasses, he made a confirmatory examination, and then rose
to an upright position—looking as Stanley may have looked when he found
Livingstone.  Then, for the first time, he became aware that he was not
alone.

"Naughty, naughty!" said a wheezy feminine voice.

"Haw, haw, haw!" roared the commissionnaire.

"I’m ashamed of you, little brighteyes!" declared the accusing angel in
the cage.

"Outside!" added the commissionnaire, recalled to a sense of duty by the
appearance at the swing-door of an authoritative-looking person in a
dinner jacket.

Uncle Fred, shamefully misunderstood and deeply wounded, hurried out.
In the street he hesitated.

"Those people might have given me some useful information," he
reflected.  "But I won’t go back now, to be insulted!  I think, after
all, it would be best to see the caretaker at the stage door.  I suppose
that will be somewhere at the back."

A voyage of circumnavigation brought him to the dingy portal which early
training and settled conviction had always represented to him as giving
direct access to the Infernal Regions.  With a guilty thrill he crossed
the threshold, and found himself confronted by an unshaven man
slumbering in a glass box.  Uncle Fred coughed nervously. The man opened
his eyes, and pushed open a glass shutter.

"Well?" he enquired.

"I want to ask a favour," began Uncle Fred. But the man cut him short.

"What is it?  Temperance, or Christian Science?  You can’t put up no
notices on our call-board.  Management don’t allow it."

"I have reason to believe," pursued Uncle Fred, with feeble dignity,
"that a young woman is employed here—"

"We employ thirty-six of ’em," said the stage-door man.

"I have just seen her likeness—in a group—round there"—explained Uncle
Fred, waving his umbrella vaguely towards the front of the house.

"It very often starts that way," remarked the stage-door man.  "But why
not pay for a seat, like a little gentleman, and go in front and see the
gel?"

"She’s my niece," explained Uncle Fred.

"They always are," said the stage-door man. "Or else cousins!  Good
night, Tirpitz!"

He shut the little glass shutter in the investigator’s face, and
recomposed his features to slumber.  But Uncle Fred, though not a
dashing person, possessed some elements of the dogged persistence of the
Clegg family.  He rapped on the window-pane.  The stage-door man opened
it again.

"Now, you run away!" he said.  "’Op it! Sling yer ’ook, or I’ll set the
cat on you!"

"Is my niece here to-night?" asked Uncle Fred, employing the handle of
his umbrella as a lever of the third order.  "I am very anxious to have
a few words with her, on a domestic matter.  I see a notice outside,
saying that the present entertainment concluded last week.  But it has
occurred to me that it is still possible—"

The stage-door man slid from his stool, came out of his den, and laid a
heavy hand, not unkindly, on the orator’s shoulder.

"What you want to do, ole friend," he said, "is to ’ire the Albert ’All,
and make a night of it!  That’ll get it out of your system nicely.
Good-bye!"  He gently impelled his guest in the direction of the street.

"I want my niece’s address," gasped Uncle Fred, clinging like a limpet
to the door-post.

"Go along, you silly old sinner!" said the stage-door man, disengaging
him.  "I’m ashamed of you."

"I will pay you!" said Uncle Fred desperately.

The stage-door man relaxed at once.

"Now you’re _talking_!" he announced.

Five minutes later, after a sordid commercial wrangle, Uncle Fred
emerged from the stage door with a slip of paper in his hand.  He walked
straight into the arms of three members of His Majesty’s Forces.  They
recognised him, and drew back in affected horror.

"What, again?" cried the Canadian.  "My God, he’s a Mormon!  Come along,
boys!"




                             *CHAPTER XVI*

                          *THE GREAT PRETEND*


"And the sweet?" enquired Marjorie, pencil poised.

"_Méringues!_" said Liss firmly.

"Well, I would say chocolate _soufflé_ every time—with whipped cream, of
course!" replied Marjorie.  "But have it your own way.  Now for the
savoury!"

"We don’t want a savoury," said Liss.

"Remember," Marjorie reminded her, "that there will be gentlemen
present."

"I was forgetting the gentlemen.  Well—what?"

"_My_ gentleman friend," said Marjorie, "is very fond of
angels-on-horseback."

"All right!  You can put them down if you like; only don’t ask me to eat
them: I expect I shall be stodged by that time, anyhow.  Oh Marjie, if
only it were true!"  Liss hugged her hungry little self, longingly.

"There, that’s the complete _menu_," said Marjorie.  She laid down her
pencil, took up the writing pad, and began to read:

"_Oysters!_"  She took up her pencil again. "By the way, we can’t have
oysters."

"Why not?"

"You can only have oysters when there’s an R in the month."

"Well, it’s August!" said Liss.  "And as they aren’t going to be there
anyhow, they may as well stay in!"

"No," said Marjorie.  "This dinner is going to be things we would order
here and now—just supposing we could.  So don’t let us spoil it by
putting down impossible things."

Liss at once recognised the logical consistency of this view.

"All right!" she said.  "No oysters!  _Hors d’oeuvres_, instead.  Then
nice hot soup!"

"Yes—_Potage à la reine_."

"It sounds a bit watery; but I don’t mind, so long as it’s hot.  Oh, how
_lovely_ it would be!"

"_Sole meunière_.  That’s Roy’s favourite."

"Oh—Roy’s to be there?  That’s your pretend, is it?"

Marjorie nodded over her hypothetical menu.

"That’s a good idea.  Who shall I pretend my man is?  Toby?"

"All right."

"In that case, we shall want more than one bottle of champagne.  You
know what that child is!  But never mind that just now!  Read out some
more food."

"_Duckling—_"

"And green peas, of course?"

"Of course!"

"What then?"

"That brings us to the _méringues_."

"Good!  That should be enough.  We will have coffee and _crème de
menthe_ afterwards, of course?"

"We will have cognac as well.  You see, Roy—Oh, Liss!"  For a moment
Marjorie’s fortitude forsook her.  Her face sank into her friend’s
fluffy hair.

"Liss, dear," she murmured, "if _only_ I knew!"

"It’s Friday afternoon now," said Liss cheerfully. "We’ll get lots to
eat to-morrow, when the boys come up to town."

"I wasn’t thinking of food," said Marjorie—"just then!"

"Well, I was!  Oh, my _dear_, I’m hungry!  I didn’t know it was possible
to be so hungry. What time is it?"

"About five, I think."

"Well, let’s have a nice drink of water, and eat a couple of biscuits,
and go to bed.  It’s the best way."

"Very well," said Marjorie listlessly.  She was the more exhausted of
the two; for Liss was of the ethereal type that seems to thrive on a
diet of next-to-nothing.  Neither girl had touched food, except a few
biscuits, since the previous evening.  This afternoon they had
endeavoured to maintain _morale_ by indulging in one of the oldest
pastimes known to children of the world—the game of "Let’s
pretend!"—sturdily endeavouring to hold a fire in their hands by
thinking on the frosty Caucasus.

Suddenly there came a tapping on the outer door.  Both girls started up.

"Who on earth can that be?" said Marjorie, hurrying automatically to the
mirror above the mantelpiece.

"I wonder if it is anybody with any money!" remarked Liss, hastily
removing herself from the couch, where she had been stifling the pangs
of hunger by lying on her front.

"Go and see!" commanded Marjorie, busy at the mirror.

Liss went out into the little vestibule, and reappeared, followed by a
visitor.  Her face was a study.

"This gentleman wants to see you, dear," she said solemnly.  "I will
leave you together!"

Marjorie turned hastily round.

"No—stay!" she commanded.  "How do you do, Uncle Fred?"

"I am very well, thank you," said Uncle Fred in a low voice.
Apprehension was written upon his features, and his large, weak mouth
trembled. This adventure was trying him high.  To penetrate into the
boudoir of an actress—two actresses, apparently—was practically
equivalent to visiting a theatre dressing-room, which he knew to be the
last station before perdition.

Marjorie shook hands.

"Sit down," she said.  "I am afraid we are not quite dressed for
callers.  Do you mind?"

Uncle Fred shook his head feebly, guiltily conscious that he did not
mind enough.  His niece was dressed in a very simple blue serge frock,
with touches of scarlet at her waist and wrists.  She was thinner and
paler than when he had last seen her.  Late suppers, of course.  She had
done something theatrical but undeniably becoming to her hair, which,
instead of being discreetly piled upon her head, framed her face in a
sort of aureole.  In order to shake hands with him she had deposited
upon the mantelpiece, without any attempt at concealment, a small
powder-puff, with which she had obviously been tampering with that
infallible symbol of respectability, a shiny nose.  She wore very thin
black silk stockings and patent leather shoes, with dangerously high
heels.  One of the shoes had a hole in the sole, but Marjorie kept that
sole glued to the floor throughout the interview.  The silk stockings
had lisle tops, but naturally Uncle Fred did not know this.  Blinking
feebly, he turned his attention to Marjorie’s companion.  In the
obscurity of the vestibule he had not particularly noticed her.  He did
so now.  His pale blue eyes bulged.

Before him he beheld a small, fluffy creature in a flimsy garment which
she would have called a _negligée_, but which to Uncle Fred looked
suspiciously like a nightgown.  On her feet were padded pink satin
bedroom slippers.  Her lips were bright red, and were directing a
dazzling smile upon him.  There were dark hollows under her large grey
eyes.  Uncle Fred resolutely averted his gaze, and turned again to his
niece.

"This is Miss Lyle," announced Marjorie. "We share the flat.  Liss,
dear, this is my uncle, Mr. Clegg.  Well, Uncle Fred, how are you? I’m
sorry we can’t offer you tea, but we—we have practically all our meals
at a restaurant. Don’t we, Liss?"

"We simply live there!" affirmed Liss.

"Will you have a cigarette?" continued Marjorie, offering a box.  "Don’t
mind about that being the last one!  There are plenty more."

"I do not smoke," replied Uncle Fred coldly.

"Throw it to me, Marjorie!" chirped the vision in the _negligée_.  A
moment later, genuinely oblivious of the sensation she was causing, Liss
was lying back in the arm-chair, blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling.

Marjorie proceeded to make conversation.

"Have you been at Netherby lately?" she asked.  "I haven’t heard a word
from anybody there since I left.  I wrote to father and mother, but
neither of them answered, so I gave it up.  I was sorry, all the same.
I hear from Joe, of course.  Have they conscripted Amos yet?  How are
the children?"

This was neither the tone nor the temper that Uncle Fred had anticipated
from the prodigal. He had expected either flamboyant defiance or
broken-hearted contrition—most probably the latter.  This resolute,
cheery, ladylike—yes, he had to admit it, ladylike—bonhomie was making
his mission more difficult than he had anticipated. He cleared his
throat.

"I was at Netherby during July," he began. "Your father and mother are
well, though borne down with sorrow, over—over—"

"Over what?"

Uncle Fred, who had meant to improve the occasion, baulked at his first
fence.

"Over this wicked war," he substituted.

"Well, they haven’t much to worry about," said Marjorie composedly.
"Joe tells me that he’s in no particular danger, except from odd
long-range shells.  Amos—I suppose he has kept out of it all right?"

"Your brother is in Glasgow," said Uncle Fred, "doing civilian war work
of national importance."

"I thought so," said Marjorie.  "Trust Amos!"

"Your father," continued Uncle Fred, "commissioned me to ascertain your
whereabouts in London—"

"How _did_ you find us, by the way?" asked Marjorie.  "It was rather
clever of you."

"I set an investigation on foot," replied Uncle Fred with a not very
successful assumption of grandeur.

"Quite a little Sherlock Holmes!" remarked an approving voice.

Despite himself, Uncle Fred looked round. The small siren in the
arm-chair was regarding him with obvious interest.  Doubtless she was
taking his moral measure, with a view to ultimate conquest.  As a matter
of fact, Liss was wondering whether it would be feasible to borrow five
shillings from him.

"How _did_ you set about it?" Marjorie continued.

"I decided not to question the police.  We were anxious to have as
little scandal as possible—"

Marjorie rose with some deliberation, and took her stand upon the
hearthrug exactly opposite her diplomatic relative.

"What did you do?" she asked.

"I began by instituting inquiries among the London theatrical managers."

"Then you knew I was working on the stage?"

"Yes.  Your mother recognised your likeness in some periodical."

Marjorie nodded her head.

"So that was why father stopped my allowance!" she said.  "I was
wondering.  Well, go on.  Father has sent you to see me?  What for?"

Uncle Fred had carefully rehearsed the little address which he proposed
to deliver to his errant niece.  Marjorie’s point-blank query gave him
as good an opening as he appeared likely to get.

"Your father," he began, settling down to work, "is a just man—"

"Yes; I think you’re right there," agreed Marjorie.  "He tries to be,
anyhow; but he’s too ignorant and narrow to succeed.  That was why I
left home.  Go on!"

"Your father," reiterated Uncle Fred, who was of that brand of orator
which finds it easier, when interrupted, to go right back to the
beginning, "is a just man—"

"Yes; I know.  You said that before," said Marjorie.

"_No Encores, by Request!_" added Liss.

"Your father suggested that when I returned to London I should institute
inquiries as to your whereabouts.  He was anxious to know if you had
been spared during these years, and—"

"That was very kind of him," said Marjorie. "No!"—as Uncle Fred took
another breath—"don’t go back to the beginning again!  ’If I had been
spared’—yes?"

"And, if so, what your circumstances were."

"Why?"

"Your father said he would not like to feel that you were in actual
destitution, and—"

"Oh!  _And?_"

"I was to tell him if you were."

"And if I were?"

"He did not say; but he practically gave me to understand that if you
would send him your assurance that you were truly and humbly repentant,
and would endeavour in future, by Divine Grace, to raise yourself from
your present condition"—Uncle Fred was settling comfortably down now to
his pulpit manner—"he was prepared on his part, to temper justice with
mercy.  You would be provided for.  Of course, you would never be
permitted to return home. There are the children to think of—"

Next moment, Uncle Fred had the surprise of his blameless and dreary
existence.  A small figure in a tempestuous _negligée_ whirled into his
field of vision, and Liss—white-faced, stammering, passionate—stood over
him.

"What do you mean?" she screamed.  "You silly old blear-eyed devil, what
do you mean by it?  What do you mean by crowding into this flat where
you weren’t invited, and insulting my Marjie?  How _dare_ you!  Get out
before we throw you out—do you hear?  You psalm-singing old nanny-goat,
for two pins I’d pull your rotten little beard off!"  She flew to
Marjorie, and threw an arm round her shoulders.  "And to think that real
men are dying in this war every minute—and the finest women in the world
killing themselves with overwork—just to keep insects like you _alive_!
Why, I—_Oh!_"  She choked.

Marjorie restored her small, hysterical, half-famished champion to the
arm-chair.

"That’s all right, Baby," she said placidly. "He means well, but he’s
had the same upbringing as father—poor old man!  Sit down!  Sit down
too, Uncle Fred!"  (The dazed ambassador was groping for the door.)  "I
want to talk to you."

The symposium resumed its session.  Uncle Fred was so benumbed by his
recent experience that when his late assailant deliberately renovated
the scarlet of her lips in his presence he made no protest at all.  How
quickly a man can become a _roué_, even at fifty-nine!

"You can tell father," announced Marjorie, "that you gave me his
message, and that I know him well enough to understand his point of
view. In a way, there’s something rather fine about it. I have seen
enough of life in the last year or two to know that this world would be
none the worse for a touch of good old-fashioned, Old Testament,
discipline.  Also, that many of my sex aren’t to be trusted with a
latch-key.  But you can remind him, from me, that I am his daughter—and
quite capable of taking care of myself!"  She sat down again.

"Now, I will tell you exactly what I have been doing during the last two
years.  Like every decent, able-bodied person in this land, I have been
doing what I could in the way of war work. I wasn’t able to do as much
as I wanted, because my education had been completely neglected; also,
as most war work is unpaid, I had to work for my living at the same
time.  That was why I went on the stage.  By working at night I had my
days free to serve in a canteen.  I have been in the canteen for more
than a year now.  I am not working at present, because I had a slight
accident to my arm.  I have also driven a motor-car, for a cabinet
minister, liberating a man for active service.  That was why I bobbed my
hair, so that I could put my service-cap on and off my head easily.
Most of us have done it; no one has time to waste over doing hair these
days.  We girl chauffeurs and munition makers have set quite a fashion.
But, of course, you aren’t interested in fashions.  Besides, bobbed hair
doesn’t really prove anything.  What you want is some direct evidence of
what I have been doing."  She thought for a moment.  "I’ll tell you
what—I’ll show you my motor-driver’s licence.  I know I put it away
somewhere."

She crossed to the bureau, and took the licence out of a drawer.

"Here it is," she said, unfolding it.  "You will notice it hasn’t been
renewed.  That was because—"

Her voice died away.  Liss glanced up, saw that her friend had turned
white, and was swaying on her feet.  She ran impulsively to her aid; but
in a moment Marjorie had recovered herself, walked across to her
flinching relative, and proffered the licence.

"There—you see!" she said.  "I drove a car during all that time.  It was
war work, all right."

Uncle Fred examined the document mechanically, and handed it back.

"That seems quite in order," he muttered.

"Father is a business man, I know," continued Marjorie, with a cheery
smile; "and I know business men like to see evidence in black and white.
You can keep that licence, if you like, and send it to him from me, as a
certificate of character, and tell him that I am very well—_and_
busy—_and_ happy—_and_ respectable—and don’t require providing for in
any way whatever.  And you can give my love to mother."

Uncle Fred rose to his feet, and held out his hand hesitatingly.  Down
in his puny soul he dimly felt himself in the presence of something
rather unusually big.

"I will tell your father I have seen you," he said, "and what you have
told me.  And I’m—I’m sorry, if—"

Marjorie cut him short.

"That’s all right!" she said, with great cheerfulness.  "It was a
difficult mission for you, I know, and I’m not surprised you made a mess
of it.  Now," she added briskly, "I feel terribly inhospitable at not
having given you any tea. Liss and I are just going out to dinner.
It’s—it’s—rather a special occasion with us, and we are going to have an
extra good one.  Won’t you join us?"

She crossed to the bureau again, and picked up the writing-pad.

"We are going," she announced, resolutely avoiding the bulging eyes of
Miss Elizabeth Lyle, "to have _Potage à la reine, Sole meunière,
Duckling, Méringues—_"

But Uncle Fred was down and out.

"I can’t accept," he replied, almost piteously. "I must be off to
Dulwich.  But thank you kindly!"  He moved to the door.  "I will write
to your father.  Good-bye, my girl!"  He nodded nervously towards Liss.
"Good-evening, all!"

Next moment the vestibule door had clicked behind him, and the girls
were alone.

Liss threw her arms round Marjorie’s neck.

"O magnificent, wonderful angel!  How you stood up to that silly old
Nosey Parker!  How you put him in his place!  How you bluffed him!  But,
darling, what a risk!  Supposing he had accepted—what then?"

"What then?"  Marjorie laughed unsteadily. "We would have taken him
round the corner to Savroni’s, and _given_ him his dinner—every bit of
it—that’s all!"

Liss looked timidly up into her idol’s face.

"Dearest," she enquired apprehensively, "are you feeling _funny_, at
all?  I don’t like the way your fist is clenched.  Relax!"

"I’m not feeling funny," Marjorie assured her, relaxing the fist in
question.  "Unless it’s funny to be rich!" She held out her hand.
"Look! Look what I found inside the pocket of my motor licence!  I might
have guessed, after that message.  Dear, kind old man!  I might have
guessed—bless him!"

In her upturned palm lay a neatly folded bank-note.

Liss’s eyes goggled.

"How much?" she whispered.

"We’ll see."  Marjorie unfolded the rustling treasure-trove.  "Ten
pounds!  Now wasn’t I right not to put down oysters?  Oh, Baby, if only,
only, only we had the guests!"

But Fortune, once she veers round, seldom does things by halves.  There
came a knock on the outer door.

"Hallo!" cried Liss.  "Surely it’s not that old Nanny back again?"

It was not.  It was a soldier—or rather, an elderly civilian in uniform.
He saluted, with all the elaboration of the newly initiated.  Both girls
surveyed him in perplexity.  Then Liss screamed:

"It’s Uncle Ga-Ga!" and embraced him forthwith.

Uncle Ga-Ga it was.  With his hair dyed a new and awe-inspiring colour,
and an almost convincing set of false teeth, he did not look a day over
forty-five.  He held his old head proudly erect, and offered a hand to
each of the girls, with a gallant gesture.

"Yes, ladies," he said; "I have the great happiness to inform you that I
have this day been accepted as a member of His Majesty’s Forces. I wear
the uniform of King George the Fifth."  His right hand went to the
salute.  "The King—God bless him!  I have only just put it on, and I
came round here at once to show myself to you—my two kind friends and
unfailing supporters! There were some of my colleagues"—his mild eyes
flashed—"men who should have known better—who derided my pretensions—who
said that the King had no need of my services!  But not you, ladies!
You knew the King better than they did!  Now, behold me!  It is a common
triumph for us all!"

"And we are going to celebrate it!" announced Liss.  "You are coming
straight out to dinner with us—isn’t he, Marjorie?"

"Most certainly he is!" said Marjorie.

"We are going," proclaimed Liss, "to have _Potage à la reine; Sole
meunière—_"

Uncle Ga-Ga laid his hand upon his heart, and made a courtly bow.

"Ladies," he announced, "you overwhelm me! But before I accede to your
most hospitable invitation, pray read this: it may affect your immediate
plans.  I found it lying thrust under your outer door."

He proffered an orange-coloured envelope.  It was addressed to Marjorie.

Telegrams in war-time take tense priority over everything else.
Marjorie seized the envelope, ripped open the flap with one feverish
movement, took out the message, and carried it to the window to read.
Then, very deliberately, for the first and only time in her life, she
slid down upon the floor, with her head on the window-seat, in a dead
faint."

"Oh, God!" cried Liss, running to her—"it must be something about Roy!"

They carried her to the sofa, and laid her down. Her eyes were closed,
but began to flutter again almost immediately.

"The telegram—should we read it?  Would it be right?" asked Uncle Ga-Ga.

"Oh, yes!" said Liss: "I’d forgotten about it."  She turned back
Marjorie’s closed fingers, extracted the crumpled message, and smoothed
it out.  Then she gave a little sudden chuckling sob.

"Listen!" she said; and read the message aloud....

"Sent off from Folkestone," she added breathlessly, "at four-forty.
What time is it now?"

"About half-past six, I think."

"Then he will be here any minute!" cried Liss, in sudden panic.  "We
must get her to for him," she added, in the mysterious syntax of her
kind.  "Help me, Uncle!"

"A lovely face!" observed Uncle Ga-Ga, respectfully, as he assisted Liss
in administering to Marjorie what they both firmly believed to be First
Aid—"but pale, and thin!"  He sighed gently.  "It is rather beautiful to
think that people can still swoon for joy."

"Not joy," said Liss, panting—"starvation! But she’ll have her guest at
dinner, after all. (She’s coming to now.)  It’s been a great pretend!
(Darling, lean your head on me.)  She’ll be as right as rain to-morrow.
In fact, she’s jolly well got to be.  It’s her wedding day!"




                             *CHAPTER XVII*

                            *THE UNDEFEATED*


This morning I went to church, in a real church—the parish church of
Craigfoot.  After more than three years, I found myself once again in
the Baronrigg gallery.

Of late, I have become accustomed to performing my religious exercises
in the open air, in a boggy field of Flanders or Picardy, struggling, in
company with a choir of some hundreds of devout, mud-splashed "Jocks,"
armed to the teeth and insufficiently supplied with hymn-books, to
produce a respectable volume of psalmody; or listening resignedly, in an
east wind, to a sermon replete with apposite references to the
canker-wurrum and the pammer-wurrum, delivered with gusto by an untimely
young chaplain newly out from home.

I shared the Baronrigg pew with the Matron of the Eskerley Auxiliary
Military Hospital, and some half-dozen restive convalescents in hospital
blue.  It was January, and bitter cold, but no fire burned in old Neil
Carrick’s grate at the back of the gallery.  The coal ration—like the
thermometer—hovered near to zero in those days.

Of the rightful occupants of the pew there was no representative.  The
son of the house was commanding his company somewhere in the
neighbourhood of La Bassée: at least, that was where I had left him last
week.  The master—well, there I was no wiser than the rest.  All I knew
was what I had read in the letter which he had written me at the time of
his disappearance—a letter very similar in substance and temper to that
received by his son.

My eyes wandered over the familiar scene below.  Here, too, were
changes: even the immutable ritual of a Scottish parish church had been
affected by forty-one months of war.  Doctor Chirnside was still in
command.  He was preaching the sermon now—on a text from his beloved
Isaiah—more gaunt, more eagle-eyed, more uncompromising than ever.  The
parish, I knew, were of the opinion that "the auld man was failing."
Still, there he was, sticking to his post.

"The most practical way," he had declared recently to a tactfully
inquisitive Kirk Session, "to maintain national efficiency at a time of
abnormal national wastage is for those of us who are spared to increase
our output; to work longer hours—longer years, in my case—in order to
make good the loss of those who have been called from our midst.  So,
though I have laboured long in the vineyard; though I have lingered long
in the arena, and am now perhaps _dignus rude donari_, I shall remain at
my post until God giveth the Victory.  In other words, Gentlemen, you
may whistle for my resignation!"

Still, the influences of the time seemed to have affected the Doctor
like the rest of us.  He was more human, less Olympian.  The First
Prayer—in which, it may be remembered, the Doctor was accustomed to
commune with his Maker to the pointed exclusion of the congregation—was
now much shorter.  The Second Prayer—the Prayer of Intercession—was
considerably longer, and very moving to hear.  In that prayer, week by
week, the progress of the Great War was reviewed—reviewed from the
standpoint of an obscure but not altogether undutiful little parish in
the Lowlands of Scotland.  Not a boy from that parish, be he laird’s son
or herd laddie, fell in action on this front or that but the fact was
duly noted, with sorrowful pride and amazing tenderness, in the Prayer
of Intercession in the Parish Kirk of Craigfoot on the following
Sabbath.

There were many such events to record.  The Roll of Honour, fluttering
in the draughty porch outside, bore witness to that fact.  So did the
composition of the congregation.  Most of the men present were
forty-five years old and upwards.  Those below that age were mainly in
khaki.  But it was the women who told the most eloquent tale.  The three
tall daughters of Sir Alistair Graeme—The Three Grenadiers—still sat
side by side in the Burling pew, to all appearances unchanged except for
their V.A.D. uniforms. Yet I knew that each of those girls had been made
a wife and widow within three short years.  Mrs. Gillespie, the Bank
Manager’s wife, on the other hand, made no pretence of being the same
woman: her son Robert, the Divinity student, had died of dysentery in
Mesopotamia. Of the Misses Peabody, only the elder now sat in the pew.
The younger was dead—dead of overwork as a ward-maid in a Base Hospital.
None disputed her claim to be of the elect now.  Little Mrs. Menzies,
the wife of Lord Eskerley’s late factor, was changed too—but only in
name.  She had done her bit—by becoming the widow of a D.S.O. and
promptly marrying a C.M.G.

Looking further afield, I observed that old Couper and his wife were
almost crowded out of their pew by a string of grandchildren, billeted
upon Abbotrigg until such time as a newly-widowed daughter-in-law could
adjust her compasses again.  I missed the kindly vacant countenance of
my friend Jamie Leslie, our organ-blower, which had usually been
visible, on pre-war days, peering furtively round the red rep curtain
which screened the organ-bellows from view. His place was now occupied
by a bucolic young gentleman of thirteen.  Subsequent inquiry on my part
elicited the news that Jamie had at last achieved his heart’s desire and
been accepted for the Army, the authorities having very properly decided
that what was sauce for the Staff was sauce for the rank-and-file.

In a back pew under the gallery I noticed old Mrs. Rorison, accompanied
by her giant son, Jock, the Scots Guardsman—discharged, permanently
unfit, with a crippled foot.  I had met the pair in Main Street the day
before.

"That’s bad luck, Jock!" I had said, noting his crutches.

"It’s naething of the kind!" replied Jock’s mother, tartly.  (She
usually replied for Jock.)  "See him, sir!  Sax feet fower—and gets
himsel’ shot in the fit!  I doot he was standing on his head in they
trenches!" concluded the old lady bitterly.  "Trust him!"

Eric was sitting in the Buckholm pew, with his lady mother: I was to
lunch with them presently.  I surveyed my friend’s handsome profile, his
empty sleeve, and the medal ribbons on his uniform.  I thought of our
regiment—which I now commanded and which he himself had led.  I thought
of the day, eighteen months since, when we had carried him away
insensible, followed by what was left of our personnel, from that tight
corner opposite Beaumont Hamel. Eric was home now with a decoration and
a soft job—the idol and the oracle of the country-side. I had not been
decorated, or even mentioned in Dispatches, but I had, so far, preserved
a whole skin—which was far better—and been confirmed in my rank.  Though
lean and grizzled, I still felt fighting fit, and had no desire to
change places with any one.  I was staying at The Heughs—a sober
household in those days, for my brother Walter had lost his eldest boy
at Gallipoli.  Of the other two, John was helping to navigate one of His
Majesty’s Destroyers, while the youngest, Alan, my namesake and
particular crony, was consuming his impatient young soul—to his mother’s
private relief—at Sandhurst.

"_Finally, my brethren_"—began Doctor Chirnside; and I knew that we were
within five minutes of the end of the sermon.  The maimed men beside me
wriggled in relieved anticipation, then settled down again; and I
hastened to conclude my church inspection.

I glanced across to the Netherby pew.  Mr. and Mrs. Clegg were both
there, with the younger children.  The two grown-up sons were absent: I
remembered having heard vaguely that one of them had enlisted and that
the other had secured a "cushie" job somewhere.  The fair daughter was
nowhere to be seen.  I was sorry, because a thing of beauty is a joy for
ever—especially during a long sermon.  I wondered what had become of
her—and Master Roy’s infatuation. I had once or twice, during the early
days in France, made playful allusion to the lady in Roy’s presence, but
my pleasantries had not been well received, and had been discontinued.

I gave a final glance round the church.

"_Plus ça change_—!" I said to myself.

But I was a little too quick in my judgment.

"_They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall
mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary: they
shall walk, and not faint_.  May God sanctify to us this poor exposition
of His Word; and to Him alone be the glory and the praise!"

The last sentence, at least, was familiar enough. It had rounded off
every one of Doctor Chirnside’s sermons, to my certain knowledge, for
the last thirty-five years.  The congregation came to life: the
organ-bellows began to pump, almost automatically, for the last hymn.
The elders of the kirk fumbled under their seats for the
collection-bags.

We rose on a triumphant chord from the little organ, and sang the
hymn—stoutly enough, and with that prickly sensation at the back of the
nose which attacks undemonstrative people engaged in a slightly
emotional exercise; for the hymn was "Onward, Christian Soldiers"!  I
learned afterwards that it had been sung (alternately with the hymn For
Those at Sea), at the close of morning worship every single Sunday since
the regular casualty lists had started.  Then, in good Scottish fashion,
we remained standing for Doctor Chirnside’s patriarchal and impressive
Benediction.

"_May the Peace of God, which Passeth All Understanding..._"

His old voice died away; and I was on the point of stooping down to
grope for my glengarry, when I became conscious of a gradual stiffening
in the attitude of the congregation. The organ began to rumble again.
(I could see the young organ-blower working as if to crack every muscle
in his back.)  Then, suddenly, explosively, with every pedal and stop in
action, it crashed into "God Save the King"!

Instinctively I came to attention.  But though my head was immovable, I
fear I allowed my eyes to stray downward to the scene below.  Here was
an unexpected test of war spirit.

Our National Anthem is a curious canticle; you never know what it will
do with you.  It may cause you to feel merely ridiculous—as when an
orchestra of aliens in a restaurant drags you to your feet in the middle
of your soup.  Too often it elicits a purely perfunctory acknowledgment.
But there are occasions when the sound of it grips the very heart of
you; when you are conscious, deep down in your well-ordered British
soul, of a sudden, tremendous, irresistible wave of passionate loyalty
to the Sovereign who rules you and the thousand-year-old tradition for
which he stands.  Here was such an occasion.  Here, in this little
church, was our battle hymn being thundered forth, after more than three
years of battle, to a community who had been paying the maximum price
for their participation therein.  How would they take it?

My field of vision was naturally constricted, but without moving my head
I could command a fair view.  Eric Bethune, of course, was standing as
straight as a ramrod.  So was the elder Miss Peabody—also the three poor
Grenadiers. The wounded men beside me stiffened their twisted bodies
proudly: evidently it was incumbent upon them to teach the rest of the
congregation something.

Finally, my eyes fell upon the Abbotrigg pew. Old Couper and his wife
were standing side by side, with bowed heads.  I saw that they were
holding hands.  Beside them, in order of size, were ranged five small
figures in black—three boys and two girls—the grandchildren whose father
had fallen in action six days ago.  They did not look too well-fed—milk
and meat were not over plentiful in those days—but they stood shoulder
to shoulder in a perfectly aligned row, emulating the soldiers in the
gallery above.  It was difficult to believe that they had not rehearsed
the formation.  (Probably they had, under the personal direction of a
martinet home on leave.)  Each small head was held resolutely up; each
small chest—situated rather low down, as is usual when we are very
young—was thrust resolutely forward; each small pair of arms pointed
rigidly to the floor; and each pair of round eyes gazed fixedly and
unblinkingly into space.

Suddenly, I saw nothing more.  But I remember feeling reassured about
things.




                            *CHAPTER XVIII*

                            *THE OLD ORDER*


After church I joined Lady Christina and Eric, and was conveyed in a
very ancient victoria—her ladyship had "put down" the motor, owing to
petrol difficulties—to Buckholm for luncheon. I noticed that my friend
Bates no longer attended to the front door; he was now, I gathered,
guarding our coast from invasion somewhere in Suffolk. His deputy was a
grim-looking crone in a black skirt, silver-buttoned coat, and yellow
waistcoat, which made her look something between a female impersonator
and a prison wardress.  I seemed to have encountered her in a previous
existence hanging washing on a line on the drying-green behind the
Buckholm orchard.  She relieved me of my glengarry, gloves, and stick,
and demanded my ration-book.

"There will be meat for dinner," she explained.

I handed over the emergency ration-book with which soldiers on leave
were supplied in those days.  It was returned to me when I left the
house, lacking not only one full meat coupon, but all the butter and
sugar coupons as well.

"Her leddyship said you would no be needing them," explained the
wardress, and I meekly acquiesced.  If Lady Christina said that I did
not need a thing, who was I to say that I did?  In any case I was due to
rejoin the best-fed Army in the world in a few days’ time.

The luncheon party consisted of Lady Christina, as bolt upright as ever,
at the head of the table; Eric, at the foot; Lord Eskerley; and a
weather-beaten Lieutenant-Commander of the Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserve, named John Wickersham.  Five years ago he had been mainly known
to fame as a prominent King’s Counsel, a superb bridge-player, and a
fair-weather yachtsman. Now, for three years or more, his converted
pleasure-craft, navigated by its owner and enrolled an original member
of a certain silent, unadvertised brotherhood of the sea, had been
keeping grim vigil over our island coast, with such effect that German
submarine crews were breaking into open mutiny rather than face that
flotilla of terror any longer.  John Wickersham was ashore on long
leave, for the first time for many months.

Doctor Chirnside, who seldom missed his Sunday luncheon at Buckholm, had
been called away, to say what he could to a girl-wife who had just
received a telegram from the War Office.

Having consumed its meat ration and sugarless apple tart, the company
proceeded to mitigate the austerity of Lady Christina’s war-time régime
with a glass of port.  Then, after a perfunctory and short-lived
struggle, we yielded to the inevitable and settled down to the topic of
the military situation.  It was a curious experience for me, who had
heard little round that peaceful table since boyhood but hunting shop
and county gossip, to find myself involved in the same eternal debate as
was exercising every mess, billet, and dug-out on the Western Front—a
debate distinguished in both cases by extreme personal bias and entire
ignorance of essential details.  It is hardly necessary to mention that
Lord Eskerley, the one person who could have enlightened us, offered no
contribution.

Naturally we concentrated upon the rumours of the knock-out blow which
Germany was preparing to deal her arch-enemy in the early spring—a blow
which came near, in the actual event, to driving a wedge between the
armies of France and Britain, and establishing a German base on the
English Channel.  But in January, nineteen-eighteen, when we had not
lost a field-gun or a trench system since the First Battle of Ypres, and
had been steadily winning back the soil of France and accumulating
German prisoners for more than three years, no one took such a
possibility seriously.  Eric was particularly sanguine.

"A good thing, too!" he said.  "Let them come!  Then we can sit well
back, and make a clean job of the lot, instead of getting hot and dusty
going to look for them!  This war will end when we have killed enough
Boches; and if the Boches will help us by coming along to get killed—and
you know what the Boche can do in that way once he gives his mind to
it—there will be no complaints on our side.  I feel—"

This characteristic pronouncement was interrupted by Lord Eskerley.

"It’s only human nature, you know," he said. "You can’t blame them.
Naturally they think of their own front first.  Must!"

This did not seem to fit in well with the rest of the conversation—a not
altogether unusual feature of his lordship’s table-talk.

"Napoleon was right," he continued.  "Or was it Hannibal?  Said he would
sooner fight two first-class generals collaborating than one
single-handed second-rater.  It works out this way. Tweedledum says to
Tweedledee: ’You must take over more Front.’  Tweedledee says to
Tweedledum: ’It can’t be done!  Look at my casualty list for the last
three months!’  Tweedledum replies: ’But you are only holding about half
as much line as I am.’  Thereupon Tweedledee produces statistics to show
that although he holds the shorter line he has sixty-seven and a half
per cent. of the enemy massed against him.  And so it goes on.  The old
game!  I believe that in Bohemian circles it is known as ’Passing the
Buck.’  A colloquial but apposite expression!  I picked it up from an
American _attaché_ in Paris. In due course we shall come to the only
solution—a Supreme Commander, responsible for the safety of the whole
line.  But, as usual, we shall pay in advance—through the nose!"

The import of the old gentleman’s ruminations was now tolerably apparent
to all; that is, to all but our hostess.

"Eh, what?  What’s he talking about?" she inquired sharply of me.  (Of
late, Lady Christina’s hearing has deteriorated a little.)  "What’s he
talking about?  Tell me; he mumbles so! What’s all this nonsense about
Tweedledee and Tweedledum?  Who are Tweedledee and Tweedledum?  They
sound like people out of Punch—two of those wretches in the Government.
In German pay, every man-jack of them! Do you know what Bessie
Brickshire told me last week?  She went to Downing Street—"

"Your leddyship’s coffee is up the stair," announced the deep voice of
the prison wardress; and a libellous and irrelevant anecdote was nipped
in the bud.

Lady Christina rose, informed us that she proposed to take her coffee in
her own room, and, with a passing admonition to her son to be sparing of
the saccharine, left us to ours.

We lit cigars and stretched ourselves, like schoolboys relieved of the
pedagogue’s presence.

"How do they feel about things in general up at the top, Eskerley?"
asked John Wickersham. "We never hear any news in our job.  Are they all
quite happy and comfortable?"

"Not at all!" replied his lordship brusquely.

"What’s the trouble?"

"Not enough troops."

"How?  The number of Divisions on the Western Front hasn’t been reduced,
has it?"

"Oh, dear, no.  We are as strong as ever—on paper.  But instead of going
frankly to the Labour bosses and telling them that another half-million
men must be released from civilian employment, our politicians have
reduced the personnel of each Division from thirteen battalions to
ten—nearly twenty-five per cent.  It’s an admirable scheme, because it
satisfies so many people.  It satisfies the politician, because it saves
his face; it satisfies the slacker, because it saves his skin; and it
satisfies the Boche, because it’s going to save him a lot of trouble
when he makes his spring offensive.  The only people who are inclined to
criticise it are the insignificant individuals who are responsible for
the safety of the Western Front.  In fact, they are crying out to Heaven
for more men.  But, of course, nobody takes any notice of
recommendations from such a prejudiced person as a soldier.  His turn
will come later, when the scapegoats are being rounded up."  The old
gentleman sighed.  "That’s one of our worries.  The other is that we
have too many Allies."

"I see!  Too many cooks—eh?"

"Precisely!  I spend all my working hours nowadays propitiating
plenipotentiaries from countries whose existence I had never heard of
two years ago.  By the time I have recognised the status of this Ally,
and soothed the susceptibilities of that, the day is over and there’s no
time left to get on with the war.  I sometimes sigh for the era when the
French and ourselves muddled along by rule of thumb without having to
expend any tact upon anybody, except a periodical slap on the back to
Russia.  _We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!_—and so on.  Life
was simple then.  Now it is a perpetual Pentecost, without the feast.
Give me a forlorn hope and a lone hand every time; that’s an invincible
combination—eh, Alan?"

"I agree," I said.  "In the first year or so there was a sort of
cheerful, simple, all-in-the-same-boat feeling about everything.  The
French liked us; there was not too many of us; and what there were were
perfectly disciplined—old Regulars and the pick of ’K’s’ Army; or else
Indian troops, with the manners of Hidalgoes. Now, the average French
citizen never wants to see an ally again—"

Lord Eskerley nodded.

"Exactly!" he said.  "And I can’t say I blame him.  I sometimes feel
that way myself.  We’re a fairly promiscuous lot.  We may be a host of
modern crusaders, but we’re a _crowd_!  I feel like old McKechnie at the
revivalist meeting here five years ago, who refused to stand up and be
’saved’ with the rest because he objected to going to heaven ’with a
d——d Cheap Trup!’  Still, we mustn’t be ungrateful.  Our post entries
may have complicated the machine, but they have made it a pretty
reliable piece of mechanism."

"What I complain of," interposed Eric, "is that we, upon whom the whole
burden fell at the start, are almost forgotten now.  Most of us have
ceased to exist, and the rest are lost in a mob of amateurs."

"The wrong attitude entirely!" announced Lord Eskerley promptly.

"What’s the right attitude, then?" asked Eric, who hated correction
almost as much as Lord Eskerley delighted to administer it to him.

"The right attitude," replied the old man, with sudden seriousness,
"should be a feeling of pride that We were fortunate enough to find
ourselves Original Members of the Brotherhood—to hold Founders’ Shares.
When the edifice is completed—and completed it will be—the world won’t
be able to see the foundations.  But they will be there all right!  And
we shall know who laid them—the Old Order!"

"What do you mean by the Old Order?" asked Eric.  "The landed gentry?"

"Far more than that.  I mean the people to whom this country, as such,
has always really meant something; I mean every mother’s son who felt
the ancient spirit of our race wake in him, perhaps for the first time,
when the challenge came in Nineteen Fourteen.  I don’t care who he
was—squire’s son, parson’s son, miner’s son, poacher’s son—it was all
the same.  If he was conscious then of that single blind impulse to get
up and play the game, just because it was the game; just because it was
impossible to do otherwise—without any dialectics about Freedom, or
Altruism, or Democracy, or whether his job would be kept open for him or
not; simply because the Blood told him to—then he belonged to the Old
Order!  He held a Founder’s Share, all right!

"Of course," the old man continued presently, "the more one has to give
the more one is expected to give, at a time like this.  And as a rule it
seems to be the best that is taken.  ’_This is the heir; come, let us
kill him!_’—that has been the general attitude of the War Gods.  Only
the very best would suffice—only the very best!"

We sat silent again.  Lord Eskerley himself had lost his two sons, and
his only grandson.  After him, what was to become of the ancient
title—of the "Big Hoose" and its "policies"—of the family which had
served the State for three hundred years?  "_This is the heir!_"  How
true that was.  I thought of my brother Walter’s eldest son.
Fortunately in this case there were two more.  And Roy?  What would
become of Baronrigg, if—

But Lord Eskerley was speaking again—more to himself than to us.

"The Old Order!  The Willing Horse!  There’s hardly an estate, or a
farm, or an allotment, in this country-side, or in any part of Scotland
or England, that has not changed hands, prospectively at least, during
the last three years.  And what with designedly disruptive death duties,
and income tax on the same scale, levied on people who have no personal
income—only a few precious, ancient, barren acres—the old estates are
passing right away from the original owners—one half sold to pay the
charges on the other half.  It seems a queer way of rewarding people who
have given everything—to sell them up because they have nothing more to
give!  Still, one has the supreme satisfaction of having played the
game.  Our record stands—"  He broke off. "I apologise: I was
sermonising!  Bad habit!"  He looked at his watch.  "Three o’clock!  I
must go; a trunk call comes through from London every afternoon at four.
Alan, I will give you a lift."

A few minutes later I found myself rolling home in an unaccustomed
motor.

"I still get twenty gallons a month," explained Lord Eskerley.
"Business of State, and so on. Going back soon?"

"Thursday," I said.

"Well, enjoy the war while you can.  When it is over there will be no
peace for anybody. After the Boche has given his last expiring kick we
are going to sit down to a Peace Congress in comparison with which the
Congress of Vienna will take rank as a model of sagacity and altruism.
The Millennium that we are all composing cantatas about is not
coming—yet."

"Are we going to have more wars, then?" I asked, gazing rather
dejectedly at the red, wintry sunset.

"We are always going to have more wars," replied my companion
testily—"and then more! (The final war will be between men and women.
Even that won’t really settle anything, because there will be too much
rendering aid and comfort to the enemy going on.)  By the way, how is
Roy?"

I reported favourably upon my nephew’s health and service record.

"I suppose you know," I remarked, "that Tom Birnie appointed yourself
and myself Roy’s trustees and executors?"

"Yes.  Tom wrote me a letter to that effect before he enlisted."

"He did enlist, then?"

"I believe so."

I did not press for details.  Lord Eskerley has means at his disposal of
discovering most of the secrets of this world—which is not to say that
he is accustomed to pass these on to third parties.

"Have you seen Roy," I continued, "or heard from him of late?"

"I have not seen him, and he has not favoured me with a single line
since he went out for the first time.  By the way, I observe she
received a decoration the other day—for conspicuous bravery during an
air-raid."

"Who?"

"Who?  The girl!"

"The girl?  You mean—the Netherby girl? Is that _affaire_ still—?"

"Yes.  Name of Clegg.  You know what became of her, I suppose?"

"No.  Roy has never been communicative on the subject, although I
believe he used to maintain a correspondence with her.  The junior
members of the mess were quite intrigued about it.  I had almost
forgotten her existence.  What became of her?"

"She couldn’t stand Papa’s peaceful principles, so ran away from home
and came to London.  I employed her to drive my car for some time; but
she left me.  Said the work wasn’t hard enough. She now supports herself
on the stage, so as to have her days free for some sort of drudgery in a
canteen."

"And you think that she and Roy still—

"Married, last August!" replied his lordship simply.

"_What?_"

"On the quiet—registry office!  Wonderful, heavenly secret, and all
that!  How the young love a clandestine romance!  And some of us never
grow up!" added the old man complacently.




                             *CHAPTER XIX*

                            *THE LAST THROW*


"I’m sorry, gentlemen," said the Divisional Commander, "but I can’t
possibly let any unit proceed to rest areas at present.  Our orders are
to stand by, day and night, and be ready to move in any direction at an
hour’s notice.  By the way, this is quite an informal meeting, so ask
any questions you like."

"What is the latest news of the tactical situation, sir?" inquired the
senior Brigadier, articulating the question that was on every one’s
lips.

We were gathered together at a Commanding Officers’ Meeting.  The
Division had just emerged from four months of winter trench-warfare in
the north—only to be diverted from its search for well-earned repose by
an urgent summons to repair southward without delay to its ancient
stamping-ground behind Albert.  We had marched all night, to be
intercepted at dawn by orders to bivouac where we stood.  I myself was
summoned to the meeting, hastily convened in a village school five miles
farther on.

"It’s a pretty sticky business all round," said the General frankly.
"The situation appears to be this.  As you know, it has been obvious for
months that the Boche has been meditating a tremendous offensive against
some part of the British front.  The Commander-in-Chief, not having
sufficient troops to give adequate protection to the whole of his line—

"Why _hasn’t_ he sufficient troops?" inquired a voice—the voice of the
C.R.A., a fiery old gentleman with a monocle.  He was a coeval of the
General’s, so was qualified to act as cross-examiner for us lesser
lights.

"It’s not my business to explain, or ours to wonder.  I can only give
you the facts.  Last year the British Army had, roughly speaking, one
million casualties.  This year the British Army is fighting in France,
Belgium, Italy, Saloniki, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Indian frontier,
and East Africa; so you can imagine the clamour for reinforcements that
is going on all over the globe.  Thirdly, the French, not long ago,
asked us to take over another twenty-eight miles of line.  We did so;
with the result that the C.-in-C. found himself in the position of
having to decide, since he hadn’t enough men to hold all the line
securely, where he must hold on at all costs, and where he could afford
to take chances.  Obviously, he had to make the Straits of Dover
impregnable; so the northern part of the line got the lion’s share of
troops.  Down here, the Fifth Army were strung out to a beggarly bayonet
per yard.  North of them, the Third Army had about three bayonets to two
yards.  Opposite this line, during the past few weeks, the Boche was
known to have accumulated a force averaging seven bayonets per yard—"  A
low murmur ran round the crowded little school-room.  It was fully light
now, and we could see one another’s startled faces.  "In other words,
sixty or seventy divisions.  Against that force we had available
twenty-two divisions in the line, with twelve infantry divisions and
three cavalry divisions in reserve.  The attack opened six days ago.
The Boches, as usual, had the Devil’s own luck with the weather—thick
mist—and were on us in a solid phalanx before we saw them at all.  I may
add that they were backed by the most terrific concentration of
artillery fire on record, and raised unexpected Sheol in our back areas
by a new very long range gas-shell. By all the rules they ought to have
wiped us right out.  But they didn’t.  We were bowled over again and
again; but we always managed to re-form some sort of line—until the want
of reserves began to tell, and brigades and divisions, thinned out to
nothing, began to draw in upon themselves and leave gaps on their
flanks.  The cavalry worked like heroes to cover the intervals; but they
couldn’t be everywhere, and one position after another was outflanked
and had to be given up.  Noyon has gone; Péronne has gone; Monchy has
gone; the whole Somme battle-field of Nineteen-Sixteen has gone.  Even
Albert"—there came a groan here from all of us who had fought in the
Somme battle—"has fallen into Boche hands.  Yes, I know!  But things
might be worse.  Arras is holding fast; and the good old Vimy Ridge is
still standing right up to them.  It’s tolerably certain now that the
Boche was booked to get Amiens in three days.  He hasn’t got it; and if
we can continue to make him pay his present price he will never get it
at all."

There was small comfort in this.  The very fact that Amiens had become a
Boche possibility was a staggerer in itself.  We thought of the Hôtel du
Rhin, and other haunts of ancient peace, and sighed.

"How is morale?" asked the C.R.A.

The General held up a paper.

"Here is the Commander-in-Chief’s latest dispatch," he said.  "Listen to
this, gentlemen!"


_At no time was there anything approaching a breakdown of command or a
failure of morale.  Under conditions that made rest and sleep impossible
for days together, officers and men remained undismayed, realising that
for the time being they must play a waiting game, and determined to make
the enemy pay the full price for the advantage which, for the moment,
was his._


We broke into applause.  We could not help it.

"Naturally," continued the General, "the strain has been awful, because
we are employing tired men, fighting without reinforcements against ever
fresh bodies of troops.  However, more divisions are coming down from
the north—you are one of the first arrivals—and Foch has taken supreme
command, which means that hereafter the Allied forces will be more
evenly distributed and the line stabilised.  The long and short of it
all is that the enemy has been frustrated, for the time being, in his
amiable attempt to drive a wedge between the British and French armies."

"Still," said the voice of the C.R.A., "I suppose the situation is
pretty critical?"

"Critical isn’t the word!  But the line is still intact, though badly
bent, and we have beaten all our previous records for Boche-killing,
which is saying something.  And if they fail to break through—good-bye
Germany!  It’s their last throw.  A German who knows he cannot win is a
German beaten.  Now, gentlemen, you will understand why it is that you
cannot go into retirement at present.  That’s all, I think!  To your
tents, O Israel—and breakfast!  But be ready to move at an hour’s
notice."


Roy and I jogged wearily back across country to the field where the men
were bivouacking. Roy was my senior company commander, and I had brought
him to the meeting in preference to the adjutant, who was very young and
already bowed down with regimental routine.  Roy, a seasoned Ironside of
twenty-two, with two-and-a-half years continuous active service to his
record, was now my shield and buckler and right-hand man.

We had little to say to one another.  We were both dog-tired, and were
suffering in addition from that unpleasant form of reaction which comes
from hope deferred.  We were thinking, too, of the men.  They had
completed four months of exhausting and expensive trench duty, working
by "internal reliefs," which really means no relief at all; each man
staying his dour dogged heart with the only two consolations available
in those days—the humdrum certainty of ultimate relief by another
division, and the ever present possibility of a "Blighty" wound. And
now, when they had actually packed up and removed out of the shell area,
with a spell of rest and relaxation well within their grasp, they found
themselves pulled back into the line.  That sort of experience is a
severer test of morale than an intensive bombardment.  The danger was
that they might go stale—just as I had once seen a highly-trained
college crew go, when the races were postponed for a week owing to ice
on the river.

"We will call a pow-wow when we get back," I said to Roy, "and tell the
officers to explain matters to the men as well as they can.  They must
sing the usual song about our trusty old indispensable Division, the
prop and stay of the weaker brethren, proudly filling the breach and
saving the situation, and so forth."

"They’ll respond all right," said Roy confidently.  "They are a
wonderful crowd."

"They certainly are; but it will break their hearts if they are shoved
back for another spell of trench duty.  Of course, if we go right into
the scrap, with a fair chance to get above ground and grab the Boche by
the ears, they won’t mind at all—quite the reverse.  It will be a
perfect tonic."

"If half of what His Nibs said is true, they’ll get all the tonic they
want!" remarked my sage young companion.  "We’re for it, this time!"

He was right.  Even at that moment our task had been assigned to us; for
when we reached Battalion Headquarters—a G.S. waggon in the corner of a
field, in the middle of which certain incurable greathearts were playing
football—we found that the telephone had outstripped us, and that our
orders were waiting.

We gobbled breakfast, with that curious mingling of sentiment and
satisfaction which comes to men who are not sure if they will ever see a
poached egg again.  Then I summoned my officers.  I passed on to them
the substance of the General’s statement, and spoke of the gaps that
were being created in the line by lack of reinforcements.

"Such a gap," I explained, "has occurred almost directly in front of us,
along the crest of a low ridge called Primrose Hill.  (The Adjutant will
give you the map reference in a minute.)  The gap is being filled at
present by a rather raw battalion of newly-arrived Territorials, rushed
up from Corps Reserve.  It is a very important point, and we are to go
in and stiffen them. Written orders will be issued to you immediately;
but it may save time if I mention that I propose to march the battalion
direct to the back of Primrose Hill, deploy, and advance in lines of
companies until we strike the trench system which the Royal Loyals are
holding.  In that way we ought to be able to plug any possible gap in
the shortest possible time.  We may have to advance through a barrage;
but that, of course, is all in the day’s work.  Company commanders will
take such precautions as are possible to ensure the safety of their men,
but they must not waste time on this occasion looking for covered lines
of advance.  In other words, the situation is critical, and must be
tackled bald-headed.  The point of deployment, as at present fixed, is a
blacksmith’s forge on the road running direct from here to Primrose
Hill.  It is marked in the map, _Michelin Forge_; there’s a big
motor-tyre advertisement on the western gable, the Brigade Major tells
me.  I shall go there now myself, and establish temporary headquarters.
Companies will move off independently in succession, A Company leading.
Company commanders will report at Michelin Forge for further
instructions.  Later, after we have deployed and advanced up the reverse
slope of Primrose Hill—it is a mere swelling in the ground, as a matter
of fact—Battalion Headquarters will be established, if possible, in a
_point d’appui_ just behind the crest, called Fountain Keep.  It is a
ruined ornamental garden, I believe, with the wreck of a fountain in the
middle.  I hope you’ll all arrive there in due course—and find me there!
That’s all!  Good luck to you!"

My officers saluted in a manner that warmed my heart, and hurried off to
their duties.  I felt sorry I had not been able to give them a more
stirring harangue: I felt sure that Eric would have done so.  Still,
harangue or no harangue, I knew they would lead their men to the crest
of Primrose Hill.  I looked after them affectionately. Most of them I
never saw again from that hour. But I remember them all to-day—their
faces, their voices, their characteristics.  They were of many types—the
variegated types of a whole nation at last in arms.  There were Public
School and Sandhurst products, like Roy; there were promoted rankers,
with permanently squared shoulders and little waxed moustaches; there
were professional and business men verging on middle-age, who had long
shed their stomachs and acquired a genuine passion for army forms and
regimental routine.  The last two figures that caught my eye were those
of my machine-gun officer, a Mathematical Fellow of an ancient Cambridge
college, and Adams, second-in-command of B Company, who in a previous
existence had officiated as under gate-porter in the same foundation.
The British Army in those days was one great ladder, up which all men,
gentle or simple, might climb if they had the character and the will.
In that army at the end of the war there was a Divisional General who
had been editor of a newspaper; there was a Brigadier-General who had
been a taxi-cab driver; another who had been a school-teacher.  Numbered
among that exclusive hierarchy, the General Staff, were an insurance
clerk, an architect’s assistant, and a college cook.  A coal miner, a
railway signalman, a market gardener, and countless promoted private
soldiers commanded battalions.

A few minutes later I rode off with my adjutant, young Hume-Logan, in
the direction of Michelin Forge.  My faithful orderly—a gigantic,
inarticulate Lowland hind named Herriott—jogged along in rear of us.  It
was a distressing ride.  A badly mangled terrain, restored to France and
cultivation by Hindenburg’s operatic retirement to the Siegfried line,
was being overrun once more: and the plucky, industrious peasant
population, which had been so busily employed for the past twelve months
in rebuilding their villages and re-ploughing their emancipated soil
behind the traditionally sure shield of a British trench line, found
itself uprooted and cast forth for the second time.  The panic-stricken
flood of refugees had now subsided; but along the road we encountered
sights which wrung the heart and tweaked the conscience—here, a pitiful
little cart loaded with worldly possessions which hardly seemed worth
salving; there, a tired woman struggling along a muddy roadside with her
children

                 _Respiciens frustra rura laresque sua_

—as Ovid used to say in the Repetition Book. I felt somehow, perhaps
unjustifiably, but none the less poignantly, that for once the British
Army had failed in a trust.

But presently I saw something which inspired me.  Down the road came a
big elderly peasant woman wheeling a barrow, piled high with household
furniture.  (You have to invade French peasant territory very suddenly
and very early in the morning indeed, if you expect to find so much as
an orange-box left to sit down upon.)  We looked down on the barrow as
it passed.

"She doesn’t seem to have forgotten anything, sir," observed Master
Hume-Logan.

I gave Madame a respectful salute as we rode past.  Her hard features
never relaxed.  Instead, she set down her barrow by the roadside, turned
round, and started back in the same direction as ourselves: in fact, she
outstripped our two horses, which were walking delicately amid the
puddles.

"She seems to have forgotten something, after all," I said.

But I was wrong.  She had forgotten nothing. Two hundred yards along the
road stood another wheelbarrow.  In it—mute, helpless, patient—lay a
very old man.  The old woman seized the shafts of this barrow and began
to wheel it after the first.  In so doing she met us again—and again I
saluted her.  We turned in our saddles and looked after her.  At her
original halting-place she deposited the second barrow as close to the
side of the road as possible, turned again to the first, and trundled it
forward, without a moment’s rest, another hundred yards or so. When last
we saw her she was coming back—grim, resolute, invincible—for the old
man.  She _was_ France—La Patrie, incarnate!

At last we penetrated beyond what we may call the refugee zone, and
arrived at Michelin Forge.  There was little of it left save the western
gable, which was still decorated by a tattered presentment of two
pre-war friends, the Bibendum Twins.  The low ridge of Primrose Hill
defined the horizon about a mile or two ahead of us.  It was nothing of
a hill; it looked no higher than its namesake in distant "N.W."  A
quarter-of-a-mile away from us enemy shells were falling with Teutonic
regularity of interval into a group of poor houses, clustered round a
cross-roads. Over the ridge itself shrapnel was bursting intermittently.
Away to our left a large canteen hut was burning fiercely: probably it
had been cleared and set alight to save it from falling into enemy
hands.  To the right of the forge a battery of our Four-point-Five
Howitzers was firing salvoes—securely dug in, and screened from
aeroplane view by nets interwoven with leaves and twigs. When, to the
great content of our horses, this performance ceased, I rode over and
sought out the young officer in command.  He had not shaved for a week,
and his quite creditable beard was encrusted with mud.

"Yes, sir," he said, "I can tell you a little. The enemy are in force
just beyond that low ridge—Primrose Hill.  We are strafing them now.
Our F.O.O. is somewhere in Fountain Keep, which is a strong point just
behind the crest, with one or two observation posts stretching over it.
He has direct observation; his last telephone-message said that the
enemy were massing again behind their own second line.  I haven’t heard
from him since: that’s why I stopped firing.  Something gone wrong with
the works, I expect."

"What’s the distance from here to the ridge?" I asked.

"Well, we are firing at a range of four thousand three hundred; but
that, of course, reaches Boche territory.  The range to the crest is
about three thousand five hundred."

"I see; a brisk country walk of about two miles?  I shall deploy here.
Has the Boche been shelling the reverse slope of the hill at all?"

"Not lately.  But yesterday afternoon, during a big attack, he put down
a heavy barrage from end to end of it."

"Hum!  That means that when he attacks again he will put down another
heavy barrage. The sooner we get to the crest of that hill the better."

I was turning away, when the gunner said:

"There’s a sunken road over there, sir, behind that hedge.  It runs
straight towards Primrose Hill for nearly a mile, and ends where the
gradient really begins.  If you followed that you could get shelter for
a bit, and need not take open order quite so soon."

"That’s good advice," I said.  "I will have a look at it.  Is there much
going on in the air at present?"

"They set one of our sausage-balloons on fire early this morning.  The
observer got down all right in his parachute; but I fancy the heavies
behind us are a bit in the dark about things, in consequence."

"How are the gas-works?"

"They put mustard down with their last barrage."

"Any aeroplanes been over?"

"One Boche machine came over at dawn, but our Archies hunted him back.
This battery hasn’t been spotted so far; but I expect we shall have to
limber up and do another Hindenburg act presently; we have been doing
nothing else for a week.  A fortnight ago we were in rest billets about
here, running about and playing football and going to the pictures!
It’s a bit thick!" he grunted ruefully, through his mask of dirt.

"We are to go in and stiffen the line ahead of us," I said.  "You stay
where you are, and back us!  Here’s my leading company coming up now.
Good-morning!"

"Good-morning, sir, and good luck!"

The gunner hurried back to his camouflaged emplacements, and I turned to
find Roy at my elbow.

"A message came through from brigade, sir," he said, "just after you
left, to say that the enemy were massing heavily opposite Primrose Hill,
and that we were to get up as soon as possible."

"Right!  Let us have a look at a covered approach I have just heard
about."

We crossed a meadow and looked over a hedge. Sure enough, at our very
feet lay a deep cutting, following the line of the hedge towards
Primrose Hill.

"Bring your company over here," I said, "and start them up this
thoroughfare for all they’re worth.  Have the signallers arrived?"

"Yes, sir; they came with me."

"Tell the signal sergeant to establish telephone communication with
Brigade Headquarters as quickly as he can."  I turned to that faithful
shadow, my adjutant.  "Notify the other companies as they arrive—to this
effect."  I scribbled an order.  "Explain to Major Wylie"—Major Wylie
was my second in command—"that I have gone ahead with A Company.  He
will take charge of affairs here and maintain communication as far as
possible from front to rear.  Is that quite clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good!  Ah! here is Captain Birnie, with A Company.  Now, Roy, young
fellow-my-lad, what about it?"


Five minutes later Roy and I were heading up the sunken lane, followed
by A Company, with steel helmets adjusted and gas-masks at the ready.

"By rights," I grunted, "I suppose I ought to be sitting in Michelin
Forge maintaining touch with Brigade Headquarters.  But I think this is
going to be one of those occasions upon which a C.O. is justified in
leading his regiment from the front.  I am fed up with this Duke of
Plaza Toro business."

Roy did not reply.  He struck me as a little _distrait_, which did not
altogether surprise me, considering that we were both going, in all
probability, straight to an early demise.  In fact, I was feeling a
little _distrait_ myself.  But this was no time for preoccupation.
Progress along the lane was not too easy.  There was a good deal of
traffic coming the other way—stragglers, stretcher-cases, walking
wounded, and dispatch-riders urging their reluctant motor-cycles through
a river of mud.  Phlegmatic cave-dwellers in dug-outs in the banks of
the lane, mainly signallers, looked out upon us, exchanging grisly jests
with my followers.  Sappers, imperturbable as ever, were running out
wire across an open space to the right.  A water-party met us, jangling
empty petrol-cans.  At one point we passed a row of our dead, awaiting
removal.  On nearly every sleeve I noticed one, two, or even three gold
stripes.  It seemed desperately hard that The Willing Horse, healed
three times of his wounds, should have gone down for good so near the
end—as the event proved it to be—when others had never left the stable.

Presently we overtook a slow-moving procession, advancing with that
injured bearing and gait which mark Thomas Atkins when employed upon an
uncongenial job.  They were a fatigue party, carrying enormous
trench-mortar bombs.

"We can never get past this crowd," I said to Roy.  "We’ll climb out
here, and deploy to the left."

Roy gave the order, and soon A Company were advancing in extended
formation with their faces set towards Fountain Keep.  Roy and I tramped
ahead of them: the ridge of Primrose Hill was barely a thousand yards
away now.  The morning mists had cleared away, and we could see it quite
distinctly.

Suddenly Roy turned to me.

"Uncle Alan," he began—

But he got no further.  There came a roar and a shock that shook the
ground.  Five hundred yards ahead of us the brown face of Primrose Hill
broke into a spouting row of earth-fountains, intermingled with the
smoke of shrapnel and whizz-bangs.  The evening’s barrage had begun. The
line of men behind us recoiled for a moment, then pressed stolidly
forward.

"We have got to get through that," I announced—a little superfluously.

Roy replied—somewhat unexpectedly—right in my left ear, at the top of
his voice:

"Uncle Alan, I want to tell you that I am married!"

"So I have been given to understand!" I bellowed.  The din was growing
louder.

"Who told you?  Old Eskerley?"

I nodded; halted; and sniffed the air,

"I thought so," I said.  "Gas-masks, Roy—quick!"

Roy turned and waved an order to his company. In a few seconds we were
advancing again: each man had transformed God’s image into a goggled
deformity, and was breathing God’s air from a box of chemicals through a
jointed tube.

Roy and I adjusted our masks last.

"Come along," I said, with a glance ahead of us: "the longer we look at
it the less we shall like it!"  I tried to fit my mask to my face, but
found that Roy was shouting into my ear again.

"Uncle Alan—"

I inclined my head towards him.

"Well?"

"_I am a father!_"

I nodded my hideous head, and smiled congratulations as well as I could.

"I only got word this morning," I heard him bawl as his face disappeared
into his mask. "BOY!"  And with that he led his company into the
barrage.

I felt convinced if we got through it Roy would tell the first German he
met about the baby.




                              *CHAPTER XX*

                            *FOUNTAIN KEEP*


Of the next half-hour my recollection is mercifully blurred.  All that I
know is that most of us got through the barrage and foregathered at the
back of Fountain Keep, which proved to be a circular _point d’appui_
intersected and honeycombed with trenches, saps and tunnels.

"Carry right on with the company," I said to Roy.  "I think you will
find some hand-to-hand work going on just over the ridge; so your men
will be welcome.  I will try to find the Headquarters of the Royal
Loyals.  Take care of yourself, laddie!"

Our gas-masks were off again by this time, so we could smile at one
another as we parted.

Ultimately Herriott and I discovered the Headquarters of the Fifth Royal
Loyals—a dug-out at the back of the Keep, occupied by a slightly
hysterical second lieutenant (apparently the adjutant) and a telephone
orderly vainly trying to make connection with a Brigade Headquarters
which we learned afterwards had been shelled out of existence twenty
minutes before.

"The battalion are cut to pieces, sir," gasped the second lieutenant.
"They are fighting more or less in the open....  There are hardly any
trenches....  The C.O. was killed half an hour ago....  Most of the
company commanders have been scuppered too.  The line’s broken in two or
three places, and we are fighting in small groups....  They are putting
up a wonderful kick....  But there’s hardly anybody left ... no platoon
commanders or anything.  I seem to be in command of the battalion!"  He
giggled, foolishly.  "I came back here to try and telephone for help....
All the numbers seem to be engaged, though!"  He began to sob.  He
looked barely twenty.

"That’s all right," I said.  "I have sent a company of my Jocks to
stiffen your front line, and three more are coming up.  Here, take a
pull at my flask, and then show me the way through this Keep of yours!
Looks like the Maze at Hampton Court, doesn’t it?  We must hold on to it
whatever happens: it’s the key to the whole business.  Who’s in command
up in front, by the way?"

"A corporal, I think."

"_A corporal_?  Come along!  The sooner we reinforce him the better."

But the boy was too badly shell-shocked to guide me, so Herriott and I
went on alone.  We plunged into the depths of the Keep, and followed its
deep mazes as best we could.  Here and there I noticed traces of the
ornamental garden.  We passed by the wrecked fountain, with a broken
stucco figure lying across its basin.  Once our road took us through an
artificial rockery, reinforced with sandbags.  The trenches were deep,
and we could see nothing but the sky above our heads.  Everywhere was
the old familiar reek—humanity and chloride of lime.  The noise was
terrific now.  Our own shells were whistling over our heads: evidently
my grimy friend with the four-point-fives had got to work again.  Enemy
artillery was silent, probably through fear of hitting its own men; but
bombs and trench-mortars were busy.

The windings of the Keep were tortuous, and we wandered more or less at
random, stepping here and there over some obstruction—an abandoned case
of ammunition, or a dead soldier. Suddenly we emerged into what was
obviously a firing-trench.  It was lined with men, mounted on the step
and maintaining a steady fusillade. From their deliberate movements I
saw that they were fighting well within themselves.  Some were Roy’s
men, others members of that sturdy Territorial unit, the Fifth Royal
Loyals.  There were other details—cyclists, signallers, Labour Corps
men—all contributing.  Evidently some organising influence had been at
work.  A few yards along the trench to the right I observed a sort of
projection, or bastion, in which a Lewis gun team were maintaining
enfilade fire along the wire to their own right.

Realising that I had reached the forward edge of Fountain Keep, I was
about to hoist myself on to the firing step in order to see what was
happening on the other side of the parapet, when my attention was
attracted to the man who appeared to be in general charge of the sector.
It was difficult to discern his rank, for he was in his shirt sleeves,
like many of his comrades. (Tommy Atkins has a passion for
_déshabillé_.)  Obviously he was not an officer, for he wore the
unæsthetic boots and grey flannel shirt of the rank-and-file.  His steel
helmet had fallen off, and I could see that his hair was quite grey.
His face, like those of most present, was framed in a six days’ beard,
with a top-dressing of dirt; but he was an undoubted leader of men.
When first I saw him he was directing the Lewis gun team. Presently he
came down the trench towards me, throwing up fresh clips of ammunition
and shouting encouragement to the men on the firing-step—though in that
hellish din I doubt if they heard much of what he said.

He passed the mouth of the communication trench in which I was standing
without noticing me, and disappeared round a traverse on the left,
evidently on his way to stiffen morale in the next bay.  I found myself
gazing after him with an interest for which I could not quite account.
Probably he was the corporal of whom the shell-shocked boy behind us had
spoken....

I became suddenly conscious that Herriott was stiffening to attention.
This meant that Herriott desired permission to deliver himself of a
remark.

"Well, Herriott?" I said.

"I beg your pardon, sirr—"

"Yes?  What?"

"Yon, sirr, is—"

At that moment a German trench-mortar bomb came sailing over, and burst
some thirty yards to our left.  Fortunately our bay was screened from
the effects by a stout island-traverse. However, I fear I missed the
purport of Herriott’s statement.  In fact, I doubt if I heard it at all,
for at that moment Roy appeared round the corner on the right, followed
by an orderly.

He was bleeding from a scratch on the cheek, and held his Colt automatic
in his hand.

"We have just pushed them back on the right, sir," he announced.  His
eyes were blazing. "They tried to rush a bad bit of our line about a
hundred yards along; but our boys were splendid, and very few Boches got
as far as the parapet. They simply withered up when they got to the
wire."

I pointed to the bastion, where the Lewis gunners were recharging
magazines.

"Those are the fellows you have to thank," I said.  "How is the
situation generally?"

"The Boche has gone back everywhere, for the moment," Roy replied.  "I
fancy he will give us a dose of trench-mortars and H.E., and then try
again.  I am going along the line now, to see if all the men are in
place."

"You will find a very efficient understudy round that traverse," I
said—"a corporal.  I found him handling this bit of line like a
field-marshal."

Again I was aware of the dour presence of Herriott at my elbow.

"I beg your pardon, sirr—" he began again.

Again the words were taken out of his mouth. Round the corner of the
traverse to our left struggled a pitifully familiar group—two stooping
men supporting a third between them.  The wounded man held an arm
resolutely round the neck of each supporter, but his feet dragged in the
mud.  It was the grey-headed corporal.

"Stretcher-bearers, there!" cried one of the men gruffly.

"How did they cop you, Corporal?" inquired a Royal Loyal, leaning down
sympathetically from the firing-step.

"That last trench-mortar!" gasped the grey-haired man, as they set him
down on the floor of the trench, just below the Lewis gun emplacement.
He turned his head feebly in our direction, and our eyes met for the
first time.  At the same moment Roy gave a cry and started forward.

Then I understood what Herriott had been trying to tell me.  Tom Birnie
lay dying before our eyes—at the feet of his own son.

Roy, very white, dropped on his knees beside his father.  A stretcher
came, and we did what we could.  Tom had a dreadful wound in his side;
plainly it was only a matter of minutes.  I remember seeing Roy unbuckle
his own equipment, take off his tunic, and wrap it round his father’s
shoulders.  Tom’s eyes were closed; his breathing was laboured; he
recognised no one.

For a moment the tempest of battle around us seemed to stand still.  The
crowded trench was silent; the men on the firing-step looked down
curiously.  Roy still knelt beside his father, motionless.  Herriott,
who had worked on the Baronrigg estate ever since he could walk, stood
rigidly at attention at the foot of the Laird’s stretcher, with tears
trickling down his cheeks.

At last Tom’s eyes opened.  He smiled and said faintly:

"That you, Roy?  Good boy!  I was expecting you....  I carried on as
well as I could, until you came to take over....  I knew you would
come....  I knew!  Give your father a kiss, old man."

Roy bowed his head....

Next moment, with the shriek of an express train emerging from a tunnel,
a German shell whirled out of the blue and exploded against the traverse
a few yards away.


When I came to myself I was being carried in Herriott’s arms—and I weigh
nearly fourteen stone—back through the mazes of Fountain Keep in the
direction of the first aid post.  After more than three years of
continuous seeking I had achieved the soldier’s ambition—a "blighty."

That night, as I passed on my jolting way to the base, with a smashed
collar-bone and a damaged skull, my rambling dreams ran naturally on one
subject—that strange meeting between father and son; and the spectacle
of the one passing on to the other, as it were some precious
inheritance, the safe custody of Fountain Keep.




                             *CHAPTER XXI*

                              *IDENTITIES*


                                  *I*


Night had fallen on Fountain Keep; for the moment the guns were silent
and the battle had died down.  To-morrow the Boche would come again—and
again.  But he would get no farther. The high-water mark of the great
spring offensive of Nineteen Eighteen had been reached—in this region at
any rate, though none knew it.  To the right the long, attenuated
British line had been pressed back to the village of Villers Bretonneux,
within sight of Amiens; the Australians were destined to do historic
work here six weeks later, when the bundling-out process began.  On the
left, before Arras, despite massed attacks and reckless expenditure of
German cannon-fodder, the line had held fast.  On every side, for the
moment, the enemy had sullenly withdrawn, to lick his wounds.  He would
try again later on further north, in the flat plain of the sluggish
Lys—only to create a second spectacular and untenable salient in the
British line, with the Vimy Ridge standing up invincibly between the
two, like a great rock splitting the force of a spring spate.

Fountain Keep was very still and silent.  It lay once more well within
the British lines.  It had been captured by the enemy in a massed attack
at three o’clock that afternoon, despite the gallant defence put up by A
Company and the great-hearted remnants of the Royal Loyals—to be
recaptured in a most skilfully directed counter-attack just before
nightfall by the three remaining companies of the Royal Covenanters.
With the key position restored, a gallant rally had taken place all
along the line, and once more the whole of Primrose Hill was in British
hands.

Out in front weary men were consolidating the position—replacing
sandbags and running out wire.  Fountain Keep itself, lying snugly
behind its restored trench-line, had resumed its proper function of
_point d’appui_ and battalion headquarters. But British prestige had
been restored at the usual prodigal cost.  Stretcher-bearers were
everywhere, stumbling about in the darkness from shell-hole to
shell-hole, where wounded men usually contrive to drag themselves.  Many
of those wounded had seen khaki puttees, then German field-boots, then
khaki puttees pass over their heads that day.

They were nearly all collected by this time; our own particular Alan
Laing had passed through the field dressing-station hours ago. Now the
battle-ground was occupied by other search-parties, whose business lay
with those who had been delivered for ever from the pain of wounds and
the weariness of convalescence.

Such a party was at this moment employing itself in Fountain Keep, under
the direction of a conscientious but not over-imaginative sergeant,
named Busby.

"We’ll go along the front parapet first," he announced; "that’s where
most of ’em are.... Yes, ’ere’s one—a Jock; lance-corporal, by his
stripe.  Get his pay-book out of his pocket, ’Erb. Not got one?  Well,
he _ought_ to ’ave, that’s all; it’s in Regulations.  Look at his
identity-disc, then.  Read it out, and read it slow; my pencil’s blunt.
_Number Seven-Six-Five-Fower-Eight—Private J. Couper_—been promoted
since he got that—_Second Royal Covenanters—Presbyterian_. Righto!  Now,
this one—No, never mind ’im, it’s only a ’Un; no need to take _his_
number!  Pass along, boys!  Get a move on; we’ve got a lot to do."

The little procession moved on, performing its grim duties with
characteristic sang-froid, lightened by the incurable, untimely,
invaluable flippancy of the British soldier.  Presently they came to a
place where a bastion of sandbags had been improvised as an emplacement
for a Lewis gun.  The gun itself lay twisted and earthy on a heap of
burst sandbags; below the emplacement lay the gun’s crew.

"One shell got the lot, I fancy," remarked Sergeant Busby.  "Switch on
your torch, Alf; there are four or five of ’em here.  Lift them clear of
one another, boys."

Four bodies were lifted, not irreverently, and laid side by side on the
ground behind the emplacement, with sightless eyes upturned to the
twinkling stars.  One remained—a long-legged figure in shirt-sleeves,
lying with face turned to the parapet.

"Help me to turn this feller over, ’Erb," commanded the sergeant.
"Seems to have lost his toonic; Government property, too!  Well, he
can’t be brought up for it now.  Hallo!  ... _’Strewth_! ... Did you see
that, ’Erb?  It give me a turn for a minute.  ’Alf a tick!"  He bent
down hurriedly, and listened.  "He’s breathing!  There’s a
stretcher-party round that traverse; you, Richards, double off and bring
them, quick!"

Five minutes later the insensible form of the man who had mislaid
Government property was borne away, and Sergeant Busby proceeded with
the identification of his less (or more) fortunate companions.  ’Erb,
the _littérateur_ of the party, read off the identity-discs one by one.

"_Smith—Turner—’Opkins_," repeated the sergeant, labouring with the
blunt pencil. "That’s the first lot of Loyals we’ve struck. There must
be a heap more somewhere; we’ll find ’em presently.  What’s the name of
this last one?  Give us his number first.  _Six-O-Four-O-Two; Private T.
Birnie_—spelt with two I’s—right!  Royal Loyals, I suppose?  _Religion_?
Eh, what’s the trouble now?"

"Sergeant," interposed ’Erb, in a puzzled voice, "look ’ere!  This ain’t
no private; it’s an orficer!  Look at his tunic—three stars, and all!"

Sergeant Busby flashed his electric torch once more.  It revealed a
grey-haired man, with a captain’s tunic wrapped round his shoulders,
tied by the sleeves.

"Yes," he announced judicially, "he’s an officer, all right; and what’s
more, he’s an officer in a Jock regiment.  I know a bit about uniforms,
my lad; and no English officer wears a cutaway tunic like that, or his
pips in that position.  And there’s his collar-badges!  He’s not a Loyal
at all, this feller; he’s a Covenanter."

"What about his identity-disc?" inquired ’Erb, respectfully.  "That says
’Private.’"

The sapient Busby pondered.  Then—

"He was a private once," he explained, "in the Loyals; then he got his
commission and was gazetted to the Covenanters; but he never got himself
issued with a new identity disc. Economical that’s what he was.  Real
Scotch, I expect! Well, if he’s an officer, we needn’t worry with his
regimental number; that goes out."  The blunt pencil thudded.  "I’ll
just put him down as _Captain Birnie, Royal Covenanters—Presbyterian_;
that’s enough.  Carry on, boys!"

The heavy-footed procession filed away through the mud, round the
traverse, and out of this narrative.

And that was how it came to pass that Sir Thomas Birnie, Baronet, of
Baronrigg, who in the humility of his heart had enlisted as a private
and died as a corporal, was buried next day, with absolute justice, as
the officer and gentleman that he really was.



                                  *II*


Meanwhile Roy, with his stout young skull almost riven by a glancing
Boche nose-cap, lay tossing and muttering in a Base Hospital.

One dream beset and obsessed him for weeks. He, Roy Birnie—the
soldierly, the punctilious, the immaculate—had been haled by an escort
of overwhelming numbers and terrifying appearance before his commanding
officer—Uncle Alan, swollen to enormous size and invested with
Mephistophelean eyebrows—upon the charge of coming upon parade
improperly dressed.  It was not merely a question of an unbuttoned
pocket, or a pair of badly-wound puttees; he had paraded in his
shirt-sleeves—minus his tunic! And in his dream, try as he might, poor
Roy could not for the life of him recall, in response to the nightmare
cross-examination of his satanic superior and relative, what he had done
with it.

All he could recollect was that he had wrapped it round someone—someone
who appeared to have lost his own and to be badly in need of another;
because he was lying on the ground in the mud.  Roy had fitful glimpses
of the face—the face of a man dying in great pain, but in great peace—a
strangely familiar face.  Roy had tried to converse with its owner; but
in his dreams their intercourse was limited chiefly to intensely
affectionate smiles.  Then, suddenly, he had recognised the face, and
was stooping, in an awkward, boyish fashion, to kiss it, when something
happened, and he remembered no more.



                                 *III*


Gradually these troubled visions faded, and with the steady healing of
his wound came healthy sleep and tranquillity of mind.  Finally he came
to himself; and one bright morning in May was carried on board a
hospital ship and transferred, across the most efficiently guarded strip
of water in the world, to a convalescent hospital in a great country
house in Kent.

That night he slept in a little room in a long passage full of doors,
behind each of which lay a boy, seldom older than himself, who had
squandered his youth, mayhap a limb, too often his whole constitution,
in the service of his country.

Next morning, when he awoke, the sun was streaming down the passage.
All the doors stood wide open, and the air was rent by a raucous and
irregular chorus, proceeding from the doorways and beginning:

    Nurse, Nurse, I’m feeling rather worse;
    Come and kiss me on my little brow!


Words of rebuke were audible, and the riot died down.  A majestic young
woman, admirably composed, presented herself at Roy’s door.

"Good morning, Captain Birnie.  I hope you slept well."

"Thank you, I did," replied Roy.  "Are you the Sister?"

Across the passage came a voice:

"Let me present you, sir, to Little Lily, our Cross Red nurse!  She—"

The lady indicated whirled round upon the offender, whose grinning face,
partially obscured by a patch over one eye, could be discerned upon the
pillow of the bed in the room opposite.

"Mr. Abercrombie," she announced, "if you can’t behave I shall report
you to the Matron."

Mr. Abercrombie was all contrition at once.

"All right, Nurse!" he announced.  "I apologise!  I only want to warn
you, sir," he added to Roy, "that she’s married!  But she never tells us
that until it’s too late!  _Do_ be careful!"

Little Lily, the Cross Red nurse—otherwise the Lady Hermione
Mulready—turned an unruffled countenance to Roy.  It was true that she
was married; she possessed what Mr. Abercrombie would have called "a
perfectly good husband of her own" in the Irish Guards.  She had once
possessed two brothers also, somewhat akin in appearance and disposition
to the effervescent Abercrombie.  Perhaps that was why she suffered his
impertinences so readily.

"Here is your breakfast, Captain Birnie," she continued.  "The Matron
says you can’t have bacon yet; but if you are good you may reach an
ordinary diet next week."

Roy thanked her.

"After breakfast," he asked politely, "may I write a letter—just one?
And see a paper? I’m a bit behind with the war, and—"

"You can have anything you want, in reason, so long as you lie still and
don’t fidget.  We have enough babies in this place already!" announced
Little Lily, with a withering glance in the direction of the room
opposite where Master Abercrombie was acting foolishly.

"It’s all right," Roy assured her.  "You will have no trouble with me.
I’m quite an old man, really: a kind husband, and an indulgent father,
and all that," he added, with a curious little air of pomposity.

His nurse looked down upon him with quickened interest.

"Are you a father?" she asked.

"Yes.  Only just, though!  I—I—haven’t seen It yet!"  His voice quivered
suddenly, to think how near he had gone to not seeing It at all.

"I am glad you came through," said Little Lily quietly; and handed him
_The Times_ to read with his breakfast.

Roy poured out his tea, stretched back luxuriously, and unfolded the
paper.  Like most of us in those days, he turned first to the casualty
list. The names of the officers alone filled two columns.

"I wonder if my old cracked cranium has figured here yet," he ruminated.
"What a nice little thrill if it’s in to-day!"

He glanced down the long list of wounded.

"No, nothing doing!  It has probably been in already."  He turned in
more leisurely fashion to the previous column, and began to read the
names of the killed.  But his eye got no further than the first name.
There were no A’s to-day: this began with B.


He laid the paper down, and grinned to himself.

"I’d rather read it than be it!" he reflected.

Then, suddenly, a blinding thought smote him.

Marjorie!  What if she had seen it?  He sat up excitedly, as a further
probability occurred to him.

"She must have been notified privately by the War Office long ago.
Then, of all times!"  He was talking to himself now, in a low, agitated
voice.  "My God!  I wonder where she is!  The old man never told me when
he wired; but he’ll know."  His voice rose.  "Nurse!  Nurse!  Nurse!"

"Great Scott!" announced Mr. Abercrombie from the opposite room: "The
lad has succumbed already!  And I _warned_ him!"

But already Lady Hermione’s tall figure was framed in Roy’s doorway.

"Here I am," she said.  "Don’t shout, please. You will find a bell-push
under your pillow, if you look....  Why, my _dear_, what is it?"

Roy handed her the paper, pointing dumbly.

"My wife!" he whispered.  "She’ll think I’m—  And I don’t even know
where she is—to contradict it!  Have you a telephone here?  Could you
ring up Lord Eskerley’s house in London? He’ll know!  He knows
everything!  He knows—"

Lady Hermione laid a cool hand upon his bandaged forehead.

"Don’t get flustered!" she said.  "Get up, and put on your
dressing-gown.  I will show you where the telephone is."

Next moment, with Roy swaying on her arm, she was sailing down the
passage in the direction of the office in the front hall.

"They’re keeping company already!  Quick work!  Quick work!" commented
Master Abercrombie, admiringly.




                             *CHAPTER XXII*

                           *THE MILLS OF GOD*


"He must have left a will of some kind," said Lord Eskerley.

"He made one before he went to France," I replied; "but that has been
invalidated by his marriage.  It doesn’t really matter; because
everything—the baronetcy, Baronrigg, and so on—will pass automatically
to the child."

"Still, you know what lawyers are when a man dies intestate!  There will
be nothing left worth scraping up if we don’t provide something of a
documentary nature for them to bite on.  Didn’t they find anything in
his pockets, when they—found him?"

"Nothing but his cigarette-case, and Marjorie’s last letter."

We were standing in the outer library of Lord Eskerley’s great house in
Curzon Street.  It was a bright morning in May, and the sun, streaming
between the heavy window-curtains, made the rest of the room look more
than usually funereal by comparison.  At one end, double doors opened
into his lordship’s _sanctum sanctorum_, where few but the faithful
Meadows ever presumed to track him.  At the other yawned a great empty
fireplace, with a curiously carved mantelpiece, over which hung Millais’
radiant portrait of Lady Eskerley as a bride.

Beside the fire-place stood the secretary’s own particular
writing-table.  To the wall just above it was fixed an incongruously
modern-looking telephone switch-board.  Lord Eskerley’s eye fell on
this; and he was off in a moment down one of his usual by-paths.

"Private wire, and so on!" he explained. "Meadows had it put in.  He
just pushes a few buttons, and puts a plug in a hole; and I can
telephone not only to the outside world but direct to the office, or the
War Cabinet, or to my own bathroom.  Wonderful invention!  Wonderful
fellow!  It’s the devil, though, when he goes out for a walk: I’m no
good at it myself.  I tried to ring up the P.M. the other day, and found
myself breathing private and confidential war secrets to my own
laundry-maid.  By the way, have you looked through those things yet?
You may find what you want there."

He pointed to the corner of the room, where a mud-stained, sun-bleached
Wolseley valise of green Willesden canvas lay rolled and strapped. It
had once been Roy’s, and had arrived the previous day, forwarded to me
as next-of-kin, bearing that pitiful designation: "_Deceased Officers
Effects_."

"I will go through it this morning," I said, "and report.  Eric is
coming along; he’ll help me.  By the way, how is Marjorie to-day?  Eric
is sure to want to know."

"Why should he want to know—eh?  Why this solicitude?"

"I don’t know.  He always does.  Why shouldn’t he take an interest in
her, like the rest of us?"

But plainly my old friend was not quite satisfied.

"To take an interest in a beautiful young widow is right and proper," he
said—"especially if you happen to be an eligible D.S.O.  But not too
premature an interest, please!  Bethune is a gallant soldier; but fine
feeling never was his _forte_."  Suddenly the old man blazed up.  "Good
God!  Has he realised that the poor child doesn’t even know she is a
widow?"

That Eric should be taking, or ever have taken, a more than fatherly
interest in Marjorie was news to me.  I am not very perceptive in these
matters; but the possibility of such a thing explained a good deal to
me—Eric’s persistent dislike of Roy, for instance.  Still, I had no
desire to pursue the topic; and switched accordingly.

"I am afraid she will have to be told now," I said.  "It’s in the paper
this morning.  People will be writing to condole, and so on."

"I know," said Lord Eskerley.  "I shall tell her myself—this afternoon."
He shook his white head sorrowfully.  "It will be pretty awful, though:
a woman ought to do it really."  He glanced up at the portrait of his
long dead wife.  "We will give her one more morning, poor little soul!
Hark!"

The door into the hall stood open; so, apparently, did the door of
Marjorie’s room, on the first floor above us.  As we stood, we could
hear her voice uplifted in a somewhat exaggerated apostrophe to her own
son; also that self-satisfied infant’s gurgling reception of the same.
Mother and son, by the way, had been in the house for more than three
weeks, having been conveyed thither from a nursing home in Kensington,
where, thanks to the timely warning of a flamboyant but attractive young
person named Liss Lyle, we had been constrained to look for them. Miss
Lyle was now our constant visitor, and had completely enmeshed the
hitherto impregnable Meadows.

"Extraordinary gibberish, baby talk!" remarked Lord Eskerley.
"Primeval, of course, and quite unaltered through the ages."  Then,
suddenly:

"Poor child, she’s had a hard time!  Three years of exhausting
self-imposed drudgery—then maternity!  And now she has to be told that
she’s a widow.  My God, Alan, how I hate Wilhelm sometimes!  And he once
dined in this house!"

"What is the news, by the way?" I asked.

"Good, decidedly good!  I think we have the Boche cold at last.
Internally Germany is on her last legs.  Only one thing could have
braced her up—a spectacular success last March.  As things turned out,
that enterprise went off at half-cock—though it gave us a most salutary
scare.  Now our morale is returning: Foch has the situation well in
hand.  I fancy he will encourage the enemy to attack a little longer:
then, when he has blown a few more swollen salients in our line, come
right back at him and puncture them one by one.  That and the arrival of
the Americans—they are splendid troops, I hear, and are being rushed
over at the rate of three hundred thousand a month now—should put the
last nail into the Teutonic coffin."  The old man paused, and sighed.
"Not before it was time, though!  Our casualties passed the three
million mark the other day, Alan!  Still, our tribulations of the past
three months may have been worth while.  They have taught us two things:
firstly, that this blundering, flat-footed old country of ours retains
its ancient staying-power; secondly, never to be too cocksure about
winning until you have won!  What time is he coming?"

"Eleven o’clock," I replied, concluding that this lightning reference
was to Eric.

"Umph!  I have to be at Downing Street at twelve.  Meanwhile, I shall be
in my own inner chamber if you want me.  Good-bye!  There are cigarettes
in that box.  Poor little girl!"

The double doors closed, and I was left alone.

I unstrapped Roy’s valise without much difficulty—my comminuted
collar-bone was mending nicely, though I had been warned that I might
never be able to wield a salmon-rod again—and emptied out its jumbled
contents on to the floor. At the same moment Eric was announced.

"Come along," I said, "and get that new tin arm of yours to work.  Sort
out everything in the shape of papers from that mess, and let us go
through them."

"Are we looking for anything in particular?" asked Eric, reluctantly
setting to work.  He always hated drudgery.

"Roy’s will."

Eric nodded; and laid a heap of documents on the table.  There was a
tattered sheaf of battalion orders; an old field dispatch book, a number
of maps; and a bundle of letters.

"I fancy the letters are from Marjorie," I said. "We need not bother to
read them."

"How is she, by the way?" asked Eric, looking up.

"Getting along, I believe."

"One would like to show her any little kindness that is possible," Eric
continued.  "One has sent her flowers, of course, and so on.  Is there
anything else?  I wonder if she would like to see me?  It would probably
do her good."

It was the old touch.  I smiled despite myself.

"I wouldn’t suggest it at present, if I were you," I said.  "She is to
have some news broken to her this afternoon."

"You mean—?"

I nodded.

"It’s in the paper this morning," I said.  "The War Office telegram we
could keep from her; but not that."

Eric was silent, and began to turn over the papers.

"These maps had better go back to Ordnance," he remarked.  "They ought
to have been taken out at Battalion Headquarters, by rights.  Some of
these old Orders are interesting: they have a musty flavour now.  Listen
to this":


_The C.O. has observed that N.C.O.’s and Men are falling into the habit
of washing their gas-helmets._


"Do you remember those noisome old flannel jelly-bags, Alan?"

"I do!  They were abolished, as far as I can remember, about the middle
of nineteen sixteen."

"Yes, that’s right.  They were about as much use as the sick headache
which they produced."


_Officers Commanding Companies will see that this practice is
discontinued at once.  Helmets so washed are entirely useless against a
gas attack._


"Still," I commented, "if you wore them unwashed you died whether there
was a gas attack on or not; so altogether, I don’t blame the washers!"

"Hallo," continued Eric; "here’s a _billet-doux_ from Corps
Headquarters."

"What is it?"

Eric grinned.

"_Mules, Brief Notes on the Treatment of_. They do manage to think of
things on  Olympus!..."

_The mule is much more dainty about what he drinks than about what he
eats._


"I think that’s true: my last consignment ate seventeen nose-bags and
three pack-saddles in a single night."


_The mule is not really of a vicious disposition; he is only shy and
nervous, and is very responsive to petting—_


"So am I, for that matter!  But let’s get on, Eric.  Here’s a field
despatch book.  It has been lying in a puddle, I fancy: these carbon
duplicates have run a bit.  Never mind!  I don’t suppose there is
anything of importance inside it."

"The only legible despatch is the last one," said Eric, turning over the
pages.  "A pretty stately epistle, too!  Listen!"


_To O.C. 7th Battalion, the Grampian Regiment._

_Sir,—Reference your FZ/357, in which it is stated that the one hundred
picks and shovels which this Battalion was directed to hand over to
yours on the 16th inst. were handed over deficient five picks and four
shovels; I am to inform you that an N.C.O. was duly sent in charge of
the picks and shovels in a G.S. Waggon to Bluepoint Farm at seven a.m.
on that date, and there handed over the full number of picks and shovels
to an N.C.O. of your Battalion, who counted them and gave a receipt for
same, a copy of which I now enclose._

_Your obedient servant,_
  _R. T. C. Birnie, Lieut.,_
     _For Lt.-Col. Commanding_
  _2nd Battalion, Royal Covenanters._


"That fairly puts it across the Grampian Regiment!" was Eric’s verdict.
"I congratulate you!"

"It was Roy who was responsible," I said. "He got me out of a nasty mess
with the C.R.E. by producing that receipt.  He was a grand adjutant,
bless him!"

Eric continued to turn over the leaves of the despatch book.

"There is nothing in the shape of a will or testament here," he said at
last.  "No; wait a minute; there’s something in the pocket of the flap."

He held the pocket open, and shook out its contents on to the table
cloth—two faded slips of pinkish paper.

"These don’t look very promising," he said. "Field telegraph
despatches!"

He unfolded the first slip, smoothed it out, and read aloud:


_The expression "Dud" will no longer be employed in Official
Correspondence._


He laughed.  "There’s Staff work for you!"

"Eric—!" I began suddenly.  Some inward monitor had jerked an alarm-cord
in my brain. Where had I heard that message before?  And in conjunction
with what?  I leaned across the table and stretched out my hand; but
already Eric had unfolded the second despatch, and was smoothing it out
with the wrist of his artificial arm.  I noticed that a covering slip
was pinned to the despatch.


_Passed to you_, read Eric—_for immediate compliance, please.—J. E. F._


"That was old Forrester, the Brigade Major. It sounds quite urgent; I
wonder what it is all about."

"Eric—!" I said again.  Then, suddenly, I held my peace.  Who was I, to
interfere with God?

"Hallo," continued Eric—"here’s my name!"


_Lieutenant-Colonel E. F. B. Bethune, D.S.O., Commanding Second
Battalion Royal Covenanters—_


He stopped suddenly—as I knew he would.  I looked up, and watched his
face go white, as he read the message to the end.  I saw him re-read it,
again and again.  Then he examined the date, and hour of despatch.  Then
came a long, deathly silence.

At last he lifted his face to me—the face of a man suddenly aged.  He
pushed the pink slip in my direction.

"Have you ever seen that before?" he asked, in a hoarse voice.

I read the message mechanically through, though I knew it by heart.  It
said:


_Lt.-Col E. F. B. Bethune, D.S.O., Commanding Second Battalion, Royal
Covenanters, will return home forthwith, and report to War Office._




                            *CHAPTER XXIII*

                       *THE SOUL OF ERIC BETHUNE*


How long we sat there I do not know.  But at last I was conscious that
Eric was speaking again.

"When did Roy Birnie get this?"

"Immediately after you had moved off with the battalion—that afternoon
at Caterpillar Farm, before the Somme show.  He and I stayed to clear
up, you remember?"

"Yes, yes!" he muttered, staring at the paper. "I remember.  But—but why
didn’t he give it to me?  Didn’t he realise what it meant?"

"Yes, he realised all right.  That was why he didn’t give it to you."

Eric took up the despatch in his shaking hand.

"Roy Birnie deliberately held that back?" he said.

I nodded.

"And you?"

"Don’t ask me about it," I replied, lighting my pipe and feeling
thoroughly uncomfortable. "It’s no part of a second-in-command’s duty to
supervise the adjutant’s correspondence."

"But—didn’t he show it to you?"

"Now you ask me, he did."

"But—but—it would have put you in command of the battalion!"

"My dear sir," I explained gruffly, "a man can’t take command of a
battalion if the adjutant neglects to publish the order which appoints
him."  I felt horribly mean, but this seemed to me to be a case where
the dead could most conveniently bear the responsibility.

Suddenly Eric rose to his feet.  I glanced at him, and flinched, for I
knew what was coming. The colour had come back to his face, and his blue
eyes were aglow.  He was "up in the cloods."  He came round to my side
of the table, and laid his hands on my shoulders.  It was strange to
feel the lifeless weight of his artificial arm.  I flinched again, and
made a testy reference to my comminuted collar-bone.

But Eric was not to be denied.  He had been exposed to himself as an
incompetent and a failure; but what mattered more—solely—to him was that
the world did not know about it; Roy and I had saved him from that.  All
that was grateful in his nature had been roused by that infernal
telegram.  He sat down beside me and took my hand in his.  I felt very
ridiculous.

"My God, old man," he said, "you saved me! You two saved me from being
broke!  You, who might have commanded the battalion—and young Roy!
Young Roy!  After what I had done to him—and—tried to do to him!"

"Oh, come!" I said.  "You were a bit of a martinet, sometimes—the heavy
C.O., and all that—but there’s no need to reproach yourself over Roy."

Eric let go my hand—greatly to my relief— and began to walk about the
room.  Suddenly he turned to me.

"Alan, old man," he said, "do you know exactly what I did to Roy?  I
tried to take his girl away from him!"

I looked up.  Lord Eskerley had been right, as usual.

"You mean—Marjorie?"

"Yes—Marjorie!  Not once—nor twice—not accidentally—nor casually; but
deliberately and continuously!  Listen!"  He was in the flood-tide of
confession now, and I knew that in that mood he was not apt to be
reticent.

"I made love to her at Craigfoot—in a ’you’re-a-nice-little-girl’ sort
of way—while Roy was at Sandhurst.  I made love to her in London, when I
was on leave and he was in France—took her out to dinner and lunch, and
so on—"

"Why not?  It was up to her to refuse."

"She didn’t refuse."

"In that case, she must have found your society agreeable."

"No, she didn’t!  I am pretty vain about myself, Alan; but I could see
she didn’t!"

"Then why did she accept your invitations?"

"I fancy it was because it gave her a chance to talk about the
regiment—which meant Roy. Not that she ever mentioned him; but—I see it
now!  My God, what a cad I was!  I let her sit there, while I crabbed
him—talked patronisingly of him—belittled the good work he had always
done for me and my battalion.  Ugh!"

"Did you really care for her?"

"I was fascinated by her for the time.  She is a glorious creature!"

"She certainly is."

"But I think that in the main it was jealousy—jealousy of Roy’s youth,
and the fact that instead of being my son, as he might have been, he was
my rival.  It was a mad business altogether.  Finally, I asked her to
marry me."

"She turned you down?"  It was an unnecessary remark.

"Of course she turned me down!  But she did it very sweetly.  She was
rather apologetic about it; said she was engaged already, and perhaps
she ought to have made that fact a little clearer to me from the start;
only she never suspected, and so on."

"She didn’t mention Roy’s name, I suppose?"

"No!  I half thought that she would, just to score me off.  It would
have been a real slap in the face for me, his Colonel, if she had.  But
she didn’t: she just said she was very, very sorry, but that she was
engaged to some one else!"

"Well, there was no great harm done," I said, wishing he would stop.
But he had not finished yet.

"And then—oh Lord, Alan!—do you know what I did then?  I turned round on
her, like a spoiled child, and accused her of having flirted with me,
and led me on!  And, not content with that, I turned on the pathetic
tap.  I said something rotten about expecting a little more
consideration from her, seeing that I was going back to the trenches
to-morrow—and muck like that!  And she just looked at me, and said,
quite quietly: ’He is there, too—now!’  As if I didn’t know!  Oh, what a
miserable rotter I was—and am!"

He dropped into a chair, and buried his face in his arms.  He was "doon
in the midden" now.  I puffed wretchedly at my pipe and longed, from the
bottom of my heart, for an air raid. I found myself wondering whether
Marjorie had ever told Roy of this incident.  I decided that my Eve
would not have done so; and therefore probably not Marjorie.

Presently Eric began to talk again, with his forehead still close to the
table.

"And this very morning," he said bitterly—"with Roy’s death hardly made
public—I came to this house fooling round Roy’s widow with flowers, and
silly old man’s messages!  I believe I was actually jealous of the dead,
Alan!  Well, that’s over now.  I needn’t insult her any more—or him!"
He sat up again, and took the pink slip.  "This has killed my conceit at
last—and perhaps saved my soul.  Thank God I came across it!  It has
brought me to myself.  And thank _you_, old friend"—Eric turned swiftly
to me, and his face broke into the smile that I loved—"for what you did
for me!  You saved me from being sent home!  Yes, and you provided me
with a far more creditable exit from my soldiering career than I ever
deserved!"

"That’s all right," I said.  "Let’s clear up these papers."

But Eric was not listening.  He had fallen into a rare mood—gentle and
frank.  He talked on—more calmly now.

"Men are queer mixtures.  And, oh Lord, how truly some women judge us!
Marjorie saw through me from the start, I believe.  So did Diana.  Did
you ever know why she broke off our engagement?"

I shook my head.  I had not heard Eric mention Diana’s name for twenty
years.

"Eve and I never spoke of it," I said.

"No, of course; you two wouldn’t—being you two.  Well, Diana said to me,
quite suddenly, one day: ’Eric, I want to tell you that I can’t marry
you after all.’  Just that!  Of course, I asked her why."

"That was probably a mistake."

"It was.  She asked me not to press her; but, being me, that only made
me more unreasonable. So finally she told me.

"’Eric,’ she said, ’I am very fond of you; I always shall be—more than I
care to think about. But you have one fault that I can’t get over: you
have a mean streak in you.  I would take you with every other fault in
the world—but not that!  So—good-bye!’  They were the last words she
ever spoke to me.  You know, she was like that.  I took my medicine with
a smiling face, as you may remember; but it hurt like hell—and it taught
me nothing!  Well"—he tapped the telegraph form—"here is my second dose!
It has got home this time.  I _have_ a mean streak in me, and I know it
at last!  Still"—he rose to his feet and held up his right hand: he
could never resist the dramatic touch—"it’s not too late.  I am still on
the right side of fifty; and I am going to spend the rest of my life
eradicating that yellow streak from my system. I think I can do it.  A
thing’s never dangerous once you know it’s there."  Suddenly he leaned
over towards me.  "Alan, old boy, I’m not a _hopeless_ outsider, am I?
Tell me!  You know me!  What am I?"

"You are what I have always thought you," I said—"a very brave soldier,
with a weakness for facing difficult situations with both eyes shut!
Also, you are my oldest friend.  Now, for goodness sake, let’s clear up
this mess, and report entire lack of progress to Eskerley!"

The telephone bell rang sharply.




                             *CHAPTER XXIV*

                               *THROUGH*


The double doors at the end of the room swung back, and Lord Eskerley
appeared.  The bell was still ringing.  A tiny hinged metal flap on the
switchboard had fallen open, revealing a white disc with a number on it.
His Lordship gazed absently down upon the apparatus.

"The inestimable Meadows is still taking the air," he said, "so I must
tackle this contraption myself.  Let me think; what is the combination?"

He peered at the vibrating flap and the revealed number.

"Three!" he announced.  "Aha!  I haven’t the faintest notion what that
implies.  Let us stop this noise, anyhow."

He pushed up the flap again, and the bell stopped ringing.

"Shall we retire?" I asked.

"No, no, no!  If it’s desperately confidential I will switch it through
to the instrument in my room; but I don’t expect"—he put the receiver to
his ear—"Who wants me?  What wants me? ... Caperton?  Never heard of
him! Oh, an exchange?  A locality?  A trunk call? Very well!  _Rien ne
m’étonne_!  Carry on!"

Lord Eskerley’s back was turned to us. Suddenly I saw his shoulders
stiffen; he caught his breath sharply.  As this was the first sign of
emotion that he had betrayed, to my knowledge, for the last thirty
years, I watched him with quickening interest.

"Yes!" he said ... "Yes, yes!  This is Lord Eskerley ... Louder,
please!"  Then came a pause, while the receiver squeaked steadily. Then,
a little unexpectedly: "Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!"

Eric was watching too, now.  The old man steadied himself, grasping the
end of the mantelpiece with his disengaged hand.  Then he looked round
over his shoulder at us, peering over his spectacles.

"A most interesting communication coming through here!" he announced.
"Forgive my demeanour!"  His voice was as harsh as ever, but there were
tears in his old eyes.  He turned to the instrument again.

"Yes," he said, "I concur.  Such a rumour would be _most_ prejudicial to
your future career. Shall we contradict it?  You are quite sure it’s
incorrect?" ... He chuckled; so did the receiver.  Then he continued:

"Eh? ... Oh!  Naturally!  You would like to do that at once? ... Yes, I
think I can put you in communication with the party in question....
When?  Oh, within a fairly reasonable interval of time, I hope.  Let us
say next week—"  He moved the receiver a few inches away from his ear.
"I can hear you quite easily in your ordinary voice, thanks!"

He chuckled again, laid down the receiver, and brooded once more over
the switchboard.  Then, after a brief mental calculation, he selected a
plug at the end of a wire, thrust it into a hole, and pressed a small
ivory button.

A bell rang faintly upstairs, then ceased sharply. Our noble operator
took up the receiver again.

"That you, Habakkuk?" he inquired.... "Good!  Some mysterious individual
in Kent wishes to speak to you on the telephone. Wonderful invention!"

The old gentleman made a final adjustment of the switches on the board,
and spoke for the last time—apparently to the person in Kent:

"You still there?"

The telephone vibrated stormily.

"All right!  You are through to her—dear boy!"

He hung up the receiver, and left them together.




                                THE END




                          The Riverside Press
                       CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
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