All Roads Lead to Calvary Part 35

Joan told her plans. "You'll be able to get along without me for a little while?" she asked doubtfully.

Mrs. Denton laughed. "I haven't much more to do," she answered. "Just tidying up, as you see; and two or three half-finished things I shall try to complete. After that, I'll perhaps take a rest."

She took from among the litter a faded photograph and handed it to Joan.

"Odd," she said. "I've just turned it out."

It represented a long, thin line of eminently respectable ladies and gentlemen in early Victorian costume. The men in peg-top trousers and silk stocks, the women in crinolines and poke bonnets. Among them, holding the hand of a benevolent-looking, stoutish gentleman, was a mere girl. The terminating frills of a white unmentionable garment showed beneath her skirts. She wore a porkpie hat with a feather in it.

"My first public appearance," explained Mrs. Denton. "I teased my father into taking me with him. We represented Great Britain and Ireland. I suppose I'm the only one left."

"I shouldn't have recognized you," laughed Joan. "What was the occasion?"

"The great International Peace Congress at Paris," explained Mrs. Denton; "just after the Crimean war. It made quite a stir at the time. The Emperor opened our proceedings in person, and the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury both sent us their blessing. We had a copy of the speeches presented to us on leaving, in every known language in Europe, bound in vellum. I'm hoping to find it. And the Press was enthusiastic. There were to be Acts of Parliament, Courts of Arbitration, International Laws, Diplomatic Treaties. A Sub-Committee was appointed to prepare a special set of prayers and a Palace of Peace was to be erected. There was only one thing we forgot, and that was the foundation."

"I may not be here," she continued, "when the new plans are submitted.

Tell them not to forget the foundation this time. Tell them to teach the children."

Joan dined at a popular restaurant that evening. She fancied it might cheer her up. But the noisy patriotism of the over-fed crowd only irritated her. These elderly, flabby men, these fleshy women, who would form the spectators, who would loll on their cushioned seats protected from the sun, munching contentedly from their well-provided baskets while listening to the dying groans rising upwards from the drenched arena. She glanced from one podgy thumb to another and a feeling of nausea crept over her.

Suddenly the band struck up "G.o.d Save the King." Three commonplace enough young men, seated at a table near to her, laid down their napkins and stood up. Yes, there was something to be said for war, she felt, as she looked at their boyish faces, transfigured. Not for them Business as usual, the Capture of German Trade. Other visions those young eyes were seeing. The little imp within her brain had seized his drum again.

"Follow me"--so he seemed to beat--"I teach men courage, duty, the laying down of self. I open the gates of honour. I make heroes out of dust.

Isn't it worth my price?"

A figure was loitering the other side of the street when she reached home. She thought she somehow recognized it, and crossed over. It was McKean, smoking his everlasting pipe. Success having demanded some such change, he had migrated to "The Albany," and she had not seen him for some time. He had come to have a last look at the house--in case it might happen to be the last. He was off to Scotland the next morning, where he intended to "join up."

"But are you sure it's your particular duty?" suggested Joan. "I'm told you've become a household word both in Germany and France. If we really are out to end war and establish the brotherhood of nations, the work you are doing is of more importance than even the killing of Germans. It isn't as if there wouldn't be enough without you."

"To tell the truth," he answered, "that's exactly what I've been saying to myself. I shan't be any good. I don't see myself sticking a bayonet into even a German. Unless he happened to be abnormally clumsy. I tried to shoot a rabbit once. I might have done it if the little beggar, instead of running away, hadn't turned and looked at me."

"I should keep out of it if I were you," laughed Joan.

"I can't," he answered. "I'm too great a coward."

"An odd reason for enlisting," thought Joan.

"I couldn't face it," he went on; "the way people would be looking at me in trains and omnibuses; the things people would say of me, the things I should imagine they were saying; what my valet would be thinking of me.

Oh, I'm ashamed enough of myself. It's the artistic temperament, I suppose. We must always be admired, praised. We're not the stuff that martyrs are made of. We must for ever be kow-towing to the cackling geese around us. We're so terrified lest they should hiss us."

The street was empty. They were pacing it slowly, up and down.

"I've always been a coward," he continued. "I fell in love with you the first day I met you on the stairs. But I dared not tell you."

"You didn't give me that impression," answered Joan.

She had always found it difficult to know when to take him seriously and when not.

"I was so afraid you would find it out," he explained.

"You thought I would take advantage of it," she suggested.

"One can never be sure of a woman," he answered. "And it would have been so difficult. There was a girl down in Scotland, one of the village girls. It wasn't anything really. We had just been children together.

But they all thought I had gone away to make my fortune so as to come back and marry her--even my mother. It would have looked so mean if after getting on I had married a fine London lady. I could never have gone home again."

"But you haven't married her--or have you?" asked Joan.

"No," he answered. "She wrote me a beautiful letter that I shall always keep, begging me to forgive her, and hoping I might be happy. She had married a young farmer, and was going out to Canada. My mother will never allow her name to be mentioned in our house."

They had reached the end of the street again. Joan held out her hand with a laugh.

"Thanks for the compliment," she said. "Though I notice you wait till you're going away before telling me."

"But quite seriously," she added, "give it a little more thought--the enlisting, I mean. The world isn't too rich in kind influences. It needs men like you. Come, pull yourself together and show a little pluck." She laughed.

"I'll try," he promised, "but it won't be any use; I shall drift about the streets, seeking to put heart into myself, but all the while my footsteps will be bearing me nearer and nearer to the recruiting office; and outside the door some girl in the crowd will smile approval or some old fool will pat me on the shoulder and I shall sneak in and it will close behind me. It must be fine to have courage."

He wrote her two days later from Ayr, giving her the name of his regiment, and again some six months later from Flanders. But there would have been no sense in her replying to that last.

She lingered in the street by herself, a little time, after he had turned the corner. It had been a house of sorrow and disappointment to her; but so also she had dreamed her dreams there, seen her visions. She had never made much headway with her landlord and her landlady: a worthy couple, who had proved most excellent servants, but who prided themselves, to use their own expression, on knowing their place and keeping themselves to themselves. Joan had given them notice that morning, and had been surprised at the woman's bursting into tears.

"I felt it just the same when young Mr. McKean left us," she explained with apologies. "He had been with us five years. He was like you, miss, so unpracticable. I'd got used to looking after him."

Mary Greyson called on her in the morning, while she was still at breakfast. She had come from seeing Francis off by an early train from Euston. He had sent Joan a ring.

"He is so afraid you may not be able to wear it--that it will not fit you," said Mary, "but I told him I was sure it would."

Joan held our her hand for the letter. "I was afraid he had forgotten it," she answered, with a smile.

She placed the ring on her finger and held out her hand. "I might have been measured for it," she said. "I wonder how he knew."

"You left a glove behind you, the first day you ever came to our house,"

Mary explained. "And I kept it."

She was following his wishes and going down into the country. They did not meet again until after the war.

Madge dropped in on her during the week and brought Flossie with her.

Flossie's husband, Sam, had departed for the Navy; and Niel Singleton, who had offered and been rejected for the Army, had joined a Red Cross unit. Madge herself was taking up canteen work. Joan rather expected Flossie to be in favour of the war, and Madge against it. Instead of which, it turned out the other way round. It seemed difficult to forecast opinion in this matter.

Madge thought that England, in particular, had been too much given up to luxury and pleasure. There had been too much idleness and empty laughter: Hitchicoo dances and women undressing themselves upon the stage. Even the working cla.s.ses seemed to think of nothing else but cinemas and beer. She dreamed of a United Kingdom purified by suffering, cleansed by tears; its people drawn together by memory of common sacrifice; cla.s.s antagonism buried in the grave where Duke's son and cook's son would lie side by side: of a new-born Europe rising from the ashes of the old. With Germany beaten, her l.u.s.t of war burnt out, her hideous doctrine of Force proved to be false, the world would breathe a freer air. Pa.s.sion and hatred would fall from man's eyes. The people would see one another and join hands.

Flossie was sceptical. "Why hasn't it done it before?" she wanted to know. "Good Lord! There's been enough of it."

"Why didn't we all kiss and be friends after the Napoleonic wars?" she demanded, "instead of getting up Peterloo ma.s.sacres, and anti-Corn Law riots, and breaking the Duke of Wellington's windows?"

"All this talk of downing Militarism," she continued. "It's like trying to do away with the other sort of disorderly house. You don't stamp out a vice by chivying it round the corner. When men and women have become decent there will be no more disorderly houses. But it won't come before. Suppose we do knock Militarism out of Germany, like we did out of France, not so very long ago? It will only slip round the corner into Russia or j.a.pan. Come and settle over here, as likely as not, especially if we have a few victories and get to fancy ourselves."

Madge was of opinion that the world would have had enough of war. Not armies but whole peoples would be involved this time. The lesson would be driven home.

"Oh, yes, we shall have had enough of it," agreed Flossie, "by the time we've paid up. There's no doubt of that. What about our children? I've just left young Frank strutting all over the house and flourishing a paper knife. And the servants have had to bar the kitchen door to prevent his bursting in every five minutes and attacking them. What's he going to say when I tell him, later on, that his father and myself have had all the war we want, and have decided there shall be no more? The old folks have had their fun. Why shouldn't I have mine? That will be his argument."