If Winter Comes Part 40

Young Perch!

V

In the morning a mysterious man with a large white face, crooked spectacles and a crooked tie, and a suggestion of thinking all the time of something else, or of nothing at all, mysteriously drifted into the house, drifted about it with apparent complete aimlessness of purpose, and presently showed himself to Sabre as about to drift out of it again.

This was the doctor, a stranger, one of those new faces which the war, removing the old, was everywhere introducing, and possessed of a mysterious and astounding faculty of absorbing, resolving, and subjugating all matters without visibly attending to any matter. "Leave everything to me," it was all he seemed to say. He did nothing yet everything seemed to come to his hand with the nicety and exactness of a drawing-room conjurer. He bewildered Sabre.

His car left and returned during his brief visit. Sabre, who had thought him upstairs, and who had a hundred perplexities to inquire of him, found him in the hall absorbed in adjusting the weights of a grandfather's clock.

He remarked to Sabre, "I thought you'd gone. You'd better get off and get a bath and some breakfast. Nothing you can do here. Leave everything to me."

"But, look here, I can't leave--"

"That's all right. Just leave everything to me. I'm taking Miss Bright back to my wife for breakfast and a rest. After lunch I'll run her to her home. She can't stay here. Have you any idea how this thing hooks on?"

"But what about--"

The extraordinary man seemed to know everything before it was said.

"That's all right. I've sent for a woman and her daughter. Leave everything to me. Here's the car. Here they are."

Two women appeared.

"But about--"

"Yes, that's all right. The poor old lady's brother is coming down.

He'll take charge. I found his name in her papers last night.

Telegraphed." He was looking through the door. "Here's the answer."

A telegraph messenger appeared.

Astounding man!

He read the telegram. "Yes, that's all right. He'll be here by the eleven train at Tidborough. I'll take Miss Bright now."

Effie appeared.

Sabre had the feeling that if he opened the next thought in his mind, an undertaker would rise out of the ground with a coffin. This astonishing man, coming upon his overwrought state, made him feel hysterical. He turned to Effie and gave her both his hands. "The doctor's taking you, Effie. It's been dreadful for you. It's all over now. Try to leave it out of your mind for a bit."

She smiled sadly. "Good-by, Mr. Sabre. Thank you so much, so very much, for coming and staying. What I should have done without you I daren't think. I've never known any one so good as you've been to me."

"I've done nothing, Effie, except feel sorry for you."

He saw her into the car. No, he would not take a lift.

"Well, leave everything to me," said the doctor. The chauffeur spoke to him about some engine trouble. "Yes, I'll see to that. Leave everything to me, Jenkins."

Even his car!

VI

Sabre, pa.s.sed on from the ordeal of the night to the ordeal of the day by this interlude of the astonishing doctor, did not know how overwrought he was until he was at home again and come to Mabel seated at breakfast. The thought in his mind as he walked had been the thought in his mind as he had sat on after the death, waiting for morning. After this, after the war had done this, how was he to go on enduring the war and refused part in it? He dreaded meeting Mabel. He dreaded going on to the office and meeting Fortune and Twyning. To none of these people, to no one he could meet, could he explain how he felt about Young Perch and what he had gone through with Mrs. Perch, nor why, because of what he felt, more poignant than ever was his need to get into the war. And yet with these feelings he must go on facing these people and go on meeting the war in every printed page, in every sight, in every conversation.

Unbearable! He could not.

Mabel looked up from her breakfast. "Well, I do think--"

This was the beginning of it. He felt himself digging his nails into the palms of his hands. "I've been up with old Mrs. Perch--"

"I know you have. I sent around to the Farguses. I must say I do think--"

He felt he could not bear it. "Mabel, look here. For goodness' sake don't say you do think I ought to have let you know. I know I ought but I couldn't. And I'm not in a state to go on niggling about it. Young Perch is killed and his mother's dead. Now for goodness' sake, for pity's sake, let it alone. I couldn't send and there's the end of it."

He went out of the room. He thought, "There you are! Now I've done it!"

He went back. "I say, I'm sorry for bursting out like that; but I've had rather a night of it. It's terrible, isn't it, both of them like that?

Aren't you awfully sorry about it, Mabel?"

She said, "I'm very sorry. Very sorry indeed. But you can't expect me to say much when you speak in that extraordinary manner."

"I was with her when she died. It's upset me a bit."

"I don't wonder. If you ask me, I think it was very extraordinary your being there. If you ask me, I think it was very funny of that Miss Bright sending for you at that hour of the night. Whyever should she send for you of all people?"

"I was their greatest friend."

"Yes, I know you always liked them. But you couldn't be of any use. I must say I do think people are very funny sometimes. If Miss Bright had done the right thing, as we are their nearest neighbors, she would have sent and asked me if I could let one of the maids go over and be with her. Then you could have gone up too if you'd wished and could have come back again. I don't think she had any right to send for you."

He had sat down and was about to pour himself out some tea. He put down the teapot and got up. "Look here, do me a favour. They're dead, both of them. Don't say anything more about them. Don't mention the subject again. For G.o.d's sake."

He went out of the house and got his bicycle and set out for the office.

At the top of the Green he pa.s.sed young Pinnock, the son of Pinnock's Stores. Some patch of colour about young Pinnock caught his eye. He looked again. The colour was a vivid red crown on a khaki bra.s.sard on the young man's arm. The badge of the recruits enrolled under the Derby enlistment scheme. He dismounted. "Hullo, Pinnock. How on earth did you get that armlet?"

"I've joined up."

"But I thought you'd been rejected about forty times. Haven't you got one foot in the grave or something?"

Young Pinnock grinned hugely. "Don't matter if you've got both feet in, or head and shoulders neither, over at Chovensbury to-day, Mr. Sabre.

It's the last day of this yer Derby scheme, an' there's such a rush of chaps to get in before they make conscripts of 'em they're fair letting anybody through."

Sabre's heart--that very heart!--bounded with an immense hope. "D'you think it's the same at Tidborough?"

"They're saying it's the same everywhere. They say they're pa.s.sing you through if you can breathe. I reckon that's so at Chovensbury anyway.

Why, they didn't hardly look at me."

Sabre turned his front wheel to the Chovensbury road. "I'll go there."

VII