Nicky-Nan, Reservist Part 14

"You ask Mr Nanjivell! Why d'ee reckon he's puttin' a lock on his doorway, 'nless 'tis to prevent what I'm tellin' you from happenin'

again?"

Mrs Penhaligon stared about her. She went to the kitchen, she pa.s.sed through the kitchen to the inner room. . . . No children! She came down the pa.s.sage and close behind Nicky-Nan (who continued to hammer hypocritically), she gazed up the stairway and called "'Bert!"

"'Beida!" "You naughty children--come down this moment!" Still no answer.

She turned upon Nicky-Nan. "If they're really here and have been breakin' your gla.s.s--"

"You never heard no complaint from _me_, ma'am," answered Nicky-Nan, still intent on fixing his staple.

"Oh!" interposed Mrs Climoe viciously, "if you two are colleaguin'

already to hush something up, the affair lies between you, of course.

It seems odd to me, Maria Penhaligon, an' your proper husband not two days gone to the wars. But if Nicholas Nanjivell, here, chooses to play father to the fatherless an' cover up the sins of the children that go an' break his parlour windows afore my very eyes, well, 'tisn't for me to say more than I hope no harm'll come of it."

She was preparing to say more. If she said more, Nicky-Nan did not hear it. For at this moment the three Penhaligon children broke in at the porch, burst past Mrs Climoe, and clung to their mother, clamouring for dinner.

In the hubbub Nicky-Nan meanly slipped back to his den, closed the door, and dragged two chairs against it. Then he took a worn tea-tray and propped it against the window, blocking the broken panes. It seemed to him that the world had suddenly grown full of eyes, peering upon him from every side.

CHAPTER X.

THE VICAR'S MISGIVINGS.

Mrs Steele, the Vicar's wife--a refined, shy little woman, somewhat austere in self-discipline and her own devotional exercises, but incapable of harsh judgment upon any other living soul--had spent Bank Holiday in writing letters and addressing them (from a list drawn up in long consultation with her husband) to "women-workers" of all denominations in the parish, inviting them to meet in the Vicarage drawing-room at 3.30 P.M. on Wednesday, to discuss "what steps (if any) could be taken to form sewing-parties, ambulance cla.s.ses, &c.," and later to partake of afternoon tea.

The list was a depressing one, and not only because it included the names of Mrs Polsue and Miss Oliver. "It makes my heart sink," Mrs Steele confessed. "I hadn't realised till now, dear, how lonely we are--after five years, too--in this parish. Three out of every four are Nonconformists. It seems absurd, my taking the chair," she added wistfully. "Most likely they will wonder--even if they don't ask outright--what business I have to be showing the lead in this way."

The Vicar kissed his wife. "Let them wonder. And if they ask--but they won't, being west-country and well-mannered--I shall be here to answer."

"I wish you would answer them before they start to ask. That would be running no risks. A few words from you, just to explain and put them at their ease--"

He laughed. "Cunning woman!" said he, addressing an invisible audience. "She means, 'to put _her_ at her ease,' by my taking over the few well-chosen remarks expected of the chairwoman. . . .

My dear, I know you will be horribly nervous, and it would be easy enough for me to do the talking. But I am not going to, and for two reasons. To begin with, you will do it better--"

"My _dear_ Robert!"

"Twice as effectively--and all the more effectively if you contrive to break down. _That_ would conciliate them at once; for it would be evident proof that you disliked the job."

"I don't quite see."

"The religion of these good people very largely consists in shaping their immortal souls against the grain: and I admire it, in a sense, though on the whole it's not comparable with ours, which works towards G.o.d by love through a natural felicity. Still, it is disciplinary, and this country will have great use for it in the next few months. To do everything you dislike, and to do it thoroughly, will carry you quite a long way in war-time. The point at which Protestantism becomes disreputable is when you so far yield to loving your neighbour that you start chastising his sins to the neglect of your own. I have never quite understood why charity should begin at home, but I am sure that discipline ought to: and I sometimes think it ought to stay there."

"That Mrs Polsue has such a disapproving face! . . . I wonder she ever brought herself to marry."

"If you had only been following my argument, Agatha, you would see that probably she had no time for repugnance, being preoccupied in getting the poor fellow to do what he disliked. . . . Secondly--"

"Oh! A sermon!"

"Secondly," pursued the Vicar with firmness, "this War is so great a business that, to my mind, it just swallows up--effaces--all scruples and modesties and mock-modesties about precedence and the like.

If any one sees a job that wants doing, and a way to put it through, he will simply have no time to be humble and let another man step before him. The jealousies and the broken pieces of Etiquette can be left to be picked up after the smoke has cleared away; and by that time, belike, they will have cleared away with the smoke. Do you remember that old story of Hans Andersen's, about the gale that altered the signboards? Well, I prophesy that a good many signboards will be altered by this blow, up and down England, perhaps even in our little parish. If it teach us at all to see things as they are, we shall all be known, the rest of our lives, for what we proved ourselves to be in 1914."

"I saw in this morning's paper," said Mrs Steele, "that over at Troy they have an inn called the King of Prussia, and the Mayor and Corporation think of changing its name."

"Yes," said her husband gravely; "the Kaiser wrote to the Town Clerk suggesting the Globe as more appropriate: but the Town Council, while willing to make some alteration, is divided between the Blue Boar and the Boot. . . . But that reminds me. If I am to attend your meeting, let us call in the Wesleyan Minister as a set-off. There's nothing makes a Woman's Meeting so womanly as a sprinkling of ministers of religion."

"Robert, you are talking odiously, and you know it. I hate people to be satirical or sarcastic. To begin with, I never understand what they mean, so that I am helpless as well as uncomfortable."

The Vicar had taken a step or two to the bay-window, where, with hands thrust within his trouser-pockets, he stood staring gloomily out on the bright flower-beds that, next to the comeliness and order of her ministering to the Church--garnishing of the altar, l.u.s.tration of the holy vessels, washing and mending of vestments,--were the pride of Mrs Steele's life.

"See how the flowers, as at parade, Under their colours stand display'd: Each regiment in order grows, That of the tulip, pink, and rose.-- O thou, that dear and happy Isle, The garden of the world erstwhile, Thou Paradise of the four seas Which Heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With wat'ry, if not flaming, sword; Unhappy! shall we never more That sweet militia restore?

When gardens only had their towers, And all the garrisons were flowers. . . ."

He murmured Marvell's lines to himself and, with a shake of the shoulders coming out of his brown study, swung round to the writing-table again.

"Dear, I beg your pardon! . . . The truth is, I feel savage with myself: and, being a condemned non-combatant, I vented it on the most sensitive soul I could find, knowing it to be gentle, and taking care (as you say) to catch and render it helpless." He groaned.

"Yes, yes--I am a brute! Even now I am using that same tone which you detest. You do right to detest it. But will it comfort you a little to know that when a man takes that tone, often enough it's because he too feels helpless as well as angry? 'Mordant' is the word, I believe: which means that the poor fool bites _you_ to get his teeth into himself."

She rose from her writing-chair and touched him by the arm.

"Robert!" she appealed.

"Oh, yes--'What is the matter with me?' . . . Nothing--or, in other words, Everything--that is to say, this War."

"It's terrible, of course; but I don't see--" She broke off.

"Is it the War itself that upsets you, or the little we can do to help? If _that's_ your trouble, why, of course it was silly of me to worry you just now about my being nervous of facing these people.

But we're only at the beginning--"

"Agatha!" The Vicar drew a hand from his pocket, laid it on his wife's shoulder, and looked her in the eyes. "Don't I know that, if the call came, you would face a platoon? It's I who am weak.

This War--" He stared out of the window again.

"It is a just War, if ever there was one. . . . Robert, you don't doubt _that_, surely! Forced on us--Why, you yourself used to warn me, when I little heeded, that the Germans were preparing it, that 'the Day' must come sooner or later: for they would have it so."

"That's true enough."

"So positive about it as you were then, proving to me that their Naval Estimates could spell nothing else! . . . And now that it has come, what is the matter with _us?_ Have _we_ provoked it? Have _we_ torn up treaties? Had you, a week ago--had any one we know-the smallest desire for it?"

"Before G.o.d, we had not. The English people--I will swear to it, in this corner of the land--had no more quarrel with the Germans than I have with you at this moment. Why, we saw how the first draft--the Naval Reservists--went off last Sunday. In a kind of stupor, they were. But wars are made by Governments, Agatha; never by peoples."

"And our Government--much as I detest them for their behaviour to the Welsh Church--our Government worked for peace up to the last."

"I honestly believe they did. I am sure they did . . . up to the last, as you say. The question is, _Were they glad or sorry when they didn't bring it off?_"

"Robert!"

"I am trying--as we shall all have to try--to look at things as they are. This trouble has been brewing ever since the South African War, . . . and for ten years at least Germany has been shaping up for a quarrel which we have hoped to decline. On a hundred points of preparation they are ready and we are not; they have probably sown this idle nation with their spies as they sowed France before 1870: they make no more bones about a broken oath or two to-day than they made about forging the Ems telegram. They are an unpleasant race,-- the North Germans, at least--and an uncivilised--"

"They make the most appalling noises with their soup. . . . Do you remember that German baron at the _table d'hote_ at Genoa?"