The Blower of Bubbles Part 6

Our world of artificiality lay like a cracked eggsh.e.l.l. As drowning men, we clutched at everything that seemed stable ... to find nothing that was not made of perishable stuff. Our pens that had criticized so long mocked us as we gazed at the pages which seemed to reject our thoughts before we gave them life. A few of us turned into special war writers and comforted the nation with statistics. We showed that Germany was beaten--it was a mathematical truth that could be proved.

While we demonstrated our immense superiority to the enemy in figures, a little British Army was fighting against odds of six to one.

And the Fates stood by with poised shears, ready to cut the thread of Britain's destiny.

It is not pleasant to recall the arraignment of the year 1914. The Boer War had shown our weakness to every nation but ourselves; our educated men had graduated into the world using their abilities as obstructionists. We had discouraged everything that had the very odor of progress.

Yet--we muddled through. Men still use that word as if it were something creditable instead of hideous. We won, because, behind the Britain that muddled and obstructed, there was the Britain of n.o.ble mothers and n.o.ble sons.

And into the first winter our orgy of statistics went on, like an endless Babylonian feast ... while the British fleet--which we should never need--strained and plunged in the icy gales of the North Sea, grimly, silently, saving the world for Civilization.

Great days. Fateful days. Terrible days.

One Friday night early in December I received a note from Norman, asking me to meet him for dinner at "Arcadia." I had not seen him for six months, but his debonair charm was as potent as ever, and we chatted of the past like friends who had not met for years. As if by mutual consent, we avoided the present until I noticed that the orchestra was different.

"Where is Klotz?" I asked suddenly.

"Gone."

"Where?"

"To the war. He was a German reservist and got away."

"And his wife?"

"She is confined to her bed all the time, but fortunately there is an excellent woman looking after her and young Siegfried. By the way, what a conductor he'll make some day!"

By the subterfuge I knew who was paying for the woman, though his income was always slender. Stimulated by a British-born orchestra that played with a respectability beyond question, we pursued bubbles of conversation for half-an-hour, saying many clever things and arriving at no conclusions; but both of us knew that, behind the badinage, there was the consciousness of war gripping our brains like a fever.

"What do you think," I said at last, "of the question of enlisting?" It would have been a mockery to deny the fever any longer.

"Why should I enlist?" His smile was so disarming that I regretted my move at once.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "You are not needed, and you never will be. Besides----" My voice trailed off into the insincere plat.i.tudes that always come to the lips when conscience is to be drugged.

He lit a cigarette. "Pest," he said, "most men are partic.i.p.ants in life; a few, like myself, are onlookers. It was my choice when I was a mere youngster--wisely or not, I do not know--but the pose has become reality now. I am a jester at the court of the world, a wordy fellow with a touch of melancholy in his humor, watching and commenting on the real things of life. Before there was a war I blew bubbles, and now I am fit for nothing else. Have a cigarette?"

"Thanks."

He pa.s.sed his hand across his brow with the same weariness I had noticed before.

"To gaze on life," he went on after a pause, "and not to live it, spares one many sorrows. Even love, which comes to most men as an overwhelming pa.s.sion, stole into my life like a perfume of Cashmere.

When I was twelve years of age and living on the south coast, I used to pa.s.s a little dream-girl of seven years or so. The purity of her face stayed with me like a melody a mother sings to her child. Then she was ill, and for three weeks I never saw her. Finally she came one day in a chair, and her beauty was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. It made me think that the G.o.d who gave us this beautiful world sometimes cherishes a soul as sweet as hers and keeps it in a body that is frail, so that through life He can watch it like a flower, tenderly, lovingly;... and when He wants it back again He has but to whisper, and, like a violet bending to a summer breeze, it hears and obeys.... I have sometimes thought that even tears shed for such a one have in them the quality of dew, and serve to keep the memory green and pleasant.

"The next day I brought her a rose. Though we had never spoken, she took it, and gave me her face to kiss.... I lost my mother when I was very young, but this dream-girl's kiss supplied that inspiration for the ideal that a child takes from its mother. I could not have been impure after that--I could not have been unkind. The next day she was gone, and I never saw her again until I went to Surrey to visit young Oxley. She was his sister."

"And you found?"

"That the dream-child had become a woman--the charm of Spring had softened to the witchery of Summer."

He shrugged his shoulders and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.

"That, my dear Pest, is how love came to me."

I frowned in an endeavor to pierce his apparently superficial dismissal of the subject.

"Don't you intend to marry her?" I said.

"Marry her?" He laughed, but there was little mirth in the sound. "Does a jester marry?" His eyes hardened, and there was a new ring to his voice. "Who am I to take a wife? A _poseur_, a _flaneur_, in a world of men, I stand discredited beside the poorest workman whose toil brings in a pittance for his wife and kiddies. England is calling for men--for men, I say." He brought his fist with a crash on the table. "What can I offer her--my parlor accomplishments? My minstrel's mummery that shudders at the sight of a sword? Can I blow bubbles in a world where hearts are breaking?"

There were tears in his voice, but his eyes were flashing furiously.

"Hexcuse me." A man had stepped up to us, wearing the armlet of a recruit. His face was oddly familiar, but I could not recall it until a light was switched on just behind him, and I recognized the pumpkin-faced man of Christmas Eve.

"I just thought of 'ow I'd like for to tell you as I've been took for the Army O.K."

We shook his hand and wished him the best of luck.

"Funny thing, sir, as 'ow the 'ole bloomin' time I was planning to sign hup I was a-thinkin' of you and that there fiddle. 'You wouldn't like to meet 'im,' I kind o' sez to myself, 'and you not in the harmy, you wouldn't,' I sez."

"Instead of which," smiled Norman, all trace of his intensity gone, "I am the one who is the slacker."

"But didn't I see you in the line the day we was going for to join hup?"

Norman laughed. "I was probably a hundred miles away," he said. "Pest, have I a double?"

The recruit scratched his head. "I could 'a sworn hit was you," he said, and launched into a graphic description of drill and the absurdities thereof, a recital which appeared to have no prospect of an ending until we were interrupted by the restaurant proprietor, who took Norman to one side for a consultation concerning the medieval cook.

I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see our friend of the pumpkin face making secret and terrifying signs for me to lend him my ear.

"'E's a-'iding something," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "I ain't been a chandlery merchant hall my life, wot does most o' 'is business hon tick, without hit learning me to remember faces. Hit _were_ 'im.

'E was turned down for a bad 'eart!"

Whereupon he made a semi-mystic sign with his thumb and forefinger to indicate that the whole affair was a secret between gentlemen.

That night, in bed, the sensitive, delicate features of Basil Norman remained in my memory. I had surprised his secret which he would admit to no one; not to the girl he loved; not to himself. It was the same spirit that had made him defy the whole of Westminster. We had called him Puck and the Blower of Bubbles, and he himself had said he was lighter than air.... But Basil Norman's life had been one endless battle with an indomitable soul that refused to yield to the body.

I could not sleep well that night.

X

I did not meet Basil Norman for nearly four years. I joined the Artists' Rifles early in 1915, fought for eleven months, and was given a commission. After a short time in England I went out in all the glory of a Sam Browne and one star, but in a few months I was wounded in the chest, which earned me Blighty and a surfeit of Aunt Hannah, who still contended that had we only concentrated on an _army_ instead of a _navy_----

As I write, it all seems a blurred memory of colorless monotony, mud, fatigue, death, and grim humor. In January, 1918, after a term of duty as musketry instructor, I returned to France, and fought through the horrible spring battles until, with cruel coincidence, I was wounded again in the same place, and once more came to England with a bullet in my chest--a bullet they dared not extract. In September I was discharged.

One morning in November I sat by the fire in my den at Sloane Square. I had resumed the tenancy of the rooms, and Mrs. Mulvaney looked upon me as being even less mature than before, warning me about goloshes when it was wet, and umbrellas when it wasn't, but appeared likely to be.

How long I sat there I do not know, but memory began to weave its spell, driving my surroundings into a dim obscurity and bringing back incidents of the past with vivid clarity. I gripped my head with both hands, and, for the hundredth time, sought the truth that lay buried in the holocaust of the nations.... My wound hurt again, and a dizziness crept over me like a fog that rises from the sea and enshrouds the land.