The Red Planet Part 4

"Heaven forbid, my dear," Sir Anthony replied warmly; and he stood, his hands under his coat-tails and his gaitered legs apart, regarding her with the air of a c.o.c.k-sparrow accused of murdering his young, or a sensitive jockey repudiating a suggestion of crooked riding. "Heaven forbid!" he repeated. "Such an idea never entered my head."

"Then where does the vanity come in?" asked Lady Fenimore.

They had their little argument. I lit a cigarette and let them argue.

In such cases, every married couple has its own queer and private and particular and idiosyncratic way of coming to an agreement. The third party who tries to foist on it his own suggestion of a way is an imbecile. The dispute on the point of vanity, charmingly conducted, ended by Sir Anthony saying triumphantly:--

"Well, my dear, don't you see I'm right?" and by his wife replying with a smile:--

"No, darling, I don't see at all. But since you feel like that, there's nothing more to be said."

I was mildly enjoying myself. Perhaps I'm a bit of a cynic. I broke in.

"I don't think it's vanity to see that you get your money's worth.

There's lots of legitimate fun in spending twenty thousand pounds properly. It's too big to let other people manage or mis-manage.

Suppose you decided on motor-ambulances or hospital trains, for instance, it would be your duty to see that you got the best and most up-to-date ambulances or trains, with the least possible profits, to contractors and middle-men."

"As far as that goes, I think I know my way about," said Sir Anthony.

"Of course. And as for publicity--or the reverse, hiding your light under a bushel--any fool can remain anonymous."

Sir Anthony nodded at me, rubbed his hands, and turned to his wife.

"That's just what I was saying, Edith."

"My dear, that is just what I was trying to make you understand."

Neither of the two dear things had said, or given the other to understand, anything of the kind. But you see they had come in their own quaint married way to an agreement and were now receptive of commonsense.

"The motor ambulance is a sound idea," said Sir Anthony, rubbing his chin between thumb and forefinger.

"So is the hospital train," said Lady Fenimore.

What an idiot I was to suggest these alternatives! I looked at my watch. It was getting late. Hosea, like a silly child, is afraid of the dark. He just stands still and shivers at the night, and the more he is belaboured the more he shivers, standing stock-still with ears thrown back and front legs thrown forward. As I can't get out and pull, I'm at the mercy of Hosea. And he knows it. Since the mount of Balaam, there was never such an intelligent idiot of an a.s.s.

"What do you say?" asked Sir Anthony. "Ambulance or train?"

"Donkey carriage," said I. "This very moment minute."

I left them and trotted away homewards.

Just as I had turned a bend of the chestnut avenue near the Park gates, I came upon a couple of familiar figures--familiar, that is to say, individually, but startlingly unfamiliar in conjunction. They were a young man and girl, Randall Holmes and Phyllis Gedge. Randall had concluded a distinguished undergraduate career at Oxford last summer.

He was a man of birth, position, and, to a certain extent, of fortune.

Phyllis Gedge was the daughter, the pretty and attractive daughter, of Daniel Gedge, the socialistic builder who did not hold with war. What did young Randall mean by walking in the dark with his arm round Phyllis's waist? Of course as soon as he heard the click-clack of Hosea's hoofs he whipped his arm away; but I had already caught him.

They tried to look mighty unconcerned as I pulled up. I took off my hat politely to the lady and held out my hand to the young man.

"Good evening, Randall," said I. "I haven't seen you for ages."

He was a tall, clean-limbed, clear-featured boy, with black hair, which though not long, yet lacked the military trimness befitting the heads of young men at the present moment. He murmured something about being busy.

"It will do you good to take a night off," I said; "drop in after dinner and smoke a pipe with an old friend."

I smiled, bowed again politely, whipped up Hosea and trotted off. I wondered whether he would come. He had said: "Delighted, I'm sure," but he had not looked delighted. Very possibly he regarded me as a meddlesome, gossiping old tom-cat. Perhaps for that reason he would deem it wise to adopt a propitiatory att.i.tude. Perhaps also he retained a certain affectionate respect for me, seeing that I had known him as a tiny boy in a sailor suit, and had fed him at Harrow (as I did poor Oswald Fenimore at Wellington) with Mrs. Marigold's famous potted shrimp and other comestibles, and had put him up, during here and there holidays and later a vacation, when his mother and aunts, with whom he lived, had gone abroad to take inefficacious cures for the tedium of a futile life. Oxford, however, had set him a bit off my plane.

As an ordinary soldierman, trained in the elementary virtues of plain-speaking and direct dealing, love of country and the sacredness of duty, I have had no use for the metaphysician. I haven't the remotest notion what his jargon means. From Aristotle to William James, I have dipped into quite a lot of them--Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Schopenhauer (the thrice besotted Teutonic a.s.s who said that women weren't beautiful), for I hate to be thought an ignorant duffer--and I have never come across in them anything worth knowing, thinking, or doing that I was not taught at my mother's knee. And as for her, dear, simple soul, if you had asked her what was the Categorical Imperative (having explained beforehand the meaning of the words), she would have said, "The Sermon on the Mount."

Of course, please regard this as a criticism not of the metaphysicians and the philosophers, but of myself. All these great thinkers have their niches in the Temple of Fame, and I'm quite aware that the consensus of human judgment does not immortalise even such an a.s.s as Schopenhauer, without sufficient reason. All I want to convey to you is that I am only a plain, ordinary G.o.d-fearing, law-abiding Englishman, and that when young Randall Holmes brought down from Oxford all sorts of highfalutin theories about everything, not only in G.o.d's Universe, but in the super-Universe that wasn't G.o.d's, and of every one of which he was c.o.c.ksure, I found my homely self very considerably out of it.

Then--young Randall was a poet. He had won the Newdigate. The subject was Andrea del Sarto, one of my favourite painters--il pittore senza errore--and his prize poem--it had, of course, to be academic in form--was excellent. It said just the things about him which Browning somehow missed, and which I had always been impotently wanting to say.

And a year or so afterwards--when I praised his poem--he would shrink in a more than deprecating att.i.tude: I might just as well have extolled him for seducing the wife of his dearest friend. His later poems, of which he was immodestly proud--"Sensations Captured on the Wing," he defined them--left me cold and unsympathetic. So, for these reasons, the boy and I had drifted apart. Until I had caught him in flagrante delicto of walking with his arm round the waist of pretty Phyllis Gedge, I had not seen him to speak to for a couple of months.

He came, however, after dinner, looking very sleek and handsome and intellectual, and wearing a velvet dinner jacket which I did not like.

After we had gossiped awhile:--

"You said you were very busy?" I remarked.

He flicked off his cigarette ash and nodded.

"What at?"

"War poetry," he replied. "I am trying to supply the real note. It is badly wanted. There are all kinds of stuff being written, but all indifferent and valueless. If it has a swing, it's merely vulgar, and what isn't vulgar is academic, commonplace. There's a crying need for the high level poetry that shall interpret with dignity and n.o.bility the meaning of the war."

"Have you written much?"

"I have an ode every week in the Albemarle Review. I also write the political article. Didn't you know? Haven't you seen them?"

"I don't take in that periodical," said I. "The omniscience of the last copy I saw dismayed me. I couldn't understand why the Government were such insensate fools as not to move from Downing Street to their Editorial offices."

Randall, with a humouring smile, defended the Albemarle Review.

"It is run," said he, "by a little set of intellectuals--some men up with me at Oxford--who must naturally have a clearer vision than men who have been living for years in the yellow fog of party politics."

He expounded the G.o.dlike wisdom of young Oxford at some length, replying vividly to here and there a Socratic interpolation on my part.

After a while I began to grow irritated. His talk, like his verse, seemed to deal with unrealities. It was a negation of everything, save the intellectual. If he and his friends had been in power, there would never have been a war; there never would have been a German menace; the lamb would have lain down in peace, outside the lion. He had an airy way of dismissing the ruder and more human aspects of the war. Said I:--

"Anyone can talk of what might have been. But that's all over and done with. We're up against the tough proposition of the present. What are you doing for it?"

He waved a hand. "That's just the point. The present doesn't matter--not in the wide conception of things. It is the past and the future that count. The present is mere fluidity."

"The poor devils up to their waists in water in the trenches would agree with you," said I.

"They would also agree with me," he retorted, "if they had time to go into the reconstruction of the future that we are contemplating."

At this juncture Marigold came in with the decanters and syphons. I noticed his one eye harden on the velvet dinner-jacket. He fidgeted about the room, threw a log on the fire, drew the curtains closer, always with an occasional malevolent glance at the jacket. Then Randall, like a silly young a.s.s, said, from the depths of his easy chair, a very silly thing.

"I see you've not managed to get into khaki yet, Sergeant."

Marigold took a tactical pace or two to the door.