The Rough Road Part 14

"Then what in the holy names of Thunder and Beauty," cried Phineas, throwing out one hand to an ancient saddle-bag sofa whose ends were covered by flimsy rags, and the other to the decayed ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, "what in the name of common sense are you doing in this awful inelegant lodging-house?"

"I don't know," replied Doggie. "It's a fact," he continued after a pause. "The scheme of decoration is revolting to every aesthetic sense which I've spent my life in cultivating. Its futile pretentiousness is the rasping irritation of every hour. Yet here I am. Quite comfortable. And here I propose to stay."

Phineas McPhail, M.A., late of Glasgow and Cambridge, looked at Doggie with his keen little grey eyes beneath bent and bristling eyebrows. In the language of 33702 Private McPhail, he asked:

"What the blazes is it all about?"

"That's a long story," said Doggie, looking at his watch. "In the meantime, I had better give some orders about dinner. And you would like to wash."

He threw open a wing of the folding-doors, once in Georgian times separating drawing-room from withdrawing-room, and now separating living-room from bedroom, and switching on the light, invited McPhail to follow.

"I think you'll find everything you want," said he.

Phineas McPhail, left alone to his ablutions, again looked round, and he had more reason than ever to ask what it was all about. Marmaduke's bedroom at Denby Hall had been a dream of satinwood and dull blue silk. The furniture and hangings had been Mrs. Trevor's present to Marmaduke on his sixteenth birthday. He remembered how he had been bored to death by that stupendous a.s.s of an old woman--for so he had characterized her--during the process of selection and installation.

The present room, although far more luxurious than any that Phineas McPhail had slept in for years, formed a striking contrast with that remembered nest of effeminacy.

"I'll have to give it up," he said to himself. But just as he had put the finishing touches to his hair an idea occurred to him. He flung open the door.

"Laddie, I've got it. It's a woman."

But Doggie laughed and shook his head, and leaving McPhail, took his turn in the bedroom. For the first time since his return to civil life he ceased for a few moments to brood over his troubles. McPhail's mystification amused him. McPhail's personality and address, viewed in the light of the past, were full of interest. Obviously he was a man who lived unashamed on low levels. Doggie wondered how he could have regarded him for years with a respect almost amounting to veneration.

In a curious unformulated way Doggie felt that he had authority over this man so much older than himself, who had once been his master. It tickled into some kind of life his deadened self-esteem. Here at last was a man with whom he could converse on sure ground. The khaki uniform caused him no envy.

"The poet is not altogether incorrect," said McPhail, when they sat down to dinner, "in pointing out the sweet uses of adversity. If it had not been for the adversity of a wee bit operation, I should not now be on sick furlough. And if I had not been on furlough I shouldn't have the pleasure of this agreeable reconciliation. Here's to you, laddie, and to our lasting friendship." He sipped his claret. "It's not like the Lafitte in the old cellar--_Eheu fugaces anni et_--what the plague is the Latin for vintages? But 'twill serve." He drank again and smacked his lips. "It will even serve very satisfactorily.

Good wine at a perfect temperature is not the daily drink of the British soldier."

"By the way," said Doggie, "you haven't told me why you became a soldier."

"A series of vicissitudes dating from the hour I left your house,"

said Phineas, "vicissitudes the recital of which would wring your heart, laddie, and make angels weep if their lachrymal glands were not too busily engaged by the horrors of war, culminated four months ago in an attack of fervid and penniless patriotism. No one seemed to want me except my country. She clamoured for me on every h.o.a.rding and every omnibus. A recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square tapped me on the arm, and said: 'Young man, your country wants you.' Said I with my Scottish caution, 'Can you take your affidavit that you got the information straight from the War Office?' 'I can,' said he. Then I threw myself on his bosom and bade him take me to her. That's how I became 33702 Private Phineas McPhail, A Company, 10th Wess.e.x Rangers, at the remuneration of one shilling and twopence per diem."

"Do you like it?" asked Doggie.

Phineas rubbed the side of his thick nose thoughtfully.

"There you come to the metaphysical conception of human happiness," he replied. "In itself it is a vile life. To a man of thirty-five----"

"Good lord!" cried Doggie, "I always thought you were about fifty!"

"Your mother caught me young, laddie. To a man of thirty-five, a graduate of ancient and honourable universities and a whilom candidate for holy orders, it is a life that would seem to have no attraction whatever. The hours are absurd, the work distasteful, and the mode of living repulsive. But strange to say, it fully contents me. The secret of happiness lies in the supple adaptability to conditions. When I found that it was necessary to perform ridiculous antics with my legs and arms, I entered into the comicality of the idea and performed them with an indulgent zest which soon won me the precious encomiums of my superiors in rank. When I found that the language of the canteen was not that of the pulpit or the drawing-room, I quickly acquired the new vocabulary and won the pleasant esteem of my equals. By means of this faculty of adaptability I can suck enjoyment out of everything. But, at the same time, mind you, keeping in reserve a little secret fount of pleasure."

"What do you call a little secret fount of pleasure?" asked Doggie.

"I'll give you an ill.u.s.tration--and, if you're the man I consider you to be, you'll take a humorous view of my frankness. At present I adapt myself to a rough atmosphere of coa.r.s.eness and l.u.s.tiness, in which nothing coa.r.s.e or l.u.s.ty I could do would produce the slightest ripple of a convulsion: but I have my store of a cultivated mind and cheap editions of the cla.s.sics, my little secret fount of Castaly to drink from whenever I so please. On the other hand, when I had the honour of being responsible for your education, I adapted myself to a hot-house atmosphere in which Respectability and the concomitant virtues of Supineness and Sloth were cultivated like rare orchids; but in my bedroom I kept a secret fount which had its source in some good Scots distillery."

Whereupon he attacked his plateful of chicken with vehement gusto.

"You're a hedonist, Phineas," said Doggie, after a thoughtful pause.

"Man," said Phineas, laying down his knife and fork, "you've just hit it. I am. I'm an accomplished hedonist. An early recognition of the fact saved me from the Church."

"And the Church from you," said Doggie quietly.

Phineas shot a swift glance at him beneath his s.h.a.ggy brown eyebrows.

"Ay," said he. "Though, mark you, if I had followed my original vocation, the Bench of Bishops could not have surpa.s.sed me in the unction in which I would have wallowed. If I had been born a bee in a desert, laddie, I would have sucked honey out of a dead camel."

With easy and picturesque cynicism, and in a Glasgow accent which had curiously broadened since his spell of Oriental ease at Denby Hall, he developed his philosophy, ill.u.s.trating it by incidents more or less reputable in his later career. At first, possessor of the ill-gotten thousand pounds and of considerable savings from a substantial salary, he had enjoyed the short wild riot of the Prodigal's life. Paris saw most of his money--the Paris which, under his auspices, Doggie never knew. Plentiful claret set his tongue wagging in Rabelaisian reminiscence. After Paris came husks. Not bad husks if you knew how to cook them. Borrowed salt and pepper and a little stolen b.u.t.ter worked wonders. But they were irritating to the stomach. He lay on the floor, said he, and yelled for fatted calf; but there was no soft-headed parent to supply it. Phineas McPhail must be a slave again and work for his living. Then came private coaching, freelance journalism, hunting for secretaryships: the commonplace story humorously told of the wastrel's decline; then a gorgeous efflorescence in light green and gold as the man outside a picture palace in Camberwell--and lastly, the penniless patriot throwing himself into the arms of his desirous country.

"Have you any whisky in the house, laddie?" he asked, after the dinner things had been taken away.

"No," said Doggie, "but I could easily get you some."

"Pray don't," said McPhail. "If you had, I was going to ask you to be kind enough not to let your excellent landlord, whom I recognize as a butler of the old school, produce it. Butlers of the old school are apt, like Peddle, to bring in a maddening tray of decanters, syphons, and gla.s.ses. You may not believe me, but I haven't touched a drop of whisky since I joined the army."

"Why?" asked Doggie.

McPhail looked at the long carefully preserved ash of one of Doggie's excellent cigars.

"It's all a part of the doctrine of adaptability. In order to attain happiness in the army, the first step is to avoid differences of opinion with the civil and military police and non-commissioned officers, and such-like sycophantic myrmidons of authority. Being a man of academic education, it is with difficulty that I agree with them when I'm sober. If I were drunk, my bonnie laddie"--he waved a hand--"well--I don't get drunk. And as I have no use for whisky, as merely an agreeable beverage, I have struck whisky out of my hedonistic scheme of existence. But if you have any more of that pleasant claret----"

Doggie rang the bell and gave the order. The landlord brought in bottle and gla.s.ses.

"And now, my dear Marmaduke," said Phineas after an appreciative sip, "now that I have told you the story of my life, may I, without impertinent curiosity, again ask you what you meant when you said you had come down to bed-rock?"

The sight of the man, smug, cynical, shameless, sprawling luxuriously on the sofa, with his tunic unb.u.t.toned, filled him with sudden fury: such fury as Oliver's insult had aroused, such as had impelled him during a vicious rag in the mess to clutch a man's hair and almost pull it out by the roots.

"Yes, you may; and I'll tell you," he cried, starting to his feet.

"I've reached the bed-rock of myself--the bed-rock of humiliation and disgrace. And it's all your fault. Instead of training me to be a man, you pandered to my poor mother's weaknesses and brought me up like a little toy dog--the infernal name still sticks to me wherever I go.

You made a helpless fool of me, and let me go out a helpless fool into the world. And when you came across me I was thinking whether it wouldn't be best to throw myself over the parapet. A month ago you would have saluted me in the street and stood before me at attention when I spoke to you----"

"Eh? What's that, laddie?" interrupted Phineas, sitting up. "You've held a commission in the army?"

"Yes," said Doggie fiercely, "and I've been chucked. I've been thrown out as a hopeless rotter. And who is most to blame--you or I? It's you. You've brought me to this infernal place. I'm here in hiding--hiding from my family and the decent folk I'm ashamed to meet.

And it's all your fault, and now you have it!"

"Laddie, laddie," said Phineas reproachfully, "the facts of my being a guest beneath your roof and my humble military rank, render it difficult for me to make an appropriate reply."

Doggie's rage had spent itself. These rare fits were short-lived and left him somewhat unnerved.

"I'm sorry, Phineas. As you say, you're my guest. And as to your uniform, G.o.d knows I honour every man who wears it."

"That's taking things in the right spirit," Phineas conceded graciously, helping himself to another gla.s.s of wine. "And the right spirit is a great healer of differences. I'll not go so far as to deny that there is an element of justice in your apportionment of blame. There may, on various occasions, have been some small dereliction of duty. But you'll have been observing that in the recent exposition of my philosophy I have not laboured the point of duty to disproportionate exaggeration."

Doggie lit a cigarette. His fingers were still shaking. "I'm glad you own up. It's a sign of grace."

"Ay," said Phineas, "no man is altogether bad. In spite of everything, I've always entertained a warm affection for you, laddie, and when I saw you staring at bogies round about the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral my heart went out to you. You didn't look over-happy."