The Rough Road Part 22

"Thousands, laddie," replied Phineas, the picture of unboastful veracity. "And so has Mo."

Mo Shendish, helmeted, browned, dried, toughened, a very different Mo from the pallid ferret whom Aggie had driven into the ranks of war, hunched himself up, his hands clasping his knees.

"I don't mind doing it, when you're so excited you don't know where you are," said he, "but I don't like thinking of it afterwards."

As a matter of fact, he had only once got home with the bayonet and the memory was unpleasant.

"But you've just thought of it," said Phineas.

"It was you, not me," said Mo. "That makes all the difference."

"It's astonishing," Phineas remarked sententiously, "how many people not only refuse to catch pleasure as it flies, but spurn it when it sits up and begs at them. Laddie," he turned to Doggie, "the more one wallows in hedonism, the more one realizes its unplumbed depths."

A little girl of ten, neatly pigtailed but piteously shod, came near and cast a child's envious eye on Doggie's bread and jam.

"Approach, my little one," Phineas cried in French words but with the accent of Sauchiehall Street. "If I gave you a franc, what would you do with it?"

"I should buy nourishment (_de la nourriture_) for _maman_."

"Lend me a franc, laddie," said McPhail, and when Doggie had slipped the coin into his palm, he addressed the child in unintelligible grandiloquence and sent her on her way mystified but rejoicing. _Ces bons droles d'Anglais!_

"Ah, laddie!" cried Phineas, stretching himself out comfortably by the jamb of the door, "you've got to learn to savour the exquisite pleasure of a genuinely kindly act."

"Hold on!" cried Mo. "It was Doggie's money you were flinging about."

McPhail withered him with a glance.

"You're an unphilosophical ignoramus," said he.

CHAPTER XII

Perhaps one of the greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment should be the means of revealing the disgrace which bit like an acid into his soul. His undisguisable air of superior breeding could not fail to attract notice. Often his officers asked him what he was in civil life. His reply, "A clerk, sir," had to satisfy them. He had developed a curious self-protective faculty of shutting himself up like a hedgehog at the approach of danger. Once a breezy subaltern had selected him as his batman; but Doggie's agonized, "It would be awfully good of you, sir, if you wouldn't mind not thinking of it," and the appeal in his eyes, established the freemasonry of caste and saved him from dreaded intimate relations.

"All right, if you'd rather not, Trevor," said the subaltern. "But why doesn't a chap like you try for a commission?"

"I'm much happier as I am, sir," replied Doggie, and that was the end of the matter.

But Phineas, when he heard of it--it was on the East Coast--began: "If you still consider yourself too fine to clean another man's boots----"

Doggie, in one of his quick fits of anger, interrupted: "If you think I'm just a dirty little sn.o.b, if you don't understand why I begged to be let off, you're the thickest-headed fool in creation!"

"I'm nae that, laddie," replied Phineas, with his usual ironic submissiveness. "Haven't I kept your secret all this time?"

Thus it was Doggie's fixed idea to lose himself in the locust swarm, to be prominent neither for good nor evil, even in the little clot of fifty, outwardly, almost identical locusts that formed his platoon. It braced him to the performance of hideous tasks; it restrained him from display of superior intellectual power or artistic capability. The world upheaval had thrown him from his peac.o.c.k and ivory room, with its finest collection on earth of little china dogs, into a horrible fetid hole in the ground in Northern France. It had thrown not the average young Englishman of comfortable position, who had toyed with aesthetic superficialities as an amus.e.m.e.nt, but a poor little by-product of cloistered life who had been brought up from babyhood to regard these things as the nervous texture of his very existence. He was wrapped from head to heel in fine net, to every tiny mesh of which he was acutely sensitive.

A hole in the ground in Northern France. The regiment, after its rest, moved on and took its turn in the trenches. Four days on; four days off. Four days on of misery inconceivable. Four days on, during which the officers watched the men with the unwavering vigilance of kindly cats:

"How are you getting along, Trevor?"

"Nicely, thank you, sir."

"Feet all right?"

"Yes, thank you, sir."

"Sure? If you want to grouse, grouse away. That's what I'm talking to you for."

"I'm perfectly happy, sir."

"Darn sight more than I am!" laughed the subaltern, and with a cheery nod in acknowledgment of Doggie's salute, splashed down the muddy trench.

But Doggie was chilled to the bone, and he had no feeling in his feet, which were under six inches of water, and his woollen gloves being wet through were useless, and prevented his numbed hands from feeling the sandbags with which he and the rest of the platoon were repairing the parapet; for the Germans had just consecrated an hour's general hate to the vicinity of the trench, and its exquisite symmetry, the pride of the platoon commander, had been disturbed. There had also been a few ghastly casualties. A sh.e.l.l had fallen and burst in the traverse at the far end of the trench. Something that looked like half a man's head and a bit of shoulder had dropped just in front of the dug-out where Doggie and his section was sheltering. Doggie staring at it was violently sick. In a stupefied way he found himself mingling with others who were engaged in clearing up the horror. A murmur reached him that it was Taffy Jones who had thus been dismembered.... The bombardment over, he had taken his place with the rest in the reparation of the parapet; and as he happened to be at an end of the line, the officer had spoken to him. If he had been suffering tortures unknown to Attila, and unimagined by his successors, he would have answered just the same.

But he lamented Taffy's death to Phineas, who listened sympathetically. Such a cheery comrade, such a smart soldier, such a kindly soul.

"Not a black spot in him," said Doggie.

"A year ago, laddie," said McPhail, "what would have been your opinion of a bookmaker's clerk?"

"I know," replied Doggie. "But this isn't a year ago. Just look round."

He laughed somewhat hysterically, for the fate of Taffy had unstrung him for the time. Phineas contemplated the length of deep narrow ditch, with its planks half swimming on filthy liquid, its wire revetment holding up the oozing sides, the dingy parapet above which it was death to put one's head, the grey free sky, the only thing free along that awful row of parallel ditches that stretched from the Belgian coast to Switzerland, the clay-covered, shapeless figures of men, their fellows, almost undistinguishable even by features from themselves.

"It has been borne upon me lately," said Phineas, "that patriotism is an amazing virtue."

Doggie drew a foot out of the mud so as to find a less precarious purchase higher up the slope.

"And I've been thinking, Phineas, whether it's really patriotism that has brought you and me into this--what can we call it? Dante's Inferno is child's play to it."

"Dante had no more imagination," said Phineas, "than a Free Kirk precentor in Kirkcudbright."

"But is it patriotism?" Doggie persisted. "If I thought it was, I should be happier. If we had orders to go over the top and attack and I could shout 'England for ever!' and lose myself just in the thick of it----"

"There's a bra.s.s hat coming down the trench," said Phineas, "and bra.s.s hats have no use for rhapsodical privates."

They stood to attention as the staff officer pa.s.sed by. Then Doggie broke in impatiently:

"I wish to goodness you could understand what I'm trying to get at."

A smile illuminated the gaunt, unshaven, mud-caked face of Phineas McPhail.

"Laddie," said he, "let England, as an abstraction, fend for itself.

But you've a bonny English soul within you, and for that you are fighting. And so had poor Taffy Jones. And I have a bonny Scottish thirst, the poignancy of which both of you have been happily spared. I will leave you, laddie, to seek in slumber a surcease from martyrdom."