The Rough Road Part 42

"And in the meanwhile," she remarked, "try to get these morbid ideas out of your silly old head."

Time came for parting. She rose and shook hands.

"Don't think I've said anything in depreciation of Tommies. I understand them thoroughly. They're wonderful fellows. Good-bye, old boy. Get well soon."

She kissed her hand to him at the door, and was gone.

It was now that Doggie began to hate himself. For all the time that Peggy had been running on, eager to convince him that his imputation of aloofness from the war was undeserved, the voice of one who, knowing its splendours and its terrors, had pierced to the heart of its mysteries, ran in his ears.

"_Leur gaiete fait peur._"

CHAPTER XIX

The X-rays showed the tiniest splinter of bone in Doggie's thigh. The surgeon fished it up and the clean wound healed rapidly. The gloomy Penworthy's prognostication had not come true. Doggie would not stump about at ease on a wooden leg; but in all probability would soon find himself back in the firing line--a prospect which brought great cheer to Penworthy. Also to Doggie. For, in spite of the charm of the pretty hospital, the health-giving sea air, the long rest for body and nerves, life seemed flat and unprofitable.

He had written a gay, irreproachable letter to Jeanne, to which Jeanne, doubtless thinking it the last word of the episode, had not replied. Loyalty to Peggy forbade further thought of Jeanne. He must henceforward think of Peggy and her st.u.r.dy faithfulness as hard as he could. But the more he thought, the more remote did Peggy seem. Of course the publicity of the interview had invested it with a certain constraint, knocked out of it any approach to sentimentality or romance. They had not even kissed. They had spent most of the time arguing from different points of view. They had been near to quarrelling. It was outrageous of him to criticize her; yet how could he help it? The mere fact of striving to exalt her was a criticism.

Indeed they were far apart. Into the sensitive soul of Doggie the war in all its meaning had paused. The soul of Peggy had remained untouched. To her, in her sheltered corner of England, it was a ghastly accident, like a railway collision blocking the traffic on her favourite line. For the men of her own cla.s.s who took part in it, it was a brave adventure; for the common soldier a sad but patriotic necessity. If circ.u.mstances had allowed her to go forth into the war-world as nurse or canteen helper at a London terminus, or motor driver in France, her horizon would have broadened. But the contact with realities into which her dilettante little war activities brought her was too slight to make the deep impression. In her heart, as far as she revealed herself to Doggie, she resented the war because it interfered with her own definitely marked out scheme of existence. The war over, she would regard it politely as a thing that had never been, and would forthwith set to work upon her aforesaid interrupted plan.

And towards a comprehension of this apparent serenity the perplexed mind of Doggie groped with ill-success. All his old values had been kicked into higgledy-piggledy confusion. All hers remained steadfast.

So Doggie reflected with some grimness that there are rougher roads than those which lead to the trenches.

A letter from Phineas did not restore equanimity. It ran:

"MY DEAR LADDIE,--

"Our unsophisticated friend, Mo, and myself are writing this letter together and he bids me begin it by saying that he hopes it finds you as it leaves us at present, in a muck of dust and perspiration. Where we are now I must not tell, for (in the opinion of the Censor) you would reveal it to the very Reverend the Dean of Durdlebury, who would naturally telegraph the information to the Kaiser. But the Division is far, far from the idyllic land of your dreams, and there is b.l.o.o.d.y fighting ahead of us. And though the hearts of Mo and me go out to you, laddie, and though we miss you sore, yet Mo says he's blistering glad you're out of it and safe in your perishing bed with a Blighty one. And such, in more academic phraseology, are the sentiments of your old friend Phineas.

"Ah, laddie! it was a bad day when we marched from the old billets; for the word had gone round that we weren't going back.

I had taken the liberty of telling the la.s.sie ye ken of something about your private position and your worldly affairs, of which it seems you had left her entirely ignorant. Of course, with my native Scottish caution, and my knowledge of human nature gained in the academies of prosperity and the ragged schools of adversity, I did not touch on certain matters of a delicate nature. That is no business of mine. If there is discretion in this world in which you can trust blindly, it is that of Phineas McPhail. I just told her of Denby Hall and your fortune, which I fairly accurately computed at a couple of million francs. For I thought it was right she should know that you weren't just a scallywag private soldier like the rest of us. And I am bound to say that the la.s.sie was considerably impressed. In further conversation I told her something of your early life, and, though not over desirous of blackening my character in her bonnie eyes, I let her know what kind of an injudicious upbringing you had been compelled to undergo. '_Il a ete eleve_,' said I, '_dans_----' What the blazes was the French for cotton-wool? The war has a pernicious effect on one's memory--I sometimes even forget the elementary sensations of inebriety. '_Dans la ouate_,' she said. And I remembered the word. '_Oui, dans la ouate_,' said I. And she looked at me, laddie, or, rather, through me, out of her great dark eyes--you mind the way she treats your substance as a shadow and looks through it at the shadows that to her are substances--and she said below her breath--I don't think she meant me to hear it--'_Et c'est lui qui a fait cela pour moi_.'

"Mo, in his materialistic way, is clamorous that I should tell you about the chicken; the which, being symbolical, I proceed to do. It was our last day. She invited us to lunch in the kitchen and shut the door so that none of the hungry varlets of the company should stick in their unmannerly noses and whine for sc.r.a.ps. And there, laddie, was an omelette and cutlets and a chicken and a _fromage a la creme_ such as in the days of my vanity I have never eaten, cooked by the old body whose soul you won with a pinch of snuff. The poor la.s.sie could scarcely eat; but Mo saw that there was nothing left. The bones on his plate looked as if a dog had been at them for a week. And there was vintage Haut Sauterne which ran down one's throat like scented gold. 'Man,' said I to Mo, 'if you lap it up like that you'll be as drunk as Noah.' So he cast a frightened glance at mademoiselle and sipped like a young lady at a christening party. Then she brings out cherries and plums and peaches and opens a half-bottle of champagne and fills all our gla.s.ses, and Toinette had a gla.s.s; and she rises in the pale, dignified, Greek tragedy way she has, and she makes a wee bit speech.

'_Messieurs_,' she said, 'perhaps you may wonder why I have invited you. But I think you understand. It is the only way I had of sharing with Doggie's friends the fortune that he had so heroically brought me. It is but a little tribute of my grat.i.tude to Doggie. You are his friends and I wish well that you would be mine--_tres franchement, tres loyalement_.' She put out her hand and we shook it. And old Mo said, 'Miss, I'd go to h.e.l.l for you!' Whereupon the little red spot you may have seen for yourself, came into her pale cheek, and a soft look like a flitting moonbeam crept into her eyes. Laddie, if I'm waxing too poetical, just consider that Mademoiselle Jeanne Bossiere is not the ordinary woman the British private soldier is in the habit of consorting with. Then she took up her gla.s.s.

'_Je vais porter un toast--Vive l'Angleterre!_' And although a Scotsman, I drank it as if it applied to me. And then she cried, '_Vive la France!_' And old Toinette cried, '_Vive la France!_'

"And they looked transfigured, and I fairly itched to sing the Ma.r.s.eillaise, though I knew I couldn't. Then she c.h.i.n.ked gla.s.ses with us.

"'_Bonne chance, mes amis!_'

"And then she made a sign to the auld wife, who added the few remaining drops to our gla.s.ses. 'To Doggie!' said mademoiselle.

We drank the toast, laddie. Old Mo began in his cracked voice, 'For he's a jolly good fellow.' I kicked him and told him to shut up. But mademoiselle said:

"'I've heard of that. It is a ceremony. I like it. Continue.'

"So Mo and I held up our gla.s.ses and, in indifferent song, proclaimed you what the Army, developing certain rudimentary germs, has made you, and mademoiselle too held up her gla.s.s and threw back her head and joined us in the hip, hip, hoorays. It would have done your heart good, laddie, to have been there to see. But we did you proud.

"When we emerged from the festival, the prettiest which, in the course of a variegated career, I have ever attended, Mo says:

"'If I hadn't a gel at home----'

"'If you hadn't got a girl at home,' said I, 'you'd be the next d.a.m.nedest fool in the army to Phineas McPhail!'

"We marched out just before dusk, and there she was by the front door; and though she stood proud and upright, and smiled with her lips and blew us kisses with both hands, to which the boys all responded with a cheer, there were tears streaming down her cheeks--and the tears, laddie, were not for Mo, or me, or any one of us ugly beggars that pa.s.sed her by.

"I also have good news for you, in that I hear from the thunderous, though excellent, Sergeant Ballinghall, there is a probability that when you rejoin, the C.O. will be afflicted with a grievous lapse of memory and that he will be persuaded that you received your wound during the attack on the wiring party.

"As I said before, laddie, we're all like the Scots wha' hae wi'

Wallace bled and are going to our gory bed or to victory.

Possibly both. But I will remain steadfast to my philosophy, and if I am condemned to the said sanguinolent couch, I will do my best to derive from it the utmost enjoyment possible. All kinds of poets and such-like l.u.s.ty loons have shed their last drop of ink in the effort to describe the pleasures of life--but it will be reserved for the disembodied spirit of Phineas McPhail to write the great Philosophic poem of the world's history, which will be ent.i.tled 'The Pleasures of Death.' While you're doing nothing, laddie, you might bestir yourself and find an enlightened publisher who would be willing to give me an ante-mortem advance, in respect of royalties accruing to my ghost.

"Mo, to whom I have read the last paragraph, says he always knew that eddication affected the brain. With which incontrovertible proposition and our joint love, I now conclude this epistle.

"Yours, PHINEAS."

"Of all the blazing imbeciles!" Doggie cried aloud. Why the unprintable unprintableness couldn't Phineas mind his own business?

Why had he given his silly accident of fortune away in this childish manner? Why had he told Jeanne of his cotton-wool upbringing? His feet, even that of his wounded leg, tingled to kick Phineas. Of course Jeanne, knowing him now to be such a gilded a.s.s, would have nothing more to do with him. It explained her letter. He d.a.m.ned Phineas to all eternity, in terms compared with which the curse of Saint Ernulphus enunciated by the late Mr. Shandy was a fantastic benediction. "If I had a dog," quoth my Uncle Toby, "I would not curse him so." But if Uncle Toby had heard Doggie of the Twentieth Century Armies who also swore terribly in Flanders, for dog he would have subst.i.tuted rattlesnake or German officer.

Yet such is the quiddity of the English Tommy, that through this devastating anathema ran a streak of love which at the end turned the whole thing into forlorn derision. And as soon as he could laugh, he saw things in a clear light. Both of his two friends were, in their respective ways, in love with his wonderful Jeanne. Both of them were steel-true to him. It was just part of their loyalty to foment this impossible romance between Jeanne and himself. If the three of them were now at Frelus, the two idiots would be playing gooseberry with the smirking conscientiousness of a pair of schoolgirls. So Doggie forgave the indiscretion. After all, what did it matter?

It mattered, however, to this extent, that he read the letter over and over again until he knew it by heart and could picture to himself every phase of the banquet and every fleeting look on Jeanne's face.

"All this," he declared at last, "is utterly ridiculous." And he tore up Phineas's letter and, during his convalescence, devoted himself to the study of European politics, a subject which he had scandalously neglected during his elegantly leisured youth.

The day of his discharge came in due course. A suit of khaki took the place of the hospital blue. He received his papers, the seven days'

sick furlough and his railway warrant, shook hands with nurses and comrades and sped to Durdlebury in the third-cla.s.s carriage of the Tommy.

Peggy, in the two-seater, was waiting for him in the station yard. He exchanged greetings from afar, grinned, waved a hand and jumped in beside her.

"How jolly of you to meet me!"

"Where's your luggage?"

"Luggage?"

It seemed to be a new word. He had not heard it for many months. He laughed.

"Haven't got any, thank G.o.d! If you knew what it was to hunch a horrible canvas sausage of kit about, you'd appreciate feeling free."

"It's a mercy you've got Peddle," said Peggy. "He has been at the Deanery fixing things up for you for the last two days."

"I wonder if I shall be able to live up to Peddle," said Doggie.

"Who's going to start the car?" she asked.