The Rough Road Part 16

"I beg your pardon, sir, but could you be telling me the meaning of it, at all?"

Doggie awoke and smiled.

"Do you like it?"

"I do," said the soldier.

"It is about Peter Pan. A kind of Fairy Tale. You can see the 'little people' peeping out--I think you call them so in Ireland."

"We do that," said the soldier.

So Doggie sketched the outline of the immortal story of the Boy Who Will Never Grow Old, and the Irishman listened with deep interest.

"Indeed," said he after a time, "it is good to come back to the true things after the things out there." He waved his one arm in the vague direction of the war.

"Why do you call them true things?" Doggie asked quickly.

They turned away, and Doggie found himself sitting on a bench by the man's side.

"It's not me that can tell you that," said he, "and my wife and children in Galway."

"Were you there at the outbreak of war?"

He was. A reservist called back to the colours after some years of retirement from the army. He had served in India and South Africa, a hard-bitten soldier, proud of the traditions of his old regiment.

There were scarcely any of them left--and that was all that was left of him. He smiled cheerily. Doggie condoled with him on the loss of his arm.

"Ah sure," he replied, "and it might keep me out of a fight when I go into Ballinasloe."

"Who would you want to fight?" asked Doggie.

"The dirty Sinn Feiners that do be always shouting 'Freedom for Ireland and to h.e.l.l with freedom for the rest of the world.' If I haven't lost my arm in a glorious cause, what have I lost it for? Can you tell me that?"

Doggie agreed that he had fought for the greater freedom of humanity and gave him a cigarette, and they went on talking. The Irishman had been in the retreat from Mons, the first battle of Ypres, and he had lost his arm in no battle at all; just a stray sh.e.l.l over the road as they were marching back to billets. They discussed the war, the ethics of it. Doggie still wanted to know why the realities of blood and mud and destruction were not the true things. Gradually he found that the Irishman meant that the true things were the spiritual, undying things; that the grim realities would pa.s.s away; that from these dead realities would arise the n.o.ble ideals of the future, which would be symbolized in song and marble; that all he had endured and sacrificed was but a part of the Great Sacrifice we were making for the Freedom of the World. Being a man roughly educated on a Galway farm and in an infantry regiment, he had great difficulty in co-ordinating his ideas; but he had a curious power of vision that enabled him to pierce to the heart of things, which he interpreted according to his untrained sense of beauty.

They parted with expressions of mutual esteem. Doggie struck across the Gardens with a view to returning home by Knightsbridge, Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue. He strode along, his thoughts filled with the Irish soldier. Here was a man, maimed for life and quite content that it should be so, who had reckoned all the horrors through which he had pa.s.sed as externals unworthy of the consideration of his unconquerable soul; a man simple, una.s.suming, expansive only through his Celtic temperament, which allowed him to talk easily to a stranger before whom his English or Scotch comrade would have been dumb and gaping as an oyster; obviously brave, sincere and loyal. Perhaps something even higher. Perhaps, in essence, the very highest. The Poet-Warrior. The term struck Doggie's brain with a thud, like the explosive fusion of two elements.

During his walk to Kensington Gardens a poisonous current had run at the back of his mind. Drifting on it, might he not escape? Was he not of too fine a porcelain to mingle with the coa.r.s.e and common pottery of the ranks? Was it necessary to go into the thick of the coa.r.s.e clay vessels, just to be shattered? It was easy for Phineas to proclaim that he found no derogation to his dignity as a man of birth and a university graduate in identifying himself with his fellow privates.

Phineas had systematically brutalized himself into fitness for the position. He had armed himself in bra.s.s--_aes triplex_. He smiled at his own wit. But he, James Marmaduke Trevor, who had lived his life as a clean gentleman, was in a category apart.

Now, he found that his talk with the Irishman had been an antidote to the poison. He felt ashamed. Did he dare set himself up to be finer clay than that common soldier? Spiritually, was he even of clay as fine? In a Great Judgment of Souls which of the twain would be among the Elect? The ultra-refined Mr. Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall, or the ignorant poet-warrior of Ballinasloe? "Not Doggie Trevor," he said between his teeth. And he went home in a chastened spirit.

Phineas McPhail appeared punctually at half-past one, and feasted succulently on fried sole and sweetbread.

"Laddie," said he, "the man that can provide such viands is a Thing of Beauty which, as the poet says, is a Joy for Ever. The light in his window is a beacon to the hungry Tommy dragging himself through the viscous wilderness of regulation stew."

"I'm afraid it won't be a beacon for very long," said Doggie.

"Eh?" queried Phineas sharply. "You'd surely not be thinking of refusing an old friend a stray meal?"

Doggie coloured at the coa.r.s.eness of the misunderstanding.

"How could I be such a brute? There won't be a light in the window because I shan't be there. I'm going to enlist."

Phineas put his elbows on the table and regarded him earnestly.

"I would not take too seriously words spoken in the heat of midnight revelry, even though the revel was conducted on the genteelest principles. Have you thought of the matter in the cool and sober hours of the morning?"

"Yes."

"It's an unco' hard life, laddie."

"The one I'm leading is a harder," said Doggie. "I've made up my mind."

"Then I've one piece of advice to give you," said McPhail. "Sink the name of Marmaduke, which would only stimulate the ignorant ribaldry of the canteen, and adopt the name of James, which your G.o.dfathers and G.o.dmothers, with miraculous foresight, considering their limitations in the matter of common sense, have given you."

"That's a good idea," said Doggie.

"Also it would tend to the obliteration of cla.s.s prejudices if you gave up smoking Turkish cigarettes at ten s.h.i.+llings a hundred and arrived in your platoon as an amateur of 'f.a.gs.'"

"I can't stand 'f.a.gs,'" said Doggie.

"You can. The human organism is so const.i.tuted that it can stand the sweepings of the elephants' house in the Zoological Gardens. Try. This time it's only 'f.a.gs.'"

Doggie took one from the crumpled paper packet which was handed to him, and lit it. He made a wry face, never before having smoked American tobacco.

"How do you like the flavour?" asked Phineas.

"I think I'd prefer the elephants' house," said Doggie, eyeing the thing with disgust.

"You'll find it the flavour of the whole British Army," said McPhail.

A few days later the Dean received a letter bearing the pencilled address of a camp on the south coast, and written by 35792 Pvte. James M. Trevor, A Company, 2-10th Wess.e.x Rangers. It ran:

"I hope you won't think me heartless for having left you so long without news of me; but until lately I had the same reasons for remaining in seclusion as when I last wrote. Even now I'm not asking for sympathy or reconsideration of my failure or desire in any way to take advantage of the generosity of you all.

"I have enlisted in the 10th Wess.e.x. Phineas McPhail, whom I met in London and whose character for good or evil I can better gauge now than formerly, is a private in the same battalion. I don't pretend to enjoy the life any more than I could enjoy living in a kraal of savages in Central Africa. But that is a matter of no account. I don't propose to return to Durdlebury till the end of the war. I left it as an officer and I'm not coming back as a private soldier. I enclose a cheque for 500.

Perhaps Aunt Sophia will be so kind as to use the money--it ought to last some time--for the general upkeep, wages, etc., of Denby Hall. I feel sure she will not refuse me this favour. Give Peggy my love and tell her I hope she will accept the two-seater as a parting gift. It will make me happier to know that she is driving it.

"I am keeping on as a _pied a terre_ in London the Bloomsbury rooms in which I have been living, and I've written to Peddle to see about making them more comfortable. Please ask anybody who might care to write to address me as 'James M.' and not as 'Marmaduke.'"

The Dean read the letter--the family were at breakfast; then he took off his tortoise-sh.e.l.l spectacles and wiped them.

"It's from Marmaduke at last," said he. "He has carried out my prophecy and enlisted."

Peggy caught at her breath and shot out her hand for the letter, which she read eagerly and then pa.s.sed over to her mother. Mrs. Conover began to cry.