Mufti Part 12

But the mental jaundice was pa.s.sing--and the natural belief of man in himself was coming back. Ho felt the gas expert had been right, even though he had died. And so Vane became a reader of books of a type which had not formerly been part of his daily programme. He was groping towards knowledge, and he deliberately sought every help for the way. He tried some of H. G. Wells's to start with. . . .

Previously he had read the "First Men in the Moon," because he'd been told it was exciting; and "Ann Veronica," because he had heard it was immoral. Now he tried some of the others.

He was engaged thus when Joan Devereux found him one afternoon in his favourite haunt. She had stumbled on his hiding place by mistake, and her first instinct was to retire as quickly as she had come. Since their first meeting, their conversation, on the rare occasions they had met at Rumfold Hall, had been confined to the most commonplace remarks, and those always in the presence of someone else. Any possibility of a _tete-a-tete_ she had avoided; and the necessary mental effort had naturally caused her to think all the more about him. Now, just as she halted in her tracks and prepared to back out through the undergrowth, Vane looked up at her with his slow lazy smile.

"Discovered!" he remarked scrambling to his feet, and saluting her.

"Joan, you have come in the nick of time."

"I would prefer you not to call me Joan," she answered coldly. "And after your abominable rudeness last time we were alone together, I don't want to talk to you at all."

"I suppose I was rather rude," answered Vane reflectively. "Though, if it's any comfort to you to know, I was much ruder to two men going up in the train a few days later. . . ."

"It isn't of the slightest interest to me," she returned, "whom you're rude to, or how you spend your spare time. The habits of an ill-mannered boor are not of great importance, are they?" She turned her back on him, and parted the undergrowth with her hands, preparatory to leaving.

"Don't go." His voice close behind her made her pause. "I need you--officially."

She looked round at him, and despite herself the corners of her lips began to twitch. "You really are the most impossible person," she remarked. "What do you need me for?"

He stepped back to his usual seat, and pointed to a small mossy bank beside him. "Come and sit down there, and let's think. . . ."

After a moment's hesitation she did as he said.

"It's rather a knotty problem, isn't it?" he continued after a moment.

"I might want you to flirt with me in order to avert my suicide in the pond through boredom. . . ."

"You may want," she retorted.

"But it's in the official programme?"

"You're not on the official list," she flashed back.

"Worse and worse," he murmured. "I begin to despair. However, I won't try you as highly as that. I will just ask you a plain, honest question. And I rely on you to answer me truthfully. . . . Do you think I should be a more attractive being; do you think I should be more capable of grappling with those great problems which--ah--surround us on all sides, if I could dissect rats--or even mice?" he added thoughtfully after a pause.

The girl looked at him in amazement. "Are you trying to be funny?" she asked at length.

"Heaven forbid!" he said fervently. "I was never more serious in my life. But, in that book,"--he pointed to one lying between them--"everybody, who is anybody dissects rodents."

She picked up the book and gazed at the t.i.tle. "But this is the book everybody's talking about," she said.

"I am nothing if not fas.h.i.+onable," returned Vane.

"And do they dissect rats in it?"

"Don't misunderstand me, and take too gloomy a view of the situation,"

said Vane rea.s.suringly. "They do other things besides. . . .

Brilliant things, all most brilliantly written about; clever things, all most cleverly told. But whenever there's a sort of gap to be filled up, a _mauvais quart d'heure_ after luncheon, the hero runs off and deals with a mouse. And even if he doesn't, you know he could. . . . And the heroine! It's a fundamental part of all their educations, their extraordinary brilliance seems to rest on it as a foundation."

She looked at him curiously. "I'm not particularly dense," she said after a while, "but I must admit you rather defeat me."

"Joan," answered Vane seriously, and she made no protest this time at the use of her name, "I rather defeat myself. In the old days I never thought at all--but if I ever did I thought straight. Now my mind is running round in circles. I chase after it; think I'm off at last--and then find myself back where I started. That's why I've put up the S.O.S., and am trying to get help." He laid his hand on the book beside him.

"Are you reading all the highbrows?" she asked.

"Most of 'em," he answered. "In the first place they're all so amazingly well written that it's a pleasure to read them for that alone; and, secondly--I'm hoping . . . still hoping. . . ." He took out his cigarette case and offered it to her. "I feel that it's I who am wrong--not they--that it's my lack of education that huffs me. I expect it's those d.a.m.ned rats. . . ."

Joan laughed, and lit a cigarette. "They're all so frightfully clever, Joan," went on Vane blowing out a cloud of smoke. "They seem to me to be discussing the world of men and women around them from the pure cold light of reason. . . . Brain rules them, and they make brain rule their creations. Instead of stomach--stomach really rules the world, you know." For a while they sat in silence, watching a dragon-fly darting like a streak of light over the pond below them.

"I wouldn't bother if I were you," said the girl after a while. "After all, if one is happy oneself, and tries to make other people happy too, it's bound to help things along a bit, isn't it? It strikes me that whatever people write, or say, everything will go on much the same.

Besides--it's so impertinent. You don't want to be reconstructed; nor does anybody else. So why worry?"

"But, my dear girl," said Vane feebly, "don't you think one ought. . . ."

"No, I don't," she interrupted. "You listen to me for a bit, my friend; and you can take it or leave it, just as you like. It strikes me you're a great deal too occupied about other people, and you don't pay sufficient attention to yourself. You've got to live your own life--not the man's next door. And you'll do most good by living that life, as you want to live it. If you really want to reform other people--well go and do it, and get a thick ear. . . . It's part of your job. But if you don't want to, there's no earthly use trying to pretend you do; you're merely a hypocrite. There's no good telling me that everybody can be lumped into cla.s.ses and catered for like so many machines. We're all sorts and conditions, and I suppose you'd say I was one of the supremely selfish sort. In fact, you have said so," she said defiantly.

"All right--we'll leave it at that," she went on before he could speak.

"But I'm happy--and I'm sincere. I do the most awful things at times--because I like doing them. I should loathe to be a nurse, and the W.A.A.C. uniform makes me look a fright. I may not realise the horrors over the water; I don't want to. And do you suppose half these women who talk about them so glibly do either? . . . . Of course they don't; they're just posing. They pretend it's awful and horrible to dance and play the fool; and all the while their teeth are chattering with envy and malice. . . ."

"We seem," remarked Vane, taking advantage of a temporary lull in the flood, "to have arrived at rather a personal discussion."

"Of course we have," she took him up. "Isn't it I--I--I everywhere?

Only a lot of people aren't sufficiently truthful to admit it. It's Number One first all the way through, right from the people up at the top down to the poor brutes in the slums. All the wonderful schemes of reform are for the glory of the schemer first, with the happy recipients amongst the also rans." She paused a moment, and a sudden tender look came into her eyes. "Of course there are exceptions.

There's a boy I know--he's a cousin of mine--with weak lungs. Rejected for the Army three times as totally unfit. For the last four years he's been living in a slum off Whitechapel and the people there love him. . . . He just walks in and planks down a pork chop in the back room; or a bottle of Basa, or something and has a talk to the woman . . . he's dying . . . but he's dying happy. . . . I couldn't do that; no more could you. . . . We should loathe it, and so we should be fools to attempt it. . . ."

"I wonder," said Vane slowly. . . . "I wonder."

"No, you don't," she cried. "You don't wonder. . . . You know I'm right. . . . If you loved such a life you'd just do it. . . . And you'd succeed. The people who fail are the people who do things from a sense of duty."

"What a very dangerous doctrine," smiled Vane.

"Perhaps it is," she answered. "Perhaps in my own way I'm groping too; perhaps," and she laughed a little apologetically, "I've fitted my religion to my life. At any rate it's better than fitting other peoples' lives to one's religion. But it seems to me that G.o.d," she hesitated, as if at a loss for words to express herself--"that G.o.d--and one's surroundings--make one what one is. . . . And unless one is very certain that either G.o.d or the surroundings are wrong, it's asking for trouble to go on one's own beaten track. . . . I suppose you think I'm talking out of my turn." She turned and faced him with a slight smile.

"On the contrary," answered Vane, "you have interested me immensely.

But you've dodged the one vital question--for me, at any rate. What is the beaten track? Just at present I can't find it?"

"You'll not find it any easier by looking for it too hard," she said thoughtfully. "I'm certain of that. . . . It'll come in a flash to you, when you least expect it, and you'll see it as clear as daylight."

For a while they sat in silence, both busy with their own thoughts.

Then the girl laughed musically.

"To think of me," she gurgled, "holding forth like this. . . . Why, I've never done such a thing before that I can remember." Then of a sudden she became serious. The big grey eyes looked steadily, almost curiously, at the face of the man beside her. "I wonder why," she whispered almost below her breath. "You've been most poisonously rude to me, and yet . . . and yet here am I talking to you as I've never talked to any other man in my life."

Vane stared at the pool for a few moments before he answered. He was becoming uncomfortably aware that grey eyes with a certain type of chin were attractive--very attractive. But his tone was light when he spoke.

"A quarrel is always a sound foundation." He looked up at her with a smile, but her eyes still held that half speculative look. . . .

"I wonder what you would have thought of me," she continued after a moment, "if you'd met me before the war. . . ."

"Why, that children of fifteen should be in bed by ten," he mocked.

"Yes, but supposing I was what I am now, and you were what you were then--and you weren't filled with all these ideas about duty and futures and things. . . ."