Page 20 of 24
"All right, Peddle, I can find my way about," said Doggie, dismissing the old butler and his wife after a little colloquy in the hall.
"Everything's in perfect order, sir, just as it was when you left; and there are the keys," said Mrs. Peddle.
The Peddles retired. Doggie eyed the heavy bunch of keys with an air of distaste. For two years he had not seen a key. What on earth could be the good of all this locking and unlocking? He stuffed the bunch in his tunic pocket and looked around him. It seemed difficult to realize that everything he saw was his own. Those trees visible from the hall windows were his own, and the land on which they grew. This spacious, beautiful house was his own. He had only to wave a hand, as it were, and it would be filled with serving men and serving maids ready to do his bidding. His foot was on his native heath, and his name was James Marmaduke Trevor.
Did he ever actually live here, have his being here? Was he ever part and parcel of it all---the Oriental rugs, the soft stair-carpet on the noble oak staircase leading to the gallery, the oil paintings, the impressive statuary, the solid, historical, oak hall furniture? Were it not so acutely remembered, he would have felt like a man accustomed all his life to barns and tents and hedgerows and fetid holes in the ground, who had wandered into some ill-guarded palace. He entered the drawing-room. The faithful Peddles, with pathetic zeal to give him a true home-coming, had set it out fresh and clean and polished; the windows were like crystal, and flowers welcomed him from every available vase. And so in the dining-room. The Chippendale dining-table gleamed like a sombre translucent pool. On the sideboard, amid the array of shining silver, the very best old Waterford decanters filled with whisky and brandy, and old cut-glass goblets invited him to refreshment. The precious mezzotint portraits, mostly of his own collecting, regarded him urbanely from the walls. The Times and the Morning Post were laid out on the little table by his accustomed chair near the massive marble mantelpiece.
"The dear old idiots," said Doggie, and he sat down for a moment and unfolded the newspapers and strewed them around, to give the impression that he had read and enjoyed them.
And then he went into his own private and particular den, the peacock and ivory room, which had been the supreme expression of himself and for which he had ached during many nights of misery. He looked round and his heart sank. He seemed to come face to face with the ineffectual, effeminate creature who had brought upon him the disgrace of his man's life. But for the creator and sybarite enjoyer of this sickening boudoir, he would now be in honoured command of men. He conceived a sudden violent hatred of the room. The only thing in the place worth a man's consideration, save a few water-colours, was the honest grand piano, which, because it did not sthetically harmonize with his squeaky, pot-bellied theorbos and tinkling spinet, he had hidden in an alcove behind a curtain. He turned an eye of disgust on the vellum backs of his books in the closed Chippendale cases, on the drawers containing his collection of wall-papers, on the footling peacocks, on the curtains and cushions, on the veined ivory paper which, beginning to fade two years ago, now looked mean and meaningless. It was an abominable room. It ought to be smelling of musk or pastilles or joss-sticks. It might have done so, for once he had tried something of the sort, and did not renew the experiment only because the smell happened to make him sick.
There was one feature of the room at which for a long time he avoided looking: but wherever he turned, it impressed itself on his consciousness as the miserable genius of the despicable place. And that was his collection of little china dogs.
At last he planted himself in front of the great glass cabinet, whence thousands of little dogs looked at him out of little black dots of eyes. There were dogs of all nationalities, all breeds, all twisted enormities of human invention. There were monstrous dogs of China and Japan; Aztec dogs; dogs in Svres and Dresden and Chelsea; sixpenny dogs from Austria and Switzerland; everything in the way of a little dog that man had made. He stood in front of it with almost a doggish snarl on his lips. He had spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds over these futile dogs. Yet never a flesh and blood, real, lusty canis futilis had he possessed. He used to dislike real dogs. The shivering rat, Goliath, could scarcely be called a dog. He had wasted his heart over these contemptible counterfeits. To add to his collection, catalogue it, describe it, correspond about it with the semi-imbecile Russian prince, his only rival collector, had once ranked with his history of wall-papers as the serious and absorbing pursuit of his life.
Then suddenly Doggie's hatred reached the crisis of ferocity. He saw red. He seized the first instrument of destruction that came to his hand, a little gilt Louis XV music stool, and bashed the cabinet full in front. The glass flew into a thousand splinters. He bashed again. The woodwork of the cabinet, stoutly resisting, worked hideous damage on the gilt stool. But Doggie went on bashing till the cabinet sank in ruins and the little dogs, headless, tailless, rent in twain, strewed the floor. Then Doggie stamped on them with his heavy munition boots until dogs and glass were reduced to powder and the Aubusson carpet was cut to pieces.
"Damn the whole infernal place!" cried Doggie, and he heaved a mandolin tied up with disgusting peacock-blue ribbons at the bookcase, and fled from the room.
He stood for a while in the hall, shaken with his anger; then mounted the staircase and went into his own bedroom with the satinwood furniture and nattier blue hangings. God! what a bedchamber for a man! He would have liked to throw bombs into the nest of effeminacy. But his mother had arranged it, so in a way it was immune from his iconoclastic rage. He went down to the dining-room, helped himself to a whisky and soda from the sideboard, and sat down in the arm-chair amidst the scattered newspapers and held his head in his hands and thought.
The house was hateful; all its associations were hateful. If he lived there until he was ninety, the abhorred ghost of the pre-war little Doggie Trevor would always haunt every nook and cranny of the place, mouthing the quarter of a century's shame that had culminated in the Great Disgrace. At last he brought his hand down with a bang on the arm of his chair. He would never live in this House of Dishonour again. Never. He would sell it.
"By God!" he cried, starting to his feet, as the inspiration came.
He would sell it, as it stood, lock, stock and barrel, with everything in it. He would wipe out at one stroke the whole of his unedifying history. Denby Hall gone, what could tie him to Durdlebury? He would be freed, for ever, from the petrification of the grey, cramping little city. If Peggy didn't like it, that was Peggy's affair. In material things he was master of his destiny. Peggy would have to follow him in his career, whatever it was, not he Peggy. He saw clearly that which had been mapped out for him, the silly little social ambitions, the useless existence, little Doggie Trevor for ever trailing obediently behind the lady of Denby Hall. Doggie threw himself back in his chair and laughed. No one had ever heard him laugh like that. After a while he was even surprised at himself.
He was perfectly ready to marry Peggy. It was almost a preordained thing. A rupture of the engagement was unthinkable. Her undeviating loyalty bound him by every fibre of gratitude and honour. But it was essential that Peggy should know whom and what she was marrying. The Doggie trailing in her wake no longer existed. If she were prepared to follow the new Doggie, well and good. If not, there would be conflict. For that he was prepared.
He strode, this time contemptuously, into his wrecked peacock and ivory room, where his telephone (blatant and hideous thing) was ingeniously concealed behind a screen, and rang up Spooner and Smithson, the leading firm of auctioneers and estate agents in the town. At the mention of his name, Mr. Spooner, the senior partner, came to the telephone.
"Yes, I'm back, Mr. Spooner, and I'm quite well," said Doggie. "I want to see you on very important business. When can you fix it up? Any time? Can you come along now to Denby Hall?"
Mr. Spooner would be pleased to wait upon Mr. Trevor immediately. He would start at once. Doggie went out and sat on the front doorstep and smoked cigarettes till he came.
"Mr. Spooner," said he, as soon as the elderly auctioneer descended from his little car, "I'm going to sell the whole of the Denby Hall estate, and, with the exception of a few odds and ends, family relics and so forth, which I'll pick out, all the contents of the house---furniture, pictures, sheets, towels and kitchen clutter. I've only got six days' leave, and I want all the worries, as far as I am concerned, settled and done with before I go. So you'll have to buck up, Mr. Spooner. If you say you can't do it, I'll put the business by telephone into the hands of a London agent."
It took Mr. Spooner nearly a quarter of an hour to recover his breath, gain a grasp of the situation and assemble his business wits.
"Of course I'll carry out your instructions, Mr. Trevor," he said at last. "You can safely leave the matter in our hands. But, although it is against my business interests, pray let me beg you to reconsider your decision. It is such a beautiful home, your grandfather, the Bishop's, before you."
"He bought it pretty cheap, didn't he, somewhere in the 'seventies?"
"I forget the price he paid for it, but I could look it up. Of course we were the agents."
"And then it was let to some dismal people until my father died and my mother took it over. I'm sorry I can't get sentimental about it, as if it were an ancestral hall, Mr. Spooner. I want to get rid of the place, because I hate the sight of it."
"It would be presumptuous of me to say anything more," answered the old-fashioned country auctioneer.
"Say what you like, Mr. Spooner," laughed Doggie in his disarming way. "We're old friends. But send in your people this afternoon to start on inventories and measuring up, or whatever they do, and I'll look round to-morrow and select the bits I may want to keep. You'll see after the storing of them, won't you?"
"Of course, Mr. Trevor."
Mr. Spooner drove away in his little car, a much dazed man.
Like the rest of Durdlebury and the circumjacent county, he had assumed that when the war was over Mr. James Marmaduke Trevor would lead his bride from the Deanery into Denby Hall, where the latter, in her own words, would proceed to make things hum.
"My dear," said he to his wife at luncheon, "you could have knocked me over with a feather. What he's doing it for, goodness knows. I can only assume that he has grown so accustomed to the destruction of property in France, that he has got bitten by the fever."
"Perhaps Peggy Conover has turned him down," suggested his wife, who, much younger than he, employed more modern turns of speech. "And I shouldn't wonder if she has. Since the war girls aren't on the look out for pretty monkeys."
"If Miss Conover thinks she has got hold of a pretty monkey in that young man, she is very much mistaken," replied Mr. Spooner.
Meanwhile Doggie summoned Peddle to the hall. He knew that his announcement would be a blow to the old man; but this was a world of blows; and after all, one could not organize one's life to suit the sentiments of old family idiots of retainers, served they never so faithfully.
"Peddle," said he, "I'm sorry to say I'm going to sell Denby Hall. Messrs. Spooner and Smithson's people are coming in this afternoon. So give them every facility. Also tea, or beer, or whisky, or whatever they want. About what's going to happen to you and Mrs. Peddle, don't worry a bit. I'll look after that. You've been jolly good friends of mine all my life, and I'll see that everything's as right as rain."
He turned, before the amazed old butler could reply, and marched away. Peddle gaped at his retreating figure. If those were the ways which Mr. Marmaduke had learned in the army, the lower sank the army in Peddle's estimation. To sell Denby Hall over his head! Why, the place and all about it was his! So deeply are squatters' rights implanted in the human instinct.
Doggie marched along the familiar high road, strangely exhilarated. What was to be his future he neither knew nor cared. At any rate, it would not lie in Durdlebury. He had cut out Durdlebury for ever from his scheme of existence. If he got through the war, he and Peggy would go out somewhere into the great world where there was man's work to do. Parliament! Peggy had suggested it as a sort of country gentleman's hobby that would keep him amused during the London seasons---so might prospective bride have talked to prospective husband fifty years ago. Parliament! God help him and God help Peggy if ever he got into Parliament. He would speak the most unpopular truths about the race of politicians if ever he got into Parliament. Peggy would wish that neither of them had ever been born. He held the trenches' views on politicians. No fear. No muddy politics as an elegant amusement for him. He laughed as he had laughed in the dining-room at Denby Hall.
He would have a bad quarter of an hour with Peggy. Naturally. She would say, and with every right: "What about me? Am I not to be considered?" Yes, of course she would be considered. The position his fortune assured him would always be hers. He had no notion of asking her to share a log cabin in the wilds of Canada, or to bury herself in Oliver's dud island of Huaheine. The great world would be before them. "But give me some sort of an idea of what you propose to do," she would with perfect propriety demand. And there Doggie was stuck. He had not the ghost of a programme. All he had was faith in the war, faith in the British spirit and genius that would bring it to a perfect end, in which there would be unimagined opportunities for a man to fling himself into a new life, and new conditions, and begin the new work of a new civilization.
"If she'll only understand," said he, "that I can't go back to those blasted little dogs, all will be well."
Not quite all. Although his future was as nebulous as the planetary system in the Milky Way, at the back of his mind was a vague conviction that it would be connected somehow with the welfare of those men whom he had learned to know and love: the men to whom reading was little pleasure, writing a school-child's laborious task, the glories of the earth as interpreted through art a sealed book; the men whose daily speech was foul metaphor; the men, hemi-demi-semi-educated, whose crude socialistic opinions the open lessons of history and the eternal facts of human nature derisively refuted; the men who had sweated and slaved in factory and in field to no other purpose than to obey the biological laws of the perpetuation of the species; yet the men with the sweet minds of children, the gushing tenderness of women, the hearts of lions; the men compared to whom the rotten squealing heroes of Homer were a horde of cowardly savages. They were men, these comrades of his, swift with all that there can be of divine glory in men.
And when they came home and the high gods sounded the false trumpet of peace?
There would be men's work in England for all the Doggies in England to do.
Again, if Peggy could understand this, all would be well. If she missed the point altogether, and tauntingly advised him to go and join his friends the Socialists at once---then---he shoved his cap to the back of his head and wrinkled his forehead---then------
"Everything will be in the soup," said he.
These reflections brought him to the Deanery. The nearest way of entrance was the stable-yard gate, which was always open. He strode in, waved a hand to Chipmunk who was sitting on the ground with his back against the garage, smoking a pipe, and entered the house by the French window of the dining-room. Where should he find Peggy? His whole mind was set on the immediate interview. Obviously the drawing-room was the first place of search. He opened the drawing-room door, the hinges and lock oily, noiseless, perfectly ordained, like everything in the perfectly ordained English Deanery, and strode in.
His entrance was so swift, so protected from sound, that the pair had no time to start apart before he was there, with his amazed eyes full upon them. Peggy's hands were on Oliver's shoulders, tears were streaming down her face, as her head was thrown back from him, and Oliver's arm was around her. Her back was to the door. Oliver withdrew his arm and retired a pace or two.
"Lord Almighty," he whispered, "here's Doggie!"
Then Peggy, realizing what had happened, wheeled round and stared tragically at Doggie, who, preoccupied with the search for her, had not removed his cap. He drew himself up.
"I beg your pardon," he said with imperturbable irony, and turned.
Oliver rushed across the room.
"Stop, you silly fool!"
He slammed the open door, caught Doggie by the arm and dragged him away from the threshold. His blue eyes blazed and the lips beneath the short-cropped moustache quivered.
"It's all my fault, Doggie. I'm a beast and a cad and anything you like to call me. But for things you said last night---well---no, hang it all, there's no excuse. Everything's on me. Peggy's as true as gold."
Peggy, red-eyed, pale-cheeked, stood a little way back, silent, on the defensive. Doggie, looking from one to the other, said quietly:
"A triangular explanation is scarcely decent. Perhaps you might let me have a word or two with Peggy."
"Yes. It would be best," she whispered.
"I'll be in the dining-room if you want me," said Oliver, and went out.
Doggie took her hand and, very gently, led her to a chair.
"Let us sit down. There," said he, "now we can talk more comfortably. First, before we touch on this situation, let me say something to you. It may ease things."
Peggy, humiliated, did not look at him. She nodded.
"All right."
"I made up my mind this morning to sell Denby Hall and its contents. I've given old Spooner instructions."
She glanced at him involuntarily. "Sell Denby Hall?"
"Yes, dear. You see, I have made up my mind definitely, if I'm spared, not to live in Durdlebury after the war."
"What were you thinking of doing?" she asked, in a low voice.
"That would depend on after-war circumstances. Anyhow, I was coming to you, when I entered the room, with my decision. I knew, of course, that it wouldn't please you---that you would have something to say to it---perhaps something very serious."
"What do you mean by something very serious?"
"Our little contract, dear," said Doggie, "was based on the understanding that you would not be uprooted from the place in which are all your life's associations. If I broke that understanding it would leave you a free agent to determine the contract, as the lawyers say. So perhaps, Peggy dear, we might dismiss---well---other considerations, and just discuss this."
Peggy twisted a rag of handkerchief and wavered for a moment. Then she broke out, with fresh tears on her cheek.
"You're a dear of dears to put it that way. Only you could do it. I've been a brute, old boy; but I couldn't help it. I did try to play the game."
"You did, Peggy dear. You've been wonderful."
"And although it didn't look like it, I was trying to play the game when you came in. I really was. And so was he." She rose and threw the handkerchief away from her. "I'm not going to step out of the engagement by the side door you've left open for me, you dear old simple thing. It stands if you like. We're all honourable people, and Oliver"---she drew a sharp little breath---"Oliver will go out of our lives."
Doggie smiled---he had risen---and taking her hands, kissed them.
"I've never known what a splendid Peggy it is, until I lose her. Look here, dear, here's the whole thing in a nutshell. While I've been morbidly occupied with myself and my grievances and my disgrace and my efforts to pull through, and have gradually developed into a sort of half-breed between a Tommy and a gentleman with every mortal thing in me warped and changed, you've stuck to the original rotten ass you lashed into the semblance of a man, in this very room, goodness knows how many months, or years, or centuries ago. In my infernal selfishness, I've treated you awfully badly."
"No, you haven't," she decided stoutly.
"Yes, I have. The ordinary girl would have told a living experiment like me to go hang long before this. But you didn't. And now you see a totally different sort of Doggie and you're making yourself miserable because he's a queer, unsympathetic, unfamiliar stranger."
"All that may be so," she said, meeting his eyes bravely. "But if the unfamiliar Doggie still cares for me, it doesn't matter."
Here was a delicate situation. Two very tender-skinned vanities opposed to each other. The smart of seeing one's affianced bride in the arms of another man hurts grievously sore. It's a primitive sex affair, independent of love in its modern sense. If the savage's abandoned squaw runs off with another fellow, he pursues him with clubs and tomahawks until he has avenged the insult. Having known ME, to decline to Spotted Crocodile! So the finest flower of civilization cannot surrender the lady who once was his to the more favoured male without a primitive pang. On the other hand, Doggie knew very well that he did not love Peggy, that he had never loved Peggy. But how in common decency could a man tell a girl, who had wasted a couple of years of her life over him, that he had never loved her? Instead of replying to her questions, he walked about the room in a worried way.
"I take it," said Peggy incisively, after a while, "that you don't care for me any longer."
He turned and halted at the challenge. He snapped his fingers. What was the good of all this beating of the bush?
"Look here, Peggy, let's face it out. If you'll confess that you and Oliver are in love with each other, I'll confess to a girl in France."
"Oh?" said Peggy, with a swift change to coolness. "There's a girl in France, is there? How long has this been going on?"
"The last four days in billets before I got wounded," said Doggie.
"What is she like?"
Then Doggie suddenly laughed out loud and took her by the shoulders in a grasp rougher than she had ever dreamed to lie in the strength or nature of Marmaduke Trevor, and kissed her the heartiest, honestest kiss she had ever had from man, and rushed out of the room.
Presently he returned, dragging with him the disconsolate Major.
"Here," said he, "fix it up between you. I've told Peggy about a girl in France and she wants to know what she's like."
Peggy, shaken by the rude grip and the kiss, flashed and cried rebelliously:
"I'm not quite so sure that I want to fix it up with Oliver."
"Oh yes, you do," cried Oliver.
He snatched up Doggie's cap and jammed it on Doggie's head and cried:
"Doggie, you're the best and truest and finest of dear old chaps in the whole wide world."
Doggie settled his cap, grinned, and moved to the door.
"Anything else, sir?"
Oliver roared, delighted: "No, Private Trevor, you can go."
"Very good, sir."
Doggie saluted smartly and went out. He passed through the French window of the dining-room into the mellow autumn sunshine. Found himself standing in front of Chipmunk, who still smoked the pipe of elegant leisure by the door of the garage.
"This is a dam good old world all the same. Isn't it?" said he.
"If it was always like this, it would have its points," replied the unworried Chipmunk.
Doggie had an inspiration. He looked at his watch. It was nearly one o'clock.
"Hungry?"
"Always 'ungry. Specially about dinner-time."
"Come along of me to the Downshire Arms and have a bite of dinner."
Chipmunk rose slowly to his feet, and put his pipe into his tunic pocket, and jerked a slow thumb backwards.
"Ain't yer having yer meals 'ere?"
"Only now and then, as sort of treats," said Doggie. "Come along."
"Ker-ist!" said Chipmunk. "Can yer wait a bit until I've cleaned me buttons?"
"Oh, bust your old buttons!" laughed Doggie. "I'm hungry."
So the pair of privates marched through the old city to the Downshire Arms, the select, old-world hotel of Durdlebury, where Doggie was known since babyhood; and there, sitting at a window table with Chipmunk, he gave Durdlebury the great sensation of its life. If the Dean himself, clad in tights and spangles, had juggled for pence by the west door of the cathedral, tongues could scarcely have wagged faster. But Doggie worried his head about gossip not one jot. He was in joyous mood and ordered a gargantuan feast for Chipmunk and bottles of the strongest old Burgundy, such as he thought would get a grip on Chipmunk's whiskyfied throat; and under the genial influence of food and drink, Chipmunk told him tales of far lands and strange adventures; and when they emerged much later into the quiet streets, it was the great good fortune of Chipmunk's life that there was not the ghost of an Assistant Provost-Marshal in Durdlebury.
"Doggie, old man," said Oliver afterwards, "my wonder and reverence for you increases hour by hour. You are the only man in the whole world who has ever made Chipmunk drunk."
"You see," said Doggie modestly, "I don't think he ever really loved anyone who fed him before."
