Page 7 of 24
At the Savoy, during the first stupefaction of his misery, Doggie had not noticed particularly the prevalence of khaki. At the Russell it dwelt insistent, like the mud on Salisbury Plain. Men that might have been the twin brethren of his late brother officers were everywhere, free, careless, efficient. The sight of them added the gnaw of envy to his heartache. Even in his bedroom he could hear the jingle of their spurs and their cheery voices as they clanked along the corridor. On the third day after his migration he took a bold step and moved into lodgings in Woburn Place. Here at least he could find quiet, untroubled by heart-rending sights and sounds. He spent most of his time in dull reading and dispirited walking. For he could walk now---so much had his training done for him---and walk for many miles without fatigue. For all the enjoyment he got out of it, he might as well have marched round a prison yard. Indeed there were some who tramped the prison yards with keener zest. They were buoyed up with the hope of freedom, they could look forward to the ever-approaching day when they should be thrown once more into the glad whirl of life. But the miraculously new Doggie had no hope. He felt for ever imprisoned in his shame. His failure preyed on his mind.
He dallied with thoughts of suicide. Why hadn't he salved, at any rate, his service revolver? Then he remembered the ugly habits of the unmanageable thing---how it always kicked its muzzle up in the air. Would he have been able even to shoot himself with it? And he smiled in self-derision. Drowning was not so difficult. Any fool could throw himself into the water. With a view to the inspection of a suitable spot, Doggie wandered, idly, in the dusk of one evening, to Waterloo Bridge, and turning his back to the ceaseless traffic, leaned his elbows on the parapet and stared in front of him. A few lights already gleamed from Somerset House and the more dimly seen buildings of the Temple. The dome of St. Paul's loomed a dark shadow through the mist. The river stretched below very peaceful, very inviting. The parapet would be easy to climb. He did not know whether he could dive in the approved manner---hands joined over head. He had never learned to swim, let alone dive. At any rate, he could fall off. In that art the riding-school had proved him a past master. But the spot had its disadvantages. It was too public. Perhaps other bridges might afford more privacy. He would inspect them all. It would be something to do. There was no hurry. As he was not wanted in this world, so he had no assurance of being welcome in the next. He had a morbid vision of avatar after avatar being kicked from sphere to sphere.
At this point of his reflections he became aware of a presence by his side. He turned his head and found a soldier, an ordinary private, very close to him, also leaning on the parapet.
"I thought I wasn't mistaken in Mr. Marmaduke Trevor."
Doggie started away, on the point of flight, dreading the possible insolence of one of the men of his late regiment. But the voice of the speaker rang in his ears with a strange familiarity, and the great fleshy nose, the high cheek-bones, and the little grey eyes in the weather-beaten face suggested vaguely some one of the long ago. His dawning recognition amused the soldier.
"Yes, laddie. Ye're right. It's your old Phineas---Phineas McPhail, Esq., M.A., defunct. Now 33702 Private P. McPhail redivivus."
He warmly wrung the hand of the semi-bewildered Doggie, who murmured: "Very glad to meet you, I'm sure."
Phineas, gaunt and bony, took his arm.
"Would it not just be possible," he said, in his old half-pedantic, half-ironic intonation, "to find a locality less exposed to the roar of traffic and the rude jostling of pedestrians and the inclemency of the elements, in which we can enjoy the amenities of a little refined conversation?"
It was like a breath from the past. Doggie smiled.
"Which way are you going?"
"Your way, my dear Marmaduke, was ever mine, until I was swept, I thought for ever, out of your path by a torrential spate of whisky."
He laughed, as though it had been a playful freak of destiny. Doggie laughed, too. But for the words he had addressed to hotel and lodging-house folk, he had spoken to no one for over a fortnight. The instinctive craving for companionship made Phineas suddenly welcome.
"Yes. Let us have a talk," said he. "Come to my rooms, if you have the time. There'll be some dinner."
"Will I come? Will I have dinner? Will I re-enter once more the paradise of the affluent? Laddie, I will."
In the Strand they hailed a taxi and drove to Bloomsbury. On the way Phineas asked:
"You mentioned your rooms. Are you residing permanently in London?"
"Yes," said Doggie.
"And Durdlebury?"
"I'm not going back."
"London's a place full of temptations for those without experience," Phineas observed sagely.
"I've not noticed any," Doggie replied. On which Phineas laughed and slapped him on the knee.
"Man," said he, "when I first saw you I thought you had changed into a disillusioned misanthropist. But I'm wrong. You haven't changed a bit."
A few minutes later they reached Woburn Place. Doggie showed him into the sitting-room on the drawing-room floor. A fire was burning in the grate, for though it was only early autumn, the evening was cold. The table was set for Doggie's dinner. Phineas looked round him in surprise. The heterogeneous and tasteless furniture, the dreadful Mid-Victorian prints on the walls---one was the "Return of the Guards from the Crimea," representing the landing from the troop-ship, repellent in its smug unreality, the coarse glass and well-used plate on the table, the crumpled napkin in a ring (for Marmaduke who in his mother's house had never been taught to dream that a napkin could possibly be used for two consecutive meals!), the general air of slipshod Philistinism---all came as a shock to Phineas, who had expected to find in Marmaduke's "rooms" a replica of the fastidious prettiness of the peacock and ivory room at Denby Hall. He scratched his head, covered with a thick brown thatch.
"Laddie," said he gravely, "you must excuse me if I take a liberty; but I canna fit you into this environment."
Doggie looked about him also. "Seems funny, doesn't it?"
"It cannot be that you've come down in the world?"
"To bed-rock," said Doggie.
"No?" said Phineas, with an air of concern. "Man, I'm awful sorry. I know what the coming down feels like. And I, finding it not abhorrent to a sophisticated and well-trained conscience, and thinking you could well afford it, extracted a thousand pounds from your fortune. My dear lad, if Phineas McPhail could return the money------"
Doggie broke in with a laugh. "Pray don't distress yourself, Phineas. It's not a question of money. I've as much as ever I had. The last thing in the world I've had to think of has been money."
"Then what in the holy names of Thunder and Beauty," cried Phineas, throwing out one hand to an ancient saddle-bag sofa whose ends were covered by flimsy rags, and the other to the decayed ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, "what in the name of common sense are you doing in this awful inelegant lodging-house?"
"I don't know," replied Doggie. "It's a fact," he continued after a pause. "The scheme of decoration is revolting to every sthetic sense which I've spent my life in cultivating. Its futile pretentiousness is the rasping irritation of every hour. Yet here I am. Quite comfortable. And here I propose to stay."
Phineas McPhail, M.A., late of Glasgow and Cambridge, looked at Doggie with his keen little grey eyes beneath bent and bristling eyebrows. In the language of 33702 Private McPhail, he asked:
"What the blazes is it all about?"
"That's a long story," said Doggie, looking at his watch. "In the meantime, I had better give some orders about dinner. And you would like to wash."
He threw open a wing of the folding-doors, once in Georgian times separating drawing-room from withdrawing-room, and now separating living-room from bedroom, and switching on the light, invited McPhail to follow.
"I think you'll find everything you want," said he.
Phineas McPhail, left alone to his ablutions, again looked round, and he had more reason than ever to ask what it was all about. Marmaduke's bedroom at Denby Hall had been a dream of satinwood and dull blue silk. The furniture and hangings had been Mrs. Trevor's present to Marmaduke on his sixteenth birthday. He remembered how he had been bored to death by that stupendous ass of an old woman---for so he had characterized her---during the process of selection and installation. The present room, although far more luxurious than any that Phineas McPhail had slept in for years, formed a striking contrast with that remembered nest of effeminacy.
"I'll have to give it up," he said to himself. But just as he had put the finishing touches to his hair an idea occurred to him. He flung open the door.
"Laddie, I've got it. It's a woman."
But Doggie laughed and shook his head, and leaving McPhail, took his turn in the bedroom. For the first time since his return to civil life he ceased for a few moments to brood over his troubles. McPhail's mystification amused him. McPhail's personality and address, viewed in the light of the past, were full of interest. Obviously he was a man who lived unashamed on low levels. Doggie wondered how he could have regarded him for years with a respect almost amounting to veneration. In a curious unformulated way Doggie felt that he had authority over this man so much older than himself, who had once been his master. It tickled into some kind of life his deadened self-esteem. Here at last was a man with whom he could converse on sure ground. The khaki uniform caused him no envy.
"The poet is not altogether incorrect," said McPhail, when they sat down to dinner, "in pointing out the sweet uses of adversity. If it had not been for the adversity of a wee bit operation, I should not now be on sick furlough. And if I had not been on furlough I shouldn't have the pleasure of this agreeable reconciliation. Here's to you, laddie, and to our lasting friendship." He sipped his claret. "It's not like the Lafitte in the old cellar---Eheu fugaces anni et---what the plague is the Latin for vintages? But 'twill serve." He drank again and smacked his lips. "It will even serve very satisfactorily. Good wine at a perfect temperature is not the daily drink of the British soldier."
"By the way," said Doggie, "you haven't told me why you became a soldier."
"A series of vicissitudes dating from the hour I left your house," said Phineas, "vicissitudes the recital of which would wring your heart, laddie, and make angels weep if their lachrymal glands were not too busily engaged by the horrors of war, culminated four months ago in an attack of fervid and penniless patriotism. No one seemed to want me except my country. She clamoured for me on every hoarding and every omnibus. A recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square tapped me on the arm, and said: 'Young man, your country wants you.' Said I with my Scottish caution, 'Can you take your affidavit that you got the information straight from the War Office?' 'I can,' said he. Then I threw myself on his bosom and bade him take me to her. That's how I became 33702 Private Phineas McPhail, A Company, 10th Wessex Rangers, at the remuneration of one shilling and twopence per diem."
"Do you like it?" asked Doggie.
Phineas rubbed the side of his thick nose thoughtfully.
"There you come to the metaphysical conception of human happiness," he replied. "In itself it is a vile life. To a man of thirty-five------"
"Good lord!" cried Doggie, "I always thought you were about fifty!"
"Your mother caught me young, laddie. To a man of thirty-five, a graduate of ancient and honourable universities and a whilom candidate for holy orders, it is a life that would seem to have no attraction whatever. The hours are absurd, the work distasteful, and the mode of living repulsive. But strange to say, it fully contents me. The secret of happiness lies in the supple adaptability to conditions. When I found that it was necessary to perform ridiculous antics with my legs and arms, I entered into the comicality of the idea and performed them with an indulgent zest which soon won me the precious encomiums of my superiors in rank. When I found that the language of the canteen was not that of the pulpit or the drawing-room, I quickly acquired the new vocabulary and won the pleasant esteem of my equals. By means of this faculty of adaptability I can suck enjoyment out of everything. But, at the same time, mind you, keeping in reserve a little secret fount of pleasure."
"What do you call a little secret fount of pleasure?" asked Doggie.
"I'll give you an illustration---and, if you're the man I consider you to be, you'll take a humorous view of my frankness. At present I adapt myself to a rough atmosphere of coarseness and lustiness, in which nothing coarse or lusty I could do would produce the slightest ripple of a convulsion: but I have my store of a cultivated mind and cheap editions of the classics, my little secret fount of Castaly to drink from whenever I so please. On the other hand, when I had the honour of being responsible for your education, I adapted myself to a hot-house atmosphere in which Respectability and the concomitant virtues of Supineness and Sloth were cultivated like rare orchids; but in my bedroom I kept a secret fount which had its source in some good Scots distillery."
Whereupon he attacked his plateful of chicken with vehement gusto.
"You're a hedonist, Phineas," said Doggie, after a thoughtful pause.
"Man," said Phineas, laying down his knife and fork, "you've just hit it. I am. I'm an accomplished hedonist. An early recognition of the fact saved me from the Church."
"And the Church from you," said Doggie quietly.
Phineas shot a swift glance at him beneath his shaggy brown eyebrows.
"Ay," said he. "Though, mark you, if I had followed my original vocation, the Bench of Bishops could not have surpassed me in the unction in which I would have wallowed. If I had been born a bee in a desert, laddie, I would have sucked honey out of a dead camel."
With easy and picturesque cynicism, and in a Glasgow accent which had curiously broadened since his spell of Oriental ease at Denby Hall, he developed his philosophy, illustrating it by incidents more or less reputable in his later career. At first, possessor of the ill-gotten thousand pounds and of considerable savings from a substantial salary, he had enjoyed the short wild riot of the Prodigal's life. Paris saw most of his money---the Paris which, under his auspices, Doggie never knew. Plentiful claret set his tongue wagging in Rabelaisian reminiscence. After Paris came husks. Not bad husks if you knew how to cook them. Borrowed salt and pepper and a little stolen butter worked wonders. But they were irritating to the stomach. He lay on the floor, said he, and yelled for fatted calf; but there was no soft-headed parent to supply it. Phineas McPhail must be a slave again and work for his living. Then came private coaching, freelance journalism, hunting for secretaryships: the commonplace story humorously told of the wastrel's decline; then a gorgeous efflorescence in light green and gold as the man outside a picture palace in Camberwell---and lastly, the penniless patriot throwing himself into the arms of his desirous country.
"Have you any whisky in the house, laddie?" he asked, after the dinner things had been taken away.
"No," said Doggie, "but I could easily get you some."
"Pray don't," said McPhail. "If you had, I was going to ask you to be kind enough not to let your excellent landlord, whom I recognize as a butler of the old school, produce it. Butlers of the old school are apt, like Peddle, to bring in a maddening tray of decanters, syphons, and glasses. You may not believe me, but I haven't touched a drop of whisky since I joined the army."
McPhail looked at the long carefully preserved ash of one of Doggie's excellent cigars.
"It's all a part of the doctrine of adaptability. In order to attain happiness in the army, the first step is to avoid differences of opinion with the civil and military police and non-commissioned officers, and such-like sycophantic myrmidons of authority. Being a man of academic education, it is with difficulty that I agree with them when I'm sober. If I were drunk, my bonnie laddie"---he waved a hand---"well---I don't get drunk. And as I have no use for whisky, as merely an agreeable beverage, I have struck whisky out of my hedonistic scheme of existence. But if you have any more of that pleasant claret------"
Doggie rang the bell and gave the order. The landlord brought in bottle and glasses.
"And now, my dear Marmaduke," said Phineas after an appreciative sip, "now that I have told you the story of my life, may I, without impertinent curiosity, again ask you what you meant when you said you had come down to bed-rock?"
The sight of the man, smug, cynical, shameless, sprawling luxuriously on the sofa, with his tunic unbuttoned, filled him with sudden fury: such fury as Oliver's insult had aroused, such as had impelled him during a vicious rag in the mess to clutch a man's hair and almost pull it out by the roots.
"Yes, you may; and I'll tell you," he cried, starting to his feet. "I've reached the bed-rock of myself---the bed-rock of humiliation and disgrace. And it's all your fault. Instead of training me to be a man, you pandered to my poor mother's weaknesses and brought me up like a little toy dog---the infernal name still sticks to me wherever I go. You made a helpless fool of me, and let me go out a helpless fool into the world. And when you came across me I was thinking whether it wouldn't be best to throw myself over the parapet. A month ago you would have saluted me in the street and stood before me at attention when I spoke to you------"
"Eh? What's that, laddie?" interrupted Phineas, sitting up. "You've held a commission in the army?"
"Yes," said Doggie fiercely, "and I've been chucked. I've been thrown out as a hopeless rotter. And who is most to blame---you or I? It's you. You've brought me to this infernal place. I'm here in hiding---hiding from my family and the decent folk I'm ashamed to meet. And it's all your fault, and now you have it!"
"Laddie, laddie," said Phineas reproachfully, "the facts of my being a guest beneath your roof and my humble military rank, render it difficult for me to make an appropriate reply."
Doggie's rage had spent itself. These rare fits were short-lived and left him somewhat unnerved.
"I'm sorry, Phineas. As you say, you're my guest. And as to your uniform, God knows I honour every man who wears it."
"That's taking things in the right spirit," Phineas conceded graciously, helping himself to another glass of wine. "And the right spirit is a great healer of differences. I'll not go so far as to deny that there is an element of justice in your apportionment of blame. There may, on various occasions, have been some small dereliction of duty. But you'll have been observing that in the recent exposition of my philosophy I have not laboured the point of duty to disproportionate exaggeration."
Doggie lit a cigarette. His fingers were still shaking. "I'm glad you own up. It's a sign of grace."
"Ay," said Phineas, "no man is altogether bad. In spite of everything, I've always entertained a warm affection for you, laddie, and when I saw you staring at bogies round about the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral my heart went out to you. You didn't look over-happy."
Doggie, always responsive to human kindness, was touched. He felt a note of sincerity in McPhail's tone. Perhaps he had judged him harshly, overlooking the plea in extenuation which Phineas had set up---that in every man there must be some saving remnant of goodness.
"I wasn't happy, Phineas," he said; "I was as miserable an outcast as could be found in London, and when a fellow's down and out, you must forgive him for speaking more bitterly than he ought."
"Don't I know, laddie? Don't I know?" said Phineas sympathetically. He reached for the cigar-box. "Do you mind if I take another? Perhaps two---one to smoke afterwards, in memory of this meeting. It is a long time since my lips touched a thing so gracious as a real Havana."
"Take a lot," said Doggie generously, "I don't really like cigars. I only bought them because I thought they might be stronger than cigarettes."
Phineas filled his pockets. "You can pay no greater compliment to a man's honesty of purpose," said he, "than by taking him at his word. And now," he continued, when he had carefully lit the cigar he had first chosen, "let us review the entire situation. What about our good friends at Durdlebury? What about your uncle, the Very Reverend the Dean, against whom I bear no ill-will, though I do not say that his ultimate treatment of me was not over-hasty---what about him? If you call upon me to put my almost fantastically variegated experience of life at your disposal, and advise you in this crisis, so I must ask you to let me know the exact conditions in which you find yourself."
Doggie smiled once again, finding something diverting and yet stimulating in the calm assurance of Private McPhail.
"I'm not aware that I've asked you for advice, Phineas."
"The fact that you're not aware of many things that you do is no proof that you don't do them---and do them in a manner perfectly obvious to another party," replied Phineas sententiously. "You're asking for advice and consolation from any friendly human creature to whom you're not ashamed to speak. You've had an awful sorrowful time, laddie."
Doggie roamed about the room, with McPhail's little grey eyes fixed on him. Yes, Phineas was right. He would have given most of his possessions to be able, these later days, to pour out his tortured soul into sympathetic ears. But shame had kept him, still kept him, would always keep him, from the ears of those he loved. Yes, Phineas had said the diabolically right thing. He could not be ashamed to speak to Phineas. And there was something good in Phineas which he had noticed with surprise. How easy for him, in response to bitter accusation, to cast the blame on his mother? He himself had given the opening. How easy for him to point to his predecessor's short tenure of office and plead the alternative of carrying out Mrs. Trevor's theory of education or of resigning his position in favour of some sycophant even more time-serving? But he had kept silent.... Doggie stopped short and looked at Phineas with eyes dumbly questioning and quivering lips.
Phineas rose and put his hands on the boy's shoulders, and said very gently:
"Tell me all about it, laddie."
Then Doggie broke down, and with a gush of unminded tears found expression for his stony despair. His story took a long time in the telling; and Phineas interjecting an occasional sympathetic "Ay, ay," and a delicately hinted question, extracted from Doggie all there was to tell, from the outbreak of war to their meeting on Waterloo Bridge.
"And now," cried he at last, a dismally tragic figure, his young face distorted and reddened, his sleek hair ruffled from the back into unsightly perpendicularities (an invariable sign of distracted emotion) and his hands appealingly outstretched---"what the hell am I going to do?"
"Laddie," said Phineas, standing on the hearthrug, his hands on his hips, "if you had posed the question in the polite language of the precincts of Durdlebury Cathedral, I might have been at a loss to reply. But the manly invocation of hell shows me that your foot is already on the upward path. If you had prefaced it by the adjective that gives colour to all the aspirations of the British Army, it would have been better. But I'm not reproaching you, laddie. Poco poco. It is enough. It shows me you are not going to run away to a neutral country and present the unedifying spectacle of a mangy little British lion at the mercy of a menagerie of healthy hyenas and such-like inferior though truculent beasties."
"My God!" cried Doggie, "haven't I thought of it till I'm half mad? It would be just as you say---unendurable." He began to pace the room again. "And I can't go to France. It would be just the same as England. Every one would be looking white feathers at me. The only thing I can do is to go out of the world. I'm not fit for it. Oh, I don't mean suicide. I've not enough pluck. That's off. But I could go and bury myself in the wilderness somewhere where no one would ever find me."
"Laddie," said McPhail, "I misdoubt that you're going to settle down in any wilderness. You haven't the faculty of adaptability of which I have spoken to-night at some length. And your heart is young and not coated with the holy varnish of callousness, which is a secret preparation known only to those who have served a long apprenticeship in a severe school of egotism."
"That's all very well," cried Doggie, "but what the------"
Phineas waved an interrupting hand. "You've got to go back, laddie. You've got to whip all the moral courage in you and go back to Durdlebury. The Dean, with his influence, and the letter you have shown me from your Colonel, can easily get you some honourable employment in either Service not so exacting as the one which you have recently found yourself unable to perform."
Doggie threw a newly-lighted cigarette into the fire and turned passionately on McPhail.
"I won't. You're talking drivelling rot. I can't. I'd sooner die than go back there with my tail between my legs. I'd sooner enlist as a private soldier."
"Enlist?" said Phineas, and he drew himself up straight and gaunt. "Well, why not?"
"Enlist?" echoed Doggie in a dull tone.
"Have you never contemplated such a possibility?"
"Good God, no!" said Doggie.
"I have enlisted. And I am a man of ancient lineage as honourable, so as not to enter into unproductive argument, as yours. And I am a Master of Arts of the two Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. Yet I fail to find anything dishonourable in my present estate as 33702 Private Phineas McPhail in the British Army."
Doggie seemed not to hear him. He stared at him wildly.
"Enlist?" he repeated. "As a Tommy?"
"Even as a Tommy," said Phineas. He glanced at the ormolu clock. "It is past one. The respectable widow woman near the Elephant and Castle who has let me a bedroom will be worn by anxiety as to my non-return. Marmaduke, my dear, dear laddie, I must leave you. If you will be lunching here twelve hours hence, nothing will give me greater pleasure than to join you. Laddie, do you think you could manage a fried sole and a sweetbread?"
"Enlist?" said Doggie, following him out to the front door in a dream.
He opened the door. Phineas shook hands.
"Fried sole and a sweetbread at one-thirty?"
"Of course, with pleasure," said Doggie.
Phineas fumbled in his pockets.
"It's a long cry at this time of night from Bloomsbury to the Elephant and Castle. You haven't the price of a taxi fare about you, laddie---two or three pounds------?"
Doggie drew from his patent note-case a sheaf of one-pound and ten-shilling treasury notes and handed them over to McPhail's vulture clutch.
"Good night, laddie!"
Phineas strode away into the blackness. Doggie shut the front door and put up the chain and went back into his sitting-room. He wound his fingers in his hair.
"Enlist? My God!"
He lit a cigarette and after a few puffs flung it into the grate. He stared at the alternatives.
Flight, which was craven---a lifetime of self-contempt. Durdlebury, which was impossible. Enlistment------?
Yet what was a man incapable yet able-bodied, honourable though disgraced, to do?
His landlord found him at seven o'clock in the morning asleep in an arm-chair.
