Читать книгу The Willing Horse - Ian Hay - Страница 4

II

On the particular spring morning with which we are already concerned, Marjorie made a bad start. She missed prayers altogether, and was late for breakfast into the bargain. To crown her iniquity, she entered the dining-room whistling a secular air, with her arms full of daffodils.

Whistling is at all times an unladylike accomplishment, even though one whistle like a mavis. Moreover, it was Sunday. Furthermore, Uncle Fred was present on a visit, and one has to keep up appearances before relations, however despicable.

"I am not at all satisfied with Doctor Chirnside," Mr. Clegg was remarking. "But we must employ such instruments as lie to our hands."

"That is very true," remarked Uncle Fred, making a mental note of this apt expression. Uncle Fred was an industrious gleaner of other people's impromptus, with a view to parliamentary requirements.

"As you know," continued Mr. Clegg, "our own Body is not represented in this county. The nearest United Free Church—which conforms most closely to our own beliefs—is fifteen miles away. In any case, I consider that a household should, as far as possible, worship in its own district."

"Quite right," said Uncle Fred. "Like a constituency."

"Besides, we would not get to know people any other way," interposed Mrs. Clegg timidly.

"My dear," said Mr. Clegg severely, "we cannot worship God and Mammon. And I will thank you for another cup of tea. John, my boy, eat up that crust; I know of many a poor lad that would be glad of it. The only other places of worship within easy reach," he continued, "besides the parish church (Established, of course), are a Papist Chapel, Burling way, which I do not go to very often"—Mr. Clegg paused and assumed a wintry smile, to indicate that he spoke sarcastically—"and the English Episcopal Church at Fiddrie—where I would as soon see any belongings of mine trying to disport themselves as in the Church of Rome itself."

Mr. Clegg paused, and Uncle Fred laughed sardonically. Mrs. Clegg, who all her life had hankered after the comfortable consolations of Anglican ritual and the social cachet of an Anglican connection, smothered a sigh, for she knew to what address her husband's remark was directed.

At this moment, as related, Marjorie tramped in, whistling, with her daffodils.

"Hallo! am I late?" she inquired. "I am so sorry: I was out gathering these. Good morning, everybody!"

She sat down amid a deathly silence.

"What were you all talking about?" Marjorie rattled on. "Church, wasn't it? I wonder how many hours old Chirnside will preach to-day? Oh, that awful children's sermon! I don't think it's sportsmanlike to make you listen to two sermons in one morning. My idea is that during the grown-ups' sermon the children should be allowed to go out and play, and that during the children's sermon the grown-ups should have their choice of going out too, or lying right down in the pews and having a nap!" She gazed out of the window, over the sunny landscape. "I know which I should choose!"

"My girl," interposed Mr. Clegg, "if you talk in that strain I shall regret more than ever that I allowed your mother to send you to that school in Paris."

Marjorie had been "finished"—which means "begun"—at Neuilly. It is difficult to understand why her father had sent her there, except that it was expensive. Mr. Clegg had long transferred the blame for this lapse of judgment to his wife.

During those two quickening years, Marjorie, though hedged about by every preventive device known to the scholastic hierarchy, had fairly wallowed in Life—Life as opposed to Existence. She had sucked in Life through her pores; she had scrutinised Life through her shrewd blue eyes; she had masticated Life with her vigorous young teeth. Life in Paris, even as viewed from the ranks of a governess-guided "crocodile" in the Bois de Boulogne, or a processional excursion to the Tuileries, is a stimulating and disturbing compound, especially to unemancipated seventeen. At any rate, Marjorie had returned to her home possessing certain characteristics which had not been apparent when she left it. These were, roughly, three in number:

Firstly, a passionate interest in the world and its contents. She was ablaze with enthusiasm for all mankind. She wanted to do something—to be a hospital nurse, a journalist, a chorus girl, a barmaid—anything, in fact, that would bring her into contact with her fellow-creatures and, if possible, enable her to make herself uncomfortable on their behalf. She was a Giver, through and through.

Secondly, an entire lack of sentimentality. Young men made no appeal to her. She had never flirted in her life: she did not know how. She made friendships at a rush—many of them with boys of her own age—but if any young man flattered himself that he had made a tender impression, he was soon woefully undeceived. Marjorie was purely maternal. If she was kind to a young man it was because she felt sorry for him—sorry for his adorable clumsiness, his transparency, his helplessness, his lack of finesse. Young men, as a class, never gave her a thrill. She loved her own sex too, especially the self-conscious and foolish. Marjorie's main instinct at that time, and indeed through all her life, was to interpose her own beautiful and vigorous young personality between the weaker vessels of her acquaintance and the hard knocks of this world.

Thirdly, a strongly critical attitude towards the theory that children owe a debt of gratitude to their parents for the mere fact of having been brought by them into existence. Loyal she was, because it was her nature. Dutiful she was prepared to be. She was impulsively affectionate always; but her inborn sense of equity was strong. Moreover, for two years she had associated with new companions—members of another world than her own—either young girls of the English upper class, who were accustomed to regard their parents as amiable but unsophisticated accomplices in misdemeanour, or maidens from New York and Philadelphia, who appeared to entertain no opinion of their parents, as such, at all. This association had shaken to its foundation the law of her childhood—that children existed entirely for the convenience of their parents, and must expect no consideration, no indulgence, and, above all, no camaraderie from those aloof and exalted beings. In the spring of nineteen-fourteen Youth had not yet been called in to rescue Age from extinction.

Such was Marjorie at eighteen—a dangerous mixture, particularly liable to explode under compression.

She had risen early this Sunday morning in order to ramble through the woods and compose her turbulent spirit. The previous evening had witnessed a sleep-destroying interview between her father and herself. After prayers, while Mr. Clegg, according to his custom, was setting the markers in the great family Bible for the following morning's devotions, Marjorie had seated herself beside him at the head of the library table, with the air of one determined upon a plunge. She waited until the servants had filed out and the rest of the family were dispersed. Then she came to the attack with characteristic promptness.

"Father," she said, "may I go and be trained as a hospital nurse?"

"No," replied Mr. Clegg, without hesitation or heat; "you may not."

"May I learn shorthand and typewriting, then?"

"No."

"May I go and take training in some profession? Any kind," she added eagerly, "as long as it is useful."

"No," said Mr. Clegg for the third time. Then with the air of a just person patient under importunity:

"Why?"

"For two reasons," said the girl. "I want to be useful, and I want to be independent."

For answer, Mr. Clegg reopened the Bible, and with the accuracy of long practice came almost immediately upon what he wanted—certain illuminated manuscript pages occurring between the Old and New Testaments. There were six of these pages. Two were allotted to the Births, two to the Marriages, and two to the Deaths of the house of Clegg. Albert Clegg turned to the Births, and ran his finger down the list. There were quite a number of names, for the Bible was a family inheritance.

Presently he found what he wanted. A line in red ink had been drawn right across the page under the name of his youngest brother, Uncle Fred, to indicate the end of a generation. Below this line was written, in his own neat business hand:

Children of Albert and Mary Clegg.

This title-heading had erred on the side of plurality, for beneath it came but one entry—that of the birth of Albert's eldest son, Amos, at Gateshead, upon the tenth of March, Eighteen Ninety-two. A second heading followed immediately:

Children of Albert and Marjorie Clegg.

After this came quite a satisfying list. First, Joe's name—it proved to be Joshua, in full—recorded upon the twelfth of August, Eighteen Ninety-four. Then came the entry he was seeking:

Marjorie; born at "The Laburnums," Jesmond, April twenty-fourth, Eighteen Ninety-Six.

Albert Clegg surveyed his daughter over the top of his spectacles, which had been assumed for purposes of perusal, and performed a small exercise in mental arithmetic.

"That makes you eighteen," he observed.

Marjorie nodded. At this point, to her intense annoyance, the egregious Uncle Fred re-entered the room and joined the Board.

"Girls of eighteen—" began her father.

"Young ladies of eighteen," amended the Member of Parliament.

"—have no call to be independent," continued Albert Clegg; "and if they want to be of some use they can stay at home and help their mothers, as God meant them to."

"Mother," riposted Marjorie, "has more servants than she knows what to do with, and she hates interference with her house management, anyway. I have been home now for three months, honestly trying to help, and there isn't a single thing for me to do. There are hundreds of things I can do away from here. I do not ask to go out and do them now, but I do ask to be trained in something useful, so that when the time comes—"

"When what time comes?" asked her father quickly.

"The time when it will be a living impossibility for me to stick it out any longer," said Marjorie frankly. "Do you think I can sit here for ever"—with one comprehensive gesture she summarised Netherby, with its stodgy gentility, its squirrel-cage routine, and its cast-iron piety—"twiddling my thumbs? Every girl has a right to make herself efficient, nowadays."

"What comes before our rights," said Albert Clegg, "is our duty—our grateful duty to the parents that brought us up."

"Honour thy father and thy mother," chaunted the apposite Uncle Fred, "that thy days—"

Marjorie sat up.

"I hope I do honour my father and mother," she said. "I am fond of them both: they have been kind to me all my life. But I do not see why I should be particularly grateful to them for bringing me up. After all"—turning to her father—"you had to, hadn't you? You were responsible for my being here, weren't you? It seems to me that parents owe a debt to their children—not children to their parents!"

This amazingly audacious deliverance—and one had to be familiar with the Clegg tradition to realise how audacious it was—produced a stunning silence. Uncle Fred, fumbling in his repertoire for something really commensurate, breathed alarmingly. Presently Albert Clegg's heavy voice broke in:

"A debt? You mean I owe you a—a debt of gratitude?"

"Not gratitude," replied Marjorie. "Something bigger—honour. I think that parents owe it to their children, having brought them into the world—and all that sort of thing," she added a little shyly, "to give them a chance to live the sort of life that appeals to them."

Uncle Fred was ready now.

"The French," he announced, "are a giddy and godless race!"

But neither Albert Clegg nor his daughter took any notice. Wide apart as their natures lay, they had one point in common—inflexible determination. Clegg surveyed Marjorie's curving lips and hot blue eyes for a moment, and asked:

"So you want to live your own life, eh?"

Marjorie nodded.

"Yes," she said. "At least, I don't want to rush off and live it right away; but I do think I ought to be given sufficient—" she hesitated for a word.

"Equipment?" suggested her father.

"Rope?" amended Uncle Fred.

Marjorie nodded to her father again.

"Yes," she said, "sufficient equipment. A girl ought to be capable of doing something. I have told you some of the things a girl might learn to do, but there are lots of others. Even if she could support herself on the Stage it would be something."

"The Stage?"

Marjorie had exploded a bombshell this time. Uncle Fred's goat-beard dropped upon his shirt front, and waggled helplessly. Albert Clegg gazed at his daughter long and fixedly. Then he pulled the Bible towards him again, and turned back a page or two in the family record. He twisted the great volume round, and pushed it in his daughter's direction and pointed.

"Look at that," he said.

Marjorie looked. Upon the page of births, near the bottom of the list of her father's brothers and sisters, she saw a horizontal black strip—perhaps a quarter of an inch high—extending the full width of the page, where an entry in the record had been crossed out again, and again, and again, by a thick quill pen. She had seen it before, and had asked what it meant—without success. Now apparently she was to know.

"That," said Albert Clegg, "was my youngest sister."

"Your Aunt Eliza," added Uncle Fred.

"When she was nineteen," continued Clegg, "she ran away from home—to go on the Stage."

"Hoo! Where?" asked Marjorie, intensely interested.

"London, my father thought; but he never enquired."

"He never—? You mean—?"

"He blotted her name out of the Book, and it was never mentioned in our home again."

"And not one of you ever tried to find what had become of her?"

"Certainly not."

Marjorie looked up at her father and drew a long and indignant breath.

"Well—!" she began.

"And now," explained Uncle Fred, "it's coming out in you, my girl."

What was coming out Marjorie did not trouble him to explain. It is doubtful if she heard him at all.

"You mean to say," she said hotly to her father, "that your father let his own daughter go right out of sight and mind, just like that?"

"He did. And I want to say to you, my daughter, that I think he was right. This life is a preparation for the next. As we live now, so shall we be rewarded hereafter. A few years' empty pleasure and excitement are a poor exchange for an eternity of punishment."

"That's right! Take no risks!" recommended the sage at the other end of the table. "Safety first!"

"The wisest life," concluded Mr. Clegg, "is the safe life. The safe life is the Christian life, and the sure foundation of the Christian life is family life—united, wisely controlled, family life. So you will stay at home and live that life; and some day you will be grateful. Now go to bed. I appreciate your honesty in telling me what is in your mind, but my advice to you is forget all about it. Good-night!"

"Don't forget your prayers!" added Uncle Fred.

III

Marjorie finished her breakfast without further flippancy, and in due course the family set out for church in the Rolls-Royce. That is to say, Mr. and Mrs. Clegg, Uncle Fred, Marjorie, and the younger children—Miss Amy, already mentioned, and Masters James and John, aged ten and eight—were packed into that spacious vehicle and driven into Craigfoot, with meticulous observation of the speed limit and all the windows up. Amos and Joe followed in the two-seater. The servants had the waggonette.

The parish kirk at Craigfoot has already been described in some detail, but it may be worth while to record a few observations made from a different angle.

From her seat against the wall in the high-curtained Netherby pew Marjorie could see nothing but the last few rows of the public gallery and the Baronrigg balcony. The latter fascinated her, for it was always full—usually of interesting, and always of different, people. Sir Thomas Birnie himself was a permanent figure. He sat in the left-hand corner of the balcony, at the end nearest the pulpit. Consequently, his severe gaze, concentrated upon the preacher, was averted from the other occupants of the pew—a circumstance particularly agreeable to some of the younger members of his numerous house parties. What fun they seemed to have among themselves! How they giggled and whispered! Marjorie longed and longed to be with them and of them, especially the girls of her own age. They were so pretty, so overflowing with life, and dressed so exactly right. For three months, ever since she came back from Paris to find her family at Netherby, and the comfortable hospitality of a Newcastle suburb exchanged for the frigid waiting-list of a county society where one knew either everybody or nobody, she had taken weekly notes of the ever-changing kaleidoscope in the Baronrigg pew—studying faces, studying frocks, studying characters, and weaving histories round each.

Some of the faces were quite familiar. This morning, for instance, in the right-hand corner of the front row, sat Major Laing. He was a frequent visitor at Baronrigg, and was a widower. Marjorie knew that his wife had been a twin-sister of the late Lady Birnie. Then there were Captain and Mrs. Roper. Captain Roper owned horses, and was here—in fact, the whole house-party was here—for the Castleton Races, the largest meeting on this side of the Border. They were constant visitors. Then there was a pretty little woman in a big hat—Mrs. Pomeroy, really—of which Marjorie took mental and quite unsabbatical note. There was Arthur Langley, one of the best-known gentlemen riders in England. There was a tall girl with fair hair—not unlike Marjorie herself. Marjorie decided that this girl was dressed not quite right. She would have been better placed in a fashionable West-end church in London than in this grey, prim, Presbyterian conventicle. Probably her first visit, Marjorie decided. She would know better next time.

Her shrewd gaze passed on.

And then, for the first time in her life, she saw Roy Birnie, home after four months of toil and tribulation at an army crammer's. He had been plucked out of Eton at Christmas to that end, Eton having decided that it was a case for desperate measures. Three months of intensive brain-culture had not affected his appearance, which was healthy, nor his snub nose, nor his cheerful grin, nor the slight curl in his hair, of which his mother had once been so proud and of which he was still so ashamed. He sat on the left of Major Laing, his chin resting on the pew ledge, his grey eyes devoutly closed, and his ebullient spirits throttled down until it should please Doctor Chirnside to conclude the first prayer. He was exactly like hundreds of other clean-run Public School boys of eighteen. Marjorie had observed a dozen such in that very pew during the past three months. But, as already noted, she had never seen Roy.

That usually dependable organ, her heart, missed a couple of beats, and she lowered her head quickly.

Presently, impelled by a power greater than herself (or, indeed, than any of us), she lifted her head and looked up—only to find that Roy was gazing straight down upon her.

For the moment her eyes were interlocked with his. Then suddenly she became aware of the expression upon his face. The result has already been described.

That evening, after prayers, her father motioned to her to stay behind. When they were alone, he said:

"I hope you have given up that idea of yours about going away."

"Well," replied his daughter pleasantly, "I have postponed it, anyhow, father."

"You have decided wisely for yourself," said Mr. Clegg.

Marjorie felt inclined to agree. But it is just possible that the matter had been decided for her.

CHAPTER III

DER TAG

I

I suppose I may be forgiven for having felt a trifle preoccupied upon the first of August, nineteen-fourteen. Most people did. But the European situation, desperate though it was, was not sufficiently desperate to excuse me for forgetting that the first Saturday in August is the inexorable date of Lady Christina's annual garden party at Buckholm. So I blundered right into it.

I am a methodical person, and I like to do the same things at the same seasons. When it comes to revisiting the place of my birth, marriage and, I hope, interment, I make a practice of going to Baronrigg for Easter, Buckholm for the August cricket week, and The Heughs for the woodcock. On this particular occasion I had travelled from King's Cross by the early morning express—it leaves at five o'clock, and is the best train in the day, if only people knew about it—with the result that by four o'clock in the afternoon I found myself rumbling along in the Craigfoot station fly, in lovely, summer weather, en route for the Buckholm cricket week. Lady Christina, whose foes—and their name is legion, for they are many—accuse her of parsimony, does not usually send the motor to the station to meet unencumbered males. She expects such guests to cover the last stage of the journey at their own charges and, in addition, to share the conveyance with such parcels and oddments as may be lying in the station office consigned to Buckholm.

On this occasion Mr. Turnbull, the station master, apologetically packed me into the fly in company with half a sheep and three bright new zinc buckets, freshly arrived from the stores in Edinburgh.

In addition to my personal luggage, I was laden with a limp, damp package, smelling to heaven of fish, which had borne me noisome company all the way from my flat in Jermyn Street, having been delivered there by an accomplice of Lady Christina's the night before my departure, with the information that her ladyship had signified my willingness to convey it to Buckholm.

But things might have been worse. Lady Christina had played this fish trick upon me last year as well. (It is one of her most cherished economies.) On that occasion the fish was delivered at my flat five minutes after I had left for Scotland. It was marked "Very Important"; so the lift boy, a conscientious but unimaginative youth, sent for the pass-key and carefully deposited the package in my hall cupboard. I found it there, quite safe, when I returned from Scotland, three weeks later.

The first warning that all was not well came to me when my equipage drew up, to a symphonic accompaniment of rattling buckets, at the lodge gates of Buckholm. These were held, like the bridge across the Tiber upon a famous occasion, by a resolute trio composed of Mackellar, the under-gardener, and Mesdames Elspeth and Maggie Mackellar, Mackellar's daughters, aged about fourteen. Horatius Codes (Mackellar) informed me that by her ladyship's orders it was "hauf-a-croon to get in," adding (quite incomprehensibly at the moment) that it was "on account of the Feet for Charity."

My contention that, as a guest, I was entitled to exemption, or, at least, abatement of entrance fee, was overruled by a dour but respectful majority of three to one. I handed Horatius Codes a reluctant half-crown; Herminius and Spurius Lartius threw open the gates, and the experienced animal between the shafts, unusually braced by the eerie combination of sounds and smells conveyed to his senses by a following breeze, delivered me at the front door, with much spurting of gravel, four minutes later.

My worst fears were realised. Dotted about the wide lawns stood bazaar-stalls, under striped awnings. The band of our Third Battalion from the Depot was making music on the terrace, and fair women and brave men drifted here and there, shying nervously at the stalls. Too late, I understood Mackellar's reference to the "Feet for Charity." I had heard from afar of the existence of this recurrent and gruesome festival for many years. No one knew why it was held, or to what charity Lady Christina devoted the proceeds. I once asked Lord Eskerley if he could tell me. He replied that so far as he was aware it was a charity which was not puffed up, and began at home. But Lord Eskerley is a cynical old gentleman, and has been at war with Lady Christina for forty years.

A sympathetic butler received me and showed me my room. The ceremony was purely formal: I knew the room almost as well as I knew him.

"It will go on until ten o'clock, sir," he announced mournfully, in reply to my anxious query. "The present company will leave about seven; but the townspeople begin to arrive then, when the admission fee is reduced to sixpence. Are we going to have a flare-up, sir?"

"No. What's the use? We shall take it lying down, Bates, as usual. You know Lady Christina!"

"I was referring, sir, to the European situation."

"Oh, sorry! Yes, it looks like it. If Germany joins Austria against Russia, France is bound to come in on the side of Russia; and if France comes in I fancy we shall all come in. And then God knows what will happen! Is there much excitement down here?"

"Very little at present, sir—less than when the South African War was imminent. But I understand that all the officers at the Depot are being recalled from leave. You will find several of them here, sir."

"Mr. Eric is here, of course?"

"For the afternoon, sir, yes. But he sleeps at the Depot now. He is very busy. You will change into flannels, I suppose?"

"Yes."

"It will fill out the time a bit, sir, before you need go outside. Her Ladyship is not aware of your arrival. Shall I bring you a whisky and soda?"

"Please."

By judicious dawdling I staved off the moment of my entrance into the "Feet" for another half-hour. Then, fortified by Bates's timely refreshment, I went downstairs to search for my hostess.

The garden was full of people—sirens in lace caps proffering useless articles of merchandise; officers from the Depot; boys and girls just home for the holidays; local dames talking scandal in deck-chairs. Upon the distant croquet lawn I beheld my hostess engaged in battle. I could hear her quite easily, shouting: "Now then—no treachery, no treachery!" to her partner, a nervous subaltern who was furtively offering advice to a pretty opponent. I remembered Bates's hint, also a maxim to the effect that what is not missed is not mourned. Perhaps it would be wiser—

"Yes, I would if I were you," remarked a raven's voice at my elbow. "She hasn't seen you yet!"

Lord Eskerley is a very remarkable old gentleman, with certain pronounced and rather alarming characteristics. In the first place, he has an uncanny knack of reading one's thoughts, which enables him to begin a conversation without wasting time over preliminaries, which he hates. Secondly, he has a peculiar habit of side-tracking a subject right in the middle of a sentence, sometimes because he is overtaken by a reverie, sometimes because another subject occurs to him—to return sooner or later, but always without warning, to the original topic—like brackets in algebra. I once met him coming out of Brooks's Club, and accompanied him down St. James's Street.

"Just been to a funeral," he announced; and forthwith subsided into a brown study.

I offered a few appropriate observations regarding the uncertainty of human life, and then proceeded to the political situation. He replied with his usual incisiveness. Ten minutes later, as we passed through the Horse Guards into Whitehall, he stopped abruptly, shook me by the hand, and said:

"Good-bye! At Woking. We cremated him. Very interesting!"—and set off at a brisk walk in the direction of the Houses of Parliament.

These conversational acrobatics call for considerable agility on the part of the listener. The strain is increased by the circumstance that, owing to his uncanny powers of memory, Lord Eskerley is able (and usually proceeds) to take up a conversation with you exactly where he left it off, sometimes after an interval of months. I was once walking in the Park on Sunday morning with Lady Christina, whom I had encountered for my sins after church. Near the Achilles statue I was aware of Lord Eskerley, plunged in profound meditation. Suddenly he looked up and saw me. He hurried forward and shook hands, utterly ignoring Lady Christina.

"Courvoisier," he said, "not Martell!"—and departed towards Stanhope Gate.

"What does the demented creature mean?" inquired Lady Christina.

I was able to explain that His Lordship had merely been unburdening himself of a name which he had been unable to recall at the time of our last conversation. Criminology is one of his numerous hobbies, and on this occasion he had been trying to tell me the name of one of the last murderers publicly hanged in England. (Thackeray went to see it.) All he could recall, however, was that the murderer had been a valet in Park Lane, and that his name had suggested liqueur brandy.

Decidedly he is a character. But he is a Pillar of State for all that, and, unlike some Pillars of State, he has done the State some service. He likes me, because I catch his references more quickly than most people.

"Well," I rejoined, "suppose you assist me to find cover?"

"Certainly!" he replied. "By the way"—extending a hand—"how do you do? Wonderful day! Now come and find a seat, and we will smoke."

We doubled a promontory of rhododendrons and sat down on a rustic bench, somewhat apart from the turmoil. The only person in sight was a girl, with very good ankles. (Eve always reproved me for beginning at that end.) She was standing fifty yards away from us, under the dappled shade of a copper-beech, surveying the scene—a little disconsolately, I thought. My companion, as usual, was ready with an appropriate but elliptic comment.

"Doesn't know he's here!" he observed.

"Why don't you tell her?" I asked.

"No need. They'll find one another all right."

"Who is she? And he?"

The question partly answered itself, for at that moment the girl turned in our direction, and I recognised her as the unexpected young beauty of the Netherby pew. Aware that two inquisitive dotards were leering at her, she withdrew out of sight. Lord Eskerley did not answer the rest of my question, because his thoughts had run ahead of the situation.

"There is something particularly cruel and brutal," he said, "about British snobbery. If this had been America, her hostess would have introduced her to every one in sight. (If she had not been prepared to do so, she would not have invited her at all.) On the Continent, young men would have led one another up, and clicked their heels together, and announced their names, with a view to a fair exchange. But here—well, she knows nobody, and every woman in the county will see to it that she continues to know nobody. Practically, that was why she was invited here. Tantalus, and so on!"

"I have often wondered," I said, "why we never go in for introducing. It would save much discomfort to rustic persons like myself."

"I'll tell you. Roughly, our attitude is this. There are only a certain number of people in this world who are anybody—Us, in fact. You are either one of Us, or you are not. If you are, obviously there is no need to introduce you. If you are not—well, an introduction would imply that you are not one of Us! So it is almost more insulting to introduce people than to ignore them. Very ingenious system: I wonder what woman invented it! Still, she's all right." (Apparently His Lordship had switched back to the girl again.) "She and her mother only get invited to Gather-'em-Alls and Charity Sales-of-Work, but most of the boys have managed to scrape acquaintance with her by this time. She fairly bowled them over at the Third Battalion Gymkhana a few weeks ago. Looked a picture; won first prize for the motor obstacle race; and fairly had to keep subalterns off with a stick! And at least one field officer!"

"You seem to have taken considerable notice of her," I observed.

"I take considerable notice of most things," replied the old gentleman complacently, "even pretty girls. By the way, we are going to fight them."

"The girls?"

"God forbid! Germany!"

"Oh!"

"Yes. I go back to town to-night. There seems little doubt now that we shall come in. We can't leave France in the lurch. For one thing, we should be skunks if we did"—Pillars of State can be surprisingly colloquial in private life—"and for another, Germany means to gobble the whole of Europe this time, including this pacific little island of ours. It would be playing Germany's game to allow her to take us on one after another, instead of all together. Of course, the peace-at-any-price crowd are yowling; but—if we don't back our friends on this occasion, we can never hold up our heads again. It is just possible that the Germans may be fools enough to invade Belgium, in which case even the Cocoa Eaters and the Intellectuals will have to stop supporting them. But I think we shall fight anyhow. It will be a short war, but it will be the bloodiest war ever fought."

"Why do you think it will be short?"

"Because it will be so expensive in money and men that no country will be able to stand the racket for longer than a few months. Modern weapons are so destructive, and modern warfare costs so much, that before we know where we are one side will all be dead and the other side bankrupt; so we shall have to stop! The South African affair cost us a quarter of a million a day, while it lasted. This enterprise may run us into two, or even three millions. Think of that! Twenty millions a week! A thousand millions a year! We can't do it! Neither can France! Neither can Germany! No, it will be a short war. I am bound to admit K. of K. doesn't agree with me. He puts it at three years. I lunched with him two days ago. He was getting ready to go back to Egypt then—sorely against the grain, naturally; but it did not seem to have occurred to anybody to tell him to hold back for a week or two. We can't allow him to go out of the country at present; the thing's preposterous! Let me see, where was I?"

"Lunching with K."

"Oh, yes. He said three years. I asked why, and he replied that before this war finished every single able-bodied man of the combatant nations would be fighting in a national army, and it would take three years for this country to put its full strength into the field. But of course K. doesn't understand economic conditions. He's our greatest soldier, but not an economist. Still, that's K.'s view. I don't agree with it, but it's K.'s view. And if we go to war, K. will probably lead us; so we must expect to provide for war on K.'s scale."

All this was sufficiently stunning and bewildering in its suddenness and immensity; but it aroused my professional instincts.

"How is K. going to set about creating such an army?" I asked. "Raise supplementary Regular battalions; expand the Territorial establishment; or what?"

"I don't think he knows himself. In fact, he said so, quite frankly. In the first place, he hasn't been invited to help, as yet. In the second, he has been absent from England for the best part of fourteen years, and has not been able to keep himself conversant with the recent orgy of Army reform. He knew that the old Militia had been scrapped, but I found he was not sure whether its place had been taken by the Special Reserve or the National Reserve. And, of course, like all Regulars, he regards the Territorials with the utmost distrust. I think he shares the general soldier-man's opinion that the 'Terriers' are the old Saturday afternoon crowd with a new label. His idea seems to be to take no risks with amateur organisations, but to create a pukka new professional army on regular lines. He's wrong. He should take the present Territorial Army as a nucleus, and expand from that. The Territorial Associations are a most capable lot, and would build up big units for him in no time. Still, whatever way he does it, he will do it well; he's our great man. And he will need all his greatness. Germany means to smash us this time. She has been calling up her reservists, on the quiet, for the last six months. Her intelligence people have told her that we are all so tied up with the Suffragettes and Ireland that we can't come in, and that if we do, we cannot put up anything of a fight. I am almost tempted to believe Germany is right. I don't suppose we have a thousand spare rifles in the country. As for artillery—it takes three years to make a gunner! How on earth—"

"Now, then, what are you two absurd creatures conspiring about?" Our hostess was upon us brandishing a croquet-mallet. We rose hurriedly. "Alan Laing, how do you do? Why didn't you come and tell me you had arrived? As for you, Eskerley, I think you are getting into your second childhood. What's all this nonsense I hear about war with Germany? Why, I have a signed photograph of the Emperor in my drawing-room! How can one make war on people like that? And yet there you sit, talking about the thing as if it were really possible, and disorganising my fête champêtre by mobilising all my young men! Come and play croquet!"

Croquet with Lady Christina resembles nothing so much as croquet with the Queen in "Alice in Wonderland." It is true that she does not order our heads to be chopped off, but one sometimes wishes she would, and be done with it. Her success at the game—and she is invariably successful—is due partly to the nervous paralysis of her opponents, and partly to the uncanny property possessed by her ball of removing itself, while its owner is engaged in altercation, to a position exactly opposite its hoop. I bent my steps dutifully towards the lawn, leaving Lord Eskerley, who fears no one, not even Lady Christina, to fight a spirited rearguard action with that worthy opponent.

On the way I encountered Eric Bethune, my friend. It always thrills me, even at my sober age, to encounter Eric suddenly. I have never got over my boyish tendency to hero-worship. We shook hands.

"Come along the Green Walk with me," he said. "My car is waiting at the West Lodge; I have to fly back to my orderly room."

"We seem to be fairly for it, this time," I said, as we strode along the avenue of grass.

Eric threw up his handsome head exultantly. The sloping sunlight caught his clean-cut profile and sinewy throat.

"Yes," he said; "we're for it! The Fleet has been ordered not to disperse after Manoeuvres. The Army is mobilising. We are going to have at them at last! It's 'Der Tag,' all right! You are coming back to us, I suppose, Alan?"

"If they will have me," I said.

"Have you? They'll jump at you! They'll give you a battalion! We shall all get battalions! Brigades, perhaps!" He laughed joyfully, like a schoolboy who sees his first eleven colours ahead. "There will be promotions all round—"

"In a month or two," I said soberly, "there will be a lot more."

"Oh, I don't know," replied Eric. "We may finish Fritz off in one big battle. The German soldier is a machine: so is his officer. The whole German Army is a machine."

"A damned efficient machine, too!" I observed.

"Yes, boy; but cumbrous, cumbrous! If we let it get into its swing, it will be hard to stop. But we won't. The little British Army—and mind you, as a result of its South African lessons, it is the best trained, the best led, and the finest body of men that we have ever put into the field in all our history—will get the first move on, and it will chuck itself, like a flinty little pebble, plumb in the middle of the German machinery, and put all its gadgets out of gear! After that, the German, with his entire lack of initiative, will go to pieces, and we'll eat him up!"

Eric's old Scottish nurse was accustomed to say of him that he was "aye up in the cloods or doon in the midden." There was no mistaking his whereabouts to-day. I began to feel the thrill too.

"Are you going back to the First Battalion?" I asked.

"No word of it as yet. My orders are to stay here and perfect mobilisation arrangements. The moment the word goes out from the jolly old War Office, we shall be swamped with reservists: we may have to start a recruiting station as well. Great work! Great work! So long, old son! Run home and polish your buttons!"

He leaped into his car, and disappeared in a cloud of dust—a most characteristic embodiment of the spirit that was flaming in the hearts of all the youth of England and Scotland during that hectic, unforgettable, blissfully ignorant week.

I walked slowly back down the Green Walk, prepared to serve my sentence on the croquet lawn. It was a perfect summer evening. Not a leaf stirred: not a bird chirruped. The shadow of my somewhat square and stocky person preceded me, flatteringly elongated and attenuated by the rays of the setting sun. Deep and abiding peace seemed to brood upon the land. Yet all the land, I knew, was making ready for battle. Well, for my part, I was satisfied. I was a soldier, a widow man, and a childless man. I had no farewells to make, no last embraces—

From among the trees on my right I was conscious of a flutter of white, and a murmur of voices. A man and a woman—no, no, in those days one still talked of boys and girls—were seated side by side on a fallen tree-trunk, with their backs to me. They did not appear to be concerning themselves with war, or strife, or hostilities of any kind. Their present relation, though decorous enough, appeared to be one of most cordial agreement. I recognised them both, and passed on discreetly, silently acknowledging the prescience of that aged but perspicacious student of humanity, my Lord of Eskerley.

"They appear to have found one another all right!" I said to myself.