Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The tag has been all but
outworn during these unending days of death; it has become almost
a cant phrase which the judicious shrink from using. Yet to
hundreds of thousands of mourning men and women there has been
nothing but its truth to bring consolation. They are conscious of
the supreme sacrifice and thereby are ennobled. The cause in which
they made it becomes more sacred. The community of grief raises
human dignity. In England, at any rate, there are no widows of
Ashur. All are silent in their lamentations. You see little black
worn in the public ways. The Fenimores mourned for their only son,
the idol of their hearts; but the manifestation of their grief was
stoical compared with their unconcealed desolation on the occasion
of a tragedy that occurred the year before.
Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea,
had been drowned in the canal. Here was a tragedy unrelieved,
stupid, useless. Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious
sacrifice; no dying for one's country. There was no dismissing it
with a heroic word that caught in the throat.
I have not started out to write this little chronicle of
Wellingsford in order to weep over the pain of the world. God
knows there is in it an infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of
which are being every day unfolded before my eyes.
If I did not believe with all my soul that out of Darkness cometh
Light, I would take my old service revolver from its holster and
blow out my brains this very minute. The eternal laughter of the
earth has ever since its creation pierced through the mist of
tears in which at times it has been shrouded. What has been will
be. Nay, more, what has been shall be. It is the Law of what I
believe to be God.... As a concrete instance, where do you find a
fuller expression of the divine gaiety of the human spirit than in
the Houses of Pain, strewn the length and breadth of the land,
filled with maimed and shattered men who have looked into the jaws
of Hell? If it comes to that, I have looked into them myself, and
have heard the heroic jests of men who looked with me.
For some years up to the outbreak of the war which has knocked all
so-called modern values silly, my young friends, with a certain
respectful superciliousness, regarded me as an amiable person
hopelessly out of date. Now that we are at grip with elementals, I
find myself, if anything, in advance of the fashion. This,
however, by the way. What I am clumsily trying to explain is that
if I am to make this story intelligible I must start from the
darkness where its roots lie hidden. And that darkness is the
black depths of the canal by the lock gates where Althea
Fenimore's body was found.
It was high June, in leafy England, in a world at peace. Can one
picture it? With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of
tender childhood. In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea
Fenimore. She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother,
modern, with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness
and sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call
"open-air"; yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies. I
have seen her in the morning tearing away across country by the
side of her father, the most passionate and reckless rider to
hounds in the county, and in the evening I have come across her, a
pretty mass of pink flesh and muslin--no, it can't be muslin--say
chiffon--anyhow, something white and filmy and girlish--curled up
on a sofa and absorbed in a novel of Mrs. Henry Wood, borrowed, if
one could judge by the state of its greasy brown paper cover, from
the servants' hall. I confess that, though to her as to her
brother I was "Uncle Duncan," and loved her as a dear, sweet
English girl, I found her lacking in spirituality, in intellectual
grasp, in emotional distinction. I should have said that she was
sealed by God to be the chaste, healthy, placid mother of men. She
was forever laughing--just the spontaneous laughter of the
gladness of life.
On the last afternoon of her existence she came to see me,
bringing me a basket of giant strawberries from her own particular
bed. We had tea in the garden, and with her young appetite she
consumed half the fruit she had brought. At the time I did not
notice an unusual touch of depression. I remember her holding by
its stalk a great half-eaten strawberry and asking me whether
sometimes I didn't find life rather rotten. I said idly:
"You can't expect the world to be a peach without a speck on it.
Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The wise person avoids the
specks."
"But suppose you've bitten a specky bit by accident?"
"Spit it out," said I.
She laughed. "You think you're like the wise Uncle in the Sunday
School books, don't you?"
"I know I am," I said.
Whereupon she laughed again, finished the strawberry, and changed
the conversation.
There seemed to be no foreshadowing of tragedy in that. I had
known her (like many of her kind) to proclaim the rottenness of
the Universe when she was off her stroke at golf, or when a
favourite young man did not appear at a dance. I attributed no
importance to it. But the next day I remembered. What was she
doing after half-past ten o'clock, when she had bidden her father
and mother goodnight, on the steep and lonely bank of the canal,
about a mile and a half away? No one had seen her leave the house.
No one, apparently, had seen her walking through the town. Nothing
was known of her until dawn when they found her body by the lock
gate. She had been dead some hours. It was a mysterious affair,
upon which no light was thrown at the inquest. No one save myself
had observed any sign of depression, and her half-bantering talk
with me was trivial enough. No one could adduce a reason for her
midnight walk on the tow-path. The obvious question arose. Whom
had she gone forth to meet? What man? There was not a man in the
neighbourhood with whom her name could be particularly associated.
Generally, it could be associated with a score or so. The modern
young girl of her position and upbringing has a drove of young
male intimates. With one she rides, with another she golfs, with
another she dances a two-step, with another she Bostons; she will
let Tom read poetry to her, although, as she expresses it, "he
bores her stiff," because her sex responds to the tribute; she
plays lady patroness to Dick, and tries to intrigue him into a
soft job; and as for Harry she goes on telling him month after
month that unless he forswears sack and lives cleanly she will
visit him with her high displeasure. Meanwhile, most of these
satellites have affaires de coeur of their own, some respectable,
others not; they regard the young lady with engaging frankness as
a woman and a sister, they have the run of her father's house, and
would feel insulted if anybody questioned the perfect correctness
of their behaviour. Each man has, say, half a dozen houses where
he is welcomed on the same understanding. Of course, when one
particular young man and one particular young woman read lunatic
things in each other's eyes, then the rest of the respective
quasi-sisters and quasi-brothers have to go hang. (In parenthesis,
I may state that the sisters are more ruthlessly sacrificed than
the brothers.) At any rate, frankness is the saving quality of the
modern note.
In the case of Althea, there had been no sign of such
specialisation. She could not have gone forth, poor child, to meet
the twenty with whom she was known to be on terms of careless
comradeship. She had gone from her home, driven by God knows what
impulse, to walk in the starlight--there was no moon--along the
banks of the canal. In the darkness, had she missed her footing
and stepped into nothingness and the black water? The Coroner's
Jury decided the question in the affirmative. They brought in a
verdict of death by misadventure. And up to the date on which I
begin this little Chronicle of Wellingsford, namely that of the
summons to Wellings Park, when I heard of the death of young
Oswald Fenimore, that is all I knew of the matter.
Throughout July my friends were like dead people. There was
nothing that could be said to them by way of consolation. The sun
had gone out of their heaven. There was no light in the world.
Having known Death as a familiar foe, and having fought against
its terrors; having only by the grace of God been able to lift up
a man's voice in my hour of awful bereavement, and cry, "O Death,
where is thy sting, O Grave, thy Victory?" I could suffer with
them and fear for their reason. They lived in a state of coma,
unaware of life, performing, like automata, their daily tasks.
Then, in the early days of August, came the Trumpet of War, and
they awakened. In my life have I seen nothing so marvellous. No
broken spell of enchantment in an Arabian tale when dead warriors
spring into life was ever more instant and complete. They arose in
their full vigour; the colour came back to their cheeks and the
purpose into their eyes. They laughed once more. Their days were
filled with work and cheerfulness. In November Sir Anthony was
elected Mayor. Being a practical, hard-headed little man, loved
and respected by everybody, he drove a hitherto contentious Town
Council into paths of high patriotism like a flock of sheep. And
no less energy did Lady Fenimore exhibit in the sphere of her own
activities.
A few days after the tidings came of Oswald's death, Sir Anthony
was riding through the town and pulled up before Perkins' the
fishmonger's. Perkins emerged from his shop and crossed the
pavement.
"I hear you've had bad news."
"Yes, indeed, Sir Anthony."
"I'm sorry. He was a fine fellow. So was my boy. We're in the same
boat, Perkins."
Perkins assented. "It sort of knocks one's life to bits, doesn't
it?" said he. "We've nothing left."
"We have our country."
"Our country isn't our only son," said the other dully.
"No. She's our mother," said Sir Anthony.
"Isn't that a kind of abstraction?"
"Abstraction!" cried Sir Anthony, indignantly. "You must be
imbibing the notions of that poisonous beast Gedge."
Gedge was a smug, socialistic, pacifist builder who did not hold
with war--and with this one least of all, which he maintained was
being waged for the exclusive benefit of the capitalist classes.
In the eyes of the stalwarts of Wellingsford, he was a horrible
fellow, capable of any stratagem or treason.
Perkins flushed. "I've always voted conservative, like my father
before me, Sir Anthony, and like yourself I've given my boy to my
country. I've no dealings with unpatriotic people like Gedge, as
you know very well."
"Of course I do," cried Sir Anthony. "And that's why I ask you
what the devil you mean by calling England an abstraction. For us,
she's the only thing in the world. We're elderly chaps, you and I,
Perkins, and the only thing we can do to help her is to keep our
heads high. If people like you and me crumple up, the British
Empire will crumple up."
"That's quite true," said Perkins.
Sir Anthony bent down and held out his hand.
"It's damned hard lines for us, and for the women. But we must
keep our end up. It's doing our bit."
Perkins wrung his hand. "I wish to God," said he, "I was young
enough--"
"By God! so do I!" said Sir Anthony.
This little conversation (which I afterwards verified) was
reported to me by my arch-gossip, Sergeant Marigold.
"And I tell you what, sir," said he after the conclusion, "I'm of
the same way of thinking and feeling."
"So am I."
"Besides, I'm not so old, sir. I'm only forty-two."
"The prime of life," said I.
"Then why won't they take me, sir?"
If there had been no age limit and no medical examination Marigold
would have re-enlisted as John Smith, on the outbreak of war,
without a moment's consideration of the position of his wife and
myself. And Mrs. Marigold, a soldier's wife of twenty years'
standing, would have taken it, just like myself, as a matter of
course. But as he could not re-enlist, he pestered the War Office
(just as I did) and I pestered for him to give him military
employment. And all in vain.
"Why don't they take me, sir? When I see these fellows with three
stripes on their arms, and looking at them and wondering at them
as if they were struck three stripes by lightning, and calling
themselves Sergeants and swanking about and letting their men
waddle up to their gun like cows--and when I see them, as I've
done with your eyes--watch one of their men pass by an officer in
the street without saluting, and don't kick the blighter to--to--
to barracks--it fairly makes me sick. And I ask myself, sir, what
I've done that I should be loafing here instead of serving my
country."
"You've somehow mislaid an eye and a hand and gone and got a tin
head. That's what you've done," said I. "And the War Office has a
mark against you as a damned careless fellow."
"Tin head or no tin head," he grumbled, "I could teach those
mother's darlings up there the difference between a battery of
artillery and a skittle-ally."
"I believe you've mentioned the matter to them already," I
observed softly.
Marigold met my eye for a second and then looked rather sheepish.
I had heard of a certain wordy battle between him and a
Territorial Sergeant whom he had set out to teach. Marigold
encountered a cannonade of blasphemous profanity, new, up-to-date,
scientific, against which the time-worn expletives in use during
his service days were ineffectual. He was routed with heavy loss.
"This is a war of the young," I continued. "New men, new guns, new
notions. Even a new language," I insinuated.
"I wish 'em joy of their language," said Marigold. Then seeing
that I was mildly amusing myself at his expense, he asked me
stiffly if there was anything more that he could do for me, and on
my saying no, he replied "Thank you, sir," most correctly and left
the room.
On the 3d of March Betty Fairfax came to tea.
Of all the young women of Wellingsford she was my particular
favourite. She was so tall and straight, with a certain Rosalind
boyishness about her that made for charm. I am not yet, thank
goodness, one of the fossils who hold up horror-stricken hands at
the independent ways of the modern young woman. If it were not for
those same independent ways the mighty work that English women are
doing in this war would be left undone. Betty Fairfax was breezily
independent. She had a little money of her own and lived, when it
suited her, with a well-to-do and comfortable aunt. She was two
and twenty. I shall try to tell you more about her, as I go on.
As I have said, and as my diary tells me, she came to tea on the
3d of March. She was looking particularly attractive that
afternoon. Shaded lamps and the firelight of a cosy room, with all
their soft shadows, give a touch of mysterious charm to a pretty
girl. Her jacket had a high sort of Medici collar edged with fur,
which set off her shapely throat. The hair below her hat was soft
and brown. Her brows were wide, her eyes brown and steady, nose
and lips sensitive. She had a way of throwing back her head and
pointing her chin fearlessly, as though in perpetual declaration
that she cared not a hang either for black-beetles or Germans. And
she was straight as a dart, with the figure of a young Diana--
Diana before she began to worry her head about beauty
competitions. A kind of dark hat stuck at a considerable angle on
her head gave her the prettiest little swaggering air in the
world. ... Well, there was I, a small, brown, withered, grizzled,
elderly, mustachioed monkey, chained to my wheel-chair; there were
the brave logs blazing up the wide chimney; there was the tea
table on my right with its array of silver and old china; and
there, on the other side of it, attending to my wants, sat as
brave and sweet a type of young English womanhood as you could
find throughout the length and breadth of the land. Had I not been
happy, I should have been an ungrateful dog.
We talked of the war, of local news, of the wounded at the
hospital.
And here I must say that we are very proud of our Wellingsford
Hospital. It is the largest and the wealthiest in the county. We
owe it to the uneasy conscience of a Wellingsford man, a railway
speculator in the forties, who, having robbed widows and orphans
and, after trial at the Old Bailey, having escaped penal servitude
by the skin of his teeth, died in the odour of sanctity, and the
possessor of a colossal fortune in the year eighteen sixty-three.
This worthy gentleman built the hospital and endowed it so
generously that a wing of it has been turned into a military
hospital with forty beds. I have the honour to serve on the
Committee. Betty Fairfax entered as a Probationer early in
September, and has worked there night and day ever since. That is
why we chatted about the wounded. Having a day off, she had
indulged in the luxury of pretty clothes. Of these I had duly
expressed my admiration.
Tea over, she lit a cigarette for me and one for herself and drew
her chair a trifle nearer the fire. After a little knitting of the
brow, she said:--
"You haven't asked me why I invited myself to tea."
"I thought," said I, "it was for my beaux yeux."
"Not this time. I rather wanted you to be the first to receive a
certain piece of information."
I glanced at her sharply. "You don't mean to say you're going to
be married at last?"
In some astonishment she retorted:--
"How did you guess?"
"Holy simplicity!" said I. "You told me so yourself."
She laughed. Suddenly, on reflection, her face changed.
"Why did you say 'at last'?"
"Well--" said I, with a significant gesture.
She made a defiant announcement:--
"I am going to marry Willie Connor."
"It was my turn to be astonished. "Captain Connor?" I echoed.
"Yes. What have you to say against him?"
"Nothing, my dear, nothing."
And I hadn't. He was an exemplary young fellow, a Captain in a
Territorial regiment that had been in hard training in the
neighbourhood since August. He was of decent family and
upbringing, a barrister by profession, and a comely pink-faced boy
with a fair moustache. He brought a letter or two of introduction,
was billeted on Mrs. Fairfax, together with one of his subs, and
was made welcome at various houses. Living under the same roof as
Betty, it was natural that he should fall in love with her. But it
was not at all natural that she should fall in love with him. She
was not one of the kind that suffer fools gladly. ... No; I had
nothing against Willie Connor. He was merely a common-place,
negative young man; patriotic, keen in his work, an excellent
soldier, and, as far as I knew, of blameless life; but having met
him two or three times in general company, I had found him a dull
dog, a terribly dull dog,--the last man in the world for Betty
Fairfax.
And then there was Leonard Boyce. I naturally had him in my head,
when I used the words "at last."
"You don't seem very enthusiastic," said Betty.
"You've taken me by surprise," said I. "I'm not young enough to be
familiar with these sudden jerks."
"You thought it was Major Boyce."
"I did, Betty. True, you've said nothing about it to me for ever
so long, and when I have asked you for news of him your answers
have shewed me that all was not well. But you've never told me, or
anyone, that the engagement was broken off."
Her young face was set sternly as she looked into the fire.
"It's not broken off--in the formal sense. Leonard thought fit to
let it dwindle, and it has dwindled until it has perished of
inanition." She flashed round. "I'm not the sort to ask any man
for explanations."
"Boyce went out with the first lot in August," I said. "He has had
seven awful months. Mons and all the rest of it. You must excuse a
man in the circumstances for not being aux petits soins des dames.
And he seems to be doing magnificently--twice mentioned in
dispatches."
"I know all that," she said. "I'm not a fool. But the war has
nothing to do with it. It started a month before the war broke
out. Don't let us talk of it."
She threw the end of her cigarette into the fire and lit a fresh
one. I accepted the action as symbolical. I dismissed Boyce, and
said:--
"And so you're engaged to Captain Connor?"
"More than that," she laughed. "I'm going to marry him. He's going
out next week. It's idiotic to have an engagement. So I'm going to
marry him the day after to-morrow."
Now here was a piece of news, all flung at my head in a couple of
minutes. The day after to-morrow! I asked for the reason of this
disconcerting suddenness.
"He's going out next week."
"My dear," said I, "I have known you for a very long time--and I
suppose it's because I'm such a very old friend that you've come
to tell me all about it. So I can talk to you frankly. Have you
considered the terrible chances of this war? Heaven knows what may
happen. He may be killed."
"That's why I'm marrying him," she said.
There was a little pause. For the moment I had nothing to say, as
I was busily searching for her point of view. Then, with pauses
between each sentence, she went on:--
"He asked me two months ago, and again a month ago. I told him to
put such ideas out of his head. Yesterday he told me they were off
to the front and said what a wonderful help it would be to him if
he could carry away some hope of my love. So I gave it to him."--
She threw back her head and looked at me, with flushed cheeks.
"The love, not the hope."
"I don't think it was right of him to press for an immediate
marriage," said I, in a grandfatherly way--though God knows if I
had been mad for a girl I should have done the same myself when I
was young.
"He didn't" said Betty, coolly. "It was all my doing. I fixed it
up there and then. Looked up Whitaker's Almanack for the necessary
information, and sent him off to get a special license."
I nodded a non-committal head. It all seemed rather mad. Betty
rose and from her graceful height gazed down on me.
"If you don't look more cheerful, Major, I shall cry. I've never
done so yet, but I'm sure I've got it in me."
I stretched out my hand. She took it, and, still holding it,
seated herself on a footstool close to my chair.
"There are such a lot of things that occur to me," I said. "Things
that your poor mother, if she were alive, would be more fitted to
touch on than myself."
"Such as--"
She knelt by me and gave me both her hands. It was a pretty way
she had. She had begun it soon after her head overtopped mine in
my eternal wheelbarrow. There was a little mockery in her eyes.
"Well--" said I. "You know what marriage means. There is the
question of children."
She broke into frank laughter.
"My darling Majy--" That is the penalty one pays for admitting
irresponsible modern young people into one's intimacy. They
miscall one abominably. I thought she had outgrown this childish,
though affectionate appellation of disrespect. "My darling Majy!"
she said. "Children! How many do you think I'm going to have?"
I was taken aback. There was this pure, proud, laughing young face
a foot away from me. I said in desperation:--
"You know very well what I mean, young woman. I want to put things
clearly before you--" It is the most difficult thing in the world
for a man--even without legs--to talk straight about the facts of
life to a young girl. He has no idea how much she knows about them
and how much she doesn't. To tear away veils and reveal
frightening starkness is an act from which he shrinks with all the
modesty of a (perhaps) deluded sex. I took courage. "I want," I
repeated, "to put things clearly before you. You are marrying this
young man. You will have a week's married life. He goes away like
a gallant fellow to fight for his country. He may be killed in the
course of the next few weeks. Like a brave girl you've got to face
it. In the course of time a child may be born--without a father
to look after him. It's a terrific responsibility."
She knelt upright and put both her hands on my shoulders, almost
embracing me, and the laughter died away from her eyes, giving
place to something which awakened memories of what I had seen once
or twice in the eyes of the dearest of all women. She put her face
very close to mine and whispered:
"Don't you see, dear, it's in some sort of way because of that?
Don't you think it would be awful for a strong, clean, brave
English life like his to go out without leaving behind him someone
to--well, you know what I mean--to carry on the same traditions--
to be the same clean brave Englishman in the future?"
I smiled and nodded. Quite a different kind of nod from the
previous one.
"Thousands of girls are doing it, you dear old Early Victorian,
and aren't ashamed to say so to those who really love and can
understand them. And you do love and understand, don't you?"
She set me off at arm's length, and held me with her bright
unflinching eyes.
"I do, my dear," said I. "But there's only one thing that troubles
me. Marriage is a lifelong business. Captain Connor may win
through to a green old age. I hope to God the gallant fellow will.
Your present motives are beautiful and heroic. But do you care for
him sufficiently to pass a lifetime with him--after the war--an
ordinary, commonplace lifetime?"
With the same clear gaze full on me she said:--
"Didn't I tell you that I had given him my love?"
"You did."
"Then," she retorted with a smile, "my dear Major Didymus, what
more do you want?"
"Nothing, my dear Betty."
I kissed her. She threw her arms round my neck and kissed me
again. Sergeant Marigold entered on the sentimental scene and
preserved a face of wood. Betty rose to her feet slowly and
serenely and smiled at Marigold.
"Miss Fairfax's car," he announced.
"Marigold," said I, "Miss Fairfax is going to be married the day
after to-morrow to Captain Connor of the--"
"I know, sir," interrupted my one-eyed ramrod. "I'm very glad, if
I may be permitted to say so, Miss. I've made it my duty to
inspect all the troops that have been quartered hereabouts during
the last eight months. And Captain Connor is one of the few that
really know their business. I shouldn't at all mind to serve under
him. I can't say more, Miss. I wish you happiness."
She flushed and laughed and looked adorable, and held out her
hand, which he enclosed in his great left fist.
"And you'll come to my wedding, Sergeant?"
"I will, Miss," said he. "With considerable pleasure."
