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Rough Road

<h2 class="chapter_title">CHAPTER XI</h2> “We’re all very proud of you, Marmaduke,” said the Dean. “I think you’re just splendid,” said Peggy. They were sitting in Doggie’s rooms in Woburn Place, Doggie having been given his three days’ leave before going to France. Once again Durdlebury had come to Doggie and not Doggie to Durdlebury. Aunt Sophia, however, somewhat ailing, had stayed at home. Doggie stood awkwardly before them, conscious of swollen hands and broken nails, shapeless ammunition boots and ill-fitting slacks; morbidly conscious, too, of his original failure. “You’re about ten inches more round the chest than you were,” said the Dean admiringly. “And the picture of health,” cried Peggy. “For anyone who has a sound constitution,” answered Doggie, “it is quite a healthy life.” “Now that you’ve got into the way, I’m sure you must really love it,” said Peggy with an encouraging smile. “It isn’t so bad,” he replied. “What none of us can quite understand, my dear fellow,” said the Dean, “is your shying at Durdlebury. As we have written you, everybody’s singing your praises. Not a soul but would have given you a hearty welcome.” “Besides,” Peggy chimed in, “you needn’t have made an exhibition of yourself in the town if you didn’t want to. The poor Peddles are woefully disappointed.” “There’s a war going on. They must bear up—like lots of other people,” replied Doggie. “He’s becoming quite cynical,” Peggy laughed. “But, apart from the Peddles, there’s your own beautiful house waiting for you. It seems so funny not to go to it, instead of moping in these fusty lodgings.” “Perhaps,” said Doggie quietly, “if I went there I should never want to come back.” “There’s something to be said from that point of view,” the Dean admitted. “A solution of continuity is never quite without its dangers. Even Oliver confessed as much.” “Oliver?” “Yes, didn’t Peggy tell you?” “I didn’t think Marmaduke would be interested,” said Peggy quickly. “He and Oliver have never been what you might call bosom friends.” “I shouldn’t have minded about hearing of him,” said Doggie. “Why should I? What’s he doing?” The Dean gave information. Oliver, now a captain, had come home on leave a month ago, and had spent some of it at the Deanery. He had seen a good deal of fighting, and had one or two narrow escapes. “Was he keen to get back?” asked Doggie. The Dean smiled. “I instanced his case in my remark as to the dangers of the solution of continuity.” “Oh, rubbish, daddy,” cried his daughter, with a flush, “Oliver is as keen as mustard.” The Dean made a little gesture of submission. She continued. “He doesn’t like the beastliness out there for its own sake, any more than Marmaduke will. But he simply loves his job. He has improved tremendously. Once he thought he was the only man in the country who had seen Life stark naked, and he put on frills accordingly Now that he’s just one of a million who have been up against Life stripped to its skeleton, he’s a bit subdued.” “I’m glad of that,” said Doggie. The Dean, urbanely indulgent, joined his fingertips together and smiled. “Peggy is right,” said he, “although I don’t wholly approve of her modern lack of reticence in metaphor. Oliver is coming out true gold from the fire. He’s a capital fellow. And he spoke of you, my dear Marmaduke, in the kindest way in the world. He has a tremendous admiration for your pluck.” “That’s very good of him, I’m sure,” said Doggie. Presently the Dean—good, tactful man—discovered that he must go out and have a prescription made up at a chemist’s. That arch-Hun enemy, the gout, against which he must never be unprepared. He would be back in time for dinner. The engaged couple were left alone. “Well?” said Peggy. “Well, dear?” said Doggie. Her lips invited. He responded. She drew him to the saddle-bag sofa, and they sat down side by side. “I quite understand, dear old thing,” she said. “I know the resignation and the rest of it hurt you awfully. It hurt me. But it’s no use grousing over spilt milk. You’ve already mopped it all up. It’s no disgrace to be a private. It’s an honour. There are thousands of gentlemen in the ranks. Besides—you’ll work your way up and they’ll offer you another commission in no time.” “You’re very good and sweet, dear,” said Doggie, “to have such faith in me. But I’ve had a year——” “A year!” cried Peggy. “Good lord! so it is.” She counted on her fingers. “Not quite. But eleven months. It’s eleven months since I’ve seen you. Do you realize that? The war has put a stop to time. It is just one endless day.” “One awful, endless day,” Doggie acquiesced with a smile. “But I was saying—I’ve had a year, or an endless day of eleven months, in which to learn myself. And what I don’t know about myself isn’t knowledge.” Peggy interrupted with a laugh. “You must be a wonder. Dad’s always preaching about self-knowledge. Tell me all about it.” Doggie shook his head, at the same time passing his hand over it in a familiar gesture. Then Peggy cried: “I knew there was something wrong with you. Why didn’t you tell me? You’ve had your hair cut—cut quite differently.” It was McPhail, careful godfather, who had taken him as a recruit to the regimental barber and prescribed a transformation from the sleek long hair brushed back over the head to a conventional military crop with a rudiment of a side parting. On the crown a few bristles stood up as if uncertain which way to go. “It’s advisable,” Doggie replied, “for a Tommy’s hair to be cut as short as possible. The Germans are sheared like convicts.” Peggy regarded him open-eyed and puzzle-browed. He enlightened her no further, but pursued the main proposition. “I wouldn’t take a commission,” said he, “if the War Office went mad and sank on its knees and beat its head in the dust before me.” “In Heaven’s name, why not?” “I’ve learned my place in the world,” said Doggie. Peggy shook him by the shoulder and turned on him her young eager face. “Your place in the world is that of a cultivated gentleman of old family, Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall.” “That was the funny old world,” said he, “that stood on its legs—legs wide apart with its hands beneath the tails of its dress-coat, in front of the drawing-room fire. The present world’s standing on its head. Everything’s upside-down. It has no sort of use for Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall. No more use than for Goliath. By the way, how is the poor little beast getting on?” Peggy laughed. “Oh, Goliath is perfectly assured of his position. He has got it rammed into his mind that he drives the two-seater.” She returned to the attack. “Do you intend always to remain a private?” “I do,” said he. “Not even a corporal. You see, I’ve learned to be a private of sorts, and that satisfies my ambition.” “Well, I give it up,” said Peggy. “Though why you wouldn’t let dad get you a nice cushy job is a thing I can’t understand. For the life of me I can’t.” “I’ve made my bed, and I must lie on it,” he said quietly. “I don’t believe you’ve got such a thing as a bed.” Doggie smiled. “Oh yes, a bed of a sort.” Then noting her puzzled face, he said consolingly: “It’ll all come right when the war’s over.” “But when will that be? And who knows, my dear man, what may happen to you?” “If I’m knocked out, I’m knocked out, and there’s an end of it,” replied Doggie philosophically. She put her hand on his. “But what’s to become of me?” “We needn’t cry over my corpse yet,” said Doggie. The Dean, after awhile, returned with his bottle of medicine, which he displayed with conscientious ostentation. They dined. Peggy again went over the ground of the possible commission. “I’m afraid she has set her heart on it, my boy,” said the Dean. Peggy cried a little on parting. This time Doggie was going, not to the fringe, but to the heart of the Great Adventure. Into the thick of the carnage. A year ago, she said, through her tears, she would have thought herself much more fitted for it than Marmaduke. “Perhaps you are still, dear,” said Doggie, with his patient smile. He saw them to the taxi which was to take them to the familiar Sturrocks’s. Before getting in, Peggy embraced him. “Keep out of the way of shells and bullets as much as you can.” The Dean blew his nose, God-blessed him, and murmured something incoherent about fighting for the glory of old England. “Good luck,” cried Peggy from the window. She blew him a kiss. The taxi drove off, and Doggie went back into the house with leaden feet. The meeting, which he had morbidly dreaded, had brought him no comfort. It had not removed the invisible barrier between Peggy and himself. But Peggy seemed so unconscious of it that he began to wonder whether it only existed in his diseased imagination. Though by his silences and reserves he had given her cause for resentment and reproach, her attitude was nothing less than angelic. He sat down moodily in an arm-chair, his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his legs stretched out. The fault lay in himself, he argued. What was the matter with him? He seemed to have lost all human feeling, like the man with the stone heart in the old legend. Otherwise, why had he felt no prick of jealousy at Peggy’s admiring comprehension of Oliver? Of course he loved her. Of course he wanted to marry her when this nightmare was over. That went without saying. But why couldn’t he look to the glowing future? A poet had called a lover’s mistress “the lode-star of his one desire.” That to him Peggy ought to be. Lode-star. One desire. The words confused him. He had no lode-star. His one desire was to be left alone. Without doubt he was suffering from some process of moral petrifaction. Doggie was no psychologist. He had never acquired the habit of turning himself inside-out and gloating over the horrid spectacle. All his life he had been a simple soul with simple motives and a simple though possibly selfish standard to measure them. But now his soul was knocked into a chaotic state of complexity, and his poor little standards were no manner of use. He saw himself as in a glass darkly, mystified by unknown change. He rose, sighed, shook himself. “I give it up,” said he, and went to bed. <hr class="thoughtbreak" /> Doggie went to France; a France hitherto undreamed of, either by him or by any young Englishman; a France clean swept and garnished for war; a France, save for the ubiquitous English soldiery, of silent towns and empty villages and deserted roads; a France of smiling fields and sorrowful faces of women and drawn patient faces of old men—and even then the women and old men were rarely met by day, for they were at work on the land, solitary figures on the landscape, with vast spaces between them. In the quiet townships, English street signs and placards conflicted with the sense of being in friendly provincial France, and gave the impression of foreign domination. For beyond that long grim line of eternal thunder, away over there in the distance, which was called the Front, street signs and placards in yet another alien tongue also outraged the serene genius of French urban life. Yet our signs were a symbol of a mighty Empire’s brotherhood, and the dimmed eyes that beheld the Place de la Fontaine transformed into “Holborn Circus,” and the Grande Rue into “Piccadilly,” smiled, and the owners, with eager courtesy, directed the stray Tommy to “Regent Street,” which they had known all their life as the Rue Feuillemaisnil—a word which Tommy could not pronounce, still less remember. It was as much as Tommy could do to get hold of an approximation to the name of the town. And besides these renamings, other inscriptions flamed about the streets; alphabetical hieroglyphs, in which the mystic letters H.Q. most often appeared; “This way to the Y.M.C.A. hut”; in many humble windows the startling announcement, “Washing done here.” British motor-lorries and ambulances crowding the little place and aligned along the avenues. British faces, British voices, everywhere. The blue uniform and blue helmet of a French soldier seemed as incongruous though as welcome as in London. And the straight endless roads, so French with their infinite border of poplars, their patient little stones marking every hundred metres until the tenth rose into the proud kilometre stone proclaiming the distance to the next stately town, rang too with the sound of British voices, and the tramp of British feet, and the clatter of British transport, and the screech and whir of cars, revealing as they passed the flash of red and gold of the British staff. Yet the finely cultivated land remained to show that it was France; and the little whitewashed villages; the curé, in shovel-hat and rusty cassock; the children in blue or black blouses, who stared as the British troops went by; the patient, elderly French Territorials in their old pre-war uniforms, guarding unthreatened culverts or repairing the roads; the helpful signs set up in happier days by the Touring Club of France. Into this strange anomaly of a land came Doggie with his draft, still half stupefied by the remorselessness of the stupendous machine in which he had been caught, in spite of his many months of training in England. He had loathed the East Coast camp. When he landed at Boulogne in the dark and the pouring rain and hunched his pack with the others who went off singing to the rest camp, he regretted East Anglia. “Give us a turn on the whistle, Doggie,” said a corporal. “I was sea-sick into it and threw it overboard,” he growled, stumbling over the rails of the quay. “Oh, you holy young liar!” said the man next him. But Doggie did not trouble to reply, his neighbour being only a private like himself. Then the draft joined its unit. In his youth Doggie had often wondered at the meaning of the familiar inscription on every goods van in France: “40 Hommes. 8 Chevaux.” Now he ceased to wonder. He was one of the forty men…. At the rail-head he began to march, and at last joined the remnant of his battalion. They had been through hard fighting, and were now in billets. Until he joined them he had not realized the drain there had been on the reserves at home. Very many familiar faces of officers were missing. New men had taken their place. And very many of his old comrades had gone, some to Blighty, some West of that Island of Desire; and those who remained had the eyes of children who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. McPhail and Mo Shendish had passed through unscathed. In the reconstruction of the regiment chance willed that the three of them found themselves in the same platoon of A Company. Doggie almost embraced them when they met. “Laddie,” said McPhail to him, as he was drinking a mahogany-coloured liquid that was known by the name of tea, out of a tin mug, and eating a hunk of bread and jam, “I don’t know whether or not I’m pleased to see you. You were safer in England. Once I misspent many months of my life in shielding you from the dangers of France. But France is a much more dangerous place nowadays, and I can’t help you. You’ve come right into the thick of it. Just listen to the hell’s delight that’s going on over yonder.” The easterly wind brought them the roar streaked with stridence of the artillery duel in progress on the nearest sector of the Front. They were sitting in the cellar entrance to a house in a little town which had already been somewhat mauled. Just opposite was a shuttered house on the ground floor of which had been a hatter and hosier’s shop, and there still swung bravely on an iron rod the red brim of what once had been a monstrous red hat. Next door, the façade of the upper stories had been shelled away and the naked interiors gave the impression of a pathetic doll’s house. Women’s garments still hung on pegs. A cottage piano lurched forward drunkenly on three legs, with the keyboard ripped open, the treble notes on the ground, the bass incongruously in the air. In the attic, ironically secure, hung a cheap German print of blowsy children feeding a pig. The wide flagstoned street smelt sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. Now and then squads marched up and down, monotonously clad in khaki and dun-coloured helmets. Officers, some only recognizable by the Sam Browne belt, others spruce and point-device, passed by. Here and there a shop was open, and the elderly proprietor and his wife stood by the doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other things to do with their heavy guns; and all the French population, save those whose homes were reduced to nothingness, had remained. They took no notice of the distant bombardment. It had grown to be a phenomenon of nature like the wind and the rain. But to Doggie it was new—just as the sight of the wrecked house opposite, with its sturdy crownless hat-brim of a sign, was new. He listened, as McPhail had bidden him, to the artillery duel with an odd little spasm of his heart. “What do you think of that, now?” asked McPhail grandly, as if it was The Greatest Show on Earth run by him, the Proprietor. “It’s rather noisy,” said Doggie, with a little ironical twist of his lips that was growing habitual. “Do they keep it up at night?” “They do.” “I don’t think it’s fair to interfere with one’s sleep like that,” said Doggie. “You’ve got to adapt yourself to it,” said McPhail sagely. “No doubt you’ll be remembering my theory of adaptability. Through that I’ve made myself into a very brave man. When I wanted to run away—a very natural desire, considering the scrupulous attention I’ve always paid to my bodily well-being—I reflected on the preposterous obstacles put in the way of flight by a bowelless military system, and adapted myself to the static and dynamic conditions of the trenches.” “Gorblime!” said Mo Shendish, stretched out by his side, “just listen to him!” “I suppose you’ll say you sucked honey out of the shells,” remarked Doggie. “I’m no great hand at mixing metaphors——” “What about drinks?” asked Mo. “Nor drinks either,” replied McPhail. “Both are bad for the brain. But as to what you were saying, laddie, I’ll not deny that I’ve derived considerable interest and amusement from a bombardment. Yet it has its sad aspect.” He paused for a moment or two. “Man,” he continued, “what an awful waste of money!” “I don’t know what old Mac is jawing about,” said Mo Shendish, “but you can take it from me he’s a holy terror with the bayonet. One moment he’s talking to a Boche through his hat and the next the Boche is wriggling like a worm on a bent pin.” Mo winked at Phineas. The temptation to “tell the tale” to the new-comer was too strong. Doggie grew very serious. “You’ve been killing men—like that?” “Thousands, laddie,” replied Phineas, the picture of unboastful veracity. “And so has Mo.” Mo Shendish, helmeted, browned, dried, toughened, a very different Mo from the pallid ferret whom Aggie had driven into the ranks of war, hunched himself up, his hands clasping his knees. “I don’t mind doing it, when you’re so excited you don’t know where you are,” said he, “but I don’t like thinking of it afterwards.” As a matter of fact, he had only once got home with the bayonet and the memory was unpleasant. “But you’ve just thought of it,” said Phineas. “It was you, not me,” said Mo. “That makes all the difference.” “It’s astonishing,” Phineas remarked sententiously, “how many people not only refuse to catch pleasure as it flies, but spurn it when it sits up and begs at them. Laddie,” he turned to Doggie, “the more one wallows in hedonism, the more one realizes its unplumbed depths.” A little girl of ten, neatly pigtailed but piteously shod, came near and cast a child’s envious eye on Doggie’s bread and jam. “Approach, my little one,” Phineas cried in French words but with the accent of Sauchiehall Street. “If I gave you a franc, what would you do with it?” “I should buy nourishment (de la nourriture) for maman.” “Lend me a franc, laddie,” said McPhail, and when Doggie had slipped the coin into his palm, he addressed the child in unintelligible grandiloquence and sent her on her way mystified but rejoicing. Ces bons drôles d’Anglais! “Ah, laddie!” cried Phineas, stretching himself out comfortably by the jamb of the door, “you’ve got to learn to savour the exquisite pleasure of a genuinely kindly act.” “Hold on!” cried Mo. “It was Doggie’s money you were flinging about.” McPhail withered him with a glance. “You’re an unphilosophical ignoramus,” said he. </div> <div class="chapter" id="chapter_XII"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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