The Rough Road

Then Jeanne and the old curé, in his time-scarred shovel-hat and his rusty soutane, followed by Toinette, turned round the corner of the lane and emerged into the main street. A sergeant gave a word of command. The guard stood at attention. Jeanne and her companions proceeded up the street, unaware of the unusual, until they entered between the first two files. Then for the first time the tears welled into Jeanne’s eyes. She could only stretch out her hands and cry somewhat wildly to the bronzed statues on each side of her, “Merci, mes amis, merci, merci,” and flee into the house.

The next day Maître Pépineau, the notary, summoned her to his cabinet. Maître Pépineau was very old. His partner had gone off to the war. “One of the necessities of the present situation,” he would say, “is that I should go on living in spite of myself; for if I died, the whole of the affairs of Frélus would be in the soup.” Now, a fortnight back, Maître Pépineau and four neighbours – the four witnesses required by French law when there is only one notary to draw up the instrument public– had visited Aunt Morin; so Jeanne knew that she had made a fresh will.

“Mon enfant,” said the old man, unfolding the document, “in a previous will your aunt had left you a little heritage out of the half of her fortune which she was free to dispose of by the code. You having come into possession of your own money, she has revoked that will and left everything to her only surviving son, Gaspard Morin, in Madagascar.”

“It is only just and right,” said Jeanne.

“The unfortunate part of the matter,” said Maître Pépineau, “is that Madame Morin has appointed official trustees to carry on the estate until Monsieur Gaspard Morin can make his own arrangements. The result is that you have no locus standi as a resident in the house. I pointed this out to her. But you know, in spite of her good qualities, she was obstinate… It pains me greatly, my dear child, to have to state your position.”

“I am then,” said Jeanne, “sans-asile– homeless?”

“As far as the house of Monsieur Gaspard Morin is concerned – yes.”

“And my English soldiers?” asked Jeanne.

“Alas, my child,” replied the old man, “you will find them everywhere.”

Which was cold consolation. For however much inspired by patriotic gratitude a French girl may be, she cannot settle down in a strange place where British troops are billeted and proceed straightway to minister to their comfort. Misunderstandings are apt to arise even in the best regulated British regiments. In the house of Aunt Morin, in Frélus, her position was unassailable. Anywhere else …

“So, my good Toinette,” said Jeanne, after having explained the situation to the indignant old woman, “I can only go back to my friend in Paris and reconstitute my life. If you will accompany me – ?”

But no. Toinette had the peasant’s awful dread of Paris. She had heard about Paris: there were thieves, ruffians that they called apaches, who murdered you if you went outside your door.

“The apaches,” laughed Jeanne, “were swept away into the army on the outbreak of war, and they’ve nearly all been killed, fighting like heroes.”

“There are the old ones left, who are worse than the young,” retorted Toinette.

No. Mademoiselle could teach her nothing about Paris. You could not even cross a street without risk of life, so many were the omnibuses and automobiles. In every shop you were a stranger to be robbed. There was no air in Paris. You could not sleep for the noise. And then – to live in a city of a hundred million people and not know a living soul! It was a mad-house matter. Again no. It grieved her to part from mademoiselle, but she had made her little economies – a difficult achievement, considering how regardful of her pence Madame had been – and she would return to her Breton town, which forty years ago she had left to enter the service of Madame Morin.

“But after forty years, Toinette, who in Paimpol will remember you?”

“It is I who remember Paimpol,” said Toinette. She remained for a few moments in thought. Then she said: “C’est drôle, tout de même. I haven’t seen the sea for forty years, and now I can’t sleep of nights thinking of it. The first man I loved was a fisherman of Paimpol. We were to be married after he returned from an Iceland voyage, with a gros bénéfice. When the time came for his return, I would stand on the shore and watch and watch the sea. But he never came. The sea swallowed him up. And then – you can understand quite well – the child was born dead. And I thought I would never want to look at the sea again. So I came here to your Aunt Morin, the daughter of Doctor Kersadec, your grandfather, and I married Jules Dagnant, the foreman of the carters of the hay … and he died a long time ago … and now I have forgotten him and I want to go and look at the sea where my man was drowned.”

“But your grandson, who is fighting in the Argonne?”

“What difference can it make to him whether I am in Frélus or Paimpol?”

“That’s true,” said Jeanne.

Toinette bustled about the kitchen. Folks had to eat, whatever happened. But she went on talking, Madame Morin. One must not speak evil of the dead. They have their work cut out to extricate themselves from Purgatory. But all the same – after forty years’ faithful service – and not to mention in the will —même pour une Bretonne, c’était raide. Jeanne agreed. She had no reason to love her Aunt Morin. Her father’s people came from Agen on the confines of Gascony; he had been a man of great gestures and vehement speech; her mother, gentle, reserved, un pen dévote. Jeanne drew her character from both sources; but her sympathies were rather southern than northern. For some reason or the other, perhaps for his expansive ways – who knows? – Aunt Morin had held the late Monsieur Bossière in detestation. She had no love for Jeanne, and Jeanne, who before her good fortune had expected nothing from Aunt Morin, regarded the will with feelings of indifference. Except as far as it concerned Toinette. Forty years’ faithful service deserved recognition. But what was the use of talking about it?

“So we must separate, Toinette?”

“Alas, yes, mademoiselle – unless mademoiselle would come with me to Paimpol.”

Jeanne laughed. What should she do in Paimpol? There wasn’t even a fisherman left there to fall in love with.

“Mademoiselle,” said Toinette later, “do you think you will meet the little English soldier, Monsieur Trevor, in Paris?”

“Dans la guerre on ne se revoit jamais,” said Jeanne.

But there was more of personal decision than of fatalism in her tone.

So Jeanne waited for a day or two until the regiment marched away, and then, with heavy heart, set out for Paris. She wrote, indeed, to Phineas, and weeks afterwards Phineas, who was in the thick of the Somme fighting, wrote to Doggie telling him of her departure from Frélus; but regretted that as he had lost her letter he could not give him her Paris address.

And in the meantime the house of Gaspard Morin was shuttered and locked and sealed; and the bureaucratically minded old Postmaster of Frélus, who had received no instructions from Jeanne to forward her correspondence, handed Doggie’s letters and telegrams to the aged postman, a superannuated herdsman, who stuck them into the letter-box of the deserted house and went away conscious of duty perfectly accomplished.

Then, at last, Doggie, fit again for active service, went out with a draft to France, and joined Phineas and Mo, almost the only survivors of the cheery, familiar crowd that he had loved, and the grimness of battles such as he had never conceived possible took him in its inexorable grip, and he lost sense of everything save that he was the least important thing on God’s earth struggling desperately for animal existence.

Yet there were rare times of relief from stress, when he could gropingly string together the facts of a pre-Somme existence. And then he would curse Phineas lustily for losing the precious letter.

“Man,” Phineas once replied, “don’t you see that you’re breaking a heart which, in spite of its apparent rugosity and callosity, is as tender as a new-made mother’s? Tell me to do it, and I’ll desert and make my way to Paris and – ”

“And the military police will see that you make your way to hell via a stone wall. And serve you right. Don’t be a blithering fool,” said Doggie.

“Then I don’t know what I can do for you, laddie, except die of remorse at your feet.”

“We’re all going to die of rheumatic fever,” said Doggie, shivering in his sodden uniform. “Blast this rain!”

Phineas thrust his hand beneath his clothing and produced a long, amorphous and repulsive substance, like a painted tallow candle overcome by intense heat, from which he gravely bit an inch or two.

“What’s that?” asked Doggie.

“It’s a stick of peppermint,” said Phineas. “I’ve still an aunt in Galashiels who remembers my existence.”

Doggie stuck out his hand like a monkey in the Zoo.

“You selfish beast!” he said.

CHAPTER XXIII

The fighting went on and, to Doggie, the inhabitants of the outside world became almost as phantasmagorical as Phineas’s providential aunt in Galashiels. Immediate existence held him. In an historic battle Mo Shendish fell with a machine bullet through his heart. Doggie, staggering with the rest of the company to the attack over the muddy, shell-torn ground, saw him go down a few yards away. It was not till later that he knew he had gone West with many other great souls. Doggie and Phineas mourned for him as a brother. Without him France was a muddier and a bloodier place and the outside world more unreal than ever.

Then to Doggie came a heart-broken letter from the Dean. Oliver had gone the same road as Mo. Peggy was frantic with grief. Vividly Doggie saw the peaceful deanery on which all the calamity of all the war had crashed with sudden violence.

“Why I should thank God we parted as friends, I don’t quite know,” said Doggie, “but I do.”

“I suppose, laddie,” said Phineas, “it’s good to feel that smiling eyes and hearty hands will greet us when we too pass over the Border. My God, man,” he added reflectively, after a pause, “have you ever considered what a goodly company it will be? When you come to look at it that way, it makes Death quite a trivial affair.”

“I suppose it does to us while we’re here,” said Doggie. “We’ve seen such a lot of it. But to those who haven’t – my poor Peggy – it’s the end of her universe.”

Yes, it was all very well to take death philosophically, or fatalistically, or callously, or whatever you liked to call it, out there, where such an attitude was the only stand against raving madness; but at home, beneath the grey mass of the cathedral, folks met Death as a strange and cruel horror. The new glory of life that Peggy had found, he had blackened out in an instant. Doggie looked again at the old man’s letter – his handwriting was growing shaky – and forgot for a while the familiar things around him, and lived with Peggy in her sorrow.

Then, as far as Doggie’s sorely tried division was affected, came the end of the great autumn fighting. He found himself well behind the lines in reserve, and so continued during the cold dreary winter months. And the more the weeks that crept by and the more remote seemed Jeanne, the more Doggie hungered for the sight of her. But all this period of his life was but a dun-coloured monotony, with but few happenings to distinguish week from week. Most of the company that had marched with him into Frélus were dead or wounded. Nearly all the officers had gone. Captain Willoughby, who had interrogated Jeanne with regard to the restored packet, and, on Doggie’s return, had informed him with a friendly smile that they were a damned sight too busy then to worry about defaulters of the likes of him, but that he was going to be court-martialled and shot as soon as peace was declared, when they would have time to think of serious matters – Captain Willoughby had gone to Blighty with a leg so mauled that never would he command again a company in the field. Sergeant Ballinghall, who had taught Doggie to use his fists, had retired, minus a hand, into civil life. A scientific and sporting helper at Roehampton, he informed Doggie by letter, was busily engaged on the invention of a boxing-glove which would enable him to carry on his pugilistic career. “So, in future times,” said he, “if any of your friends among the nobility and gentry want lessons in the noble art, don’t forget your old friend Ballinghall.” Whereat – incidentally – Doggie wondered. Never, for a fraction of a second, during their common military association, had Ballinghall given him to understand that he regarded him otherwise than as a mere Tommy without any pretensions to gentility. There had been times when Ballinghall had cursed him – perhaps justifiably and perhaps lovingly – as though he had been the scum of the earth. Doggie would no more have dared address him in terms of familiarity than he would have dared slap the Brigadier-General on the back. And now the honest warrior sought Doggie’s patronage. Of the original crowd in England who had transformed Doggie’s military existence by making him penny-whistler to the company, only Phineas and himself were left. There were others, of course, good and gallant fellows, with whom he became bound in the rough intimacy of the army; but the first friends, those under whose protecting kindliness his manhood had developed, were the dearest. And their ghosts remained dear.

At last the division was moved up and there was more fighting.

One day, after a successful raid, Doggie tumbled back with the rest of the men into the trench and, looking about, missed Phineas. Presently the word went round that “Mac” had been hit, and later the rumour was confirmed by the passage down the trench of Phineas on a stretcher, his weather-battered face a ghastly ivory.

“I’m alive all right, laddie,” he gasped, contorting his lips into a smile. “I’ve got it clean through the chest like a gentleman. But it gars me greet I canna look after you any longer.”

He made an attempt at waving a hand, and the stretcher-bearers carried him away out of the army for ever.

Thereafter Doggie felt the loneliest thing on earth, like Wordsworth’s cloud, or the Last Man in Tom Hood’s grim poem. For was he not the last man of the original company, as he had joined it, hundreds of years ago, in England? It was only then that he realized fully the merits of the wastrel Phineas McPhail. Not once or twice, but a thousand times had the man’s vigilant affection, veiled under cynical humour, saved him from despair. Not once but a thousand times had the gaunt, tireless Scotchman saved him from physical exhaustion. At every turn of his career, since his enlistment, Phineas had been there, watchful, helpful, devoted. There he had been, always ready and willing to be cursed. To curse him had been the great comfort of Doggie’s life. Whom could he curse now? Not a soul – no one, at any rate, against whom he could launch an anathema with any real heart in it. Than curse vainly and superficially, far better not to curse at all. He missed Phineas beyond all his conception of the blankness of bereavement. Like himself, Phineas had found salvation in the army. Doggie realized how he had striven in his own queer way to redeem the villainy of his tutorship. No woman could have been more gentle, more unselfish.

“What the devil am I going to do?” said Doggie.

Meanwhile Phineas, lying in a London hospital with a bullet through his body, thought much and earnestly of his friend, and one morning Peggy got a letter.

“Dear Madam, —

“Time was when I could not have addressed you without incurring your not unjustifiable disapproval. But I take the liberty of doing so now, trusting to your generous acquiescence in the proposition that the war has purged many offences. If this has not happened, to some extent, in my case, I do not see how it has been possible for me to have regained and retained the trust and friendship of so sensitive and honourable a gentleman as Mr. Marmaduke Trevor.

“If I ask you to come and see me here, where I am lying severely wounded, it is not with an intention to solicit a favour for myself personally – although I’ll not deny that the sight of a kind and familiar face would be a boon to a lonely and friendless man – but with a deep desire to advance Mr. Trevor’s happiness. Lest you may imagine I am committing an unpardonable impertinence and thereby totally misunderstand me, I may say that this happiness can only be achieved by the aid of powerful friends both in London and Paris.

“It is only because the lad is the one thing dear to me left in the world, that I venture to intrude on your privacy at such a time.

“I am, dear Madam,“Yours very faithfully,“Phineas McPhail.”

Peggy came down to breakfast, and having dutifully kissed her parents, announced her intention of going to London by the eleven o’clock train.

“Why, how can you, my dear?” asked Mrs. Conover.

“I’ve nothing particular to do here for the next few days.”

“But your father and I have. Neither of us can start off to London at a moment’s notice.”

Peggy replied with a wan smile: “But, dearest mother, you forget. I’m an old, old married woman.”

“Besides, my dear,” said the Dean, “Peggy has often gone away by herself.”

“But never to London,” said Mrs. Conover.

“Anyhow, I’ve got to go.” Peggy turned to the old butler. “Ring up Sturrocks’s and tell them I’m coming.”

“Yes, miss,” said Burford.

“He’s as bad as you are, mother,” said Peggy.

So she went up to London and stayed the night at Sturrocks’s alone, for the first time in her life. She half ate a lonely, execrable war dinner in the stuffy, old-fashioned dining-room, served ceremoniously by the ancient head waiter, the friend of her childhood, who, in view of her recent widowhood, addressed her in the muffled tones of the sympathetic undertaker. Peggy nearly cried. She wished she had chosen another hotel. But where else could she have gone? She had stayed at few hotels in London: once at the Savoy; once at Claridge’s; every other time at Sturrocks’s. The Savoy? Its vastness had frightened her. And Claridge’s? No; that was sanctified for ever. Oliver in his lordly way had snapped his fingers at Sturrocks’s. Only the best was good enough for Peggy. Now only Sturrocks’s remained.

She sought her room immediately after the dreary meal and sat before the fire – it was a damp, chill February night – and thought miserable and aching thoughts. It happened to be the same room which she had occupied, oh – thousands of years ago – on the night when Doggie, point-device in new Savile Row uniform, had taken her to dinner at the Carlton. And she had sat, in the same imitation Charles the Second brocaded chair, looking into the same generous, old-fashioned fire, thinking – thinking. And she remembered clenching her fist and apostrophizing the fire and crying out aloud: “Oh, my God! if only he makes good!”

Oceans of years lay between then and now. Doggie had made good; every man who came home wounded must have made good. Poor old Doggie. But how in the name of all that was meant by the word Love she could ever have contemplated – as she had contemplated, with an obstinate, virginal loyalty – marriage with Doggie, she could not understand.

She undressed, brought the straight-backed chair close to the fire, and, in her dainty nightgown, part of her trousseau, sat elbow on knee, face in thin, clutching hands, slippered feet on fender, thinking, thinking once again. Thinking now of the gates of Paradise that had opened to her for a few brief weeks. Of the man who never had to make good, being the wonder of wonders of men, the delicious companion, the incomparable lover, the all-compelling revealer, the great, gay, scarcely, to her woman’s limited power of vision, comprehended heroic soldier. Of the terrifying meaninglessness of life, now that her God of Very God, in human form, had been swept, in an instant, off the earth into the Unknown.

Yet was life meaningless after all? There must be some significance, some inner truth veiled in mystery, behind even the casually accepted and never probed religion to which she had been born and in which she had found poor refuge. For, like many of her thoughtless, unquestioning class, she had looked at Christ through stained-glass windows, and now the windows were darkened… For the first time in her life, her soul groped intensely towards eternal verities. The fire burned low and she shivered. She became again the bit of human flotsam cruelly buffeted by the waves, forgotten of God. Yet, after she had risen and crept into bed and while she was staring into the darkness, her heart became filled with a vast pity for the thousands and thousands of women, her sisters, who at that moment were staring, hopeless, like her, into the unrelenting night.

She did not fall asleep till early morning. She rose late. About half-past eleven as she was preparing to walk abroad on a dreary shopping excursion – the hospital visiting hour was in the afternoon – a telegram arrived from the Dean.

“Just heard that Marmaduke is severely wounded.”

She scarcely recognized the young private tutor of Denby Hall in the elderly man with the deeply furrowed face, who smiled as she approached his bed. She had brought him flowers, cigarettes of the exquisite kind that Doggie used to smoke, chocolates…

She sat down by his bedside.

“All this is more than gracious, Mrs. Manningtree,” said Phineas. “To a vieux routier like me, it is a wee bit overwhelming.”

“It’s very little to do for Doggie’s best friend.”

Phineas’s eyes twinkled. “If you call him Doggie, like that, maybe it won’t be so difficult for me to talk to you.”

“Why should it be difficult at all?” she asked. “We both love him.”

“Ay,” said Phineas. “He’s a lovable lad, and it is because others besides you and me find him lovable, that I took the liberty of writing to you.”

“The girl in France?”

“Eh?” He put out a bony hand, and regarded her in some disappointment. “Has he told you? Perhaps you know all about it.”

“I know nothing except that – ‘a girl in France,’ was all he told me. But – first about yourself. How badly are you wounded – and what can we do for you?”

She dragged from a reluctant Phineas the history of his wound and obtained confirmation of his statement from a nurse who happened to pass up the gangway of the pleasant ward and lingered by the bedside. McPhail was doing splendidly. Of course, a man with a hole through his body must be expected to go back to the regime of babyhood. So long as he behaved himself like a well-conducted baby all would be well. Peggy drew the nurse a few yards away.

“I’ve just heard that his dearest friend out there, a boy whom he loves dearly and has been through the whole thing with him in the same company – it’s odd, but he was his private tutor years ago – both gentlemen, you know – in fact, I’m here just to talk about the boy – ” Peggy grew somewhat incoherent. “Well – I’ve just heard that the boy has been seriously wounded. Shall I tell him?”

“I think it would be better to wait for a few days. Any shock like that sends up their temperatures. We hate temperatures, and we’re getting his down so nicely.”

“All right,” said Peggy, and she went back smiling to Phineas. “She says you’re getting on amazingly, Mr. McPhail.”

Said Phineas: “I’m grateful to you, Mrs. Manningtree, for concerning yourself about my entirely unimportant carcass. Now, as Virgil says, ‘paullo majora canemus.’”

“You have me there, Mr. McPhail,” said Peggy.

“Let us sing of somewhat greater things. That is the bald translation. Let us talk of Doggie – if so be it is agreeable to you.”

“Carry on,” said Peggy.

“Well,” said Phineas, “to begin at the beginning, we marched into a place called Frélus – ”

In his pedantic way he began to tell her the story of Jeanne, so far as he knew it. He told her of the girl standing in the night wind and rain on the bluff by the turning of the road. He told her of Doggie’s insane adventure across No Man’s Land to the farm of La Folette. Tears rolled down Peggy’s cheeks. She cried, incredulous:

“Doggie did that? Doggie?”

“It was child’s play to what he had to do at Guedecourt.”

But Peggy waved away the vague heroism of Guedecourt.