Book: The Red Planet

W >> William J. Locke >> The Red Planet




"Oh, it's you, is it? Come at last where your duty calls you, eh?"

"I always come when I can, father," she replied.

She bent down and kissed his cheek. He caught her roughly round
the waist and, leaning back in his chair, looked up at her sourly.

"How long are you going on defying me like this?"

She tried to disengage herself, but his arm was too strong. "Oh,
father," she said, rather wearily, "don't let us go over this old
argument again."

"But suppose I find some new argument? Suppose I send you packing
altogether, refuse to contribute further to your support. What
then?"

She started at the threat but replied valiantly: "I should have to
earn my own living."

"How are you going to do it?"

"There are heaps of ways."

He laughed. "There ain't; as you'd soon find out. They don't even
pay you for being scullery-maid to a lot of common soldiers."

She protested against that view of her avocation. In the perfectly
appointed Wellingsford Hospital she had no scullery work. She was
a probationer, in training as a nurse. He still gripped her.

"The particular kind of tomfoolery you are up to doesn't matter.
We needn't quarrel. I've another proposition to put before you--
much more to your fancy, I think. You like this Mr. Randall
Holmes, don't you?"

She shivered a little and flushed deep red. Her father had never
touched on the matter before. She said, straining away:

"I don't want to talk about Mr. Holmes."

"But I do. Come, my dear. In this life there must be always a
certain amount of give and take. I'm not the man to drive a one-
sided bargain. I'll make you a fair offer--as between father and
daughter. I'll wipe out all that's past. In leaving me like this,
when misfortune has come upon me, you've been guilty of unfilial
conduct--no one can deny it But I'll overlook everything, forgive
you fully and take you to my heart again and leave you free to do
whatever you like without interfering with your opinions, if
you'll promise me one thing--"

"I know what you're going to say." She twisted round on him
swiftly. "I 'll promise at once. I'll never marry Mr. Holmes. I've
already told him I won't marry him."

Surprise relaxed his grip. She took swift advantage and sheered
away to the other side of the table. He rose and brought down his
hand with a thump.

"You refused him? Why, you silly little baggage, my condition is
that you should marry him. You're sweet on him aren't you?"

"I detest him," cried Phyllis. "Why should I marry him?"

Her eyes, young and pure, divined some sordid horror behind eyes
crafty and ignoble. Once before she had had such a fleeting,
uncomprehended vision into the murky depths of the man's soul.
This was some time ago. In the routine of her secretarial duties
she had, one morning, opened and read a letter, not marked
"Private" or "Personal," whose tenor she could scarcely
understand. When she handed it to her father, he smiled,
vouchsafed a specious explanation, and looked at her in just the
same crafty and ignoble fashion, and she shrank away frightened.
The matter kept her awake for a couple of nights. Then, for sheer
easing of her heart, she went to her adored Betty Fairfax, her
Lady Patroness and Mother Confessor, who, being wise and strong,
and possessing the power of making her kind eyes unfathomable,
laughed, bade her believe her father's explanation, and sent her
away comforted. The incident passed out of her mind. But now
memory smote her, as she shrank from her father's gaze and the
insincere smile on his thin lips.

"For one thing," he replied after a pause, pulling his straggly
beard, "your poor dear mother was a lady, and if she had lived she
would have wanted you to marry a gentleman. It's for her sake I've
given you an education that fits you to consort with gentlefolk--
just for her sake--don't make any mistake about it, for I've
always hated the breed. If I've violated my principles in order to
meet her wishes, I think you ought to meet them too. You wouldn't
like to marry a small tradesman or a working man, would you?"

"I'm not going to marry anybody," cried Phyllis. She was only a
pink and white, very ordinary little girl. I have no idealisations
or illusions concerning Phyllis. But she had a little fine steel
of character running through her. It flashed on Gedge.

"I don't want to marry anybody," she declared. "But I'd sooner
marry a bricklayer who was fighting for his country than a fine
gentleman like Mr. Holmes who wasn't. I'd sooner die," she cried
passionately.

"Then go and die and be damned to you!" snarled Gedge, planting
himself noisily in his chair. "I've no use for khaki-struck
drivelling idiots. I've no use for patriots. Bah! Damn patriots!
The upper classes are out for all they can get, and they befool
the poor imbecile working man with all their highfalutin phrases
to get it for them at the cost of his blood. I've no use for them,
I tell you. And I've no use either for undutiful daughters. I've
no use for young women who blow hot and cold. Haven't I seen you
with the fellow? Do you think I'm a blind dodderer? Do you think I
haven't kept an eye on you? Haven't I seen you blowing as hot as
you please? And now because he refuses to be a blinking idiot and
have his guts blown out in this war of fools and knaves and
capitalists, you blast him like a three-farthing iceberg."

Everything in her that was tender, maidenly, English, shrank
lacerated. But the steel held her. She put both her hands on the
table and bent over towards him.

"But, father, except that he's a gentleman, you haven't told me
why you want me to marry Mr. Holmes."

He fidgeted with his fingers. "Haven't you a spark of affection
for me left?"

She said dutifully, "Yes, father."

"I want you to marry him. I've set my heart on it. It has been the
one bright hope in my life for months. Can't you marry him because
you love me?"

"One generally marries because one loves the man one's going to
marry," said Phyllis.

"But you do love him," cried Gedge. "Either you're just a wanton
little hussy or you must care for the fellow."

"I don't. I hate him. And I don't want to have anything more to do
with him." The tears came. "He's a pro-German and I won't have
anything to do with pro-Germans."

She fled precipitately from the office into the street and made a
blind course to the hospital; feeling, in dumb misery, that she
had committed the unforgivable sin of casting off her father and,
at the same time, that she had made stalwart proclamation of her
faith. If ever a good, loyal little heart was torn into piteous
shreds, that little heart was Phyllis's.

In the bare X-ray room of the hospital, which happened to be
vacant, Betty sat on the one straight-backed wooden chair, while
a weeping damsel on the uncarpeted floor sobbed in her lap and
confessed her sins and sought absolution.

Of course Gedge was a fool. If I, or any wise, diplomatic, tactful
person like myself, had found it necessary to tackle a young woman
on the subject of a matrimonial alliance, we should have gone
about the business in quite a different way. But what could you
expect from an anarchical Turk like Gedge?

Phyllis, not knowing whether she were outcast and disinherited or
not, found, of course, a champion in Betty, who, in her spacious
manner, guaranteed her freedom from pecuniary worries for the rest
of her life. But Phyllis was none the less profoundly unhappy, and
it took a whole convoy of wounded to restore her to cheerfulness.
You can't attend to a poor brave devil grinning with pain, while a
surgeon pokes a six-inch probe down a sinus in search of bits of
bone or shrapnel, and be acutely conscious of your own two-penny-
half-penny little miseries. Many a heartache, in this wise, has
been cured in the Houses of Pain.

Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis,
driven from the hospital by superior decree that she should take
fresh air and exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards
across the common by the canal. Bordering the latter, Wellingsford
has an avenue of secular chestnuts of which it is inordinately
proud. Dispersed here and there are wooden benches sanctified by
generations of lovers. Carven thereon are the presentments, often
interlaced, of hearts that have long since ceased to beat; lonely
hearts transfixed by arrows, which in all probability survived the
wound and inspired the owner to the parentage of a dozen children;
initials once, individually, the record of many a romance, but
now, collectively, merely an alphabet run mad.

Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and
rested, a pathetically lonely little grey-uniformed figure on one
of the benches. On the common, some distance behind her, stretched
the lines of an Army Service train, with mules and waggons, and
here and there a tent. In front of her, beyond the row of trees,
was the towing-path; an old horse in charge of a boy jogged by,
pulling something of which only a moving stove pipe like a
periscope was visible above the bank. Overhead the chestnuts
rioted in broad leaf and pink and white blossom, showing starry
bits of blue sky and admitting arrow shafts of spring sunshine. A
dirty white mongrel dog belonging to the barge came up to her,
sniffed, and made friends; then, at last obeying a series of
whistles from the boy, looked at her apologetically and trotted
off. Her gaze followed him wistfully, for he was a very human dear
dog, and with a sympathetic understanding of all her difficulties
in his deep topaz eyes. After that she had as companions a couple
of butterflies and a bumble-bee and a perky, portly robin who
hopped within an inch of her feet and looked up at her sideways
out of his hard little eye (so different from the dog's) with the
expression of one who would say: "The most beauteous and
delectable worm I have ever encountered. If I were a bit bigger,
say the size of the roc of the Arabian Nights, what a dainty
morsel you would make! In the meantime can't you shed something of
yourself for my entertainment like others, though grosser, of your
species?" She laughed at the cold impudence of the creature, just
as she had smiled at the butterflies and the bumble-bee. She
surrendered herself to the light happiness of the moment. It was
good to escape for an hour from the rigid lines of beds and the
pale suffering faces and the eternal faint odour of disinfectants,
into all this greenery and the fellowship of birds and beasts
unconscious of war. She remembered that once, in the pocket of her
cloak, there had been a biscuit or two. Very slowly and carefully,
her mind fixed on the robin, she fished for crumbs and very
carefully and gently she fed the impudent, stomach-centred fellow.
She had attracted him to the end of the seat, when, whizz and
clatter, came a motor cycle down the avenue, and off in a terrible
scare flew the robin; the idyll of tree and beast and birds
suffered instant disruption and Randall Holmes, in his canvas
suit, stood before her.

He said:

"Good morning, Phyllis."

She said, with cold politeness: "Good morning." But she asked the
spring morning in dumb piteousness, "Oh, why has he come? Why has
he come to spoil it all?"

He sat down by her side. "This is the luckiest chance I've ever
had--finding you here," he said. "You've had all my letters,
haven't you?"

"Yes," she answered, "and I've torn them all up."

"Why?"

"Because I didn't want them," she flashed on him: "I've destroyed
them without reading them."

He flushed angrily. Apart from the personal affront, the fact that
the literary products of a poet, precious and, in this case,
sincere, should have been destroyed, unread, was an anti-social
outrage.

"If it didn't please a woman to believe in God," he said, "and God
came in Person and stood in front of her, she would run out of the
room and call upon somebody to come and shoot Him for a burglar,
just to prove she was right."

Phyllis was shocked. Her feminine mind pounced on the gross
literalness of his rhetorical figure.

"I've never heard anything more blasphemous and horrible," she
exclaimed, moving to her end of the bench. "Putting yourself in
the position of the Almighty! Oh!" she flung out her hand. "Don't
speak to me."

In spite of the atheistical Gedge, Phyllis believed in God and
Jesus Christ and the Ten Commandments. She also believed in a host
of other simple things, such as Goodness and Truth, Virtue and
Patriotism. The arguments and theories and glosses that her father
and Randall wove about them appeared to her candid mind as
meaningless arabesques. She could not see how all the
complications concerning the elementary canons of faith and
conduct could arise. She appreciated Randall's intellectual gifts;
his power of weaving magical words into rhyme fascinated her; she
was childlike in her wonder at his command of the printed page;
when he revealed to her the beauty of things, as the rogue had a
pretty knack of doing, her nature thrilled responsive. He gave her
a thousand glimpses into a new world, and she loved him for it.
But when he talked lightly of sacred matters, such as God and
Duty, he ran daggers into her heart. She almost hated him.

He had to expend much eloquence and persuasion to induce her to
listen to him. He had no wish to break any of the Commandments,
especially the Third. He professed penitence. But didn't she see
that her treatment of him was driving him into a desperate
unbelief in God and man? When a woman accepted a man's love she
accepted many responsibilities.

Phyllis stonily denied acceptance.

"I've refused it. You've asked me to marry you and I told you I
wouldn't. And I won't."

"You're mixing up two things," he said, with a smile. "Love and
marriage. Many people love and don't marry, just as many marry and
don't love. Now once you did tell me that you loved me, and so you
accepted my love. There's no getting out of it. I've given you
everything I've got, and you can't throw it away. The question is
--what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with
me?"

His sophistries frightened her; but she cut through them.

"Isn't it rather a question of what you're going to do with
yourself?"

"If you give me up I don't care a hang what becomes of me." He
came very near and his voice was dangerously soft. "Phyllis dear,
I do love you with all my heart. Why won't you marry me?"

But a hateful scene rushed to her memory. She drew herself up.

"Why are my father and you persecuting me to marry you?"

"Your father?" he interrupted, in astonishment. "When?"

She named the day, Wednesday of last week. In desperation she told
him what had happened. The poor child was fighting for her soul
against great odds.

"It's a conspiracy to get me round to your way of thinking. You
want me to be a pro-German like yourselves, and I won't be a pro-
German, and I think it wicked even to talk to pro-Germans!"

She rose, all sobs, fluster, and heroism, and walked away. He
strode a step or two and stood in front of her with his hands on
her shoulders.

"I've never spoken to your father in that way about you. Never.
Not a word has passed my lips about my caring for you. On my word
of honour. On Tuesday night I left your father's house never to go
there again. I told him so."

She writhed out of his grasp and spread the palms of her hands
against him. "Please don't," she said, and seeing that she stood
her ground, he made no further attempt to touch her. The austerity
of her grey nurse's uniform gave a touch of pathos to her
childish, blue-eyed comeliness and her pretty attitude of
defiance.

"I suppose," she said, "he was too pro-German even for you."

He looked at her for a long time disconcertingly: so
disconcertingly and with so much pain and mysterious hesitation in
his eyes as to set even Phyllis's simple mind a-wondering and to
make her emphasize it, in her report of the matter to Betty, as
extraordinary and frightening. It seemed, so she explained, in her
innocent way, that he had discovered something horrible about her
father which he shrank from telling her. But if they had
quarrelled so bitterly, why had her father the very next day urged
her to marry him? The answer came in a ghastly flash. She recoiled
as though in the presence of defilement. If she married Randall,
his lips would be closed against her father. That is what her
father had meant. The vague, disquieting suspicions of years that
he might not have the same standards of uprightness as other men,
attained an awful certainty. She remembered the incident of the
private letter and the look in her father's eyes. ... Finally she
revolted. Her soul grew sick. She took no heed of Randall's
protest. She only saw that she was to be the cloak to cover up
something unclean between them. At a moment like this no woman
pretends to have a sense of justice. Randall had equal share with
her father in an unknown baseness. She hated him as he stood there
so strong and handsome. And she hated herself for having loved
him.

At last he said with a smile:

"Yes, That's just it."

"What?"

She had forgotten the purport of her last remark.

"He was a bit too--well, not too pro-German--but too anti-English
for me. You have got hold of the wrong end of the stick all the
time, Phyllis dear. I'm no more pro-German than you are. Perhaps I
see things more clearly than you do. I've been trained to an
intellectual view of human phenomena."

Her little pink and white face hardened until it looked almost
ugly. The unpercipient young man continued:

"And so I take my stand on a position that you must accept on
trust. I am English to the backbone. You can't possibly dream that
I'm not. Come, dear, let me try to explain."

His arm curved as if to encircle her waist. She sprang away.

"Don't touch me. I couldn't bear it. There's something about you I
can't understand."

In her attitude, too, he found a touch of the incomprehensible. He
said, however, with a sneer:

"If I were swaggering about in a cheap uniform, you'd find me
simplicity itself."

She caught at his opening, desperately.

"Yes. At any rate I'd find a man. A man who wasn't afraid to fight
for his country."

"Afraid!"

"Yes," she cried, and her blue eyes blazed. "Afraid. That's why I
can't marry you. I'd rather die than marry you. I've never told
you. I thought you'd guess. I'm an English girl and I can't marry
a coward--a coward--a coward--a coward."

Her voice ended on a foolish high note, for Randall, very white,
had seized her by the wrist.

"You little fool," he cried. "You'll live to repent what you've
said."

He released her, mounted his motor bicycle, and rode away. Phyllis
watched him disappear up the avenue; then she walked rather
blindly back to the bench and sat down among the ruins of a black
and abominable world. After a while the friendly robin, seeing her
so still, perched first on the back of the bench and then hopped
on the seat by her side, and cocking his head, looked at her
enquiringly out of his little hard eye, as though he would say:

"My dear child, what are you making all this fuss about? Isn't it
early June? Isn't the sun shining? Aren't the chestnuts in flower?
Don't you see that bank of dark blue cloud over there which means
a nice softening rain in the night and a jolly good breakfast of
worms in the morning? What's wrong with this exquisitely perfect
universe?"

And Phyllis--on her own confession--with an angry gesture sent him
scattering up among the cool broad leaves and cried:

"Get away, you hateful little beast!"

And having no use for robins and trees and spring and sunshine and
such like intolerable ironies, a white little wisp of a nurse left
them all to their complacent riot and went back to the hospital.





CHAPTER XII


A few days after this, Mrs. Holmes sent me under cover a telegram
which she had received from her son. It was dispatched from
Aberdeen and ran: "Perfectly well. Don't worry about me. Love.
Randall." And that was all I heard of him for some considerable
time. What he was doing in Aberdeen, a city remote from his sphere
of intellectual, political, and social activities, Heaven and
himself alone knew. I must confess that I cared very little. He
was alive, he was well, and his mother had no cause for anxiety.
Phyllis had definitely sent him packing. There was no reason for
me to allow speculation concerning him to keep me awake of nights.

I had plenty to think about besides Randall. They made me Honorary
Treasurer of the local Volunteer Training Corps which had just
been formed. The members not in uniform wore a red brassard with
"G.R." in black. The facetious all over the country called them
"Gorgeous Wrecks." I must confess that on their first few parades
they did not look very military. Their composite paunchiness,
beardedness, scragginess, spectacledness, impressed me
unfavourably when, from my Hosea-carriage, I first beheld them.
Marigold, who was one of the first to join and to leap into the
grey uniform, tried to swagger about as an instructor. But as the
little infantry drill he had ever learned had all been changed
since the Boer War, I gathered an unholy joy from seeing him hang
like a little child on the lips of the official Sergeant
Instructor of the corps. In the evenings he and I mugged up the
text-books together; and with the aid of the books I put him
through all the new physical exercises. I was a privileged person.
I could take my own malicious pleasure out of Marigold's enforced
humility, but I would be hanged if anybody else should. Sergeant
Marigold should instruct those volunteers as he once instructed
the recruits of his own battery. So I worked with him like a
nigger until there was nothing in the various drills of a modern
platoon that he didn't know, and nothing that he could not do with
the mathematical precision of his splendid old training.

One night during the thick of it Betty came in. I waved her into a
corner of the library out of the way, and she smoked cigarettes
and looked on at the performance. Now I come to think of it, we
must have afforded an interesting spectacle. There was the gaunt,
one-eyed, preposterously wigged image clad in undervest and
shrunken yellow flannel trousers which must have dated from his
gym-instructor days in the nineties, violently darting down on
his heels, springing up, kicking out his legs, shooting out his
arms, like an inspired marionette, all at the words of command
shouted in fervent earnest by a shrivelled up little cripple in a
wheel-chair.

When it was over--the weather was warm--he passed a curved
forefinger over his dripping forehead, cut himself short in an
instinctive action and politely dried his hand on the seat of his
trousers. Then his one eye gleamed homage at Betty and he drew
himself up to attention.

"Do you mind, sir, if I send in Ellen with the drinks?"

I nodded. "You'll do very well with a drink yourself, Marigold."

"It's thirsty work and weather, sir."

He made a queer movement of his hand--it would have been idiotic
of him to salute--but he had just been dismissed from military
drill, so his hand went up to the level of his breast and--right
about turn--he marched out of the room. Betty rose from her corner
and threw herself in her usual impetuous way on the ground by my
chair.

"Do you know," she cried, "you two dear old things were too funny
for words."

But as I saw that her eyes were foolishly moist, I was not as
offended as I might have been by her perception of the ludicrous.

When I said that I had plenty to think about besides Randall, I
meant to string off a list. My prolixity over the Volunteer
Training Corps came upon me unawares. I wanted to show you that my
time was fairly well occupied. I was Chairman of our town Belgian
Relief Committee. I was a member of our County Territorial
Association and took over a good deal of special work connected
with one of our battalions that was covering itself with glory and
little mounds topped with white crosses at the front. If you think
I lived a Tom-tabby, tea-party sort of life, you are quite
mistaken, if the War Office could have its way, it would have
lashed me in red tape, gagged me with Regulations, and sealing-
waxed me up in my bed-room. And there are thousands of us who have
shaken our fists under the nose of the War Office and shouted,
"All your blighting, Man-with-the-Mudrake officialdom shan't
prevent us from serving our country." And it hasn't! The very
Government itself, in spite of its monumental efforts, has not
been able to shackle us into inertia or drug us into apathy. Such
non-combatant francs-tireurs in England have done a power of good
work.

And then, of course, there was the hospital which, in one way or
another, took up a good deal of my time.

I was reposing in the front garden one late afternoon in mid-June,
after a well-filled day, when a car pulled up at the gate, in
which were Betty (at the wheel) and a wounded soldier, in khaki,
his cap perched on top of a bandaged head. I don't know whether it
is usual for young women in nurse's uniform to career about the
country driving wounded men in motor cars, but Betty did it. She
cared very little for the usual. She came in, leaving the man in
the car, and crossed the lawn, flushed and bright-eyed, a
refreshing picture for a tired man.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.