Book: The Red Planet

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"Confound the fellow," said I, with an irritable gesture and
covered myself with cigar ash.

She had called Boyce a devil and implied a wish that he were dead.
For myself I did not know what to make of him, for reasons which I
will state. I never approved of the engagement. As a matter of
fact, I knew--and was one of the very few who knew--of a black
mark against him--the very blackest mark that could be put against
a soldier's name. It was a puzzling business. And when I say I
knew of the mark, I must be candid and confess that its awful
justification lies in the conscience of one man living in the
world to-day--if indeed he be still alive.

Boyce was a great bronzed, bull-necked man, with an overpowering
personality. People called him the very model of a soldier. He was
always admired and feared by his men. His fierce eye and deep,
resonant voice, and a suggestion of hidden strength, even of
brutality, commanded implicit obedience. But both glance and voice
would soften caressingly and his manner convey a charm which made
him popular with men--brother officers and private soldiers alike
--and with women. With regard to the latter--to put things crudely
--they saw in him the essential, elemental male. Of that I am
convinced. It was the open secret of his many successes. And he
had a buoyant, boyish, disarming, chivalrous way with him. If he
desired a woman's lips he would always begin by kissing the hem of
her skirt.

Had I not known what I did, I, an easy-going sort of Christian
temperamentally inclined to see the best in my fellow-creatures,
and, as I boastingly said a little while ago, a trained judge of
men, should doubtless have fallen, like most other people, under
the spell of his fascination. But whenever I met him, I used to
look at him and say to myself: "What's at the back of you anyway?
What about that business at Vilboek's Farm?"

Now this is what I knew--with the reservation I have made above--
and to this day he is not aware of my knowledge.

It was towards the end of the Boer War. Boyce had come out rather
late; for which, of course, he was not responsible. A soldier has
to go when he is told. After a period of humdrum service he was
sent off with a section of mounted infantry to round up a certain
farm-house suspected of harbouring Boer combatants. The excursion
was a mere matter of routine--of humdrum commonplace. As usual it
was made at night, but this was a night of full dazzling moon. The
farm lay in a hollow of the veldt, first seen from the crest of a
kopje. There it lay below, ramshackle and desolate, a rough wall
around; flanked by outbuildings--barn and cowsheds. The section
rode down. The stoep led to a shuttered front. There was no sign
of life. The moonlight blazed full on it. They dismounted,
tethered their horses behind the wall, and entered the yard. The
place was deserted, derelict--not even a cat.

Suddenly a shot rang out from somewhere in the main building, and
the Sergeant, the next man to Boyce, fell dead, shot through the
brain. The men looked at Boyce for command and saw a hulking idiot
paralysed by fear.

"His mouth hung open and his eyes were like a silly servant girl's
looking at a ghost." So said my informant.

Two more shots and two men fell. Boyce still stood white and
gasping, unable to move a muscle or utter a sound. His face looked
ghastly in the moonlight. A shot pierced his helmet, and the shock
caused him to stagger and lose his legs. A corporal rushed up,
thinking he was hit, and, finding him whole, rose, in order to
leave him there, and, in rising, got a bullet through the neck.
Thus there were four men killed, and the Commanding Officer, of
his own accord, put out of action. It all happened in a few
confused moments. Then the remaining men did what Boyce should
have commanded as soon as the first shot was fired--they rushed
the house.

It contained one solitary inmate, an old man with a couple of
Mauser rifles, whom they had to shoot in self-defence.

Meanwhile Boyce, white and haggard-eyed, had picked himself up;
revolver in hand he stood on the stoep. His men came out, cursed
him to his face while giving him their contemptuous reports
brought the dead bodies of their comrades into the house and laid
them out decently, together with the body of the white-bearded
Boer. After that they mounted their horses without a word to him
and rode off. And he let them ride; for his authority was gone;
and he knew that they justly laid the deaths of their comrades at
the door of his cowardice.

What he did during the next few awful hours is known only to God
and to Boyce himself. The four dead men, his companions, have told
no tales. But at last, one of his men--Somers was his name--came
riding back at break-neck speed. When he had left the moon rode
high in the heavens; when he returned it was dawn--and he had a
bloody tunic and the face of a man who had escaped from hell. He
threw himself from his horse and found Boyce, sitting on the stoep
with his head in his hands. He shook him by the shoulder. Boyce
started to his feet. At first he did not recognise Somers. Then he
did and read black tidings in the man's eyes.

"What's the matter?"

"They're all wiped out, sir. The whole blooming lot."

He told a tale of heroic disaster. The remnant of the section had
ridden off in hot indignation and had missed their way. They had
gone in a direction opposite to safety, and after a couple of
hours had fallen in with a straggling portion of a Boer Commando.
Refusing to surrender, they had all been killed save Somers, who,
with a bullet through his shoulder, had prudently turned bridle
and fled hell for leather.

Boyce put his hands up to his head and walked about the yard for a
few moments. Then he turned abruptly and stood toweringly over the
scared survivor--a tough, wizened little Cockney of five foot six.

"Well, what's going to happen now?" he asked, in his soft,
dangerous voice.

Somers replied, "I must leave that to you, sir."

Boyce regarded him glitteringly for a long time. A scheme of
salvation was taking vivid shape in his mind....

"My report of this occurrence will be that as soon as, say, three
men dropped here, the rest of the troop got into a panic and made
a bolt of it. Say the Sergeant and myself remained. We broke into
the house and did for the old Boer, who, however, unfortunately
did for the Sergeant. Then I alone went out in search of my men
and following their track found they had gone in a wrong
direction, and eventually scented danger, which was confirmed by
my meeting you, with your bloody tunic and your bloody tale."

"But good God! sir," cried the man, "You'd be having me shot for
running away. I could tell a damned different story, Captain
Boyce."

"Who would believe you?"

The Cockney intelligence immediately appreciated the situation. It
also was ready for the alternative it guessed at the back of
Boyce's mind.

"I know it's a mess, sir," he replied, with a straight look at
Boyce. "A mess for both of us, and, as I have said, I'll leave it
to you, sir."

"Very well," said Boyce. "It's the simplest thing in the world.
There were four killed at once, including Sergeant Oldham. You
remained faithful when the others bolted. You and I tackled the
old Boer and you got wounded. You and I went on trek for the rest
of the troop. We got within breathing distance of the Commando--
how many strong?"

"About a couple of hundred, sir."

"And of course we bolted back without knowing anything about the
troop, except that we are sure that, dead or alive, the Boers have
accounted for them. If you'll agree to this report, we can ride
back to Headquarters and I think I can promise you sergeant's
stripes in a very short time!"

"I agree to the report, sir," said Somers, "because I don't see
that I can do anything else. But to hell with the stripes under
false pretences and don't you try playing that sort of thing off
on me."

"As you like," replied Boyce, unruffled. "Provided we understand
each other on the main point."

So they left the farm and rode to Headquarters and Boyce made his
report, and as all save one of his troop were dead, there were
none, save that one, to gainsay him. On his story no doubt was
cast; but an officer who loses his whole troop in the military
operation of storming a farm-house garrisoned by one old man does
not find peculiar favour in the eyes of his Colonel. Boyce took a
speedy opportunity of transference, and got into the thick of some
fighting. Then he served with distinction and actually got
mentioned in dispatches for pluckily rescuing a wounded man under
fire.

For a long time Somers kept his mouth shut; but at last he began
to talk. The ugly rumour spread. It even reached my battery which
was a hundred miles away; for Johnny Dacre, one of my subs, had a
brother in Boyce's old regiment. For my own part I scouted the
story as soon as I heard it, and I withered up young Dacre for
daring to bring such abominable slander within my Rhadamanthine
sphere. I dismissed the calumny from my mind. Providentially, (as
I heard later), the news came of Boyce's "mention," and Somers was
set down as a liar. The poor devil was had up before the Colonel
and being an imaginative and nervous man denied the truth of the
rumour and by dexterous wriggling managed to exculpate himself
from the charge of being its originator.

I must, parenthetically, crave indulgence for these apparently
irrelevant details. But as, in this chronicle, I am mainly
concerned with the career of Leonard Boyce, I have no option but
to give them. They are necessary for a conception of the character
of a remarkable man to whom I have every reason and every
honourable desire to render justice. It is necessary, too, that I
should state clearly the manner in which I happened to learn the
facts of the affair at Vilboek's Farm, for I should not like you
to think that I have given a credulous ear to idle slander.

It was in Cape Town, whither I had been despatched, on a false
alarm of enteric. I was walking with Johnny Dacre up Adderley
Street, dun with kahki, when he met his brother Reginald, who was
promptly introduced to Johnny's second in command. Reggie was off
to hospital to see one of his men who had been badly hurt.

"It's the chap," he said to his brother, "who was with Boyce
through that shady affair at Vilboek's Farm."

"I don't know why you call it a shady affair," said I, somewhat
acidly. "I know Captain Boyce--he is a near neighbour of mine at
home--and he has proved himself to be a gallant officer and a
brave man."

The young fellow reddened. "I'm awfully sorry, sir. I withdraw the
word 'shady.' But this poor chap has something on his mind, and
everyone has a down on him. He led a dog's life till he was
knocked out, and he has been leading a worse one since. I don't
call it fair." He looked at me squarely out of his young blue
eyes--the lucky devil, he is commanding his regiment now in
Flanders, with the D.S.O. ribbon on his tunic. "Will you come with
me and see him, sir?"

"Certainly," said I, for I had nothing to do, and the boy's
earnestness impressed me.

On our way he told me of such mixture of rumour and fact as he was
acquainted with. It was then that I heard the man Somers's name
for the first time. We entered the hospital, sat by the side of
the man's bed, and he told us the story of Vilboek's Farm which I
have, in bald terms, just related. Shortly afterwards I returned
to the front, where the famous shell knocked me out of the Army
forever.

What has happened to Somers I don't know. He was, I learned, soon
afterwards discharged from the Army. He either died or disappeared
in the full current of English life. Perhaps he is with our armies
now. It does not matter. What matters is my memory of his nervous,
sallow, Cockney face, its earnestness, its imprint of veracity,
and the damning lucidity of his narrative.

I exacted from my young friends a promise to keep the unsavoury
tale to themselves. No good would arise from a publicity which
would stain the honour of the army. Besides, Boyce had made good.
They have kept their promise like honest gentlemen. I have never,
personally, heard further reference to the affair, and of course I
have never mentioned it to anyone.

Now, it is right for me to mention that, for many years, I lived
in a horrible state of dubiety with regard to Boyce. There is no
doubt that, after the Vilboek business, he acted in an exemplary
manner; there is no doubt that he performed the gallant deed for
which he got his mention. But what about Somers's story? I tried
to disbelieve it as incredible. That an English officer--not a
nervous wisp of a man like Somers, but a great, hulking, bull-
necked gladiator--should have been paralysed with fear by one shot
coming out of a Boer farm, and thereby demoralised and
incapacitated from taking command of a handful of men; that,
instead of blowing his brains out, he should have imposed his
Mephistophelian compact upon the unhappy Somers and carried off
the knavish business successfully--I could not believe it. On the
other hand, there was the British private. I have known him all my
life, God bless him! Thank God, it is my privilege to know him
now, as he lies knocked to bits, cheerily, in our hospital. It was
inconceivable that out of sheer funk he could abandon a popular
officer. And his was not even a scratch crowd, but a hard-bitten
regiment with all sorts of glorious names embroidered on its
colours....

I hope you see my difficulty in regard to my Betty's love affairs.
I had nothing against Boyce, save this ghastly story, which might
or might not be true. Officially, he had made an unholy mess of
such a simple military operation as rounding up a Boer farm, and
the prize of one dead old Boer had covered him with ridicule; but
officially, also, he had retrieved his position by distinguished
service. After all, it was not his fault that his men had run
away. On the other hand...well, you cannot but appreciate the
vicious circle of my thoughts, when Betty, in her frank way, came
and told me of her engagement to him. What could I say? It would
have been damnable of me to hint at scandal of years gone by. I
received them both and gave them my paralytic blessing, and
Leonard Boyce accepted it with the air of a man who might have
been blessed, without a qualm of conscience, by the Third Person
of the Trinity in Person.

This was in April, 1914. He had retired from the Army some years
before with the rank of Major, and lived with his mother--he was a
man of means--in Wellingsford. In the June of that year he went
off salmon fishing in Norway. On the outbreak of war he returned
to England and luckily got his job at once. He did not come back
to Wellingsford. His mother went to London and stayed there until
he was ordered out to the front. I had not seen him since that
June. And, as far as I am aware, my dear Betty had not seen him
either.

Marigold entered.

"Well?" said I.

"I thought you rang, sir."

"You didn't," I said. "You thought I ought to have rung, But you
were mistaken."

I have on my mantelpiece a tiny, corroded, wooden Egyptian bust,
of so little value that Mr. Hatoun of Cairo (and every visitor to
Cairo knows Hatoun) gave it me as Baksheesh; it is, however, a
genuine bit from a poor humble devil's tomb of about five thousand
years ago. And it has only one positive eye and no expression.

Marigold was the living replica of it--with his absurd wig.

"In a quarter of an hour," said I, "I shall have rung."

"Very good, sir," said Marigold.

But he had disturbed the harmonical progression of my reflections.
They all went anyhow. When he returned, all I could say was:

"It's Miss Betty's wedding to-morrow. I suppose I've got a morning
coat and a top hat."

"You have a morning coat, sir," said Marigold. "But your last silk
hat you gave to Miss Althea, sir, to make a work-bag out of the
outside."

"So I did," said I.

It was an unpleasant reminiscence. A hat is about as symbolical a
garment as you may be pleased to imagine. I wanted to wear at the
live Betty's wedding the ceremonious thing which I had given, for
purposes of vanity, to the dead Althea. I was cross with Marigold.

"Why did you let me do such a silly thing? You might have known
that I should want it some day or other. Why didn't you foresee
such a contingency?"

"Why," asked Marigold woodenly, "didn't you or I, sir, or many
wiser than us, foresee the war?"

"Because we were all damned fools," said I.

Marigold approached my chair with his great inexorable tentacles
of arms. It was bed time.

"I'm sorry about the hat, sir," said he.





CHAPTER V


In due course Captain Connor's regiment went off to France; not
with drums beating and colours flying--I wish to Heaven it had; if
there had been more pomp and circumstance in England, the popular
imagination would not have remained untouched for so long a time--
but in the cold silent hours of the night, like a gang of
marauders. Betty did not go to bed after he had left, but sat by
the fire till morning. Then she dressed in uniform and resumed her
duties at the hospital. Many a soldier's bride was doing much the
same. And her days went on just as they did before her marriage.
She presented a smiling face to the world; she said:

"If I'm as happy as can be expected in the circumstances, I think
it my duty to look happier."

It was a valiant philosophy.

The falling of a chimney-stack brought me up against Daniel Gedge,
who before the war did all my little repairs. The chimney I put
into the hands of Day & Higgins, another firm of builders.

A day or two afterwards Hosea shied at something and I discovered
it was Gedge, who had advanced into the roadway expressing a
desire to have a word with me. I quieted the patriotic Hosea and
drew up by the kerb. Gedge was a lean foxy-faced man with a long,
reddish nose and a long blunt chin from which a grizzled beard
sprouted aggressively forwards. He had hard, stupid grey eyes.

"I hope you 'll excuse the liberty I take in stopping you, sir,"
he said, civilly.

"That's all right," said I. "What's the matter?"

"I thought I had given you satisfaction these last twenty years."

I assented. "Quite correct," said I.

"Then, may I ask, sir, without offence, why you've called in Day &
Higgins?"

"You may," said I, "and, with or without offence, I'll answer your
question. I've called them in because they're good loyal people.
Higgins has joined the army, and so has Day's eldest boy, while
you have been going on like a confounded pro-German."

"You've no right to say that, Major Meredyth."

"Not when you go over to Godbury"--the surging metropolis of the
County some fifteen miles off--"and tell a pack of fools to strike
because this is a capitalists' war? Not when you go round the
mills here, and do your best to stop young fellows from fighting
for their country? God bless my soul, in whose interests are you
acting, if not Germany's?"

He put on his best platform manner. "I'm acting in the best
interests of the people of this country. The war is wrong and
incredibly foolish and can bring no advantage to the working man.
Why should he go and be killed or maimed for life? Will it put an
extra penny in his pocket or his widow's? No. Oh!"--he checked my
retort--"I know everything you would say. I see the arguments
every day in all your great newspapers. But the fact remains that
I don't see eye to eye with you, or those you represent. You think
one way, I think another. We agree to differ."

"We don't," said I. "I don't agree at all."

"At any rate," he said, "I can't see how a difference of political
opinion can affect my ability now to put a new chimney-stack in
your house, any more than it has done in the past."

"In the past," said I, "political differences were parochial
squabbles in comparison with things nowadays. You're either for
England, or against her."

He smiled wryly. "I'm for England. We both are. You think her
salvation lies one way. I think another. This is a free country in
which every man has a right to his own opinion."

"Exactly so," said I. "Therefore you'll admit that I've a right to
the opinion that you ought to be locked up either in a gaol or a
lunatic asylum as a danger to the state, and that, having that
rightful opinion, I'm justified in not entrusting the safety of my
house to one who, in my aforesaid opinion, is either a criminal or
a lunatic."

Dialectically, I had him there. It afforded me keen enjoyment.
Besides being a John Bull Englishman, I am a cripple and therefore
ever so little malicious.

"It's all very well for you to talk, Major Meredyth," said he,
"but your opinions cost you nothing--mine are costing me my
livelihood. It isn't fair."

"You might as well say," I replied, "that I, who have never dared
to steal anything in my life, live in ease and comfort, whereas
poor Bill Sykes, who has devoted all his days to burglary, has
seven years' penal servitude. No, Gedge," said I, gathering up the
reins, "it can't be done. You can't have it both ways."

He put a detaining hand on Hosea's bridle and an evil flash came
into his hard grey eyes.

"I'll have it some other way, then," he said. "A way you've no
idea of. A way that'll knock all you great people of Wellingsford
off your high horses. If you drive me to it, you'll see. I'll bide
my time and I don't care whether it breaks me."

He stamped his foot and tugged at the bridle. Two or three
passers-by halted wonderingly and Prettilove, the hairdresser,
moved across the pavement from his shop door where he had been
taking the air.

"My good fellow," said I, "you have lost your temper and are
talking drivel. Kindly unhand my donkey."

Prettilove, who has a sycophantic sense of humour, burst into a
loud guffaw. Gedge swung angrily away, and Hosea and I continued
our interrupted progress down the High Street. Although I had
called his dark menaces drivel, I could not help wondering what it
meant. Was he going to guide a German Army to Wellingsford? Was
he, a modern Guy Fawkes, plotting to blow up the Town Hall while
Mayor and Corporation sat in council? He was not the man to utter
purely idle threats. What the dickens was he going to do?
Something mean and dirty and underhand. I knew his ways, He was
always getting the better of somebody. The wise never let him put
in a pane of glass without a specification and estimate, and if he
had not been by far the most competent builder in the town--
perhaps the only one who thoroughly knew his business in all its
branches--no one would have employed him.

When I next saw Betty, it was in one of the corridors of the
hospital, after a committee meeting; she stopped by my chair to
pass the time of day. Through the open doorway of a ward I
perceived a well-known figure in nurse's uniform.

"Why," said I, "there's Phyllis Gedge."

Betty nodded. "She has just come in as a probationer."

"I thought her father wouldn't let her. I've heard--Heaven knows
whether it's true, but it sounds likely--that he said if men were
such fools as to get shot he didn't see why his daughter should
help to mend them."

"He has consented now," said Betty, "and Phyllis is delighted."

"No doubt it's a bid for popular favour," said I. And I told her
of his dwindling business and of my encounter with him. When I
came to his threat Betty's brows darkened.

"I don't like that at all," she said.

"Why? What do you think he means?"

"Mischief." She lowered her voice, for, it being visiting day at
the hospital, people were passing up and down the corridor.
"Suppose he has some of the people here in his power?"

"Blackmail--?" I glanced up at her sharply. "What do you know
about it?"

"Nothing," she replied abruptly. Then she looked down and fingered
her wedding-ring. "I only said 'suppose.'"

A Sister appeared at the door of the ward and seeing us together
paused hoveringly.

"I rather think you're wanted," said I.

I left the hospital somewhat disturbed in mind. Summons to duty
had cut our conversation short; but I knew that no matter how long
I had cross-questioned Betty I should have got nothing further
out of her. She was a remarkably outspoken young woman. What she
said she meant, and what she didn't want to say all the cripples
in the British Army could not have dragged out of her.

I tried her again a few days later. A slight cold, aided and
abetted by a dear exaggerating idiot of a tyrannical doctor,
confined me to the house and she came flying in, expecting to find
me in extremis. When she saw me clothed and in my right mind and
smoking a big cigar, she called me a fraud.

"Look here," said I, after a while. "About Gedge--" again her brow
darkened and her lips set stiffly--"do you think he has his knife
into young Randall Holmes?"

I had worried about the boy. Naturally, if Gedge found the
relations between his daughter and Randall unsatisfactory, no one
could blame him for any outbreak of parental indignation. But he
ought to break out openly, while there was yet time--before any
harm was done--not nurse some diabolical scheme of subterraneous
vengeance. Betty's brow cleared, and she laughed. I saw at once
that I was on a wrong track.

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