_ PART II CHAPTER II. THE ROLL-CALL
I
The telephone rang in the principal's room of George's office in Museum Street. He raised his head from the drawing-board with the false gesture of fatigued impatience which, as a business man, he had long since acquired, and took the instrument. As a fact he was not really busy; he was only pretending to be busy; and he rather enjoyed the summons of the telephone, with its eternal promise of some romantic new turn of existence. Nevertheless, though he was quite alone, he had to affect that the telephone was his bane.
"Can Sir Isaac Davids speak to you, sir, from the Artists Club?"
"Put him on."
Immediately came the thick, rich voice of Sir Isaac, with its implications of cynicism and triumphant disdain--attenuated and weakened in the telephone, suggesting an object seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
"Is that you, Cannon?"
"It is," said George shortly. Without yet knowing it, he had already begun to hate Sir Isaac. His criticism of Sir Isaac was that the man was too damnably sure of himself. And not all Sir Isaac's obvious power, and influence, and vast potential usefulness to a young architect, could prevent George from occasionally, as he put it, 'standing up to the fellow.'
"Well, you'd better come along here, if you can. I want to see you," said the unruffled voice of Sir Isaac.
"Now?"
"Yes."
"All right."
As George replaced the instrument, he murmured:
"I know what that means. It's all off." And after a moment: "I knew jolly well it would be."
He glanced round the very orderly room, to which, by judicious furnishing, he had given a severe distinction at no great cost. On the walls were a few interesting things, including a couple of his own perspectives. A neo-impressionist oil-sketch over the mantelpiece, with blue trees and red fields and a girl whose face was a featureless blob, imperiously monopolized the attention of the beholder, warning him, whoever he might be, that the inescapable revolutionary future was now at hand. The room and everything in it, that entity upon which George had spent so much trouble, and of which he had been so proud, seemed futile, pointless, utterly unprofitable.
The winning of the Indian limited competition, coupled with the firm rumour that Sir Isaac Davids had singled him out for patronage, had brilliantly renewed George's reputation and the jealousy which proved its reality. The professional journals had been full of him, and everybody assured everybody that his ultimate, complete permanent success had never been in doubt. The fact that the barracks would be the largest barracks in India indicated to the superstitious, and to George himself, that destiny intended him always to break records. After the largest town hall, the largest barracks; and it was said that Sir Isaac's factory was to be the largest factory! But the outbreak of war had overthrown all reputations, save the military and the political. Every value was changed according to a fresh standard, as in a shipwreck. For a week George had felt an actual physical weight in the stomach. This weight was his own selfish woe, but it was also the woe of the entire friendly world. Every architect knew and said that the profession of architecture would be ruined for years. Then the India Office woke George up. The attitude of the India Office was overbearing. It implied that it had been marvellously original and virtuous in submitting the affair of its barracks to even a limited competition, when it might just as easily have awarded the job to any architect whom it happened to know, or whom its wife, cousin, or aunt happened to know, or whose wife, cousin, or aunt happened to know the India Office--and further, that George ought therefore to be deeply grateful. It said that in view of the war the barracks must be erected with the utmost possible, or rather with quite impossible, dispatch, and that George would probably have to go to India at once. Simultaneously it daily modified George's accepted plans for the structure, exactly as though it was a professional architect and George an amateur, and it involved him in a seemly but intense altercation between itself and the subordinate bureaucracy of a Presidency. It kept George employed. In due course people discovered that business must proceed as usual, and even the architectural profession, despite its traditional pessimism, had hopes of municipalities and other bodies which were to inaugurate public works in order to diminish unemployment.
Nevertheless George had extreme difficulty in applying himself efficiently to urgent tasks. He kept thinking: "It's come! It's come!" He could not get over the fact that it had come--the European War which had obsessed men's minds for so many years past. He saved the face of his own theory as to the immediate impossibility of a great war, by positively asserting that Germany would never have fought had she foreseen that Britain would fight. He prophesied (to himself) Germany's victory, German domination of Europe, and, as the grand central phenomenon, mysterious ruin for George Edwin Cannon. But the next instant he would be convinced that Germany would be smashed, and quickly. Germany, he reckoned superiorly, in 'taking on England' had 'bitten off more than she could chew.'
He knew almost naught of the progress of the fighting. He had obtained an expensive map of Western Europe and some flagged pins, and had hung the map up in his hall and had stuck the pins into it with exactitude. He had moved the pins daily, until little Laurencine one morning, aloft on a chair, decided to change all the positions of the opposing armies. Laurencine established German army corps in Marseilles, the Knockmillydown Mountains, and Torquay, while sending the French to Elsinore and Aberdeen. There was trouble in the house. Laurencine suffered, and was given to understand that war was a serious matter. Still, George soon afterwards had ceased to manipulate the pins; they seemed to be incapable of arousing his imagination; he could not be bothered with them; he could not make the effort necessary to acquire a scientific conception of the western campaign--not to mention the eastern, as to which his ignorance was nearly perfect.
Yet he read much about the war. Some of the recounted episodes deeply and ineffaceably impressed him. For example, an American newspaper correspondent had written a dramatic description of the German army marching, marching steadily along a great Belgian high road--a procession without beginning and without end--and of the procession being halted for his benefit, and of a German officer therein who struck a soldier several times in the face angrily with his cane, while the man stood stiffly at attention. George had an ardent desire to spend a few minutes alone with that officer; he could not get the soldier's bruised cheek out of his memory.
Again, he was moved and even dismayed by the recitals of the entry of the German army into Brussels and of its breaking into the goose-step as it reached the Grande Place, though he regarded the goose-step as too ridiculous and contemptible for words. Then the French defence of Dinant, and the Belgian defence of Liege, failure as it was, and the obstinate resistance at Namur, inspired him; and the engagements between Belgians and Uhlans, in which the clumsy Uhlans were always scattered, destroyed for him the dread significance of the term 'Uhlan.'
He simply did not comprehend that all these events were negligible trifles, that no American correspondent had seen the hundredth part of the enemy forces, that the troops which marched through Brussels were a tiny, theatrical side-show, a circus, that the attack on Liege had been mismanaged, that the great battle at Dinant was a mere skirmish in the new scale of war, and the engagements with Uhlans mere scuffles, and that behind the screen of these infinitesimal phenomena _the German army_, unimagined in its hugeness, horror, and might, was creeping like a fatal and monstrous caterpillar surely towards France.
A similar screen hid from him the realities of England. He saw bunting and recruits, and the crowds outside consulates. But he had no idea of the ceaseless flight of innumerable crammed trains day and night southwards, of the gathering together of Atlantic liners and excursion steamers from all the coasts into an unprecedented Armada, of the sighting of the vanguard of that Armada by an incredulous Boulogne, of the landing of British regiments and guns and aeroplanes in the midst of a Boulogne wonderstruck and delirious, and of the thrill which thereupon ecstatically shivered through France. He knew only that 'the Expeditionary Force had landed in safety.'
He could not believe that a British Army could face successfully the legendary Prussians with their Great General Staff, and yet he had a mystic and entirely illogical belief in the invincibility of the British Army. He had read somewhere that the German forces amounted in all to the equivalent of over three hundred divisions; he had been reliably told that the British forces in France amounted to three divisions and some cavalry. It was most absurd; but his mysticism survived the absurdity, so richly was it nourished by news from the strange, inartistic colonies, where architecture was not understood. Revelation came to George that the British Empire, which he had always suspected to be an invention of those intolerable persons the Imperialists, was after all something more than a crude pink smear across the map of the world.
Withal he was acutely dejected as he left his office to go to the club.
II
Sir Isaac was sitting quite alone in the large smoking-room of the Artists in Albemarle Street--a beautiful apartment terribly disfigured by its pictures, which had been procured from fashionable members in the fashionable taste of twenty years earlier, and were crying aloud for some one brave enough to put them out of their misery. No interpretation of the word 'artist' could by any ingenuity be stretched to include Sir Isaac. Nevertheless he belonged to the club, and so did a number of other men in like case. The difference between Sir Isaac and the rest was that Sir Isaac did actually buy pictures, though seldom from fashionable painters.
He was a personage of about forty-five years, with a rather prominent belly, but not otherwise stout; a dark man; plenty of stiff black hair (except for one small central bald patch); a rank moustache, and a clean-shaven chin apparently woaded in the manner of the ancient Britons; elegantly and yet severely dressed--braided morning-coat, striped trousers, small, skin-fitting boots, a black flowered-silk necktie. As soon as you drew near him you became aware of his respiratory processes; you were bound to notice continually that without ceasing he carried on the elemental business of existence. Hair sprouted from his nose, and the nose was enormous; it led at a pronounced slope to his high forehead, which went on upwards at exactly the same angle and was lost in his hair. If the chin had weakly receded, as it often does in this type, Sir Isaac would have had a face like a spear-head, like a ram of which the sharp point was the top of his nose; but Sir Isaac's chin was square, and the wall of it perpendicular.
His expression was usually inquisitive, dissatisfied, and disdainful--the effect being produced by a slight lifting of the back of the nostrils and a slight tipping forward of the whole head. His tone, however, often by its bluff good-humour, contradicted the expression. He had in an extreme degree the appearance of a Jew, and he had the names of a Jew; and most people said he was a Jew. But he himself seriously denied it. He asserted that he came of a Welsh Nonconformist family, addicted to christening its infants out of the Bible, and could prove his descent for generations--not that he minded being taken for a Jew (he would add), was indeed rather flattered thereby, but he simply was not a Jew. At any rate he was Welsh. A journalist had described him in a phrase: "All the time he's talking to you in English you feel he's thinking something different in Welsh." He was an exceedingly rich industrial, and had made his money by organization; he seemed always to have leisure.
"Here," he curtly advised George, producing a magnificent Partaga, similar to the one he was himself smoking, "you'd better have this."
He cut the cigar carefully with a club tool, and pushed the match-stand across the table with a brusque gesture. George would not thank him for the cigar.
"You're on that Indian barracks, aren't you?"
"Yes. They're in a Hades of a hurry."
"Well, my factory is in much more of a hurry."
George was startled. He had heard nothing of the factory for a month, and had assumed that the war had scotched the enterprise.
He said:
"Then the war won't stop you?"
Sir Isaac shook his head slowly, with an arrogant smile. It then occurred to George that this man differed strangely from all other men--because the sinister spell of the war had been powerless over him alone. All other men bore the war in their faces and in their gestures, but this man did not.
"I'm going to make munitions now--explosives. I'm going to have the biggest explosives factory in the world. However, the modifications in the general plan won't be serious. I want to talk to you about that."
"Have you got contracts, then, already?"
"No. Both the War Office and the Admiralty have told me they have all the explosives they want," he sneered. "But I've made a few inquiries, and I think that by the time my factory's up they'll be wanting more explosives than they can get. In fact I wish I could build half a dozen factories. Dare say I shall."
"Then you think we're in for a long war?"
"Not specially that. If it's a long war you English will win. If it's a short war the Germans will win, and it will be the end of France as a great power. That's all."
"Won't it be the end of your factory too?"
"Noh!" exclaimed Sir Isaac, with careless compassion in his deep, viscid voice. "If it's a short war, there'll be another war. You English will never leave it alone. So that whatever happens, if I take up explosives, I can't go wrong. It's velvet."
"It seems to me we shall bust up the whole world if we aren't careful, soon."
Sir Isaac smiled more compassion.
"Not at all," he said easily. "Not at all. Things are always arranged in the end--more or less satisfactorily, of course. It's up to the individual to look out for himself."
George said:
"I was thinking of going into the Army."
The statement was not strictly untrue, but he had never formulated it, and he had never thought consecutively of such a project, which did indeed appear too wild and unpractical for serious consideration.
"This recruiting's been upsetting you."
George's vague patriotism seemed to curdle at these half-dozen scornful words.
"Do you think I oughtn't to go into the Army, Sir Isaac?"
"My dear boy, any----can go into the Army. And if you go into the Army you'll lose your special qualities. I see you as the best factory designer we have, architecturally. You've only just started, but you have it in you. And your barracks is pretty good. Of course, if you choose to indulge in sentimentality you can deprive the country of an architect in a million and make it a present of a mediocre soldier--for you haven't got the mind of a soldier. But if you do that, mark my words--you'll only do it to satisfy the egotism that you call your heart, you'll only do it in order to feel comfortable; just as a woman gives a penny to a beggar and thinks it's charity when it's nothing of the sort. There are fellows that go and enlist because they hear a band play."
"Yes," George concurred. He hated to feel himself confronted by a mind more realistic than his own, but he was realistic enough to admit the fact. What Sir Isaac said was unanswerable, and it appealed very strongly to George. He cast away his sentimentality, ashamed of it. And at the same time he felt greatly relieved in other ways.
"You'd better put this Indian barracks on one side as much as you can, or employ some one to help you. I shall want all your energies."
"But I shall probably have to go to India. The thing's very urgent."
Sir Isaac scorned him in a profound gaze. The smoke from their two magnificent cigars mingled in a canopy above them.
"Not it!" said Sir Isaac. "What's more, it's not wanted at all. They think it is, because they're absolutely incapable of thought. They know the word 'war' and they know the word 'barracks.' They put them together and imagine it's logic. They say: 'We were going to build a barracks, and now we're at war. Therefore we must hurry up with the barracks.' That's how they reason, and the official mind will never get beyond it. _Why_ do they want the barracks? If they want the barracks, what's the meaning of what they call 'the response of the Indian Empire'? Are they going to send troops to India or take them away from India? They're going to take them away, of course. Mutiny of India's silent millions? Rubbish! Not because a mutiny would contradict the far-famed 'response of the Indian Empire,' but because India's silent millions haven't got a rifle amongst them. You needn't tell me they've given you forty reasons for getting on with that barracks. I know their reasons. All of 'em put together only mean that in a dull, dim Oxford-and-Cambridge way they see a connexion between the word 'war' and the word 'barracks.'"
George laughed, and then, after a few seconds, Sir Isaac gave a short, rough laugh.
"But if they insist on me going to India--" George began, and paused.
Sir Isaac grew meditative.
"I say, speaking of voyages," he murmured in a tone almost dreamy. "If you have any loose money, put it into ships, and keep it there. You'll double it, you'll treble it.... Any ships. No matter what ships."
"Well, I haven't got any loose money," said George curtly. "And what I want to know is, if they insist on me going to India, what am I to do?"
"Tell them you can't go. Tell 'em your professional engagements won't permit it. They'll lick your boots, and ask humbly if you can suggest any suitable person to represent you. I shall want all your energies, and my factory will be worth more to this country in the war than all the barracks under heaven. Now just bend your eye to these."
He took some papers from his tail-pocket. The discussion grew technical.
III
George sailed down Piccadilly westwards on the top of a motor-bus. The August afternoon was superb. Piccadilly showed more than its usual splendour of traffic, for the class to whom the sacred word 'England' signified personal dominion and a vast apparatus of personal luxury either had not gone away for its holiday or had returned therefrom in a hurry. The newspaper placards spoke of great feats of arms by the Allies. Through the leafage of Hyde Park could be seen uncountable smart troops manoeuvring in bodies. On the top of the motor-bus a student of war was explaining to an ignorant friend that the active adhesion of Japan, just announced, meant the beginning of the end for Germany. From Japan he went to Namur, seeing that Namur was the 'chief bastion' of the defensive line, and that hence the Germans would not be 'allowed' to take it. Almost every motor-bus carried a fine specimen of this type of philosopher, to whom the whole travelling company listened while pretending not to listen. George despised him for his manner, but agreed with some of his reasoning.
George was thinking chiefly about Sir Isaac. Impressive person, Sir Isaac, even if hateful! It was remarkable how the fellow seemed always to have leisure. Organization, of course! Indubitably the fellow's arguments could not be gainsaid. The firing-line was not the only or even the most important part of the national war machine. To suppose otherwise was to share the crude errors of the childlike populace and its Press. Men were useless without guns, guns without shot, shot without explosives; and explosives could not be produced without a factory. The populace would never understand the close interdependence of various activities; it would never see beyond the recruiting station; it was meet only for pity. Sir Isaac had uttered a very wise saying: "Things are always arranged in the end ... It's up to the individual to look out for himself." Sir Isaac was freed from the thrall of mob-sentimentality. He was a super-man. And he was converting George into a super-man. George might have gone back to the office, but he was going home instead, because he could think creatively just as well outside the office as inside--so why should he accept the convention of the ordinary professional man. (Sir Isaac assuredly did not.) He had telephoned to the office. A single consideration appealed to him: How could he now best serve his country? Beyond question he could now serve his country best as an architect. If his duty marched with his advantage, what matter? It was up to the individual to look out for himself. And he, George, with already an immense reputation, would steadily enhance his reputation, which in the end would surpass all others in the profession. The war could not really touch him--no more than it could touch Sir Isaac; by good fortune, and by virtue of the impartiality of his intelligence, he was above the war.... Yes, Sir Isaac, disliked and unwillingly but deeply respected, had cleared his ideas for him.
In Elm Park Gardens he met the white-clad son of a Tory M.P. who lived in that dignified street.
"The very man! Come and make a fourth, will you, Cannon?" asked the youth, dandiacal in flannels, persuasively and flatteringly.
George demanded with firmness:
"Who are the other two?"
"Miss Horton and Gladys What's-her-name."
Why shouldn't he play at tennis? It was necessary to keep fit.
"All right. But not for long, you know."
"That's all right. Hurry up and get into your things."
"Ten minutes."
And in little more than ten minutes he was swinging a racket on the private sward that separates Elm Park Gardens East from Elm Park Gardens West, and is common to the residents of both. He had not encountered Lois at home, and had not thought it necessary to seek her out. He and she were often invited to play tennis in Elm Park Gardens.
The grass was beautifully kept. At a little distance two gardeners were at work, and a revolving sprinkler whirled sprays of glinting water in a wide circle. The back windows of the two streets disclosed not the slightest untidiness nor deshabille; rising irregularly in tier over tier to the high roof-line, they were all open, and all neatly curtained, and many of them had gorgeous sun-blinds. The sound of one or two pianos emerged faintly on the warm, still afternoon. Miss Horton and the slim Gladys were dressed in white, with short skirts, at once elegant and athletic. Miss Horton, very tall and strong, with clear eyes, and a complexion damaged by undue exposure to healthy fresh air, was a fine player of many years' experience, now at the decline of her powers. She played seriously, every stroke conscientious and calculated, and she gave polite, good-humoured hints to the youth, her partner. George and Gladys were together. Gladys, eighteen, was a delightful girl, the raw material of a very sound player; she held herself well, and knew by instinct what style was. A white belt defined her waist in the most enchanting fashion. George appreciated her, as a specimen of the newest generation of English girls. There were thousands of them in London alone, an endless supply, with none of the namby-pambiness and the sloppiness and the blowziness of their forerunners. Walking in Piccadilly or Bond Street or the Park, you might nowadays fancy yourself in Paris ... Why indeed should he not be playing tennis at that hour? The month was August. The apparatus of pleasure was there. Used or unused, it would still be there. It could not be destroyed simply because the times were grave. And there was his health; he would work better after the exercise. What purpose could there be in mournful inactivity? Yet continuously, as he ran about the court, and smiled at Gladys, and called out the score, and exclaimed upon his failures in precision, the strange, physical weight oppressed his stomach. He supposed that nearly everybody carried that physical weight. But did Sir Isaac? Did the delicious Gladys? The youth on the other side of the net was in the highest spirits because in a few days he would be entering Sandhurst.
A butler appeared from the French window of the ground floor of the M.P.'s house, walked down the curving path screened by a pergola, and came near the court with a small white paper in his solemn hand. At a suitable moment he gave the paper to the young master, who glanced at it and stuffed it into his pocket; the butler departed. A few minutes later the players changed courts. While the girls chatted apart, the youth leaped over the net, and, drawing the paper from his pocket, showed it furtively to George. It bore the words:
"Namur has fallen."
The M.P.'s household received special news by telephone from a friend at the War Office.
The youth raised his eyebrows, and with a side-glance seemed to say that there could be no object in telling the women immediately. The next instant the game was resumed with full ardour.
George missed his strokes. Like thousands of other people, untaught by the episode of Liege, he had counted upon Namur. Namur, the bastion, the shoulder of the newly forming line, if not impregnable, was expected to hold out for many days. And it had tumbled like a tin church, and with it the brave edifice of his confidence. He saw the Germans inevitably in Paris, blowing up Paris quarter by quarter, arrondissement by arrondissement, imposing peace, dictating peace, forcing upon Europe unspeakable humiliations. He saw Great Britain compelled to bow; and he saw worse than that. And the German officer, having struck across the face with his cane the soldier standing at attention, would go back to Germany in triumph more arrogant than ever, to ogle adoring virgins and push cowed and fatuous citizens off the pavement into the gutter. The solid houses of Elm Park Gardens, with their rich sun-blinds, the perfect sward, the white-frocked girls, the respectful gardeners, the red motor-buses flitting past behind the screen of bushes in the distance, even the butler in his majestic and invulnerable self-conceit--the whole systematized scene of correctness and tradition trembled as if perceived through the quivering of hot air. Gladys, reliant on the male and feeling that the male could no longer be relied on, went 'off her game,' with apologies; the experience of Miss Horton asserted itself, and the hard-fought set was lost by George and his partner. He reminded the company that he had only come for a short time, and left in a mood of bitter blackness.
IV
In front of his own house George saw a tradesman's coupe of the superior, discreet sort, with a smart horse (the same being more 'distinctive' than motor-traction), a driver liveried in black, and the initials of the firm in a restrained monogram on the doors. He thought: "She's blueing money again. Of course it's her own, but--" He was extremely sardonic. In the drawing-room he found not only Lois but Laurencine and an attentive, respectful, bright-faced figure rather stylishly dressed in black. This last was fastening a tea-gown on the back of pale Lois, who stood up with a fatigued, brave air. Laurencine sat critically observant on the end of a sofa. The furniture of the room was heaped with tea-gowns, and other garments not very dissimilar, producing a rich and exciting effect. All three women quickened to George's entry.
"Oh! George!" said Lois querulously. "Are you going to play tennis? I wish I could! I'm so glad you came in; we'd no idea you were in the house, had we, Laurencine? Laurencine's giving me a tea-gown. Which of them do you prefer? It's no good me having one you don't like."
He had been unjust to her, then.
"It's really her birthday present," said Laurencine, "only a bit late. Oh! Dear! Darling, do sit down, you're standing too long."
Both Laurencine and the young woman in black regarded Lois with soft compassion, and she sat down. Laurencine too was a mother. But she had retained her girlhood. She was a splendid, powerful, erect creature, handsome, with a frank, benevolent, sane face, at the height of her physical perfection. George had a great fondness for her. Years earlier he had wondered how it was that he had not fallen in love with her instead of with Lois. But he knew the reason now. She lacked force of individuality. She was an adorer by instinct. She adored Lois; Lois could do no wrong. More strange, she adored her husband. Ingenuous simpleton! Yet wise! Another thing was that her mind was too pure. Instead of understanding, it rejected. It was a mind absolutely impregnable to certain phenomena. And this girl still enjoyed musical comedies and their successors in vogue, the revues!
"The Germans have taken Namur," George announced.
The news impressed. Even the young woman in black permitted herself by a facial gesture to show that she was interested in the war as well as in tea-gowns, and apart from its effect on tea-gowns.
"Oh! Dear!" murmured Laurencine.
"Is it serious?" Lois demanded.
"You bet it is!" George replied.
"But what's Sir John French doing, then? I say, Laurencine, I think I shall have that pale blue one, after all, if you don't mind." The black young woman went across to the piano and brought the pale blue one. "George, don't you think so?"
The gown was deferentially held out for his inspection.
"Well, I can't judge if I don't see it on, can I?" he said, yielding superciliously to their mood. Women were incurable. Namur had fallen, but the room was full of finery, and the finery claimed attention. And if Paris had fallen, it would have been the same. So he told himself. Nevertheless the spectacle of the heaped finery and its absorbed priestess was very agreeable. Lois rose. Laurencine and the priestess helped her to remove the white gown she wore, and to put on the blue one. The presence of the male somewhat disturbed the priestess, but the male had signified a wish and the wish was flattering and had to be fulfilled. George, cynically, enjoyed her constraint. He might at least have looked out of the window, but he would not.
"Yes, that's fine," he decided carelessly, when the operation was done. He did not care a pin which tea-gown Lois had.
"I knew you'd like it better," said Lois eagerly. The other two, in words or by demeanour, applauded his august choice.
The affair was over. The priestess began to collect her scattered stock into a light trunk. Behind her back, Lois took hold of Laurencine and kissed her fondly. Laurencine smiled, and persuaded Lois into a chair.
"You will of course keep that on, madam?" the priestess suggested.
"Oh yes, darling, you must rest, really!" said Laurencine earnestly.
"Thank you, madam."
In three minutes the priestess, bearing easily the trunk by a strap, had gone, bowing. Lois's old tea-gown, flung across the head of the sofa, alone remained to brighten the furniture.
The drawing-room door opened again immediately, and a military officer entered. Laurencine sprang up with a little girlish scream and ran to him.
"Oh! Dearest! Have you got them already? You never told me you would have! How lovely you look!"
Blushing with pleasure and pride, she kissed him. It was Everard Lucas. Laurencine had come to Elm Park Road that afternoon with the first news that Everard, through a major known to his late mother, had been offered a commission in a Territorial line regiment. George, who saw Lucas but seldom, had not the slightest idea of this enormous family event, and he was astounded; he had not been so taken back by anything perhaps for years. Lucas was rounder and his face somewhat coarser than in the past; but the uniform had created a new Lucas. It was beautifully made and he wore it well; it suited him; he had the fine military air of a regular; he showed no awkwardness, only a simple vanity.
"Don't you feel as if you must kiss him, Lois darling?" said Laurencine.
"Oh! I certainly must!" Lois cried, forgetting her woes in the new tea-gown and in the sudden ecstasy produced by the advent of an officer into the family.
Lucas bent down and kissed his sister-in-law, while Laurencine beheld the act with delight.
"The children must see you before you go," said Lois.
"Madam, they shall see their uncle," Lucas answered. At any rate his agreeable voice had not coarsened. He turned to George: "What d'you think of it, George?"
"My boy, I'm proud of you," said George. In his tennis-flannels he felt like one who has arrived at an evening party in morning-dress. And indeed he was proud of Lucas. Something profound and ingenuous in him rose into his eyes and caused them to shine.
Lucas related his adventures with the tailor and other purveyors, and explained that he had to 'join his regiment' the next day, but would be able to remain in London for the present. George questioned him about his business affairs.
"No difficulty about that whatever!" said Lucas lightly. "The old firm will carry on as usual; Enwright and Orgreave will have to manage it between them; and of course they wouldn't dream of trying to cut off the spondulicks. Not that I should let that stop me if they did."
"Yes, it's all very well for _you_ to talk like that!" said Lois, with a swift change of tone. "You've got partners to do your work for you, and you've got money.... Have you written to mother, Laurencine?"
George objected to his wife making excuses. His gaze faltered.
"Of course, darling!" Laurencine answered eagerly, agreeing with her sister's differentiation between George and Everard. "No, not yet. But I'm going to to-night. Everard, we ought to be off."
"I've got a taxi outside," said Lucas.
"A taxi?" she repeated in a disappointed tone. And then, as an afterthought: "Well, I have to call at Debenham's."
The fact was that Laurencine wanted to be seen walking with her military officer in some well-frequented thoroughfare. They lived at Hampstead.
Lois rang the bell.
"Ask nurse to bring the children down, please--at once," she told the parlourmaid.
"So this is the new tea-gown, if I mistake not!" observed Lucas in the pause. "_Tres chic_! I suppose Laurencine's told you all about the chauffeur being run off with against his will by a passionate virgin. _I_ couldn't start the car this morning myself."
"You never could start a car by yourself, my boy," said George. "What's this about the passionate virgin?"
V
George woke up in the middle of the night. Lois slept calmly; he could just hear her soft breathing. He thought of all the occupied bedrooms, of the health of children, the incalculable quality in wives, the touchy stupidity of nurses and servants. The mere human weight of the household oppressed him terribly. And he thought of the adamant of landlords, the shifty rapacity of tradesmen, the incompetence of clerks, the mere pompous foolishness of Government departments, the arrogance of Jew patrons, and the terrifying complexity of problems of architecture on a large scale. He was the Atlas supporting a vast world a thousand times more complex than any problem of architecture. He wondered how he did it. But he did do it, alone; and he kept on doing it. Let him shirk the burden, and not a world but an entire universe would crumble. If he told Lois that he was going to leave her, she would collapse; she would do dreadful things. He was indispensable not only at home but professionally. All was upon his shoulders and upon nobody else's. He was bound, he was a prisoner, he had no choice, he was performing his highest duty, he was fulfilling the widest usefulness of which he was capable ... Besides, supposing he did go insane and shirk the burden, they would all say that he had been influenced by Lucas's uniform--the mere sight of the uniform!--like a girl! He could not stand that, because it would be true. Not that he would ever admit its truth! He recalled Lucas's tact in refraining from any suggestion, even a jocular suggestion, that he, George, ought also to be in uniform. Lucas was always tactful. Be damned to his tact! And the too eager excuses made by Lois in his behalf also grated on his susceptibility. He had no need of excuses. The woman was taciturn by nature, and yet she was constantly saying too much! And did any of the three of them--Lois, Laurencine, and Lucas--really appreciate the war? They did not. They could not envisage it. Lucas was wearing uniform solely in obedience to an instinct.
At this point the cycle of his reflections was completed, and began again. He thought of all the occupied bedrooms.... Thus, in the dark, warm night the contents of his mind revolved endlessly, with extreme tedium and extreme distress, and each moment his mood became more morbid.
An occasional sound of traffic penetrated into the room,--strangely mournful, a reminder of the immense and ineffable melancholy of a city which could not wholly lose itself in sleep. The window lightened. He could descry his wife's portable clock on the night-table. A quarter to four. Turning over savagely in bed, he muttered: "My night's done for. And nearly five hours to breakfast. Good God!" The cycle resumed, and was enlarged.
At intervals he imagined that he dozed; he did doze, if it is possible while you are dozing to know that you doze. His personality separated into two personalities, if not more. He was on a vast plain, and yet he was not there, and the essential point of the scene was that he was not there. Thousands and tens of thousands of men stood on this plain, which had no visible boundaries. A roll-call was proceeding. A resounding and mysterious voice called out names, and at each name a man stepped briskly from the crowds and saluted and walked away. But there was no visible person to receive the salute; the voice was bodiless. George became increasingly apprehensive; he feared a disaster, yet he could not believe that it would occur. It did occur. Before it arrived he knew that it was arriving. The voice cried solemnly:
"George Edwin Cannon."
An awful stillness and silence followed, enveloping the entire infinite plain. George trembled. He was there, but he was not there. Men looked at each other, raising their eyebrows. The voice did not deign to repeat the call. After a suitable pause, the voice cried solemnly:
"Everard Lucas."
And Lucas in his new uniform stepped gravely forward and saluted and walked away.
"Was I asleep or awake?" George asked himself. He could not decide. At any rate the scene impressed him. The bigness of the plain, the summons, the silence, the utter absence of an expression of reproof or regret--of any comment whatever.
At five o'clock he arose, and sat down in his dressing-gown at Lois's very untidy and very small writing-desk, and wrote a letter on her notepaper. The early morning was lovely; it was celestial.
"DEAR DAVIDS," the letter began.--That would annoy the fellow, who liked the address respectful.--"Dear Davids, I have decided to join the Army, and therefore cannot proceed further with your commission. However, the general idea is complete. I advise you to get it carried out by Lucas & Enwright. Enwright is the best architect in England. You may take this from me. I'm his disciple. You might ring me up at the office this afternoon.--Yours faithfully, GEORGE CANNON"
"P.S.--Assuming you go to Lucas & Enwright, I can either make some arrangement with them as to sharing fees myself, or you can pay me an agreed sum for the work I've done, and start afresh elsewhere. I shall want all the money I can get hold of."
Yes, Sir Isaac would be very angry. George smiled. He was not triumphant, but he was calm. In the full sanity of the morning, every reason against his going into the Army had vanished. The material objection was ridiculous--with Edwin Clayhanger at the back of him! Moreover, some money would be coming in. The professional objection was equally ridiculous. The design for the Indian barracks existed complete; and middle-aged mediocrity could carry it out in a fashion, and Lucas & Enwright could carry it out better than he could carry it out himself. As for Davids, he had written. There was nothing else of importance in his office. The other competition had not been won. If people said that he had been influenced by Lucas's uniform, well, they must say it. They would not say it for more than a few days. After a few days the one interesting fact would be that he had joined. By such simple and curt arguments did he annihilate the once overwhelming reasons against his joining the Army.
But he did not trouble to marshal the reasons in favour of his joining the Army. He had only one reason: he must! He quite ignored the larger aspects of the war--the future of civilization, freedom versus slavery, right versus wrong, even the responsibilities of citizenship and the implications of patriotism. His decision was the product, not of argument, but of feeling. However, he did not feel a bit virtuous. He had to join the Army, and 'that was all there was to it.' A beastly nuisance, this world-war! It was interfering with his private affairs; it might put an end to his private affairs altogether; he hated soldiering; he looked inimically at the military caste. An unspeakable nuisance. But there the war was, and he was going to answer to his name. He simply could not tolerate the dreadful silence and stillness on the plain after his name had been called. "Pooh! Sheer sentimentality!" he said to himself, thinking of the vision--half-dream, half-fancy. "Rotten sentimentality!"
He asked:
"Damn it! Am I an Englishman or am I not?"
Like most Englishmen, he was much more an Englishman than he ever suspected.
"What on earth are you doing, George?"
At the voice of his wife he gave a nervous jump, and then instantly controlled himself and looked round. Her voice was soft, liquid, weak with slumber. But, lying calmly on one side, her head half buried in the pillow, and the bedclothes pushed back from her shoulders, she was wideawake and gazed at him steadily.
"I'm just writing a letter," he answered gruffly.
"Now? What letter?"
"Here! You shall read it." He walked straight across the room in his gay pyjamas only partly hidden by the splendid dressing-gown, and handed her the letter. Moving nothing but her hand, she took the letter and held it in front of her eyes. He sat down between the beds, on the edge of his own bed, facing her.
"Whatever is it?"
"Read it. You've got it," he said, with impatience. He was trembling, aware that the crisis had suddenly leapt at him.
"Oh!"
She had read the opening phrase; she had received the first shock. But the tone of her exclamation gave no clue at all to her attitude. It might mean anything--anything. She shut her eyes; then glanced at him, terror-struck, appealing, wistful, implacable.
"Not at once?"
"Yes, at once."
"But surely you'll at least wait until after October."
He shook his head.
"But why can't you?"
"I can't."
"But there's no object--"
"I've got to do it."
"You're horribly cruel."
"Well, that's me!" He was sullen, and as hard as a diamond.
"George, I shall never be able to stand it. It's too much to expect. It'll kill me."
"Not it! What's the use of talking like that? If I'd been in the Territorials before the war, like lots of chaps, I should have been gone long ago, and you'd have stood it all right. Don't you understand we're at war? Do you imagine the war can wait for things like babies?"
She cried:
"It's no good your going on in that strain. You can't leave me alone with all this house on my shoulders, and so that's flat."
"Who wants to leave you all alone in the house? You can go and stay at Ladderedge, children and nurse and all." This scheme presented itself to him as he spoke.
"Of course I can't! We can't go and plant ourselves on people like that. Besides--"
"Can't you? You'll see!"
He caught her eye. Why was he being so brutal to her? What conceivable purpose was served by this harshness? He perceived that his nerves were overstrung. And in a swift rush of insight he saw the whole situation from her point of view. She was exhausted by gestation; she lived in a world distorted. Could she help her temperament? She was in the gravest need of his support; and he was an ass, a blundering fool. His severity melted within him, and secretly he became tender as only a man can be.
"You silly girl!" he said, slightly modifying his voice, taking care not to disclose all at once the change in his mood.
"You silly girl! Can't you see they'll be so proud to have you they won't be able to contain themselves? They'll turn the whole place upside-down for you. I know them. They'll pretend it's nothing, but mother won't sleep at night for thinking how to arrange things for the best, and as for my cuckoo of an uncle, if you notice something funny about your feet, it'll be the esteemed alderman licking your boots. You'll have the time of your life. In fact they'll ruin your character for you. There'll be no holding you afterwards."
She did not smile, but her eyes smiled. He had got the better of her. He had been cleverer than she was. She was beaten.
"But we shall have no money."
"Read the letter, child. I'm not a fool."
"I know you're not a fool. No one knows that better than me."
He went on:
"And what's uncle's money for, if it comes to that?"
"But we can't spunge on them like that!"
"Spunge be dashed! What's money for? It's no good till it's spent. If he can't spend it on us, who can he spend it on? He always makes out he's fiendishly hard, but he's the most generous idiot ever born."
"Yes, you're awfully like him."
"I'm not."
He was suddenly alive to the marvellous charm of the intimacy of the scene with his wife, in the early summer dawn, in the silent, enchanted house of sleepers, in the disorder of the heaped bedroom. They were alone together, shameless in front of one another, and nobody knew or saw, or could ever know or see. Their relations were unique, the resultant of long custom, of friction, of misunderstanding, of affection, of incomprehensible instincts, of destiny itself. He thought: "I have lived for this sensation, and it is worth living for."
Without the slightest movement, she invited him with her strange eyes, and as she did so she was as mysterious as ever she had been. He bent down responsively. She put her hot, clammy hands on his shoulders, and kept his head at a little distance and looked through his eyes into his soul. The letter had dropped to the floor.
"I knew you would!" she murmured, and then snatched him to her, and kissed him, and kept her mouth on his.
"You didn't," he said, as soon as she loosed him. "I didn't know myself."
But he privately admitted that perhaps she did know. She had every fault, but she was intelligent. Constantly he was faced with that fact. She did not understand the significance of the war; she lacked imagination; but her understanding was sometimes terrible. She was devious; but she had a religion. He was her religion. She would cast the god underfoot--and then in a passion of repentance restore it ardently to the sacred niche.
She said:
"I couldn't have borne it if Everard had gone and you hadn't. But of course you meant to go all the time."
That was how she saved his amour-propre.
"I always knew you were a genius--"
"Oh! Chuck it, kid!"
"But you're more, somehow. This business--"
"You don't mean joining the Army?"
"Yes."
"What rot! There's nothing in it. Fellows are doing it everywhere."
She smiled superiorly, and then inquired:
"How do you join? What are you going to do? Shall you ask Everard?"
"Well--" he hesitated. He had no desire to consult Lucas.
"Why don't you see Colonel Rannion?" she Suggested.
"Jove! That's a scheme. Never thought of him!"
Her satisfaction at the answer was childlike, and he was filled with delight that it should be so. They launched themselves into an interminable discussion about every possible arrangement of everything. But in a pause of it he destroyed its tremendous importance by remarking casually:
"No hurry, of course. I bet you I shall be kept knocking about here for months." _