He smiled again. "Really sometimes, for a row of pins, I"d have turned conscientious objector."
Mrs. Naylor looked apprehensively at the General: would he explode? No, he took it quite quietly. "You"re a man who can afford to say it, Alec," he remarked, with a nod that was almost approving.
Naylor looked affectionately at his son and turned to Beaumaroy. "And what"s the war done to you?" he asked. And this question did draw from the General, if not an explosion, at least a rather contemptuous smile: Beaumaroy had earned no right to express opinions!
But express one he did, and with his habitual air of candour. "I believe it"s destroyed every scruple I ever had!
"Mr. Beaumaroy!" exclaimed his hostess, scandalized; while the two girls, Cynthia and Gertie, laughed.
"I mean it. Can you see human life treated as dirt--absolutely as cheap as dirt--for three years, and come out thinking it worth anything? Can you fight for your own hand, right or wrong? Oh, yes, right or wrong, in the end, and it"s no good blinking it. Can you do that for three years in war, and then hesitate to fight for your own hand, right or wrong, in peace? Who really cares for right or wrong, anyhow?"
A pause ensued--rather an uncomfortable pause. There was a raw sincerity in Beaumaroy"s utterance that made it a challenge.
"I honestly think we did care about the rights and wrongs--we in England," said Naylor.
"That was certainly so at the beginning," Irechester agreed.
Beaumaroy took him up smartly. "Aye, at the beginning. But what about when our blood got up? What then? Would we, in our hearts, rather have been right and got a licking, or wrong and given one?"
"A searching question!" mused old Naylor. "What say you, Tom Punnit?"
"It never occurred to me to put the question," the General answered brusquely.
"May I ask why not, sir?" said Beaumaroy respectfully.
"Because I believed in G.o.d. I knew that we were right, and I knew that we should win."
"Are we in theology now, or still in biology?" asked Irechester, rather acidly.
"You"re getting out of my depth anyhow," smiled Mrs. Naylor. "And I"m sure the girls must be bewildered."
"Mamma, I"ve done biology!"
"And many people think they"ve done theology!" chuckled Naylor. "Done it completely!"
"I"ve raised a pretty argument!" said Beaumaroy, smiling. "I"m sorry! I only meant to answer your question about the effect the whole thing has had on myself."
"Even your answer to that was pretty startling, Mr. Beaumaroy," said Doctor Mary, smiling too. "You gave us to understand that it had obliterated for you all distinctions of right and wrong, didn"t you?"
"Did I go as far as that?" he laughed. "Then I"m open to the remark that they can"t have been very strong at first."
"Now don"t destroy the general interest of your thesis," Naylor implored. "It"s quite likely that yours is a case as common as Alec"s, or even commoner. "A brutal and licentious soldiery"--isn"t that a cla.s.sic phrase in our histories? All the same, I fancy Mr. Beaumaroy does himself less than justice." He laughed. "We shall be able to judge of that when we know him better."
"At all events, Miss Gertie, look out that I don"t fake the score at tennis!" said Beaumaroy.
"A man might be capable of murder, but not capable of that," said Alec.
"A truly British sentiment!" cried his father. "Tom, we have got back to the national ideals."
The discussion ended in laughter, and the talk turned to lighter matters, but, as Mary Arkroyd drove Cynthia home across the heath, her thoughts returned to it. The two men--the two soldiers--seemed to have given an authentic account of what their experience had done to them.
Both, as she saw the case, had been moved to pity, horror, and indignation that such things should be done, or should have to be done, in the world. After that point came the divergence. The higher nature had been raised, the lower debased; Alec Naylor"s sympathies had been sharpened and sensitized; Beaumaroy"s blunted. Where the one had found ideals and incentives, the other found despair--a despair that issued in excuses and denied high standards. And the finer mind belonged to the finer soldier; that she knew, for Gertie had told her General Punnit"s story, and, however much she might discount it as the tale of an elderly martinet, yet it stood for something--for something that could never be attributed to Alec Naylor.
And yet--for her mind travelled back to her earlier talk by the tennis-court--Beaumaroy had a conscience, had feelings. He was fond of old Mr. Saffron; he felt a responsibility for him--felt it, indeed, keenly. Or was he, under all that seeming openness, a consummate hypocrite? Did he value Mr. Saffron only as a milch cow--the doting giver of a large salary? Was his only desire to humour him, keep him in good health and temper, and use him to his own profit? A puzzling man--but, at all events, cutting a poor figure beside Alec Naylor, about whom there could circle no clouds of doubt. Doctor Mary"s learning and gravity did not prevent her from drawing a very heroic and rather romantic figure of Captain Alec--notwithstanding the fact that she sometimes found him rather hard to talk to.
She felt Cynthia"s arm steal round her waist, and Cynthia said softly, "I did enjoy my afternoon. Can we go again soon, Mary?"
Mary glanced round at her. Cynthia laughed and blushed. "Isn"t he splendid?" Cynthia murmured. "But I don"t like Mr. Beaumaroy at all, do you?"
"I say yes to the first question, but I"m not quite ready to answer the second," said Mary with a laugh.
Three days later, on Christmas Eve, one whom Jeanne, who caught sight of him in the hall, described as being all there was possible of ugliness, delivered (with a request for an immediate answer) the following note for Mary Arkroyd:
"DEAR DR. ARKROYD,
Mr. Saffron is unwell, and I have insisted with him that he must see a doctor. So much he has yielded--after a fight! But nothing will induce him to see Dr. Irechester again. On this point I tried to reason with him, but in vain. He is obstinate and resolved. I am afraid that I am putting you in a difficult and disagreeable position, but it seems to me that I have no alternative but to ask you to call on him professionally. I hope that Dr. Irechester will not be hurt by a whim which is, no doubt, itself merely a symptom of disordered nerves, for Dr. Irechester has been most attentive, and very successful hitherto in dealing with the dear old gentleman. But my first duty is to Mr. Saffron. If it will ease matters at all, pray hold yourself at liberty to show this note to Dr. Irechester. May I beg you to be kind enough to call at your earliest convenience, though it is, alas, a rough evening to ask you to come out?
Yours very faithfully,
HECTOR BEAUMAROY"
"How very awkward!" exclaimed Mary. She had prided herself on a rigorous abstention from "poaching"; she fancied that men were very ready to accuse women of not "playing the game" and had been resolved to give no colour to such an accusation. "Mr. Saffron has sent for me--professionally. He"s ill, it seems," she said to Cynthia.
"Why shouldn"t he?"
"He"s a patient of Dr. Irechester"s."
"But people often change their doctors, don"t they? He thinks you"re cleverer, I suppose, and I expect you are, really."
There was no use in expounding professional etiquette to Cynthia. Mary had to decide the point for herself--and quickly; the old man might be seriously ill. Beaumaroy had said, at the Naylors", that his attacks were sometimes alarming.
Suddenly she recollected that he had also seemed to hint that they were more alarming than Irechester appeared to appreciate; she had not taken much notice of that hint at the time, but now it recurred to her very distinctly. There was no suggestion of the sort in Beaumaroy"s letter.
Beaumaroy had written a letter that could be shown to Irechester! Was that dishonesty, or only a pardonable diplomacy?
"I suppose I must go--and explain to Dr. Irechester afterwards." She rang the bell to recall the maid, and gave her answer. "Say I will be round as soon as possible. Is the messenger walking?"
"He"s got a bicycle, Miss."
"All right. I shall be there almost as soon as he is."
She seemed to have no alternative, just as Beaumaroy had none. Yet while she put on her mackintosh--it was very wet and misty--got out her car, and lit her lamps, her face was still fretful and her mind disturbed.
For now--as she looked back on it--Beaumaroy"s conversation with her at Old Place seemed just a prelude to this summons, and meant to prepare her for it. Perhaps that too was pardonable diplomacy, and no reference to it could be expected in a letter which she was at liberty to show to Dr. Irechester. She wondered, uncomfortably, how Irechester would take it.
CHAPTER V