Doggie, always responsive to human kindness, was touched. He felt a note of sincerity in McPhail"s tone. Perhaps he had judged him harshly, overlooking the plea in extenuation which Phineas had set up--that in every man there must be some saving remnant of goodness.
"I wasn"t happy, Phineas," he said; "I was as miserable an outcast as could be found in London, and when a fellow"s down and out, you must forgive him for speaking more bitterly than he ought."
"Don"t I know, laddie? Don"t I know?" said Phineas sympathetically. He reached for the cigar-box. "Do you mind if I take another? Perhaps two--one to smoke afterwards, in memory of this meeting. It is a long time since my lips touched a thing so gracious as a real Havana."
"Take a lot," said Doggie generously, "I don"t really like cigars. I only bought them because I thought they might be stronger than cigarettes."
Phineas filled his pockets. "You can pay no greater compliment to a man"s honesty of purpose," said he, "than by taking him at his word.
And now," he continued, when he had carefully lit the cigar he had first chosen, "let us review the entire situation. What about our good friends at Durdlebury? What about your uncle, the Very Reverend the Dean, against whom I bear no ill-will, though I do not say that his ultimate treatment of me was not over-hasty--what about him? If you call upon me to put my almost fantastically variegated experience of life at your disposal, and advise you in this crisis, so I must ask you to let me know the exact conditions in which you find yourself."
Doggie smiled once again, finding something diverting and yet stimulating in the calm a.s.surance of Private McPhail.
"I"m not aware that I"ve asked you for advice, Phineas."
"The fact that you"re not aware of many things that you do is no proof that you don"t do them--and do them in a manner perfectly obvious to another party," replied Phineas sententiously. "You"re asking for advice and consolation from any friendly human creature to whom you"re not ashamed to speak. You"ve had an awful sorrowful time, laddie."
Doggie roamed about the room, with McPhail"s little grey eyes fixed on him. Yes, Phineas was right. He would have given most of his possessions to be able, these later days, to pour out his tortured soul into sympathetic ears. But shame had kept him, still kept him, would always keep him, from the ears of those he loved. Yes, Phineas had said the diabolically right thing. He could not be ashamed to speak to Phineas. And there was something good in Phineas which he had noticed with surprise. How easy for him, in response to bitter accusation, to cast the blame on his mother? He himself had given the opening. How easy for him to point to his predecessor"s short tenure of office and plead the alternative of carrying out Mrs. Trevor"s theory of education or of resigning his position in favour of some sycophant even more time-serving? But he had kept silent.... Doggie stopped short and looked at Phineas with eyes dumbly questioning and quivering lips.
Phineas rose and put his hands on the boy"s shoulders, and said very gently:
"Tell me all about it, laddie."
Then Doggie broke down, and with a gush of unminded tears found expression for his stony despair. His story took a long time in the telling; and Phineas interjecting an occasional sympathetic "Ay, ay,"
and a delicately hinted question, extracted from Doggie all there was to tell, from the outbreak of war to their meeting on Waterloo Bridge.
"And now," cried he at last, a dismally tragic figure, his young face distorted and reddened, his sleek hair ruffled from the back into unsightly perpendicularities (an invariable sign of distracted emotion) and his hands appealingly outstretched--"what the h.e.l.l am I going to do?"
"Laddie," said Phineas, standing on the hearthrug, his hands on his hips, "if you had posed the question in the polite language of the precincts of Durdlebury Cathedral, I might have been at a loss to reply. But the manly invocation of h.e.l.l shows me that your foot is already on the upward path. If you had prefaced it by the adjective that gives colour to all the aspirations of the British Army, it would have been better. But I"m not reproaching you, laddie. _Poco a poco._ It is enough. It shows me you are not going to run away to a neutral country and present the unedifying spectacle of a mangy little British lion at the mercy of a menagerie of healthy hyenas and such-like inferior though truculent beasties."
"My G.o.d!" cried Doggie, "haven"t I thought of it till I"m half mad? It would be just as you say--unendurable." He began to pace the room again. "And I can"t go to France. It would be just the same as England. Every one would be looking white feathers at me. The only thing I can do is to go out of the world. I"m not fit for it. Oh, I don"t mean suicide. I"ve not enough pluck. That"s off. But I could go and bury myself in the wilderness somewhere where no one would ever find me."
"Laddie," said McPhail, "I mis...o...b.. that you"re going to settle down in any wilderness. You haven"t the faculty of adaptability of which I have spoken to-night at some length. And your heart is young and not coated with the holy varnish of callousness, which is a secret preparation known only to those who have served a long apprenticeship in a severe school of egotism."
"That"s all very well," cried Doggie, "but what the----"
Phineas waved an interrupting hand. "You"ve got to go back, laddie.
You"ve got to whip all the moral courage in you and go back to Durdlebury. The Dean, with his influence, and the letter you have shown me from your Colonel, can easily get you some honourable employment in either Service not so exacting as the one which you have recently found yourself unable to perform."
Doggie threw a newly-lighted cigarette into the fire and turned pa.s.sionately on McPhail.
"I won"t. You"re talking drivelling rot. I can"t. I"d sooner die than go back there with my tail between my legs. I"d sooner enlist as a private soldier."
"Enlist?" said Phineas, and he drew himself up straight and gaunt.
"Well, why not?"
"Enlist?" echoed Doggie in a dull tone.
"Have you never contemplated such a possibility?"
"Good G.o.d, no!" said Doggie.
"I have enlisted. And I am a man of ancient lineage as honourable, so as not to enter into unproductive argument, as yours. And I am a Master of Arts of the two Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. Yet I fail to find anything dishonourable in my present estate as 33702 Private Phineas McPhail in the British Army."
Doggie seemed not to hear him. He stared at him wildly.
"Enlist?" he repeated. "As a Tommy?"
"Even as a Tommy," said Phineas. He glanced at the ormolu clock. "It is past one. The respectable widow woman near the Elephant and Castle who has let me a bedroom will be worn by anxiety as to my non-return.
Marmaduke, my dear, dear laddie, I must leave you. If you will be lunching here twelve hours hence, nothing will give me greater pleasure than to join you. Laddie, do you think you could manage a fried sole and a sweetbread?"
"Enlist?" said Doggie, following him out to the front door in a dream.
He opened the door. Phineas shook hands.
"Fried sole and a sweetbread at one-thirty?"
"Of course, with pleasure," said Doggie.
Phineas fumbled in his pockets.
"It"s a long cry at this time of night from Bloomsbury to the Elephant and Castle. You haven"t the price of a taxi fare about you, laddie--two or three pounds----?"
Doggie drew from his patent note-case a sheaf of one-pound and ten-shilling treasury notes and handed them over to McPhail"s vulture clutch.
"Good night, laddie!"
"Good night!"
Phineas strode away into the blackness. Doggie shut the front door and put up the chain and went back into his sitting-room. He wound his fingers in his hair.
"Enlist? My G.o.d!"
He lit a cigarette and after a few puffs flung it into the grate. He stared at the alternatives.
Flight, which was craven--a lifetime of self-contempt. Durdlebury, which was impossible. Enlistment----?
Yet what was a man incapable yet able-bodied, honourable though disgraced, to do?
His landlord found him at seven o"clock in the morning asleep in an arm-chair.
CHAPTER IX
After a bath and a change and breakfast, Doggie went out for one of his solitary walks. At Durdlebury such a night as the last would have kept him in bed in a darkened room for most of the following day. But he had spent many far, far worse on Salisbury Plain, and the inexorable reveille had dragged him out into the raw dreadful morning, heedless of his headache and yearning for slumber, until at last the process of hardening had begun. To-day Doggie was as unfatigued a young man as walked the streets of London, a fact which his mind was too confusedly occupied to appreciate. Once more was he beset less by the perplexities of the future than by a sense of certain impending doom. For to Phineas McPhail"s "Why not?" he had been able to give no answer. He could give no answer now, as he marched with swinging step, automatically, down Oxford Street and the Bayswater Road in the direction of Kensington Gardens. He could give no answer as he stood sightlessly staring at the Peter Pan statue.
A one-armed man in a khaki cap and hospital blue came and stood by his side and looked in a pleased yet puzzled way at the exquisite poem in marble. At last he spoke--in a rich Irish accent.