PART TWENTY

THE HOME FRONT

§ 1

All through the thirty-six hours of his journey back to England, business nagged at the mind of Peter Jameson. He made the first twenty miles, Neuve Eglise—Strazeele—Borre—Hazebrouck, on horse-back; caught an afternoon train which crawled through Amiens and Abbeville, making Boulogne too late for dinner; slept at the Officers’ Club; and crossed the Channel in smooth sunshine on a boat which carried only the mails and a few fortunates to whom leave restrictions did not apply.

But neither Little Willie trotting happily along uncrowded roads, nor the stammered friendliness of blue-clad gaudy-capped French Officers in the antimacassared first-class compartment, nor a night in a civilized bedroom, nor any of the petty pleasures of home-going, penetrated to a conscience obsessed with uncomfortable thought, a brain occupied with financial riddles.

Moreover—though this Peter failed to realize—that brain was not quite the sure-functioning machine of old days. No man comes quite unscathed through eight months of fighting: even if the body be unwounded, the mind—which must force the body through its physical revulsion—pays toll in restlessness, in loss of concentration.

And so Peter’s problem, instead of coming to him clear-cut and impersonal, took at first the shape of a grievance, of a self-reproach. Fate had not treated him quite fairly. No reasonable being could have imagined that the renewal of the partnership deed with Simpson would land him in such a coil. It was just rotten bad luck.

Arrived at which point, the wind began to reproach itself. Bad luck! Not a bit of it. If he, Peter Jameson, had possessed any common-sense, he might have foreseen this happening. He, Peter Jameson, thought himself a damn clever fellow; whereas, actually, he was a fool. Otherwise, he would have stayed at home, like Sir Hubert Rawlings and a thousand others. . . .

But at that, the soul revolted; the dumb patriotism of the man re-asserted itself. For, deep down in Peter’s consciousness, lay the firm conviction that in volunteering for service he had done the one possible thing. . . . Only, it did seem as though Fate were exacting a highish price for his self-respect—first the loss of Nirvana, and now this new complication.

He pulled himself together; set his brains to grapple the problem resolutely. It was,—regarded as he now managed to regard it, impersonally—a simple riddle. Jamesons’ capital consisted of twenty-eight thousand pounds; half of this roughly belonged to him, half to Simpson’s estate. Under the deed, he would have to pay out Simpson’s executors within twelve months.

Had he been free, had there been no War, he could have borrowed the money on the security of the business, taken in another partner, amalgamated with a competitor. But he was not free, would not be free till the War ended. And he had seen enough at first hand to know that the War—unless America came in—could easily go on another five years.

He might, of course, compromise with Simpson’s executors, spread the payment over a longer period. But, in that case, who would carry on the concern? Miss Macpherson? He could hardly imagine a woman running Jamesons’. Mallabone, their sole remaining traveller? Mallabone had no brains. Besides—and here the effect of war on Peter’s temperament clearly revealed itself—any such solution contained the element of _risk_. He had lost more than half his capital: and he funked any diminution of the rest.

Funked it! He, Peter Jameson, who had never funked a business gamble in his life. . . .

“The only alternative,” said reason, “is to sell out. You’ll get hardly anything for goodwill: outside the stock and book-debts, your only asset was the Beckmann contract. That’s not worth twopence today. Still, if you could sell the business as a going concern, your capital would, at any rate, be _safe_. . . .”

So thinking, Peter stepped out of the Pullman on to the platform of Victoria Station.

§ 2

This time, no Patricia met him. Apparently his wire to her had not arrived. He looked at the clock above the archway; saw it was half-past two; and decided to go straight to the City.

In the Underground, an elderly civilian insisted on talking to him; asked—looking at his high-laced boots, his soft cap, his bulging haversack—if he had been to the Front.

“Just come from it,” answered Peter, lighting a fresh cigar.

“You’re in the R.F.A., aren’t you? I wonder if you’ve ever met my nephew. No, he’s not got a commission. A sergeant, I believe he is. His name’s Tomkins, same as mine: but I’ve forgotten the number of his battery. . . .”

The conversation lasted till the train pulled up in the cavernous gloom of Monument Station.

“Silly old ass,” thought Peter as he clinked along Gracechurch Street. “These people at home seem to think the R.F.A. is about as big as a platoon.”

Pushing his way through the glass doors of the office, he bumped his haversack; vented an Expeditionary Force oath.

No office-girl sat at the reception window. The racks in the duty-paid stock-rooms were quite empty; he passed between them into the back office; found Miss Macpherson, busy with ledgers and foolscap, sitting at Simpson’s old desk.

“I didn’t expect you so soon, Mr. Jameson,” she said, rising. The war had altered the Scotswoman: higher pay had clad her in a well-cut skirt, a silk blouse, good boots and stockings; she looked almost comely with her dark hair, just graying, her firm well-moulded features, her keen brown eyes.

“I’ve just been taking the bonded stock,” she went on. “There isn’t much of it, I’m glad to say. Almost everything is sold before arrival now. And the book-debts are low.”

They discussed details; and Peter found himself amazed at her knowledge, her capability.

“Mr. Simpson left a good deal to me at the end,” she explained. “He was ill for nearly three months before he died. But he wouldn’t have you written to about it. Poor Mrs. Simpson! I went to see her yesterday. She was so sorry you couldn’t be home to the funeral. You ought to go and see her if you can.”

A girl brought tea. Over it, Miss Macpherson put her question:

“What are you going to do about the business? Will it have to be sold? You don’t mind my asking, I hope. But it’s rather important _to me_.”

“I’m afraid it _will_ have to be sold, Miss Macpherson. You know about the partnership deed, I suppose?”

“Yes. Mr. Simpson told me.” She finished her cup. “I could run it, you know—easily—till you came back.”

“Could you?” Her earnestness appealed to Peter. This type of managing woman, bred by the war, was new and very refreshing.

“Of course I could. It’s not a very difficult business.”

The telephone bell rang. Miss Macpherson picked up the receiver; pushed the instrument across the desk. “It’s your wife, I think.”

“Peter”—the voice came faintly over the wire—“I just missed you at Victoria. Shall I bring the car down to the office?”

“Yes, do,” he answered.

The little scene was—could Peter but have realized it—very typical of war: women working with and for men, driving cars, running businesses, doing a thousand jobs which would have seemed impossible two years since. But Peter Jameson had no sense of drama; he accepted new conditions, as most Englishmen, with nothing more than a mild surprise.

“I wish you’d get me the private ledger, Miss Macpherson,” he said: and immersed in the “private ledger,” Patricia found him.

As she entered, tall, gauntleted, small toque low on her blond head, he looked up from his work; rose to greet her. They did not kiss: they were not of the breed that kisses before employés. But there was no condescension in Patricia’s, “How do you do, Miss Macpherson?”

“I shan’t be more than ten minutes, Pat,” Peter said. “You don’t mind waiting, do you?”

She sat there, looking at the two of them, the man in soldier’s uniform, bending over the account book, the middle-aged woman with the fountain-pen—holding her love for Peter in abeyance, recognizing that this was “business,” a mystery beyond her scope. And with that realization came a little flash of jealousy against the other woman who could help where the wife must sit useless.

Peter snapped-to the catch of the private-ledger; pulled the telephone across the desk; asked for a number.

“Mr. Reid in?”—Patricia heard—“No. Mr. George Reid. Gone for the day. Confound it. Is he free at ten o’clock tomorrow? Right. Yes, Mr. Jameson, Mr. Peter Jameson.”

He turned to Miss Macpherson, said “Do you think you can have those figures ready by lunch-time tomorrow?” received her affirmative; asked if she knew the names and addresses of Simpson’s executors; wrote them down in his note-book.

“Ready now,” he told Patricia: and, as an afterthought, “How much petrol have you got?”

“I filled up just before coming out.”

“Good.” He looked at his wrist-watch. “Then I think, if you don’t mind, we’ll run down to Harrow to see Mrs. Simpson.”

§ 3

The drive to Harrow, through traffic and tramlines for the most part, gave little opportunity for conversation.

“Are you very worried?” she managed to ask.

“Yes,” he confessed, “I am.”

They drew up, at about six in the afternoon, before an unpretentious, comfortable villa in an unpretentious, comfortable side-street. It was the usual English suburban home, a doll’s house of red-brick and stucco: two lime trees sheltered the little iron gate; on either side of the gravelled path which led to the front door, tiny well-clipt lawns gave on to laurel-bushes. As they came up the path, a half-seen figure moved behind the muslin curtains of the dining-room window.

Ringing the ivory knob of a well-polished brass bell-push, they were welcomed by a maid in cap-and-apron; ushered, through a marble-papered hall with a mahogany hat-stand, into an over-furnished room (piano and sofa prominent) whose long French windows looked out on “the garden”—a narrow strip of lawn ending in a fence crowned with trellis-work and scant ivy.

“Mrs. Simpson will be down in a moment,” announced the maid.

She came in, a little faded woman, light-haired—the pallor of her accentuated by the obviously new black dress. An open-faced gold locket with the miniature of her dead husband hung from a gold chain at her breast.

“This is very good of you,” began Mrs. Simpson.

Condoling with her, Peter felt—for the first time—a real sorrow at loss of his partner. He remembered “Tom” bringing his wife to dinner at Lowndes Square, remembered how Pat had laughed at his calling her “mother.”

“Won’t you sit down?” said Mrs. Simpson; and began to talk about the illness, the funeral. “Poor man, he was worried you know. Worried! The work got too much for him. I used to say to him, ‘Tom, don’t go to the office today.’ But he would go. And the trains are so crowded now—these soldiers. Often, he’d have to stand up the whole way home. Then the raids used to keep him awake.”

To Patricia, she seemed a pathetic figure; to Peter, she grew rapidly irritating. Sorrow disappeared. He had come there to talk money-matters, not to hear about the “dear departed.” The front had hardened him to death: death was just an incident, a daily incident: one did not mention the dead.

“Tell me, Mrs. Simpson,” he interrupted, not unsympathetically. “About money? Are you all right? You know it will take some little time to get the estate settled up. I thought of going to see the executors tomorrow.”

“It’s very good of you to take so much trouble, Mr. Jameson. Very good of you indeed. But I’ve got enough to go on with. And my brother-in-law tells me. . . .”

In her narrow way she was shrewd—with the shrewdness of the English middle-class. Business, taboo in Lowndes Square, had always been the staple topic of conversation at “The Limes.” Mrs. Simpson knew all about Nirvana, about Hagenburg, about the partnership deed; knew too, exactly what she wanted.

And she wanted her money out of Jamesons; wanted it in War Loan. This, without any definite statement beyond, “She hoped he wouldn’t have to sell the business,” and “It seemed very difficult, his being at the front,” she made very clear to the astute mind of Peter Jameson.

Yet she pressed them to have some tea, which they refused; pressed them to come again. The visit, the car at the gate, flattered her vanity. “Tom,” she said to herself, “had always thought very highly of young Peter. Tom would be glad that young Peter and his wife had been to see her. But Tom would not like her to leave his money in the business.”

She walked to the gate with them; said what a beautiful evening it was; watched the car glide off round the corner of St. John’s road. Then she turned back to her lonely house, her lonely life. For Tom Simpson’s “mother” had only been a joke between them; and now, he would never joke with her again. . . .

§ 4

Instead of swinging the car left for London, Patricia drove straight past the Harrow foot-ball fields, up the Hill towards the School. Holidays had emptied the Georgian street, the red-brick buildings; the little low cake-shop at which they halted was quite empty.

“I haven’t had any tea,” she explained, as they sat down at a clean table.

“Sorry, old thing,”—Peter’s voice sounded gentler than usual—“I’m afraid I’m a selfish beast.”

“Sometimes,” she laughed, “but I’m glad to have you back all the same.”

A waitress appeared from the back of the shop. Patricia ordered tea for two. They wandered up to the counter; chose cakes, sat down again.

“Now tell me about business,” she said. And Peter told her, a little bitterly, the whole tale.

“I can’t see any hope of saving the show,” he ended. “Miss Macpherson thinks she can run it. Perhaps she could, if one had enough capital. But one hasn’t. So that’s the end of that. First Nirvana, then Jamesons—they all go the same way home. Serves me right for gambling, I suppose. But I wish I hadn’t let _you_ down, Pat.”

“You haven’t let me down,” she flashed at him: and the sudden anger surprised them both. “Do you think I married you just for money? Do you think I want you to be like Rawlings? . . .”

“No”—somehow her anger soothed him—“of course I don’t.”

“Well then, why do you talk about letting _me_ down?”

“Because, Pat”—he spoke slowly, fumbling for words—“a man’s got no right to marry a woman and have children if he can’t look after them. Two years ago, we had three thousand a year; today, we’ll be lucky if we’ve got six hundred. That’s failure, Pat. And you know what I think of failure.”

She remembered a similar conversation, long ago, at the Carlton.

“It isn’t your fault,” she said stubbornly. “And besides”—her voice grew very gentle—-“lots of people are very happy on six hundred a year.”

“In books,” he sneered.

“Peter”—she looked at him and he saw her eyes suffuse—“that _hurts_.”

The sudden change in her dumbfounded him. Always, they had talked openly, as man to man. Now, he knew instinctively that he must finesse. And he hated finesse—even in commerce. Yet he was sorry to have hurt her; told her so; tried to explain.

“It’s all right for some people, Pat. But it wouldn’t suit us. Imagine us living in a place like ‘The Limes.’ . . .”

Thought Patricia, “He’s been home half a day and he hasn’t even kissed me yet!”

Nevertheless, she pulled herself together. He had come home “on business”; and he must be allowed to settle his business in his own way. He looked thinner, she thought: and it seemed to her a shame that he should be worried with money-matters when his real work lay elsewhere, at the front.

She let him talk himself into optimism; admired the ultimate philosophy with which he said: “Anyway, it’s only temporary. One doesn’t alter a deal by talking round it. Jamesons will have to go. Let it! Once this war’s over, I’ll get into business again. And then, then, my dear, you’ll see me make things hum.”

He paid for tea; insisted on driving home himself. They spun out of twilit country into the blueing gloom of war-time London; made Harley Street in time for dinner.

The children, who had waited up for his return, greeted their father uproariously; could hardly be induced to bed. Later Heron Baynet produced Clicquot, a decanter of special brandy. The three of them made semblance of enjoyment. Peter told them how he had wangled his leave; Patricia broached a plan long contemplated—the taking of a little place in the country; her father spoke, as always, of his work.

The little consultant with the lined face and the kind eyes was one of the only three men in England who had made any study of war’s effect on the fighting man’s nerves. Already, in the card-index on the table in his consulting-room, he had tabulated five hundred cases; and from those five hundred cases, a theory had begun to evolve itself—a theory of eminent simplicity. Heron Baynet called it, “The Curve of the Limit of Human Endurance.”

The curve and the limit of each individual varied, were affected by conditions—physical, mental, and sexual, conditions of heredity and conditions of pre-war environment. But of one thing, Heron Baynet already held the absolute certainty:—The superman, as preached by German philosophers, did not exist. Every human individuality possessed its breaking-strain, the point beyond which will-power could not force either the body or the brain. Any attempt to pass that “limit of human endurance” must be foredoomed to failure.

And it seemed to Heron Baynet, sitting alone after the two had gone to bed, that he could already detect from certain tones in his son-in-law’s voice, from the way his conversation ran from one topic to another, from the whole atmosphere his personality exuded, that Peter Jameson had already abandoned the flat level of the normal, begun the slow climb up that curve of endurance which must lead eventually to breaking point. . . .