Part 13

Every head in the room went round with indignation to William--whom most of the gathering, Faraday included, now noticed for the first time. He was on his feet, stiffened and pallid with passion; but after the cry that had cut short Jay-Blenkinsop he stood silent, with his lips apart and his hands clutching at a chair-back. His fingers knotted and worked as they clutched and his mouth was twisted and quivering; he stood like an animal backed into a corner, defying the astounded eyes and the open incredulous mouths of those who had once been his comrades ... Most incredulous of all was the mouth of Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop, who gaped in amazement at the unprovoked attack on her son.

"May I ask----?" began Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, less slowly and languidly than usual--whereat William, hearing the silence broken, also found words to his tongue.

"You may ask," he interrupted, "oh yes, you may ask! Anything you like. But for God's sake don't lay down the law and make ignorant assertions--for God's sake don't do that. You mustn't lay down the law until you know something, until you've really tried to find out. Then, perhaps, you'll have a right to speak; now when I hear you, I--I----" From sheer sense of the inadequacy of words his voice tailed huskily away; then, with an odd little snarl at his auditors, he burst out savagely afresh: "You child, you great impudent jackanapes! You stand there and dare to make jokes about the hell that other men have burned in. The flames and the blood and the guns and people dying in the road. You talk blank foolery and laugh about it--you laugh and turn up your nose. You think you're clever--and enlightened--and it sickens me, sickens me to hear you!"

He finished on a note that was almost a scream, and they looked at him aghast and dumfoundered. It was his face that held them even more than his disconcerting words--all but Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, who, pricked in his vanity, would have accepted the challenge and started again had not Faraday silenced him with a turn of the head and a gesture. Still more pricked in his vanity he slid to a chair, muttering sulkily and red to the neck.

"Tully----" began Faraday with reproof in his voice--but Tully defied even his mentor. Not savagely and with contempt, as he had defied and decried Jay-Blenkinsop, but as one who had a right to be heard.

"He mustn't talk like that till he knows something. It's child's talk--ridiculous babble. I know what I'm saying--I've come from it--and I've a right to tell him what I know. Not one of you here has seen what I have--you're just guessing. When a shell bursts ... I've seen a man with his legs like red jelly and a horse..." he choked at the memory. "That's being a soldier--let him fight and he'll find it out. Now he thinks it's what he said just now--a sort of game that they like. Everything he said was mean little nonsense--how dare you listen to it and laugh at his silly little jokes? What's the good of saying that it shouldn't happen? Of course it shouldn't happen--we all know that--of course it shouldn't happen, but it does. And you can't stop it with sneers about soldiers and Kitchener.... It's hell and the mouth of hell--I've seen it. He says he wouldn't lift a finger to keep them out. Do you know why he says that? It's because he can't imagine what it means. I would. I'd die to keep them out, because I've seen ... I've seen a man shot--not a soldier, just an ordinary man--put against a wall and shot while his wife howled like a dog. Two men--and their wives standing by. They might do that to him if they came--has he ever thought of that?--while his mother howled like a dog." He shot out a quivering finger at the open-mouthed Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop. "And his women--would he let them do as they liked with his women? They would if they came here--he can take my word for it they would. Would he ask them in politely and shake hands and give them drinks and let them? ... If they came, people would run from them, leaving everything they had--beggars. Would he like to be driven and beaten and made to work like a slave? I've had that--I've been driven and beaten and made to work. And I've run from them and starved and hidden because I was afraid. And my wife died--they killed her----"

There was a gasp, a rustle of movement and a sudden straightening of backs. Every one in the room knew Griselda Tully, many quite intimately, and not a few had been at her wedding; amazement and wrath against the disturber of the peace gave way to a real consternation, and in the silence that followed the momentary rustle William heard Faraday's "Good God!" ... They stared at him in dumb consternation, dimly conscious, perhaps, that they were in the presence of an eternal fact, and that the little man who stabbed at them with a trembling forefinger was the embodiment of that sense of injustice and agony which makes men cry to Heaven for vengeance and, Heaven failing them, take the sword and smite for themselves. Dolly Murgatroyd, Griselda's bridesmaid, who had twice accompanied Griselda to Holloway, saw and shrank from the reality of that tortured revolt which for years she had striven to simulate under the lash of her leaders' bombast.... In face of the fact that was William their theories wilted and failed them, and the new black suit of their comrade Tully was to them as the writing on the wall at the feast of Belshazzar--and came, like that other writing on the wall, at the moment when the evil from which they had hidden their faces was an evil actually accomplished. In each man's heart was a faint reflection of the amaze that had fallen on William and Griselda when their world first crumbled about them.

The sudden movement, the chairman's exclamation and the abashed silence that followed it checked William and brought him to a standstill; speech failed him and he stood with his mouth half open while the meeting stared at him motionless. There was a blank period of tension, of awkward stillness hi the presence of emotion, and then Faraday coughed uncertainly and moved. Probably he intended to say something, perhaps to adjourn the meeting; but his movement and the breaking of silence with his cough gave William back his voice and he spoke before Faraday began.

"And they won't take me in the Army. Although my wife has been killed they won't take me in the Army. I'm not tall enough; I'm only five foot five, and they won't take me. I've seen my wife die--she died in the road--and they refused me when I tried to enlist. If I were only two inches taller--God in Heaven, if I were two inches taller!"

The high, tight voice broke suddenly and he wept with his face in his hands. For the space of a painful moment there was no sound in the room but his sobs--no man knowing what to do or where to turn his eyes until Faraday came down from the platform. The tread of his feet on the gangway broke the spell of embarrassed silence--and chairs were moved softly and the occupants looked away from William as Faraday took him very gently by the arm and led him out into the street.

*CHAPTER XVI*

There was to be a gulf henceforth between William and Faraday, and the twain who had once lived so near together were to see but little of each other; yet it was Faraday who gave him the first word of comfort as he walked by the side of his former disciple on the road to William's flat. "If," he said suddenly and awkwardly--they were nearing their destination and it was the first time he had opened his lips since he led William out of the hall--"if it's this recruiting business, this refusal, that's adding to your trouble, I don't think you need be too much discouraged. Honestly--you see it isn't necessarily final. I know for a fact they're refusing men now, because they can't equip them as fast as they come in. They haven't the uniforms, the accommodation, or the arms, and that's why they sent up the standard for recruits with a rush. But if the thing's as big as they say--the common talk is that Kitchener has prophesied three years of it, and it's very likely true--they'll be wanting every man who'll come in before they've done with it. Not only the big chaps--every one. It will merely be a question of a few months--at the outside only a few months. So I shouldn't take this refusal to heart."

His message of comfort cost Faraday something to deliver; it was the sheer wretchedness of the broken little man beside him that moved him to deny his principles, by implication if not in so many words. The only audible reply that he received was a sniff, but even in the darkness he knew that his inconsistency had not been wasted, and that William had gained from it some measure of help and consolation. He said no more, and they parted with constraint on the pavement outside the flat--to tread through the future ahead of them their separate and several ways. Faraday did not go back to his meeting; he left it to break up or pursue as it would, while he walked the streets restlessly alone.

Between the uttering and fulfilment of Faraday's prophecy William's way, for the next few weeks, was the way of drift and uncertainty; it was also the way of great loneliness, an experience entirely new to him. Loneliness not only by reason of the loss of his wife, but because of the gap that the war had made between himself and his former associates. With the ending of his platform and committee career he was cut off, automatically and completely, from the fellowship of those who had been his co-workers in the various causes and enthusiasms he had once espoused and advocated. It was not that all of his former co-workers would have disagreed with his altered point of view; his was not the only perversion to militarism the stalwarts had to deplore; it was merely that he ceased to meet them. All the same the new isolation in which he lived was largely due to his own initiative or lack of it, since many, even among the stalwarts would have given him kindly welcome and done their best to be of help to him personally; but after the meeting in Bloomsbury he felt small desire to seek them out. On the contrary, he shrank into himself and avoided, as far as possible, any contact with those whose very presence would remind him of the busy, self-satisfied life he had passed in their company, of the vanished, theoretical world where he had met Griselda and loved her. It was a real misfortune that his small private income, though to a certain extent affected by the war, was yet sufficient to keep a roof over his head and supply him with decent necessaries of food and clothing. Thus, he was not driven to the daily work of hand or brain that might have acted as a tonic to the lethargic hopelessness of his mood. Nature had not made him versatile and he had lived in a groove for years; and, his occupation as a public speaker gone, he was left without interest as well as without employment. More than once, goaded into spasmodic activity by some newspaper paragraph, he offered himself vaguely for war-work--only to be discouraged afresh by the offer of an entirely unsuitable job or by delays and evasions which might have discouraged men more competent and energetic than himself.

In one respect fortune was kind to him; he was able, within a week or two of his return to London, to get rid of the lease of the haunted little flat in Bloomsbury. The place was dreadful to him, with its empty demand for Griselda, and he left it thankfully for a lodging in Camden Town. There for some weeks he lived drearily in two small rooms, with no occupation to fill up the void in his life, passing hermit days in the company of newspapers and poring over cheap war literature; he bought many newspapers and much war literature and aroused the sympathy of his elderly landlady by his helplessness and continual loneliness. What kept him alive mentally was his thirsty interest in the war; anything and everything that dealt with it was grist to his mill, and he acquired necessarily in the course of his eager reading some smattering of European history and the outlines of European geography. The pamphlet and journal soon ceased to satisfy, and he felt the need of supplementing their superficial comments and sketchy allusions by reading that was not up-to-date. A newspaper denunciation of the Silesian policy of Frederick the Great led him to Macaulay and others on the Kaiser's ancestor, and references to the Franco-German War resulted in the borrowing from the nearest Free Library of a volume of modern French history. One volume led on to others and the local librarian came to know him as a regular client.

His reading was haphazard, but perhaps, for that reason, all the more informative and illuminating. So far he had acquired such small learning as he possessed on a definite and narrow plan, assimilating only such facts as squared with his theories and rejecting all the others; where his new studies were concerned the very blankness of his ignorance was a guarantee of freedom from prejudice. He stumbled amongst facts and opinions, making little of them and yet making much--since for the first time in his life there was no glib mentor to guide him and he was thrown on his own resources. With his theories demolished and his mind blank as a child's, he became aware of phases of human idea and striving of which he had known nothing in the past, and the resulting comprehension of the existence of spheres outside his own increased his sense of the impossibility of his previous classification of mankind into the well-intentioned and the evil. His own experience had shown him that there might be at least a third class--the ignorant, the mistaken, to which he, William Tully, belonged--and his reading, by its very vagueness, confirmed that personal experience. As he floundered through histories, bewildered and at random, he realized dizzily, but none the less surely, something of the vast and terrifying complexity of these human problems upon which he had once pronounced himself with the certainty of absolute ignorance.

The Free Library, though he knew it not, was a salve to his wounded heart; all unconsciously he had done the best for himself in applying his mind to matters of which his little wife had known nothing. Bismarckian policy and the Napoleonic Wars were topics he had not discussed and interests he had not shared with her; hence they tended to come between him and her memory and distract him from lonely brooding. Without his new studies he might have drifted into sheer melancholia and helplessness; as it was, he burned midnight gas over his books and kept his brain alive. In a measure his interest in his new studies was personal; the craving to strike back was always with him and his reading fed and fanned it; beginning without system he was naturally enough attracted by the drama and movement of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic epoch, read avidly all that the librarian could give him on the subject and moulded his ideas of a soldier's life and military science on the doings of men of those days. The seed of hope that Faraday had implanted did not die, and he thought of himself as a soldier to be, while queer little ambitions flamed up in his barren heart. He read of Ney and Murat, who had carried marshals' batons in their knapsacks--until, the fervour of his obsession growing, he dreamed of himself as an avenging leader, and, with a half-confessed idea of fitting himself for the office, applied hours to the study of the art of war through the medium of an obsolete volume on military lore picked up from a second-hand bookstall in the Charing Cross Road. By its aid--it had been published in the early 'fifties--he attempted to work out the strategy of Kluck and Joffre, and spent long evenings poring over diagrams explanatory of the tactics of Napoleon at Montereau or the Archduke Charles at Essling.

For a time his only real human intercourse, and that by letter, was with Edith Haynes; he had written to her telling of his rejection for the Army and she wrote to him more than occasionally. She was fixed busily in her Somersetshire home, looking after the property of a brother fighting in Flanders, acting as bailiff and herself taking a hand in farm-work. For the first few weeks after Griselda's death she remained William's only friend in the new world of war, and it was not until he had been settled for nearly two months in his Camden Town lodging that he discovered that some at least of his former associates had seen fit, like himself, to reconsider their views and take up arms for their country. He ran against one of them--Watson, in the old days a fiery committee-member of his branch--in the garb of the London Scottish; and he did not know how lonely he had been until he spent an evening in the convert's company, talking his heart out, talking of the war and himself.

With the first announcement of the reduction in the standard of height for recruits he tried to enlist again and was again refused--this time by the doctor who seemingly had doubts about his heart. On the way home a fool woman, arrogating to herself the right to make men die for her, offered him a white feather as he stood waiting for his 'bus--whereupon he turned and swore at her using filthy words that were strange to his lips till her vapid little face grew scarlet. That day, for the first time, his books were no comfort to his soul and he thrust them away and sat brooding--understanding perhaps how personal and revengeful had been his interest in the lore of the past, understanding how strong had been the dreams and ambitions he had cherished in his empty heart. Watson, dropping in for a final chat before starting on foreign service, found him sullen and inert before his fire, and, casting about for a method of comfort, suggested application to another recruiting station; he knew, he said, of more than one man who, refused at a first medical examination, had been passed without trouble at a second. Hope was beaten out of William and he shook his head ... all the same, next morning he tubed to the other end of London, there to make his third attempt.

He asked his way to the townhall and in a species of dull resignation stood waiting his turn for the ordeal of medical inspection. When it came he went listlessly through the now familiar process, stripped, was weighed and measured, was pummelled, showed his teeth, answered questions. It was the stethoscope that had done the business yesterday, and would do it again to-day; not that there was anything the matter with him or his heart--it was just the blind cruel stupidity that was always and in everything against him.... While the doctor bent to listen he was wondering what he should do with to-morrow, what he should do with the next day, what he should do with his life!

He had made so sure of a third rejection that he could hardly believe his ears when he heard he was up to the physical standard required of a soldier of the King. "You've made a mistake," was on the tip of his tongue, and though he checked the words before they were uttered, he stood dazed and staring, much as he had done on the day he was first refused. He could not remember clearly what happened to him next or what he did; he went where he was told, he sat and waited, he repeated words which he knew must have been the oath; his fellows talked to him and he answered back ... but all he was conscious of was the stunning fact of his acceptance. It seemed to him Griselda must know and rejoice--and he had thoughts of her watching him, of her white soul blessing him to victory.

*CHAPTER XVII*

A pencilled scrawl despatched from a mushroom camp in the Home Counties told Edith Haynes that William was at last a soldier; it was brief, written shakily by a man tired in body but uplifted in spirit, informed her that he had just been absorbed into a London battalion, that he had not yet got his uniform, was sleeping in a barn and drilling hard and concluded with the words "Thank God!" She answered the scrawl by return of post and a few weeks later, hearing nothing, wrote again; but, in spite of her request for further news, for month after month she waited in vain for a successor to the shaky scribble.

When it came the war had been in progress a couple of years and the address was a procession of letters--whereof the three last were the B.E.F. that denoted service over-Channel. It was a restrained and correct little letter, on the face of it uninteresting and not much longer than the last, but differing from it in that it was written in ink and in the tidy, clerical hand which William had acquired in the days of his boyhood for the use of the insurance office. It expressed regret for his lengthy silence, but did not attempt to explain it; and went on to relate that before coming to France he had been an orderly-room clerk, that he was at present at an advanced base--he must not of course give its name--where he was employed in office work, principally the typewriting of letters. It concluded with an assurance that he had not forgotten her kindness and a hope she would write to him again ... and she read and re-read the polite little missive, half-guessing what lay between its lines.

It had been written in an interval of that typing of local official communications which was Private Tully's daily contribution to the waging of the European War; and it had not been written earlier because Private Tully was too sullen of heart to write.

For a few weeks only he had known what it was to be a soldier of England in the making; he had drilled, he had marched, he had learned to hold a rifle and his body had ached with the discipline. He had lain down at night so weary that he could not sleep, and he had risen giddily in the morning in fear of the day that was coming. Other men filled out and hardened with their training, grew healthy, muscular and brown--and he set his teeth and argued with himself that this stage of sick exhaustion was only a stage and in time he would be even as they. What he lacked in strength he made up in fiery willingness, overtaxing his energy by dogged efforts to keep level with broader shouldered, tighter muscled men, and steadfastly refusing to admit that his bodily misery was more than a passing discomfort. More than once a good-natured comrade suggested a visit to the doctor--whereat William would flush as at an insult and turn on the meddler almost savagely.

He held on longer than he could have done unaided, by virtue of much kindly help. Once, in a sudden need for sympathy he had told to one of his fellows the story of Griselda and his own conversion to militarism; and, unknown to himself, the story went the round of his mess. From the beginning the men had treated him with the instinctive kindness that the stronger feels for the weakling, but from that time forth their kindness was more than instinctive; they ranged themselves tacitly on the weakling's side in his struggle with his own deficiencies. Little odd jobs of cleaning and furbishing were done for him--often secretly, he knew not by whom--and no man was ever too weary to take on work that would spare him. They were in a conspiracy to save him from blunders--to warn him or shield him from consequences, and as far as camp life permitted they coddled him, with something of the sweet roughness wherewith Nelson was coddled by his captains.