The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 7

The jolly old war drags on and seems as though it were never going to end. Not that I've much to kick about, for it's proved a chance for me. Here's the great news. I'm in for my commission and shall soon be 'an officer and a gentleman.' Don't tell his Lords.h.i.+p if you write to him or see him; he's still in the ranks and might not like it. It's funny to think that I shall be his military superior before many weeks are out and that, were he and I to meet, he'd have to salute me. If I come through the war, I sha'n't go back to being a valet.

Once having been a gentleman----"_

Tabs ran rapidly through this sheet and turned to the next:--

_"You're wonderfully good. I got the socks that you knitted and the two parcels of food from Harrods. You mustn't spend so much of your money on me. When it's all ended, I'll pay you back. We'll get married and have a little cottage in a little town, the way the song says that we heard together at the Comedy on my last leave. You remember how it goes.

'And we'll have a little mistress in a silken gown.

A little doggie, a little cat, A little doorstep, with WELCOME on the mat.'

"My dearest sweetheart, I love you.

"Yours, in the pink, etc."_

Tabs looked up. "May I keep this for the present?--And, by the way, how many more of them have you?"

"Nearly a hundred from the day he enlisted. That's one of the last--I never heard from him whether he lived to get his commission."

When she had vanished, he reread the letter more carefully, made a copy of it and slipped the copy into another envelope addressed to General Braithwaite, together with a note from himself, which read, "_One of the important reasons why I am insistent that you shall call on me is contained in the enclosed copy of one of your many letters, the originals of all of which are in my possession. To a man of honor it speaks for itself_."

IV

At the red pillar-box, at the foot of the Square, he posted this second missive. "He'll receive them both by the first delivery to-morrow," he thought. "I wonder what he'll---- Rotten! But it can't be helped." Then he turned to the right by the Tube Station, going up the narrow old world pa.s.sage, behind the backs of houses, through the graveyard of the Brompton Parish Church to Ennismore Gardens and the sudden, railed in solitudes of Hyde Park.

There were few pedestrians about. Until he reached the Park they were for the most part men in evening-dress, going to dinner-parties, like himself. Sometimes they were accompanied by their wives or sweethearts, whose little high-heeled shoes made a sharp tap-a-tap against the pavement. Lamps were lighted. The reluctant twilight was gradually fading; the sunset still glowed faintly above cl.u.s.tered chimney-pots to the west. "I'm going to meet Terry," he told himself. "If the day had worked out as I'd planned, I should be going to ask for her hand in marriage---- When I planned that, I still believed that I was young."

Then he thought forward. Sir Tobias, from the moment he entered, would be scheming to get him to himself. Sir Tobias must be avoided. Directly dinner was ended, he would try to hurry him off and imprison him in his library to discuss this Maisie woman and Adair. Still he was going to see Terry; merely to see her was a compensation which stirred his blood.

He crossed the Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his coat and hat with the velvet-plush manner of a fas.h.i.+onable surgeon feeling a patient's pulse.

"If you will come this way, Sir Tobias is waiting for your Lords.h.i.+p in the library."

It was happening precisely as he had foreseen; it was being taken for granted that he had come as her father's friend, and therefore in some absurd measure as his contemporary.

As he prepared to follow, his attention was attracted by the scarlet band and gold braid about an officer's cap which was lying carelessly on the hall-table beside a pair of dog-skin gloves.

V

Sir Tobias was standing astride the hearth-rug with his back towards the fire. As the door opened, he was caught in a last nervous adjustment of his tie.

He was a little man, inclined to be podgy, brimful of a darting kind of energy and dignified with an air of fussy distinction which none of his antics, however grotesque, could diminish. He was Shakespeare as he might have appeared at sixty, after years and a return to Ann Hathaway had quenched the taller flames of his poetic fire. The resemblance was haunting and remarkable: there underlay it a hint of gnome-like agility.

One suspected that he affected age as a disguise. The pointed beard was white; the scanty hair had receded from the calm forehead; the eyes were blue and faded, and red about the rims with over-much study. The top part of the face above the cheek-bones was n.o.ble; but the lower part fell away to a mouth and chin which were amiable and undecided. At the hour of Tabs' arrival, he was flinging up his hands and spluttering impotently, an inexpert swimmer in the waters of adversity.

"My dear Lord Taborley! My dear fellow!" The moment he discovered his guest in the doorway he came darting forward. "My dear boy, this is real friends.h.i.+p. We missed you and wanted you so much.--So you're out of it at last? I mean the khaki."

The little, wrinkled hand with its stubby fingers reached up timidly in an attempt to pat the big breadth of shoulders.

"Yes, I'm out of it, Sir Tobias."

Tabs didn't want to be patted. He was impatient of polite evasions. He foresaw that he was expected to spend the next five minutes in replying to questions which required no answers--all this as a conventional preface to a discussion of the delicate position of Adair and Maisie.

But Tabs had his own problem, and one question in particular about a hat on the hall-table that he was burning to ask. They stood staring at each other, the big, fair man and the worn version of Shakespeare, both wondering how long it would be decorous to chatter before they clinched with the vital topic.

"May as well sit down. There's time for a cigarette. Terry----" Sir Tobias made a short-winded attempt to push a second arm-chair into place beside the fire; Tabs achieved the desired end with one lurch of his body. "Terry brought some one in to tea; he's not gone yet. They never know when to go, these New Army fellows. Good at their job, they tell me, but no polish. I suppose I oughtn't to say that--ungrateful of me!

But I'm sick of it all, the invasion of the cla.s.ses, the women in trousers, the beggars on horseback, the Jazz music. I want the old world back--the womanly women, everybody labeled, and Beethoven."

He pushed the cigarette-box fretfully across to Tabs, having first selected one for himself.

"Beethoven," he snorted, "that's what I want, and no bobbed hair and everybody happily married."

"This New Army chap who's with Terry," Tabs paused to make his voice unanxious and ordinary, "does she see much of him? Is she fond of him?"

"Fond of him!" The little man jerked round quickly. He was in a mood to see the shadow of terror in the most far-fetched suggestion. "If I thought she was, I should pack her off to Lady Dawn and keep her with her until the fellow was dead or----"

"What's the matter with him?" Tabs flipped the ash off his cigarette indifferently.

"The matter with him!" Sir Tobias pulled at the point of his beard, making a mental effort to frame the charge. "If you'd asked me that question five years ago I could have told you; but not now. In 1914 we spoke of a man as belonging to our cla.s.s and meant that he had our standards of conduct, our code of honor, our sense of public duty, our traditions--that he could be trusted to run true to form. To-day any man's a gentleman, provided he killed enough Germans."

"But still you do feel that there's something the matter with him."

"Yes, but I can't tell you for the life of me why I feel it. In many ways he's admirable: I believe he's about the youngest brigadier we have who rose from the ranks. There was no hanky-panky about his promotion either--no petticoat influence; it was all sheer merit and courage. He was a fighting-man from first to last and shared all the chances. But the trouble is that one doesn't know where he came from, and, therefore, one can't be sure where he's going. I know that sounds sn.o.bbish. You have the right to tell me that if a man was good enough to be butchered to save an old chap like myself, he ought to be good enough to sit down with me at the same table. But what people don't realize is that men have been wounded in protecting old chaps like myself in coal-mines, and on railroads, and a thousand other places ever since the world started, but until now we never felt it necessary to offer them a bed in our houses. War asked for the simplest gifts from men, physical strength, uncomplaining endurance and courage. The war's ended, and if those same gifts are to continue to secure social advancement, every policeman who captures a burglar ought to be made a bank-president. When I demand that a man shall have traditions to be my friend, I ask no more than when I refuse to buy a dog without a pedigree."

"But this man, what's he called? If he's as distinguished as you say, I ought to have heard of him."

Before his host could answer, the door was discreetly opened. "Dinner is being served, Sir Tobias."

There was a rush of light footsteps and Terry breezed past the butler.

"I know you're going to scold me, Daddy. It's all my fault that you were kept waiting. It took me so long to persuade General Braithwaite. By the time he'd consented---- I had to dress like a hurricane. I'm not at all sure that I'm properly hooked up the back. I know I feel draughty."

Then, as though she had not remembered that he was expected, "Why, hullo, Tabs! In a dinner-jacket! You do look peaceful and jolly."

VI

They had taken their places at the square handsome table, illuminated at each corner by a silver candle-stick, red-shaded and electric-lighted.

Tabs and Terry were seated side by side, so that he saw her always in profile, except when she turned to him in conversation. He saw the soft roundness of her shoulder, the satin pallor of her throat and breast, the quivering gold of her childishly wavy hair.

The General sat isolated, opposite and facing them. Sir Tobias and his wife sat at either end--had they known it, for all the world like judges.

Lady Beddow was a proud, unbending woman, gracious to her own sort, unquestioningly respectful to those above her, tender in a practical way to those below her and coldly scrutinizing to any one who tapped at her door claiming to be an equal. Being bred to her finger-tips, she was as ill-at-ease as her husband in the jostling democracy of the moment.

In the hall Sir Tobias rather huffily had introduced his guests. Tabs had relieved the tension by smiling quietly at Braithwaite, "The General and I have met before."

It was an uncomfortable dinner from the moment they sat down. Sir Tobias, although he had shown no signs of it in the library, seemed to have developed a resentment at having been kept waiting. No reference was made to this resentment, but Terry and the General were obviously the culprits. Sir Tobias was vaguely unhappy and had to blame somebody.

Under the tacitly implied criticism Terry's rebellious spirits rose higher, but the General's authoritative a.s.surance began to crumble.

Sir Tobias was continuing the conversation which had started in the library. He seemed oblivious to the fact that it had then concerned the man who was now present. "You can't make the world afresh with a catastrophe. Men are like water: in a storm they rise above or sink below themselves. When the disturbance is ended, they tend to find their own level. War destroys; it never created anything."

"That's not true, if you'll excuse me for contradicting you. You're speaking without knowledge." Braithwaite uttered himself bluntly as he would have done in his own Headquarters' mess--this despite the fact that it was Tabs whom his host had been addressing.