The Rough Road Part 40

"And all this time you haven't told me how you got it. How did you?"

Doggie squirmed. The inevitable and dreaded question had come at last.

"I just got sniped when I was out, at night, with a wiring party," he said hurriedly.

"But that's no description at all," she objected.

"I'm afraid it's all I can give," Doggie replied. Then, by way of salve to a sensitive conscience, he added: "There was nothing brave or heroic about it, at all--just a silly accident. It was as safe as tying up hollyhocks in a garden. Only an idiot Boche let off his gun on spec and got me. Don't let us talk about it."

But Peggy was insistent. "I'm not such a fool as not to know what mending barbed wire at night means. And whatever you may say, you got wounded in the service of your country."

It was on Doggie's agitated lips to shout a true "I didn't!" For that was the devil of it. Had he been so wounded, he could have purred contentedly while accepting the genuine hero's meed of homage and consolation. But he had left his country's service to enter that of Jeanne. In her service he had been shot through the leg. He had no business to be wounded at all. Jeanne saw that very clearly. To have exposed himself to the risk of his exploit was contrary to all his country's interests. His wound had robbed her of a fighting man, not a particularly valuable warrior, but a soldier in the firing line all the same. If every man went off like that on private missions of his own and got properly potted, there would be the end of the Army. It was horrible to be an interesting hero under false pretences.

Of course he might have been George Was.h.i.+ngtonian enough to shout: "I cannot tell a lie. I didn't." But that would have meant relating the whole story of Jeanne. And would Peggy have understood the story of Jeanne? Could Peggy, in her plain-sailing, breezy British way, have appreciated all the subtleties of his relations with Jeanne? She would ask pointed, probably barbed, questions about Jeanne. She would tear the whole romance to shreds. Jeanne stood too exquisite a symbol for him to permit the sacrilege of Peggy's ruthless vivisection. For vivisect she would, without shadow of doubt. His long and innocent familiarity with womankind in Durdlebury had led him instinctively to the conclusion formulated by one of the world's greatest cynics in his advice to a young man: "If you care for happiness, never speak to a woman about another woman."

Doggie felt uncomfortable as he looked into Peggy's clear blue eyes; not conscience-stricken at the realization of himself as a scoundrelly Don Juan--that never entered his ingenuous mind; but he hated his enforced departure from veracity. The one virtue that had dragged the toy Pom successfully along the Rough Road of the soldier's life was his uncompromising att.i.tude to Truth. It cost him a sharp struggle with his soul to reply to Peggy:

"All right. Have it so if it pleases you, my dear. But it was an idiot fluke all the same."

"I wonder if you know how you've changed," she said, after a while.

"For better or worse?"

"The obvious thing to say would be 'for the better.' But I wonder. Do you mind if I'm frank?"

"Not a bit."

"There's something hard about you, Marmaduke."

Doggie wrinkled lips and brow in a curious smile. "I'll be frank too.

You see, I've been living among men, instead of a pack of old women."

"I suppose that's it," Peggy said thoughtfully.

"It's a dud sort of place, Durdlebury," said he.

"Dud?"

He laughed. "It never goes off."

"You used to say, in your letters, that you longed for it."

"Perhaps I do now--in a way. I don't know."

"I bet you'll settle down there after the war, just as though nothing had happened."

"I wonder," said Doggie.

"Of course you will. Do you remember our plans for the reconstruction of Denby Hall, which were knocked on the head? All that'll have to be gone into again."

"That doesn't mean that we need curl ourselves up there for ever like caterpillars in a cabbage."

She arched her eyebrows. "What would you like to do?"

"I think I'll want to go round and round the world till I'm dizzy."

At this amazing p.r.o.nouncement from Marmaduke Trevor, Peggy gasped. It also astonished Doggie himself. He had not progressed so far on the road to self-emanc.i.p.ation as to dream of a rupture of his engagement.

His marriage was as much a decree of destiny as had been his enlistment when he walked to Peter Pan's statue in Kensington Gardens.

But the war had made the prospect a distant one. In the vague future he would marry and settle down. But now Peggy brought it into alarming nearness, thereby causing him considerable agitation. To go back to vegetation in Durdlebury, even with so desirable a companion cabbage as Peggy, just when he was beginning to conjecture what there might be of joy and thrill in life--the thought dismayed him; and the sudden dismay found expression in his rhetorical outburst.

"Oh, if you want to travel for a year or two, I'm all for it," cried Peggy. "I can't say I've seen much of the world. But we'll soon get sick of it, and yearn for home. There'll be lots of things to do.

We'll take up our position as county people--no more of the stuffy old women you're so down on--and you'll get into Parliament and sit on committees, and so on, and altogether we'll have a topping time."

Doggie had an odd sensation that a stranger spoke through Peggy's familiar lips. Well, perhaps, not a stranger, but a half-forgotten dead and gone acquaintance.

"Don't you think the war will change things--if it hasn't changed them already?"

"Not a bit," Peggy replied. "Dad's always talking learnedly about social reconstruction, whatever that means. But if people have got money and position and all that sort of thing, who's going to take it away from them? You don't suppose we're all going to turn socialists and pool the wealth of the country, and everybody's going to live in a garden-city and wear sandals and eat nuts?"

"Of course not," said Doggie.

"Well, how are people like ourselves going to feel any difference in what you call social conditions?"

Doggie lit another cigarette, chiefly in order to gain time for thought; but an odd instinct made him secure the matchbox before he picked out the cigarette. Superficially, Peggy's proposition was incontrovertible. Unless there happened some social cataclysm, involving a newly democratized world in ghastly chaos, which after all was a remote possibility, the externals of gentle life would undergo very slight modification. Yet there was something fundamentally wrong in Peggy's conception of post-war existence. Something wrong in essentials. Now, a critical att.i.tude towards Peggy, whose presence was a proof of her splendid loyalty, seemed hateful. But there was something wrong all the same. Something wrong in Peggy herself that put her into opposition. In one aspect, she was the pre-war Peggy, with her cut-and-dried little social ambitions and her definite projects of attainment; but in another she was not. The pre-war Peggy had swiftly turned into the patriotic English girl who had hounded him into the army. He found himself face to face with an amorphous, characterless sort of Peggy whom he did not know. It was perplexing, baffling. Before he could formulate an idea, she went on:

"You silly old thing, what change is there likely to be? What change is there now, after all? There's a scarcity of men. Naturally. They're out fighting. But when they come home on leave, life goes on just the same as before--tennis parties, little dances, dinners. Of course, lots of people are hard hit. Did I tell you that Jack Paunceby was killed--the only son? The war's awful and dreadful, I know--but if we don't go through with it cheerfully, what's the good of us?"

"I think I'm pretty cheerful," said Doggie.

"Oh, you're not grousing and you're making the best of it. You're perfectly splendid. But you're philosophizing such a lot over it. The only thing before us is to do in Germany, Prussian militarism, and so on, and then there'll be peace, and we'll all be happy again."

"Have you met many men who say that?" he asked.

"Heaps. Oliver was only talking about it the other day."

"Oliver?"

At his quick challenge he could not help noticing a little cloud, as of vexation, pa.s.s over her face.

"Yes, Oliver," she replied, with an unnecessary air of defiance. "He has been over here on short leave. Went back a fortnight ago. He's as cheerful as cheerful can be. Jollier than ever he was. I took him out in the dear old two-seater and he insisted on driving to show how they drove at the Front--and it's only because the Almighty must have kept a special eye on a Dean's daughter that I'm here to tell the tale."

"You saw a lot of him, I suppose?" said Doggie.

A flush rose on Peggy's cheek. "Of course. He was staying at the Deanery most of his time. I wrote to you about it. I've made a point of telling you everything. I even told you about the two-seater."

"So you did," said Doggie. "I remember." He smiled. "Your description made me laugh. Oliver's a major now, isn't he?"

"Yes. And just before he got his majority they gave him the Military Cross."