William John Locke

“ Wellingsford was my little world. I knew everybody in it. I had grown to regard myself as the repository of all its gossip. The fraction of it that I retailed was a matter of calculated discretion. I made a little hobby—it was a foible, a vanity, what you will—of my omniscience. I knew months ahead the dates of the arrivals of young Wellingsfordians in this world of pain and plenitude. I knew of maidens who were wronged and youths who were jilted; of wives who led their husbands a deuce of a dance, and of wives who kept their husbands out of the bankruptcy court. ”

“ Long as I had loved Betty in a fatherly way, deeply as I loved her now, the man's unexpected picture of her was a revelation. You see it was only after her marriage, when she had softened and grown a woman and come so near me that I felt the great comfort of her presence when she was by, the need of it when she was away. How could I have known anything of the elusiveness in her maidenhood before which he knelt so reverently?
That he so knelt is the keynote of the man's soul untainted by the flesh. ”

“ If it had been any other man than Boyce, I should not have worried about the matter at all. Save that I was deeply attached to Betty, what had her discarded lover's attitude to do with me? But Boyce was Boyce, the man of the damnable story of Vilboek's Farm. And he, of his own accord, had revived in my mind that story in all its intensity. A chance foolish question, such as thousands of gentle, sheltered women have put to their suddenly uncomprehended, suddenly deified sons and husbands, had obviously disturbed his nervous equilibrium. ”

“ The shells that burst and slew these brave fellows spread their devastation into our little sheltered town; in a thundering crash tearing off from the very trunk of life here a friend, there a son, there a father, there a husband. And I repeat, at the risk of wearisome insistence, that our sheltered homeland shares the calm, awful fatalism of the battlefield; we have to share it because every rood of our country is, spiritually, as much a battlefield as the narrow, blood-sodden wastes of Flanders and France.
Willie Connor, fine brave gentleman, was dead. My beloved Betty was a widow. ”

“ Sir Anthony had a nervous trick of rattling off many sentences before his interlocutor could get in a word. When he had finished, Boyce politely declined the invitation.
"And with a damned chilly, stand-offish politeness," cried Sir Anthony furiously, when telling me about it. "Just as if I had been Perkins, the fish-monger, asking him to meet the Prettiloves at high tea. It's swelled head, my dear chap; that's what it is. Just swelled head. None of us are good enough for him and his laurels. He's going to remain the modest mossy violet of a hero blushing unseen. Oh, damn the fellow!" ”

“ I hate to be carried up many stairs even by my steel-crane of a Marigold. Just try doing without your legs for a couple of days, and you will see what I mean. Of course I despise myself for such nervous apprehensions, and do not allow them to influence my actions—just as one, under heavy fire, does not satisfy one's simple yearning to run away. I would have given a year's income to be able to refuse Boyce's request with a clear conscience; but I could not. I shrank all the more because my visit in the autumn to Reggie Dacre had shaken me more than I cared to confess. ”

“ Boyce put up the most amazing bluff that has ever happened in this war. He crawls out by himself, without anybody knowing—it was a pitch-black night—gets through the barbed wire, heaven knows how, up to the house; lays a sentry out with his life-preserver; gives a few commands to an imaginary company; and summons the occupants—two officers and fifteen men—to surrender. Thinking they are surrounded, they obey like lambs, come out unarmed, with their hands up, officers and all, and are comfortably marched off in the dark, as prisoners into our trenches. ”

“ I want votes, freedom, opportunity for expansion, power—everything that can develop Betty Connor into a human product worthy of the God who made her. But how she could fulfil herself without the collaboration of a man, has baffled her ever since she was a girl of sixteen, when she began to awake to the modern movement. On one side I saw women perfectly happy in the mere savage state of wifehood and motherhood, and not caring a hang for anything else, and on the other side women who threw babies back into limbo and preached of nothing but intellectual and political and economic independence. ”

“ Nor can there be doubt that unconsciously she fired the passion in him. The deliberate, cold-blooded seducer of his friend's daughter, such as Boyce, in his confession, made himself out to be, is a rare phenomenon. Almost invariably it is the woman who tempts—tempts innocently and unknowingly, without intent to allure, still less with thought of wrong—but tempts all the same by the attraction which she cannot conceal, by the soft promise which she cannot keep out of her eyes.
That was the beginning of it. Betty, whom he loved, and to whom he was engaged, was away from Wellingsford. ”

“ Marigold, with a wooden face, opened wide the door, and Randall, with a shrug of the shoulders, went out.
I stayed awake the whole of that livelong night.
When I learned the death of young Oswald Fenimore, whom I loved far more dearly than Randall Holmes, I went to bed and slept peacefully. A gallant lad died in battle; there is nothing more to be said, nothing more to be thought. The finality, heroically sublime, overwhelms the poor workings of the brain. But in the case of a fellow like Randall Holmes—well, as I have said, I did not get a wink of sleep the whole night long. ”

“ She said dutifully, "Yes, father."
"I want you to marry him. I've set my heart on it. It has been the one bright hope in my life for months. Can't you marry him because you love me?"
"One generally marries because one loves the man one's going to marry," said Phyllis.
"But you do love him," cried Gedge. "Either you're just a wanton little hussy or you must care for the fellow."
"I don't. I hate him. And I don't want to have anything more to do with him." The tears came. "He's a pro-German and I won't have anything to do with pro-Germans." ”

“ Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea, had been drowned in the canal. Here was a tragedy unrelieved, stupid, useless. Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious sacrifice; no dying for one's country. There was no dismissing it with a heroic word that caught in the throat.
I have not started out to write this little chronicle of Wellingsford in order to weep over the pain of the world. God knows there is in it an infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of which are being every day unfolded before my eyes. ”

“ Now a cripple is very sensitive to kindness. I could not reject his overtures. What interested motive could he have in seeking out a useless hulk like me? On the first opportunity I told Betty of the new friendship, having a twinge or two of conscience lest it might appear to her disloyal.
"But why in the world shouldn't you see him, dear?" she said, open-eyed. "He brings the breath of battle to you and gives you fresh life. You're looking ever so much better the last few days. The only thing is," she added, turning her head away, "that I don't want to run the risk of meeting him again." ”

“ The little traitorous folk who gambled for their own hands in politics, the little traitorous folk who put the outworn shibboleths of a party before the war-cry of an Empire, the little traitorous folk who strove with all their power to starve our navy of ships, our ships of coal, our men in the trenches of munitions, our armies of men, our country of honour—all these will one day be mercilessly arraigned at the bar of history. The plains of France, the steeps of Gallipoli, the swamps of Mesopotamia, the Seven Seas will give up their dead as witnesses. ”

“ But a merciful Providence steps in and steels our hearts. The loyal hearts are there beating truly; and in order that they should beat truly and stoutly, they are given this God-sent armour.
So, when we raised our glasses and drank gladly to the success of Willie Connor the living, and put from our thoughts Frank Etherington the dead, you must not account it to us as lack of human pity. You must be lenient in your judgment of those who are thrown into the furnace of a great war.
Lady Fenimore smiled on Betty. "We should all be proud, my dear, if Captain Connor won the Victoria Cross. ”

“ If you think I lived a Tom-tabby, tea-party sort of life, you are quite mistaken, If the War Office could have its way, it would have lashed me in red tape, gagged me with Regulations, and sealing-waxed me up in my bed-room. And there are thousands of us who have shaken our fists under the nose of the War Office and shouted, "All your blighting, Man-with-the-Mudrake officialdom shan't prevent us from serving our country." And it hasn't! The very Government itself, in spite of its monumental efforts, has not been able to shackle us into inertia or drug us into apathy. ”

“ On this occasion, for the first time since South African days, I met him without any mistrust. What had passed between Betty and himself, I did not know. Relations between man and woman are so subtle and complicated, that unless you have the full pleadings on both sides in front of you, you cannot arbitrate; and, as often as not, if you deliver the most soul-satisfying of judgments, you are hopelessly wrong, because there are all important, elusive factors of personality, temperament, sex, and what not which all the legal acumen in the world could not set down in black and white. ”

“ I had been obsessed by the Vilboek Farm story, and by that alone. Reggie Dacre—to say nothing of personages in high command—had proved it to be a horrible lie. He had Marshal Ney's deserved reputation—le brave des braves—and there is no more coldly critical conferrer of such repute than the British Army in the field. To win it a man not only has to do something heroic once or twice—that is what he is there for—but he has to be doing it all the time. Boyce had piled up for himself an amazing record, one that overwhelmed the possibility of truth in old slanders. ”

“ And there was Betty—with all the inexplicable feminine whirring inside her—socially reconciled with Boyce. Where the deuce was this reconciliation going to lead? I have told you how my lunatic love for Betty had stood revealed to me. Had she chosen to love and marry any ordinary gallant gentleman, God knows I should not have had a word to say. The love that such as I can give a woman can find its only true expression in desiring and contriving her happiness. But that she should sway back to Leonard Boyce—no, no. ”

“ The proud will bent. She surrendered herself to a paroxysm of sorrow.
She was not in a fit state to return to the hospital, where, I learned, she shared a bedroom with Phyllis Gedge. I shrank from sending her home to the tactless comforting of her aunts. They were excellent, God-fearing ladies, but they had never understood Betty. All her life they had worried her with genteel admonitions. They had regarded her marriage with disfavour, as an act of foolhardiness—I even think they looked on her attitude as unmaidenly; and now in her frozen widowhood they fretted her past endurance. ”

“ You may say that my plea is no excuse for his betrayal; that no man, even if he is tempted, can be pardoned for non-control of his passions. But I am asking for no pardon; I am trying to obtain your understanding. Remember what I have told you about Boyce, his great bull-neck, his blood-sodden life-preserver, the physical repulsion I felt when he carried me in his arms. ”

“ No one has died or lost sight or limbs in vain. I look around my own little circle. Oswald Fenimore, Willie Connor, Reggie Dacre, Leonard Boyce—how many more could I not add to the list? All those little burial grounds in France—which France, with her exquisite sense of beauty, has assigned as British soil for all time—all those burial grounds, each bearing its modest leaden inscription—some, indeed, heart-rendingly inscribed "Sacred to the memory of six unknown British soldiers killed in action"—are monuments not to be bedewed with tears of lamentation. ”

“ Boyce would have called "Spartianism," Betty kept up her brave face. When Willie Connor's kit came home she told me tearlessly about the heartrending consignment. Now and then she spoke of him—with a proud look in her eyes. She was one of the women of England who had the privilege of being the wife of a hero. In this world one must pay for everything worth having. Her widowhood was the price. All the tears of a lifetime could not bring him back. All the storms of fate could not destroy the glory of those few wonderful months. ”

“ All these great thinkers have their niches in the Temple of Fame, and I'm quite aware that the consensus of human judgment does not immortalise even such an ass as Schopenhauer, without sufficient reason. All I want to convey to you is that I am only a plain, ordinary God-fearing, law-abiding Englishman, and that when young Randall Holmes brought down from Oxford all sorts of highfalutin theories about everything, not only in God's Universe, but in the super-Universe that wasn't God's, and of every one of which he was cocksure, I found my homely self very considerably out of it. ”

“ As I came nearer I recognised the same man, Major Boyce. There were no lights in the lock-keeper's cottage. He and his wife had gone to bed long before. I was so interested that I forgot what I was doing and ran into the hedge so that I nearly came down. There was the noise of the scrape and drag of the machine which must have sounded very loud in the stillness. It startled him, for he looked all round, but he didn't see me, for I was under the hedge. Then suddenly he started running. He ran as if the devil was after him. I saw him squash down his Trilby hat so that it was shapeless. ”

“ I remembered how once she had called him a devil. I remembered, too, uncomfortably, the scrap of conversation I had overheard between Boyce and herself in the hall. She had lashed him with her scorn, and he had taken his whipping without much show of fight. Still, a woman's love, especially that of a lady barbarian, was a curiously complex affair, and had been known to impel her to trample on a man one minute and the next to fall at his feet. ”