Chapter V The Inevitable
Marjorie stood on the bank above the road, knee-deep in bracken. The Baronrigg chauffeur, an elderly gentleman with that perfect repose of manner which is given only to such members of the tribe as are promoted coachmen, drew up beside the two-seater. Roy jumped out and saluted with great smartness. He was in uniform, and was hung about with that warlike paraphernalia professionally known as “the whole Christmas Tree.” Having disencumbered himself of this, he threw it into the car, climbed the bank, and joined his lady. His heart bumped.
“You do look nice,” said Marjorie. “But what is the matter with your buttons?”
“I have painted them with some black stuff,” replied Roy. “Quite the thing—not swank! It is always done on active service: otherwise my twinkling little buttons might attract the eye of vigilant Boche.” He took her arm, a little feverishly. “What about a stroll in the shades of the forest? What about it, what?”
This was not the way in which Roy had intended to begin the interview. Upon such occasions of stress no man knows what humiliating tricks self-consciousness may not play upon him. But Marjorie, of the superior sex, appeared quite unruffled.
“All right,” she said cheerfully; “come along! I am so glad you are here.”
“Are you, Marjorie?” exclaimed Roy, much encouraged.
“Yes. I want to consult you about something.”
Roy drew back an overhanging branch.
“Step inside the consulting room!” he suggested.
Marjorie seated herself upon a ledge of rock in the snug nook which the branch had concealed. Roy lay down on the grass at her feet. There was silence. At last Marjorie said:
“When must you be at the Depot?”
“Six.” Roy glanced at his new, luminous, dust-proof, non-breakable wrist-watch. “That gives me twenty minutes. What did you want to talk to me about, Marjorie?”
“About Joe.”
“Oh!” There was a certain lack of enthusiasm about the interjection, but Marjorie did not notice it. Roy looked up at her. Her brow was puckered, and her eyes were troubled. She was very fond of brother Joe. Roy, resolutely disengaging his attention from the high lights in her hair, said gently:
“Tell me.”
Marjorie blazed out suddenly.
“He can’t stand it any longer! He has done his best to be patient, and obedient to father, and all that; but it’s breaking his heart. Why, only this morning—”
She related the pitiful incident of the school circular and the Roll of Honour. There were tears in her eyes when she had finished.
“So,” she concluded, “he has made up his mind to join up.”
“Good egg!” observed Roy. “Is he going to apply for a commission, or what?”
“That was what I wanted to consult you about,” said Marjorie. “You are so clever about these things, Roy.”
“Fire away!” replied Roy, much inflated.
“Commissions,” asked Marjorie—“can you get them easily?”
“Not so easily now. The authorities are beginning to sit up and take notice. The first lot of officers in the new armies were mostly all right. They didn’t know much, but they were sahibs, who played the game and handled their men properly. Now they are getting used up, and some pretty strange fish have been given commissions lately. The voice of the T.G. is heard in the land. Here is a letter from my uncle, Alan Laing—our second-in-command. You know him?”
“No, but I have seen him.”
Roy chuckled.
“Yes,” he said, “and he has seen you; and you fairly knocked him flat! But never mind Uncle Alan now. He’s a wicked old man, anyhow. About this T.G. business. Uncle Alan wrote to me the other day. He said that some of the officers lately sent out were about the stickiest crowd he had yet handled. Here’s the letter.”
Of course, among ourselves in the Mess, he read, we make allowances, and try to get the best out of them; for after all, most of them are plucky enough and efficient enough. Unfortunately, the rank-and-file, with the true British passion for inequality, do not share our democratic sentiments. They say, in effect: “This blankety blighter is no better than we are. Why should we salute him, or obey him, or follow him?” The T.G. too often confirms his own sentence; I caught one of my subalterns trying to stand a corporal a drink the other day. I hear they are going to start officers’ schools soon. The sooner the better!
“Of course,” said Marjorie, flying, woman-like, to the personal application of the subject, “Joe wouldn’t behave like that.”
“Good Lord, no! Of course he wouldn’t,” said Roy.
“Amos probably would, though,” added honest Marjorie. “He has never been to a proper school, so he has had no chance to have his Clegg manners improved. But we aren’t troubling about Amos: it’s Joe. Would they take him into a Cadet Officers’ School, do you think?”
“I am sure they would,” said Roy confidently. “Only, it might require a little time, you know.”
“That’s a drawback,” replied Marjorie. “Once father knows what Joe is trying to do, his life at home won’t be worth living. It’ll be a fight all day long: he will be lectured, and badgered, and prayed over. I shouldn’t wonder if they sent for Uncle Fred!”
A thought struck Roy.
“I say,” he enquired, “how old is Joe?”
“Twenty.”
“That hangs the crape on Joseph!” announced Roy—“for a year, at any rate. They won’t give a commission to a minor without his father’s consent.” He wriggled. “Don’t I know it! If they did, I’d have been in the show a year ago.”
“In that case,” said Marjorie, “we must fall back on our second plan.”
“We?”
“I mean Joe and I.”
“Oh, sorry. I was hoping you meant you and me! What is the plan?”
“It’s a secret just now,” said Marjorie. “Perhaps I’ll tell you about it, when I write.”
Roy looked up eagerly.
“You will write to me?” he said. “Often?”
“Of course I will!” said the girl. “It will be wonderful!”
What she meant was that it would be wonderful to have, in future, a personal interest in the British Expeditionary Force. As already indicated, the circle in which Marjorie had been born and bred was not very heavily represented in France—nor would be until conscription came. But now Roy would be there. She would have a personal outlet for her imagination, and a peg to hang her prayers on. Women hate abstract patriotism, as they hate all abstractions. Roy would supply the human, personal element, upon which a woman’s visions must always be founded. Male orators might volley and thunder about the common cause and the redemption of civilization; but to most women the Great War and its issues were usually embodied in the person of a single undistinguished individual in a tin bowler.
Roy, of course, did not understand.
“How glorious of you to say that, Marjorie!” he exclaimed.
“You do not know,” continued Marjorie rapturously, “how I have longed and longed to have some one to write to, and send parcels to, and everything—some one I really knew!—instead of a bundle of things to be distributed among a whole platoon!”
“And you are going to make me that particular person?” said Roy, joyfully.
“Rather! You see,” explained Marjorie with fatal frankness, “I don’t know anyone else. At least, I shan’t, until Joe—”
Roy’s face fell. “I thought there was a catch about it!” he said woefully.
“About what?”
“About what you said. I didn’t understand that all you wanted was some one to write to; and any old thing would do—even me! I did hope, for a minute—”
Marjorie was all repentance at once.
“Oh!” she cried. “How hateful of me! Roy, I didn’t mean it! What must you think of me? I must seem like a common little war-flapper. But I’m not, am I? Roy, you know I’m not! Will you forgive me?” She extended a hand impetuously.
It fired the train. Next moment Roy had caught it in both of his, and was kissing it rapturously.
“Marjorie—dear!” he murmured. He was kneeling before her now, with his arms crossed upon her knees. He looked up into her face, and suddenly realised what he was leaving behind. A great sob shook him. Perhaps the thought of the twenty-three second lieutenants had something to do with it. After all, he was only nineteen, and love and life were very sweet. His head sank on to his arms; his shoulders heaved.
There followed a brief interval of silence—perhaps three minutes. But within that interval something happened to Marjorie.
Presently a slim hand removed Roy’s glengarry bonnet, and began to stroke his obstinately curly hair. Next, Roy was conscious of a warm splash, somewhere behind his right ear—followed by another, and another. Marjorie was shaking now. Roy looked up at her again, and the sight of her wet face suddenly braced him against his own weakness. He sprang up.
“You poor, poor, poor!” he said. “Let me—”
He produced a khaki handkerchief from his sleeve, and dried her eyes, Marjorie meekly submitting. After that, inevitably, he kissed her. It was not a very successful kiss: first kisses seldom are. Then he sat down upon the grass again with his head against her knee, and her hand against his cheek. He sighed, long and rapturously. Marjorie stroked his hair with her free hand. Children both, they were living through a moment for which others, less fortunate, have sometimes waited a lifetime, and which in no case ever comes to man or maid a second time.
Presently they began to talk, employing the two inevitable topics of the newly-betrothed—“When did it begin?” and, “Do you remember?”
They recalled their first glimpse of one another—that May morning in church, more than a year ago.
“Uncle Alan was very witty on the subject,” said Master Roy. “Oh, most diverting! It’s my belief the old ruffian was having a good one-time-look-see at you himself, and that was why he caught me at it. Well, I can’t say I blame him!”
They wandered on to the second subject. Here they had much ground to cover.
They had not actually met until three weeks after the glimpse. During those weeks Roy religiously attended dances, tea-parties, political meetings, even a church soirée, in the hope of encountering his divinity; but in vain. Once he bought three numbered and reserved seats for an amateur theatrical entertainment in the Town Hall, and sent two of these to Netherby, “With the compliments of the committee.” But Mrs. Clegg, knowing that her husband did not hold with theatrical entertainments, and that under no circumstances would she or the family be permitted to attend this one, had passed the tickets on to a more emancipated quarter, with the result that Roy witnessed the performance in the giggling company of two Netherby housemaids. He told the story to Marjorie now, and was rewarded with tears and laughter.
But they had met at last—at the local Hunt Steeplechases. Marjorie was present, privily, in the two-seater, with brother Joe. Roy had spied the pair from the regimental enclosure. He was due back at his crammer’s in two days’ time, and was a desperate man. Summoning his entire stock of audacity—it was considerable, but he needed it all—he left the enclosure, pushed his way through the crowd, and addressed himself to the male member of the rather forlorn couple standing by the rails.
“I say, sir, aren’t you Mr. Clegg, of Netherby?”
Joe, quite unequal to the situation, murmured something inarticulate; but Marjorie came to the rescue.
“How do you do?” she said. “You are Mr. Birnie, aren’t you?”
“Yes. We are your next-door neighbours—your nearest little playmates, in fact,” replied Master Roy. (Netherby is some four or five miles from Baronrigg; but no matter.) “My father has been meaning to shoot cards on you for a long time. Meanwhile, would you care to come into the enclosure? Bracing air! Gravel soil! Commands a distant prospect of the Cheviot Hills, and so on! Highly recommended! Do come!” He waited breathlessly for her reply, fearful of having gone too far. But the invitation was accepted.
“What a moment!” he said. “What a moment!” He looked up at Marjorie again. “I was afraid you would turn me down, for cheek. You hesitated a bit, didn’t you?”
Marjorie laughed, joyously.
“My dear, that was for manners! I wouldn’t have let you go at that moment for anything in the world!” She played a gentle arpeggio on the brown cheek under her hand.
“By gum, I wish I had known that!” observed Roy, with sincerity.
Once inside the enclosure Marjorie created a profound sensation. It is true that not many of her own sex addressed themselves to her, but this omission was more than balanced by the empressement of the gentlemen.
First of all, naturally, she was introduced to the senior officer present—Major Eric Bethune, who, in the secret view of his subordinates, proceeded to take an unsportsmanlike and unduly prolonged advantage of his superior rank. Duty called him at last to the side of a lady of riper years. Thereafter, Marjorie, almost invisible for second lieutenants, was escorted about the course, shown the jumps, plied with tea, and invited to back horses at other people’s expense. She had driven home in a dream, with her exhausted relative slumbering beside her.
After that a few mothers and sisters, hounded thereto by clamorous menkind, had left cards at Netherby. The calls had been duly returned, with the result that some of the sisters added themselves, quite voluntarily, to the ranks of the brothers. Marjorie possessed the supreme quality in a woman of being attractive to her own sex. Mrs. Clegg and her daughter began to be seen at subscription balls and the more comprehensive garden parties; presently at more intimate entertainments. In the end, Netherby usually received a card for any function that was going, always excepting such—formal dinner parties and the like—as necessitated inviting Albert Clegg.
“The girl is a peach,” was the local verdict, “and mother does her best; but the old man merely suggests eternal punishment!”
And wherever Marjorie appeared—at ball, function, fête, bazaar, gymkhana, or tea-fight, Master Roy Birnie, home for good from the crammer’s, was usually visible in respectful attendance.
Not that she had not other adherents. Even Major Bethune himself, the handsomest man and the most eligible parti in the county, did not consider it beneath his dignity to sit out a dance or two with the daughter of Albert Clegg. But Roy’s devotion was marked by its unflagging and conscientious continuity. He was a regular visitor at Netherby. It was his habit to ride over every morning—usually about eleven, when the master of the house was engaged in transacting business in the library, mostly over the telephone to Newcastle—where he would play tennis, perform tricks on the billiard table, give the children riding-lessons, pick roses for Mrs. Clegg—do anything, in fact, which afforded him a reasonable excuse for remaining on the premises. Being British, and only eighteen, his passion had not declared itself in words; nor would have for many a day, but for the quickening influences already indicated. Even when the coming of war suddenly laid a man’s responsibilities upon his young shoulders, and removed most of his rivals, real and imaginary, en masse, to the other side of the Channel, he did not look higher, for the present, than the foot of Marjorie’s pedestal. His intention was to leave his lady perched upon the summit thereof for the duration; and then, if and when he returned safe and whole from castigating the Boche, to invite her to step down to earth and start, under his escort, upon the adventure of life. To do more at present struck him as unsportsmanlike. He would be forcing her hand unfairly; he would be taking a sentimental advantage of the military situation. But the last ten minutes had entirely upset his plan of operations. He had kissed Marjorie; Marjorie had indubitably kissed him back; and now they were sitting side by side in Craigfoot Wood, in an attitude which twelve months ago would have outraged both his susceptibilities and his sense of humour, facing the prospect of indefinite separation. What was the next step? What about it, what? Pending a decision, he saluted his lady afresh.
From the road below them came a respectful toot from the horn of the Craigfoot motor, suggestive of a faithful attendant coughing a discreet reminder behind his hand. Roy glanced at his watch, and rose to his feet with a heartrending sigh.
“Time to go!” he groaned.
He held out his hands to Marjorie, and raised her up. For a moment those two young people looked one another bravely in the face—for the last time, for aught they knew. They were very much of a height; Roy had the advantage of perhaps an inch. Then that direct young maiden, Marjorie, put both arms round Roy’s neck.
“Good-bye, dear,” she said. “Take care of yourself, and come back safe to me!”
“I’ll come back,” replied Roy stoutly, forgetting all about the twenty-three second lieutenants. He had no doubts about anything now. Then:
“Marjorie,” he asked, “when will you marry me? As soon as the war is over?” He waited, expectant.
Marjorie’s answer took the rather puzzling form of a little choking laugh, accompanied by two large tears.
“As soon as that?” she asked.
The young of the male species possesses no intuition.
“Yes,” replied Roy earnestly, “just as soon! Or”—with the air of one conceding a point—“pretty soon after.” He came closer. “Marjorie—will you?”
This time Marjorie smiled without any tears at all—a purely maternal smile.
“Leave it to me, little man!” she said.
Then she kissed him again, and sent him off to fight for her.
That night Joe Clegg crept downstairs, out of the house, and thence (per two-seater) to the railway junction twelve miles away. Here he caught the early morning train to London, where it was his intention to enlist. He was accompanied by his sister Marjorie, who, after a final and tempestuous debate with her father upon the subject of filial duty and feminine usefulness in war-time, had decided to burn her boats too, and enlist in the gallant sisterhood of those who were Really Trying to Help.