“It’s brutal and unjust.”
“Yes, it’s brutal,” she admitted coldly.
“I thought you, at any rate, would sympathize with me,” he cried.
She turned on him. “And what about me? Who sympathizes with me? Do you ever give a moment’s thought to what I’ve had to go through the last few months?”
“I don’t quite know what you mean,” he stammered.
“I should have thought it was obvious. You can’t be such an innocent babe as to suppose people don’t talk about you. They don’t talk to you because they don’t like to be rude. They send you white feathers instead. But they talk to me. ‘Why isn’t Marmaduke in khaki?’ ‘Why isn’t Doggie fighting?’ ‘I wonder how you can allow him to slack about like that!’ – I’ve had a pretty rough time fighting your battles, I can tell you, and I deserve some credit. I want sympathy just as much as you do.”
“My dear,” said Doggie, feeling very much humiliated, “I never knew. I never thought. I do see now the unpleasant position you’ve been in. People are brutes. But,” he added eagerly, “you told them the real reason?”
“What’s that?” she asked, looking at him with cold eyes.
Then Doggie knew that the wide world was against him. “I’m not fit. I’ve no constitution. I’m an impossibility.”
“You thought you had nerves until you learned to drive the car. Then you discovered that you hadn’t. You fancy you’ve a weak heart. Perhaps if you learned to walk thirty miles a day you would discover you hadn’t that either. And so with the rest of it.”
“This is very painful,” he said, going to the window and staring out. “Very painful. You are of the same opinion as the young women who sent me that abominable thing.”
She had been on the strain for a long while and something inside her had snapped. At his woebegone attitude she relented however, and came up and touched his shoulder.
“A girl wants to feel some pride in the man she’s going to marry. It’s horrible to have to be always defending him – especially when she’s not sure she’s telling the truth in his defence.”
He swung round horrified. “Do you think I’m shamming, so as to get out of serving in the Army?”
“Not consciously. Unconsciously, I think you are. What does your doctor say?”
Doggie was taken aback. He had no doctor. He had not consulted one for years, having no cause for medical advice. The old family physician who had attended his mother in her last illness and had prescribed Gregory powders for him as a child, had retired from Durdlebury long ago. There was only one person living familiar with his constitution, and that was himself. He made confession of the surprising fact. Peggy made a little gesture.
“That proves it. I don’t believe you have anything wrong with you. The nerves business made me sceptical. This is straight talking. It’s horrid, I know. But it’s best to get through with it once and for all.”
Some men would have taken deep offence and, consigning Peggy to the devil, have walked out of the room. But Doggie, a conscientious, even though a futile human being, was gnawed for the first time by the suspicion that Peggy might possibly be right. He desired to act honourably.
“I’ll do,” said he, “whatever you think proper.”
Peggy was swift to smite the malleable iron. To use the conventional phrase might give an incorrect impression of red-hot martial ardour on the part of Doggie.
“Good,” she said, with the first smile of the day. “I’ll hold you to it. But it will be an honourable bargain. Get Dr. Murdoch to overhaul you thoroughly, with a view to the Army. If he passes you, take a commission. Dad says he can easily get you one through his old friend General Gadsby at the War Office. If he doesn’t, and you’re unfit, I’ll stick to you through thick and thin, and make the young women of Durdlebury wish they’d never been born.”
She put out her hand. Doggie took it.
“Very well,” said he, “I agree.”
She laughed, and ran to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To the telephone – to ring up Dr. Murdoch for an appointment.”
“You’re flabby,” said Dr. Murdoch the next morning to an anxious Doggie in pink pyjamas; “but that’s merely a matter of unused muscles. Physical training will set it right in no time. Otherwise, my dear Trevor, you’re in splendid health. I was afraid your family history might be against you – the child of elderly parents, and so forth. But nothing of the sort. Not only are you a first-class life for an insurance company, but you’re a first-class life for the Army – and that’s saying a good deal. There’s not a flaw in your whole constitution.”
He put away his stethoscope and smiled at Doggie, who regarded him blankly as the pronouncer of a doom. He went on to prescribe a course of physical exercises, so many miles a day walking, such and such back-breaking and contortional performances in his bathroom; if possible, a skilfully graduated career in a gymnasium, but his words fell on the ears of a Doggie in a dream; and when he had ended, Doggie said:
“I’m afraid, Doctor, you’ll have to write all that out for me.”
“With pleasure,” smiled the doctor, and gripped him by the hand. And seeing Doggie wince, he said heartily: “Ah! I’ll soon set that right for you. I’ll get you something – an india-rubber contrivance to practise with for half an hour a day, and you’ll develop a hand like a gorilla’s.”
Dr. Murdoch grinned his way, in his little car, to his next patient. Here was this young slacker, coddled from birth, absolutely horse-strong and utterly confounded at being told so. He grinned and chuckled so much that he nearly killed his most valuable old lady patient, who was crossing the High Street.
But Doggie crept out of bed and put on a violet dressing-gown that clashed horribly with his pink pyjamas, and wandered like a man in a nightmare to his breakfast. But he could not eat. He swallowed a cup of coffee and sought refuge in his own room. He was frightened. Horribly frightened, caught in a net from which there was no escape – not the tiniest break of a mesh. He had given his word – and in justice to Doggie, be it said that he held his word sacred – he had given his word to join the Army if he should be passed by Murdoch. He had been passed – more than passed. He would have to join. He would have to fight. He would have to live in a muddy trench, sleep in mud, eat in mud, plough through mud, in the midst of falling shells and other instruments of death. And he would be an officer, with all kinds of strange and vulgar men under him, men like Chipmunk, for instance, whom he would never understand. He was almost physically sick with apprehension. He realized that he had never commanded a man in his life. He had been mortally afraid of Briggins, his late chauffeur. He had heard that men at the front lived on some solid horror called bully-beef dug out of tins, and some liquid horror called cocoa, also drunk out of tins; that men kept on their clothes, even their boots, for weeks at a time; that rats ran over them while they tried to sleep; that lice, hitherto associated in his mind with the most revolting type of tramp, out there made no distinction of persons. They were the common lot of the lowest Tommy and the finest gentleman. And then the fighting. The noise of the horrid guns. The disgusting sights of men shattered to bloody bits. The horrible stench. The terror of having one’s face shot half away and being an object of revolt and horror to all beholders for the rest of life. Death. Feverishly he ruffled his comely hair. Death. He was surprised that the contemplation of it did not freeze the blood in his veins. Yes. He put it clearly before him. He had given his word to Peggy that he would go and expose himself to Death. Death. What did it mean? He had been brought up in orthodox Church of England Christianity. His flaccid mind had never questioned the truth of its dogmas. He believed, in a general sort of way, that good people went to Heaven and bad people went to Hell. His conscience was clear. He had never done any harm to anybody. As far as he knew,