“Ker-ist!” said Chipmunk.
“What in the thundering blazes are you doing there?” cried Oliver.
Chipmunk turned.
“Oh, my God!” said Oliver.
Then he sank on a chair and laughed and laughed, and the more he looked at Chipmunk the more he laughed. And Chipmunk stood stolid, holding the shirt of the awful, wet, thumb-marked front. But it was not at the shirt that Oliver laughed.
“Good God!” he cried, “were you born like that?”
For Chipmunk, having gone to the barber’s, was clean-shaven, and revealed himself as one of the most comically ugly of the sons of men.
“Never mind,” said Oliver, after a while, “you’ve made the sacrifice for your country.”
“And wot if I get the face-ache?”
“I’d get something that looked like a face before I’d talk of it,” grinned Oliver.
At the family dinner-table, Doggie being present, he announced his intentions. It was the duty of every able-bodied man to fight for the Empire. Had not half a million just been called for? We should want a jolly sight more than that before we got through with it. Anyway, he was off to-morrow.
“To-morrow?” echoed the Dean.
Burford, who was handing him potatoes, arched his eyebrows in alarm. He was fond of Oliver.
“With Chipmunk.”
Burford uttered an unheard sigh of relief.
“We’re going to enlist in King Edward’s Horse. They’re our kind. Overseas men. Lots of ’em what you dear good people would call bad eggs. There you make the mistake. Perhaps they mayn’t be fresh enough raw for a dainty palate—but for cooking, good hard cooking, by gosh! nothing can touch ’em.”
“You talk of enlisting, dear,” said Mrs. Conover. “Does that mean as a private soldier?”
“Yes—a trooper. Why not?”
“You’re a gentleman, dear. And gentlemen in the Army are officers.”
“Not now, my dear Sophia,” said the Dean. “Gentlemen are crowding into the ranks. They are setting a noble example.”
They argued it out in their gentle old-fashioned way. The Dean quoted examples of sons of family who had served as privates in the South African War.
“And that to this,” said he, “is but an eddy to a maelstrom.”
“Come and join us, James Marmaduke,” said Oliver across the table. “Chipmunk and me. Three ‘sworn brothers to France.’ ”
Doggie smiled easily. “I’m afraid I can’t undertake to swear a fraternal affection for Chipmunk. He and I would have neither habits nor ideals in common.”
Oliver turned to Peggy. “I wish,” said he, with rare restraint, “he wouldn’t talk like a book on deportment.”
“Marmaduke talks the language of civilization,” laughed Peggy. “He’s not a savage like you.”
“Don’t you jolly well wish he was!” said Oliver.
Peggy flushed. “No, I don’t!” she declared.
The Dean being called away on business immediately after dinner, the young men were left alone in the dining-room when the ladies had departed. Oliver poured himself out a glass of port and filled his pipe—an inelegant proceeding of which Doggie disapproved. A pipe alone was barbaric, a pipe with old port was criminal. He held his peace however.
“James Marmaduke,” said Oliver, after a while, “what are you going to do?” Much as Marmaduke disliked the name of “Doggie,” he winced under the irony of the new appellation.
“I don’t see that I’m called upon to do anything,” he replied.
Oliver smoked and sipped his port. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings any more,” said he gravely, “though sometimes I’d like to scrag you—I suppose because you’re so different from me. It was so when we were children together. Now I’ve grown very fond of Peggy. Put on the right track, she might turn into a very fine woman.”
“I don’t think we need discuss Peggy, Oliver,” said Marmaduke.
“I do. She is sticking to you very loyally.” Oliver was a bit of an idealist. “The time may come when she’ll be up the devil’s own tree. She’ll develop a patriotic conscience. If she sticks to you while you do nothing she’ll be miserable. If she chucks you, as she probably will, she’ll be no happier. It’s all up to you, James Doggie Marmaduke, old son. You’ll have to gird up your loins and take sword and buckler and march away like the rest. I don’t want Peggy to be unhappy. I want her to marry a man. That’s why I proposed to take you out with me to Huaheine and try to make you one. But that’s over. Now, here’s the real chance. Better take it sooner than later. You’ll have to be a soldier, Doggie.”
His pipe not drawing, he was preparing to dig it with the point of a dessert-knife, when Doggie interposed hurriedly.
“For goodness’ sake, don’t do that! It makes cold shivers run down my back!”
Oliver looked at him oddly, put the extinct pipe in his dinner-jacket pocket and rose.
“A flaw in the dainty and divine ordering of things makes you shiver now, old Doggie. What will you do when you see a fellow digging out another fellow’s intestines with the point of a bayonet? A bigger flaw there somehow!”
“Don’t talk like that. You make me sick,” said Doggie.
CHAPTER VI
During the next few months there happened terrible and marvellous things, which are all set down in the myriad chronicles of the time; which shook the world and brought the unknown phenomenon of change into the Close of Durdlebury. Folks of strange habit and speech walked in it, and, gazing at the Gothic splendour of the place, saw through the mist of autumn and the mist of tears not Durdlebury but Louvain. More than one of those grey houses flanking the cathedral and sharing with it the continuity of its venerable life, was a house of mourning; not for loss in the inevitable and not unkindly way of human destiny as understood and accepted with long disciplined resignation—but for loss sudden, awful, devastating; for the gallant lad who had left it but a few weeks before, with a smile on his lips, and a new and dancing light of manhood in his eyes, now with those eyes unclosed and glazed staring at the pitiless Flanders sky. Not one of those houses but was linked with a battlefield. Beyond the memory of man the reader of the Litany had droned the accustomed invocation on behalf of the Sovereign and the Royal Family, the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, the Lords of the Council and all prisoners and captives, and the congregation had lumped them all together in their responses with an undifferentiating convention of fervour. What had prisoners and captives, any more than the Lords of the Council, to do with their lives, their hearts, their personal emotions? But now—Durdlebury men were known to be prisoners in German hands, and after “all prisoners and captives” there was a long and pregnant silence, in which was felt the reverberation of war against pier and vaulted arch and groined roof of the cathedral, which was broken too, now and then, by the stifled sob of a woman, before the choir came in with the response so new and significant in its appeal—“We beseech thee to hear us, O Lord!”