Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  He knew no one and throughout the four days no one spoke to him at all. He moved through the crowded thoroughfares unnoticed as a wraith; he sat apart in restaurants; and as his father had done, he tramped by night the hollow-sounding streets of the city where the lamp-posts kept their sentry guard. On the fifth day, however, the expected letter did come by the first post from Mr. Ferguson.

  “If you will travel to Pulburo’ in Sussex by the 3.55 P. M. train from Victoria on the day you receive this, Colonel Vanderfelt will send a car to meet you at the station and will put you up for the night. Will you please send a telegram to him”; and the Colonel’s address followed.

  Paul sent off his telegram at once and followed it in the afternoon. Outside Pulboro’ station a small grey car was waiting and a girl of his own age, with brown eyes and a fresh pretty face and a small bright blue hat sitting tightly on her curls, was at the wheel.

  “I am Phyllis Vanderfelt,” she explained. “My father asked me to drive in and fetch you. He has had to be away to-day and won’t get home much before dinner time, I’m afraid.”

  She turned the car and drove westwards under the railway arch talking rather quickly as people who are uneasy and dread an awkward silence will do. They passed through a little town of narrow winding streets and high walls clustered under a great church with a leaping spire, like a piece of old France, and swung out onto a high wide road which dipped and rose, with the great ridge of the South Downs sweeping from Chanctonbury Ring to Hampshire on their left, forests and bush-strewn slopes of emerald and cliffs of chalk silver-white in the sun, and from end to end of the high rolling barrier the swift shadows of the clouds flitting like great birds.

  They had ceased to talk now and there was no awkwardness in the silence. Paul was leaning forward gazing about him with a queer look of eagerness upon his face.

  “To come home to country like this!” he said in a low voice. “You can’t think what it means after months of brown earth and hot skies.”

  Upon their right a low wall bordered the road, and on the other side of the wall fallow-deer grazed in a Park. Beyond, a line of tall oaks freshly green was the home of innumerable rooks who strewed the air about the topmost branches, wheeling and cawing. The square tower of a church stood upon a little hill.

  “It’s friendly, isn’t it?” he cried, and a look of commiseration made the eyes of the girl at his side tender. Would he think this countryside so friendly when the evening was over and he had got to his room?

  “Do you know our Downs?”

  Phyllis spoke at random and hastily as he turned towards her.

  “I wonder,” he answered. “Could I have forgotten them if I had once known them? I seem to have been within a finger’s breadth of recognising something.”

  “When you have seen my mother we will walk through the village. We shall have time before dinner,” said Phyllis, and she turned the car into the carriage-way of a square old house with big windows level with the wall, which stood close to the road.

  Mrs. Vanderfelt, a middle-aged woman with shrewd and kindly eyes received him with a touch of nervousness in her manner and, as her daughter had done, talked volubly and a little at random whilst she was giving him some tea.

  “I don’t know what you would like to do until dinner time,” she said, and Phyllis said:

  “I am going to show Mr. Ravenel the village.”

  A glance of comprehension was swiftly exchanged between the mother and the daughter, but not so swiftly but that Paul intercepted it.

  “You can get the key at Rapley’s,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.

  The two young people came to four cross-roads, and Paul exclaimed:

  “Up the hill to the right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  They mounted the hill and Paul stopped. He pointed with his stick towards the signboard of an inn built on the high bank above the road.

  “Now I know. I lived here once as a child. I always wondered why the Horse Guards had an inn here, and what sort of people they were. I used to imagine that they were half-horse, like the Centaurs, and I always hoped to see them.”

  Phyllis Vanderfelt laughed.

  “Isn’t that like a man? I show you a place as beautiful as any in England and the only thing which you have remembered of it from the time when you were four is the place where you could get a drink.”

  “Yes, the Horseguards’ Inn,” repeated Paul cheerfully. “Let us go on!”

  But it was now Phyllis who stopped with a face from which the merriment had gone.

  “I don’t know,” she said indecisively. “It shall be as you wish. But I wonder. We talked it all over at home. We couldn’t tell whether it would be helpful to you, whether you would care to remember everything to-morrow — whether you already remembered. My father was quite clear that you should see everything. But I am not sure—”

  Paul felt the clutch of fear catching his breath once more as he looked into the girl’s compassionate eyes.

  “I am with your father,” he said. “My recollections are too faint. I can only remember what I see. Let us go on!”

  “Very well!”

  Phyllis Vanderfelt went into one of the cottages and came out again with a big key in her hand. Beyond the cottages a thick high hedge led on to an old rose-red house with an oriel window looking down the road from beneath a gable and a tiled roof golden with lichen. Wisteria draped the walls in front with purple.

  “It is empty,” said Phyllis, as she put the key into the lock and opened the door. The rooms were all dismantled, the floors uncarpeted. Paul Ravenel shook his head.

  “I remember nothing here.”

  Phyllis led him through a window into a garden. A group of beech trees sheltered the house from the southwest wind and beyond the beech trees from a raised lawn their eyes swept over meadows and a low ridge of black firs and once more commanded the shining Downs. Paul stood for a little while in silence, whilst Phyllis watched his face. There came upon it a look of perplexity and doubt. He turned back towards the house. On its south side, a window had been thrown out; on its tiled roof a wide band of white clematis streamed down like a great scarf. On the wall beside the window a great magnolia climbed.

  “Wait a moment,” cried Paul; and as he gazed his vision cleared. He saw, as the gifted see in a crystal, a scene small and distant and very bright.

  There was a table raised up on some sort of stand upon the gravel paths outside this window. A man was sitting at the table and a small crowd of people, laughing and jeering a little — an unkindly crowd — was gathered about him. And furniture and ornaments were brought out. He turned to Phyllis. “There was a sale here, ever so long ago — and I was present outside the crowd, looking on. I lived here, then?”

  “Yes,” said Phyllis.

  “And it was our furniture which was being sold?”

  “Yes.”

  So far there was no surprise for Paul Ravenel, nothing which conflicted with his conception and estimate of his father. Monsieur Ravenel had sold off his furniture, just as he had changed his name and abode. It was part of the process of destroying all his associations with the country and people of his birth. Only — his recollections had revealed something new to him — and disquietingly significant.

  “Why were those who came to buy unfriendly and contemptuous?” he asked slowly.

  “Are you sure that they were?” Phyllis returned. But she did not look at Paul’s face and her voice was a little unsteady.

  “I am very sure about that,” said Paul. “A woman was with me, holding my hand. She led me away — yes — I was frightened by those noisy, jeering people, and she led me away. It was my nurse, I suppose. For my mother was dead.”

  “Yes,” replied Phyllis, and then, not knowing how hard she struck, she added, “Your mother had died a couple of months before the sale.”

  Paul Ravenel, during the last days, had been schooling himself to a reserve of manner, but this statement, as of a thing well known which he
too must be supposed to know, loosened all his armour. A startled cry burst from his lips.

  “What’s that?” he exclaimed, and with a frightened glance at his white face Phyllis repeated her words.

  “I thought you knew,” she added.

  “No.”

  Paul walked a little apart. One of the garden paths was bordered by some arches of roses. He stood by them, plucking at one or two of the flowers and seeing none of them at all. The keystone of the explanation which he had built in order to account for and uphold his father was down now and with it the whole edifice. It had all depended upon the idea of a passionate, enduring love in his father’s heart for the wife who had died in giving birth to her son, the enemy. And in that idea there was no truth at all!

  Paul reflected now in bitterness that there never had been any reason why he should have held his belief — any wild outburst from Monsieur Ravenel, any word of tender remembrance. He had got his illusion — yes, he reached the truth now in this old garden — from an instinct to preserve himself from hating that stranger with whom he lived and on whom he depended for his food and the necessities of his life. He turned suddenly back to Phyllis Vanderfelt.

  “What I don’t understand, Miss Phyllis, is how it is that remembering so much of other things here, I can remember nothing of my mother.”

  “She only came home here to die,” Phyllis replied gently.

  Paul pressed his hands over his eyes for a moment or two in a gesture of pain which made the young girl’s heart ache for him. But he looked at her calmly afterwards and said: “I am afraid that Colonel Vanderfelt has very bad news to tell me to-night.”

  Phyllis Vanderfelt laid her hand gently upon his arm.

  “You will remember that you have made very real friends here in a very short time, won’t you?” she pleaded. “My mother and myself.”

  “Thank you,” said Paul.

  Yet another shock was waiting for him in Colonel Vanderfelt’s house. For as he entered the drawing room three-quarters of an hour later, a tall man lifted himself with an effort from an easy chair and with the help of a stick limped across the room towards him.

  “This is my husband,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt, and before Paul could check his tongue, the cry had sprung from his lips:

  “The man with the medals!”

  The older man’s eyes flashed with a sudden anger. Mrs. Vanderfelt gasped and flushed red. Phyllis took a step forward. All had a look as if they had suffered some bitter and intolerable insult.

  Paul quickly explained. “My father and I crossed you one night a long time ago when you were coming from a banquet at the Guildhall. You called to my father. I was a child, and I always remembered you as the man with the medals. The phrase jumped out when I saw you again.”

  The fire died out of Colonel Vanderfelt’s eyes. A look of pity sheathed them.

  “We will talk of all these things after dinner,” he said gently, and his hand clasped the youth’s arm. “Let us go in now.”

  CHAPTER III

  At King’s Corner

  “FERGUSON WROTE TO me that you mean to return to your own race,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, when the ladies had withdrawn from the dining room. He was a small, wiry man, dark of complexion, with a sleek black head of hair in which there was not one visible thread of grey. His face too was hardly lined, so that it was not until one looked at his eyes that one got any impression of age. The eyes, however, betrayed him. Deeply sunken and with a queer set appearance, they were the eyes of an old, old man; and they provoked a guess that they had at one time gazed so desperately upon horrors that they could never again quite get free of what they had seen.

  “Yes,” replied Paul. “Mr. Ferguson was not very sympathetic.”

  “Then I think he was wrong,” said Colonel Vanderfelt heartily. “Philosophers and Labour leaders talk very placidly about throwing down the walls between nation and nation, as if it was an easy morning’s work. But the walls aren’t of our building. They are mother earth and climate and were there from the beginning of time. Some people can pass over them, of course — American women, especially. But very few men aren’t weaklings, I believe. To the men worth anything, their soil cries out louder and louder with each year that passes. A glass of port? Help yourself! A cigar? No? The cigarettes are in that Battersea box in front of you. It’s a fiction that tobacco spoils the flavour of port. Claret, yes! Port, not a bit.”

  Colonel Vanderfelt took a cigar from a box upon a side table, lit it and resumed his seat. Paul brought him back to the subject of their talk.

  “I am glad to hear you agree with me, Colonel Vanderfelt. I have been more and more convinced since I have sat in this room.”

  Paul Ravenel looked about the dining room with its fastidious and sober elegance. Cream walls, upon which a few good prints were hung; a bright red screen drawn in front of the door; shapely old furniture with red upholstery, and heavy curtains of red brocaded silk at the one big bow window; a long, slender Sheraton sideboard against the wall; a fine Chippendale cabinet in a recess; and this round gleaming table of mahogany, with its candlesticks and salt-cellars of Battersea enamel, its silver equipment and its short tubby decanters with the blue tinge of old Waterford in the glass; in every aspect of the room grace was so wedded to homeliness, comfort to distinction that Paul could not but envy its possessors.

  “I resume my race and with it of course my name,” he said, keenly watching Colonel Vanderfelt.

  But Colonel Vanderfelt took his cigar from his lips only to ask a question.

  “And then?” he enquired.

  “Then I propose to try for a commission in the army,” Paul replied.

  “Oh, yes,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, “but the Bar offers more opportunities to a young fellow nowadays, doesn’t it? Why the Army? There are other professions.”

  “Not for me, sir.”

  Colonel Vanderfelt shrugged his shoulders and stared at the shining table in front of him. It was a devil of a world — everything cross-wise and upside down and unaccommodating. Why must this youth with money and the world to choose from, choose just the one bunch of grapes quite out of his reach? And set his very heart on it too. There had been a ring in that “Not for me, sir!” which could not be stilled by argument. It was youth’s challenge to the elders, its “I know better” which there was no use in debating.

  “Let me hear,” said Colonel Vanderfelt; and the lad’s ambitions were shyly revealed to him. Histories of campaigns, the lives of great soldiers, books of strategy too technical for him to follow — these had been his favourite reading. It was the actual work of the soldier which had fascinated Paul, not the glitter of the great days of parades and manœuvres, but his daily responsibilities and the command of men and the glory of service. Colonel Vanderfelt listened and nodded and remembered a phrase in Mr. Ferguson’s letter: “The boy’s of the right temper.” Surely he was, and the whole business was perverse and pitiful! He heard Paul closing his little apologia.

  “So you see, sir, from the time when I began to think at all of what I should do in the world, this has always been my wish.” The lad was seeking to challenge and defy, but the anxiety which had tortured him during the last four days turned the challenge into a prayer. He searched Colonel Vanderfelt’s face for a sign of agreement. “I know of nothing,” he asserted, “of nothing at all which should hinder me from trying to fulfil my wish.”

  “But I do,” replied the other. “I think, Paul, that it would be very difficult for you to take your father’s name and seek a commission in the Army here.”

  Paul’s cigarette had gone out whilst he was speaking. He lit it now at one of the candles with trembling fingers. The gentleness of Colonel Vanderfelt’s voice made him think of some compassionate judge passing sentence.

  “You will, I trust, make that clear to me,” he said.

  “Of course,” returned the Colonel. “I admit to you that up to the last few minutes I had hoped to escape, and leave most of the story untold. And ha
d you chosen another profession, why, very likely I should have spared you and myself, too.”

  But though he had promised to be frank, he was reluctant to begin and he had ended on so evident a note of discomfort and pain that Paul Ravenel dared not interpose a word. The windows stood open upon the garden and let into the room the perfume of flowers and the freshness of the dew. Outside was the glamorous twilight of a summer night. It was very still. Occasionally a bird rustled the leaves of a branch; and across a field a cuckoo whose voice was breaking called incessantly. Paul was never to forget that background to these moments of suspense. All the bitterness was not with him on this night. Colonel Vanderfelt was back in the dark places of his life amongst old shames and miseries.

  “Your father’s name was John Edward Revel,” he began, and the boy drew a long breath. “Yes, the infantry manual was his, some relic of the old days that he must keep, I suppose — some one small valueless thing — yes, I think that’s natural. He and I were friends. We passed out of Sandhurst together and met again in India. Years afterwards — Service brought us together.”

  He named an outlying post in the hills to the northwest of Quetta where John Edward Revel and he lay beleaguered during one of the frontier wars. They were ordered to hold on to their position at all costs and help would come to them.

  “We were neither of us youngsters, you must understand, pitchforked into commands we weren’t fit for. We had seen a lot of service and done well — both of us. That makes the matter worse perhaps. All the less excuse! That’s what they did say! We were losing men all the time, and we hadn’t many to begin with. Ammunition was running low, water still lower, we were attacked day and night, we two had no sleep, and the promised relief didn’t come. The Baluchis got into our outer court one evening and we had the greatest trouble to get them out. The same night one of our spies came in with the news that a fresh big force was hurrying to reinforce the Baluchis. We were pretty well at the end of our tether — Ravel and I — . Something snapped in both of us . . . we slipped out under cover of darkness, the whole force, and fell back in spite of our instructions, leaving this key-post unguarded. And the new enemy we fell back from was our own relief expedition which had marched night and day and turned the Baluchis’ flank. They found the fort empty, which we had been ordered at all costs to hold. You can guess what happened. We were arrested, court-martialled — cashiered! So you can understand perhaps now our queer reception of you in the drawing room this evening. When you startled us by calling me, ‘The man with the medals,’ it sounded like some bitter jibe from those bad days.”