Mufti Read online

  “Why don’t you institute a little system of labels?” asked Vane. “Blue for those who passionately adore you – red for those who love someone else. People of large heart might wear several.”

  “I think that’s quite wonderful.” She leaned back in her chair and regarded Vane with admiration. “And I see that you’re only a Captain… How true it is that the best brains in the Army adorn the lower positions. By the way – I must just make a note of your name.” She produced a small pocket-book from her bag and opened it. “My duties are so arduous that I have been compelled to make lists and things.”

  “Vane,” he answered, “Christian – Derek.”

  She entered both in her book, and then shut it with a snap. “Now I’m ready to begin. Are you going to amuse me, or am I going to amuse you?”

  “You have succeeded in doing the latter most thoroughly,” Vane assured her.

  “No – have I really? I must be in good form today. One really never can tell, you know. An opening that is a scream with some people falls as flat as ditch-water with others.” She looked at him pensively for a moment or two, tapping her small white teeth with a gold pencil.

  Suddenly Vane leaned forward. “May I ask your age, Joan?”

  Her eyebrows went up slightly. “Joan!” she said.

  “I dislike addressing the unknown,” remarked Vane, “and I heard Lady Patterdale call you Joan. But if you prefer it – may I ask your age, Miss Snooks?”

  She laughed merrily. “I think I prefer Joan, thank you; though I don’t generally allow that until the fourth or fifth performance. You see, if one gets on too quickly it’s so difficult to fill in the time at the end if the convalescence is a long one.”

  “I am honoured,” remarked Vane. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

  “I really see no reason why I should. It doesn’t come into the rules – at least not my rules… Besides I was always told that it was rude to ask personal questions.”

  “I am delighted to think that something you were taught at your mother’s knee has produced a lasting effect on your mind,” returned Vane. “However, at this stage we won’t press it… I should hate to embarrass you.” He looked at her in silence for a while, as if he was trying to answer to his own satisfaction some unspoken question on his mind.

  “I think,” she said, “that I had better resume my official duties. What do you think of Rumfold Hall?”

  “It would be hard in the time at my disposal, my dear young lady, to give a satisfactory answer to that question.” Vane lit a cigarette. “I will merely point out to you that it contains a banqueting chamber in which Bloody Mary is reported to have consumed a capon and ordered two more Protestants to be burned – and that the said banqueting hall has been used of recent years by the vulgar for such exercises as the foxtrot and the one step. Further, let me draw your attention to the old Elizabethan dormer window from which it is reported that the celebrated Sir Walter Raleigh hung his cloak to dry, after the lady had trodden on it. On the staircase can be seen the identical spot where the dog basket belonging to the aged pug dog of the eighteenth Countess of Forres was nightly placed, to the intense discomfiture of those ill-behaved and rowdy guests who turned the hours of sleep into a time for revolting debauches with soda water syphons and flour. In fact it is commonly thought that the end of the above-mentioned aged pug dog was hastened by the excitable Lord Frederick de Vere Thomson hurling it, in mistake for a footstool, at the head of his still more skittish spouse – celebrated Tootie Rootles of the Gaiety. This hallowed spot has been roped off, and is shown with becoming pride by the present owner to any unfortunate he can inveigle into listening to him. Finally I would draw your attention…”

  “For Heaven’s sake, stop,” she interrupted weakly. “The answer is adjudged incorrect owing to its length.”

  “Don’t I get the grand the piano?” he demanded.

  “Not even the bag of nuts,” she said firmly. “I want a cigarette. They’re not gaspers, are they?”

  “They are not,” he said, holding out his case. “I am quite ready for the second question.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully through a cloud of smoke. “Somehow I don’t think I will proceed along the regular lines,” she remarked at length. “Your standard seems higher.”

  “Higher than whose?” Vane asked.

  “Than most of the others.” Her smile was a trifle enigmatic. “There is a cavalryman here and one or two others – but …well! you know what I mean.”

  “I do know what you mean – exactly,” he remarked quietly. “And, Joan, it’s all wrong.”

  “It’s all natural, anyway. Their ways are not our ways; their thoughts are not our thoughts… I can’t help whether I’m being a poisonous snob or not; it’s what I feel. Take Sir John. Why, the man’s an offence to the eye. He’s a complete outsider. What right has he got to be at Rumfold?”

  “The right of having invented a patent plate. And if one looks at it from an unbiased point of view it seems almost as good a claim as that of the descendant of a really successful brigand chief.”

  “Are you a Socialist?” she demanded suddenly.

  “God knows what I am,” he answered cynically. “I’m trying to find out. You see something has happened over the water which alters one’s point of view. It hasn’t happened over here. And just at the moment I feel rather like a stranger in a strange land.” He stared thoughtfully at a thrush which was dealing with a large and fat worm. Then he continued – “You were talking about outsiders. Lord! my dear girl, don’t think I don’t know what you mean. I had a peerless one in my company – one of the first and purest water – judged by our standards. He was addicted to cleaning his nails, amongst other things, with a prong of his fork at meals… But one morning down in the Hulluch sector – it was stand to. Dawn was just spreading over the sky – grey and sombre; and lying at the bottom of the trench just where a boyau joined the front line, was this officer. His face was whiter than the chalk around him, but every now and then he grinned feebly. What was left of his body had been covered with his coat: because you see a bit of a flying pig had taken away most of his stomach.”

  The girl bit her lip – but her eyes did not leave Vane’s face.

  “He died, still lying in the wet chalky sludge, still grinning, and thanking the stretcher bearers who had carried him.” He paused for a moment – his mind back in the Land over the Water. “There are thousands like him,” he went on thoughtfully, “and over there, you see, nothing much matters. A man, whether he’s a duke or a dustman, is judged on his merits in the regimental family. Everyone is equally happy, or equally unhappy – because everyone’s goal is the same.”

  “And over here,” put in the girl, “everyone’s goal is different. How could it be otherwise? It’s when you get a man trying to kick the ball through the wrong goal – and succeeding – that the trouble comes.”

  “Quite right,” agreed Vane. “Personally I’m trying to find out what my own goal is.”

  “What was it before the war?”

  “Soda water syphons and flour; hunting, cricket and making love.”

  “And you don’t think that would still fill the bill?”

  “The Lord knows!” laughed Vane. “In the fullness of time probably I shall too.”

  “And how do you propose to find out?” persisted the girl.

  Once again Vane laughed. “By the simple process of doing nothing,” he answered. “I shall – as far as my arduous military duties allow me – carry on… I believe everyone is carrying on… It’s the phase, isn’t it? And in the process, as far as it progresses before I have to return to France – I may get some idea as to whether I am really a pronounced Pacifist or a Last Ditcher.”

  For a while she looked at him curiously without speaking. “You’re somewhat different from most of my patients,” she
announced at last.

  He bowed ironically. “I trust that in spite of that, I may find favour in your sight. It’s something, at any rate, not to be labelled GS, as we say in the Army.”

  “Frankly and honestly, you despise me a little?”

  Vane considered her dispassionately. “Frankly and honestly, I do. And yet… I don’t know. Don’t you see, lady, that I’m looking at your life through my spectacles; you look at it through your own. For all I know you may be right, and I may be wrong. In fact,” he continued after a short pause, “it’s more than likely it is so. You at any rate have not been qualifying for a lunatic asylum during the past four years.”

  She rose from her chair, and together they strolled towards the lawn. Tennis was still in full swing, and for a time they watched the game in silence.

  “Do those men think as you think?” she asked him suddenly. “Are they all asking the why and the wherefore – or is it enough for them to be just out of it?”

  “It’s enough for us all for the time,” he answered gravely. “And then it tugs and it pulls and we go back to it again… It’s made everyone a bit more thoughtful; it’s made everyone ask the why and the wherefore, insistently or casually, according to the manner of the brute. But Hell will come if we don’t – as a whole – find the same answer…”

  She idly twisted her parasol, and at that moment the cavalryman lounged up. “Thought you’d deserted us, Miss Devereux.” He glanced at Vane and grinned. “I appeal to you,” he cried, “as an infantry soldier to state publicly whether you have ever seen a more masterly bit of scouting than mine when the old man buttonholed you. Jove! you should have seen it. Purple face caught him by the rhododendron bush, where he’d been inflicting himself on me for a quarter of an hour; and in one minute by the clock I’d got to ground in the parsley bed.”

  They all laughed, and for a few minutes the two men chatted with her; then Vane disappeared into the house to write letters. It was a slow and laborious process, and, as a rule, he wrote as few as possible. But there was one he had to get off his conscience, though he dreaded doing so. A promise to a dead pal is sacred…

  At length the scrawl was finished, and looking up from the writing table he saw Joan Devereux passing through the hall. He got up and hurried after her. “Would you mind addressing this for me?” He held out the envelope. I’ve managed to spoil the paper inside, but I don’t want to tax the postman too highly.”

  With a smile she took the letter from him, and picked up a pen. Well,” she said after a moment, “I’m waiting.”

  She looked up into his face as he stood beside her at the table, and a glint of mischief came into her eyes as they met his. He was staring at her with a thoughtful expression, and, at any rate for the moment he seemed to find it a pleasant occupation.

  “And what may the seeker after truth be thinking of now?” she remarked flippantly. “Condemning me a second time just as I’m trying to be useful as well as ornamental?”

  “I was thinking…” he began slowly, and then he seemed to change his mind. “I don’t think it matters exactly what I was thinking,” he continued, “except that it concerned you. Indirectly, perhaps – possibly even directly…you and another…”

  “So you belong to the second of my two classes, do you?” said the girl. “Somehow I thought you were in the first…”

  “The class you embrace?” asked Vane dryly.

  With a quick frown she turned once more to the table. “Supposing you give me the address.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Vane quietly. “The remark was vulgar, and quite uncalled for. After four years in the Army, one should be able to differentiate between official and unofficial conversation.”

  “May I ask what on earth you mean?” said the girl coldly.

  “I take it that your preliminary remarks to me in the garden were in the nature of official patter – used in your professional capacity… When off duty, so to speak, you’re quite a normal individual… Possibly even proper to the point of dullness.” He was staring idly out of the window. “In the States, you know, they carry it even further… I believe there one can hire a professional female co-respondent – a woman of unassailable virtue and repulsive aspect – who will keep the man company in compromising circumstances long enough for the wife to establish her case.”

  The girl sprang up and confronted him with her eyes blazing, but Vane continued dreamily. “There was one I heard of who was the wife of the Dissenting Minister, and did it to bolster up her husband’s charities…”

  “I think,” she said in a low, furious voice, “that you are the most loathsome man I ever met.”

  Vane looked at her in surprise. “But I thought we were getting on so nicely. I was just going to ask you to have lunch with me one day in town – in your official capacity, of course…”

  “If you were the last man in the world, and I was starving, I wouldn’t lunch with you in any capacity.” Her breast was rising and falling stormily.

  “At any rate, it’s something to know where we stand,” said Vane pleasantly.

  “If I’d realised that you were merely a cad – and an outsider of the worst type – do you suppose that I would have talked – would have allowed…” The words died away in her throat, and her shoulders shook. She turned away, biting furiously at her handkerchief with her teeth “Go away – oh! go away; I hate you.”

  But Vane did not go away; he merely stood there looking at her with a faint, half-quizzical smile on his lips.

  “Joan,” he said, after a moment, “I’m thinking I have played the deuce with your general routine. All the earlier performances will be in the nature of an anti-climax after this. But – perhaps, later on, when my abominable remarks are not quite so fresh in your mind, you won’t regard them as quite such an insult as you do now. Dreadful outsider though I am – unpardonably caddish though it is to have criticised your war work – especially when I have appreciated it so much – will you try to remember that it would have been far easier and pleasanter to have done the other thing?”

  Slowly her eyes came round to his face, and he saw that they were dangerously bright. “What other thing?” she demanded.

  “Carried on with the game; the game that both you and I know so well. Hunting, cricket and making love… Is it not written in Who’s Who – unless that interesting publication is temporarily out of print?”

  “It strikes me,” the girl remarked ominously, “that to your caddishness you add a very sublime conceit.”

  Vane grinned. “Mother always told me I suffered from swelled head…” He pointed to the envelope still unaddressed, lying between them on the writing table. “After which slight digression – do you mind?”

  She picked up the pen, and sat down once again. “I notice your tone changes when you want me to help you.”

  Vane made no answer. “The address is Mrs Vernon, 14, Culman Terrace, Balham,” he remarked quietly.

  “I trust she is doing war work that pleases you,” sneered the girl. She handed him the envelope, and then, as she saw the blaze in his eyes, she caught her breath in a little quick gasp.

  “As far as I know,” he answered grimly, “Mrs Vernon is endeavouring to support herself and three children on the large sum of one hundred and fifty pounds a year. Her husband died in my arms while we were consolidating some ground we had won.” He took the envelope from her hand. “Thank you; I am sorry to have had to trouble you.”

  He walked towards the door, and when he got to it, he paused and looked back. Joan Devereux was standing motionless, staring out of the window. Vane dropped his letter into the box in the hall, and went up the stairs to his room.

  Chapter 6

  There was no objection to Vane going to London, it transpired. He had merely to write his name in a book, and he was then issued a half-fare voucher. No one even asked him his
religion, which seemed to point to slackness somewhere.

  It was with feelings the reverse of pleasant that Vane got into the first-class carriage one morning four days after he had written to Mrs Vernon. She would be glad to see him, she had written in reply, and she was grateful to him for taking the trouble to come. Thursday afternoon would be most convenient; she was out the other days, and on Sundays she had to look after the children…

  Vane opened the magazine on his knees and stared idly at the pictures. In the far corner of the carriage two expansive looking gentlemen were engaged in an animated conversation, interrupted momentarily by his entrance. In fact they had seemed to regard his intrusion rather in the light of a personal affront. Their general appearance was not prepossessing, and Vane having paused in the doorway, and stared them both in turn out of countenance, had been amply rewarded by hearing himself described as an impertinent young puppy.

  He felt in his blackest and most pugilistic mood that morning. As a general rule he was the most peaceful of men; but at times, some strain inherited from a remote ancestor who, if he disliked a man’s face hit it hard with a club, resurrected itself in him. There had been the celebrated occasion in the Promenade at the Empire, a few months before the war, when a man standing in front of him had failed to remove his hat during the playing of “The King.” It was an opera hat, and Vane removed it for him and shut it up. The owner turned round just in time to see it hit the curtain, whence it fell with a thud into the orchestra… Quite inexcusable, but the fight that followed was all that man could wish for. The two of them, with a large chucker-out, had finally landed in a heap in Leicester Square – with the hatless gentleman underneath. And Vane – being fleet of foot, had finally had the supreme joy of watching from afar his disloyal opponent being escorted to Vine Street, in a winded condition, by a very big policeman…

  Sometimes he wondered if other people ever felt like that; if they were ever overcome with an irresistible desire to be offensive. It struck him that the war had not cured this failing; if anything it had made it stronger. And the sight of these two fat, oily specimens complacently discussing business, while a woman – in some poky house in Balham – was waiting to hear the last message from her dead, made him gnash his teeth.