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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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IT was upon the last day of his flying leave that Captain John Falconer suddenly realised that he wholly loathed the bare idea of returning to the trenches.
The blow fell unsoftened by a pang of prescient warning. Fresh from the great spade war, he had enjoyed every moment of his holiday by reason of the incisive contrast. The train that bore him from one adjacent country into another had magical qualities, for it passed the boundary of the fifth dimension and whirled him into a new world, while the other blew out in a puff of smoke and a last crackling roar of artillery. At Victoria Station, he stepped from night into day.
Lying back in his lounge-chair and fortified by a good dinner, he gazed around the drawing-room with his newly stimulated appreciation. The sense of security, the absence of noise, the comforts of home—each contributed to his all-pervading happiness. It was good to look at familiar faces after daily lightning glances at the great scarred countenance of General Death. There was a smile upon his lips as he turned to answer a girl's question. 'When are you going back to the trenches?'
'I'm due back to-morrow.'
He paused to admire once more the somewhat unusual beauty of the girl. With flaming hair, the colour of an autumn leaf, and amber eyes, she exacted a toll of fugitive glances, by reason of her vital brilliancy.
Hitherto, Falconer had paid homage to no woman—only answering the call of one—mighty and mail-clad—who stood waist-deep in the green-white circlet of her seas. But while he now paid tribute to Yvonne Parmiter's charm, he could not avoid wonder as to the source of the intermittent trouble that clouded the clarity of her eyes.
She echoed his word.
'To-morrow? So soon? Will you—mind?' Those around looked at him: the women with admiration, the men with some envy. The perfect physical fitness that was the heritage of his personal hardships, marked him as one apart—one who was living, in reality, and sowing a rich harvest of experience and memory.
'Mind!' He laughed. 'Rather not! It's a grand life, I wouldn't miss it for worlds. Indeed, we all of us pity those who stay at home.'
Every word was uttered in honest faith.
'But the change,' the girl persisted. 'It is so impossible to realise.' She furrowed her brow in an effort to capture the idea. 'To-night, you are here. We are here. And to-morrow, we shall all go out, just like the flame of a candle, and you'll be there. To-morrow, the trenches will be the reality. Home will be only the dream.'
Falconer nodded.
'That's so.'
His lips moved stiffly. It was at that moment that he fell into hell—to find, like many another of his comrades, that it was but a few spadefuls deep.
Suddenly he visualised it, with merciless clarity. Mud. There was nothing but mud—earth and water still writhing—mingling and separating—in the giant throes of creation. Again he crawled over it upon hands and knees until he was cased inside a pitch plaster. He sank thigh-deep and felt his boots plucked off by the suction of its foul noisome lips. He had helped to dig out its victims, buried to their waists and shoulders. He thought of his last dug-out, where a spring rose nightly, like a vile caricature of Undine, turning his straw bedding to oozing filth. He recalled snapshot nightmare patches of slumber, when the air seemed to materialise to black honey, and he fought with fear of suffocation. A mean, foul, muddy hell—such as made its victims yearn— Tomlinson-wise—for the clear red pit-coal fires of tradition.
Yet for months Falconer had dwelt therein, finding the life good, upon the whole, and meeting hardships with fortitude and optimism. It was true that he went to the war animated with that nervousness that is not incompatible with courage and had felt the heroic thrill of the conquest of fear. His name had been mentioned in a dispatch.
Yet he had been spared the reaction that is the inevitable aftermath of overstrained nerves. While his comrades, in rotation, had collapsed under exhaustive nerve-drainage, he had been invulnerable. The enemy had reserved him for a long-range target, striking at him in the midst of his enjoyment of the security of home.
A clod of mud had found its billet in his brain.
The mellow chimes of a clock aroused him from his reverie. It was a sinister reminder of the passing of the flying leave. To-morrow, he was due back in hell.
He gazed round the room with brooding eyes, marking the signs of external comfort, which, by comparison with his muddy trench, seemed transmuted to luxury—the pile of the carpet, the delicate hue of the hangings—the glint of many an ornament gleaming under the rose-shaded electric globes. He stared at the dainty gowns of the women—the indifferent faces of the men.
In a gust of anger, he hated them all. He was a damned soul who had just heard the recalling whistle of his overseer. There were but three prime factors of existence—to be warm, clean, and safe. These care-free, over-washed men and women were spending their energies in the pursuit of trifles, blindly unconscious of their possession of the fundamental essentials. And to keep the roof whole above their heads—and others of their kind—he must go back to rot in that slimy pestilential foulness.
It was not fair. His madness waxed, inflamed by the bitter sense of injustice of the labourer who has borne the heat and burden of the day. He had spent a couple of days of his flying leave in London, and while there, had thrilled with the stimulating sense of acquitted duty. Upheld by conscious rectitude, he had faced pertinent questions posed by recruiting-posters; lying back in his stall, at places of amusement, he had listened, outwardly stolid of demeanour, but inwardly elated, while he was vocally thanked from the stage.
He had done his share. Let one of these others take his place for awhile!
'Halloa, Falconer! Your leave's running rather dry.' Falconer looked up at the man who had addressed him with feelings of unconcealed aversion. Charteris was a lawyer of some distinction, with an undertow of sinister repute that avoided the reproach of open scandal. The soldier instinctively distrusted the sagging lines of his tired face—plain traces of the collapse of misspent power. He hated even to see him in the proximity of Yvonne Parmiter, although Charteris was for many years married. Moreover, he had known too many women and held them light.
'How d'you feel?' Charteris gave his habitual croaking laugh. 'Rather like a schoolboy at the end of the holidays?'
From sheer force of habit, Falconer dissented.
'Not much! I couldn't stick the life here now. Besides, I never cared a rap for going back to school. Except'—he added in a different voice—once.'
'Ah?'
The question was perfunctory; but, seized with a sudden need for self-expression, Falconer caught at the opportunity. He craved the relief of utterance. For a few minutes, at least, he would escape the strain of pretence, and in re-living the minor pangs of his boyish tragedy, he could re-live the major tragedy of to-day.
He began to speak rapidly.
'It was this way. I thought it was going to be my last term, and, in my youthful exuberance, I took my toll of last grudges on the place. I forget exactly what I did, and when I heard that, after all, I was to go back, I magnified the thought of my mischief into crime. The fear of its consequences poisoned my whole holiday. I brooded over it, day and night. I dreaded going back—I positively dreaded it.'
The note of actuality in his voice was arresting. His account of the charge in which he had won recognition had been terse as a telegraphic dispatch. Yet now, he was plainly in the grip of a real agony.
'Nonsense!' It was Charteris who objected. 'The average boy isn't a nerve-centre. Probably, you had five bad minutes of funk just as your train came in.'
'No!' Falconer's voice was sharp. 'I was—in those days—highly strung as a hare, for ever on the hop. I tell you, I used to make pictures in my mind of my return. I can see them now.'
Instead—he saw mud—a desolation of sodden flats intersected with interminable trenches, where rain-drilled pools reflected a leaden shell-stabbed heaven.
He tightened his mouth to hide the involuntary quiver of his lips.
'The last day came. My time was up, even as now. I was standing, just as we are now, in this drawing-room, watching the rains. An express shot by, and suddenly, my whole brain caught on fire. I saw my future written in one word, Escape.'
'Ah!' Charteris awoke to interest. 'The wonder is that you ever thought of it before. In every impasse there is always the way out.'
The heaviness of his features broke into mobility as his eyes caught, for a second, the downcast face of Yvonne. 'Kipling was right,' he went on, 'when he wrote of the magic of the locomotive. "Unseen, romance brought up the 9.15." Hulloa! There goes the Folkestone boat-express.'
With a long-drawn shriek, a golden streak, luminous and explosive, tore across the darkness.
Charteris laughed at Falconer's involuntary start.
'Remind you of a Jack Johnson?'
'Not the least resemblance.' Falconer laughed. 'But, seeing that train, brings it all back again. I remembered a maiden aunt, a foolish soul, devoted to me, who lived in a creeper-bound house, absolutely buried in a Devonshire combe. My refuge. I thought of no side-issues. I just fixed my thoughts on her. And that express seemed to me like a bridge from me to her.'
'Go on!'
Charteris's unwonted interest was sustained.
'It was then, or never. That very night, in fact.... By the way, has it ever struck you that this is an unusually easy house to escape from, as there are practically no alternatives? You could not undo all the bars and bolts of the big entrance without waking up the stone Crusaders in the church yonder, and the back regions are always infested with crowds of yelping dogs. There only remains the small side-door. Have you ever noticed it, Miss Parmiter?'
'Yes. At least—I think so.'
'Everything depended on whether that door would be left open —that is, whether that key would be left in the lock. Nine times in ten, it is. The chances were all in my favour. But occasionally the Governor, in an unusual fit of fussiness, for some occult reason, pockets the key.
'I waited until the house grew quiet, until the very last inmate had gone to bed. One by one, I accounted for them; listening for their footsteps and verifying them safe within bounds by the slam of their doors. After all my vision of travel in a lightning express, the only train that stopped was the 4.15, due at the Junction, forty minutes away.
'I packed my bag, and waited. Presently, the last sound in the house died away. Then silence. And then the house woke up and began to talk. You know those myriad noises that make you strain your ears, for you know that you are just upon the point of distinguishing words that never come?'
'I know.' It was Yvonne who spoke. In the pallor of her face her eyes shone with yellow-brown lustre. 'You wait, and listen in the darkness, and all the time, all around you, that great Whisper.'
Falconer nodded.
'Presently—the time to start. I opened the door and crept down the passage, fearing every step, lest a creaking plank should betray me. I reached the staircase and peered into the black well of the hall. I could only just distinguish the door....
'Would it be open? I asked myself the question a hundred times as I crept down the stairs, but I had no real anxiety. I knew that it would be open. There was no reason to doubt. I firmly believed in my luck. All the same, when I reached it, my hands trembled so violently that I could hardly try the latch.
'And ... I found it locked.'
He breathed heavily, again savouring the accumulated disappointment of the years. His last hope gone. His flying leave at an end. And ahead—mud! Wastes of churned-up mud!
'What happened afterwards?' Yvonne had also caught her breath.
Falconer laughed.
'Oddly enough, I really forget. Of course, I went back. And I am fairly positive that nothing was half so bad as I expected. It never is.'
The clod of mud in his brain stirred, momentarily threatened by the solvent of returning sanity. He held out his hand.
'And now, I must wish you all "Good-bye." I must get a long night. I shall be off before you're up to-morrow.'
He formed an heroic central figure in that cheery drama of farewell, a counterpart in living bronze to his forebears, those stone Crusaders at rest.
Half an hour later, he was alone in his own room, prowling around it, restlessly fingering the ornaments and staring at the pictures, unable to control his movements. Although the radiator was turned on, he lit the gas-fire and held out his hands to the ruddy glow of the asbestos. He pressed another switch and flooded the room with extra light. He wanted heat and brightness to excess. To-morrow he would be back in a deliquescent trench.
The thought was unbearable.
Presently, he turned off the lights again, and, opening his window, looked out into the night. It lay below him, earth-scented, faintly luminous and thrilling with the last vibrations of the world's many voices—thready echoes from tropical bazaar and filmy splashing of polar seas mingling in an English garden.
Filled with a passionate yearning for its peace and beauty, he drew a long breath. He could not leave his country.
Involuntarily, he thought of another spot that he loved. A northern vale, remote and rarely visited, where the silvery ribbons of foaming streams fell sheer down the green and purple hills and the brown surface of the tarn reflected the trees in pellucid sepia. Dry ling underfoot, silence unbroken save by nature's orchestration. Fur, fin, and feather and the rough comfort of the primitive inn. In one word—sanctuary.
As he watched, a whistling scream awoke every slumbering Dryad in her tree. With a rattle of metal and a pall of fire-sprayed smoke, the express shot by in a roar of thunder.
The sight fired the torch in Falconer's brain.
In that second, he captured the elusive fragment of thought that had evaded him in the drawing-room.
A parallel. At last, he saw everything clearly, reading the cryptic script of the 'Book of Destiny.' From the beginning, this minute had been foreseen. His boyish flight was no childish freak, but a carefully planned trial essay—preparation for the real performance. In every detail, the parallel was perfect.
He would escape.
But, this time, the door would be open.
A tempestuous storm of exhilaration rushed through him. wrecking all proportions into chaotic ruin. Side-issues were nonexistent, the far future a blank. Yet, moved by some blurred scruple, he snatched at a writing-pad and scrawled a few lines.
I am leaving earlier than we planned so as to save the mater another good-bye. Thought it best. Don't worry about me: am feeling splendidly fit after my good time here, but am anxious to be back again.
He laughed as he wrote.
Slowly the night wore on, and, in its passage, proved the truth of the saying that the future is but the past entered by another door.
It seemed to Falconer that every detail of his early escapade was duplicated. He waited, with the same strained eagerness, for the household to answer to his call-over. He heard his father's heavy stump and the outburst of simulated high spirits under which he concealed his real feelings. Falconer was touched by the noisy laughter and pointless jest; the poor old governor was taking it hard. He felt, too, how his mother paused perceptibly by his door, fingering the handle as though she would fain turn it.
To keep the old childish lump from arising in his throat, he began to pack his bag, whistling softly the while. He did not know that the tune was not the inevitable 'Tipperary,' but 'Forty Years On.'
Presently, his preparations were made, and he took up the timetable that hung from a nail in the wall. Even in that remote spot, train services were mutable.
Yet, upon the whole, he was not surprised to read that, even after the lapse of years, the only train that stopped at the Junction was timed for 4.15.
The faithfulness of the repetition was even more forcible as the hours wore on. The interminable vigil, when he fretted against the strain of inaction—when every second was a slice of hell sandwiched between each clock-tick. And then the noises of the night, rising one after the other, to merge into the general under-chorus. Here and there, he traced back one to its source: the distant hoot of an owl, the patter of a mouse, the squeak of a bat, the snapping of a board.
One voice was silent—the trumpet-call of her who stood amidst the foaming seas, her mighty heart giving back an answering throb to every wave that buffeted her sides.
That voice he heard no longer.
Slowly, the hands of his watch crawled on until they reached the hour of his start. He threw a last farewell look around his room, then opening the door, stole, with beating heart, into the corridor. As he cautiously felt his way in the darkness, the warrior of a campaign shrank down to the little frightened schoolboy of so many years ago.
Every board seemed to snap underneath his weight in just the same startling manner; the handle of every door turned audibly as he passed by; unseen people stalked him down the length of the passage. When he reached the landing and looked down into the gulf of blackness below, the familiarity of the scene gave birth to a tremour of apprehension.
The parallel was growing too perfect. What if it persisted in following in the lines of the abortive experiment right up to its conclusion?
Last time, the door had been locked.
The suggestion was appalling. The whole concentrated dread of return fell upon him, engulfing him, paralysing every faculty. With the ineffective strength of a sleep-bound dreamer, he struggled vehemently to break free. At any cost, he must escape. Never before had the Flemish mud choked so vilely—never was the northern valley so dear and so remote.
He scarcely knew how he descended the staircase. It seemed to him that something vital within him had dragged forwards the leaden limbs of a dead man. He reached the bottom and there stood awhile, straining his vision to the utmost.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw, against the darkness of the walls, a lighter patch, with the tracery of naked boughs outlined against a star-spangled sky.
At last the drama had freed itself from the spell of the past and had boldly broken into a new and startling development.
The door was already open.
Scarcely able to credit his good fortune, he stared at it. It seemed to symbolise his success—to show that the gods of chance had breathed their benison upon his flight.
But while his thanksgiving was still a breath fluttering upon his lips, he shrank into the shadow, at the sound of a footstep without.
The patch of sky was eclipsed by the bulk of a heavily coated man's form. A whisper, audible by reason of its very force, reached his ears.
'Why haven't you come? The car's in the lane. I've been waiting.'
Charteris's voice was easy of recognition. It was instinct, however, that told Falconer the name of the second shadow that materialised from the darkness.
'I—I couldn't make up my mind.'
From the quiver in her voice, Falconer felt that Yvonne's indecision was piteous. It moved the other man to scarce-concealed impatience.
'I thought we had settled all that, for once and for all.'
'I know, I know. But I want to think again. It means a lot for me.'
'Very well, then. Take ten minutes.' Charteris turned on his heel. 'You are a free agent, and your choice must be freewill. If you do not come at the end of that time, I shall go off alone.'
The words suddenly recalled Falconer to a sense of his own crisis. His train would soon be due at the Junction. Ten minutes' delay would nibble away a fatal deficit in his margin of time.
As he caught his breath in the anger of baffled purpose, hope revived once more. There was no reason to despair. The girl would go. Many a barely noticed hint and rumour recurred, all pointing to the inevitable conclusion. From Charteris's recent words, it was evident that she had already made up her mind. Her present misgiving was but the automatic recoil.
Quivering with impatience, he stood, waiting for her to move.
The minutes slowly ticked away, yet no second blot obscured the sky.
The door stood open in vain.
Every nerve in Falconer's frame chafed at the torture of delay. He writhed with the agony of some small wood-creature snared within sight of its hole. Would she never stir? His whole fate was interdependent with hers, yet she remained passive, squandering the last precious minutes in inert caprice.
With the whole force of his nature, he prayed that she would go.
The answer to his appeal came with startling celerity. Throwing back her head with a movement of resolution, Yvonne sprang to her feet. No hesitation was in her step as she passed towards the door.
It was his own savage throb of joy that awoke the submerged soul of Captain John Falconer....
In the cumulative horror of that moment of realisation, he watched Yvonne.
Her hand was on the latch. For a space, she paused. Then—she closed the door. Upstairs she sped, the key tightly clasped in her hand, leaving Falconer standing once more inside the locked door.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.