Chapter II

Civilization had gone to pieces, but outwardly London looked just the same. The winding loops of traffic weaved their perpetual chain, checked by imperturbable, blue policemen; picture palaces and public houses, congested tubes and swinging ’buses, the long, blue shadows of the dusk and the arched lights of the street corners, had no new secrets to reveal. The husks of everything Anthony saw were mercilessly indifferent to change.

But surely the people would be different? People cannot pass through hell and keep their values of life the same; they cannot lose security and not gain a certain spiritual significance.

It was startling to Anthony to find that Henry had not altered at all; he did not even look older. He lived in the same charming rooms, full of old French china. Henry could not afford good pictures, so he had very wisely limited himself to excellent prints. His books neither frightened the unreading public nor shocked the cultivated. Henry had kept an expensive cook, and during the war by her help had evaded food difficulties while keeping patriotically within his rations. There was no track once beaten that Henry did not follow; nor had he ever found it difficult to believe what he knew to be generally accepted. He shook hands with Anthony with some emotion, and asked twice how he was.

“This is really tremendous,” Henry exclaimed, “quite tremendous.” The situation promptly dwindled under his qualifying adjectives. “By Jove! what a lot we shall have to talk over! How does it feel to be back?”

“I can’t tell you yet,” said Anthony, sinking into a luxurious arm-chair before the fire. “Physically it’s comfortable. I’ve often thought of this arm-chair.”

Henry said, “My dear fellow!” deprecatingly. He hoped he wasn’t going to hear too much about hardship; he always skipped what he referred to as “literary horrors” in the accounts of war correspondents. “Things,” as he often used to say without specifying what things, “were quite bad enough without unduly harrowing one’s feelings.”

“We’ll have dinner in a minute,” Henry continued cheerfully, “and then we’ll make history. Of course I know everybody has written regularly to you, but it’s quite extraordinary how facts drop out one way or another in correspondence—quite important little facts.”

“I haven’t written everything back,” observed Anthony in a queer, tired voice, which sounded thick. “You see, I couldn’t—lots of things. I couldn’t; but I dare say they don’t matter now.”

“I knew you’d take a sensible view,” Henry agreed eagerly. “It’s no use raking over old troubles, is it? I assure you we’ve all had hardships to bear as well; air raids, for instance, _most_ unpleasant and so noisy. The servants felt it a great deal. The one thing that has kept me up during the last few years has been the spirit of cheeriness. I’ve insisted upon taking a bright view of things, and I’ve found it paid; over and over again I’ve found it paid.”

“You would find it pay,” Anthony agreed after a short pause, looking round the room with curious, inattentive eyes. “And none of the china has been broken, has it? It seems to me I remember all the pieces.”

“No,” Henry replied; “Mary is very careful, you know. I shouldn’t let her touch them if she wasn’t. Some of this is priceless.”

“Quite right,” agreed Anthony. “Only being careful doesn’t always prevent things from being broken, does it? There’s an awful lot of luck in what breaks and what doesn’t. D’you mind, before we have dinner, telling me what’s known about Tom?”

Anthony moved as he spoke, and crouched forward a little over the fire as if he were cold. Henry couldn’t see his face; he was privately shocked at the thin, rather weak, and shaky look of his restored brother.

Anthony had not kept his spirit up; he had lost smartness in a manner that, if it was pitiable, was also annoying to a relative who had been prepared to be proud of him. And it showed a certain lack of tact upon Anthony’s part to ask Henry about Tom before dinner.

“I expect,” Henry said in a grave, constrained voice, which indicated deep feeling without transgressing good taste, “you know practically all there is to know already. Tom was acting as Forward observing officer in one of the woods on the Somme. It is a little confusing, as no one actually saw what took place, but they suppose a shell caught him and his telephonist. The messages stopped, and when they advanced they found the bodies. The major wrote, of course, and several of his brother-officers. Mother will show you all the letters. Dear old Tom, he did his duty like—”

Henry stopped abruptly. He was going to say a Briton or a hero; a burst of most appalling profanity checked him.

He stared blankly at the crouched and blasphemous figure in front of the fire. Anthony cursed steadily and monotonously for several seconds. He seemed beyond his own control; then he pulled himself together.

“I beg your pardon, old man,” he stammered. “I—I—my nerves, you know; that was why I wanted to have my home-coming over gradually. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’ll be all right in a minute. What I want to know is, How long was it between the time they got Tom’s last message and found the body? That’s all I want to know.”

“Have a whisky and soda,” Henry murmured sympathetically. “Of course it’s quite natural you should be upset; it would have been better to go into all this after dinner. As far as I can make out—the major was a little vague—there were three days before they actually found the body; but of course Tom was killed instantly. All of them said so in their letters. It was a great comfort to us to feel that there could have been no actual suffering—my God! Anthony! don’t laugh like that! It doesn’t sound human; it really doesn’t. Here, take this whisky and soda!”

Henry had to force the glass between Anthony’s stiffened lips. He was bowed and contracted with his unearthly laughter. His hands shook as if he were in an ague; his whole body shook. Henry had never been in such a situation in his life, and all of it was perfectly unnecessary. Tom had been dead two years. Then Anthony gasped out:

“Thanks. Yes, that’s what I wanted to know—three days.” The whisky and soda had quieted him. He stopped trembling.

Mary came in and announced dinner.

Henry asked Anthony considerately if he would like to wait five minutes, but Anthony, without any consideration whatever, replied that he was as hungry as a wolf. He really did seem very hungry, and ate like a wolf, but he drank nothing. Henry heard him say in a whisper that was perfectly audible:

“If I drink anything, I shall go to pieces. If I drink anything, I shall go to pieces.”

Henry looked anxiously at Mary, but her eyes were intent upon a green vegetable, over which she noiselessly readjusted one of Henry’s solid silver spoons. Anthony did not notice Mary at all, but in helping himself he dropped the spoon.

When they were back again in Henry’s drawing-room, Anthony moved restlessly about and tried to pull the curtains to look out of the window.

Henry said:

“Sit down, my dear old chap,” and Anthony sat down with a jerk, as if some one had pulled him.

“I don’t know if you would like me to run over the terms of Tom’s will,” Henry suggested. “I suppose we must dip into business some time or other, but perhaps—”

“Run over anything you like now,” said Anthony. He leaned back in his arm-chair and closed his eyes, but he wasn’t asleep. He followed Henry’s excellent account of business affairs with his old clear-cut attention. Henry was greatly relieved at the questions Anthony shot out at him. He went on to speak of Pannell.

“It wouldn’t be a bad thing if you were home for a time to look after things,” Henry suggested. “Father has lost grip. You’ll notice a difference in him, and in mother, too. The strain upon those who remained at home has been greater perhaps than you fellows quite realize.” Henry sighed a little reproachfully. He wanted Anthony to understand that he had not been the only one to suffer; he felt that self-pity would be very bad for a man of Anthony’s type. “I mustn’t weaken him by my sympathy,” Henry reminded himself.

“Yes,” said Anthony, without opening his eyes. “If people realized it, it must have been—I was going to say worse for them; but mercifully we’re so built that what we don’t see reaches only the most imaginative. Knowledge and realization seldom meet. I see that now. I used to believe, as a doctor, that I knew something about pain; but of course I didn’t. I knew as much about it as people know of an earthquake shock from reading about it in a newspaper. My nerves were untouched.”

“I have always thought doctors must be rather insensitive,” said Henry, complacently. “Frankly, I have never been able to stand the sight of suffering. I suppose things were pretty rotten over there for you?” As Anthony did not answer, Henry added tactfully, “You must tell me all about it some time when you feel more up to the mark, and things get easier to talk about.”

Anthony’s eyelids flickered; the lines between his lips and his mouth were deep as furrows.

It was obvious that with his usual good sense he agreed with Henry that it was better to postpone the history of his captivity.

Still, Henry did not want to postpone it entirely. He was curious to be told something about it—how many meals one got a day, and what amount of exercises one was allowed to take. He wanted to hear the kind of things one could afterwards talk over comfortably at the club with the other fellows.

But Anthony had lost the faculty of realizing what was expected of him in conversation. He didn’t follow the line of Henry’s thoughts. He began abruptly:

“Those were awfully good cigarettes you kept sending me. Wonderful what a civilizing thing a cigarette is! Did some fellows good, you know, just to look at them; kept them up to the mark. ’Pon my word, I shouldn’t wonder if it helped ’em to be straight more than their prayers. What one wants, you know, out there is some point to hold on to, some point outside oneself. Religions that push you inside yourself make a shocking mess of it, and all religions do it too much. What you want is to get out, no matter how small the point you’re aiming at; then you’re safe—I mean that’s your chance of keeping sane. Of course it’s only a chance.”

Henry cleared his throat nervously.

“The Young Men’s Christian Association,” he said, “has really done wonders in this war. It is one of the charities I made a point of backing up. I quite agree with you that the social element in religion is extremely important. The church has overlooked it shockingly. I put down its comparative failure to its inability to deal with its congregations socially.”

Anthony opened his eyes and stared at Henry. He looked as if he did not know what his brother was talking about. Apparently he had not been referring to the church.

The door burst open.

“I can’t help it, Mary. No matter what Mr. Henry said, I will see—Tony!”

She was in his arms; when he heard her voice he had got up and felt for her as if he were blind.

It was Daphne; of course she had done exactly what they had arranged for her not to do. Her eyes blazed at him, fierce with tenderness; he could hardly meet them. He felt her arms tighten round him.

“Ah, they’ve hurt you! they’ve hurt you!” she gasped.

Anthony tried hard to hold himself together. He kept telling himself that he mustn’t make an ass of himself before Henry. Daphne pushed him back into his chair and knelt beside him, gazing at him with the piercing eyes of mercy and love. There was no use trying to hoodwink Daphne. She saw what war had done to Anthony; she saw nothing else.

Henry hovered ineffectually in the rear of the situation; he tried hard to stop its being a situation, but Daphne overpowered him. She took no notice of the halves of inconspicuous sentences which escaped from his lips except to say, after a moment or two, casually over her shoulder, as if he weren’t a member of his family and her host, “You’d better go, Henry.”

If Anthony had lifted his little finger to keep him, Henry would have stayed—but Anthony did not look in his direction either. His lips had started trembling; he held his elbow on his knee and his hand over his eyes. Henry tiptoed out of the room as if he had inadvertently strayed into a prayer-meeting.

Daphne took Anthony in her arms again.

“Oh, what have they done to you!” she murmured. “They have eaten half your life.”

Then she began to cry terribly, and it gave back Anthony all his self-control to see her cry. He laughed at her, and patted the back of her obstinately untidy curls. They were just like his own, only made out of spun gold. His had turned gray.

“Don’t be a goose,” he protested. “It’s all right now. Nothing’s the matter really. I’m perfectly fit. Are you crying about me or is it Tom?”

“Oh, you!” she sobbed. “Tom’s only dead.”

“Well, I’ll be all right soon,” Anthony reassured her. “I’ll be just as usual in a little while. All the fellows feel rather queer at first, you know. You ought to be at Pannell. I kept thinking you’d meet me there to-morrow. I suppose they’re all right, aren’t they? Henry would have told me if they weren’t.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Daphne, quickly; “everything’s quite all right.” Her sobs had subsided now, and she searched through his pockets to find the handkerchief she ought to have had the sense to bring with her.

“Something’s changed?” said Anthony, sharply. “What is it, Daphne? You’re hiding something from me.”

“No, no, not changed,” whispered Daphne. “I’m not changed, Tony; only I didn’t mean to tell you to-night. Don’t you see how old I am, how monstrously, awfully old?”

Anthony studied her beautiful, radiant face with keen, questioning eyes.

“You’ve turned into some kind of grownup woman at last, haven’t you?” he asked slowly. “Hullo! what’s that on your finger?”

“Yes,” she said, “it is really. Isn’t it funny? I can’t get used to it. I didn’t want to be happy a bit by myself without you, but he was in the Flying Corps, and I was so anxious! We were married last June. I made them all swear not to tell you. I censored their letters for months for fear of its dropping out. You see, I knew, if you were with me, you’d be glad. O Tony, doesn’t it seem wonderful! It’s over, and he’s all right. I keep saying that instead of my prayers all day. It’s over, and he’s all right.”

Anthony nodded.

“Yes,” he said; “yes, I suppose so. It’s over, and it’s all right, either way you look at it, perhaps.”

They were silent for a moment, then she said quickly: “Oh, Tony darling, Tom was killed at once. Jim found out for me; I can prove it to you. Tell me you believe me? You know I wouldn’t rest till I found out. Jim went over and saw the Major. You know I wouldn’t lie to you. You do believe me, Tony?”

Anthony was not looking at her; he was looking straight into the heart of the fire.

“Yes,” he said in a perfectly level voice; “yes, I believe you. I say—I say, Daphne, d’you think Henry’d mind if I kept a light in my room all night?”