Phyllis Bottome - The Dark Tower

Winn started.

“It isn’t disappointment,” he said quickly; “it was the only thing to do.”

“Ah, well,” said Dr. Gurnet, “Heaven forbid that I should enter into a controversy with any one who believes in moral finality! Sensible people compromise, Major Staines; but do not be offended, for I have every reason to believe that sensible people do not make the best soldiers. I am asking you to remain for a few minutes further because there is one other point to which I wish to draw your attention should you be able to spare me the time?”

“All right,” said Winn, with a short laugh; “I’ve got time enough, according to you; I’ve got two years.”

“Well, yes,” said Dr. Gurnet, drawing the tips of his fingers carefully together. “And, Major Staines, according to me you will — er — need them.”

Winn sat up.

“What d’ you mean?” he asked quickly.

“Men in my position,” replied Dr. Gurnet, guardedly, “have very interesting little side-lights into the mentality of other nations. I don’t know whether you remember my asking you if you knew German?”

“Yes,” said Winn. “It went out of head; but now you speak of it, I do remember.”

“I am delighted,” said Dr. Gurnet, blandly, “to have reconstructed your brain-tissue up to that point. I had a certain reason for asking you this question. I have a good many German patients, some French ones, and a most excellent Belgian professor has placed himself under my care.”

“Well, what about it?” asked Winn with some sharpness. He had an idea that this queer fellow before him meant something.

“The Germans are an interesting nation,” Dr. Gurnet proceeded without hurrying, “and they have a universal hobby. I don’t know whether you have noticed, Major Staines, but a universal hobby is a very powerful thing. I am sometimes rather sorry that with us it has wholly taken the form of athletic sports. I dare say you are going to tell me that with you it is not golf, but polo; even this enlarged idea does not wholly alter my depression.

“With the Germans, you see, the hobby happens to be manœuvers — military manœuvers. I understand that this spring Alsace and Lorraine have taken on the aspect of one gigantic camp. Now, Belgium,” Dr. Gurnet proceeded, tapping Winn’s knee with his fore-finger, “is a small, flat, undefended country, and one of my French patients informs me that the French Government have culpably neglected their northern line of forts.

“I hear from my other friend, the Belgian professor, that three years ago the Belgian Government ordered big fortress guns from Krupp. They have not got them yet; but I do not believe Krupp is incapable of turning out guns. On the contrary, I hear that Krupp has, in a still shorter time, entirely renovated the artillery of the Austrian army.”

Winn leaned forward excitedly.

“I say, sir,” he exclaimed, “you ought to be in the intelligence office.”

“God forbid!” said Dr. Gurnet, piously. “Not that I believe in God,” he added; “but I cling to the formulated expletives.

“I should be extremely uncomfortable in any office. Besides, I have my doubts as to the value of intelligence in England. It is so very rare and so un-English. One suspects occasional un-English qualities drawn together for government purposes.

“I merely mentioned these interesting national traits because I had an idea, partly that you would respond to them, and partly that they are going in an exceedingly short time to become manifest to the world at large.”

“You think we are going to have war?” asked Winn, his eyes sparkling. “War!” He said the word as if he loved it.

Dr. Gurnet shrugged his shoulders and sighed, and spread out his rather fat little hands.

“Yes, Major Staines,” he said dryly, “I quite think we are going to have war.”

“Then I must get back to my regiment as quickly as possible,” said Winn, getting up.

“I shouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Dr. Gurnet. “I should advise your remaining in England for three months, I think you will be used quicker if you do that. War is unlikely to begin in India, and the climate is deleterious in the summer months. And might I suggest the carrying out of a few minor precautions? If you are to live efficiently for two years, it will be highly necessary for you to carry them out.”

Winn turned toward him eagerly.

“I’ll do any bally thing you tell me to now,” he said quickly.

Dr. Gurnet laughed, then he said:

“Go back to England, study German, and await your chance. Don’t play any more heavy games, don’t lose your temper or try your heart, don’t drink or smoke or play billiards or sit in a room with a shut window. Take plenty of good plain food and a certain amount of exercise. You are going to be needed.”

Winn drew a deep breath.

“It’s a funny thing,” he said, turning toward the door, “but somehow I believe in you.”

Dr. Gurnet shook hands with him cordially.

“In a sense, I may say,” he observed, “in spite of your extremely disappointing behavior, that I return the compliment. I believe in you, Major Staines, only — ” Dr. Gurnet finished the rest of the sentence after the door had shut behind his patient. “Unfortunately, I am not sure if there are quite enough of you.”

When the Staineses gave an entertainment it was to mark their contempt for what more sensitive people might have considered a family catastrophe.

They had given a ball a week from the day on which Dolores ran away with the groom. A boat-race had been inaugurated upon the occasion on which Winn lost his lawsuit; and some difficulty (ultimately overcome) between James and the Admiralty had resulted in a dinner followed by fireworks on the lawn.

When Winn returned from Davos, Lady Staines decided upon a garden party.

“Good God!” cried Sir Peter. “Do you mean to tell me I’ve wasted that three hundred pounds, Sarah?” Sir Peter preferred this form of the question to “Is my boy going to die?” He meant precisely the same thing.

“As far as I know,” Lady Staines replied, “nobody ever dies before causing trouble; they die after it, and add their funeral expenses to the other inconveniences they have previously arranged for. Can’t you see the boy’s marriage has gone to pot?”

“I wish you wouldn’t pick up slang expressions from your sons,” growled Sir Peter. “You never hear me speaking in that loose way. Why haven’t they got a home of their own? You would ask them here — nurse, bottles, and baby like a traveling Barnum’s — and Winn glares in one corner — and that little piece of dandelion fluff lies down and grizzles on the nearest cushion — and now you want to have a garden party on the top of ’em! Anybody’d suppose this was a Seamen’s Home from the use you put it to! And of all damned silly ways of entertaining people, a garden party’s the worse! Who wants to look at other people’s gardens except to find fault with ’em?

“Besides, unless you want rain (which we don’t with the hay half down) it’s tempting Providence. Nothing’ll keep rain off a garden party except prayers in church during a drought.

“What the hell do you expect to gain by it? I know what it all means — Buns! Bands! high-heeled kick-shaws cutting up my turf! Why the devil don’t you get a Punch and Judy show down and be done with it?”

“Of course you don’t like a garden party,” said Lady Staines, smoothly, “nor do I. Do you suppose I care to be strapped tight into smart stays at my age, and walk about my own gravel paths in purple satin, listening to drivel about other people’s children? We must do something for the neighborhood sometimes, whether they like it or not. That’s what we’re here for — it’s the responsibility of our position. Quite absurd, I know, but then, most people’s responsibilities are quite absurd. You have a son and he behaves like a fool. You can leave him to take the consequences of course if you like — only as some of them will devolve on us, it is worth a slight effort to evade them.”

“For God’s sake, spit it out, and have done with it!” shouted Sir Peter. “What’s the boy done?”

Lady Staines sat down opposite her husband and folded her hands in her lap. She was a woman who always sat perfectly still on the rare occasions when she was not too busy to sit down at all.

“What I hoped would happen,” she said, “hasn’t happened. He’s presumably picked up with some respectable woman.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Sir Peter. “I never knew any one as cold-bloodedly immoral as you are, Sarah. Did you want the boy to pick up with a baggage?”

“Certainly,” said Lady Staines. “Why not? I have always understood that the Social Evil was for our protection, but I never believed it. No woman worth her salt has ever wanted protection. It’s men that want it. They need a class of creature that won’t involve them beyond a certain point, and quite right too. Winn seemed to see this before he went off — but he didn’t keep it in mind — he ran his head into a noose.”

“Has he talked to you about it?” asked Sir Peter, incredulously.

“I don’t need talk,” said Lady Staines. “I judge by facts. Winn goes to church regularly, his temper is execrable, and he takes long walks by himself. A satisfied man is neither irate nor religious — and has nothing to walk off. Consequently it’s a virtuous attachment. That’s serious, because it will lead to the divorce court. Virtues generally lead to somebody trying to get out of something.”

“Pooh!” Sir Peter grunted. “You’ve got that out of some damned French novel. You must have virtue, the place has got to be kept up somehow, hasn’t it? If what you say is true — and I don’t for a moment admit a word of it — I don’t see how you’re going to sugar things over with a couple of hundred people trampling up my lawn?”

“Estelle likes people,” Lady Staines replied. “My idea is to make her a success. I will introduce her to everybody worth knowing. I’ll get some of our people down from town. They’ll hate it, of course; but they’ll be curious to see what’s up. Of course they won’t see anything. At the end of the day, if it’s all gone off well — I’ll have a little talk with Estelle. I shall tell her first what I think of her; and then I shall offer to back her if she’ll turn over a new leaf. Winn’ll do his part for the sake of the boy, if she meets him half way. I give religion its due — he wants to do his duty, only he doesn’t see what it is. He must live with his wife. His prayers will come in nicely afterwards.”

Sir Peter chuckled. “There’s something in your idea, Sarah,” he admitted. “But it’s a damned expensive process. All my strawberries will go. And if it rains, everybody’ll come into the house and scuttle over my library like so many rabbits.”

“I’ll keep them out of the library,” said Lady Staines, rising, “and I shall want a hundred pounds.”

She left the library after a short series of explosions, with a check for seventy-five. She had only expected fifty.

The garden party was, if not a great success, at least a great crowd.

The village was entertained by sports in a field, backed by beer in tents, and overseen by Winn with the delighted assistance of the younger Peter.

Lady Staines, in stiff purple satin, strode uncomfortably up and down herbaceous borders, exposing the ignorance of her fellow gardeners by a series of ruthless questions.

Charles and James, who had put in an intermittent appearance in the hope of a loan from Sir Peter, did their best to make things go. Charles had brought down a bull terrier, and the bull terrier brought down, first one of the donkeys that was to take part in the sports, but was permanently incapacitated from any further participation either in sport or labor, then two pet lap dogs, in a couple of sharp shakes on the lawn, and crowned his career of murder with the stable cat, in an outhouse where Charles had at last incontinently and a little inconsiderately, as far as the cat was concerned, flung him.

Isabel and her husband had driven over from a neighboring parish.

Isabel liked garden parties. She made her way at once to a group of clergy, her husband dangling meekly in her rear; and then told them in her quarter deck style exactly what she thought ought to be done with their parishes. Sir Peter remained in the library with the windows open and his eye upon passing clouds.

Several of his friends joined him, and they talked about Ulster.

Everybody was at this time talking about Ulster.

Most of them spoke of it as people talk of a tidal wave in China. They did not exactly wish the wave to destroy the whole of China, but they would all have felt a little annoyed if it had withdrawn without drowning anybody.

“The Government has been weak,” said Sir Peter sternly; “as weak as a soft-boiled egg! What Ireland wants is a firm hand, and if that’s not enough, a swift kick after it! Concession! Who wants concessions? A sensible man doesn’t make concessions unless he’s trying to bluff you into thinking he’s got what he hasn’t got, or is getting out of you what he hasn’t right to get!