THE WORLD WAR COLLECTION OF H. C. MCNEILE (SAPPER). Sapper
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 dulness." 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 VI
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.
Of course it was all quite wrong. No well-brought-up and decorous Englishman had any right to feel so annoyed with another man's face that he longed to hit it with a stick. But Vane was beginning to doubt whether he had been well brought up; he was quite certain that he was not decorous. He was merely far more natural than he had ever been before; he had ceased to worry over the small things.
And surely the two other occupants of the carriage were very small. At least they seemed so to him. For all he knew, or cared, they might each of them be in control of a Government Department; that failed to alter their littleness.
Fragments of their conversation came to him over the rattle of the wheels, and he became more and more irate. The high price of whisky was one source of complaint—it appeared, according to one of them, that it was all going to France, which caused a shortage for those at home. Then the military situation. . . . Impossible, grotesque. . . . Somebody ought to be hanged for having allowed such a thing to happen. After four years to be forced back—inexcusable. What was wanted was somebody with a business brain to run the Army. . . . In the meantime their money was being wasted, squandered, frittered away. . . .
Vane grew rampant in his corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. Grey-faced and grey-coated with the mud, their eyes had been clear and steady and cheerful, even if their chins were covered with