The Rough Road

“Let us join the ladies,” said the Dean.

In the drawing-room the Dean exchanged glances with his wife. She saw that he had done as he had been bidden. Marmaduke was not an ideal husband for a brisk, pleasure-loving modern young woman. But where was another husband to come from? Peggy had banned the Church. Marmaduke was wealthy, sound in health and free from vice. It was obvious to maternal eyes that he was in love with Peggy. According to the Dean, if he wasn’t, he oughtn’t to be for ever at her heels. The young woman herself seemed to take considerable pleasure in his company. If she cared nothing for him, she was acting in a reprehensible manner. So the Dean had been deputed to sound Marmaduke.

Half an hour later the young people were left alone. First the Dean went to his study. Then Mrs. Conover departed to write letters. Marmaduke advancing across the room from the door which he had opened, met Peggy’s mocking eyes as she stood on the hearthrug with her hands behind her back. Doggie felt very uncomfortable. Never had he said a word to her in betrayal of his feelings. He had a vague idea that propriety required a young man to get through some wooing before asking a girl to marry him. To ask first and woo afterwards seemed putting the cart before the horse. But how to woo that remarkably cool and collected young person standing there, passed his wit.

“Well,” she said, “the dear old birds seem very fussy to-night. What’s the matter?” And as he said nothing, but stood confused with his hands in his pockets, she went on. “You, too, seem rather ruffled. Look at your hair.”

Doggie, turning to a mirror, perceived that an agitated hand had disturbed the symmetry of his sleek black hair, brushed without a parting away from the forehead over his head. Hastily he smoothed down the cockatoo-like crest.

“I’ve been talking to your father, Peggy.”

“Have you really?” she said with a laugh.

Marmaduke summoned his courage.

“He told me I might ask you to marry me,” he said.

“Do you want to?”

“Of course I do,” he declared.

“Then why not do it?”

But before he could answer, she clapped her hands on his shoulders, and shook him, and laughed out loud.

“Oh, you dear silly old thing! What a way to propose to a girl!”

“I’ve never done such a thing before,” said Doggie, as soon as he was released.

She resumed her attitude on the hearthrug.

“I’m in no great hurry to be married. Are you?”

He said: “I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it. Just whenever you like.”

“All right,” she returned calmly. “Let it be a year hence. Meanwhile, we can be engaged. It’ll please the dear old birds. I know all the tabbies in the town have been mewing about us. Now they can mew about somebody else.”

“That’s awfully good of you, Peggy,” said Marmaduke. “I’ll go up to town to-morrow and get you the jolliest ring you ever saw.”

She sketched him a curtsy. “That’s one thing, at any rate, I can trust you in – your taste in jewellery.”

He moved nearer to her. “I suppose you know, Peggy dear, I’ve been awfully fond of you for quite a long time.”

“The feeling is more or less reciprocated,” she replied lightly. Then, “You can kiss me if you like. I assure you it’s quite usual.”

He kissed her somewhat shyly on the lips.

She whispered: “I do think I care for you, old thing.” Marmaduke replied sententiously: “You have made me a very happy man.” Then they sat down side by side on the sofa, and for all Peggy’s mocking audacity, they could find nothing in particular to say to each other.

“Let us play patience,” she said at last.

And when Mrs. Conover appeared awhile later, she found them poring over the cards in a state of unruffled calm. Peggy looked up, smiled, and nodded.

“We’ve fixed it up, Mummy; but we’re not going to be married for a year.”

Doggie went home that evening in a tepid glow. It contented him. He thought himself the luckiest of mortals. A young man with more passion or imagination might have deplored the lack of romance in the betrothal. He might have desired on the part of the maiden either more shyness, delicacy, and elusiveness, or more resonant emotion. The finer tendrils of his being might have shivered, ready to shrivel, as at a touch of frost, in the cool ironical atmosphere which the girl had created around her. But Doggie was not such a young man. Such passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once, somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading Manon Lescaut– he had bought a cheap copy haphazard – and taking the delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what he thought of it.

“It’s like reading about a lunatic,” replied the bewildered Doggie. “Do such people as Des Grieux exist?”

“Ay, laddie,” replied McPhail, greatly relieved. “Your acumen has pierced to the root of the matter. They do exist, but nowadays we put them into asylums. We must excuse the author for living in the psychological obscurity of the eighteenth century. It’s just a silly, rotten book.”

“I’m glad you’re of the same opinion as myself,” said Doggie, and thought no more of the absurd but deathless pair of lovers. The unprincipled McPhail, not without pawky humour, immediately gave him Paul et Virginie, which Doggie, after reading it, thought the truest and most beautiful story in the world. Even in later years, when his intelligence had ripened and his sphere of reading expanded, he looked upon the passion of a Romeo or an Othello as a conventional peg on which the poet hung his imagery, but having no more relation to real life as it is lived by human beings than the blood-lust of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, or the uncomfortable riding conversation of the Valkyrie.

So Doggie Trevor went home perfectly contented with himself, with Peggy Conover, with his Uncle and Aunt, of whom hitherto he had been just a little bit afraid, with Fortune, with Fate, with his house, with his peacock and ivory room, with a great clump of typescript and a mass of coloured proof-prints, which represented a third of his projected history of wall-papers, with his feather-bed, with Goliath, his almost microscopic Belgian griffon, with a set of Nile-green silk underwear that had just come from his outfitters in London, with his new Rolls-Royce car and his new chauffeur Briggins (parenthetically it may be remarked that a seven-hour excursion in this vehicle, youth in the back seat and Briggins at the helm, all ordained by Peggy, had been the final cause of the evening’s explanations), with the starry heavens above, with the well-ordered earth beneath them, and with all human beings on the earth, including Germans, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks – all save one: and that, as he learned from a letter delivered by the last post, was a callous, heartless London manicurist who, giving no reasons, regretted that she would be unable to pay her usual weekly visit to Durdlebury on the morrow. Of all days in the year: just when it was essential that he should look his best!

“What the deuce am I going to do?” he cried, pitching the letter into the waste-paper basket.

He sat down to the piano in the peacock and ivory room and tried to play the nasty crumpled rose-leaf of a manicurist out of his mind.

Suddenly he remembered, with a kind of shock, that he had pledged himself to go up to London the next day to buy an engagement-ring. So after all the manicurist’s defection did not matter. All was again well with the world.

Then he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just and perfect man living the just and perfect life in a just and perfect universe.

And the date of this happening was the fifteenth day of July in the year of grace one thousand nine hundred and fourteen.

CHAPTER III

The shadow cast by the great apse of the cathedral slanted over the end of the Deanery garden, leaving the house in the blaze of the afternoon sun, and divided the old red-brick wall into a vivid contrast of tones. The peace of centuries brooded over the place. No outside convulsions could ever cause a flutter of her calm wings. As it was thirty years ago, when the Dean first came to Durdlebury, as it was three hundred, six hundred years ago, so it was now; and so it would be hundreds of years hence as long as that majestic pile housing the Spirit of God should last.

Thus thought, thus, in some such words, proclaimed the Dean, sitting in the shade, with his hands clasped behind his head. Tea was over. Mrs. Conover, thin and faded, still sat by the little table, wondering whether she might now blow out the lamp beneath the silver kettle. Sir Archibald Bruce, a neighbouring landowner, and his wife had come, bringing their daughter Dorothy to play tennis. The game had already started on the court some little distance off – the players being Dorothy, Peggy and a couple of athletic, flannel-clad parsons. Marmaduke Trevor reposed on a chair under the lee of Lady Bruce. He looked very cool and spick and span in a grey cashmere suit, grey shirt, socks and tie, and grey suède shoes. He had a weak, good-looking little face and a little black moustache turned up at the ends. He was discoursing to his neighbour on Palestrina.

The Dean’s proclamation had been elicited by some remark of Sir Archibald.

“I wonder how you have stuck it for so long,” said the latter. He had been a soldier in his youth and an explorer, and had shot big game.

“I haven’t your genius, my dear Bruce, for making myself uncomfortable,” replied the Dean.

“You were energetic enough when you first came here,” said Sir Archibald. “We all thought you a desperate fellow who was going to rebuild the cathedral, turn the Close into industrial dwellings, and generally play the deuce.”

The Dean sighed pleasantly. He had snowy hair and a genial, florid, clean-shaven face.

“I was appointed very young – six-and-thirty – and I thought I could fight against the centuries. As the years went on I found I couldn’t. The grey changelessness of things got hold of me, incorporated me into them. When I die – for I hope I shan’t have to resign through doddering senility – my body will be buried there” – he jerked his head slightly towards the cathedral – “and my dust will become part and parcel of the fabric – like that of many of my predecessors.”

“That’s all very well,” said Sir Archibald, “but they ought to have caught you before this petrification set in, and made you a bishop.”

It was somewhat of an old argument, for the two were intimates. The Dean smiled and shook his head.

“You know I declined – ”