"I don't want to marry anybody," she declared. "But I'd sooner marry a bricklayer who was fighting for his country than a fine gentleman like Mr. Holmes who wasn't. I'd sooner die," she cried passionately.
"Then go and die and be damned to you!" snarled Gedge, planting himself noisily in his chair. "I've no use for khaki-struck drivelling idiots.
I've no use for patriots. Bah! Damn patriots! The upper classes are out for all they can get, and they befool the poor imbecile working man with all their highfalutin phrases to get it for them at the cost of his blood. I've no use for them, I tell you. And I've no use either for undutiful daughters. I've no use for young women who blow hot and cold.
Haven't I seen you with the fellow? Do you think I'm a blind dodderer?
Do you think I haven't kept an eye on you? Haven't I seen you blowing as hot as you please? And now because he refuses to be a blinking idiot and have his guts blown out in this war of fools and knaves and capitalists, you blast him like a three-farthing iceberg."
Everything in her that was tender, maidenly, English, shrank lacerated.
But the steel held her. She put both her hands on the table and bent over towards him.
"But, father, except that he's a gentleman, you haven't told me why you want me to marry Mr. Holmes."
He fidgeted with his fingers. "Haven't you a spark of affection for me left?"
She said dutifully, "Yes, father."
"I want you to marry him. I've set my heart on it. It has been the one bright hope in my life for months. Can't you marry him because you love me?"
"One generally marries because one loves the man one's going to marry,"
said Phyllis.
"But you do love him," cried Gedge. "Either you're just a wanton little hussy or you must care for the fellow."
"I don't. I hate him. And I don't want to have anything more to do with him." The tears came. "He's a pro-German and I won't have anything to do with pro-Germans."
She fled precipitately from the office into the street and made a blind course to the hospital; feeling, in dumb misery, that she had committed the unforgivable sin of casting off her father and, at the same time, that she had made stalwart proclamation of her faith. If ever a good, loyal little heart was torn into piteous shreds, that little heart was Phyllis's.
In the bare X-ray room of the hospital, which happened to be vacant, Betty sat on the one straight-backed wooden chair, while a weeping damsel on the uncarpeted floor sobbed in her lap and confessed her sins and sought absolution.
Of course Gedge was a fool. If I, or any wise, diplomatic, tactful person like myself, had found it necessary to tackle a young woman on the subject of a matrimonial alliance, we should have gone about the business in quite a different way. But what could you expect from an anarchical Turk like Gedge?
Phyllis, not knowing whether she were outcast and disinherited or not, found, of course, a champion in Betty, who, in her spacious manner, guaranteed her freedom from pecuniary worries for the rest of her life.
But Phyllis was none the less profoundly unhappy, and it took a whole convoy of wounded to restore her to cheerfulness. You can't attend to a poor brave devil grinning with pain, while a surgeon pokes a six-inch probe down a sinus in search of bits of bone or shrapnel, and be acutely conscious of your own two-penny-half-penny little miseries.
Many a heartache, in this wise, has been cured in the Houses of Pain.
Now, nothing much would have happened, I suppose, if Phyllis, driven from the hospital by superior decree that she should take fresh air and exercise, had not been walking some days afterwards across the common by the canal. Bordering the latter, Wellingsford has an avenue of secular chestnuts of which it is inordinately proud. Dispersed here and there are wooden benches sanctified by generations of lovers. Carven thereon are the presentments, often interlaced, of hearts that have long since ceased to beat; lonely hearts transfixed by arrows, which in all probability survived the wound and inspired the owner to the parentage of a dozen children; initials once, individually, the record of many a romance, but now, collectively, merely an alphabet run mad.
Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and rested, a pathetically lonely little grey-uniformed figure on one of the benches. On the common, some distance behind her, stretched the lines of an Army Service train, with mules and waggons, and here and there a tent. In front of her, beyond the row of trees, was the towing-path; an old horse in charge of a boy jogged by, pulling something of which only a moving stove pipe like a periscope was visible above the bank.
Overhead the chestnuts rioted in broad leaf and pink and white blossom, showing starry bits of blue sky and admitting arrow shafts of spring sunshine. A dirty white mongrel dog belonging to the barge came up to her, sniffed, and made friends; then, at last obeying a series of whistles from the boy, looked at her apologetically and trotted off.
Her gaze followed him wistfully, for he was a very human dear dog, and with a sympathetic understanding of all her difficulties in his deep topaz eyes. After that she had as companions a couple of butterflies and a bumble-bee and a perky, portly robin who hopped within an inch of her feet and looked up at her sideways out of his hard little eye (so different from the dog's) with the expression of one who would say: "The most beauteous and delectable worm I have ever encountered. If I were a bit bigger, say the size of the roc of the Arabian Nights, what a dainty morsel you would make! In the meantime can't you shed something of yourself for my entertainment like others, though grosser, of your species?" She laughed at the cold impudence of the creature, just as she had smiled at the butterflies and the bumble-bee. She surrendered herself to the light happiness of the moment. It was good to escape for an hour from the rigid lines of beds and the pale suffering faces and the eternal faint odour of disinfectants, into all this greenery and the fellowship of birds and beasts unconscious of war. She remembered that once, in the pocket of her cloak, there had been a biscuit or two. Very slowly and carefully, her mind fixed on the robin, she fished for crumbs and very carefully and gently she fed the impudent, stomach-centred fellow. She had attracted him to the end of the seat, when, whizz and clatter, came a motor cycle down the avenue, and off in a terrible scare flew the robin; the idyll of tree and beast and birds suffered instant disruption and Randall Holmes, in his canvas suit, stood before her.
He said:
"Good morning, Phyllis."
She said, with cold politeness: "Good morning." But she asked the spring morning in dumb piteousness, "Oh, why has he come? Why has he come to spoil it all?"
He sat down by her side. "This is the luckiest chance I've ever had--finding you here," he said. "You've had all my letters, haven't you?"
"Yes," she answered, "and I've torn them all up."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want them," she flashed on him: "I've destroyed them without reading them."
He flushed angrily. Apart from the personal affront, the fact that the literary products of a poet, precious and, in this case, sincere, should have been destroyed, unread, was an anti-social outrage.
"If it didn't please a woman to believe in God," he said, "and God came in Person and stood in front of her, she would run out of the room and call upon somebody to come and shoot Him for a burglar, just to prove she was right."
Phyllis was shocked. Her feminine mind pounced on the gross literalness of his rhetorical figure.
"I've never heard anything more blasphemous and horrible," she exclaimed, moving to her end of the bench. "Putting yourself in the position of the Almighty! Oh!" she flung out her hand. "Don't speak to me."
In spite of the atheistical Gedge, Phyllis believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Ten Commandments. She also believed in a host of other simple things, such as Goodness and Truth, Virtue and Patriotism. The arguments and theories and glosses that her father and Randall wove about them appeared to her candid mind as meaningless arabesques. She could not see how all the complications concerning the elementary canons of faith and conduct could arise. She appreciated Randall's intellectual gifts; his power of weaving magical words into rhyme fascinated her; she was childlike in her wonder at his command of the printed page; when he revealed to her the beauty of things, as the rogue had a pretty knack of doing, her nature thrilled responsive. He gave her a thousand glimpses into a new world, and she loved him for it. But when he talked lightly of sacred matters, such as God and Duty, he ran daggers into her heart. She almost hated him.
He had to expend much eloquence and persuasion to induce her to listen to him. He had no wish to break any of the Commandments, especially the Third. He professed penitence. But didn't she see that her treatment of him was driving him into a desperate unbelief in God and man? When a woman accepted a man's love she accepted many responsibilities.
Phyllis stonily denied acceptance.
"I've refused it. You've asked me to marry you and I told you I wouldn't. And I won't."
"You're mixing up two things," he said, with a smile. "Love and marriage. Many people love and don't marry, just as many marry and don't love. Now once you did tell me that you loved me, and so you accepted my love. There's no getting out of it. I've given you everything I've got, and you can't throw it away. The question is--what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with me?"
His sophistries frightened her; but she cut through them.
"Isn't it rather a question of what you're going to do with yourself?"
"If you give me up I don't care a hang what becomes of me." He came very near and his voice was dangerously soft. "Phyllis dear, I do love you with all my heart. Why won't you marry me?"
But a hateful scene rushed to her memory. She drew herself up.
"Why are my father and you persecuting me to marry you?"
"Your father?" he interrupted, in astonishment. "When?"
She named the day, Wednesday of last week. In desperation she told him what had happened. The poor child was fighting for her soul against great odds.
"It's a conspiracy to get me round to your way of thinking. You want me to be a pro-German like yourselves, and I won't be a pro-German, and I think it wicked even to talk to pro-Germans!"
She rose, all sobs, fluster, and heroism, and walked away. He strode a step or two and stood in front of her with his hands on her shoulders.
"I've never spoken to your father in that way about you. Never. Not a word has passed my lips about my caring for you. On my word of honour.
On Tuesday night I left your father's house never to go there again. I told him so."
She writhed out of his grasp and spread the palms of her hands against him. "Please don't," she said, and seeing that she stood her ground, he made no further attempt to touch her. The austerity of her grey nurse's uniform gave a touch of pathos to her childish, blue-eyed comeliness and her pretty attitude of defiance.
"I suppose," she said, "he was too pro-German even for you."
He looked at her for a long time disconcertingly: so disconcertingly and with so much pain and mysterious hesitation in his eyes as to set even Phyllis's simple mind a-wondering and to make her emphasize it, in her report of the matter to Betty, as extraordinary and frightening. It seemed, so she explained, in her innocent way, that he had discovered something horrible about her father which he shrank from telling her.
But if they had quarrelled so bitterly, why had her father the very next day urged her to marry him? The answer came in a ghastly flash.