Part 8 (2/2)
Yeovil nodded.
”It's good enough for criminals and imbeciles,” said the parson, ”but think of it for those boys, who might have been marching along to the tap of the drum, with a laugh on their lips instead of h.e.l.l in their hearts.
I have had h.e.l.l in my heart sometimes, when I have come in touch with cases like those. I suppose you are thinking that I am a strange sort of parson.”
”I was just defining you in my mind,” said Yeovil, ”as a man of G.o.d, with an infinite tenderness for little devils.”
The clergyman flushed.
”Rather a fine epitaph to have on one's tombstone,” he said, ”especially if the tombstone were in some crowded city graveyard. I suppose I am a man of G.o.d, but I don't think I could be called a man of peace.”
Looking at the strong young face, with its suggestion of a fighting prior of bygone days more marked than ever, Yeovil mentally agreed that he could not.
”I have learned one thing in life,” continued the young man, ”and that is that peace is not for this world. Peace is what G.o.d gives us when He takes us into His rest. Beat your sword into a ploughshare if you like, but beat your enemy into smithereens first.”
A long-drawn cry, repeated again and again, detached itself from the throb and hoot and whir of the street traffic.
”Speshul! Military service, spesh-ul!”
The young clergyman sprang from his seat and went up the staircase in a succession of bounds, causing the domino players and novelette readers to look up for a moment in mild astonishment. In a few seconds he was back again, with a copy of an afternoon paper. The Imperial Rescript was set forth in heavy type, in parallel columns of English and German. As the young man read a deep burning flush spread over his face, then ebbed away into a chalky whiteness. He read the announcement to the end, then handed the paper to Yeovil, and left without a word.
Beneath the courtly politeness and benignant phraseology of the doc.u.ment ran a trenchant searing irony. The British born subjects of the Germanic Crown, inhabiting the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, had habituated themselves as a people to the disuse of arms, and resolutely excluded military service and national training from their political system and daily life. Their judgment that they were unsuited as a race to bear arms and conform to military discipline was not to be set aside.
Their new Overlord did not propose to do violence to their feelings and customs by requiring from them the personal military sacrifices and services which were rendered by his subjects German-born. The British subjects of the Crown were to remain a people consecrated to peaceful pursuits, to commerce and trade and husbandry. The defence of their coasts and s.h.i.+pping and the maintenance of order and general safety would be guaranteed by a garrison of German troops, with the co-operation of the Imperial war fleet. German-born subjects residing temporarily or permanently in the British Isles would come under the same laws respecting compulsory military service as their fellow-subjects of German blood in the other parts of the Empire, and special enactments would be drawn up to ensure that their interests did not suffer from a periodical withdrawal on training or other military calls. Necessarily a heavily differentiated scale of war taxation would fall on British taxpayers, to provide for the upkeep of the garrison and to equalise the services and sacrifices rendered by the two branches of his Majesty's subjects. As military service was not henceforth open to any subject of British birth no further necessity for any training or exercise of a military nature existed, therefore all rifle clubs, drill a.s.sociations, cadet corps and similar bodies were henceforth declared to be illegal. No weapons other than guns for specified sporting purposes, duly declared and registered and open to inspection when required, could be owned, purchased, or carried. The science of arms was to be eliminated altogether from the life of a people who had shown such marked repugnance to its study and practice.
The cold irony of the measure struck home with the greater force because its nature was so utterly unexpected. Public antic.i.p.ation had guessed at various forms of military service, aggressively irksome or tactfully lightened as the case might be, in any event certain to be bitterly unpopular, and now there had come this contemptuous boon, which had removed, at one stroke, the bogey of compulsory military service from the troubled imaginings of the British people, and fastened on them the cruel distinction of being in actual fact what an enemy had called them in splenetic scorn long years ago--a nation of shopkeepers. Aye, something even below that level, a race of shopkeepers who were no longer a nation.
Yeovil crumpled the paper in his hand and went out into the sunlit street. A sudden roll of drums and crash of bra.s.s music filled the air.
A company of Bavarian infantry went by, in all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of martial array and the joyous swing of rapid rhythmic movement. The street echoed and throbbed in the Englishman's ears with the exultant pulse of youth and mastery set to loud Pagan music. A group of lads from the tea-shop cl.u.s.tered on the pavement and watched the troops go by, staring at a phase of life in which they had no share. The martial trappings, the swaggering joy of life, the comrades.h.i.+p of camp and barracks, the hard discipline of drill yard and fatigue duty, the long sentry watches, the trench digging, forced marches, wounds, cold, hunger, makes.h.i.+ft hospitals, and the blood-wet laurels--these were not for them.
Such things they might only guess at, or see on a cinema film, darkly; they belonged to the civilian nation.
The function of afternoon tea was still being languidly observed in the big drawing-room when Yeovil returned to Berks.h.i.+re Street. Cicely was playing the part of hostess to a man of perhaps forty-one years of age, who looked slightly older from his palpable attempts to look very much younger. Percival Pla.r.s.ey was a plump, pale-faced, short-legged individual, with puffy cheeks, over-prominent nose, and thin colourless hair. His mother, with nothing more than maternal prejudice to excuse her, had discovered some twenty odd years ago that he was a well-favoured young man, and had easily imbued her son with the same opinion. The slipping away of years and the natural transition of the unathletic boy into the podgy unhealthy-looking man did little to weaken the tradition; Pla.r.s.ey had never been able to relinquish the idea that a youthful charm and comeliness still centred in his person, and laboured daily at his toilet with the devotion that a hopelessly lost cause is so often able to inspire. He babbled incessantly about himself and the accessory futilities of his life in short, neat, complacent sentences, and in a voice that Ronald Storre said reminded one of a fat bishop blessing a b.u.t.ter-making compet.i.tion. While he babbled he kept his eyes fastened on his listeners to observe the impression which his important little announcements and p.r.o.nouncements were making. On the present occasion he was pattering forth a detailed description of the upholstery and fittings of his new music-room.
”All the hangings, violette de Parme, all the furniture, rosewood. The only ornament in the room is a replica of the Mozart statue in Vienna.
Nothing but Mozart is to be played in the room. Absolutely, nothing but Mozart.”
”You will get rather tired of that, won't you?” said Cicely, feeling that she was expected to comment on this tremendous announcement.
”One gets tired of everything,” said Pla.r.s.ey, with a fat little sigh of resignation. ”I can't tell you how tired I am of Rubenstein, and one day I suppose I shall be tired of Mozart, and violette de Parme and rosewood.
I never thought it possible that I could ever tire of jonquils, and now I simply won't have one in the house. Oh, the scene the other day because some one brought some jonquils into the house! I'm afraid I was dreadfully rude, but I really couldn't help it.”
He could talk like this through a long summer day or a long winter evening.
Yeovil belonged to a race forbidden to bear arms. At the moment he would gladly have contented himself with the weapons with which nature had endowed him, if he might have kicked and pommelled the abhorrent specimen of male humanity whom he saw before him.
Instead he broke into the conversation with an inspired flash of malicious untruthfulness.
”It is wonderful,” he observed carelessly, ”how popular that Viennese statue of Mozart has become. A friend who inspects County Council Art Schools tells me you find a copy of it in every cla.s.s-room you go into.”
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