Part 11 (2/2)

No; little Marmalade might win the V.C.; but only when he thought he was a Follett. Was that what it all came to, really? Something broke and stopped in his mind.

He heard his father's voice. How long ago it had all happened. He had known for years, hadn't he, that this was his father?

”Marmaduke! Mr. Follett! What have I done? Shall I call somebody? Oh, forgive me!”

His father was standing now beside him and bending over him. He looked up at him and shook his head. He did not want any one to come.

”Oh, what have I done?” the man repeated.

”I was dying anyway, you know,” he heard himself say.

What a pitiful face it was, this weary, loosened, futureless old face above him! What a frightened face! What long years of slow disgarnis.h.i.+ng lay behind it: youth, romance, high hopes, all dropped away. He had come to-day with their last vestiges, still the sentimental, romancing fool, self-centred and craving; but nothing of that was left. He was beaten, at last, down into the very ground. It was a haggard, humiliated, frightened face, and miserable. As he himself had been. But not even death lay before this face. For how many years must it go on sinking down until the earth covered it? Marmaduke seemed to understand all about him, as well as if he had been himself.

”Sit down,” he said. He heard that his voice was gentle, though he was not aware of feeling anything, only of understanding. ”I was rather upset. No; I don't want any one. Of course I forgive you. Don't bother about it, I beg.”

His father sat down, keeping his swollen eyes on the motoring-cap which, unseeingly, he turned and turned in his hands.

”Tell me about yourself a little,” said Marmaduke, with slow, s.p.a.ced breaths. ”Where do you live? How? Are you fairly happy?”

He knew that he was not happy; but he might, like most people with whom life had not succeeded, often imagine himself so, and Marmaduke wanted to help him, if possible, to imagine it.

”I live near London. I used to do a good deal of University Extension lecturing. I've a clerks.h.i.+p in the Education Office now.” Mr. Thorpe spoke in a dead obedient voice. ”A small salary, not much hope of advance; and I've a large family. It's rather up-hill, of course. But I've good children; clever children. My eldest boy's at Oxford; he took a scholars.h.i.+p at Westminster; and my eldest girl's at Girton. The second girl, Winnie, has a very marked gift for painting; she is our artist; we're going to send her to the Slade next year when she leaves the High School. Good children. I've nothing to complain of.”

”So you're fairly happy?” Marmaduke repeated. Oddly, he felt himself comforted in hearing about the good and happy children, in hearing about Winnie, her father's favourite.

”Happy? Well, just now, with this terrible war, one can't be that, can one? It is a great adventure for me, however, this work of mine, motoring about France. I don't think I've ever done anything I cared so much about since--for years,” said Mr. Thorpe. ”It's a beautiful country, isn't it? and the soldiers are such splendid fellows! One gets a lot out of it. But happy? No, I don't suppose I am. I'm pretty much of a failure, and I started life with great imaginings about myself. One doesn't get over that sort of disappointment; one never really gets over it in a way.” Mr. Thorpe was looking at him now, and it was as if there were a kindliness between them. ”Things have been rather grey and disagreeable on the whole,” he said.

”They can be very grey and disagreeable, can't they?” said Marmaduke, closing his eyes.

He was very tired, and as he lay there quietly, having nothing further to know or to suffer, having reached the very limits of conscious dissolution, something else began to come to him. It seemed born of the abolition of self and of the acceptance of the fact that he was dead to all that had given life worth or beauty. It would have been very good to be a Follett; though, he saw it now, he had over-prized that special sort of goodness--with so much else from which he had been, as really, shut out; but he was not a Follett; nor was he merely this poor, insignificant father. He did not quite make out in what the difference lay and he did not rejoice in it, for there was no rejoicing left in him. But, even if the difference were only an acquired instinct (dimly, the terms of his complacent readings in biology and sociology returned to him), even if it were only that, not anything inherent and transmissible, it was, all the same, his own possession; something that he and the Folletts had made together; so that it was as true to say that he had won the V.C. as to say that they had. The lessened self that was left to him had still its worth. To see the truth, even if it undid you, was worthy; to see so unwaveringly that it was good to be a Follett even when you weren't one, had the elements of magnanimity; and to accept the fact of being second-rate proved, did it not?--if you still cared to prove it; he felt himself smile as gently at the relinquished self as he had smiled at his father,--that you were not merely second-rate.

There was now a sound of stumbling movement; doors opening and shutting; nurses, surgeons in the room; and his father's face, far away, against the blue bands, looking at him, still so frightened and so miserable that he tried again to smile at him and to say, ”It's all right. Quite all right.”

At all events he had been decent to the poor old fellow. His thoughts came brokenly, but he was still seeing something, finding something; it was like a soft light growing. At all events, he had behaved as a Follett would wish to behave even when brought to such a pa.s.s. No--but it wasn't quite that, either; it was something new. He had behaved as any one decent should wish to behave. And the daffodils glimmering to his vision seemed to light him further still. ”We are as common as daffodils,” came back to him. Daffodils were for everybody. Foolish little boy who, on the distant spring morning in the woods of Channerley, dug them up to take them to his own garden!

He was there among them with his little red-and-yellow cart, and the thrush was singing high above him, in the rosy topmost branches of an elm.

Beautiful woods. Beautiful flowers of light and chivalry. How the suns.h.i.+ne streamed among them!

”Dear Channerley,” he thought. For again he seemed to belong there.

Gentle hands were tending him and, as he turned his cheek on the pillow, it was with the comfort--almost that of the little boy at Channerley being tucked up in the warm nursery to go to sleep--of knowing that he was dying, and that, in spite of everything, he had given something to the name.

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]

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