Part 33 (2/2)
”I'm not surprised,” she said, after reading it. ”I'd been fearing it all along.”
”Yes, he could not stand by and see such wrong done without wanting to strike his blow. I honour him for it.”
”But he's Phil--the only boy we have!”
”I am leaving it to you,” the Doctor concluded. ”He will not if you say not.”
”We'll think it over,” said Mrs. Sanford.
When they broke silence and began a discussion of the pros and cons it was only to return to silence; for they were merely rehearsing the heads of trains of thought that occurred to both of them in a vicious circle. At the supper table Jane realised that something was wrong, and poignantly wrong.
”If it's about Phil,” she blurted out, ”I guess I'm ent.i.tled to know!”
When they told her, she said:
”Against that thieving Kaiser and for them poor little Belgiums! He just couldn't help it! That's Phil all over. But it ain't the United States' war, it's Europe's; and all I've got to say is that maybe he'll never come back. He'll just be killed and buried over in them furrin parts.”
”We've thought of that, Jane,” replied Mrs. Sanford.
”You're going to let him do it!” gasped Jane. ”He won't, though, if you say not.”
”Buried in furrin parts!” Jane repeated in fresh horror. This was the most awful aspect of it to her. If one insisted on being killed it ought to be at home, where he could be laid in the family plot.
After supper the Doctor and Mrs. Sanford went into the study, though it was early September and hot. There they sat silent as the flow of still waters which run deep.
”I leave it to you and to him,” she said quietly, after a time.
Dr. Sanford hunted in his desk and found a telegraph blank, and rapidly in his fine, small hand which was suggestive of his mental self-possession when he had a pen between his fingers, he wrote:
”Yes, by Jehovah, fight if your heart is in the cause and you are not fighting for fighting's sake.”
After Mrs. Sanford, who had been sitting very still, had read it she nodded. The decision was made. It takes such occasions as this to prove that fort.i.tude still survives in quiet people who live on quiet village streets.
Before going to bed Dr. Sanford wrote to the vicar of Truckleford:
”It has been our aim to teach Phil self-reliance and to decide for himself. He is going to fight for the same kind of a cause that the ancestor fought for, this time with the British. He is very far away from us, but we are happy to think that he will have a second home with you.”
He showed the letter to Mrs. Sanford, who approved it.
As soon as Phil received the cable he moved on the War Office. As he approached that enormous pile of stone he felt his inconsequence and quizzically wondered if anybody had ever laughed inside its solemn halls. Would the General whom Phil had met on the train see him? An august person who attended at the door allowed him to write his name on a slip of paper, and after a while a messenger conducted him to the General's office, through the long, gloomy corridors, which seemed to protest against the activity which the war had brought.
The General was doing the work of five men because there were so few officers who knew how to do that kind of work and trying, English fas.h.i.+on, not to make any show of it, in order to preserve his appearance of poise and leisureliness. He asked Phil what his training had been and then stepped into an adjoining room, where he spoke to another general. The door had been left open, so that the other general could look over the slim figure, with its well-moulded features, which stood awaiting the result.
”Rather got me, his wanting to fight, so different from the usual soldier of fortune type,” he said. ”Nice chap, well set up, from one of the great American colleges. Just the man for the guns. That _attache_ fellow said he came from good old stock, which you can see for yourself.”
He returned, after the other general had written the name of Philip Sanford on a sheet of paper, to say that Philip Sanford would be gazetted a second lieutenant of artillery. They were making second lieutenants rapidly at the War Office in those days. Phil did not know anything about guns, but, then, he knew as much as many other second lieutenants of artillery.
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