Chapter III

Anthony would not have admitted that he had a creed, because he thought creeds unscientific; but if you habitually act up to certain unspoken principles, they become dogmas. Anthony’s creed ran as follows:

“Play your best whether you are likely to win or not. Never let any one down for the sake of your own convenience; never lie; face disaster readily, even if you could by exercising a little ingenuity evade your share of it. Back whatever you believe in except your own mistakes; own up to a blunder instantly without the emphasis of egoism. Do not involve other people in your actions, and do not be involved by them, and let the end of your work have the same quality as its beginning.”

It was an excellent creed, full of self-respect and armed at all points against the inroads of reality; the kind of creed that gives a man peace at the last, unless he has had too bad a time in the interval. It had no mercy in it either for himself or for others. Prison shook it to its foundation. Anthony had not allowed for a life that was a hideous nightmare beneath the plane of self-control, or for a moral chaos without rules. There was nothing he could act upon; he simply suffered as those under the harrow of acute physical pain suffer, without horizon.

Incidents in Anthony’s hospital career flashed into his mind with a new meaning. He remembered a woman dying in child-birth who had told her agonized husband with unfaltering mendacity that it wasn’t nearly so bad as she had expected. Anthony had admired her then, but he had not thought her superhuman; he had believed that people could always bear pain properly.

The last words of a boy of nineteen crushed in a street accident came back to him: “I don’t want to live; it’s too cruel to care about.” At the time Anthony had believed this remark to be a proof of the lack of discipline in the lower classes.

He knew now that there are moments in which it is a miracle to behave properly, when life becomes simply too cruel to care about. He felt that there was a power which sometimes saved people at these moments, but that it was not a virtue inherent in themselves; and he lost a little of his self-respect.

The other prisoners taught Anthony that kindness was more necessary than skill. It wasn’t enough to do things for them; many of them were beyond the more direct aids of science, and even if they had not been, Anthony had not the proper means for assisting them.

What was necessary, if he was to be of any use to his fellow-prisoners, was for him to involve himself in their sufferings. It was precisely what Anthony had made a point of avoiding throughout his career. He had to put aside his personal fastidiousnesses and to overcome his love of independence.

At first the other men were afraid of Anthony’s self-control, and they had left him alone in consequence, and Anthony had to destroy this salutary fear to which he owed his privacy. Nothing but the fact that he hated being useless gave him the courage to persevere. He wanted to work. He did not love his fellow-prisoners; they maddened him. They had had codes, too, once, but either they had not taken their codes so seriously as Anthony had taken his, or their power of control was slighter. They grumbled without ceasing, quarreled readily, and were often disgusting.

Only one or two of them were really complaining, quarrelsome, or disgusting men; these were the things that happened to them from outside, through the gigantic pressure of adverse circumstance playing upon their unnourished bodies. They could not help themselves.

In time Anthony realized the power of adversity, and it made it much easier to get on with his fellow-prisoners; he saw that their temper was no more to blame than their indigestion. Even their vices, or their endless references to vice, were merely like the outbreak of a tedious delusion. The difference between them and Anthony was that Anthony _could_ help himself. It ceased to be their self-control that mattered; his became vital. If that went, he could be of no use to anybody. Anthony guarded his self-control as if it were the elixir of life. He measured it out by inches; when he felt it menaced, he retired into absolute silence. It was the only thing he could retire into; there was no space for solitude except in his own soul.

It was a long and difficult task, and Anthony never got to the end of it; but long before he realized that he was succeeding, every one in the camp came to him with their troubles. They saw that he had a margin of strength to deal with the affairs of other people, and most of them had become men without margins.

There were plenty of damaged bodies for Anthony to treat, and added to these were the more complicated cases, broken hearts, bad habits, and the deadly collapse of the will. These attacked Anthony’s inner citadel, and found him at a loss for supplies. He tried hard to evolve comfort for his patient from his scanty spiritual stores, because he had discovered that very unhappy men cannot live without spiritual comfort even when they are being half-starved. Men were going to pieces because they missed religion just as much as because they missed bread. It was even more disintegrating. The religion that they missed had no definite form; it was that of human ties, traditions, and the obligations of love. The prison rules did not take the place of these obligations, nor did quinine act as a substitute for love.

There was no give and take between their former existence and their present one. They could not send anything home except their hopes, and after a time these were broken by the endless monotony of expectation. Anthony fought against despair as if it were the German Empire. It became part of his profession. He had always fought death as if it were despair, and now he fought despair as if it were death. But his methods had to be more empirical.

“You’ll have a hell of a time if you don’t keep straight,” he reminded his menaced patients, “a much worse hell than if you do.” But he soon found that this was not a successful argument. Self-preservation has to be an instantaneous need before it can resist despair.

Tradition was a better specific.

“After all, we’re Englishmen,” Anthony urged. “We don’t want them to think they’ve reduced us to behaving like pigs or sinking into idiots. We’ve got to keep our end up.”

But this stimulant wore out in time. There was nothing fundamental in it; there is a greater need of letting go under great pressure than in preserving appearances. Men ceased to care what anybody thought of them; they even ceased to care what they thought of themselves.

Anthony was more successful when he appealed to their feeling for their people at home.

“We mustn’t go back spoiled,” he pleaded; “we must pull ourselves together so that there will be something to take back worth taking. One couldn’t let one’s people down.”

Anthony often laughed at himself over his own methods, they were so rough and ready, and reminded him so often of the attempts at religious reformations, which he had always despised.

“It takes more,” he said to himself, grimly, “to make a good Salvation Army lass than I should have thought possible.”

And, after all, nothing answered for long, nothing that Anthony could find to say. He had no idea that what kept the tone of the camp considerably higher than it would otherwise have been was the quiet persistency of his own example. Anthony planned his advice, and it was good as far as it went; but his example was spontaneous, and it went very much further.

For two years Anthony fought in the dark the battle of the soul in which he did not believe, and now he told himself the battle could stop. There was nothing else to fight against except a few strained nerves. He could go back to his proper work, the study of how to heal the human body, a much more reasonable and satisfactory adventure than how to keep alive the human soul. He was still nervous, and he did not feel happy yet; but that was because he had the meeting with his people before him, and the memory of Tom’s death standing like a shadow across his return to Pannell. The first few minutes would be difficult, especially with his father.

Pannell meant Tom to Mr. Arden; the rest of his family was only a pleasant and expensive annex. He had built all his future, and the future of his race, upon his eldest son. Mr. Arden had never understood Anthony; he did not see why any son of his should wish to be a doctor. There was the army, the navy, the civil service, the church, and the bar, ample professions for any one with brains to find a career in. Ardens _had_ doctors; they didn’t expect to _be_ them.

Mr. Arden told Anthony plainly that a surgeon’s was not a gentleman’s profession. Quite good fellows went into it sometimes when they couldn’t afford better, but the squire was prepared to do something better than that even for his second son.

But Anthony had been obstinate about this low taste for science. He had clung to it as if it had been a barmaid, and there were moments when the squire would have preferred a barmaid; for it is easier to get rid of a woman than of an idea. Anthony knew that he had a painful struggle to face with his father, for he had no intention of giving up his profession for the sake of Pannell, and if science was a blunder in a younger son, it would be considered a crime in the eldest.

He thought perhaps it was because of this impending struggle that he could not enjoy the approach to Pannell. The velvety green fields did not move him, nor the wide expanse of the barebacked downs. He was nervously aware of the passing stations, as if he wished to retain them between himself and Boscott. Daphne wouldn’t be there now; he had left her with her husband. His first meeting with this new brother-in-law had hurt him intensely. Anthony had immediately liked Jim Wynne, but he hadn’t got over the fact of the marriage; it made him feel absurdly lonely, and as if his return to his profession wouldn’t be the final satisfaction he had expected. Of course going to Pannell would make it all right if he could overcome being afraid of rows. He’d always rather liked rows before. His father used to get hot over them, and Anthony used to get cold. They said outrageous things to each other, and neither of them ever came within range of the other one’s arguments; but there had been no fear on either side, and no favor. Anthony was aware of fear now. He did not want to hurt his father.

Boscott came, after all, with a rush. Anthony saw his father’s face as the train drew up at the tiny station before he recognized the two tall young sisters who had shot up into women during his absence. He reflected that his sisters had grown, but they had not changed. His father had changed.

The squire shook Anthony’s hand with welcoming vigor, and looked him between the eyes.

“I’m glad to have you back, my boy,” he said heartily; then he looked away suddenly, as if he were seeing some one else.

The squire had determined to be cordial. He had prepared the words all the way down to the station, but he had not known what it would cost him to meet the wrong son. And then Anthony refused to drive Vixen.

“Please yourself, of course,” said Mr. Arden, gruffly. “She’s a fine little mare, goes like silk. You won’t have seen such a horse anywhere where you’ve been.” The squire did not wish to say the word “Germany.” He considered the bare existence of such a country indecent.

Anthony kissed his sisters’ cool, firm cheeks. They were pink with excitement and extremely shy. They wondered if Anthony noticed how grown up they were, and why he was so terribly thin despite all their parcels.

“We didn’t bring the dogs,” Ursula explained—“we thought they would be too excited—but Max is quite well.”

Max was Anthony’s own dog, a brusque, unamiable, and fanatically loyal Aberdeen.

“He simply hated your being away, you know. He sleeps in your room regularly, because he won’t sleep anywhere else, and he bit Mary for cleaning it last week—not badly—on the ankle.”

“A quarrelsome, bad-tempered, crotchety cur,” Mr. Arden asserted, with restored good-humor; “but your mother thinks the world of him because he refused to eat for three days after you left. The girls tempted him with raw meat, and in the end he gave way to ’em. But he’s borne a grudge against ’em ever since.”

“That was awfully nice of you,” Anthony said gratefully to his sisters. He would have been ashamed to say how often he had thought of Max during his captivity, and that he hadn’t liked to ask how he was for fear of hearing he was dead.

“Your mother didn’t come to meet you,” Mr. Arden explained as they seated themselves in the dog-cart, and Vixen, after a slight premonitory shy at the gate-post, darted off down the long, white road like a swallow. “I persuaded her not to. She’s not up to much excitement nowadays, and of course we’re not giving any celebration in the village for your return. You’ll understand all that.”

Anthony nodded.

It was too early for the trees to be out, but there was a misty look over the budding boughs, and the tilled fields and woodlands had already slipped from the hand of winter and lay open for the visiting spring. The white road stretched between the Pannell woods and the Pannell farms, and straight before them, as the road wound up toward the low, soft skies, were the sloping shoulders of the downs. Pannell stood under them, gray and weather-beaten, facing the shifting shadows with its unchanging stone.

As they passed into the drive, Vixen, moving as if she ran on velvet springs, the gray walls of Pannell rose up in front of them. First the clock-tower in the massive stone stables, a stretch of open park, and then the long, uneven lines of the roof. Anthony’s heart struck suddenly against his side. He had not realized before what it would be to own Pannell. The knowledge flooded him with a kind of awe. The ancient trees, the mossy lawns were his, and his the evanescent spirit of the changeless place.

Mr. Arden glanced sharply at him. Neither of them said anything, but Anthony knew that his father divined his feeling and bitterly resented it. Anthony flushed painfully. He wanted to explain how gladly he would have given up that strange thrill of possession for the sight of Tom, broad-shouldered and casual, strolling out of the stable door, a gun over his shoulder and a dog at his heels. If his father could only have guessed that deeper feeling, that stubborn sense of loss which had become part of Anthony’s very being since Tom’s death, he would not have been hurt at the momentary pride of place which had swept over him without replacing or touching the deeper sense of his grief. But it was Mr. Arden’s misfortune that he could not read deeply into the mind of his younger son.

The last moments of the drive were intolerably long; even his sisters, who had been pointing out all the changes of three years to Anthony, ceased chattering.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the February light lay level across the lawn, fugitive and without weight.

Vixen consented to draw up on the familiar gravel after a slight pretense that she had never been there before and couldn’t be expected to remain an instant in so strange a situation. A groom ran to her head and out of a French window poured a torrent of dogs, a fox-terrier, two white West Highlanders, and more gingerly, as a matter of form, came Max.

For a moment he stood stock-still, his whole being centered in an anxious, questioning sniff, and then three years, a third of his brief lifetime, ceased to exist. He hurled the two white West Highlanders to right and left of him, he passed straight over the back of Demon, the ecstatic fox-terrier, he leaped at the thin, gray figure of Anthony fiercely and without a sound. Three times he flung himself upward silently at his master’s chest, weaving like a shuttle the pattern of his desperate joy; then Anthony found a voice to say his name huskily, and Max, the sober, the undemonstrative, that foe to emotion in fox-terriers, sat down on the top of a flight of steps and proceeded to have a fit of violent hysterics.

Anthony had to push him aside in order to hurry through the open French windows to his mother’s arms.

As he caught her against his heart, he heard her whisper over and over under her breath:

“Are you sure you’re not hungry, Tony? Are you sure you’re not hungry?”

She knew he had been in Holland and overnight in London, but she wanted to hear him say he was not hungry. She had thought of nothing else for two years.

Anthony felt quite happy at coming back to his mother, because he knew she would not want him to be Tom.

Tom was not the race to Mrs. Arden as he had been to his father. He was Tom, and the son she held in her frail arms was Anthony.

“You must have tea at once,” she whispered tremulously. “It’s quite ready, and I hope you won’t mind eating a new-laid egg with it, it’s more solid. Oh, you’re so thin, my darling!”

“I’m not nearly so thin as you are, Mother,” said Anthony, trying to see her face through misty eyes. “By Jove! you’re like a little leaf!” His mother shook her head smilingly at him.

“I’m not thin, Anthony,” she murmured; “I’m only old.”

And then Anthony saw that was what had happened while he was away; his mother had grown old.