The Red Planet | Page 7

Duncan." He was just one and twenty, but a couple of
years out of Sandhurst. Only a week before I had received an exuberant
letter from him extolling his men as "super- devil-angels," and
imploring me if I loved him and desired to establish the supremacy of
British arms, to send him some of Mrs. Marigold's potted shrimp.
And now, there he was dead; and, if lucky, buried with a little wooden
cross with his name rudely inscribed, marking his grave.
I reached out my hand.
"My poor old Anthony!"
He jerked his head and glance towards his wife and wheeled me to her
side, so that I could put my hand on her shoulder.

"It's bitter hard, Edith, but--"
"I know, I know. But all the same--"
"Well, damn it all!" cried Sir Anthony, in a quavering voice, "he died
like a man and there's nothing more to be said."
Presently he looked at his watch.
"By George," said he, "I've only just time to get to my Committee."
"What Committee?" I asked.
"The Lord Lieutenant's. I promised to take the chair."
For the first time Lady Fenimore lifted her stricken face.
"Are you going, Anthony?"
"The boy didn't shirk his duty. Why should I?"
She looked at him squarely and the most poignant simulacrum of a
smile I have ever seen flitted over her lips.
"Why not, darling? Duncan will keep me company till you come back."
He kissed his wife, a trifle more demonstratively than he had ever done
in alien presence, and with a nod at me, went out of the room.
And suddenly she burst into sobbing again.
"I know it's wrong and wicked and foolish," she said brokenly. "But I
can't help it. Oh, God! I can't help it."
Then, like an ass, I began to cry, too; for I loved the boy, and that
perhaps helped her on a bit.
CHAPTER II

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The tag has been all but outworn
during these unending days of death; it has become almost a cant
phrase which the judicious shrink from using. Yet to hundreds of
thousands of mourning men and women there has been nothing but its
truth to bring consolation. They are conscious of the supreme sacrifice
and thereby are ennobled. The cause in which they made it becomes
more sacred. The community of grief raises human dignity. In England,
at any rate, there are no widows of Ashur. All are silent in their
lamentations. You see little black worn in the public ways. The
Fenimores mourned for their only son, the idol of their hearts; but the
manifestation of their grief was stoical compared with their
unconcealed desolation on the occasion of a tragedy that occurred the
year before.
Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea, had
been drowned in the canal. Here was a tragedy unrelieved, stupid,
useless. Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious sacrifice; no
dying for one's country. There was no dismissing it with a heroic word
that caught in the throat.
I have not started out to write this little chronicle of Wellingsford in
order to weep over the pain of the world. God knows there is in it an
infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of which are being every day
unfolded before my eyes.
If I did not believe with all my soul that out of Darkness cometh Light,
I would take my old service revolver from its holster and blow out my
brains this very minute. The eternal laughter of the earth has ever since
its creation pierced through the mist of tears in which at times it has
been shrouded. What has been will be. Nay, more, what has been shall
be. It is the Law of what I believe to be God.... As a concrete instance,
where do you find a fuller expression of the divine gaiety of the human
spirit than in the Houses of Pain, strewn the length and breadth of the
land, filled with maimed and shattered men who have looked into the
jaws of Hell? If it comes to that, I have looked into them myself, and
have heard the heroic jests of men who looked with me.
For some years up to the outbreak of the war which has knocked all

so-called modern values silly, my young friends, with a certain
respectful superciliousness, regarded me as an amiable person
hopelessly out of date. Now that we are at grip with elementals, I find
myself, if anything, in advance of the fashion. This, however, by the
way. What I am clumsily trying to explain is that if I am to make this
story intelligible I must start from the darkness where its roots lie
hidden. And that darkness is the black depths of