A fool's errand

Chapter I

Quentin Dillon was back in London again, suffering from a sense of general flatness. There seemed to be no more ups and downs or tremendous moments left in life. The waves of war had receded, and the feverish exaltations, the queerly inconsequent intricacies, and all the horror, as well as much of the zest of the past, had vanished quietly and was no longer there.

If fete days “ask for to-morrow,” it is also true that misery, and the terrible intoxication of a long ordeal, makes its demand for something further, to stir the soul. Though he had once longed for a renewal of the old order of things, he did not know then that change had touched him with a strong, formative hand, and a gap wider than years alone separated the old Quentin Dillon from the man who stared out of the window of his club in Pall Mall.

In some respects the war had treated him kindly, and his unusually striking good looks had been reinforced by a much greater power and definiteness than had formerly been his. His thick dark hair was slightly streaked with grey, though he was lit- 7 tie more than thirty, and his sensitive face and dark, audacious eyes had a hint of past suffering even in their defiant mirth. His slim figure, narrow-hipped and slender at the waist, was essentially graceful, and he held himself with the energy and happy eagerness of one who is very much at home in the world.

As he stood, looking out at the traffic of the street below, he was debating a question in his mind with a touch of real amusement.

Like all other human beings, whichever their sex, who have strong personalities, Quentin was capable of making many enemies for himself. He had a quick temper which clothed itself in a smile, and was therefore doubly irritating to his foes, and he was usually successful. Success brings jealousy in its train, and Quentin accepted his laurels carelessly and wore them without any seriousness of manner. He was a law unto himself, and as the world is composed chiefly of people who desire to make laws for the rest of us, the law-givers regarded him as a rebel.

It must not be concluded from this that Quentin had a score of crimes to his record, or that he defied decency and order; he merely refused to bow to central authority only when it did not impress him sufficiently. He went his way carelessly and said what he thought and did pretty much as he pleased, and there were very few who had, so to speak, called him out, and challenged him to single combat. Over and over again he had been badly reported upon by his seniors, and again and again he had fought his reports and scored a success, because in the fortunes of war his virtues had been those of the necessary kind. But dash and a defiant gallantry under exceptional conditions no longer carried weight, and having affronted more than one of his senior officers at a time when his characteristic audacity was of value, Quentin lived to learn that elderly gentlemen can have long memories.

Among the younger men in the regiment which he had joined in the war, Quentin was popular — with exceptions. Here again his power of creating a following had shown its disadvantages, and it is true that you may not be liked in excess of the ordinary and limited standard without being disliked by quite a lot of people of whose existence you need hardly be aware.

What set him thinking of all this, or to be exact, what made him reflect upon the fact that he had a good reckoning of detractors, was the prospect of a regimental dinner taking place that night at the Grantham Hotel. He had received the usual notification, and though he had not come to London in order to be present on the occasion, it came to his mind that he might turn up there.

He wanted to see Stephen Lome, and Markham, and it would be sufficiently amusing to meet Wade, his late commanding officer, who had done his best * to break him before the last advance, when, by a curious turn of fate, it had fallen to Quentin to take the battalion through the heaviest fighting of that year to its triumphant objective, Wade having broken himself temporarily through over-much recourse to the courage he found in a brandy bottle. In Wade’s case the break had been capable of repair, and he received all the necessary decorations to cover the cracks.

There was not a hint of personal rancour in his mind as he thought of the past. Take it all round, there had been ample good fellowship and a fine camaraderie to give life a swing, and if some fellows were better than other fellows, the majority were altogether good. As for his own part in it all, he hardly threw it a thought. Anything he had done had been done in the way of duty, and the things he hadn’t done were numerous enough according to his reports. He was careless, lacked a sense of discipline, and had no head for detail. In fact, in the eyes of Colonel Wade his only virtue was that he “presented a smart appearance and rode well.” His eyes laughed as he thought of it.

He was out of the army now, and they might say or think what they pleased, but the old friends would remain, and he wanted to see Lome and Markham.

For the rest of it, there was always a tumultuous richness about life, and Quentin had a happy, unperplexed outlook towards the future. He was sufficiently well off to be independent, and just now he was at a kind of pause, before a new beginning. What it would be he did not yet know, but whatever it was he felt that he must grow interested, and he realised that there is significance in what seem to be the accidental combinations of the careless events of life.

As he went out of the club, telling himself again that he hated London, he decided to spend an hour looking at some paintings in a small gallery off ii

Trafalgar Square, and, making his way there, he walked round the room slowly searching for a picture of a garden, which he wanted to buy and send to his mother.

The gallery proved a little disappointing. It showed him angels in moon-rainbows, soldiers in tin helmets, and women, whom he was glad to think he did not know nor have to meet, they looked so nervy and fantastic ; but there were no gardens. At length Quentin sat down on a velvet sofa, hopelessly tired, after the way of people who really know nothing about pictures and who yet go to look at them, and he turned a jaded attention towards the other human beings who made up the crowd.

They were not attractive. It is nearly impossible for any crowd of people to be charming in the mass, and many of them looked very nearly as bored as Quentin felt himself to be. Just before he got up to leave in utter despair, he saw one face which rewarded him for having come there at all.

The girl who attracted his attention was not in the least well dressed, and she was of a distinct and unusual type, her features attractively irregular, and her deep grey eyes just a little wistful. Her hair was fair, of the clear gold fairness which goes with a pale complexion, and among so many faces, vacant or wearing masks, hers was intrinsically real. She was being, in fact, herself, and she was quite alone. No elderly lady followed her, and no strangelydressed young man talked art to her with the air of a critic. She was not one of a bunch, and so much did she impress Quentin with the solitariness of her individuality that she stood out like a beacon on a dark hill. Her clothes were very simple, and he guessed that she was probably poor, or at least that she couldn’t afford the fashionable garments worn by some of the others.

He longed to ask her what she thought of it all. Not what she thought of the paintings, which mattered very little, he felt, but of the men and women; what she thought of life and things in general, and whether she always went along, looking steadily around her with the wisdom of a grey-eyed Athene. She did think. You could tell that much, having seen her at all, and she was graceful and held herself well.

It was unusual for Quentin to occupy his mind with women. He could have counted for you on the fingers of one hand how many he had ever been in the habit of giving any place in his thoughts. There was his mother and her sunny garden; there was his Aunt Alice, who had a moustache and whom he regarded as the best rider to hounds he knew, in spite of her advancing years. There was Cassandra Austen, his cousin, known as Sandra, who was supposed by family tradition to be his future wife, and there had been Dolly Bernard. . . . Dolly Bernard had been a mistake.

It was stupid actually to see a girl who looked exactly the person you might talk to for any length of time, yet because of the conventions, to be forced to let her drift out of reach, and Quentin wondered whether, in such a case, one acted upon impulse. He decided that perhaps it was better not to do this, i3

and having hesitated, the opportunity was irrevocably lost, for the girl went through the door and out of the gallery, leaving nothing of herself behind except that queer, fluid impression which may subsequently mean either so much, or nothing whatever, because we remember very little of faces just seen, however beautiful, when they have drifted out on the tides of life.

The remainder of the day passed in a kaleidoscopic jumble, as days without any very definite event get themselves through in London, and Quentin found himself thinking again and again of the girl who had stirred him so unexpectedly. It was not her beauty, for she was less beautiful, strictly speaking, than a number of the other women he had watched without enthusiasm, but it was rather some special quality she possessed, and for the life of him he could not define it in words. The whole soul of her was in her expression and the grace of her carriage. He felt himself to be in the same mood with the poet who wrote of “lady, sweet and kind — was never face so pleased my mind,” who passed him by, and left him loving her.

He laughed at himself, and thought of Sandra Austen. Sandra was indicated by the steady pointing of the family finger, and she was his cousin. She was dark, clever and marvellously tactful. The elders and betters of the world loved her, and Quentin liked her very much, but never, never in all the years they had been friends, had he experienced a single thrill caused by the touch of her hand or the sound of her charming voice.

And yet, marriage . . .? You would always know where you were with Sandra. . . . He grew vague and restless as he put on his mess uniform and frowned at his own dark face in the glass. It wasn’t sensible to think of a girl whom you had seen once and once only, and at last he fell back on the consolation that Sandra might not really care for him in the way of love. The gentle pressure of family influence was constantly pushing them towards one another, and there were the memories into the bargain. He forgot all about both women by the time he arrived at the Grantham Hotel, and found that as usual he was after time. Punctuality was one of the things he had never learnt.

Quentin Dillon was accustomed to popularity, and when he went into the room, which was crowded with men, he was at once aware of the queer electric forces that warn the sensitive mind of hostility, and he immediately collected himself for battle. One glance around the room told him that his best allies were absent. Lome and Markham were not there, and the predominance of power was all on the side of Wade, his late commanding officer, who only gave him the most cursory acknowledgment. There were a number of elderly officers, dating from the ancient past, to whom Wade had kow-towed as a subaltern and of whom Dillon knew next to nothing, and there were half a dozen younger men who owed Quentin a grudge or two. With these there was also Vivian Young, who had been his friend, but who now met him with a considerable lowering of the usual temperature, and the stiffness of a corpse was about the i5

manner of Goldstein, who walked into the dining-room beside Quentin when dinner was announced, and he found himself seated between him and Young.

Had he been the devil arriving at a Sunday-school treat he could not have felt himself a more ill-timed guest. His eyes grew bright, and when he spoke to Young his manner was dangerously polite. They were his enemies, and Young, for all his good qualities, was also a social barometer. If you were doing well he was friendly and even gushing, but if the wind set against you, Vivian became illusive and declined to commit himself, and it was very evident that Dillon was not a popular figure that night.

The dinner wore on as such entertainments do, and the collection of former colonels talked of previous times, old Standish doing his best to bring some bonhomie into the meeting. He even shouted in his husky voice at Quentin in his effort at producing a kindly atmosphere, but Wade, at the head of the table, did not intend that he should achieve any success. At the conclusion of dinner the moment came for speeches, and Wade stood up. He was a short, ineffective little man with indefinite features and the rather slovenly appearance of an elderly, self-indulgent field officer, but he spoke well and expressed himself in carefully arranged words which had taken him a good deal of preparation.

All down the long table the faces of the guests were turned towards him, and Quentin watched him with his blazing dark eyes full of secret amusement. Wade’s shortcomings had been so carefully glozed

1 6 over that it appeared as though he must have quite forgotten them himself.

There was a good deal to be said, and the names of one after another of the regiment who had distinguished themselves and died in the doing, were followed by the names of others who were still alive, and some of them present, and the cheering after each name was continuous and brought a thrill of the old glory back to the heart. Wade came to the most recent of the actions in which the regiment had distinguished itself, and an uneasy feeling took hold upon Quentin. His own part had been dramatic enough to call for a strong personal testimony from his commanding officer, and to sit there and hear himself described as a hero by Wade would be damnably awkward. He had held the battalion together for a week of desperate fighting, and though he had never received so much as a mention in dispatches, every man in the regiment knew what he had done.

It came back to him very clearly, the vision of icy weather under a sullen, hideous sky, the outpost where the battalion held a line of trenches in the thick of the heaviest fighting, the trails of smoke and the roaring of guns — the naked brutality of it all . . . sleepless days and nights, the tragic splendour of a hand to hand battle with death. And then he remembered Wade, who had not gone on with his men. ... His eyes travelled the length of the table and he wondered, as so many other men have wondered, why it had all happened, and what it all meant, when the result was nothing but a return to just this.

Wade was still speaking, and he looked straight before him. He wanted, he said, to remind them of a fight which was the last marked on their record.

Quentin moved uneasily, and Vivian Young gave a quick glance in his direction. It was not the look of a man who knows that something pleasant is to happen, and there was a furtive sideways flicker in his eyes which should have warned Quentin, if he had been paying any attention to Captain Young, but, as it happened, he was not.

Wade mentioned the names of Lome, and Markham, and Young, and Dillon cheered with the rest. They had been magnificent, no one knew that better than he, in his temporary command of the dire situation, and even the fact that the recognition came from such a poor creature could not lessen the greatness of the praise due to them. And then, with a few well-turned phrases, Wade asked them to drink the health of those they honoured in memory, and of those who were still with them, to accept the tribute of their admiration and regard.

In the warmth of good fellowship, Quentin had dealt Young a hearty smack on his shoulder at the mention of his name, and when it came to him in a quick flash of wonder, that his own was deliberately omitted from the list, he felt very much as though Wade had leaned forward and struck him in the face.

Some one else was speaking now, and there was a little time to think. Dillon had a good command i8 of his features and outwardly he showed nothing. After all, what did it matter? Wade was only using the one tool he had to hit with, and it did not alter a single incident of the past. And yet it hurt. He did not want applause. Very few people whose actions are in the least spontaneous do stop to consider whether they are to receive the cheap payment of thanks, but for all that the deliberate omission had a jagged edge to it. Rather than give him his due, Wade had chosen to belittle the action itself, for much of it could not be spoken of without mention of Dillon’s part in leading the battalion. The smallness of a mean personal dislike coupled with envy had conquered with wonderful completeness, and Wade had his allies and backers.

It was the finest thing Quentin had ever done or was likely to do, and now it had been mauled and illhandled by the little souls, and as he sat there outwardly unconcerned and indifferent, he felt an inward sinking of his heart.

Why should he mind? These things don’t matter. Wade talking like a hack journalist, with his studied phrases, when he had eaten a good dinner and there were no bombs falling in the neighbourhood, was enough to make angels laugh or weep — whichever way it takes an angel when he witnesses such sights. Young, crowned with Dillon’s laurels, and all these pompous old men, each with something to say, duller than the last. Yet he had known the real satisfaction of having carried through his work with perfection, he was sure of that.

Yet one couldn’t escape unscathed. That was the only thing which mattered. Wade was pulling at his moustache and looking pleased. After a long time he had settled a score to his own satisfaction, and the joy of the ungenerous man was his. He felt that he had let Quentin down quite publicly, and Quentin remembered with a touch of rather cynical mirth, that when it lay in his hands to have thrown Wade to the dogs, he had refrained. The war was over then, and Wade couldn’t very well mess things up in any future actions.

No, it didn’t matter what they did to him. Carruthers who had fought beside him was dead, and most of the best fellows were dead. The survivors . . . it made Dillon want to laugh once more, as he considered them.

Kemp was on his legs now, barking like an angry terrier about some grievance of his own. He was always angry with everyone, and had a bad word for everyone, whether he called him friend or foe, so it didn’t much matter which you were. For a moment Dillon was consciously helpless, and again he stood away from his personal point of view with an effort.

As the night wore on and the dinner came to its end, Quentin decided that so far as he was concerned the situation had taught him a lesson. He had been at a loose end and was anxious to find something new to do, and the regimental dinner made him realise that he wanted more than that. He wanted to forget all about them — you couldn’t fight Wade and his fellows, and if you allowed yourself to be angry with them, it only meant that you acknowledged that they had enough power to irritate. He might let Wade affect him like a mosquito bite, but that was ridiculous. Wade’s own resentment against Dillon was active enough to be as unpleasant for himself as an attack of smallpox, and as they walked out of the dining-room it was certainly true that Dillon’s tall figure and easy air of perfect nonchalance made the contrast between them cruelly striking. Nature was on the side of Quentin, and she seemed to be proclaiming the fact as he stood in the centre of the room talking to a group of men who were uneasily aware that something rather ill-bred and unsporting had been done under their very noses.

Even if they did not altogether approve of Dillon, they admitted his power, and no one was quite sure what to do next. Ought they to speak to him, and say that they felt the affront, or should they ignore it? The line Wade had taken put them in a difficulty.

“I think you should have been named, Dillon,” old Colonel Grant said kindly, for he was the most well-intentioned of men. “All our gallant fellows. . .

“Surely not, sir,” Quentin laughed. “There wasn’t time for giving special pats on the head to so many of us. I did nothing!”

Fisher, who had been on the staff, and was one constellation of decorations, wandered up and joined them. “I thought you’d done something special,” he said wearily. “Oh, well, I suppose there were so many recommendations. . .

“I expect so.” Dillon turned away. Someone wanted him to play bridge.

Even then he could not entirely quench the sharp little flame of vexation. Young was waiting about near Wade like a well-trained dog, wagging his tail and jumping up to be patted; Young, who had received a sharp dose of truth from Quentin when for one fatal moment his nerves had broken.

It was all over now. The weary old war was over, and what you had done or failed to do was forgotten. The world had swept on over the graves and the scars, and they were doing their best to get back into grooves and grow a nice fresh crop of small hates and personal rancours, the seeds of which had been carefully gathered and preserved. Let them. It was the last time Quentin intended to permit them the chance of ever ruffling the surface of his mind.

“The former things had passed away,” it was true, and in the blank which followed nothing new had yet come to take their place.

Let the door close finally and shut them out from each other. He had no further part with them, and never had really belonged to the old school. They wanted to get everything back to a place they described as “the old footing,” and even had they wished him to join them there, Dillon knew it to be no place for the likes of him.

He left with a sense of relief. It was so well to be done with them, when you looked at it squarely. Lome and Markham were of a different kind, and those others who would never come back again.

These wanted their world. Let them have it; and what a blessing to be able to say of them that one need never stifle yawns in their company again, or listen to the latest misdeeds of this one or that He left them gladly, unconscious for his part that he was to be turned into a kind of legend of darkness, a battle ground where subsequently one or two upheld him, and a lingering and even attractive memory to those very few who had really known and cared for him. He had been angry with them, but it was not Dillon’s way to remain angry. He only laughed and went on to the next stage, because fate had blessed him in that he was of those for whom there is always a next stage.

Chapter II

Sandra Austen lived with her father, a retired general, in a house on the Surrey Downs, about an hour’s run from London. Suburbs had encroached around it, reaching out red bricks and stucco fingers to grasp the chalky white and willow green of the country, but Foxhurst had retained its own isolation in spite of this. It stood away from the roads that hummed with motor traffic, and General Austen had refused all offers to buy the patch of wild wood at the back and the stretch of gorse-grown upland beyond, so Sandra maintained that they still lived in the country.

It was a pleasant house to go to, and Quentin felt a fresh warmth of satisfaction as he walked up the steep hill and through the avenue gate, between rhododendron borders in full blossom. Sandra had a way of softening the hard edges of life and putting you on good terms with yourself, so that a visit to her always held much consolation, and he had awakened to a fresh feeling of annoyance when he remembered the occurrence of the evening before. He had passed through a mental crisis which marked a parting of the ways, and in retrospect he wondered why he had not said something very telling, or scored on Wade before he left the Grantham Hotel.

The brightness of the day and the singing of many 23 birds aroused him from angry meditations, and he walked through the house without ringing, and on to the green lawn outside the drawing-room windows. General Austen was likely to be out, and Quentin sincerely hoped that he might be. He was a fussy, well preserved old gentleman, who had, in former times, driven his staff frantic, and who now concentrated upon keeping his figure and attending vestry meetings. He looked like an aristocratic dancing master, and he was, Dillon thought, the most complete bore in England. Still, it occupied him to hunt the Vicar on his bicycle, and he sat on various committees and wasted time in a number of busy ways.

Sandra was in the garden planting out little seedlings from a box in a shady corner, and she looked up under a rush hat, her face full of greeting and her strong, white teeth showing in a gay smile of welcome. She pulled off her leather gloves and held out her hand to her cousin, her narrow, clever eyes watching him steadily. It occurred to her at once that Quentin had a “blackdog” on his shoulder, and she wondered what the cause of it might be. He seemed always to drown people with the tremendous depth of his own glance, and she swam into it for a second and then looked at the twist of his mouth.

“Shall we go into the wood?” she asked, “or shall we have the deck chairs out on to the lawn?”

“The wood,” he said, as they turned up the narrow path to where a sheet of bluebells painted the whole undergrowth below the shining of the spring-clothed trees. “I’ve come here to be smoothed down, Sandra. My self-contentment has been tampered with and it must be put in order again.”

“Who has been throwing stones at you?” she asked, as they came to a broader path which led to the edge of the little wood, where a gate and a white painted seat separated them from the common. Having reached it she sat down, prepared to listen, and Quentin flung himself on the grass at her feet.

“A silly old man, called Wade, of whom I have the very lowest opinion,” Dillon said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s funny, isn’t it, Sand, that even if one doesn’t like people oneself, one is illogical enough to resent it if they don’t like you?”

“Colonel Wade was commanding your battalion.”

“So it is said,” Quentin laughed. “But I mustn’t be ill-natured. Anyhow, I went to the regimental dinner last night, and it was made plain to me that I was a wash-out. I’ll be quite honest over this. I know that I’d done pretty well in that last show, and though I don’t care a kick about ribbons and mentions I would have appreciated a kind word.”

“They never did like you much, Quentin,” she said reflectively. “You’re not in the least the kind of man whom people like, exactly. They either go to greater lengths, or they hate the sight of you.”