Guy Thorne - The Secret Service Submarine - A Story of the Present War

"Well," she said at length, "let us hope the Germans invade us – it will be somewhere about here, I suppose, if they do – and then you can have a smack at them with your single eight-bore, Johnny; that would be something, wouldn't it?"

She told me the news of the school, such as it was, and then, with a final kiss, we separated and I was left alone.

The bitterness was still in my heart, a deep sort of fire at the bottom of everything which I can't put into words – like the gentlemen in the boys' historical novels, who always begin: "I am but a plain, unlettered yeoman, and more handy with the sword than with the pen" – you know what I mean. Still, I was a man and a strong one, and an Englishman whose brother was fighting for his King. I did not know before that life could hurt so badly as it was hurting now. For nearly an hour, I suppose, I walked up and down my room, until the fire grew low and the wailing of the wind outside seemed to speak of disaster and complete the innuendo of the time.

And then, quite suddenly, I do not know what it was, my spirits began to clear. It was like a thick sea-mist on the marshes, which hangs like a dull, grey blanket for hours, with the birds calling all round, only you cannot get a shot at them. Suddenly the sun, or a puff of wind, makes the whole thing roll up like a curtain, and you see a herd of curlew or a wisp of snipe quite close to you. That is how I felt. I caught sight of my face in the glass, and I was surprised. It was positively glowing – just as if I had been made Commander-in-Chief of the R.N.F.C. and Admiral Jellicoe had asked me to come and have a drink.

I am not used to analysing my feelings, which seem to me like chemicals – the more you analyse them, the worse they smell; so I could not account in the least for this sudden change.

Well, I was wondering at it and thinking that I had better turn in before I got the black dog on my shoulders again, when there was a tap at the door, and in shuffled little Lockhart. He had a bottle of whisky under one arm and a syphon under the other, and he looked, as usual, like a plucked spring chicken that had not been properly fed – bones sticking out everywhere.

"Thought perhaps you hadn't any whisky," he said – and then, "Hallo! pulled it off this time?" He was looking at my face.

I started, because there was something in his voice I had not heard before, and something in his eyes I had not seen.

"My dear chap," he went on, banging down the whisky on the table and holding out his hand. "I can't tell you how glad I am!"

Well, this made it rather hard. Of course, I had to tell him that I had got the kick out again, but I didn't feel the depression coming back, all the same. What I did feel, though, was a sudden liking for the odd little fellow who was my colleague. We had always got on well enough together, never had rows or anything of that sort, but he was too cynical for me as a rule. In five minutes, however, I found myself sitting on one side of the fire – which we made up – with Lockhart on the other, talking away as if we had been intimate friends for years.

By Jove, how the little fellow came out! If his body was maimed and crippled, he had a big soul, if ever a man had. I can recognise beautiful English when I hear it or read it. This man seemed inspired. His talk of England and what we were going through and of what we still had to go through was like that wonderful passage in Richard II which I had been trying to make my idiot boys learn for rep. He was so awfully kind and sympathetic, too. He said all that Doris had said, though in quite another way. It was like a wise man, who had known and done everything, comforting one.

When he had finished, and sat looking at the fire, I had to tell him what I felt.

"I'm awfully indebted to you, Lockhart," was what I said. "You've pulled me together and made a man of me again, and I can't thank you enough. I'm afraid we haven't been such friends as we ought to have been" – and I held out my hand. He took it and there was a strained smile upon his wizened little face.

"Carey," he said, "don't you be downhearted, for you are going to have your chance yet, unless I am very much mistaken."

"What do you mean?" I asked, for there was obviously something behind his words.

For answer, he did a curious thing. He slipped out of his arm-chair, hopped across the room like a sparrow, and as quietly, and opened the door, looking into the passage. Then he closed it and came back into the middle of the room.

"In the first place, John Carey," he said, "I mean that there is something very wrong about this house."

I had just finished my tub the next morning, and was about to shave, when there was a knock at my bedroom door. The school porter came in with a message – "the Doctor sends his compliments, sir, and will you give him the pleasure of your company at breakfast this morning?"

This was quite unusual on the part of my chief. He always breakfasted alone in his own house; even his daughters did not share the meal with him. Lockhart and myself breakfasted with the boys – that is to say, we sat at a table at one end of the room, while old Mrs. Gaunt, the matron, presided over the bread-and-scrape and the urn of wishy-washy tea which was all the boarders got, unless they provided delicacies for themselves.

About half-past eight, I went downstairs, round the rectangular wing, into the Doctor's garden, and knocked at his front door. I was almost immediately shown into the breakfast-room, a comfortable place, with a good many books and a fine view over the marshes.

Old Upjelly was standing upon the hearthrug as I entered, and I must describe for you a very remarkable personality indeed.

The Doctor was six feet high and proportionately broad. He was not only broad from shoulder to shoulder, but thick in the chest, a big, powerful man of fifty years of age. His face was enormous, as big as a ham almost, and it was of a uniform pallor, rather like badly-cooked tripe, as I once heard Lockhart describe it. A parrot-like nose projected in the centre of this fleshy expanse; small, but very bright eyes, sunk in caverns of flesh, looked out under bushy, black brows which squirted out – there is no other word. He was clean-shaved and his mouth was large, firm and curiously watchful, if I may so express it. Upjelly could make his eyes say anything he pleased, but I have always thought that the mouth is the feature in the human face which tells more than any other. And if Upjelly's mouth revealed anything, it was secretiveness, while there was a curious Chinese insensitiveness about it. Lockhart, who had rather a genius for description, used to say that he could conceive Doctor Upjelly locking himself up in his study and sitting down to spend a quiet and solitary afternoon torturing a cat.

He greeted me with his soft, rather guttural voice and with something meant for an expansive smile.

"Ah, here we are," he said, "and tell me at once, Mr. Carey, if you have been successful in your application."

Of course, I was quite prepared for this question and briefly related the facts of the case, explaining that even my brother's influence had failed to secure my entry into the Royal Naval Flying Corps.

"I am truly sorry," he said, with the unctuous manner he reserved for parents, "truly sorry; but you must remember, Mr. Carey, that 'they also serve who only stand and wait.'" And as he said it, or was it my fancy, there came a curious gleam into those little bits of glistening black glass he called his eyes.

A minute or two afterwards, and just as the maid was bringing in various hot dishes, the door opened and Mr. Jones entered.

I had been introduced to Mr. Jones some months before, though neither he nor Upjelly had ever invited me to shoot with them. I had only met him for a few minutes and had never formed a very definite opinion about him one way or the other.