Loe raamatut: «The Rough Road», lehekülg 14

“But he was in danger of death all the time,” said Jeanne, losing the steadiness of her voice.

“He was. Every second. It was one of the most dare-devil, scatter-brained things I’ve ever heard of. And I’ve heard of many, mademoiselle. The only pity is that instead of being rewarded, he will be punished.”

“Punished?” cried Jeanne.

“Not very severely,” laughed Smithers. “Captain Willoughby will see to that. But reflect, mademoiselle. His military duty was to remain with his comrades, not to go and risk his life to get your property. Anyhow, it is clear that he was not out for loot… Of course, they sent me here as Intelligence officer, to get corroboration of his story.” He paused for a moment. Then he added: “Mademoiselle, I must congratulate you on the restoration of your fortune and the possession of a very brave friend.”

For the first time the red spots burned on Jeanne’s pale face.

“Je vous remercie infiniment, monsieur.”

“Il sera all right,” said Willoughby.

The officers saluted and went their ways. Jeanne took up her packet and mounted to her little room in a dream. Then she sat down on her bed, the unopened packet by her side, and strove to realize it all. But the only articulate thought came to her in the words which she repeated over and over again:

“Il a fait cela pour moi! Il a fait cela pour moi!”

He had done that for her. It was incredible, fantastic, thrillingly true, like the fairy-tales of her childhood. The little sensitive English soldier, whom his comrades protected, whom she herself in a feminine way longed to protect, had done this for her. In a shy, almost reverent way, she opened out the waterproof covering, as though to reassure herself of the reality of things. For the first time since she left Cambrai a smile came into her eyes, together with grateful tears.

“Il a fait cela pour moi! Il a fait cela pour moi!”

A while later she relieved Toinette’s guard in the sick-room.

“Eh bien? And the two officers?” queried Aunt Morin, after Toinette had gone. “They have stayed a long time. What did they want?”

Jeanne was young. She had eaten the bread of dependence, which Aunt Morin, by reason of racial instinct and the stress of sorrow and infirmity, had contrived to render very bitter. She could not repress an exultant note in her voice. Doggie, too, accounted for something; for much.

“They came to bring good news, ma tante. The English have found all the money and the jewels and the share certificates that Père Grigou hid in the well of La Folette.”

“Mon Dieu! It is true?”

“Oui, ma tante.”

“And they have restored them to you?”

“Yes.”

“It is extraordinary. It is truly extraordinary. At last these English seem to be good for something. And they found that and gave it to you without taking anything?”

“Without taking anything,” said Jeanne.

Aunt Morin reflected for a few moments, then she stretched out a thin hand.

“Ma petite Jeanne chérie, you are rich now.”

“I don’t know exactly,” replied Jeanne, with a mingling of truth and caution. “I have enough for the present.”

“How did it all happen?”

“It was part of a military operation,” said Jeanne.

Perhaps later she might tell Aunt Morin about Doggie. But now the thing was too sacred. Aunt Morin would question, question maddeningly, until the rainbow of her fairy-tale was unwoven. The salient fact of the recovery of her fortune should be enough for Aunt Morin. It was. The old woman of the pain-pinched features looked at her wistfully from sunken grey eyes.

“And now that you are rich, my little Jeanne, you will not leave your poor old aunt, who loves you so much, to die alone?”

“Ah, mais non! mais non! mais non!” cried Jeanne indignantly. “What do you think I am made of?”

“Ah!” breathed Aunt Morin, comforted.

“Also,” said Jeanne, in the matter-of-fact French way, “Si tu veux, I will henceforward pay for my lodging and nourishment.”

“You are very good, my little Jeanne,” said Aunt Morin. “That will be a great help, for, vois-tu, we are very poor.”

“Oui, ma tante. It is the war.”

“Ah, the war, the war; this awful war! One has nothing left.”

Jeanne smiled. Aunt Morin had a very comfortably invested fortune left, for the late Monsieur Morin, corn, hay and seed merchant, had been a very astute person. It would make little difference to the comfort of Aunt Morin, or to the prospects of Cousin Gaspard in Madagascar, whether the present business of Veuve Morin et Fils went on or not. Of this Aunt Morin, in lighter moods, had boasted many times.

“Every one must do what they can,” said Jeanne.

“Perfectly,” said Aunt Morin. “You are a young girl who well understands things. And now – it is not good for young people to stay in a sick-room – one needs the fresh air. Va te distraire, ma petite. I am quite comfortable.”

So Jeanne went out to distract a self already distraught with great wonder, great pride and great fear.

He had done that for her. The wonder of it bewildered her, the pride of it thrilled her. But he was wounded. Fear smothered her joy. They had said there was no danger. But soldiers always made light of wounds. It was their way in this horrible war, in the intimate midst of which she had her being. If a man was not dead, he was alive, and thereby accounted lucky. In their gay optimism they had given him a month or two of absence from the regiment. But even in a month or two – where would the regiment be? Far, far away from Frélus. Would she ever see Doggie again?

To distract herself she went down the village street, bareheaded, and up the lane that led to the little church. The church was empty, cool, and smelt of the hill-side. Before the tinsel-crowned, mild-faced image of the Virgin were spread the poor votive offerings of the village. And Jeanne sank on her knees, and bowed her head, and, without special prayer or formula of devotion, gave herself into the hands of the Mother of Sorrows.

She walked back comforted, vaguely conscious of a strengthening of soul. In the vast cataclysm of things her own hopes and fears and destiny mattered very little. If she never saw Doggie again, if Doggie recovered and returned to the war and was killed, her own grief mattered very little. She was but a stray straw, and mattered very little. But what mattered infinitely, what shone with an immortal flame, though it were never so tiny, was the Wonderful Spiritual Something that had guided Doggie through the jaws of death.

That evening she had a long talk in the kitchen with Phineas. The news of Doggie’s safety had been given out by Willoughby, without any details. Mo Shendish had leaped about her like a fox-terrier, and she had laughed, with difficulty restraining her tears. But to Phineas alone she told her whole story. He listened in bewilderment. And the greater the bewilderment, the worse his crude translations of English into French. She wound up a long, eager speech by saying:

“He has done this for me. Why?”

“Love,” replied Phineas bluntly.

“It is more than love,” said Jeanne, thinking of the Wonderful Spiritual Something.

“If you could understand English,” said Phineas, “I would enter into the metaphysics of the subject with pleasure, but in French it is beyond me.”

Jeanne smiled, and turned to the matter-of-fact.

“He will go to England now that he is wounded?”

“He’s on the way now,” said Phineas.

“Has he many friends there? I ask, because he talks so little of himself. He is so modest.”

“Oh, many friends. You see, mademoiselle,” said Phineas, with a view to setting her mind at rest, “Doggie’s an important person in his part of the country. He was brought up in luxury. I know, because I lived with him as his tutor for seven years. His father and mother are dead, and he could go on living in luxury now, if he liked.”

“He is then, rich – Doggie?”

“He has a fine house of his own in the country, with many servants and automobiles, and – wait” – he made a swift arithmetical calculation – “and an income of eighty thousand francs a year.”

“Comment?” cried Jeanne sharply, with a little frown.

Phineas McPhail was enjoying himself, basking in the sunshine of Doggie’s wealth. Also, when conversation in French resolved itself into the statement of simple facts, he could get along famously. So the temptation of the glib phrase outran his discretion.

“Doggie has a fortune of about two million francs.”

“Il doit faire un beau mariage,” said Jeanne, with stony calm.

Phineas suddenly became aware of pitfalls and summoned his craft and astuteness and knowledge of affairs. He smiled, as he thought, encouragingly.

“The only fine marriage is with the person one loves.”

“Not always, monsieur,” said Jeanne, who had watched the gathering of the sagacities with her deep eyes. “In any case” – she rose and held out her hand – “our friend will be well looked after in England.”

“Like a prince,” said Phineas.

He strode away greatly pleased with himself, and went and found Mo Shendish.

“Man,” said he, “have you ever reflected that the dispensing of happiness is the cheapest form of human diversion?”

“What’ve you been doin’ now?” asked Mo.

“I’ve just left a lassie tottering over with blissful dreams.”

“Gorblime!” said Mo, “and to think that if I could sling the lingo, I might’ve done the same!”

But Phineas had knocked all the dreams out of Jeanne. The British happy-go-lucky ways of marriage are not those of the French bourgeoisie, and Jeanne had no notion of British happy-go-lucky ways. Phineas had knocked the dream out of Jeanne by kicking Doggie out of her sphere. And there was a girl in England in Doggie’s sphere whom he was to marry. She knew it. A man does not gather his sagacities in order to answer crookedly a direct challenge, unless there is some necessity.

Well. She would never see Doggie again. He would pass out of her life. His destiny called him, if he survived the slaughter of the war, to the shadowy girl in England. Yet he had done that for her. For no other woman could he ever in this life do that again. It was past love. Her brain boggled at an elusive spiritual idea. She was very young, flung cleanly trained from the convent into the war’s terrific tragedy, wherein maiden romantic fancies were scorched in the tender bud. Only her honest traditions of marriage remained. Of love she knew nothing. She leaped beyond it, seeking, seeking. She would never see him again. There she met the Absolute. But he had done that for her – that which, she knew not why, but she knew – he would do for no other woman. The Splendour of it would be her everlasting possession.

She undressed that night, proud, dry-eyed, heroical, and went to bed, and listened to the rhythmic tramp of the sentry across the gateway below her window, and suddenly a lump rose in her throat and she fell to crying miserably.

CHAPTER XVII

“How are you feeling, Trevor?”

“Nicely, thank you, Sister.”

“Glad to be in Blighty again?”

Doggie smiled.

“Good old Blighty!”

“Leg hurting you?”

“A bit, Sister,” he replied with a little grimace.

“It’s bound to be stiff after the long journey, but we’ll soon fix it up for you.”

“I’m sure you will,” he said politely.

The nurse moved on. Doggie drew the cool clean sheet around his shoulders and gave himself up to the luxury of bed – real bed. The morning sunlight poured through the open windows, attended by a delicious odour which after a while he recognized as the scent of the sea. Where he was he had no notion. He had absorbed so much of Tommy’s philosophy as not to care. He had arrived with a convoy the night before, after much travel in ambulances by land and sea. If he had been a walking case, he might have taken more interest in things; but the sniper’s bullet in his thigh had touched the bone, and in spite of being carried most tenderly about like a baby, he had suffered great pain and longed for nothing and thought of nothing but a permanent resting-place. Now, apparently, he had found one, and looking about him he felt peculiarly content. He seemed to have seen no cleaner, whiter, brighter place in the world than this airy ward, swept by the sea-breeze. He counted seven beds besides his own. On a table running down the ward stood a vase of sweet-peas and a bowl of roses. He thought there was never in the world so clean and cool a figure as the grey-clad nurse in her spotless white apron, cuffs and cap.

When she passed near him again, he summoned her. She came to his bedside.

“What do you call this particular region of fairyland?”

She stared at him for a moment, adjusting things in her mind; for his name and style were 35792 Private Trevor, J. M., but his voice and phrase were those of her own social class. Then she smiled, and told him. The corner of fairyland was a private auxiliary hospital in a Lancashire seaside town.

“Lancashire,” said Doggie, knitting his brow in a puzzled way, “but why have they sent me to Lancashire? I belong to a West Country regiment, and all my friends are in the South.”

“What’s he grousing about, Sister?” suddenly asked the occupant of the next bed. “He’s the sort of chap that doesn’t know when he’s in luck and when he isn’t. I’m in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, I am, and when I was hit before, they sent me to a military hospital in Inverness. That’d teach you, my lad. This for me every time. You ought to have something to grouse at.”

“I’m not grousing, you idiot!” said Doggie.

“’Ere – who’s he calling an idjit?” cried the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantryman, raising himself on his elbow.

The nurse intervened; explained that no one could be said to grumble at a hospital when he called it fairyland. Trevor’s question was that of one in search of information. He did not realize that in assigning men to the various hospitals in the United Kingdom, the authorities could not possibly take into account an individual man’s local association.

“Oh well, if it’s only his blooming ignorance – ”

“That’s just it, mate,” smiled Doggie, “my blooming ignorance.”

“That’s all right,” said the nurse. “Now you’re friends.”

“He had no right to call me an idjit,” said the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantryman. He was an aggressive, red-visaged man with bristly black hair and stubbly black moustache.

“If you’ll agree that he wasn’t grousing, Penworthy, I’m sure Trevor will apologize for calling you an idiot.”

And into the nurse’s eyes crept the queer smile of the woman learned in the ways of children.

“Didn’t I say he wasn’t grousing? It was only his ignorance?”

Doggie responded. “I meant no offence, mate, in what I said.”

The other growled an acceptance, whereupon the nurse smiled an ironic benediction and moved away.

“Where did you get it?” asked Penworthy.

Doggie gave the information and, in his turn, made the polite counter-inquiry.

Penworthy’s bit of shrapnel, which had broken a rib or two, had been acquired just north of Albert. When he left, he said, we were putting it over in great quantities.

“That’s where the great push is going to be in a few days.”

“Aren’t you sorry you’re out of it?”

“Me?” The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantryman shook his head. “I take things as I finds ’em, and I finds this quite good enough.”

So they chatted and, in the soldier’s way, became friends. Later, the surgeon arrived and probed Doggie’s wound and hurt him exquisitely, so that the perspiration stood out on his forehead, and his jaws ached afterwards from his clenching of them. While his leg was being dressed he reflected that, a couple of years ago, if anyone had inflicted a twentieth part of such torture on him he would have yelled the house down. He remembered, with an inward grin, the anguished precautions on which he had insisted whenever he sat down in the chair of his expensive London dentist.

“It must have hurt like fun,” said the nurse, busily engaged with the gauze dressing.

“It’s all in the day’s work,” replied Doggie.

The nurse pinned the bandage and settled him comfortably in bed.

“No one will worry you till dinner-time. You’d better try to have a sleep.”

So Doggie nodded and smiled and curled up as best he could and slept the heavy sleep of the tired young animal. It was only when he awoke, physically rested and comparatively free from pain, that his mind, hitherto confused, began to work clearly, to straighten out the three days’ tangle. Yes, just three days. A fact almost impossible to realize. Till now it had seemed an eternity.

He lay with his arms crossed under his head and stared at the blue sky – a soft, comforting English sky. The ward was silent. Only two beds were occupied, one by a man asleep, the other by a man reading a novel. His other room-mates, including his neighbour Penworthy, were so far convalescent as to be up and away, presumably by the life-giving sea, whose rhythmic murmur he could hear. For the first time since he awoke to find himself bandaged up in a strange dug-out, and surrounded by strange faces, did the chaos of his ideas resolve itself into anything like definite memories. Yet many of them were still vague.

He had been out there, with the wiring party, in the dark. He had been glad, he remembered, to escape from the prison of the trench into the open air. He was having some difficulty with a recalcitrant bit of wire that refused to come straight and jabbed him diabolically in unexpected places, when a shot rang out and German flares went up and everybody lay flat on the ground, while bullets spat about them. As he lay on his stomach, a flare lit up the ruined well of the farm of La Folette. And the well and his nose and his heels were in a bee-line. The realization of the fact was the inception of a fascinating idea. He remembered that quite clearly. Of course his discovery, two days before, of the spot where Jeanne’s fortune lay hidden, when Captain Willoughby, with map and periscope, had called him into consultation, had set his heart beating and his imagination working. But not till that moment of stark opportunity had he dreamed of the mad adventure which he undertook. There in front of him, at the very farthest three hundred yards away, in bee-line with nose and heels – that was the peculiar and particular arresting fact – lay Jeanne’s fortune. In thinking of it he lost count of shots and star-shells, and heard no orders and saw no dim forms creeping back to the safety of the trench. And then all was darkness and silence.

Doggie lay on his back and stared at the English sky and wondered how he did it. His attitude was that of a man who cannot reconcile his sober self with the idiot hero of a drunken freak. And yet, at the time, the journey to the ruined well seemed the simplest thing in the world. The thought of Jeanne’s delight shone uppermost in his mind… Oh! he was forgetting the star, which hung low beneath a canopy of cloud, the extreme point of the famous feet, nose and well bee-line. He made for it, now and then walking low, now and then crawling. He did not mind his clothes and hands being torn by the unseen refuse of No Man’s Land. His chief sensation was one of utter loneliness, mingled with exultance at freedom. He did not remember feeling afraid: which was odd, because when the star-shells had gone up and the German trenches had opened fire on the wiring party, his blood had turned to water and his heart had sunk into his boots and he had been deucedly frightened.

Heaven must have guided him straight to the well. He had known all along that he merely would have to stick his hand down to find the rope … and he felt no surprise when the rope actually came in contact with his groping fingers; no surprise when he pulled and pulled and fished up the packet. It had all been preordained. That was the funny part of the business which Doggie now could not understand. But he remembered that when he had buttoned his tunic over the precious packet, he had been possessed of an insane desire to sing and dance. He repressed his desire to sing, but he leaped about and started to run. Then the star in which he trusted must have betrayed him. It must have shed upon him a ray just strong enough to make him a visible object; for, suddenly, ping! something hit him violently on the leg and bowled him over like a rabbit into a providential shell-hole. And there he lay quaking for a long time, while the lunacy of his adventure coarsely and unsentimentally revealed itself.

As to the rest, he was in a state of befogged memory. Only one incident in that endless, cruel crawl home remained as a landmark in his mind. He had paused to take breath, almost ready to give up the impossible flight – it seemed as though he were dragging behind him a ton of red-hot iron – when he became conscious of a stench violent in his nostrils. He put out a hand. It encountered a horrible, once human face, and his fingers touched a round recognizable cap. Horror drove him away from the dead German and inspired him with the strength of despair… Then all was fog and dark again until he recovered consciousness in the strange dug-out.

There the doctor had said to him: “You must have a cast-iron constitution, my lad.”

The memory caused a flicker round his lips. It wasn’t everybody who could crawl on his belly for nearly a quarter of a mile with a bullet through his leg, and come up smiling at the end of it. A cast-iron constitution! If he had only known it fifteen, even ten years ago, what a different life he might have led. The great disgrace would never have come upon him.

And Jeanne? What of Jeanne? After he had told his story, they had given him to understand that an officer would be sent to Frélus to corroborate it, and, if he found it true, that Jeanne would enter into possession of her packet. And that was all he knew, for they had bundled him out of the front trenches as quickly as possible; and once out he had become a case, a stretcher case, and although he had been treated, as a case, with almost superhuman tenderness, not a soul regarded him as a human being with a personality or a history – not even with a military history. And this same military history had vaguely worried him all the time, and now that he could think clearly, worried him with a very definite worry. In leaving his firing-party he had been guilty of a crime. Every misdemeanour in the Army is termed a crime – from murder to appearing buttonless on parade. Was it desertion? If so, he might be shot. He had not thought of that when he started on his quest. It had seemed so simple to account for half an hour’s absence by saying that he had lost his way in the dark. But now, that plausible excuse was invalid…

Doggie thought terribly hard that quiet, sea-scented morning. After all, it did not very much matter what they did to him. Sticking him up against a wall and shooting him was a remote possibility; he was in the British and not the German Army. Field punishments of unpleasant kinds were only inflicted on people convicted of unpleasant delinquencies. If he were a sergeant or a corporal, he doubtless would be broken. But such is the fortunate position of a private, that he cannot be degraded to an inferior rank. At the worst they might give him cells when he recovered. Well, he could stick it. It didn’t matter. What really mattered was Jeanne. Was she in undisputed possession of her packet? When it was a question of practical warfare, Doggie had blind faith in his officers – a faith perhaps even more childlike than that of his fellow-privates, for officers were the men who had come through the ordeal in which he had so lamentably failed; but when it came to administrative affairs, he was more critical. He had suffered during his military career from more than one subaltern on whose arid consciousness the brain-wave never beat. He had never met even a field officer before whom, in the realm of intellect, he had stood in awe. If any one of those dimly envisaged and still more dimly remembered officers of the Lancashire Fusiliers had ordered him to stand on his head on top of the parapet, he would have obeyed in cheerful confidence; but he was not at all certain that, in the effort to deliver the packet to Jeanne, they would not make an unholy mess of things. He saw stacks of dirty yellowish bits of paper, with A.F. No. something or the other, floating between Frélus and the Lancashire Battalion H.Q. and the Brigade H.Q. and the Divisional H.Q., and so on through the majesty of G.H.Q. to the awful War Office itself. In pessimistic mood he thought that if Jeanne recovered her property within a year, she would be lucky.

What a wonderful creature was Jeanne! He shut his eyes to the blue sky and pictured her as she stood in the light, on the ragged escarpment, with her garments beaten by wind and rain. And he remembered the weary thud, thud of railway and steamer, which had resolved itself, like the rhythmic tramp of feet that night, into the ceaseless refrain: “Jeanne! Jeanne!”

He opened his eyes again and frowned at the blue English sky. It had no business to proclaim simple serenity when his mind was in such a state of complex tangle. It was all very well to think of Jeanne – Jeanne, whom it was unlikely that Fate would ever allow him to see again, even supposing the war ended during his lifetime; but there was Peggy – Peggy, his future wife, who had stuck to him loyally through good and evil repute. Yes, there was Peggy – not the faintest shadow of doubt about it. Doggie kept on frowning at the blue sky. Blighty was a very desirable country, but in it you were compelled to think. And enforced thought was an infernal nuisance. The beastly trenches had their good points after all. There you were not called upon to think of anything; the less you thought, the better for your job; you just ate your bully-beef and drank your tea and cursed whizz-bangs and killed a rat or two, and thanked God you were alive.

Now that he came to look at it in proper perspective, it wasn’t at all a bad life. When had he been worried to death, as he was now? And there were his friends: the humorous, genial, deboshed, yet ever-kindly Phineas; dear old Mo Shendish, whose material feet were hankering after the vulgar pavement of Mare Street, Hackney, but whose spiritual tread rang on golden floors dimly imagined by the Seer of Patmos; Barrett, the D. C. M., the miniature Hercules, who, according to legend, though, modestly, he would never own to it, seized two Boches by the neck and knocked their heads together till they died, and who, musically inclined, would sit at his, Doggie’s, feet while he played on his penny whistle all the sentimental tunes he had ever heard of; Sergeant Ballinghall, a tower of a man, a champion amateur heavy-weight boxer, with a voice compared with which a megaphone sounded like a maiden’s prayer, and a Bardolphian nose and an eagle eye and the heart of a broody hen, who had not only given him boxing lessons, but had pulled him through difficult places innumerable … and scores of others. He wondered what they were doing. He also was foolish enough to wonder whether they missed him, forgetting for the moment that if a regiment took seriously to missing their comrades sent to Kingdom Come or Blighty, they would be more like weeping willows than destroyers of Huns.

All the same, he knew that he would always live in the hearts of two or three of them, and the knowledge brought him considerable comfort. It was strange to realize how the tentacles of his being stretched out gropingly towards these (from the old Durdlebury point of view) impossible friends. They had grafted themselves on to his life. Or was that a correct way of putting it? Had they not, rather, all grafted themselves on to a common stock of life, so that the one common sap ran through all their veins?

It took him a long time to get this idea formulated, fixed and accepted. But Doggie was not one to boggle at the truth, as he saw it. And this was the truth. He, James Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall, was a Tommy of the Tommies. He had lived the Tommy life intensely. He was living it now. And the extraordinary part of it was that he didn’t want to be anything else but a Tommy. From the social or gregarious point of view his life for the past year had been one of unclouded happiness. The realization of it, now that he was clearly sizing up the ramshackle thing which he called his existence, hit him like the butt-end of a rifle. Hardship, cold, hunger, fatigue, stench, rats, the dread of inefficiency – all these had been factors of misery which he could never eliminate from his soldier’s equation; but such free, joyous, intimate companionship with real human beings he had never enjoyed since he was born. He longed to be back among them, doing the same old weary, dreary, things, eating the same old Robinson Crusoe kind of food, crouching with them in the same old beastly hole in the ground, while the Boche let loose hell on the trench. Mo Shendish’s grin and his “’Ere, get in aht of the rain,” and his grip on his shoulder, dragging him a few inches farther into shelter, were a spiritual compensation transcending physical discomfitures and perils.

“It’s all dam funny,” he said half aloud.

But this was England, and although he was hedged about, protected and restricted by War Office Regulation Red Tape twisted round to the strength of steel cables, yet he was in command of telegraphs, of telephones, and, in a secondary degree, of the railway system of the United Kingdom.

He found himself deprecating the compulsory facilities of communication in the civilized world. The Deanery must be informed of his home-coming.

As soon as he could secure the services of a nurse he wrote out three telegrams: one addressed “Conover, The Deanery, Durdlebury”; one to Peddle at Denby Hall, and one to Jeanne. The one to Jeanne was the longest, and was “Reply paid.”

“This is going to cost a small fortune, young man,” said the nurse.

Doggie smiled as he drew out a £1 treasury note from his soldier’s pocket-book, the pathetic object containing a form of Will on the right-hand flap and on the left the directions for the making of the Will, concluding with the world-famous typical signature of Thomas Atkins.