In the Guardianship of God

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

After the discussion on a certain story told by the grey man had reached dissolution point from sheer want of coherence, I observed that the Major--though still standing in his usual place by the fire--was looking into the embers instead of warming his coat-tails at them. This fact, and the expression of his face, convinced me that he had forgotten the present in some past experience.

"The Major remembers a story," I remarked aloud. He looked up with a smile.

"I must have a very transparent face," he said, "but it is quite true. I have been wondering if I ought not to tell you something that happened to some one--to me, in fact--a great many years ago. It seems to me that I ought. You see most of you are inclined to scoff at the story we have just heard; unwilling to allow anything but a rational explanation of the mysterious summons. I am not, simply because I happen to have had certain experiences which most of you have not had. The question therefore arises as to whether I am not bound to give my evidence, and so, perhaps, prevent you from forming a hasty judgment?"

He looked inquiringly round the room, but no one spoke. We were so much accustomed to accept the Major's decisions as, above all things, equitable, that we were content to let him arrive at one unbiassed by our views. During the pause which followed, I found myself thinking that weight for weight, inches for inches, brains for brains, I knew no man who had made a better use of life than our Major. Not over clever, certainly not handsome, handicapped heavily by having to start at scratch in worldly matters, he had a distinct personality of his own which influenced every society he entered. You felt somehow that your estimate of that society rose from his presence, and that he brought an element of sound, healthy strength of heart and mind into the mêlée which you would not willingly spare from the struggle for existence. It came to this. Had he not been there the world would have been the worse for his absence; high praise, indeed, for any man.

"Yes!" continued the Major, after a pause, "I'll have to tell my tale like the Ancient Mariner; and if in so doing I bore you with a few uninteresting confidences about myself, I can't help it. You shall have as little of them as possible."

He was so long settling himself in a chair, pulling up his trousers in his careful, economical way, and poking the fire, that our attention had begun to waver, when his opening words startled us into renewed curiosity.

"I don't suppose," he began, "that any of you know I am a widower; but I am. My wife died a year after our marriage; and the child too--a girl. If you search the whole wide world through you won't find a more desolate creature than a boy of two-and-twenty coming back alone in a strange country from the grave of his wife and child. Perhaps, as Rudyard Kipling says, he has no business to have a wife and child. Anyhow he feels a mistake somewhere in the universe when he tries to behave like a man in the little drawing-room she made so pretty. The twopenny-halfpenny fans put up to hide the bare walls--the little dodges to make the sticks of furniture look nice which seemed to you so clever, and over which you have both laughed so often--the unused basket thing done up with lace and frills over which she was so happy that last evening, while you sate by wondering if it could be true, and that your child would lie amongst the dainty furbelows. Well! I suppose it has to be sometimes, but it drove me mad. I was like the boy in another of Kipling's tales, and could think of nothing but death to end it all; just to creep away and die by myself somewhere. I did not want so much to be dead, but to be quite alone--by myself. You see I had lost everything--for ever--and the rest of the stupid world drove me wild with impatience.

"So I went out on leave to the old Salt Road, which ran right across the loneliest part of the district. Perhaps some of you don't know what a Salt Road is? Simply the Customs line which in old days used to be patrolled day and night in order to prevent smuggling. The cactus hedge had been cut down when the protection system was given up, but the road behind it was still passable, and the patrol houses, more or less dilapidated, stood at intervals of ten or twelve miles. I had seen some of them when out on shooting expeditions, and the remembrance of their desolation came back on me now with a new sort of fascination.

"After I settled to go I used to lie awake wondering which of them would be the place. Not the first. That was within hail of other people and help; besides, I could not so soon get rid of the servant whom I had to take with me in order to avoid suspicion. My plan was to send the man on early with orders to do two stages, and have everything ready for me at night in bungalow Number Three; then I should have all the day to myself. Would it be bungalow Number Two, at noon, I wondered? As there were five patrol houses in all, it would most likely be Two or Four; but if I liked any of the others better I could easily find some excuse for getting rid of the servant.

"This may seem unnatural, but I was really quite mad with a sort of rage and spite against everything and everybody; so utterly absorbed in myself that I felt as if I were taking a revenge on life by quitting it. My own pain being the axis of the universe, the world must surely be the loser by its removal. In fact, my mental position at this time might be fairly represented by that of a man quitting a pleasant society because some one has been rude to him. I had no hopes of bettering my condition; I simply wanted to show my resentment.