A marrying man

by G. B. Stern

Pending his new official appointment, Gareth made of his nights a feverish inferno by conjuring up a series of horror-stricken predicaments in which he might find himself involved in every fresh employment that his fancy selected as probable to materialize on the following day. Suppose he were given a job for which he was totally incapable, and they did not believe his protestations, and he bungled it—with disastrous public consequences. Or suppose, misled by the quiet strength of his personality, they put him in a position of authority—he who could never master the secret of dealing with subordinates ... and suppose these noticed his lack of confidence, mocked his waverings, flouted his commands; suppose he were told to perform some important mission, and it were taken for granted that he knew more than he did, and he did not fully understand his instructions, and dared not ask further questions; suppose....

He had been too long in the sheltered routine of Leslie Campbell's, not to torment himself with the dread of exposure to the awful unknown.

But still, there was a thrill and a sweetness in the daylight thought that he was doing war-work at last!

And at last the long droning summer days of idleness and boredom convinced him that he was doing nothing of the sort. There was really and actually not much open to a man of forty-three, well over age for the Conscription Act, both shy and contemptuous of home service or the special constable badge, and not sufficiently One of Them, in the generic sense of the phrase, to be swung aloft by the crane of influence and lowered into exactly the right place.

He discovered there were Labour Bureaux, where one might put down one's marketable assets. What were his marketable assets? Gareth spent a whole night chasing these elusive qualities and trying to reduce them to a clear statement.

"I should like a job in the Censorship," he decided finally. And left it at that.

He had put down his name on the Civil Service list, and was told that he would hear from them in due course. But though the rumour was current that men were badly wanted to replace those who had been called up, yet beyond sending him a paper to fill up with details of age, citizenship, etc., the administration seemed to have successfully pigeon-holed his application. He was glad of their forgetfulness; having stood for a moment outside one of the big offices, quailing from the prospect of being absorbed and lost among these hundreds of drab little men scurrying out of the building for their hour of lunch and relaxation. Too humble to deem himself fit for anything more splendid than this, he was still too much the dreamer to accept the belief that symbolically to bear a banner in the great Crusade could be reduced actually to such humdrum insignificance.

And he missed the world of books. Ever more and more he missed it. That, after all, was the atmosphere he best understood, where words stood for deeds, and the importance of words for the importance of deeds; where all life was imprisoned by language, translated into style, shut between covers.... For nineteen years he had been a reader ... two weeks astray on the hustling pavements were enough to make him regard the dim little offices off Covent Garden as precious sanctuary.

So he went back.

Leslie Campbell readily accepted his stumbling explanations of his odd behaviour a fortnight ago. He had not been well—the strain of the war—nerves out of order; and then the culminating anxiety of his wife's departure that night for Flanders.... "It seems worse when they return, and then go out again, doesn't it, sir?"