“The straw is a useful animal. Awful dearth of village idiots because Selfridge’s have made a corner in straws for their soda fountain. Species practically extinct. Sole surviving specimen, C. Kennedy, Esq., fireman, pageant-maker and pork-butcher. Pageants and pork while you pause. Preposterous prices! Antonia, you remember my inspiration for a grand historical pageant of barques up the Thames in commemoration of the death of Ethelred the Unready?”
“I remember a few rough suggestions you threw out, of a sort of Lord Mayor’s show,” laughed Antonia, “presenting every sort of special occasion on which the English people were notoriously unready, headed by Ethelred himself, refusing to get up on his wedding-morning because he had overtired himself the night before, taking cinema films of a tortoise——”
“And ending with a symbolic presentment of the proverb ‘Always lock the stable door after the horse has got away; it does no harm and amuses the horse’—tableau of same, with horse smiling happily over the adjoining hedge. Would you believe it, Antonia, that when I approached the Lord Mayor on the subject, and put it to him that this was the undoubted moment for the Educational Value of such a moral lesson upon the psychology of the gritty-nosed board-school child, and would he lend me some of the comic costumes and coachmen he must have lying about from his own piffling show—Antonia, he said: ‘Young man, are you aware that this country is at war?’ and handed me a white feather torn from the hindmost of a flock of geese who happened to be waddling across the hall. I didn’t lose my temper, Antonia. I put it into my buttonhole, and said very calmly, ‘Thank you—that’s the second present I’ve had to-day,’ and turning back the coat lapel on the other side, I showed him my V.C. where the King had pinned it. Then all the geese rose on their hind legs and cheered——”
Deb’s childish peals of laughter broke off his narration. Till the last episode recounted, she had been in bewilderment trying to sift fantasy from fact; with such vivid conviction did the speaker present each succeeding picture: the smiling horse, the mayor bending for the feather, the proud young V.C. ... but that incident at least might quite well be true——
“Are you a V.C.?”
He gave her rather a queer look from his candid forget-me-not blue eyes. And he put down his cup and walked sharply to the window, and remarked in a very matter-of-fact tone: “No. I’ve been medically rejected for the Army. You see, I’ve only been given another year to live, and I suppose they thought it a pity to reduce the allowance.”
“Never mind, Cliffe,” said Antonia gently—and Deb, the tears choking in her throat, waited for the message of divine womanly consolation that was doubtless on its way—“A well-meaning man can tell an enormous quantity of lies even in one year. Don’t give up. Look at him well, Deb—he has a wrinkle in his face for every lie his lips have spoken.”
The man turned round to give the entire benefit of his long face, webbed and wrinkled by a thousand evidences of inaccurate statement. Sombrely he looked at Deb:
“Shall I tell you how I was cured of my habit of lying, in spite of Antonia? Yes, cured, by God, and by pretty drastic means....” He bent his chin on to his hands. Deb knew instinctively that on this one occasion, if never again, out of a fever of imaginative falsehood was emerging a simple and rather poignant piece of truth——
“Never mind the details,” he broke out abruptly—“just take it that there was a woman, and she loved me—I never knew how much. She was responsive to my moods as a field of barley to the wind—rustling to shadow and waving back to pure light. A field of barley, I tell you!” he cried fiercely, striking the table with his fist.... “I was miserably depressed over something or other—again a detail—and she tried to laugh it off. That irritated me—she wasn’t taking the tragedy seriously enough. My tragedy! ‘Ring me up to-morrow, Cliffe, between seven and eight, and let me hear the worst,’ and again that forced silly little laugh. I replied with an inflexion of mocking composure—intensely dramatic: ‘Very well, dear. If I haven’t rung up by five minutes to eight, you’ll know I’ve put a bullet through my head.’ And left it at that.”