Among the officers who came to call upon him, none surprised him more than did Major Bayne. While that officer had always been careful to maintain an attitude toward him, at once correct and civil, there had never been any approach to friendliness. As a matter of fact, Major Bayne was too entirely occupied with his own interests to have either the leisure or the inclination for anything but a casual concern for the chaplain and his affairs. That was not to be wondered at. Life in the army, notwithstanding all its loyalties and its fine unselfishnesses, is, in some of its phases, a brutally self-centred form of existence. Its routine consists in the continual performance of “duties” under an authority ruthless in its exactions and relentless in its penalties. Only after months of experience of its iron rigidity does the civilian, accustomed as he is to self-determination, with a somewhat easygoing regard for the conventions of his community, arrive at the state of mind in which unconsciously and as a matter of second nature he estimates the quality of the most trivial act by its relation to the standard set by the Military High Command. Like a spectre does that solemn, impalpable, often perfectly unreasonable omniscient and omnipotent entity lurk in the shadow ready to reach out a clutching hand, and for some infraction of regulations, wilful or inadvertent, hale the luckless and shivering defaulter to judgment. It therefore behooves a man to take heed to himself and to his ways, for, with the best intention, he may discover that he has been guilty of an infraction, not of a regulation found in K. R. & O., with which he has painfully made himself familiar and which he has diligently exercised himself to observe, but of one of those seventeen hundred and sixty-nine “instructions” and “informations” which from time to time have appeared in those sacred writings known as Army, Divisional, Brigade, or Battalion Orders.
In consequence, an officer with a conscience toward his duty, or an ambition for promotion, gives himself so completely to the business of “watching his step” that only by a definite exercise of his altruistic faculties can he indulge himself in the commendable civilian luxury of caring for his neighbour.
And so it came about that Major Bayne, possessing in a large measure the quality of “canniness” characteristic of his race—a quality which for the benefit of the uninitiated Saxon it may be necessary to define as being a judicious blending of shrewdness and caution,—and being as well, again after the manner of his race, ambitious for his own advancement, and, furthermore, being a man of conscience, had been so entirely engrossed in the absorbing business of “watching his step” that he had paid slight heed to the affairs of any other officer, and least of all to those of the chaplain, whose functions in the battalion he had regarded, it must be confessed, as more or less formal, if not merely decorative.
But, in spite of all this, in the major the biggest thing was his heart, which, however, true to his race type again, he kept stored in the deepest recesses of his system. To “touch” the major's “heart” was an operation of more than ordinary difficulty. It was that very thing, however, which the letter to the battalion Commanding Officer from the A. D. C. S. had achieved. The effect of this letter upon the members of the mess, and most especially upon the junior major in regard to their relation to their chaplain, was revolutionary. Hence the major's visit to Barry upon the evening of his return.
It was with an unusually cordial handshake that he greeted the chaplain.
“We are glad to have you back with us, Captain Dunbar,” he said. “We missed you, and we have discovered that we need you. Things have been moving while you were away. This battalion is undergoing a transformation. The O. C. is tightening down the screws of discipline. He sees, and we all are beginning to see, that we are up against a different proposition from what we had imagined, and right here, Captain Dunbar, I want to say for myself, and I believe for the rest of the boys, that we have not given you a square deal.”
His attitude and his words astounded Barry.
“Don't say that, major,” he said, in a voice husky with emotion. “Don't say that. I have been all wrong. I am not going to talk about it, but I am awfully glad to get a second chance.”
“If you need a second chance, Pilot,” said the major, for the first time using the friendly western sobriquet, “believe me, you'll get it.”
The major sat down, pulled out his pipe, and began to impart some interesting bits of news.