The Red Planet

by William John Locke

"No good. You must take it as gripped. Goodbye, old chap."

I bade him good-bye and Marigold wheeled me away.

A few days afterwards they told me that this gay, gallant, honourable, sensitive gentleman was dead. Although I had known him so little, it seemed that I knew him very intimately, and I deeply mourned his loss.

I think this episode was the most striking of what I may term personal events during those autumn months.

Of Randall Holmes we continued to hear in the same mysterious manner. His mother visited the firm of solicitors in London through whom his correspondence passed. They pleaded ignorance of his doings and professional secrecy as to the disclosure of his whereabouts. In December he ceased writing altogether, and twice a week Mrs. Holmes received a formal communication from the lawyers to the effect that they had been instructed by her son to inform her that he was in perfect health and sent her his affectionate greetings. Such news of this kind as I received I gave to Betty, who passed it on to Phyllis Gedge.

Of course my intimacy with my dear Betty continued unbroken. If the unmarried Betty had a fault, it was a certain sweet truculence, a pretty self-assertiveness which sometimes betrayed intolerance of human foibles. Her widowhood had, in a subtle way, softened these little angularities of her spiritual contour. And bodily, the curves of her slim figure had become more rounded. She was no longer the young Diana of a year ago. The change into the gracious woman who had passed through the joy and the sorrow of life was obvious even to me, to whom it had been all but imperceptibly gradual. After a while she rarely spoke of her husband. The name of Leonard Boyce was never mentioned between us. With her as with me, the weeks ate up the uneventful days and the months the uneventful weeks. In her humdrum life the falling away of Mrs. Tufton loomed catastrophic.

For four months Mrs. Tufton shone splendid as the wife of the British warrior. The Wellingsford Hospital rang with her praises and glistened with her scrubbing brush. She was the Admirable Crichton of the institution. What with men going off to the war and women going off to make munitions, there were never-ending temporary gaps in the staff. And there was never a gap that Mrs. Tufton did not triumphantly fill. The pride of Betty, who had wrought this reformation, was simply monstrous. If she had created a real live angel, wings and all, out of the dust-bin, she could not have boasted more arrogantly. Being a member of the Hospital Committee, I must confess to a bemused share in the popular enthusiasm. And was I not one of the original discoverers of Mrs. Tufton? When Marigold, inspired doubtless by his wife, from time to time suggested disparagement of the incomparable woman, I rebuked him for an arrant scandal-monger. There had been a case or two of drunkenness at the hospital. Wounded soldiers had returned the worse for liquor, an almost unforgivable offence.... Not that the poor fellows desired to get drunk. A couple of pints of ale or a couple of glasses of whisky will set swimming the head of any man who has not tasted alcohol for months. But to a man with a septic wound or trench nephritis or smashed up skull, alcohol is poison and poison is death, and so it is sternly forbidden to our wounded soldiers. They cannot be served in public houses. Where, then, did the hospital defaulters get their drink?

"If I was you, sir," said Marigold, "I'd keep an eye on that there Mrs. Tufton."

I instantly annihilated him—or should have done so had his expressionless face not been made of non-inflammable timber. He said: "Very good, sir." But there was a damnably ironical and insubordinate look in his one eye.

Gradually the lady lapsed from grace. She got up late and complained of spasms. She left dustpan and brush on a patient's bed. She wrongfully interfered with the cook, insisting, until she was forcibly ejected from the kitchen, on throwing lettuces into the Irish stew. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, a policeman wandering through some waste ground, a deserted brickfield behind Flowery End, came upon an unedifying spectacle. There were madam and an elderly Irish soldier sprawling blissfully comatose with an empty flask of gin and an empty bottle of whisky lying between them. They were taken to the hospital and put to bed. The next morning, the lady, being sober, was summarily dismissed by the matron. Late at night she rang and battered at the door, clamouring for admittance, which was refused. Then she went away, apparently composed herself to slumber in the roadway of the pitch-black High Street, and was killed by a motor-car. And that, bar the funeral, was the end of Mrs. Tufton.