“I think I’ll want to go round and round the world till I’m dizzy.”
At this amazing pronouncement from Marmaduke Trevor, Peggy gasped. It also astonished Doggie himself. He had not progressed so far on the road to self-emancipation as to dream of a rupture of his engagement. His marriage was as much a decree of destiny as had been his enlistment when he walked to Peter Pan’s statue in Kensington Gardens. But the war had made the prospect a distant one. In the vague future he would marry and settle down. But now Peggy brought it into alarming nearness, thereby causing him considerable agitation. To go back to vegetation in Durdlebury, even with so desirable a companion cabbage as Peggy, just when he was beginning to conjecture what there might be of joy and thrill in life—the thought dismayed him; and the sudden dismay found expression in his rhetorical outburst.
“Oh, if you want to travel for a year or two, I’m all for it,” cried Peggy. “I can’t say I’ve seen much of the world. But we’ll soon get sick of it, and yearn for home. There’ll be lots of things to do. We’ll take up our position as county people—no more of the stuffy old women you’re so down on—and you’ll get into Parliament and sit on committees, and so on, and altogether we’ll have a topping time.”
Doggie had an odd sensation that a stranger spoke through Peggy’s familiar lips. Well, perhaps, not a stranger, but a half-forgotten dead and gone acquaintance.
“Don’t you think the war will change things—if it hasn’t changed them already?”
“Not a bit,” Peggy replied. “Dad’s always talking learnedly about social reconstruction, whatever that means. But if people have got money and position and all that sort of thing, who’s going to take it away from them? You don’t suppose we’re all going to turn socialists and pool the wealth of the country, and everybody’s going to live in a garden-city and wear sandals and eat nuts?”
“Of course not,” said Doggie.
“Well, how are people like ourselves going to feel any difference in what you call social conditions?”
Doggie lit another cigarette, chiefly in order to gain time for thought; but an odd instinct made him secure the matchbox before he picked out the cigarette. Superficially, Peggy’s proposition was incontrovertible. Unless there happened some social cataclysm, involving a newly democratized world in ghastly chaos, which after all was a remote possibility, the externals of gentle life would undergo very slight modification. Yet there was something fundamentally wrong in Peggy’s conception of post-war existence. Something wrong in essentials. Now, a critical attitude towards Peggy, whose presence was a proof of her splendid loyalty, seemed hateful. But there was something wrong all the same. Something wrong in Peggy herself that put her into opposition. In one aspect, she was the pre-war Peggy, with her cut-and-dried little social ambitions and her definite projects of attainment; but in another she was not. The pre-war Peggy had swiftly turned into the patriotic English girl who had hounded him into the army. He found himself face to face with an amorphous, characterless sort of Peggy whom he did not know. It was perplexing, baffling. Before he could formulate an idea, she went on:
“You silly old thing, what change is there likely to be? What change is there now, after all? There’s a scarcity of men. Naturally. They’re out fighting. But when they come home on leave, life goes on just the same as before—tennis parties, little dances, dinners. Of course, lots of people are hard hit. Did I tell you that Jack Paunceby was killed—the only son? The war’s awful and dreadful, I know—but if we don’t go through with it cheerfully, what’s the good of us?”