“I’m not aware that I’ve asked you for advice, Phineas.”
“The fact that you’re not aware of many things that you do is no proof that you don’t do them—and do them in a manner perfectly obvious to another party,” replied Phineas sententiously. “You’re asking for advice and consolation from any friendly human creature to whom you’re not ashamed to speak. You’ve had an awful sorrowful time, laddie.”
Doggie roamed about the room, with McPhail’s little grey eyes fixed on him. Yes, Phineas was right. He would have given most of his possessions to be able, these later days, to pour out his tortured soul into sympathetic ears. But shame had kept him, still kept him, would always keep him, from the ears of those he loved. Yes, Phineas had said the diabolically right thing. He could not be ashamed to speak to Phineas. And there was something good in Phineas which he had noticed with surprise. How easy for him, in response to bitter accusation, to cast the blame on his mother? He himself had given the opening. How easy for him to point to his predecessor’s short tenure of office and plead the alternative of carrying out Mrs. Trevor’s theory of education or of resigning his position in favour of some sycophant even more time-serving? But he had kept silent…. Doggie stopped short and looked at Phineas with eyes dumbly questioning and quivering lips.
Phineas rose and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders, and said very gently:
“Tell me all about it, laddie.”
Then Doggie broke down, and with a gush of unminded tears found expression for his stony despair. His story took a long time in the telling; and Phineas interjecting an occasional sympathetic “Ay, ay,” and a delicately hinted question, extracted from Doggie all there was to tell, from the outbreak of war to their meeting on Waterloo Bridge.
“And now,” cried he at last, a dismally tragic figure, his young face distorted and reddened, his sleek hair ruffled from the back into unsightly perpendicularities (an invariable sign of distracted emotion) and his hands appealingly outstretched—“what the hell am I going to do?”
“Laddie,” said Phineas, standing on the hearthrug, his hands on his hips, “if you had posed the question in the polite language of the precincts of Durdlebury Cathedral, I might have been at a loss to reply. But the manly invocation of hell shows me that your foot is already on the upward path. If you had prefaced it by the adjective that gives colour to all the aspirations of the British Army, it would have been better. But I’m not reproaching you, laddie. Poco à poco. It is enough. It shows me you are not going to run away to a neutral country and present the unedifying spectacle of a mangy little British lion at the mercy of a menagerie of healthy hyenas and such-like inferior though truculent beasties.”
“My God!” cried Doggie, “haven’t I thought of it till I’m half mad? It would be just as you say—unendurable.” He began to pace the room again. “And I can’t go to France. It would be just the same as England. Every one would be looking white feathers at me. The only thing I can do is to go out of the world. I’m not fit for it. Oh, I don’t mean suicide. I’ve not enough pluck. That’s off. But I could go and bury myself in the wilderness somewhere where no one would ever find me.”
“Laddie,” said McPhail, “I misdoubt that you’re going to settle down in any wilderness. You haven’t the faculty of adaptability of which I have spoken to-night at some length. And your heart is young and not coated with the holy varnish of callousness, which is a secret preparation known only to those who have served a long apprenticeship in a severe school of egotism.”