Phineas strode away into the blackness. Doggie shut the front door and put up the chain and went back into his sitting-room. He wound his fingers in his hair.
“Enlist? My God!”
He lit a cigarette and after a few puffs flung it into the grate. He stared at the alternatives.
Flight, which was craven—a lifetime of self-contempt. Durdlebury, which was impossible. Enlistment——?
Yet what was a man incapable yet able-bodied, honourable though disgraced, to do?
His landlord found him at seven o’clock in the morning asleep in an arm-chair.
CHAPTER IX
After a bath and a change and breakfast, Doggie went out for one of his solitary walks. At Durdlebury such a night as the last would have kept him in bed in a darkened room for most of the following day. But he had spent many far, far worse on Salisbury Plain, and the inexorable reveille had dragged him out into the raw dreadful morning, heedless of his headache and yearning for slumber, until at last the process of hardening had begun. To-day Doggie was as unfatigued a young man as walked the streets of London, a fact which his mind was too confusedly occupied to appreciate. Once more was he beset less by the perplexities of the future than by a sense of certain impending doom. For to Phineas McPhail’s “Why not?” he had been able to give no answer. He could give no answer now, as he marched with swinging step, automatically, down Oxford Street and the Bayswater Road in the direction of Kensington Gardens. He could give no answer as he stood sightlessly staring at the Peter Pan statue.