

E-text prepared by David Clarke, Barbara Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team http://www.pgdp.net)



THE ROUGH ROAD

by

WILLIAM J. LOCKE







First Edition... September 1918

John Lane
The Bodley Head Ltd




TO
SHEILA

THIS LITTLE TALE OF
THE GREAT WAR
AS A MEMORY FOR AFTER YEARS




THE ROUGH ROAD




CHAPTER I


This is the story of Doggie Trevor. It tells of his doings and of a
girl in England and a girl in France. Chiefly it is concerned with the
influences that enabled him to win through the war. Doggie Trevor did
not get the Victoria Cross. He got no cross or distinction whatever.
He did not even attain the sorrowful glory of a little white cross
above his grave on the Western Front. Doggie was no hero of romance,
ancient or modern. But he went through with it and is alive to tell
the tale.

The brutal of his acquaintance gave him the name of "Doggie" years
before the war was ever thought of, because he had been brought up
from babyhood like a toy Pom. The almost freak offspring of elderly
parents, he had the rough world against him from birth. His father
died before he had cut a tooth. His mother was old enough to be his
grandmother. She had the intense maternal instinct and the brain, such
as it is, of an earwig. She wrapped Doggie--his real name was James
Marmaduke--in cotton-wool, and kept him so until he was almost a grown
man. Doggie had never a chance. She brought him up like a toy Pom
until he was twenty-one--and then she died. Doggie being comfortably
off, continued the maternal tradition and kept on bringing himself up
like a toy Pom. He did not know what else to do. Then, when he was
five-and-twenty, he found himself at the edge of the world gazing in
timorous starkness down into the abyss of the Great War. Something
kicked him over the brink and sent him sprawling into the thick of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

That the world knows little of its greatest men is a commonplace among
silly aphorisms. With far more justice it may be stated that of its
least men the world knows nothing and cares less. Yet the Doggies of
the War, who on the cry of "Havoc!" have been let loose, much to their
own and everybody else's stupefaction, deserve the passing tribute
sometimes, poor fellows, of a sigh, sometimes of a smile, often of a
cheer. Very few of them--very few, at any rate, of the English
Doggies--have tucked their little tails between their legs and run
away. Once a brawny humorist wrote to Doggie Trevor "_Sursum cauda._"
Doggie happened to be at the time in a water-logged front trench in
Flanders and the writer basking in the mild sunshine of Simla with his
Territorial regiment. Doggie, bidden by the Hedonist of circumstance
to up with his tail, felt like a scorpion.

Such feelings, however, will be more adequately dealt with hereafter.
For the moment, it is only essential to obtain a general view of the
type to which Trevor belonged.

       *       *       *       *       *

If there is one spot in England where the present is the past, where
the future is still more of the past, where the past wraps you and
enfolds you in the dreamy mist of Gothic beauty, where the lazy
meadows sloping riverward deny the passage of the centuries, where the
very clouds are secular, it is the cathedral town of Durdlebury. No
factory chimneys defile with their smoke its calm air, or defy its
august and heaven-searching spires. No rabble of factory hands shocks
its few and sedate streets. Divine Providence, according to the
devout, and the crass stupidity of the local authorities seventy years
ago, according to progressive minds, turned the main line of railway
twenty miles from the sacred spot. So that to this year of grace it is
the very devil of a business to find out, from Bradshaw, how to get to
Durdlebury, and, having found, to get there. As for getting away, God
help you! But whoever wanted to get away from Durdlebury, except the
Bishop? In pre-motor days he used to grumble tremendously and threaten
the House of Lords with Railway Bills and try to blackmail the
Government with dark hints of resignation, and so he lived and
threatened and made his wearisome diocesan round of visits and died.
But now he has his episcopal motor-car, which has deprived him of his
grievances.

In the Close of Durdlebury, greenswarded, silent, sentinelled by
immemorial elms that guard the dignified Gothic dwellings of the
cathedral dignitaries, was James Marmaduke Trevor born. His father, a
man of private fortune, was Canon of Durdlebury. For many years he
lived in the most commodious canonical house in the Close with his
sisters Sophia and Sarah. In the course of time a new Dean, Dr.
Conover, was appointed to Durdlebury, and, restless innovator that he
was, underpinned the North Transept and split up Canon Trevor's home
by marrying Sophia. Then Sarah, bitten by the madness, committed
abrupt matrimony with the Rev. Vernon Manningtree, Rector of
Durdlebury. Canon Trevor, many years older than his sisters, remained
for some months in bewildered loneliness, until one day he found
himself standing in front of the cathedral altar with Miss Mathilda
Jessup, while the Bishop pronounced over them words diabolically
strange yet ecclesiastically familiar. Miss Jessup, thus transformed
into Mrs. Trevor, was a mature and comfortable maiden lady of ample
means, the only and orphan daughter of a late Bishop of Durdlebury.
Never had there been such a marrying and giving in marriage in the
cathedral circle. Children were born in Decanal, Rectorial and
Canonical homes. First a son to the Manningtrees, whom they named
Oliver. Then a daughter to the Conovers. Then a son, named James
Marmaduke, after the late Bishop Jessup, was born to the Trevors. The
profane say that Canon Trevor, a profound patristic theologian and an
enthusiastic palaeontologist, couldn't make head or tail of it all,
and, unable to decide whether James Marmaduke should be attributed to
Tertullian or the Neolithic period, expired in an agony of dubiety. At
any rate, the poor man died. The widow, of necessity, moved from the
Close, in order to make way for the new Canon, and betook herself with
her babe to Denby Hall, the comfortable house on the outskirts of the
town in which she had dwelt before her marriage.

The saturated essence of Durdlebury ran in Marmaduke's blood: an
honourable essence, a proud essence; an essence of all that is
statically beautiful and dignified in English life; but an essence
which, without admixture of wilder and more fluid elements, is apt to
run thick and clog the arteries. Marmaduke was coddled from his birth.
The Dean, then a breezy, energetic man, protested. Sarah Manningtree
protested. But when the Dean's eldest born died of diphtheria, Mrs.
Trevor, in her heart, set down the death as a judgment on Sophia for
criminal carelessness; and when young Oliver Manningtree grew up to be
an intolerable young Turk and savage, she looked on Marmaduke and,
thanking heaven that he was not as other boys were, enfolded him more
than ever beneath her motherly wing. When Oliver went to school in the
town and tore his clothes, and rolled in mud and punched other boys'
heads, Marmaduke remained at home under the educational charge of a
governess. Oliver, lean and lanky and swift-eyed, swaggered through
the streets unattended from the first day they sent him to a
neighbouring kindergarten. As the months and years of his childish
life passed, he grew more and more independent and vagabond. He swore
blood brotherhood with a butcher-boy and, unknown to his pious
parents, became the leader of a ferocious gang of pirates. Marmaduke,
on the other hand, was never allowed to cross the road without
feminine escort. Oliver had the profoundest contempt for Marmaduke.
Being two years older, he kicked him whenever he had a chance.
Marmaduke loathed him. Marmaduke shrank into Miss Gunter, the
governess's, skirts whenever he saw him. Mrs. Trevor therefore
regarded Oliver as the youthful incarnation of Beelzebub, and
quarrelled bitterly with her sister-in-law.

One day, Oliver, with three or four of his piratical friends, met
Marmaduke and Miss Gunter and a little toy terrier in the High Street.
The toy terrier was attached by a lead to Miss Gunter on the one side,
Marmaduke by a hand on the other. Oliver straddled rudely across the
path.

"Hallo! Look at thet two little doggies!" he cried. He snapped his
fingers at the terrier. "Come along, Tiny!" The terrier yapped. Oliver
grinned and turned to Marmaduke. "Come along, Fido, dear little
doggie."

"You're a nasty, rude, horrid boy, and I shall tell your mother,"
declared Miss Gunter indignantly.

But Oliver and his pirates laughed with the truculence befitting their
vocation, and bowing with ironical politeness, let their victim depart
to the parody of a popular song: "Good-bye, Doggie, we shall miss
you."

From that day onwards Marmaduke was known as "Doggie" throughout all
Durdlebury, save to his mother and Miss Gunter. The Dean himself grew
to think of him as "Doggie." People to this day call him Doggie,
without any notion of the origin of the name.

To preserve him from persecution, Mrs. Trevor jealously guarded him
from association with