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He received his papers, the seven days' sick furlough and his railway warrant, shook hands with nurses and comrades and sped to Durdlebury in the third-class carriage of the Tommy. Peggy, in the two-seater, was waiting for him in the station yard. He exchanged greetings from afar, grinned, waved a hand and jumped in beside her. "How jolly of you to meet me!" "Where's your luggage?" "Luggage?"
Besides music, Doggie had other social accomplishments. He could dance. He could escort young ladies home of nights. Not a dragon in Durdlebury would not have trusted Doggie with untold daughters. With women, old and young, he had no shynesses. He had been bred among them, understood their purely feminine interests, and instinctively took their point of view.
"Don't talk like that. You make me sick," said Doggie. During the next few months there happened terrible and marvellous things, which are all set down in the myriad chronicles of the time; which shook the world and brought the unknown phenomenon of change into the Close of Durdlebury.
"Ker-ist!" said Chipmunk. "Can yer wait a bit until I've cleaned me buttons?" "Oh, bust your old buttons!" laughed Doggie. "I'm hungry." So the pair of privates marched through the old city to the Downshire Arms, the select, old-world hotel of Durdlebury, where Doggie was known since babyhood; and there, sitting at a window table with Chipmunk, he gave Durdlebury the great sensation of its life.
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?
"Who knows what he's going to do? What are you going to do? Fly back to your little Robinson Crusoe Durdlebury of a Pacific Island? I don't think so." Oliver stuck his pipe on the mantelpiece and his hands on his hips and made a stride towards Doggie. "Damn you, Doggie! Damn you to little bits! How the Hades did you guess what I've scarcely told myself, much less another human being?"
Are you residing permanently in London?" "Yes," said Doggie. "And Durdlebury?" "I'm not going back." "London's a place full of temptations for those without experience," Phineas observed sagely. "I've not noticed any," Doggie replied. On which Phineas laughed and slapped him on the knee. "Man," said he, "when I first saw you I thought you had changed into a disillusioned misanthropist.
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.
Till to-day he had not been allowed to see visitors, or to receive letters. They told him that the Dean of Durdlebury had called; had brought flowers and fruit and had left a card "From your Aunt, Peggy and myself." But to-day he felt wonderfully strong, in spite of the unrelenting pain, and the nurse had said: "I shouldn't wonder if you had some visitors this afternoon." Peggy, of course.
"Mademoiselle," said he, in his best Durdlebury manner, "may I dare to present my two comrades, my best friends in the battalion, Monsieur McPhail, Monsieur Shendish?" She made them each a little formal bow, and then, somewhat maliciously, addressing McPhail, as the bigger and the elder of the two: "I don't yet know the name of your friend." Phineas put his great hand on Doggie's shoulder.
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