The Victim and The Worm

Oliver P. Brett sat under the shade of a giant yew and regarded a hedge of red and purple fuchsias with thoughtful eyes.

“These bees,” he said to himself, “(if they ain’t wasps which is just as likely), make the calmest sound in the universe.

“They act brisk, but they hum as if they were dreaming. They’re like the English.

“You could make a skipping run over the face of the earth and not find a quieter place to decline in than England, and yet while you’re declining the English get things done. They’re slow but they go on, and they go on after everything else has stopped.

“I put my flashiest into giving them a boost when they needed it most, and they tried hard to turn me down for showing them how. Mad! I was so mad that if I could have got my papers in a hurry I’d have gone out of this old country as fast as their kindergarten railway cars would have taken me. But they hung me up over my papers—just the same as they hung me up over my gas—and by the time they knew what my mother’s maiden name was, and what made my great-aunt kick the bucket at 92, they’d decided to have a go at the gas after all. I’d have lost time if I’d gone elsewhere then, so I stayed.

“That ain’t gas the Germans used to start off with—that was just a little parlour scent squirted out so as to surprise the troops that weren’t looking for perfumes at the moment, but it looked bad. I admit it looked real bad. Those Canadians and all were splendid chaps, and it riles me to think they stood and died of it; they needn’t have died of it, if they hadn’t drunk it in wrong, and breathed too quick. Why, when I practised at it myself (after we got some over to experiment with) I sat kind of near the cylinder, and smoked a cigar right into it. I wasted that cigar, but I got no more harm than a turtle dove swallowing a gnat. My gas—well—it’s a real gas! Thinking don’t matter to it, any more than Christian Science matters to a jug of prussic acid half way down your throat.

“But gee! How long it took these English to see it! They just kinder felt they ought to be good about war.

“I guess they don’t feel that way now; it’s been submarined out of them.

“If we could have morally won this war—we wouldn’t have needed to have started it. We had all the morals in a row on our side sitting on the Belgian fence; but a good knock down blow at the fence kinder dispersed the morals.

“That’s the way war acts. You can have morals before, and you can have morals after; in between you want to study the swiftest kicks.”

Mr. Brett leaned back still further in his steamer chair, and drew his hat almost over his keen half shut eyes.

“I guess,” he continued to himself dreamily, “that I shall just sit here and watch the English till I pan out. America’s my home, but I don’t want to die in it. I should feel too lively. You can live just as dead here as you like. No newspaper men, no prominent citizens, no delegates, nothing to keep up, and no one thinking how many million dollars you own and trying to creep inside them.

“I’ve had my fight and Theodora’s dead; and I guess I feel played out. If there was a harp here I’d think I was in Heaven, but so long as Theodora’s in the next world I’m a good deal better off in this.”

Oliver P. Brett sighed retrospectively at a passing butterfly. There was something in the tilt of its white and flashing wings that reminded him of Theodora.

“It wiggle woggles to put you off,” said Mr. Brett thoughtfully, watching the insect’s tortuous approach to the fuchsias, which was causing much confusion to a more direct and simple minded bee, “but it knows what it’s about. That’s like Theodora too.

“She wanted to die, and she always had to do what she wanted, and on that occasion she hadn’t time to change her mind before she really was dead. The Almighty acted spry and took her at her word, which was more than I ever succeeded in doing.”

Mr. Brett’s thoughts at this point did not stop, but they ceased to take the form of words; they crystallized into pictures. For the first time for forty years he was resting.

In the quiet, old, creeper-covered, brick house behind him there was no one to thwart or work against him.

There were half a dozen perfectly trained English servants who knew nothing about him but his superficial tastes, which they studied as easily and silently as possible to satisfy. And then there was Elise. Elise was his unmarried daughter; it made Mr. Brett’s sardonic deep lined mouth smile tenderly when he thought of Elise. She slipped in and out of the big sweet rooms as if she were a shaft of travelling sunshine.

Elise was as pretty as a picture, and as gentle as the fall of dew on the wide emerald lawns.

She was generally to be found in the garden, and when she was in the house she never looked as if it belonged to her. She looked as if she were one of the flowers waiting on a side table to be arranged by the stiff backed parlour-maid.

Yet Elise could have had half a dozen houses if she had wanted them. She was dimly aware that her father would never set a limit to her desires, but it made it still simpler that she had very few, and that he satisfied them all without her asking him for anything. All except one.

Unfortunately, this one wish was a very strong and frequent wish, and all Papa ever said when Elise expressed it was, “Why, no, Elise. I guess I don’t see my way to it.”

It really did look as if Papa was cruel about Hermione.

Elise knew that it was not the fault of her beautiful and enchanting elder sister that her marriage with a Roumanian Prince had turned out a disastrous failure. In spite of her wit, her beauty and her charm, nobody had ever breathed a word against Hermione. Her virtue was as undisturbed as her complexion.

She was bereft of her husband (a comfort under the circumstances, but a comfort which could always be used as a grievance), and, by the wickedest of European laws, she was parted from her only child.

She lived (Papa no doubt gave her a great deal of money to live on) the life of a broken-hearted invalid in the best apartments that the Ritz could offer.

She wrote that she didn’t like Paris, but Papa wouldn’t have her come to stay at Mambles.

When the air raids became troublesome in Paris, Hermione was moved with an extraordinary amount of care and the best attentions of the highest officials in France and England, with all her papers especially signed and eased of their usual restrictions, to London.

Papa found two trained nurses for her and a house in one of the quietest of London squares, but he did not relax his inexplicable refusal to have Hermione at Mambles.

“Why, no, Elise,” he repeated. “You can go up to see Hermione (if she isn’t too ill to speak, and I don’t understand that her illnesses take that form), as long as you won’t make her any deathbed promises. I should object to that. But I don’t want her down here.

“You just tell her it’s a dull place and damp, unless you find she hankers after damp and wants it dull—then you tell her it’s lively and dry as a bone.

“You can take Whisket and go and stay at Claridge’s Hotel, stay there just as long as you want, and remember, if you stay after you’ve stopped wanting, I shall send John to bring you away.

“I notice John is as good as a rain gauge about your feelings, and I will say for John, though he has all the faults of the English that rile me most, if he puts his foot on a wasp he gets the wasp.

“Hermione will probably say it’ll kill her to have you leave her, but don’t you believe it. Hermione is so tough she can die that way 365 times in the year and start up all over again on New Year’s Day with resolutions of ill health that would weaken a hefty elephant.

“People who can stand dying as often as Hermione, don’t die—not under sixty.”

Elise flushed painfully, and set her delicate, weak little mouth into stiffness.

It was hard not to be angry with Papa, and she had to remind herself of his tragedy in order to forgive him.

Papa’s tragedy was that he had lost his only son in France and that the telegram announcing it had killed Mamma on the spot.

Mamma had opposed Arnold’s going from the first, and curiously enough, Papa, who always seemed so much more fond of Arnold than Mamma ever was, hadn’t stopped it. Mamma said that as long as his country wasn’t in, why should Arnold fight?