“Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,Every wise man’s son doth know,”
he said.
There were thirty or forty officers in the lounge of the hotel, all condemned, as I was, to spend the greater part of the day there. Some men have better luck. It was the fourth time I had been held up in this wretched place on my way back to France after leave. Dragged out of our beds at an unreasonable hour, crammed into a train at Victoria, rushed down to an embarkation port as if the fate of the empire depended on our getting there without a minute’s delay, we find, when we get out of the train, that the steamer will not start for three hours, four hours, on this occasion six hours. We are compelled to sit about in an hotel, desolate and disgusted, when we might have been comfortable in London.
I looked round to see if there were anyone I wanted to talk to. There were—I had seen them at Victoria—three or four men whom I knew slightly, but I had no particular wish to spend hours with any one of them. I had just decided to go out for a walk by myself when I felt a slap on my shoulder. I turned and saw Daintree. I was uncommonly glad to see him. Daintree and I were friends before the war and I have always found him an amusing companion. He greeted me heartily.
“Great luck,” he said, “running into you like this. I don’t see a single other man I know in the whole crowd. And any way I particularly wanted to talk to you. I’ve got a story to tell you.”
We secured a corner and two comfortable chairs. I lit a pipe and waited. Daintree is a wonderful man for picking up stories. The most unusual things happen to him and he gets mixed up in far more adventures than anyone else I know. And he likes telling stories. Usually, the men who have stories to tell will not talk, and the men who like talking have nothing interesting to tell. Daintree is exceptional.
“What is it this time?” I asked. “What journalists call a ‘sob story,’ or is it meant to be humorous?”
“I should call it a kind of joke,” said Daintree; “but my wife says it’s the most pathetic thing she’s ever heard. It makes her cry even to think of it You can take it either way. I’ll be interested to see how you do take it. I was thinking of writing it to you, ‘for your information and necessary action, please.’ My wife wanted me to, but it’s too long for a letter. Besides, I don’t see what you or anyone else could possibly do in the matter. You may give advice—that’s what my wife expects of you—but there’s really no advice to give. However, you can tell me how it strikes you. That’s what I want to know, whether you agree with my wife or with me. You know Simcox, don’t you, or do you? I forget.”
“Simcox?” I said. “Is that a tall, cadaverous man in the Wessex? Rather mournful looking?”
“That’s the man. Came home from a remote corner of the Argentine, or somewhere like that, early in the war, and got a commission. He’s a captain now.”
“I met him,” I said, “down Albert way, shortly before the push last year. I can’t say I knew him. He seemed to me rather a difficult kind of man to know.”
“So my wife says,” said Daintree. “He’s older than most of us, for one thing, and has spent twenty years all by himself herding sheep or branding bullocks, or whatever it is they do out in those places. Naturally he’d rather lost touch with life at home and found it difficult to fit himself in; especially with a lot of boys straight from the ‘Varsities or school. They were mostly boys in his battalion. Anyhow, he seems to have been a bit morose, but he did his job all right in the regiment and was recommended for the M.C.. He got knocked out in the Somme push and jolly nearly lost a leg. They saved it in the end and sent him down to my place to convalesce.”
Daintree owns a very nice place in the Midlands. In the old days it was one of the pleasantest houses I know to stay in. Daintree himself was a capital host and his wife is a charming woman. The house is a convalescent home for officers now, and Mrs. Daintree, with the help of three nurses, runs it. Daintree pretends to regard this as a grievance, and says it was all his wife’s doing, though he was just as keen on the place as she was.
“Damned nuisance,” he said, “finding the place full of boys rioting when I get home on leave. And it’s full up now—twelve of them, no less. There’s hardly a spot in the house I can call my own, and they’ve spoiled the little lake I made at the bottom of the lawn. That young ass Pat Singleton started what he called boat-races on it——”
“Oh, Pat Singleton’s there?” I said. “I knew he’d been wounded, but I didn’t hear he’d been sent to your place.”
“Pat Singleton’s always everywhere,” said Daintree. “I’ve never come across a place where he wasn’t, and he’s a devil for mischief. Remind me afterwards to tell you about the trick he played on the principal nurse, a Scotchwoman with a perfectly terrific sense of her own dignity,” Daintree chuckled.
“If you’d rather tell me that story,” I said, “instead of the one about Simcox, I’d just as soon have it. In fact, I’d prefer it. Sob stories are always trying.”
“But I’m not sure that the Simcox one is a sob story, though there’s a certain amount of slosh in it. Anyhow, I’ve got to tell it to you, for my wife says you’re the only man she knows who can advise what ought to be done.”
“All right,” I said, “but Pat Singleton’s escapades always amuse me. I’d like to hear about his making an apple-pie bed for that nurse.”
Daintree chuckled again, and I gathered from the expression of his face that the nurse had endured something worse than an apple-pie bed.
“Or about the boat-races,” I said. “I didn’t know you had anything which floated on that lake of yours.”
“I haven’t,” said Daintree, “except the kind of wooden box in which the gardener goes out to clear away the duck-weed. However, Pat Singleton comes into the Simcox story in the end. It’s really about him that my wife wants your advice.”
“No one,” I said, “can give advice about Pat Singleton.”
“Knowing the sort of man Simcox is,” said Daintree, “you’ll understand that he was rather out of it at first in a house full of boys just out of hospital and jolly glad to have a chance of running about a bit. Pat Singleton wasn’t there when Simcox arrived. But the others were nearly as bad; silly jokes from morning to night and an infernal row always going on. My wife likes that sort of thing, fortunately.”
“Simcox, I suppose, just sat by himself in a corner of the veranda and glowered?”
“Exactly. And at first my wife could do nothing with him. In the end, of course——”
“In the end,” I said, “she persuaded him to tell her his inmost secrets and to confide to her the tragedy of his soul. That’s just what she would do.”
Mrs. Daintree is a very kind and sympathetic lady. When she talks to me I feel ready to tell her anything. A man like Simcox, shy, reserved, and wholly unaccustomed to charming ladies, would succumb to her easily and pour out a love story or anything else he happened to have on his chest at the time.
“You see,” said Daintree, “his leg was pretty stiff and he couldn’t get about much, even if he’d wanted to. There was nothing for him to do except sit in a deck-chair. My wife felt it her duty to talk to him a good deal.”
Daintree seemed to be making excuses for Mrs. Daintree and Simcox. They were unnecessary. Mrs. Daintree would have got his story out of him if she thought he was really in need of sympathy, whether he sat in a chair all day or was able to row races in the lake in the gardener’s punt.
“Anyhow,” said Daintree, “what he told her—he told it to me afterwards, so there’s no secret about it—was this: He got hit in the leg during an advance through one of those woods north of the Somme, Mametz, I think. It was a beastly place. Our fellows had been in there two days before and had to clear out again. Then Simcox’s lot went in—you know the sort of thing it was?”
I nodded.
“Shell holes, and splintered tree trunks,” I said. “Machine-guns enfilading you, and H.E. bursting promiscuous. I know.”
“Well, Sirmcox’ fellows went in all right, and stayed there for a while. Simcox says he remembers noticing that the ground was strewed with débris left by the Germans when they cleared out, and by our fellows afterwards. Equipment, rifles and all the rest of it lying about, as well as other things—pretty ghastly things.”
“You needn’t go into details,” I said. “I can guess.”
“I’m only telling you this,” said Daintree, “because all the stuff lying about seems to have interested Simcox. It’s odd the feelings men have at these times. Simcox says the thing he chiefly wanted to do was to tidy up. He had a kind of strong desire to pick things up and put them away somewhere. Of course he couldn’t; but he did pick up one thing, a cigarette case. He showed it to me. It was one of those long-shaped, flat white metal cases which fellows carry because they hold about thirty cigarettes. Simcox says he doesn’t know why he picked it up. He didn’t want it in the least. He just saw it lying there on the ground and stuffed it into his pocket. Almost immediately after that he was hit. Bit of shrapnel under the knee.”
“I remember hearing about that business,” I said. “We were driven out again, weren’t we?”
“Exactly. And Simcox was left behind. He couldn’t walk, of course. But he crawled into a shell hole, and there he lay. Well, for the next two days that wood wasn’t healthy for either side. The Germans couldn’t get back, because we were sprinkling the whole place with shrapnel. We couldn’t advance for similar reasons. Simcox just lay in his shell hole. He tied up his leg somehow. He had some brandy in a flask as well as his iron rations. But he hadn’t much tobacco. There were only two cigarettes in his own case. However, he had the other case, the one he picked up. There were nearly twenty in it Also there was—I say, at this point the story gets sloppy.”
“Never mind,” I said. “Go on. What else was in the cigarette case? A farewell letter to a loving wife? Love to little Willie and a text of Scripture?”
“Not so bad as that. A photo of a girl. He showed it to me when he told me the story.”
“Good looking girl?”
“Very. Large eyes—sort of tender, you know, and appealing; and a gentle, innocent face, and a mouth——”
“I suppose,” I said, “that these raptures are necessary if I’m to understand the story. Otherwise, you may skip them.”
“Can’t possibly skip them,” said Daintree. “The whole point of the story depends on your realizing the sort of girl she was. Pathetic—that’s the word I want. Looked at you out of the photo as if she was a poor, lonely, but uncommonly fetching little thing, who wanted a strong, true man to shelter her from the evil world. She was got up in some sort of fancy dress which kind of heightened the effect. I don’t altogether profess to understand what happened, though my wife says she does. But Simcox in a sort of way fell in love with her. That’s not the way he put it. He didn’t feel that she was just an ordinary girl—the sort one falls in love with. She was—well, he didn’t think of her as flesh and blood—more a kind of vision—spiritual, you know.”
“Angel?” I said.
“That sort of thing. You know. That was the idea that gripped Simcox while he lay there in the shell hole. Stars came out at night and Simcox felt that she was looking down at him. In the day he used to lie and gaze at her. When he thought it was all up with him and that he couldn’t live, he seemed to hear her voice—I say, you ought to hear my wife telling this part of the story. Simcox wouldn’t tell it to me, naturally; but he seems to have enlarged on it a good deal to her. He says that only for that photo he’d have given in and just died. I daresay he wouldn’t really, but he thinks he would. Anyhow, he didn’t. He stuck it out and his leg didn’t hurt nearly as much as he expected. He attributes that to the influence of this—this——”
“Angel visitant?” I said.
“You can call her an angel if you like,” said Daintree.
“This,” I said, “seems to me a pure sob story. If there’s any other part less harrowing, I wish you’d hurry up and get to it.”
“All right,” said Daintree. “I’ll cut out the rest of his experiences in that shell hole, though, mind you, they’re rather interesting and frightfully poetic the way my wife tells them. After two days our fellows got back into the wood and kept it. The stretcher-bearers found Simcox in his hole and they lugged him down to a Casualty Clearing Station. From that he went to a hospital—the usual round. He had a pretty bad time, first over there, and then, when they could move him, in London. By degrees he got more sane about the photo. He stopped thinking she was any kind of spirit and took to regarding her just as a girl, though a very exceptional kind of girl, of course. He was hopelessly in love with her. Do you think a man really could fall in love with a photo?”
“Simcox did,” I said, “so we needn’t discuss that point.”
“The chances were, of course,” said Daintree, “that she was some other fellow’s girl, possibly some other fellow’s wife. But Simcox didn’t care. He was too far gone to care for anything except to get that girl. Those morose, shy men are frightfully hard hit in that sort of way, I’m told. That’s what my wife says, anyhow. They get it much worse than we do when they do get it. Simcox would have dragged that girl out of the arms of an archbishop if that was where he found her. Of course he couldn’t go hunting her over England while he was in hospital with a bad leg; but he made up his mind to find out who she was and where she lived as soon as he was well enough to go about. He’d very little to go on—practically nothing. The photo had been cut down so as to fit into the cigarette case, so that there wasn’t even a photographer’s name on it.”
“He might have advertised,” I said. “There are papers which go in for that sort of thing, publish rows of reproductions of photographs ‘Found on the battle-field,’ with requests for identification.”
“My wife thought of that,” said Daintree, “but Simcox didn’t seem to take to the idea. He said the photo was too sacred a thing to be reproduced in a paper. My own idea is that he was afraid of any kind of publicity. You see, the other fellow might turn up—the fellow who really had a right to the girl.”
“How the deuce did he propose to find her?”
“I don’t know. He told my wife some rotten yarn about instinct guiding him to her; said he felt sure that the strength of his great love would somehow lead him to her side. He didn’t say that to me, couldn’t, you know. But it’s wonderful what a fellow will say to a woman, if she’s sympathetic, and my wife is. Still, even so, he must be more or less mad to think a thing like that. Mad about the girl. He’s sane enough in every other way.”
“He can’t be so mad as that,” I said. “Just fancy going out into a field—I suppose that’s the way you’d do it—and hanging about until your great love set you strolling off either to the right or to the left. No man, however mad, could expect to come on a girl that way—no one particular girl, I mean. Of course you’d meet several girls whichever way you went. Couldn’t help it. The world’s full of girls.”
“I don’t know what he meant,” said Daintree, “but my wife sympathized with him and seemed to think he’d pull it off in the end. At first he was a bit shy of letting her see the photo; but when he saw she was as sympathetic as all that he showed it to her. Well, the moment she saw it, she felt that she knew the face.”
“That was a stroke of luck for Simcox.”
“No it wasn’t,” said Daintree, “for my wife couldn’t put a name to the girl. She was sure she had seen her somewhere, knew her quite well, in fact, but simply couldn’t fix her. Funny thing, but it was exactly the same when they showed me the photo. At the first glance I said right away that I knew her. Then I found I couldn’t say exactly who she was. The more I looked the more certain I was that I’d seen her somewhere, her or someone very like her. And it wasn’t a commonplace face by any means. Poor Simcox kept begging us to think. My wife went over our visitors’ book—we’ve kept one of those silly things for years—but there wasn’t a name in it which we couldn’t account for. I got out all the old albums of snapshots and amateur photos in the house. You know the way those things accumulate; groups of all sorts. But we couldn’t find the girl. And yet both my wife and I were sure we’d met her. Then one morning Simcox burst into my wife’s little sitting-room—a place none of the convalescents have any right to go. He was in a fierce state of excitement. Said that an officer who’d arrived the night before was exactly like the photo and that the girl must be his sister or cousin, or something. The only officer who came that night was—you’d never guess!—Pat Singleton.”
“Pat,” I said, “though a young devil, is cheerful, and I never saw him anything but self-confident. I can’t imagine a girl such as you described bearing the faintest resemblance to that boy. You said that she was a kind of die-away, pathetic, appealing angel. Now Pat——”
“I know,” said Daintree. “All the same, the likeness was there. The moment I looked at the photo with Pat in my mind I knew why I thought I recognized it My wife said the same thing.”
“But Pat Singleton hasn’t any sisters,” I said.
“No, he hasn’t. He hasn’t even a first cousin anything like the age of the girl in the photo. I knew all the Singletons well, have for years. But Simcox insisted his girl must be some relation of Pat’s, and in the end I promised to ask the boy. In the first place, if she was a relation, it seemed an impudent sort of thing to do, and if she wasn’t, Pat would be sure to make up some infernal story about me and a girl and tell it all over the place. However, my wife egged me on and poor Simcox was so frightfully keen that I promised.
“Well, I sent for Pat Singleton next morning. He was a little subdued at first, as much subdued as I’ve ever seen him. He thought I was going to rag him about the spoof he’d played off on the nurse. He did that before he was twelve hours in the house. Remind me to tell you about it afterwards. I don’t wonder he looked piano. She’d been going for him herself and that woman is a real terror. However, he cheered up the moment I showed him the photo of the girl. He asked me first of all where the devil I’d got it. Said he’d lost it somewhere before he was wounded.”
“Oh, it was his, then?” I said.
“Yes,” said Daintree, grinning, “it was his. He was particularly anxious to know how I came by it. I didn’t tell him, of course. Couldn’t give Simcox away, you know. Then Pat began to cheek me. Asked if I’d fallen in love with the girl and what my wife would say when he told her. Said he carried the photo about with him and showed it to fellows just to watch them falling in love with her. It seems that nine men out of ten admired her greatly. He asked me if I didn’t think she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and that I wasn’t the first man by any means who wanted her name and address. He grinned in a most offensive way and said that he never gave away that girl’s name to anyone; that I ought to know better than to go running after a nice, innocent little thing like that who wouldn’t know how to take care of herself. I wasn’t going to stand much of that sort of talk from Pat Singleton. I told him straight that if he didn’t tell me that girl’s name and where she lived I’d make things hot for him. I threatened to report the little game he’d had with the nurse and that if I did he’d be court-martialled. I don’t know whether a man could be court-martialled for cheeking a nurse, but the threat had a good effect on Pat. He really was a bit afraid of that woman. I don’t wonder, though it’s the first time I’ve ever known him afraid of anyone.”
Daintree paused and chuckled horribly.
“Well,” I said, “who was the girl?”
“Haven’t you tumbled to it yet?” said Daintree.
“No. Do I know her?”
“I can’t say you exactly know her,” said Daintree. “You knowhim. It was a photo of Pat himself dressed up as the Sleeping Beauty, or Fatima, or some such person in a pantomime they did down at the base last Christmas when he was there. The young devil carried the thing about with him so as to play off his silly spoof on every fellow he met. I must say he made a damned pretty girl.”
“Good Lord!” I said. “And how did Simcox take it?”
“Simcox hasn’t been told—yet,” said Daintree. “That’s just what my wife wants your advice about. You see it’s an awkward situation.”
“Very,” I said.
“If we tell him,” said Daintree, “he’ll probably try to kill Pat Singleton, and that would lead to a lot of trouble. On the other hand, if we don’t tell him he’ll spend the rest of his life roaming about the world looking for a girl who doesn’t exist, and never did. It seems a pity to let that happen.”
“My idea,” I said, “would be to get another girl, not necessarily like the photo, but the same type, appealing and pathetic and all that. He’d probably take to her after a time.”
“I suggested that,” said Daintree, “but my wife simply won’t hear of it. She says the story as it stands is a great romance and that it would be utterly spoiled if Simcox switched off after another girl. I can’t see that, can you?”
“In a case like this,” I said, “when the original girl wasn’t a girl at all——”
“Exactly,” said Daintree, “but when I say that my wife brings up the Angel in the Shell Hole part of the story and says that a great romance is its own reward.”
“I don’t know what to advise,” I said.
“I didn’t think you would,” said Daintree, “though my wife insisted that you’d be able to suggest something. But you can tell me what you think of the story. That’s what I really want to get out of you. Is it a Sob Story or just a rather unusual spoof?”
“That,” I said, “depends entirely whether you look at it from Simcox’ point of view or Pat Singleton’s.”
The order, long expected and eagerly desired, came at last. The battalion moved out from dusty and crowded barracks to a camp in the wilderness. Lieutenant Dalton, a cheerful boy who had been taught Holy Scripture in his childhood, wrote to his mother that the new camp was “Somewhere in the wilderness beyond Jordan between the river of Egypt and the great sea.” This description of the situation was so entirely inaccurate that the Censor allowed it to pass without complaint. Old Mrs. Dalton told her friends that her son was living under the shadow of Mount Sinai. He was, in fact, nowhere near either Jordan or Sinai. He was some miles east of the Suez Canal. For a week or so officers and men rejoiced in their new quarters. There was plenty of elbow room; no more of the overcrowding they had suffered since they landed. They had, indeed, miles of totally unoccupied desert at their disposal. Each tent might have stood in its own private grounds, three acres or so in extent, if that had not been felt by the colonel to be an inconvenient arrangement. There was also—and this particularly pleased the battalion—the prospect of a fight with the Turks. Everyone believed when the move was made that a battle was imminent, and the battalion, which had no experience of fighting, was most anxious to show what it could do.
After awhile the enthusiasm for the new camp began to fade. The Turks did not put in an appearance, and life was as peaceful as it had been in the English camp where the battalion was trained. The situation of the camp, though roomy, was not exciting. Both officers and men began to find existence exceedingly dull. Lieutenant Dalton, who at this time wrote long letters to his mother, told her that he understood at last why the Children of Israel were so desperately anxious to get back to Egypt and were inclined to rag Moses about the want of melons and cucumbers. At the end of the month the whole battalion was bored to exasperation.
The desert which stretched in front of the camp was intolerably flat. The sun rose with pitiless regularity, shone with a steady glare for a great many hours, and then set. That was all that ever happened. The coming of a cloud into the sky would have been greeted with cheers. No cloud appeared. A sandstorm, however disagreeable, would have been welcomed as a change. The sand stayed quietly where it was. The men tried football, and gave it up because of the blistering heat. They played “House” until even the excitement of that mild gamble exhausted itself. No other form of amusement suggested itself. There was not even any work to do. Had the battalion belonged to the Brigade of Guards it would no doubt have gone on doing barrack-square drill every day and all day long until the men learned to move like parts of a machine. But this was a Territorial battalion, and the colonel held reasonable views about modern warfare. The value of drill, a mechanical business, was in his opinion easily exaggerated. Had the battalion belonged to an Irish regiment there would probably have been several interesting fights and some means of obtaining whisky would have been devised. In such ways the men would have escaped the curse of monotony, and the officers would have been kept busy in the orderly room. But this battalion came from the English Midlands. The men did not want to fight each other, and had no overpowering desire to get drunk. When the morning parades were over they lay in their tents and grumbled peacefully. Under such circumstances tempers often wear thin, and a habit of bickering takes possession of a mess. It is greatly to the credit of everyone concerned that there was no sign of bad temper among the officers of the battalion. The colonel lived a good deal by himself in his tent, but was always quietly good-humoured. Lieutenant Dalton, an incurably merry boy, kept the other subalterns cheerful. Only Captain Maitland was inclined to complain a little, and he had a special grievance, an excuse which justified a certain amount of grumbling. He slept badly at night, and liked to read a book of some sort after he went to bed. The mess had originally possessed an excellent supply of books, some hundred volumes of the most varied kind supplied by the Camps Libraries’ Association at home. Unfortunately, almost all the books were left behind when the move was made. Only three volumes were to be found in the new camp—one novel, a treatise on the culture of apple trees, and Mallory’s “Morte D’Arthur.”
Captain Maitland blamed the chaplain for the loss.
“You ought to have looked after those books, padre,” he said. “It’s a padre’s business to look after books.”
The Rev. John Haddingly, C.F., was a gentle little man, liked by the officers because he was entirely unassuming, and popular with the men because he was always ready to help them. He accepted the whole blame for the loss of the books without an attempt to defend himself.
“I’m awfully sorry, Maitland,” he said. “I ought to have seen to those books. I did look after the Prayer Books. They’re here all right; at least most of them are.”
“Prayer Books!” said Maitland. “If they were even whole Prayer Books! But those little yellow tracts of yours! They haven’t even got the Thirty-Nine Articles in them. If they were pukka Prayer Books I’d borrow one and try to read it. I expect there are lots of interesting things in the small print parts of the Prayer Book, the parts you padres never read out. But what’s the good of the books you have? Nothing in them but what we all know off by heart.”
Haddingly sighed. He was painfully conscious of the shortcomings of the Field Service Books supplied for the use of the troops. Dalton came to his defence.
“Don’t strafe the padre,” he said. “He brought along a church, an entire church. Is there another padre in the whole Army who could have got a church to a place like this?”
Dalton’s almost incredible statement was literally true. Haddingly had succeeded, contrary to all regulations, in bringing with him from England a corrugated iron church. It was quite a small one, it folded up and could be packed flat. When unpacked and erected it was undeniably a church. It had a large cross at one end of it outside. Inside it was furnished with an altar, complete with cross and candlesticks, a collapsible harmonium and a number of benches. Chaplains have certainly no right to load up troopships with churches, but Haddingly had somehow got his to Egypt. By what blandishments the transport officer had been induced to drag the thing out into the desert beyond the canal no one knew. Haddingly was one of those uncomplainingly meek men who never stand up for themselves. It is a curious fact, but it is a fact, that a really helpless person gets things done for him which the most aggressive and masterful men cannot accomplish. The success in life of women of the “clinging” kind is an illustration of this law.
Haddingly smiled with joy at the mention of his church. It stood, securely bolted together, a little outside the camp. No one, the cross being disproportionately large, could possibly mistake it for anything but a church. In front of it was a notice board, a nice black notice board with a suggestion of Gothic architecture about it. On the board, in bright white letters, was a list of services and the name of the church—St John in the Wilderness.
Originally, before the move into the desert, it had been simply St John the Evangelist, but Haddingly felt that the new circumstances demanded a change of dedication. Everyone, from the colonel down to the humblest private, was secretly proud of the church. The possession of such a thing gave a certain distinction to the battalion. Haddingly was a good deal chaffed about it; but the building was in a fair way to become a regimental mascot. “I’m not strafing the padre,” said Captain Maitland, “but I wish we had a few of the books we left behind.”
“To listen to you talking,” said Dalton, “anyone would think you were some kind of literary swell—Hall Caine and Wordsworth rolled into one, whereas we all know that the only thing you take an interest in is horses.” Captain Maitland was very far from being a literary swell or claiming any such title. The books he really liked, the only books he read when he had a free choice, were sporting stories with a strong racing and betting interest. But in camp in the wilderness no sporting stories were obtainable. The one novel which remained to the mess dealt with the sex problem, a subject originally profoundly uninteresting to Maitland, who had a healthy mind. He read it, however, as a remedy for insomnia. It proved effective. A couple of chapters sent him to sleep every night, so the book lasted a good while.
Every morning at breakfast Maitland used to propound the problems raised by the chapters which he had read the night before. The mess got into the way of holding informal debates on the divorce laws. When he finished the book, Maitland declared that he intended to devote himself to Eugenics and the more enlightened kind of social reform as soon as the war was over.
“I never thought of it before,” he said, “but I can see now that the future of the Empire really depends on the proper legislation for child welfare, on ante-natal clinic, and the abolition of the old empiric methods of marriage.”
“Wait till after I’m married before you begin,” said Dalton.
Haddingly was a little pained. He said things about the sanctity of marriage and the family as a divine institution. No one else took Maitland seriously. It was felt that when the war came to an end—if it ever did—he would go back to horse-racing and leave the scientific aspects of marriage in decent obscurity.
When he had finished the novel he took the book on apple trees to bed with him. He became, after a short time, interested in that subject. He announced that when the war was over he intended to buy a small place in Devonshire and go in for orchards.
“Apple growing,” he said, “is just exactly the peaceable, shady kind of life a man wants after being stuck down in a desert like this.”
“With your taste for the turf,” said Dalton, “you’ll get into a shady kind of life all right, whether you plant apple trees or not.”
Dalton was an irreverent boy. Haddingly was greatly pleased at the thought of Maitland sitting innocently under an apple tree.
The turn of Mallory came next. Maitland left it for the last because the print was very small and the only light in his tent was a feeble candle. When he got fairly started in the book he became profoundly interested, and the other members of the mess were treated at breakfast time to a good deal of information about medieval warfare.
“As far as I can make out,” Maitland said, “every officer in those days was knighted as soon as he got his commission.”
“Jolly good idea,” said Dalton. “I should buck about like anything if they made me a K.C.B.”
“You wouldn’t have been an officer or a knight,” said Maitland. “You’d have been the court fool. You’ve no idea whatever of chivalry.”
Like most simple men who read very little, Maitland took the books he did read seriously and was greatly influenced by them. The apple tree treatise made him want to be a gardener. A slow and careful study of Mallory filled him with a profound admiration for medieval romance.
“The reason modern war is such a sordid business,” he said, “is that we’ve lost the idea of chivalry.”
“Chivalry is all very well,” said Dalton, “if there’s anyone to chival about. I haven’t read much about those old knights of yours, Maitland; but so far as I can make out from what you tell us they were always coming across damsels, fair, distressed, and otherwise fetching. Now, I haven’t seen a damsel since I left England. How the deuce can I be chivalrous? I defy anyone, even that Lancelot blighter of yours, to go into raptures about the old hag you turned out of the camp yesterday for selling rotten dates to the men.”
Dalton was not the only member of the mess who made jokes about the knights of King Arthur’s fellowship. But Maitland went on reading out selected passages from Mallory, and there is no doubt that everyone, even Dalton, became interested. Haddingly, the padre, made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was profoundly influenced.
He had always been proud of his church, but had hitherto been content to use it in the normal way for parade services on Sunday morning. The services were undeniably popular. The men enjoyed singing hymns, and they listened patiently to the sermons because they liked Haddingly. The officers, who also liked Haddingly, attended the Sunday morning services with great regularity. Dalton, though he preferred playing rag-time on the piano, accompanied the hymns on the harmonium.
Haddingly was greatly moved by Maitland’s account of the medieval spirit. He took to spending half an hour in the church every morning before breakfast Nobody knew what he did there. The officers, through feelings of delicacy, never asked him questions about these new devotions. The men, who were getting to know and like Haddingly better and better as time went on, regarded his daily visits to the church as proof that their padre was one who knew his job and did it thoroughly.
One morning—the mess had then been discussing medieval chivalry for about a fortnight—Maitland read out a passage from Mallory about a visit paid by Sir Galahad to a lonely chapel among the mountains, “where he found nobody at all for all was desolate.” Haddingly had just spent his lonely half hour in the church of St John in the Wilderness. He sighed. He found nobody there in the mornings, and could not help wishing that the battalion contained a Galahad. Dalton felt that something must be done to preserve the credit of the mess and the dignity of English manhood. He felt sure that sentiment about desolate chapels was an unwholesome thing. He scoffed:
“All very well for Gallipot,” he said, “but——”
“Galahad,” said Maitland.
“Galahad, or Gallipot, or Golly-wog,” said Dalton. “If a man has a silly name like that, it doesn’t matter how you spell it. The point is that it would be simply ridiculous to attempt that sort of thing now. Suppose, for instance—— I put it to you, padre. Suppose you saw Maitland mounted on one of the transport gee-gees trotting up to that tin cathedral of yours—on a week-day, mind! I’m not talking about Sundays. Suppose he got down and went inside all by himself, what would you think, padre? There’s only one thing you could think, that Maitland had been drinking.”
“Sir Galahad,” said Maitland, “went in to say his prayers. He was on his way to a battle. They didn’t have to wait months and months for a battle in those days. They had a scrap of some sort about once a week.”
He sighed. The Turks had failed to do what was expected of them, and life in the camp was intolerably dull.
He looked at Haddingly. It was plainly a padre’s duty to support a spiritual and romantic view of life against the profane jibes of Dalton. Haddingly spoke judicially.
“The general tone of society in those days,” he said, “seems to have been very different from what it is now. Men had much less difficulty in giving expression to their emotions. No doubt we still feel much as they did, but——”
Haddingly became aware that no one was listening to him. The attention of everyone at the table was attracted by something else. The men sat stiffly, listening intently. Haddingly heard a faint, distant humming sound. It grew louder.
“Jiminy!” said Dalton, “an aeroplane!”
The breakfast table was laid in the open air outside the mess tent The men rose from their seats and stared in the direction of the coming sound. It was the first time that an aeroplane had approached the camp in the desert. Its coming was an intensely exciting event, an unmistakable evidence of activity somewhere; surely a sign that activity everywhere might be expected.
The sound increased in volume. The machine appeared, a distant speck in the clear sky. It grew rapidly larger, flying fast. It was seen to be a biplane. It passed directly over the camp, flying so low that the head of the pilot was plainly visible. In a few minutes it passed from sight. The hum of its engines grew fainter. But till the sound became inaudible no one spoke.
Then a babble of inquiry and speculation broke out. Where was the thing going? What was it doing? What did its sudden swift voyage mean? For the rest of the day the camp was less sleepy than usual. Men everywhere discussed the aeroplane. Dalton was not the only one who envied the members of the Flying Corps. It seemed a very desirable thing to be able to rush through the air over unknown deserts; to have the chance of seeing strange and thrilling things, Arab encampments, green oases, mirages, caravans and camels; to drop bombs perhaps on Syrian fortresses; to estimate the numbers of Turkish columns on the march, to reckon their strength in artillery; to take desperate risks; to swerve and dart amid clouds of bursting shrapnel. How much more gloriously exciting such a life than that of men baking slowly in the monotony of a desert camp.
Maitland, stimulated by his reading to an unnatural effort of imagination, recognized in the men of the Flying Corps the true successors of Mallory’s adventurous knight-errants. For them war still contained romance. Chivalry was still possible. Haddingly caught the thought and expanded it. Knights of old had this wonderful spirit, because to them the forests through which they roamed were unknown wastes, where all strange things might be expected. Then when all the land became familiar, mapped, intersected with roads, covered thick with towns, sailors inherited the spirit of romance. Afterwards all the seas were charted, policed, and ships went to and fro on ocean highways. The romance of adventure was lost to seamen, lost to the world, until the airmen came and found it again by venturing on new ways.
In the evening the aeroplane returned. Once more its engines were heard. Once more it appeared, a speck, a shape, a recognizable thing. But this time it did not pass away. On reaching camp it circled twice, and then, with a long swift glide, took the ground outside the camp a few yards beyond Haddingly’s church of St. John in the Wilderness. The pilot stepped out of the machine.
“Good man,” said Dalton. “Friendly of him dropping in on us like this. Must want a drink after that fly. Eight hours at least. I’ll go and bring him along to the mess. Hope he’ll tell us what he’s been doing. Wonder if the Turks potted at him.”
The pilot left his machine. He walked stiffly, like a man with cramped limbs, towards the camp.
“Something wrong with the engine, perhaps,” said Dalton. “Or he’s short of petrol. I’ll fetch him along. A whisky and soda in a big tumbler is the thing for him. I dare say he’ll stay for dinner.”
He started and walked quickly towards the machine. The airman, approaching the camp, reached the church. Instead of passing it he stopped, opened the door, and went in. Dalton paused and looked back.
“Must have mistaken your tin cathedral for the mess, padre,” he said. “I’ll run on and fetch him out.”
“If he’s made a mistake,” said Haddingly, “he’ll find it out for himself and come out without your fetching him.”
Dalton stood still. His eyes were on the door of the church. Maitland and Haddingly were gazing at it too. The other officers, gathered in a group outside the mess tent, stood in silence, staring at the church. It seemed as if hours passed. In fact, nearly half an hour went by before the door of the church opened and the airman came out. He turned his back on the camp and went towards his machine. Neither Dalton nor anyone else made an attempt to overtake him. The noise of the engine was heard again. The machine raced a few yards along the ground and then rose in steep flight. It passed across the camp and sped westwards, its shape sharply outlined for a minute against the light of the setting sun. Then it disappeared.
Maitland took Haddingly by the arm and led him to his tent. The two men sat down together on the camp bedstead. Maitland opened Mallory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” and read aloud:
“Then Sir Galahad came unto a mountain, where he found an old chapel, and found there nobody, for all was desolate, and there he kneeled before the altar and besought of God wholesome counsel.”
“I suppose it was just that,” said Haddingly.
Dalton put his head into the tent.
“I thought I’d find you here,” he said. “I just wanted to ask the padre something. Was that Sir Golliwog come to life again or just some ordinary blighter like me suffering from nerve strain?”
Haddingly had no answer to give for a moment.
“He can’t have really wanted to sit in that church for half an hour,” said Dalton. “What the dickens would he do itfor?”
“He might have wanted to pray,” said Haddingly.
Not even his profession justified the saying of such a thing as that outside church. But every excuse must be made for him. He had been soaked in Mallory for a fortnight. Deserts, even when there are camps in them, are queer places, liable to upset men’s minds, and the conduct of the airman was certainly peculiar.
“Of course, if you put it that way,” said Dalton, “I’ve nothing more to say. All the same, he might have come into the mess for a drink. I’m not complaining of his doing anything he liked in the way of going to church; but I don’t see that a whisky and soda would have hurt him afterwards. He must have wanted it.”