PART SEVENTEENTHE SUICIDE CLUB
At midnight between the 26th and 27th of September, 1915, two men faced each other across a chequered French table-cloth in the baresalle à mangerof anestaminetat Beuvry.
An orderly stood outside the door, an orderly with tiny highly-polished grenades on his shoulder-straps, and below the grenades two winking brass letters—the second of the letters being “G.” Outside theestaminet, a car waited; and past the car filed steady columns of tall men. These men, too, bore a winking “G” on each shoulder-strap of their excessively clean tunics.
Said the first of the two at the table, a broad-shouldered quiet man, rather full in the face, steady of eye, big of brown moustache—a man who wore the crossed swords and star of a Major General: “And so we have the job of cleansing their Augean stable for them. As far as I can make out, the position is this.” He spread a big white map on the table; indicated with one finger a semi-circle drawn in thick blue chalk. “Whether the 9th can hang on to Fosse Eight or not, is pretty doubtful. You already know thepolitical situation”—he emphasized the words a trifle scornfully—“with regard to Hill 70. . . . The rest of the line, as far as the Hulluch Road, P. must look after. Now, what about those guns? . . .”
His companion, a saturnine aquiline Brigadier General of Artillery, well over six-foot, glass in his eye, drew a creased plan from his pocket; spread it over the table-cloth. As he did so, his long hands betrayed intense concentration; a concentration not belied by the clipped phrases in which he spoke.
“I’ve seen both the Brigades, sir,” he began, “and as they apparently know very little of the ground, I’ve arranged to take over both Artilleries myself. Our own can’t be up for three days. The Southdown batteries”—he pointed to the map—“are marked in red; the Northdown in blue.”
“Too far back,” commented the other, scrutinizing the coloured dots, the shaded arcs which showed their approximate ranges.
“They seem to have done the best they could under the circumstances.”
“The circumstances,” known to both the speakers, did not bear overmuch thinking of—being on a par with the “political situation” which, by a premature announcement in the English Parliament of the capture of Hill 70, was forcing them to attempt an attack both knew to be in the nature of a very forlorn hope.
The Gunner General went on detailing his plans: “I shall put Stark in command of the Left Group. He’s the only regular Colonel they’ve got.”
“Good man?” asked the other.
“Yes, sir. Very sound. I’ve known him for years: stuck pig with him in India. . . . We’re very short of ammunition for the Hows.”
“That’s nothing unusual. Allenby’s had to chuck it altogether in the Salient. What about eighteen-pounders?”
“We can just manage a two-hours’ bombardment. When do you propose attacking, sir?”
“Day after tomorrow.” The senior General glanced at his watch, saw it was past midnight. “As you were, tomorrow. Sometime in the afternoon.”
At last, Peter Jameson slept.
All through that long afternoon of sunshine, the eighteen-pounders of the Fourth Brigade had been silent. Round the outside lip of the chalk-saucer, attack and counter attack had died in exhaustion. Only, at its extreme left edge, under the shadow of Fosse Eight, in the Hohenzollern Redoubt, kilted men fought out the light, hand to hand, with bomb and bayonet and grenade. In front of Loos, the saviour Cavalry watched the silent woods and the hill whereon death waited.
O’Grady had come back at dusk to report the situation. At nine o’clock, the men sleeping round the guns had been awakened by a vast crackle of rifle-fire far away on the left, by a torrent of white lights spurting up inky skies. This they had watched, as a dog, too tired to bay, watches the moon; watched and slept again—all save the weary sentries peering towards the lonely tree, and the weary signallers in the trench by the telephone.
But Doctor Carson might not sleep. All that afternoon, his red-crossed tilt had lured piteous bandaged men. All that night they came; staggering down the slopes; waiting a while; staggering on with a “Thank yer, doctor” towards Vermelles. The doctor was fifty-five and a specialist; but bending over those piteous men, he did not regret his quiet consulting-room in Harley Street—even though that which he accomplished for them scarcely required as much skill as he had possessed in his medical student days.
He felt a little lonely, there in the shadowed darkness, watching the lights leaping all about him; and when, from the Vermelles road, there came other men, tramping steadily together, he enjoyed the modulated voices which asked him: “I say, this is right for Loos, isn’t it? Thanks so much.”
These voices, when he inquired who they might be, all replied with one word: “Guards”; and tramped on through the night. . . .
Later, there arrived a car, with a Staff officer who inquired for Colonel Stark. Him, the doctor directed to a trench covered with a water-proof sheet: under which, after a moment, showed the light of a candle. The Staff officer with a “Thanks. Feels like rain,” departed: but the candle still shone. And after about an hour, another car arrived, with another Staff officer.
Doctor Carson, seeing blue cigar-smoke curling up against the candle-glow, thought to himself: “Hello. They’ve woken P.J.”
They had; and Peter, note-book in hand, squatted on his chalk-covered valise, peering at two maps; copying little red dots from one to the other. The original map from which Peter copied had been sent from Beuvry; and the last note in his book read “Report to G.O.C. Guards D.A. at Le Rutoire farm elevena. m.”
Weasel Stark’s preliminary instructions, given in the candle-lit gloom of a dirty trench at 3 o’clock in the morning, confined themselves to few words. The problem consisted firstly, secondly and lastly in efficient communication: Peter, awake at dawn, got busy on it. As primary difficulty, he encountered Purves.
Said Purves yawning: “As I understand things, you and the Colonel are going off to Le Rutoire. I remain here as Adjutant to Major Lethbridge, who will command the Brigade. Communication will of course be arranged by Divisional Signals.”
Growled Peter, shivering in the misty dawn: “For God’s sake forget ‘Training Manual Signallers.’ How much wire have we got on the telephone cart?”
Purves sent for Corporal Waller. Corporal Waller said he thought they had four and a half miles of “D 3.” Peter pulled out his map: showed the Corporal what he wanted done. Purves sulked in the background.
At five-fifteen, Seabright and Pirbright, carrying a red drum between them, set out to find the Third Brigade. At ten minutes to six, a very sleepy battery commander of that unit protested down the new wire that he had no instructions as to taking orders from the Adjutant of another Brigade. At five minutes to six Weasel Stark—overhearing the long range wrangle—came to the phone and explained the situation at some length of blasphemy. Throughout breakfast, eaten squatting on damp clay, similar conversations took place.
At ten-thirty, Corporal Waller again telephoned. He had found the Second and First Brigades; was tapping into their wire. Also, he had nearly run out of wire. . . .
“See that he gets some more,” rasped the Weasel to Purves. “You and I must be off, P.J.”
They made their way on foot, through sparse traffic, down a sodden road, towards the huge gutted farm. As they passed under the great gateway into the crowded courtyard, something exploded with an earth-shaking concussion.
“Six-inch How,” said the Weasel.
A very tall young subaltern, with carefully up-curled moustache and tiny bronze buttons on his loose tunic, came up; saluted the Colonel; and said, “Are you Colonel Stark, sir? . . . The Artillery General won’t be here till two o’clock.” Then, to Peter, “Hallo, Jameson, haven’t seen you since you left. . . . Come and have a drink before lunch, won’t you, sir?”
Peter introduced “Sandiland of Impey’s” to his Colonel; and the young Guardee led downstairs to the foul cellar they had visited on the night of the twenty-fifth. It was no longer a charnel-house. Down the middle of it, a long table, spread with a white cloth, testified the imminence of lunch. About the table, talking quietly, stood other tall men, all in identical tunics, all with the same carefully up-curled moustaches, the same modulated voices.
They called each other by nicknames: “I say, Bunny, what about those smoke-bombs?” “My dear Trousers, don’t panic.” “Where’s the General?” “Is Muggins about?”
Sandiland produced gin and vermouth. Talk grew general.
Peter did not take long to recognize the peculiar social atmosphere. It was merely glorified Eton. Everybody trying their best to assume that facts didn’t exist; that emotions didn’t exist; that they knew little and cared less about the job they had at heart. It was over twelve years since Peter had lived in that particular atmosphere: but he sniffed it gratefully. His voice changed to it. He said, “Oh, really. Well, of course,Idon’t know much about Gunnery,” knowing perfectly well that he knew considerably more about it than Sandiland—and, “It’s been very quiet round the batteries”—feeling that nobody had ever been quite so heavily shelled as the Fourth Southdown Brigade.
The Weasel, who happened to have been at Winchester before going on to Woolwich, felt suddenly and immensely superior to everybody on earth. For, on that point, all old English “public-school” men feel alike: which is what makes them at times so insufferable to outsiders. If a foreigner had asked any of the men in that cellarwhyhe was fighting, the foreigner would have met with an incredulous lift of the eyebrow: that particular lift of the eyebrow which no foreigner understands; but which conveys—to one who can interpret—“My dear fellow, I was at Eton” (or Winchester, or Haileybury, or Harrow, or Radley or a hundred other foundations of that classical tradition which literary pacifists despise) “andone does, don’t you know, one just does.”
Luckily, there is no “education” at English “public-schools.” They merely train boys to bemen.
The Infantry Brigadier, arriving about mid-day, declared to his Brigade-Major:
“My dear fellow, the whole countryside looks like Hampstead Heath. Have some one go out and clean it up, please. I really can’t have men wandering aboutallover the skyline.”
The Brigade Major, strolling across the room, said: “I say, Bunny, I wish you’d take a peep round and see what we’re to do about these fellows wandering about on the skyline.”
Bunny disappeared and did not return till after lunch.
Nobody in all that farm seemed in the least degree excited about anything. Work was notdone—it proceeded. Stark and Peter, returning to the outer air, watched the procedure. By now, their own communication orderlies, servants and telephonists had arrived. It began to rain, vaguely, unpleasantly. . . .
At one minute to two, a limousine, mud-spattered from roof to axle, tore down the road; pulled up slithering before the gateway. From the car, sprang a tall aquiline eye-glassed man; who said, “Hello, Stark. Sorry to be late. Look here”; drew a very dirty map from his pocket; and swept one finger over a blue semi-circle of it. Stark, drawing an identical map from his pocket, copied the semi-circle; asked: “Any particular instructions?”
“No.” The aquiline one was obviously working under extreme pressure. “You’ll get those from Trench later. This isn’t as much fun as pig-sticking, is it?” He leapt back into his car; whirled off down the road.
Two minutes afterwards Peter—note-book on knee—was writing from orders Stark’s dictation. . . .
The remainder of the afternoon resolved itself into a constant dispatching of orderlies, a constant running in and out to the jingling clicking telephone station.
At half-past four, the aquiline one returned. Peter, instructed to report communication completed, found him closeted with a big vaguely seen man in the semi-dusk of yet another dug-out. At five o’clock, these two removed themselves.
Said the Weasel: “What sort of a dug-out was the one in which you found him?”
Said Peter: “Pretty good, sir.”
Ordered the Weasel: “Then we’d better occupy it.”
In that flimsy tin-roofed tunnel, hidden away in mud between brick walls, glass-doored at each end, perpetually illumined with guttering candles, Peter spent three days and three nights. Incredible things happened in that tunnel: equally incredible things in the farm above. Our own howitzers shook it till the glass-doors rattled to splinters: shells, screaming down out of nowhere, missed it by inches, plunging visibly through the shattered roof of the farm, extinguishing candles, shattering telephone wires. Men came to it—all sorts and conditions of men: orderlies and Generals, Colonels and battery commanders. Guardsmen, dizzy with shell-fumes, staggered down its steps, were given gas-capsules, departed. Murchison the Brigade Major came to it, sojourned with them two days. A weary officer of the Third Southdown Brigade, who had been shelled out of his position with the loss of two guns and twenty men, dropped down on its muddy floor and slept like a dog, cap under head, in his spurred field-boots.
And always, Peter—in the dark forward compartment—sat by the telephone operator. Men were blown to bits above—(there were one hundred and twenty casualties in Le Rutoire during those three days): orderlies, sent out on cycles, failed to report, were never again heard of: men died at the batteries even as he spoke to the batteries: the farm rocked: lights went out: shelling stopped: shelling began again. But always, Peter Jameson was trying to explain over a wire which either carried four different voices or went absolutely dead, that Colonel Stark wanted fire directed here, that the Coldstreams reported two field-guns 200 yards South West of Metallurgique tower firing on G 24, that the Bois Hugo was full of M.G’s, that if Major Lethbridge couldn’t fire with A Battery, because A battery had three guns out of action, he must fire with B. . . .
The world-famous attack on Hill 70, when the Guards went over the top, (“By the right,” as the unemotional Pettigrew reported afterwards, “just as if there hadn’t been a Boche within miles of them”) resolved itself for P.J. into a jumble of buzzes, translated to scribbled message-forms, a pile of scribbled message-forms, translated to buzzes. (For by that time, speech on the majority of the sodden lines had become impossible.). . .
By late afternoon of the twenty-ninth, when the most incredible occurrence of all took place, Peter—still sitting at the telephone,—was too weary to appreciate it.
It had been a baddish day. Fosse Eight seemed by the accuracy of the hostile shell-fire, to have fallen at last. Major Lethbridge reported twelve guns of his sixteen now out of action, the remaining four being pushed up by hand owing to buffer troubles. Third Brigade wires refused to act. They had run out of whisky. A five-nine shell had missed the bomb-store wherein the servants and the orderlies slept by two feet; killing a horse and wounding three men. Murchison slept. The Colonel, just returned from visiting the Infantry Brigadier in his dug-out across the road, had found the Brigadier absent; tripped in a sodden trench; looked like a scare-crow; was swearing like a fish-fag. . . . At which precise moment, “Royalty” appeared in the tunnel!
“Royalty,” represented by a jolly fair-haired youngster in a darkish rain-coat, followed the missing Infantry Brigadier past the telephone shelf where Peter sat, into the rear part of the tunnel. Murchison, miraculously awaking, and the Weasel, with his tunic off, stood up and said “Sir.”
Peter, who imagined them to be greeting the Brigadier, found a dark-moustached young man beside him.
Whispered the dark-moustached young man, taking Peter’s knowledge for granted: “I’d rather be a Tommy in the front line than have to look afterhim. Once the Guards are in the trenches, we can’t keephimaway from them.Heran away from G.H.Q. this morning, andhe’sinsisted on tramping all round the front line.Heenjoys it. I don’t! It isn’t right, you know. It really isn’t.Hemight remember thathe’sthe heir to the throne. Don’t you think so?”
Peter, realizing the jolly fair-haired youngster to be the Prince of Wales, whispered agreement. The conference in rear of the tunnel broke up.
“Thank goodnesshe’sgoing,” whispered Peter’s companion. “This job will turn my hair gray.”
The three passed out through the shattered glass-door; up mud-steps into the farm. . . . Very far away, Peter heard a low whistle, a whistle that rose to a high-pitched scream, seemed to surge up the skies. Interminably they waited; penned in the dusk. Impotent! Down upon them, faster and faster, shrieking and howling, rushed noise. . . . They were deaf. . . . The tunnel staggered. . . . Light disappeared. . . . Glass tinkled about them. . . . Things thudded from walls to floor. . . . Noise stopped. . . . Peter heard the Weasel’s voice: “Good God, I hope that didn’t get him”: saw a shadow stumble up the steps. They waited—interminably. Murchison’s voice called: “It’s all right, Colonel.” . . .
“Will you please speak to Mr. Purves, sir?” asked the unconcerned operator at the telephone.
And the next night, first of October, they were relieved. The thing seemed impossible. They had always lived in the tunnel; would continue to live there till the end of time. The big man in khaki who sat talking to them had no corporeal existence. He was a joke—an elaborate joke. “Of course, Stark, I shan’t occupytheseheadquarters.” Of course he wouldn’t. Why should he? Nobody except themselves. . . .
“Hallo,” laughed a voice, “your Adjutant’s gone to sleep.”
“I’m not asleep, sir.” Peter, very indignant, started up from the Weasel’s berth on which he had been sitting; dived back to his own part of the tunnel. The two Colonels heard his voice down the telephone: “Very well Corporal. If the Brigade’s gone, you can disconnect. Are the horses ready? Just coming up the road. Thanks. . . .”
And then, for the first time in his life, Peter knew fear. Real crazy fear. It was midnight. Pitch-dark. Not a shell falling. But a shell might fall. If it did, what would happen to Little Willie? Little Willie was trotting up that damned road. If anything happened to Little Willie. If Jelks hadn’t fed Little Willie properly. Little Willie was the finest horse. . . .
“Your coat, sir, and your spurs. I’ve packed your belt in the valise. And there’s only two cigars left, sir?”
Driver Garton, smiling, proffered one of them.
“Got a match?” asked Peter.
The batteries of the 4th Brigade had been amazingly fortunate; got away almost without a casualty.
Laughed the Colonel, as he and Peter trotted side by side through cool rain: “Well, P.J., you won’t forget Le Rutoire in a hurry.”
Peter turned in his saddle, looked back towards the farm: “I should think not,” he said, and added, “Though I suppose that dug-out must have been pretty safe.”
“Safe?” Stark laughed again. “Why, man, it wouldn’t have stopped a direct hit from a pip-squeak.” . . .
They passed the cross-roads of Corons de Rutoire. “Francis!” thought Peter suddenly. Through the blurr of sleep, memory came back, clear-cut, horribly personal. He must find out what had happened to Francis. Then he fell fast asleep in his saddle; woke with a start to find Little Willie at walk through shadowy traffic.
“It’s a pity that attack didn’t succeed,” the Colonel was saying. “If it had, we might have got a brace of medals between us. As it is, if you live to be as old as Methuselah you’ll never see a worse show than the first two days of the battle of Loos.”
Next morning, as they rode, Brigade behind them, through the streets of Béthune, Peter fumbled in his breeches pocket; found a coin; stretched it down to the boy trotting at Little Willie’s head; took the proffered paper; spread it on his saddle-peak.
“Any news?” asked the Weasel.
For answer, Peter held up the staring headlines.
“Great British Victory,” they read. “Triumph of Staff Work. Hill 70 Ours. Official.”
Peter ripped the paper to shreds; flung it in the gutter.
PART EIGHTEENRESPITE
Francis Gordon was not killed at the disaster of Loos. A stretcher-bearer wheeled him, unconscious of whistling shrapnel, to the casualty-clearing station at Vermelles; and thence, still unconscious, he came by Ford ambulance and Red Cross train and yet another ambulance to a great bare hospital at Rouen.
For three days he knew nothing. Life ebbed and flowed back again in waves as of morphia: pain throbbed and receded through the torn body it could not awaken. On the fourth day, very dimly, he grew conscious of his suffering self. It seemed to him that he lay in a four-poster bed, round which figures moved vaguely. He heard one of the figures speaking: “It’s time for his injection”; felt something prick his fore-arm; drowsed off again into unconsciousness.
Next morning he awoke to pain. Some one was questioning him. The some one had a board in her hand; wanted to know who he was. (For secret service men wear no “identity discs”; and Nurse Prothero had been ordered to find out the name of the patient). He told her: “Gordon, Francis, Captain, Intelligence Corps.” “Religion?” she asked. “Church of England, sister.”
The nurse, a comely middle-aged creature, smiled down at him; and he slept. But gradually, the morphia ebbed away from him. Pain called to consciousness. . . .
It took his drugged mind three whole days to grasp its new realities. He had been wounded, badly wounded. (How, he could not yet remember.) His left thigh-bone was shattered; his right foot badly smashed. The thing above him—which made the bed seem like a four-poster—was a “super-structure”: a frame-work with a pulley arrangement whereby his left leg, a mass of bandages, could be hauled up and down for dressing. Both left leg and right foot were “septic”: in the wounds, had been inserted indiarubber-tubing—Carrel-Dakin tubes—to drain them. The changing of these tubes caused him constant pain.
The screens round his bed prevented him from seeing the other patients in the ward. But he knew them to be many; and, lying awake at night, he could hear the orderlies shuffling round in their list slippers: their “Are you awake, sir?” sounded an unceasing chorus to his dreams.
For the alert clean-shaven doctor had only reduced, not stopped, the morphia: and Francis had many dreams. They came as the morphia-wave surged over him in comfortable pain-killing warmth; receded as the wave ebbed, leaving him prey to suffering. And always, in his dreams, he saw Beatrice, a gracious figure vignetted in silver radiance against the background of his thought. It seemed as though her spirit watched over him, tender, infinitely solicitous. . . .
He had been in hospital eight days before it was borne in on his dazed intellect that he must write to her. They fought him, sisters and doctor, for three weary hours. “He was too ill to write letters,” said the doctor. “Let me write for you,” begged Sister Prothero. But Francis insisted. They could neither persuade nor coerce him. He would write a letter; write it with his own hand. Lying there, feverish, broken, not even certain of the exact words his lips uttered, he forced them to his will. At last, they yielded—for they knew his chance of life still hung by a hair: and an orderly brought him paper, an envelope, an indelible pencil.
The sister propped him with pillows. As she lifted him, he felt his head turning, spinning. . . . Yet he wrote, tracing each word with pain. A letter of lies, of glorious lies. He was in hospital, wounded—only slightly wounded, she must understand—in a few days, he would be about again—would write her a long letter—meanwhile, he sent his “very kind regards.” He folded the sheet himself; put it in the envelope; wrote the address; signed in the left-hand bottom corner. . . . Then he fainted; and, for a week, doctor and sisters blamed themselves for their yielding, fearful lest the man should die.
As a “case,” he puzzled them. The wounds were healing, slowly, very slowly. Thinking to cheer him, they told him of his progress. It appeared to have no interest for him. He was content to drowze away the hours: watching his leg move up and down for its dressing; listening to the murmur of the ward. For he had lived in a year, this broken man who lay there so quietly, a thousand aeons of terror. He had walked, unarmed and alone, through countless caverns of fear. Now, fear had departed; and the mind took its revenge for long coercion, refused to function. The mind knew that its body would not die; and with that knowledge, was content. . . .
They pronounced him “out of danger.” Nurse Prothero brought him many letters. He read them languidly. It appeared that Peter had been moving heaven and earth to find out if he lived: Patricia wrote asking him if he wanted books, cigarettes: Prout wrote and sent on a package of press-cuttings: his name had been in the “Roll of Honour”: the literary press of England noticed him, praised him, printed his photograph in their columns. But Francis Gordon cared for none of these old things. He wanted Beatrice!
He used to lie there, hour after hour, screened from the world, thinking of her. His mind went back to days before the War, and he saw himself as he had been: the tango-dancing champagne-bibbing egotist, very proud of his little literary achievements, neither good nor bad, merely a drifter. He saw himself, ruined financially, miserable. And he met her again, in his dreams; sailed with her, once again, the tropic seas of their delight.
Beatrice, the Woman Denied! Surely that God who had once denied her to him, calling him unworthy, would not refuse her to him now. Surely, now, he might say to himself, in clean pride: “I have done my Work; paid full price for any happiness this world can offer me?” . . .
And then, five weeks after he had written, came her cable: “Am anxious,” she wired, “have you told me the truth about your wounds.” He spread the cablegram on his bed; read it again and again. Intuition, sounder than judgment, told him the truth. To this girl, five thousand miles removed from the cataclysm of Europe, he stood for “heroism”—a vague figure dowered with all the virtues of war. It needed only a word, aweakword, to make her love him.
The mere thought was a flaring temptation. Why not? If ever man had earned woman. . . .
When the doctor made his midday visit, Francis—looking down at his swathed legs—asked one straight question.
“You mean,” said the doctor, “is there any reason, any physical reason, why you should not marry?”
“Exactly, doctor.”
“None whatever.”
“But I shall always be more or less a cripple?”
“You will walk with a limp—a slight limp. That isn’t being a cripple.”
Alone, he fought the problem out again: and decision came to him, clear-cut, obvious. She was twenty, rich, beautiful: he, a cripple—and a pauper cripple into the bargain. Leaving God out of the question, to take her in marriage would not be the act of a gentleman. . . . Chivalrous, stubborn, a fool if you will but no weakling, he traced the answer to her cablegram: “Much better thanks writing.”
In the middle of December, 1915, they shipped him—still a “stretcher-case”—to England.
In those early days, the Endsleigh Gardens Hospital for officers was a place of easy discipline, comely V.A.D. nurses and frolicsome patients. Francis, still unable to walk, could not be frolicsome: but they gave him a room to himself, a tiny room, linoleum-carpeted, high up on the sixth floor; and in a funny introspective way, he was happy.
The “faithful Prout,” overjoyed at his master’s return, insinuated himself somehow or other into the Hospital; brought meals; ran errands as of yore. A new doctor substituted “B.I.P.”—a saffron ointment of bismuth, iodoform and petroleum—for the Carrel-Dakin treatment; and pain departed. His kit arrived from France. He began to read, omnivorously, old books and new: dreamed even of working. But no poem came, only vague inspirations which refused to materialize. Beatrice wrote—a chatty letter; was answered in the same strain. And, of course, there were visitors, flowers, cigarettes, well-wishes from admirers. For, among a limited circle, Francis enjoyed “celebrity.” . . .
It was early afternoon of Christmas Eve. He lay in bed, wicker cage over his legs, propped on multitudinous pillows. Through the open window by the glowing fire-place, he could see the high hills of outer London, tree-fringed, blue against gray skies. He had been alone all day, visioning once again that great poem of Anglo-Saxondom which always eluded him. For now that he had—as he thought—definitely put aside all hope of Beatrice, this belief in a Federation of the English-speaking races, with which she had inspired him, seemed somehow a consolation.
“Mrs. Jameson to see you, sir,” announced Prout. Patricia followed the little man into the room. She had been driving the car: and the dark motoring-furs accentuated the blond tallness of her. He had thought, once or twice, that the strain of Peter’s absence was telling on his cousin’s wife, graving little lines round eyes and chin. But today she looked young, radiant.
“Peter’s coming home,” she said. “On leave.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Isn’t it splendid?”
They talked Peter for a while. Prout brought them tea on a little wicker-table.
“I heard all about his Brigade the other day,” said Patricia, bringing a second cup to the bedside. “Captain Torrington—you met him I think, he’s a V.C.—told me. They must have had a dreadful time at Loos.”
“Torrington?” Francis thought the name over. “Yes. I remember him. He was there the night I dined with them. Where did you meet him? Is he on leave too?”
“No. He’s home for good. He never ought to have gone out, you know. But he insisted—and broke down. You men are so stupid about that sort of thing. I supposeyou’llwant to do something again as soon as your leg’s right. . . .”
“I wonder,” said Francis. “You see, I’ll never be any good at my own job again. A man with a limp is too easily spotted. And as for office jobs, there seem to be enough stay-at-home heroes without me. . . .”
“I wonder why it is”—Patricia lit herself a cigarette—“that you are all so bitter against the people who stay at home. Everybody can’t go to the front.”
“It isn’teverybodywho wants to,” commented Francis acridly.
She changed the topic; produced the Christmas present she had brought—a Whytwarth fountain-pen, gold-mounted and of enormous ink-capacity. He eyed it doubtfully at first; till she shewed him the simplicity of its action. Then he began to take professional interest; screwed it up and down again; tested the nib on the fly-leaf of one of the many books at his bed-side.
“By Jove, Pat,” he said at last, “I believe you’ve discovered the only fountain-pen. . . . And I never thought you a clever woman!”
Remembering old animosities, she blushed at that, and they laughed together like two children.
“And when does Peter arrive?” he asked.
“Late, I’m afraid. Not before midnight anyway.”
“Are you going to meet him?”
“Of course.”
He began to tease her aimlessly; called her the “expectant bride.” “Do you know, Pat, that I believe you’re madly in love with that cousin of mine. After nine years of matrimony, too. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Said Patricia, arranging her veil for the street: “I shouldn’t chaff peopletoo muchabout being in love, if I were you, Francis”: and with a meaning glance at Beatrice’s photograph on the mantelpiece, departed.
As Patricia paced up and down the cold, scarce-lit platform, the great vault of Victoria Station seemed like a tomb. Already the leave-train from France had been announced. But it was half-past two on Christmas morning; and, except for herself and two ordered taxis, none waited. England had not yet troubled to organize any reception for her weary fighting-men. They would arrive, as Patricia and a few voluntary motor-drivers had so often seen them arrive, cheerlessly, unfed, unwelcomed, to sleep the night as best they might in fireless waiting-rooms, or tramp the streets till dawn.
“Didn’t expect to see you here tonight, mum,” said a porter who knew her of old, touching his cap.
She told him she was waiting for her husband; and he bustled off in search of information.
“Another five minutes, mum. They must have had a bad crossing. She didn’t get to Folkestone till nearly one o’clock.”
A bell clanged; she saw the glow of smoke and sparks; the train slid alongside the platform, stopped, began to disgorge its khaki. She had met that train so often; knew so exactly what to expect; but always before, she had watched the third-class carriages. Now, she had eyes only for the Pullman. Excitedly, she scrutinized the descending officers. . . . Last of them all, very calm, cigar-butt between his lips, coat-collar pulled up to the eyes, cane under his arm, came Peter.
Obviously, he did not expect her. She let him saunter a yard or two along the platform; noticed the cleanliness of his boots, the sheen of his spurs. Then she touched him on the arm, said: “Taxi, sir?”
He turned round; began to say something; recognized her; burst out, “Good God, Pat, what on earth are you doing here?”
“Meeting lonely soldiers,” she laughed: and put up her lips to be kissed. He took her in his arms. . . .
“But you ought to be in bed,” he protested, as they made way arm-in-arm along the crowded platform.
“My dear, if I can drive Tommies home four nights a week, surely I can devote one to meeting my own husband. Have you had anything to eat?”
“Rather. And a bath at Boulogne. And a cabin to myself on the boat. It’s quite a comfortable journey if only one knows the ropes. I say, what are these poor devils going to do?” He looked at the crowd of men, mud-stained, kit-loaded.
“Sleep in the waiting-rooms till the trains start running.”
He let go her arm; stood still. “Supposing I weren’t here,” he said, “what would you do?”
“Oh, we usually try and find two or three who live fairly close, not more than five miles out. Then we drive them home.”
Husband and wife looked at each other; then Peter said: “Damn it all, Pat. . . .”
“As you like, dear,” she answered: but the heart grew heavy within her. She wanted him to herself, to herself: and he was away from her already, striding here and there among the men.
“Any of you men live in London?” asked P.J.
“Yes, sir. I do, sir. So do I, sir,” a dozen voices answered the question.
“West London? Marylebone? Regent’s Park?”
“Albany Street, sir.” A heavy-laden infantryman detached himself from the crowd; looked up expectantly.
“Right. I’ll drive you home. Any one else live that way?”
“My mate was coming ’ome with me. Could you take ’im too, sir?” asked the infantryman.
“Very well. Hurry up, though.” Peter turned to the crowd; said: “Sorry you chaps. I can’t manage more than two. Merry Christmas to you all.”
“Merry Christmas, sir,” answered a dozen voices. . . .
“I’ve got a brace,” he told her, “and they both want to go to Albany Street. It’s hardly out of our way at all.”
The two men followed them under the gloomy archway into the blue-lit gloom without; climbed stolidly to the rear seat of the open cabriolet. Pat took the wheel; Peter cranked up; and the Crossley crawled out into the dark canyon of Grosvenor Gardens. She was a very different car now from the royal-blue garnished plaything which Peter had hurled along the Bath Road in August 1914: countless muddy boots had left their mark on her varnish; countless accoutrements had torn her gray cord lining: but the engine still purred sweetly as of old, bore them smoothly past the dark bulk of Hyde Park Corner, up Park Lane, homewards.
As she drove, Patricia’s momentary spasm of discontent vanished. They were so pathetically grateful, the comments she caught from the passengers behind; and when she stopped the car at a shuttered house in Albany Street; when there came—from the mysterious lower regions—a woman who said, “Why, Alf, is it really you? I’ve been waiting up just on the off chance you might get home tonight”; when—with a grateful “Merry Christmas to you, sir”—the two weary men stumbled down the steps out of sight; it seemed to her as though, by parting with those few moments of her own selfish happiness, she had somehow earned the right to enjoy every moment of the seven days during which Peter would be hers.
Peter’s comment, as they sat over the little supper prepared for them in her father’s library, is characteristic. “I hated doing it,” he said, “but somehow one feels one ought to do all one can for them. Compared with us, the men have a pretty thin time.” . . .
In the ordinary workaday life of the peacetime individual, a week seems a distinct interval of time: but to the men and women of the recent War, who snatched their respite from long months of anxiety in a few brief hours of happiness, the allotted seven days used to pass like a quickly-flashing dream.
Still, for her one week, Patricia was happy; and much of that happiness came from the knowledge that this man whom War had sent back to her, was no longer the same creature whom she had given to War. He had left her a civilian in khaki; he came back a member of the British Expeditionary Force.
She found the change in him difficult of analysis. The old absorbed Peter still lived—a reticent animal; unwilling to tell her of his life “out there”; though eager enough to explain the changes in his Brigade: how Major Lethbridge had been promoted Lieutenant Colonel, and Conway given “C” Battery in his stead: how Torrington’s successor, Captain Sandiland, was inclined to take unto himself too much credit for the work done by his subalterns: how Little Willie still flourished. But of Loos, of trench-warfare, of Reninghelst and Dickebusch, and the three weeks’ rest at Acquin which the Fourth Southdown Brigade had been enjoying when he left—he told her little or nothing. “It was really not so bad,” seemed the limit of his descriptive powers.
But, grafted onto the old Peter, there existed a new Peter, irresistibly young, who amazed his wife. He seemed to have acquired a capacity for enjoyment, a carelessness about money-matters, a delight in petty personal comforts, utterly out of keeping with his civilian self.
Formerly, the theatre had not appealed to him; now, he wanted to go every night. He disliked eating at home; seemed happiest in some gaudy restaurant, some rag-time night-club. He took taxis everywhere; bought expensive presents for her, for the children, for himself. When she attempted to expostulate, he laughed at her—and taxi’d to Cox’s Bank to draw another cheque.
Then too, he had become quaintly tolerant. On Boxing-Day Heron Baynet gave a family dinner-party. Rawlings and Violet came in their new car: Violet overdressed and overbearing; her husband, who had been promised a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours list, full of it and of himself. Peter, in evening-dress, new enamel buttons in his white waistcoat, welcomed the pair like long lost friends; congratulated Hubert; flattered Violet. “Hubert,” said Peter to his face, “was a devilish clever fellow. Perhaps when Hubert got his Knighthood, he could find him, Peter, some soft job at home. . . .”
“But I thought you didn’t like Hubert,” Pat said to him when they were alone in their bed-room.
“Oh, he’s not a bad chap,” laughed Peter, “not ourclassof course—I mean, one can’t have any respect for him—still, I daresay he’s all right.”
When she pressed him further on the subject, he said—after a little hesitation: “It’s a question of caste, I think, Pat. One looks upon those sort of people—you know, politicians and the Whitehall gang—as one used to look on the lower orders. One doesn’t dislike them: one’s just sorry for them.”
Arthur Jameson, a taller blonder edition of his brother, came to town on two days’ leave; and she let them make one night of it together. From their boyhood, Arthur and Peter had quarrelled; but now they seemed to see eye to eye on a hundred subjects. As the flying-man—he had passed for his “wings” and was next on the roster for active service—confided to Patricia: “That husband of yours always wanted a good shaking up; and this War seems to have done it for him.”
The swift days fled. They visited Francis; took the delighted children to the Pantomime. She drove him to the City; sat in the office while he talked away half-an-hour with Simpson; whirled him westwards again. . . . “And will you ever go back to Lime Street?” she asked as they sat down to lunch. “I suppose so,” he answered, “if this War ever gets itself over. What shall we do this afternoon, old thing?” . . .
“Was he in love with her?” Patricia asked herself that question more than once during those breathless days: but found no answer to it. Obviously, her companionship, the physical joy of her, moved him as never before. They were pals again, better pals than ever. She told herself to be content with that.
And yet, reason was not content. Reason said: “This is excitement, pleasure at being back with the accustomed luxuries. After what he has gone through—almost any woman of his own class could give him what you are giving him.”
She hated that thought. Moreover something sounder than reason, the instinct of matehood, told her that she misjudged him. In so far as the average man can love the woman he has been married to for nine years, Peter did love her. There had been no other woman in his life. Only, only, she wanted more from him than the average husband gave to the average wife!
And so once again, they came to the last twenty-four hours.
It was raining when they woke; very good to potter about in dressing-gowns and slippers, to dawdle through their baths, and take late breakfast leisurely in the roomy library. (For Heron Baynet’s patients already waited round the book-strewn table in the long dining-room facing Harley Street.) Among her letters, Patricia found one from Alice Stark—the first since her confinement. She wrote from Devonshire: the boy flourished, had red hair like his father; Douglas had enjoyed his leave; she had heard from him that day; the Brigade had been ordered into action again; he hoped Peter was enjoying himself.
Said Peter: “You would have laughed to see the old man when the wire arrived. He sent out for three bottles of champagne. Morency rode ten miles for them; and we had to drink the youngster’s health. I wishwehad a boy, Pat.”
She knew the chance remark almost meaningless—long ago, they had abandoned the hope of a son: nevertheless, it depressed her. All that day—when the children came in to be played with, at lunch with her father, through the matinée which followed—she thought of it. For now, he seemed almost gone again. And it had been so good to have him home. If only she could feel that he would come back safe. If only she had given him a son.
“The Optimist! And the Pessimist!” sang the two comedians on the stage in front of her. Patricia looked round the auditorium. Everywhere, she saw excited men, smiling women. Once she had envied such joyous couples. Now she only wondered, if, like herself, all the women were hiding, stifling, drugging-away somewhere, the sorrows at their heart. “But we must laugh,” she said to herself. “Theymustn’t think of us as unhappy.”
And again, as on that last day at Deepcut, Patricia played out her comedy to the end. But for the first time in her life—she admitted as much to her father after Peter had gone—she let alcohol share her troubles.
Cowardly? Perhaps it was cowardly: but she couldn’t face the prospect of spoiling his last night by tears. And the alcohol helped her to put a brave face on things. The cocktails which he offered after tea, she took; and the whisky-and-soda when they got home; and the champagne for dinner, the night-cap ofcrême-de-menthe.
Poor Pat! She was only a very human, very loving woman, sending her man back to the lands of no-tomorrow. And the warmth of those harmless drinks helped her through, helped her to hide the misery behind her eyes. . . . Let the self-righteous, the uncomprising ones who have never known unhappiness, cast the first stone!
He would not let her see him off from the station; and she lay in bed, watching him as he laced his high-boots, straightened his spur-chains, pinned khaki collar.
“Anyway, old thing,” he said, “we’ve had a great time together. And in four or five months, well make another week of it. . . .”
He went down to his early breakfast; came back again; kissed her good-bye.
“Take care of yourself, Peter,” she smiled at him. And again he answered “Trust me, old thing. . . .”
But as she listened to the taxi purring down Harley Street, to the slam of the closing front-door, it seemed to Patricia as though there were no Power, either heavenly or earthly, in whom a woman of those days might put her trust.