MASCOT
A single light burned in Christine's bedroom. It stood low on the
pedestal by the wide bed and was heavily shaded, so that only one half
of the bed, Christine's half, was exempt from the general gloom of the
chamber. The officer had thus ordained things. The white, plump arm of
Christine was imprisoned under his neck. He had ordered that too. He
was asleep. Christine watched him. On her return from the Albany she
had found him apparently just as she had left him, except that he
was much less talkative. Indeed, though unswervingly polite--even
punctilious with her--he had grown quite taciturn and very obstinate
and finicking in self-assertion. There was no detail as to which he
did not formulate a definite wish. Yet not until by chance her eye
fell on the whisky decanter did she perceive that in her absence
he had been copiously drinking again. He was not, however, drunk.
Remorseful at her defection, she constituted herself his slave; she
covered him with acquiescences; she drank his tippler's breath. And he
was not particularly responsive. He had all his own ideas. He ought,
for example, to have been hungry, but his idea was that he was not
hungry; therefore he had refused her dishes.
She knew him better now. Save on one subject, discussed in the
afternoon, he was a dull, narrow, direct man, especially in love. He
had no fancy, no humour, no resilience. Possibly he worshipped women,
as he had said, perhaps devoutly; but his worship of the individual
girl tended more to ritualism than to ecstasy. The Parisian devotee
was thrown away on him, and she felt it. But not with bitterness. On
the contrary, she liked him to be as he was; she liked to be herself
unappreciated, neglected, bored. She thought of the delights which she
had renounced in the rich and voluptuous drawing-room of the Albany;
she gazed under the reddish illumination at the tedious eternal
market-place on which she exposed her wares, and which in Tottenham
Court Road went by the name of bedstead; and she gathered nausea and
painful longing to her breast as the Virgin gathered the swords of
the Dolours at the Oratory, and was mystically happy in the ennui of
serving the miraculous envoy of the Virgin. And when Marthe, uneasy,
stole into the sitting-room, Christine, the door being ajar, most
faintly transmitted to her a command in French to tranquillise herself
and go away. And outside a boy broke the vast lull of the Sunday night
with a shattering cry of victory in the North Sea.
Possibly it was this cry that roused the officer out of his doze. He
sat up, looked unseeing at Christine's bright smile and at the black
gauze that revealed the reality of her youth, and then reached for his
tunic which hung at the foot of the bed.
"You asked about my mascot," he said, drawing from a pocket a small
envelope of semi-transparent oilskin. "Here it is. Now that is a
mascot!"
He had wakened under the spell of his original theme, of his sole
genuine subject. He spoke with assurance, as one inspired. His eyes,
as they masterfully encountered Christine's eyes, had a strange,
violent, religious expression. Christine's eyes yielded to his, and
her smile vanished in seriousness. He undid the envelope and displayed
an oval piece of red cloth with a picture of Christ, his bleeding
heart surrounded by flames and thorns and a great cross in the
background.
"That," said the officer, "will bring anybody safe home again."
Christine was too awed even to touch the red cloth. The vision of the
dishevelled, inspired man in khaki shirt, collar and tie, holding
the magic saviour in his thin, veined, aristocratic hand, powerfully
impressed her, and she neither moved nor spoke.
"Have you seen the 'Touchwood' mascot?" he asked. She signified
a negative, and then nervously fingered her gauze. "No? It's a
well-known mascot. Sort of tiny imp sort of thing, with a huge head,
glittering eyes, a khaki cap of _oak_, and crossed legs in gold and
silver. I hear that tens of thousands of them are sold. But there is
nothing like my mascot."
"Where have you got it?" Christine asked in her queer but improving
English.
"Where did I get it? Just after Mons, on the road, in a house."
"Have you been in the retreat?"
"I was."
"And the angels? Have you seen them?"
He paused, and then said with solemnity:
"Was it an angel I saw?... I was lying doggo by myself in a hole,
and bullets whizzing over me all the time. It was nearly dark, and a
figure in white came and stood by the hole; he stood quite still
and the German bullets went on just the same. Suddenly I saw he was
wounded in the hand; it was bleeding. I said to him: 'You're hit in
the hand.' 'No,' he said--he had a most beautiful voice--'that is an
old wound. It has reopened lately. I have another wound in the other
hand.' And he showed me the other hand, and that was bleeding too.
Then the firing ceased, and he pointed, and although I'd eaten
nothing at all that day and was dead-beat, I got up and ran the way he
pointed, and in five minutes I ran into what remained of my unit."
The officer's sonorous tones ceased; he shut his lips tightly, as
though clinching the testimony, and the life of the bedroom was
suspended in absolute silence.
"That's what _I_ saw.... And with the lack of food my brain was
absolutely clear."
Christine, on her back, trembled.
The officer replaced his mascot. Then he said, waving the little bag:
"Of course, there are fellows who don't need mascots. Fellows that if
their name isn't written on a bullet or a piece of shrapnel it won't
reach them any more than a letter not addressed to you would reach
you. Now my Colonel, for instance--it was he who told me how good my
mascot was--well, he can stop shells, turn 'em back. Yes. He's just
got the D.S.O. And he said to me, 'Edgar,' he said, 'I don't deserve
it. I got it by inspiration.' And so he did.... What time's that?"
The gilded Swiss clock in the drawing-room was striking its tiny gong.
"Nine o'clock."
The officer looked dully at his wrist-watch which, not having been
wound on the previous night, had inconsiderately stopped.
"Then I can't catch my train at Victoria." He spoke in a changed
voice, lifeless, and sank back on the bed.
"Train? What train?"
"Nothing. Only the leave train. My leave is up to-night. To-morrow I
ought to have been back in the trenches."
"But you have told me nothing of it! If you had told me--But not one
word, my dear."
"When one is with a woman--!"
He seemed gloomily and hopelessly to reproach her.