THE SOLDIER
But outside she lost faith. Half a dozen motor-cars were slumbering
in a row near the door of the Guinea-Fowl, and they all stirred
monstrously yet scarcely perceptibly at the sight of the woman's
figure, solitary, fragile and pale in the darkness. They seemed for an
instant to lust for her; and then, recognising that she was not their
prey, to sink back into the torpor of their inexhaustible patience.
The sight of them was prejudicial to the dominion of the unseen
powers. Christine admitted to herself that she had drunk a lot, that
she was demented, that her only proper course was to return dutifully
to the supper-party. She wondered what, if she did not so return, she
could possibly say to justify herself to G.J.
Nevertheless she went on down the street, hurrying, automatic, and
reached the main thoroughfare. It was dark with the new protective
darkness. The central hooded lamps showed like poor candles, making a
series of rings of feeble illumination on the vast invisible floor of
the road. Nobody was afoot; not a soul. The last of the motor-buses
that went about killing and maiming people in the new protective
darkness had long since reached its yard. The seductive dim violet
bulbs were all extinguished on the entrances of the theatres, and,
save for a thread of light at some lofty window here and there, the
curving facades of the street were as undecipherable as the heavens
above or as the asphalte beneath.
Then Christine's ear detected a faint roar. It grew louder; it became
terrific; and a long succession of huge loaded army waggons with
peering head-lamps thundered past at full speed, one close behind
the next, shaking the very avenue. The slightest misjudgment by the
leading waggon in the confusion of light and darkness--and the whole
convoy would have pitched itself together in a mass of iron, flesh,
blood and ordnance; but the convoy went ruthlessly and safely forward
till its final red tail-lamp swung round a corner and vanished. The
avenue ceased to shake. The thunder died away, and there was silence
again. Whence and why the convoy came, and at whose dread omnipotent
command? Whither it was bound? What it carried? No answer in the
darkness to these enigmas!... And Christine was afraid of England. She
remembered people in Ostend saying that England would never go to war.
She, too, had said it, bitterly. And now she was in the midst of the
unmeasured city which had darkened itself for war, and she was afraid
of an unloosed might....
What madness was she doing? She did not even know the man's name.
She knew only that he was "Edgar W." She would have liked to be his
_marraine_, according to the French custom, but he had never written
to her. He was still in her debt for the hotel bill and the taxi fare.
He had not even kissed her at the station. She tried to fancy that she
heard his voice calling "Christine" with frantic supplication in her
ears, but she could not. She turned into another side street, and saw
a lighted doorway. Two soldiers were standing in the veiled radiance.
She could just read the lower half of the painted notice: "All service
men welcome. Beds. Meals. Writing and reading rooms. Always open." She
passed on. One of the soldiers, a non-commissioned officer of mature
years, solemnly winked at her, without moving an unnecessary muscle.
She looked modestly down.
Twenty yards further on she described near a lamp-post a tall soldier
whose somewhat bent body seemed to be clustered over with pots, pans,
tins, bags, valises, satchels and weapons, like the figure of some
military Father Christmas on his surreptitious rounds. She knew that
he must be a poor benighted fellow just back from the trenches. He was
staring up at the place where the street-sign ought to have been. He
glanced at her, and said, in a fatigued, gloomy, aristocratic voice:
"Pardon me, Madam. Is this Denman Street? I want to find the Denman
Hostel."
Christine looked into his face. A sacred dew suffused her from head
to foot. She trembled with an intimidated joy. She felt the mystic
influences of all the unseen powers. She knew herself with holy dread
to be the chosen of the very clement Virgin, and the channel of a
miraculous intervention. It was the most marvellous, sweetest
thing that had ever happened. It was humanly incredible, but it had
happened.
"Is it you?" she murmured in a soft, breaking voice.
The man stooped and examined her face.
She said, while he gazed at her: "Edgar!... See--the wrist watch,"
and held up her arm, from which the wide sleeve of her mantle slipped
away.
And the man said: "Is it you?"
She said: "Come with me. I will look after you."
The man answered glumly:
"I have no money--at least not enough for you. And I owe you a lot of
money already. You are an angel. I'm ashamed."
"What do you mean?" Christine protested. "Do you forget that you gave
me a five-pound note? It was more than enough to pay the hotel.... As
for the rest, let us not speak of it. Come with me."
"Did I?" muttered the man.
She could feel the very clement Virgin smiling approval of her fib;
it was exactly such a fib as the Virgin herself would have told in a
quandary of charity. And when a taxi came round the corner, she knew
that the Virgin disguised as a taxi-driver was steering it, and she
hailed it with a firm and yet loving gesture.
The taxi stopped. She opened the door, and in her sombre mantle and
bright trailing frock and glinting, pale shoes she got in, and the
military Father Christmas with much difficulty and jingling and
clinking insinuated himself after her into the vehicle, and banged to
the door. And at the same moment one of the soldiers from the Hostel
ran up:
"Here, mate!... What do you want to take his money from him for, you
damned w----?"
But the taxi drove off. Christine had not understood. And had she
understood, she would not have cared. She had a divine mission; she
was in bliss.
"You did not seem surprised to meet me," she said, taking Edgar's
rough hand.
"No."
"Had you called out my name--'Christine'?"
"No."
"You are sure?"
"Yes."
"Perhaps you were thinking of me? I was thinking of you."
"Perhaps. I don't know. But I'm never surprised."
"You must be very tired?"
"Yes."
"But why are you like that? All these things? You are not an officer
now."
"No. I had to resign my commission--just after I saw you." He paused,
and added drily: "Whisky." His deep rich voice filled the taxi with
the resigned philosophy of fatalism.
"And then?"
"Of course I joined up again at once," he said casually. "I soon got
out to the Front. Now I'm on leave. That's mere luck."
She burst into tears. She was so touched by his curt story, and by the
grotesquerie of his appearance in the faint light from the exterior
lamp which lit the dial of the taximeter, that she lost control of
herself. And the man gave a sob, or possibly it was only a gulp to
hide a sob. And she leaned against him in her thin garments. And he
clinked and jingled, and his breath smelt of beer.