MARCHING OUT
1
The nightmare settled again around Jeremy with double darkness and
bewilderment. Again he labored in the workshops with his octogenarian
assistants, but this time at first under a new oppression and a new
hopelessness. Yet in some ways his mind was easier since he had
understood that the frenzied haste which the Speaker urged on him was
not urged without reason. After the council of war, the terrible old
man, still jubilant, still strung up to the highest pitch of nervous
energy, opened his mind to Jeremy without reserve. Jeremy, alarmed by
his shining eyes, his feverish manner, his wild and abrupt gestures,
still could not help seeing that his discourse was that of a sane man,
a practical statesman, who was putting all he had on a single throw
because there was no other choice.
“My family has ruled without dispute,” the Speaker said, “for a hundred
years--and that is a long time. We had no position, we merely stepped
into the place of the old government, and the people let us because
they were so tired. They obeyed us because they had been in the habit
of obeying us, when there was no one else for them to follow. But we
were not chosen, and we are too new to claim divine right. We cannot
even look to our religion for support, because the country is divided.
We here in the south are mostly by way of being Catholics, but though
the Holy Father would give us his help, we have never dared to accept
it. They are violent Methodists in Wales, and in Yorkshire and the
north they are nearly all Spiritualists.”
Jeremy inquired with interest what this new religion might be; but the
Speaker could only describe it as it existed, and then but vaguely.
He could not give the history of its growth. Jeremy gathered that
the Spiritualists still called themselves Christians, but depended
much less on the ministrations of any church than on advice received
in various grotesque ways from departed friends and relatives. Their
creed seemed to have degenerated into a gloomy and superstitious form
of ancestor-worship. They had absorbed also, he guessed, some of the
tenets of what had been called Christian Science; and the compound had
produced a great many extravagant manifestations. The Spiritualists
owned no law or discipline in the spiritual world, but acted on the
latest intelligence received from the dead. Most of them held firmly
that evil was a delusion, a doctrine which had come to have a strange
influence on conduct. All of them believed without a question in the
future life; and the absolute quality of their belief, the Speaker
thought, had gradually changed among them the distaste for fighting
which at one time possessed the whole country. It would further, he
thought, make them formidable soldiers. The picture he drew of them,
still living in the decay of an industrial system, packed close amid
the ruins of the old towns in a bleak country, dismayed and repelled
Jeremy. The Speaker’s discourses did not fail of their intended
effect. The listener began to believe that this enemy must be opposed
at all risks.
“And you,” the Speaker said earnestly, as Jeremy rested for a moment in
the workshop, “you shall have your reward. I have no son and I have a
daughter.” He muttered the last sentence so much under his breath that
it seemed he wished Jeremy not so much to hear it as to overhear it.
Jeremy’s mind had been elsewhere; and it was a minute or two before the
sense of these words penetrated to him. When it did, it brought him
sharply back to the actual world. But he did not speak at once. His
natural caution interposed, his natural diffidence bade him consider.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked quietly after an interval.
“What I say,” the Speaker answered. “If you succeed in what you have to
do, you shall be rewarded. If you don’t succeed, I shall not be able to
reward you, even if I wish to.”
Jeremy desired very strongly to point out that this was unjust, that
whether the guns would be a decisive factor in the coming battle
depended almost entirely on chance. But he refrained. He refrained,
too, from asking the Speaker precisely where the Lady Eva came into
the scheme. Fortune appeared to him like a great, glittering bubble,
which a miracle might make solid at the proper time for his hand to
seize it. He dared not question further: he dared not think how much
he was influenced by the Speaker’s determination not to consider the
consequences of defeat.
And as that crowded week wore on, his mind settled into a sort of calm,
like the apparent quietness of a wheel revolving at high speed. That
would be which was written. In his anxiety to be sure that there was
an adequate supply of shells (he did not hope to have more than thirty
for each gun) he quite forgot that one of them might suddenly blow him
into eternity, together with all the Speaker’s chance of success.
A great part of his time in the workshops was now spent alone--alone,
that is to say, as far as the Speaker was concerned, for the old man
was busy at the Treasury, mustering his army and making ready for it to
march. As for the octogenarians, Jeremy felt little more kinship with
them than if they had been a troop of trained animals. Communication
with them was so difficult that he confined it to the most necessary
orders. But when he realized that these ludicrous old men would have
to come with him to the battlefield to fire the guns, for want of time
to train others, he began to feel for them a kind of compassionate
affection. He regarded them rather as he would have done the horses
of the gun-teams than as the men of his battery; but towards the end
of the week he found himself talking to them, quite incomprehensibly,
as he might have done to horses. It seemed to him pathetic that
these witless veterans should be led out to war and set to the
highly hazardous venture of firing off the guns they had themselves
manufactured.
So, between the hours which he devoted to elementary instruction in
loading, aiming, and firing, he gave to them his views on the situation
in which he found himself. His views were, by reason of fatigue,
strong emotions and bewilderment, of a confused and even childish
sort. He told Jabez, the wizened expert in explosives, the whole story
of Trehanoc’s dead rat--a story which, brief as it was, covered more
than a hundred and seventy years. He confided to Jabez his desire,
his impossible craving, to see the rat again. It was perhaps a little
ridiculous to hanker so much after the society of a rather unpleasant
animal. Nevertheless he and the rat were in the same boat, and in his
more light-headed moments he felt that he ought to seek it out and take
counsel with it. He was sure that the rat would understand. At other
times he had a suspicion that it would have adjusted itself much more
easily to the changed world than he could ever hope to do. Perhaps it
had not even noticed that there had been any change. Jabez, wrinkled,
skinny and toothless, listened complacently while he went on fumbling
with his work, never letting a sign appear to show whether he did or
did not understand a word of it. Jeremy reflected that it was perhaps
better to be quite incomprehensible than to be half understood.
At the end of the week, on the afternoon of the sixth day, he decided
that all was done that could be hoped for. He put the gun-crew again
through its drill, and desisted for fear of scaring away what little
sense its members still retained. Then, after overhauling the guns once
more, he returned to the Treasury to report to the Speaker that he was
ready.
As he entered the building he met the Lady Eva, who had just come in
from riding. His mind was too dull and heavy to respond even to the
sight of her vigorous, flushed beauty. He merely saluted her--he had
queerly taken in the last few days to using again the old artillery
salute--and would have gone on. But he saw her hesitate and half turn
towards him; and he stopped and faced her. But when he had done so, she
evidently did not know what to say to him. She stood there, tapping
her foot on the ground and biting her lip, while he waited, bowed,
lethargic, incapable of speech.
At last she said, with a jerky effort: “I do not know how my father is
expecting you to save us ... but I know that he is....”
He wondered whether this was the attempt of a frivolous girl to get
news to which she had no right. He inclined his head gravely and made
no reply.
She went on, still with an obvious effort: “I know he is ... and I
wanted to wish you success, and that--that no accident may happen to
you.”
“I hope for all our sakes that there will be no accident,” he answered
wearily, “but you never know.” He waited a few moments; but she seemed
to have nothing more to say. He saluted her again and left her,
continuing his slow way to the Speaker’s room. He did not see that she
stood there looking after him until he was out of sight.
“We’re all ready,” he said tersely, as he entered.
“Then everything is ready,” the Speaker replied from his desk, where,
with his clerk standing by his side, he was signing documents with
great flourishes of a quill. “And it’s only just in time.”
“Only just in time?”
The Speaker dismissed the clerk and turned to Jeremy. “Only just in
time,” he repeated, with an expression of gravity. “They have moved
much quicker than I expected. They held up a train last week as soon as
their messengers got back, and they’ve been bringing up troops in it
nearly as far as Hitchin. Luckily it broke down before they had quite
finished, and so the line is blocked. But the advance-guard I sent out
met some of their patrols just outside St. Albans this morning.”
“Then the fighting has begun?” Jeremy asked, with a little excitement.
“Yes--begun.” The Speaker’s face was dark and sullen. “A hundred of
our men were driven through the town by a score or so of theirs. They
are moving on London already, but now they are coming more slowly than
they have been. I intend to set out to-night and we shall meet them
to-morrow somewhere on the other side of Barnet. They will come by the
Great North Road.”
Jeremy was silent, and the Speaker came to him and took his arm. “Yes,
Jeremy,” he said, with almost tenderness in his voice, “by this time
to-morrow it ought to be all over.”
“But if they beat us,” Jeremy cried, “they will be into London at once.
Haven’t you made any preparations? Won’t you send the Lady Burney and
the Lady Eva somewhere in the south where they will be safe? I met the
Lady Eva just now--she is still here----” He stopped and gulped.
“I will not,” said the Speaker, his voice deepening and taking on the
resounding, the courageous, the mournful tones of a trumpet. “If we are
beaten, then it is all over, and there is no need for us to look beyond
defeat. If we are beaten, I do not care what happens to me or to you
or to any one that belongs to me. For our civilization, that I have
worked so long to maintain, would be dead, it would be too late to save
England from savagery, and it would be better for all of us to die. Go
now and see that your guns are ready to move in three hours. The horses
will be there in time.”
Jeremy hesitated, reluctantly impressed by the old man’s solemn
fervor. Then, without a word, he left the room and returned to the
workshop.
2
As the end of the summer day faded and grew cooler, the Lady Eva sat
with her mother and their attendants in a window of the Treasury
overlooking Whitehall. The Lady Burney, who had long abandoned the
practice of reading, was yet in the habit of hearing long stories and
romances from clever persons who got them out of books; and she judged
from what she had learnt of wars in the old times that it would be
proper to her position to sit in a window and smile graciously on the
army as it marched out to battle. It was an unfortunate thing that
the Speaker, ignorant of her intentions and careless of the ritual of
conflict, had appointed various places of assembly for the troops, and
had taken no pains to make any part of them march through Whitehall.
Detached bodies went by at intervals; and some of them, who chanced
to look up, saw fluttering handkerchiefs. But most of them marched
doggedly and dully with drooping heads, reflecting in their courage the
prevailing spirit of gloomy anxiety which had settled on London.
Once a small erect figure on horseback clattered suddenly out of the
Treasury almost immediately underneath, struggling with a wildly
curvetting mount. The Lady Burney bowed and waved to it graciously.
The girl Mary began and checked a sharp sigh of admiration. The Lady
Eva sat motionless and expressionless. But Thomas Wells, impatient
annoyance apparent in the line of his back, as soon as he had mastered
the restive horse, trotted off, without once looking up, in the
direction of Piccadilly, where he was to join the Speaker.
The light grew less and less, the sky became paler, with a curious
and depressing lividity, as though the day were bleeding to death.
The sound of marching troops, never very great or very frequent, came
to the listeners in the window less often and less loud. A cloud
of impalpable sadness fell upon the city and affected the Lady Eva
like a spiritual miasma. The streets were not, in truth, quieter or
emptier than was usual at nightfall: there was no outward sign that
the people guessed at an approaching calamity. But there rose from all
the houses a soft, deadening air of gloom. It was as though London had
the heavy limbs, the racked nerves, the difficult breathing of acute
apprehension. The Lady Eva could feel, and dumbly shared, the general
oppression. She wished to leave the window, to take refuge amid lights
and conversation from the creeping chill. But her mother, obstinate and
sullen, dully incensed by the failure of her romantic purpose, insisted
on staying, and made the rest stay with her.
Just when the day was changing from a pale light shot with shadow
into the first darkness of evening, they heard a loud clattering in
Whitehall, a little way out of sight; and presently a long, slow
procession came by, made up of obscure, grotesque shapes, hidden or
rendered monstrous by the doubtful light. First there came a string of
wagons, each drawn by two or four horses; and the men who walked beside
them seemed to walk, or rather to hobble, with ludicrous awkwardness,
all with bent backs and some leaning on sticks. At the end rolled two
strange wheeled objects heavily swathed in tarpaulins, each drawn by
a team of eight horses. The women in the window, tired of regarding
the empty street for so long, gazed eagerly at these, but could not
make out or give them a name. The Lady Eva alone sat back in her chair,
hardly looking, until with a start she thought she saw a square,
familiar figure riding beside the train on a horse as square and sedate
as itself. Then she leant impulsively forward; but already Jeremy and
his guns were swallowed up in the shades as they jogged along towards
Charing Cross.
“Another baggage-train!” observed the Lady Burney, crossly and obesely,
as she turned away from the window.
* * * * *
Jeremy had, in fact, looked up at the windows of the Treasury as he
went by, and with a romantic thought in his head. But he, as little
aware as the Speaker of the observances proper to the marching out
of the army, had not expected to see any one there, and consequently
saw no one. He merely reflected that the Lady Eva was somewhere
behind those black walls; and he strove to lift away his depression
by reminding himself that he was going to fight for her. But this
exhortation had no effect on his anxious mind. The circumstances did
not in the slightest degree alter an extremely difficult situation. It
was merely one, even if the chief, of the factors which compelled him
to face that situation, however unwillingly. It would not assist him to
change the issue of a good old-fashioned infantry battle by means of
two very doubtful sixty-pounder guns.
But this depression occupied only one part of his mind. With another
he had got his column together at Waterloo, had seen to the effectual
disguising of the guns, had marshalled the old men in their proper
places and set out without misadventure or delay. The collapse of other
means of crossing the river sent them round by Westminster Bridge,
which shook and rumbled ominously under the weight of the guns, and
thence along Whitehall in the direction of Charing Cross Road. Jeremy’s
route had been indicated to him by the Speaker without the help of a
map; but, to his surprise, he had been able to recognize the general
line of it by means of the names. The column plodded slowly along a
vile causeway that had been Tottenham Court Road into another as vile
which was still called Euston Road, and, turning sharp to the right,
made for the long hill which led towards Islington.
The mere marching through that shadowed and cheerless evening was
depressing to Jeremy. He had chosen for his own use the fattest and
least exuberant nag that the Speaker’s stables could offer him; and
on this beast he cantered now and again to the head of the column and
back, to see that all was well and to urge haste on the leaders. The
old men were bearing it well. There was no doubt that they looked
forward with a gruesome and repulsive glee to the use of their
handiwork in action. As he rode by, Jeremy could see them hobbling
cheerfully, cackling and exchanging unintelligible jokes in high,
cracked voices. The gathering darkness and the changing shadows made
them seem even more ghostly and grotesque. Jeremy shivered. He felt as
though he were leading out against the living an army of the dead. But
he mastered his repulsion and cried out encouragement, now to one, now
to another, bidding them when they were tired to take it in turns to
ride on the wagons. They answered him with thin cheers; and a few of
them, marching arm-in-arm together, like old cronies released for an
airing from the workhouse, set up a feeble but cheerful marching song.
As they topped the rise of the hill, the moon came up and revealed the
uncanny desolation of the country through which they were moving. Here
all was ruin, with partial clearings, like those which had been made
in St. John’s Wood, only more extensive. The wide road had not been
mended, yet had nowhere fallen into complete disuse, and was a maze
of crisscrossing tracks and ruts, studded with pits which had here
and there become little pools. Jeremy silently but fervently thanked
the moon for rising in time to save his guns from being stuck in any
of these death-traps. He rode by the first gun, watching the road
anxiously; and he spent an agonized five minutes when one of the wagons
in front slipped a wheel just over the edge of a pit and blocked up the
only practicable way. The old men gathered around at once, cheering
themselves on with piping cries, and at last heaved the wagon out. The
column went slowly on--all too slowly, it seemed to Jeremy, who yet
dared not make greater haste.
And then, in spite of his fears and his whirling brain, fatigue sent
down on him a sort of numbing cloud. He drooped and nodded in the
saddle, picking his way only by a still, vigilant instinct. Wild
fancies and figures hurled themselves through his weary brain without
startling him. Once he seemed to see the thin, animal face of the
Canadian, teeth bared and a little open, painted on the darkness only a
few inches from his eyes. Once as he lurched heavily it seemed that the
arms of the Lady Eva caught him and steadied him and held him, and that
he let fall his head on the delicious peace of her breast. He woke
with a start to see that the road forked and that the column was taking
the road on the right. The moon was now high, and made his battery and
the road and the few houses that were still standing here all black and
silver. On his right stood a small ale-house, with open door, whence
came the pale glow of a dying fire. It occurred to him that he must
see to it that none of his old men straggled in here to rest or hide;
and, pulling out of his place in the column, he rode towards it. As he
did so he saw the sign on which the moonlight fell full and read with
strange feelings the rudely-scrawled words, “The Archway Tavern.” He
looked, with hanging lip and staring eyes, for the busy swing-doors
of the public-house which had been a landmark and which he had passed
he knew not how many times. Though he had never entered it, this
simulacrum, this dwindled vestige on the place where of old it had
stood, opulent, solid and secure, affected him like a _memento mori_,
a grim epitaph, the image of a skull. It was a sudden and poignant
reminder of the transiency of human things and of the strange nakedness
of the age in which he now lived. When he turned away he was sitting
limp and dazed in the saddle.
In an alternation of fits of such drowsiness and of vigorous, bustling
wakefulness, Jeremy got his column slowly over the undulations of
the Great North Road. The moon at last went down; and as morning
approached, the sky grew cloudy and every spark of light vanished from
the world. Then, at the moment they entered on the first rise of what
Jeremy supposed to be Barnet Hill, a thin breeze began to blow from the
east and to bring with it a faint radiance. Jeremy felt on his right
cheek the wind and the light at once, light like wind and wind like
light, both numbingly cold. And, as they came to the top of the hill,
the sun rose and revealed to them the assembled army.