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 suppose _you’ll_ want 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’t _everybody_ who 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
people _too much_ about being in love, if I were you, Francis”: and with
a meaning glance at Beatrice’s photograph on the mantelpiece, departed.
§ 3
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.” . . .
§ 4
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 our _class_ of 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.
§ 5
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 wish _we_
had 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. “_They_ mustn’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 of _crême-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!
§ 6
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.
PART NINETEEN
THE CITY OF FEAR
§ 1
Had Peter Jameson been an Irishman, a Gaul, or an Italian, his mind—as
he taxied to Victoria Station—would have pictured to himself the
physical charms of the wife he was leaving: her dark eyes framed in the
golden aureole of hair, her smooth loving hands, the tones of her low
voice. . . . But Peter, in his attitude towards women, was very much the
Anglo-Saxon; and his thoughts of Pat, if he could have voiced them,
would not have exceeded: “Dear old Pat, she’s a jolly good sort.”
Still, it needed effort not to think of her overmuch during the long
journey back to his Brigade!
Three mornings after they had said good-bye, he lit a cigar; pulled
tight the belt of his mackintosh; drew on his gauntlets; and set out on
his first journey from Poperinghe to “Wipers.”
Little Willie, skittish after long inactivity, lashed out as his master
mounted; danced erratically over the cobbles: Queen Bess and Jelks
jogged soberly in rear.
It had been snowing. Under-foot the streets were still starred and
sodden; and when they came to the great Square, they found men at work,
shovelling dirty brown heaps to the side of the road. Gloomy, the place
looked: gray-housed under its gray skies, inhospitable, a vision of
discomfort. . . .
Peter rode on.
Scant houses gave way to flat open country—white on either side between
the shell-pocked trees. It was very silent. An occasional car, a
returning G.S. waggon, the clop of their own horses’ hoofs, alone broke
the silence. They came to the red ruin of Vlamertinghe; passed the
Church, halved by a 17-inch shell as a man halves cheese with a knife,
and the four roads and the railway. Now, the road mounted, glistening
bluely, veneered with mud. Peter heard, in front of him, the whistle and
burst of a heavy shell; slowed to a walk.
At the top of the incline, between the trees, stood a little white
toll-house. From it, emerged a man in khaki, holding up his hand.
“What’s the matter?” asked Peter.
“They’re shelling the road, sir. I should wait a little, if I were you.
It’s big stuff.”
Peter dismounted; surveyed the country. In front of him the road dipped
to a level-crossing; rose again. In the hollow, stood a red-and-yellow
château, forlorn among dank gardens. Along the railway, to the left of
the road, showed a line of dug-outs—gigantic molehills, brown and
shapeless.
“Seems safe enough,” he said to his groom: but even as he spoke, there
came the ominous whistle, the double crash of a five-nine shell, the
black spattered fountain of it among the trees on the crest in front.
Hell for leather through the spattered fountain, galloped a heavy
two-horse waggon, driver lashing frantically from his seat. The waggon
bounded across the railway, up the slope into safety. . . .
By now, a little crowd had congested round the toll-house. Peter heard
the men talking. Said one:—
“Funny? I don’t call it funny. How long have you been out? Two months. I
thought so. I’ve had over a year of it. You wait till you’ve seen a bit
more. Funny indeed.”
They waited half-an-hour, as civilians wait for it to stop raining;
trotted on up the slope. Now they could see the shattered roofs of
Ypres. At that distance, it still looked like a city. Only as they came
to it, was its nakedness, the ruin and desolation of the place,
apparent.
The huge red bulk of the Asylum turned, as they approached, to a gutted
skeleton of a building; and beyond, the houses which they passed leered
at them in drunken burlesque, shameless. Here, a made bed lurched half
out of a shattered window; there, shells had ripped away the whole front
of a dwelling, exposing—as a lewd woman exposes herself—all the petty
secrets of what had once been a home.
Left they swung, past the chipped and bulging Water Tower, past more
ruins of villadom, into a bare tree-lined road; right again.
“Colonel doesn’t like the horses to come further than this by daylight,
sir” warned Jelks.
“Very well.” Peter dismounted. “Which way do I go?”
“Just up to that bridge, sir. Then, left along the canal bank. You’ll
see the Lock-House just in front of you.” . . .
Peter found the Weasel, reading his _Times_ by the light of their one
oil lamp (it was just lunch-time) in a low, timber-shored dug-out which
one approached down greasy steps, along duck-boards laid just above the
water-level of a muddy creek.
“Hallo,” said the Weasel. “So you’ve turned up at last, have you? Jolly
place this. What?”
“A trifle cramped, sir,” laughed Peter; and began to explain his
overdueness.
“Oh, that’s all right,” chaffed Stark; “we’ll take the three days off
your next leave. I’m glad you’re back though. Purves, as acting
Adjutant, does not shine. Morency’s at the waggon-lines. I’ve had to do
most of the office-work myself. He’s out on the wires now. We’re
commanding a ‘Group.’ If you get that map down, I’ll show you the
battery-positions.”
He indicated them.
Doctor Carson came in, bumping his head on the lintel as usual; said
“Hallo, P.J. Jolly spot, isn’t it? Time for lunch, I think.”
Bombardier Michael appeared, carrying plates; followed by Peter’s batman
Garton, with food from the tiny cook-house which Gunner Horne had found
on a tottery foot-bridge over the creek.
Somehow, in spite of discomforts, Peter was glad to be back. Lunch over,
he explored along the creek; was shown the doctor’s dug-out (shared
willy-nilly with Purves); clambered a little mud-slope; found the
“office,” a steel tunnel let into the foundations of what must once have
been a house, and the “telephone-room”—a sunk cellar.
“I’ve put your bed in the office, sir,” announced Garton. “The room next
to the Colonel’s leaks.”
“Good lad,” said Peter, looking down, from the little mound, onto the
desolation of “Wipers.” . . .
In the months which followed, he grew to know that view as a bank-clerk
knows Lombard Street. Below him, on his left, stretched the muddy waters
of the Yser Canal, men living like water-rats all along its banks. On
his right, stood the shattered lock-house beneath which slept Sergeant
(once Corporal) Waller and the staff. In front of him, water lapped the
stone quay of “Tattenham Corner,” with its tipsy blind lamp-posts, its
twisted railings. For the rest, the panorama was just ruined houses,
skeletons of houses, mockeries of homes: above them, jagged
spires—broken dogs-teeth against winter skies. Sometimes at night, a
blue, almost Whistlerian radiance brooded over this ghost of a city: but
mostly blackness hid it—a blackness broken only by the silver of Véry
lights, the orange of candle-flames in dug-outs, the crimson flash from
a gun-muzzle. . . .
§ 2
It is owing to a higher capacity for adaptability that the human animal
has defeated all the other animals on this planet; made himself in fact
the “lord of creation.” For example, one need but take the Southdown
Division during its winter in the “City of Fear.”
Their life—from the front-line infantry, frozen blue or blown to bits
between rotting sandbags, to the drivers in the swamped horse-lines
where the dumb beasts stood all day, tail to storm, fetlock-deep in mud,
and whence men and beasts sallied forth every night up that road of
death between the scarred poplars—was indescribably foul, a reversion
to conditions at which an aristocratic caveman might well have jibbed.
In the fighting-zone itself, boredom followed fear, fear boredom, with
monotonous and unending regularity. There were some days when never a
rifle cracked, never a gun barked: others—as that Sunday which saw
Stark’s headquarters moved to the Ramparts—when unanswered salvos
rained on ruined streets, on gun-positions, and cross-roads, on
stumbling fatigue-parties and sentries acrouch behind sandbags; when the
very breastworks heaved and blew skyward, crashing down in mud and
mine-débris on the corpses of the men who had inhabited them.