fortune to the beggar; ten thousand a charity-subscription for a
millionaire. But in Peter’s case money had hitherto represented more
than mere coin to spend or save as the mood happened: it had stood for
the measure of success in his career. So that, as he walked home through
Lombard Street that fine April evening, he bore, in addition to the
weight of his loss (and no man, pauper or millionaire, _likes_ losing
money), another heavier burden—the burden of failure.
The whole street, the gold-deviced signs that had hung three hundred
years and more outside stolid buildings, buttressed on millions, the
marble-pillared windows, the iron-shuttered entrances, mocked at such
failures as his own; seemed glutted with money, money to be picked up by
anybody with brains and nerve. He hurried through it; left the low black
bulk of the Bank of England behind him; struck westwards through
Cheapside.
It was late, and most of the shops had closed. He slackened his pace to
the slow dawdle of the man who thinks.
“Failure!” thought Peter. “Argue round it as you like—the result’s the
same.” And so thinking, there came over him another wave of that
bitterness which, under the Voluntary System, is reserved for those who
fight for their country while others, equally fit, stay safe at home.
Tolerance for those others, clean pride in himself were submerged in
that bitter wave; the scum of thought floated upwards.
“A fine fool I made of myself,” he argued, “rushing into the army. Why
didn’t I wait? All these people at home are making more money than ever.
Marcus must be coining it out of Nirvana. Beresfords’ will get back the
purchase-price of Jamesons in six months. If I’d only stayed at home!”
He began to rail, as so many railed in that black time, against the very
thing to which he had dedicated himself. “What are we all fighting for!
The country? Oh, hell! A lot ‘the country’ cares. Look at it. Every one
having the time of their lives—more money being made and spent than
ever—politicians at £5,000 a year yapping of patriotism,
munition-workers getting ten pounds a week—while poor bloody Tommy is
blown to bits for seven bob.”
“Poor bloody Tommy!” The thought acted as a life-buoy in the storm of
anger. What right had he, Peter Jameson, Lieutenant and Adjutant of
Gunners, he Peter with his cushy job at the front, his security from
want at home, to grouse at hard luck, while men—(thought pictured them
clearly)—trudged the shelled duck-boards to Railway Wood through
endless nights, clung to its whizz-banged breastworks through endless
days? And among those men—a dozen confided stories leaped to mind—were
plenty who had sacrificed not half an inherited fortune, but everything:
men with assured positions, skilled mechanics, dock-foremen,
master-printers, who had thrown up fine jobs, whose wives struggled
along on ludicrous separation allowances, because. . . . “Because of
what?” asked thought. And reason answered thought in one clear sentence:
“Because they were _men_!”
Evening had come as he dawdled. Twilight brooded over London. But now no
twilight brooded over the soul of Peter Jameson. The burden of the past
week dropped from him as a heavy pack drops from weary shoulders. He
stood upright in a sudden blaze of clarity. Let the old, the emasculate,
the pimps and the panderers haggle in their market-places, babble at
their talking-shops: his path led clean away from their market-places
and their talking-places, clean across the seas into that other country
where neither his money nor his talk but only a man’s manhood availed
him: a loathsome and a desolate country, a country of fear and mud and
boredom intolerable, of maiming and of death: yet a country above whose
desolation shone always the one clear light—the Light of Duty!
§ 5
A little of that new vision which had been vouchsafed to him, Peter
confided to Patricia, haltingly and half ashamed of it, during their
last night together; and after he had fallen asleep she lay for a long
time, listening to his easy breathing, hoping and fearing for him,
wondering about him.
Her own patriotism was a simple star-clear faith in birth and flag; his,
she had never yet entirely understood. It seemed to her a voiceless
sullen creed—superstition rather than belief. Striving to analyse it, a
fantasy came to her. It was as though she stood among the ruins of a
huge temple in the midst of a desolate city. Outside, guns flashed and
boomed: their flashes illumined the black sky above the roofless temple.
Round her, on the brick-strewn floor, among the fragments of granite
pillars and stained-glass windows, knelt men—thousands upon thousands
of armed and helmeted men. Their helmets were dinted, their arms foul
and bloody, their drab uniforms wet and clotted with yellow slime. And
from a ruined altar, One spoke to the men on their knees, saying:
“Know ye the Whys and the Wherefores of this thing ye do?”
Then the kneeling men answered as with one voice:
“Neither the Whys nor the Wherefores of this Thing are known to us; nor
do we care to know them. Only we know that this Thing we do is the Fine
Thing: and with that knowledge we are content.”
Then said the One at the altar: “This is My Work which ye accomplish.”
But the men on their knees answered him: “What is that to us? We have
set our hands to this Work and, Thine or another’s, we will accomplish
it. For this Work is the Fine Thing.”
And so saying they rose from their knees, man after helmèd man; rose and
passed out into the desolation of the city. . . .
* * * * *
But fantasy proved no consolation to Patricia when, once again, she bade
_her_ man good-bye!
PART TWENTY-TWO
“SUNFLOWERS”
§ 1
Peter Jameson returned to his unit in a very peculiar frame of mind: a
mixture of gladness at having left his business annoyances behind him,
regret for missed enjoyments, and determination not to allow anything
that might happen at home to interfere with his work as a soldier—a
determination slightly tinged with fanaticism, which did not improve his
temper.
He detrained at Steenwerck, in pitch darkness, after a nine-hour
train-journey; was accosted by his groom at the exit from the station.
“Hope you had a good leaf, sir.” The squat little man saluted awkwardly.
“Thanks, Jelks. Quite good. Where are the horses?”
“Just over there, sir. I tied them up to the fence.”
“Both of them all right?”
“Queen Bess had a bit of a cold, sir. Captain Horrocks made me keep her
in for two days. She’s all right now.”
They made their way across shadows; untethered the horses. Peter
mounted.
“Colonel told me to bring your gas-helmet, sir.” Jelks divested himself
of the extra satchel he wore slung from his shoulder; handed it up to
his master. “He told me to tell you, sir, with his compliments”—Jelks
grinned as the Weasel had grinned when he gave the message—“orders is
that both officers and men should take their gas-helmets when they go on
leaf.”
Peter, rather annoyed at being called over the coals for infraction of
an order nobody ever obeyed in those early days, put Little Willie to a
trot. They rode, under vague starlight, through La Creche into the main
Bailleul-Armentières Road; were challenged at the barrier. As they
turned leftwards up the pavé for Neuve Eglise, a mild wind blew across
their faces. Passing the low huts of Divisional Baths, a sentry saluted
them. “Gas Alert, sir,” he called out.
Peter called back, “Thanks.”
At the canvas house which hid the naval gun from hostile airmen, another
sentry gave the same warning. Peter slackened to a walk; summoned his
groom.
“We’ll go round by Kortepyp,” he said. “It’s quicker.”
“Very good, sir. Turning’s about a hundred yards on.”
They found it; veered away from the trees into flat country. Now the
wind blew direct in their faces. In front of them, Véry lights glowed
skyward, hung and disappeared silently behind the trees. “Devilish
quiet,” thought Peter. Not a gun boomed, not a rifle cracked. . . . He
seemed to catch the faint sound of a gong; halted hand-to-ear.
Again, the gas-gong belled faintly down wind; a distant gunflash winked
across the darkness ahead. Then, maniacally, the countryside awoke.
Sound swept back, as a wave sweeps, leaping down the valley towards
them—horns shrieked, gongs dinned, whistles blew: rifle-fire crackled,
burst to a roar: guns boomed dully from beyond the horizon; they caught
the far crash of shell-fire. The sky blazed with electric flashes, with
whitely-soaring lights, with orange hints of machine-gun flame. Hedges,
trees, crest-line, sprang from shadow into silhouette. And suddenly,
near and high above the silhouetted valley, soared the crimson rockets
of the S.O.S. station on Hill 63; hung a moment; waking pandemonium as
they drooped to ground.
A mile away among the trees, our own guns awoke, red and roaring; the
flames of them cut great gashes against the sky, the voice of them
drowned the far crash of shells, the crackle and sputter of rifle-fire.
But shrill above the voice of the guns, Peter and Jelks heard the
howling shrieking Klaxons. “Gas,” they shrieked, “Gas! Gas! Gas!”
“Better dismount, I think,” said Peter calmly. “It’s hardly likely to
come as far back as this; but there’s no sense in taking risks.”
They stood, bridles over arms, watching and listening. Every now and
then, Peter sniffed at the breeze. “Gas-training”—beyond the putting-on
of the helmet—had not yet been invented. He felt irritatingly ignorant.
How long would the stuff take to reach them? Would he be able to see it?
What did it look like? Smell like? Could it kill horses?
Driver Jelks began fiddling at his satchel; extracted the clammy “P. H.”
mask; shook it out; pulled it half-on, tucking up the glass eye-pieces
and the rubber mouth-valve over his head. Peter saw that the man’s hands
were shaking.
“Not frightened, are you?” he asked.
“I don’t mind shells, sir,”—stammered Jelks—“but this gas, it fairly
puts the wind up me, sir.”
“Don’t be a damn fool, man,” said Peter gruffly. “You’re all right as
long as you’ve got your helmet on.”
And then, suddenly, he saw the poison—a low gray wraith, rushing down
the darkness; heard himself say, “Pull that helmet down _quick_”; caught
a whiff as of rotten pears; closed mouth and nostrils; felt Little
Willie wrench at bridle over his right arm; whipped gas-helmet out and
on, stuffing the flaps of it under his collar. He found the rubber
tubing with his lips; sucked on it; realized instantaneously that the
valve leaked!
Now fear had its way with him. The eye-pieces blurred. To breathe meant
death. . . . He must breathe. . . . His lungs would burst. . . . Blood
drummed in his ears. . . .
Came another wrench at bridle-rein; with it the madness of inspiration.
His right hand found the peak of the saddle, his left the cantle, swung
him from ground to horse. . . . Teeth unclenched from rubber, breath
surged through mouth and nostrils. . . . Now death was certain. Be
damned, though, if he’d die in that acrid clammy darkness. . . .
Peter jerked up the stifling cloth; felt cool air on his eyes, sweet air
in his nostrils; failed for a second to realize the miracle. Then,
instinctively, he knew that his leap to horse had poised him above the
heavy gas-cloud, that he was looking down on it, as a man riding the
fields at dusk looks down on the ground mist. . . . But even as Peter
looked, the tail of the poison-belt blew clear!
For a full minute, he sat his horse—motionless, amazed, still afraid to
breathe. The horror had come and gone like some bestial dream. Guns were
still flashing and roaring; the sky still blazed; Klaxons howled all
round him. Jelks’ squat figure, cowled in its goggling mask, Queen
Bess’s bridle over its arm, stood within three yards of his stirrup.
Little Willie began coughing; fidgeted for a second; stood still again.
“You can take that thing off,” said Peter.
“Beg pardon, sir,” answered a muffled voice.
“You can take that damn thing off,” roared Peter.
Fumblingly, the man removed his helmet. “Was it gas, sir?” he asked.
“Very much so,” began Peter; “and the next time you bring me a
gas-helmet, I wish to Christ. . . .” He bit off the end of the sentence.
After all, the fault lay with himself, not with his man.
They waited half-an-hour; heard the shriek of the Klaxons die away to
silence, the roar of the guns to an intermittent crackling.
“I think we might go on now,” said Peter. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt
the horses, thank goodness.”
Nevertheless, since the wind still blew fairly from the north-east, he
kept ears and nostrils a-cock as they made gingerly for Headquarters.
“That you, Jameson?” called Stark’s voice from the lighted doorway of
the villa.
“Yes, sir.”—Peter dismounted—“Is Captain Horrocks up, sir?”
“Up? Everybody’s up, except our ruddy Belgian landlord. He and his wife
have got their respirators on, their heads under the bed clothes, and
the fear of God in ’em. Why do you want Horrocks?”
The Weasel looked a quaint figure. His red hair was still towzled with
sleep. He wore a “British Warm” coat over silk pyjamas, striped white
and crimson, rather short in the leg, and heelless slippers of red
morocco-leather. From his bare neck depended a vast respirator (one of
the earliest experiments in that direction), whose square box—thick
tube hanging down like a diminutive elephant-trunk—bobbed at his chest
whenever he spoke.
“I’m afraid the horses got a whiff or two of that damn stuff, sir,”
explained Peter. “Oh, and thank you very much for sending me my helmet.”
“Some sense in Corps Orders occasionally,” said the Weasel grimly. “I
told Mr. Black to pick you out a new one. Hope it was all right.”
Peter, not wishing to make trouble, kept silence. Horrocks, also in
pyjamas, appeared clutching a whisky-and-soda; fingered his moustaches
professionally; gave it as his opinion that gas, except in very large
quantities, had no effect on horses. Peter dismissed Jelks; and the
three passed into the Mess-Room.
Dr. Carson, in mauve and yellow pyjamas, gas-helmet perched drunkenly on
his white hair, was just opening a potted tongue. Purves, fully dressed
except for his tie, and very _affairé_, stood tracing imaginary lines on
the large-scale map above the mantelpiece. Morency, barefoot in unlaced
breeches and striped vest, held a huge bottle of Perrier in one hand, a
tin of sardines in the other.
Came a rap at the panelled door, a breathless signaller: “Ack Battery
report infantry asking for retaliation, sorr. They have begun firing,
sorr. And they want to know if Gas Alert has been cancelled, sorr. I
told them it had not been cancelled, sorr. . . .”
“Better go and see what they want, P.J.,” Stark nodded to his Adjutant.
“Doesn’t look as though we shall get much sleep tonight.”
And as a matter of cold fact, it was 5:0 A. M. on the morning of his
return from leave to that “cushy” spot Neuve Eglise, before Peter at
last crawled between his Jaeger blankets.
“Wonder if Pat’s awake,” he thought. . . .
§ 2
“Can’t we come too, Mummy?” asked Evelyn.
“You might take us?” pleaded Primula.
The children came running into Heron Baynet’s garage where Patricia—in
smock and wash-leather gloves—stood tinkering under the open bonnet of
her car.
“No, you can’t. And you’re both very wicked children. How on earth did
you manage to get here? Without your hats, too!”
She stood there, the faulty sparking-plug in her hand, half-smiling,
half-frowning at the two pinafored figures.
“Well,” said Evelyn proudly. “It was my idea. Miss Merridew left us
alone. So _I_ said to Primula, ‘Let’s just _rush_ downstairs, open the
front-door, and go to Mummy. It’s only at the end of the road.’ . . .”
“We did keep on the pavements,” remarked Primula airily; and added:
“Even if you don’t take us with you, you’ll _have_ to drive us as far as
the front-door.”
“I shall do nothing of the sort”—Patricia knew how easily children grow
to dominate their parents—“I shall telephone Miss Merridew to fetch
you, and you’ll both do half-an-hour’s extra lessons.”
“Oh, Mummy,” began Evelyn: but her mother had already stepped to the
house-telephone; was ringing up for their governess,—who appeared,
flustered and hatless, a few minutes afterwards; dragged the culprits
back to their multiplication table.
“That woman,” thought Patricia as she returned the cleaned plug to its
socket, “is a fool, an untrained fool and an expensive fool. I shall
have to take on the kids’ education myself.”
She peeled off smock and wash-leather gloves; arranged toque and furs at
the cracked mirror over the shelf whereon Heron Baynet’s chauffeur (long
since enlisted) had kept his “spares”; cranked up; and backed the car
steadily out through the folding doors. . . .
Peter had been gone nearly a fortnight. He had written her—his usual
scribbles. Reading between the lines of them, her heart forgave him its
wounds. But now, she too had her work to do, little time for musing.
She thought of that work as her firm hands steered the Crossley towards
Endsleigh Gardens. She had been her father’s unpaying guest long enough.
The sale of the Lowndes Square house made her homeless; and she was not
the type of woman who could be without a home. She needed her own things
about her; needed the bother and the fret and the pleasure of
housekeeping. And London, with its darkness and its air-raids, was no
place for children.
So Patricia’s imagination had taken unto itself a “little place in the
country”; a place to which Peter could come back—on leave if his luck
held, to recover if he were wounded. For that other contingency, his
death and her own widowhood, even Patricia’s stout heart refused to
face. . . .
She pulled up at the entrance to the hospital; jumped down from the
driving-seat; slammed door behind her; ran lightly up the steps.
“Captain Gordon?” she inquired at the porter’s office.
“He’s in the drawing-room, Miss,” the orderly smiled back at her. (She
had been there nearly every day for five months; and the orderly knew
her name perfectly. But she looked young, and she looked attractive, and
she always came to see the same officer. So he called her “Miss” instead
of “Madam.” In days gone by, when he had been a skate-fitter at Olympia,
the little trick had earned Private Johnson, R.A.M.C.,[14] many tips!)
Patricia walked swiftly through the hall—(the Endsleigh Gardens
Hospital had been a hotel before the war)—into the ornate and
over-furnished drawing room; found Francis alone.
He had been “up” only three weeks; rose to greet her with difficulty,
supporting himself first on the arms of his chair, then on two
rubber-shod sticks.
“Morning, Pat,” he said. “I’m all ready, you see.”
The months of illness had told on him, graven lines of pain on his
temples, at the corners of his mouth. His hair, too, had grayed a little
above close-set ears. His eyes seemed to have grown darker. But his
clothes—he wore mufti in sublime defiance of Regulations—were
immaculate as ever.
“They’ll never let you out of the door in that get-up,” pronounced
Patricia—eyeing the “Barnard” motoring-cap, the blue-and-black old
Etonian tie, the loose fitting brown over-coat.
“Wonderful what one can do in this place if one only smiles at the
sisters, bullies one’s doctor, and gives half-crowns to the orderlies,”
laughed Francis.
He shuffled awkwardly across the impeding carpet, through the
swing-doors Patricia opened for him. Prout emerged from the basement by
the elevator-shaft; and together the two helped the invalid down the
steps into the car.
Patricia swung the crank-shaft; climbed to her seat; switched gear-lever
into “first”; let in the clutch.
Watching them as they glided out of sight, round the corner of the
square, Prout’s thoughts turned to bygone and merrier days. “Poor Mister
Francis,” muttered the old man. “And him that was always so fond of
dancing. . . .”
-----
[14] Royal Army Medical Corps.
§ 3
“. . . And what perfectly-appointed country residences do we inspect
today, Pat?” asked “poor Master Francis” as they threaded the traffic of
Tottenham Court Road.
“Look at them if you like. They’re in that pocket.”
Francis lifted the leather flap in the door, which she indicated; pulled
out and opened a long envelope; began to study the house-agent’s slips.
“Berkshire,” he read out. “Berkshire again. Oxfordshire, border of
Berkshire. Berkshire, border of Oxfordshire. . . . None of them sound
very promising, Pat.”
“No,” she admitted, “but I like the idea of living in that part of the
world. My mother was Oxfordshire, you know. Besides, we might _find_
something.”
“I don’t know why you’re so keen about the country all of a sudden,
Pat,” went on Francis. “What about your lonely leave-men. Who’ll motor
them home to their wives?”
Patricia drove on in silence for a few minutes; then she said: “A woman
with six hundred a year and two children to educate, can’t indulge in
the luxury of unpaid war-work, Francis. And besides there are heaps of
people meeting the leave-trains now: it’s become quite fashionable.”
“Then why not take a paid job?” he suggested.
“Because other women”—she thought of Miss Macpherson—“not only need
the money more than I, but can do the work a great deal better.”
By now they had cleared the heat-haze which brooded over inner London.
Up and out from his cloud-veils, clambered the sun. The laburnum trees
in the little suburban gardens were all a-bloom with yellow. It promised
a glorious day.
And promise fulfilled itself. They left the last tram-lines of Brentford
astern; emerged mile by mile into the full splendour of England’s
Maying. The home-counties unrolled beneath their questing wheels in
vista upon vista of young green fields, of pink and white hedgerows, of
orchards all alight with blossoms, of silver river-reaches, of pleasant
homes where pigeons fluttered dazzingly to age-reddened roofs and the
lilac bloomed palest amethyst over the glowing emerald of close-clipped
lawns.
But there was never a pleasant home among those which Patricia’s
house-agents had persuaded her to visit!
§ 4
“Never mind, Pat. It’s been a topping drive,” said Francis consolingly.
It was nearly four o’clock; and his cousin’s wife had just emerged from
her last disappointment—a drainless waterless abomination of mouldy
stone-work, with acres of unkempt gardens, ten miles from anywhere among
the bleak hills beyond Ipsden.
“Where now?” he went on.
“Home, I suppose,” said Patricia, drawing her map out of its case. “We’d
better make for Henley, I think.”
She felt tired, out of patience. The house-agents were idiots: three of
the places they recommended turned out to be glaring brick villas on the
outskirts of Reading; at the fourth—a converted farmhouse near Bix—a
long-haired foreigner had informed her, after gibbering for three
quarters of an hour, that “vot he vanted vas to sell de place, not to
let it”; the fifth, as far as they could ascertain from the inn at
Nettlebed which gave them lunch, did not exist at all: to crown disaster
she had wasted time, temper and petrol on this mid-Victorian
mare’s-nest.
“It’s done me all the good in the world,” went on Francis. “For two pins
I’d let my flat—the Lord knows if I’ll ever be able to manage those
stairs again—and come to live in the country myself.”
“Apparently, you’d have to camp out in it,” said Patricia. . . .
They climbed, sputteringly, up a rough road; dropped to an uninhabited
valley; climbed again; left the bare lands behind. Now, their way led
through burgeoning woods of beech and larch-trees past a quiet
village-green, into woods again.
Patricia drove slowly. The scent and the silence of the woods summoned
her, bidding her stay. She wanted to stop the car, to wander away all
alone over that flower-strewn moss, down those long brown avenues, under
that pale-green canopy of spring-time.
All day long “country” before her eyes had been calling to “country” in
her veins. A long clear call, dominant, heart-compelling. The country!
She knew so little of it; the simplest names of its trees and its
flowers were mysteries to her. Yet the trees and the flowers spoke to
Patricia that afternoon; spoke to her of happiness. “Here, here, here
and here only,” they seemed to say, “will you find that for which you
are seeking. . . .”