looked closely. Of the performance of _Lakme_--an opera that I love
very much, since the music is soft, moving, and generous--I remember
very little. So it must have been a good rendering with no performer
in particular “sticking out”. The British naval officers were rather
funny. And I think it is no left-handed compliment to the composer,
Délibes--though it may be to the librettist--to say that my thoughts
were elsewhere. The music was just sensuous pleasure; the aspect of
the house, spreading round in great lines of polychromatic humanity,
more regular than is the case with most theaters in London--more suave
and more classical--soothed one after what was certainly an emotional
crisis; an escaped danger. For it would have mortified me for the
rest of my life if I had burst out under the goadings of the French
officers. But, by the Grace of God and the skin of my teeth, I had
retained, quite certainly, my aspect of insular phlegm.
Still it had been exhausting--and I was enervated. And then, quite
suddenly, it came to me to wonder what was going on outside the
theater--what was going on under the black roof of the night, with
the infinitely numerous population of leaves, blades, branches, reeds
beside streams, great trees in the woodlands--and with the silent,
watchful population of the thickets where the shadows are so extremely
deep. I found myself wondering what time of year it was. And I said:
the first weeks of September. For that morning I had recollected that,
two years before on that day, the Germans had turned back from in front
of Paris. Forty-six years before they had won the battle of Sedan.
It was, then, during the first weeks of September. But what
happened--in September? One forgot. One had repaired trenches; one had
commanded fatigues digging drains round Bn.H.Q., to the left of Mount
Kemmel. One had dug so efficiently that, during the first thunderstorm
the repaired trenches below were neck-deep in water. All that had
passed in “the Country”.
But what happened in September? There were no doubt apples on the
trees, and, certainly, it was the time of year when many cobwebs, frail
nets across the tall grasses on commons or single, brilliant filaments,
streamed out and glistened on still, bright days.
There would be plums, too; but what about damsons? Wasn’t it early for
them? And how about garden peas? Were they over? And field peas? And
would there be an autumn feel in the air?
It was twenty-one days to Michaelmas--and Michaelmas certainly brought
the autumn feeling, with touches of vine in the shadow of yellowing
plants and the leaves of sunflowers drooping straight down, like
unfurled colors on windless days. But in copses, shaves, and spinneys
were the leaves on forest trees yet turning? Were roads yet hard and
frosty in the morning? And were horses yet sluggish and apt to stumble
on roads as they do at the turn of the year and the fall of the
leaf?... Time to give ’em a ball.
The baffled mind seemed to stumble at all these questions. One was in
the theater and having been forbidden by the will to think that what
surrounded the great walls with their human lining was a vast black
map fringed by conflagrations, the poor mind hung faltering.
It fell suddenly back on contemplating the green nook that--on the down
behind Albert--it had reserved for itself. Yes, the mind actually did
that. And, across the gilding of the proscenium, across Lakme’s singing
the great song of yearning, there hung a slight shimmer of green that
intensified itself and took shape like a recumbent oval.... And there
began to become visible the yellowing, grayish rows of broad beans; a
rather ragged hedge and a little stream beyond, level with the grass
and fringed with the glistening stems of clumps of rushes that had been
cut for thatching stacks. Because it was indeed September.
[Footnotes]
[7] For the benefit of the uninstructed reader, I may say that new
Schools of Art, like new commercial enterprises, need both backers with
purses and backers of a certain solid personal appearance or weight
in the world. And it is sometimes disagreeable, though it is always a
duty, to be such an individual.
[8] The knowledgeable reader will observe that here Gringoire has
consulted the monograph on Gaudier by Mr. Pound--the best piece of
craftsmanship that Mr. Pound has put together; or at least the best
this writer has read of that author’s.
[9] Gringoire is too fond of this word--which he uses in a special
sense to indicate persons--mostly reviewers--who do not appreciate
the work of himself and his school. In his conversation he introduced
at this point a long denunciation of the ---- Literary Supplement,
principally because, whilst purporting to be a literary paper, it
devotes, according to him, 112/113ths of its space to books about
facts, at the expense of works of the imagination. So he calls that
respectable journal a blackmailing organ. Since, however, this is a
topic that can hardly interest the non-literary, and since the literary
are hardly likely to read these pages, the compiler has taken the
liberty of not reporting these sallies. It may be true that Pontius
Pilate is more criminal than the crucified thieves--but it is _never_
politic to say so.
XI
_“Rosalie Prudent”_
One evening the compiler addressed Gringoire, who was making notes in a
seed catalogue, somewhat as follows:
“Do you remember, oh Gringoire, what it is to awake of a September
morning at dawn? Being _horticulteur_, your first thought will be for
the weather: being _poète_, your first thought will be for your new
volume. And the two first thoughts will overlay the one the other,
according as chance wills. But the still mist is so reassuring as to
the weather that you can put that aside and think only of your volume.
The goodly fruits of the earth in the late summer season, the plums,
the apples, the quinces; the maize, the marrows, the melons, have
yet another day, for sure, of bright, warm sun, of gorgeous, mellow
downward shavers of sun. They, surely, shall stand motionless in the
warmth.
“But the poems ... oh my poor Gringoire of the dawn: the great,
half-finished epic! Ah that! that seemed so glowing too when last night
in the golden light of the two candles, in your poor little, rickety
salon that yet has a style of its own ... you read them to Madame
Sélysette ... the poor verses that you read so famously to little
Madame!... In the dawn, ah, the wolf of the night that says: ‘Hou ...
hou’ from the mountains has not gone home! Almost you hear his sniffing
round the little green door that, because yours is a land of idylls
and the innocent, you have left open. One day the wolf with the great,
cocked hairy ears, with the long white teeth like razors for their
sharpness shall come in. You will hear upon the uncarpeted stairway the
pad of the feet; the little thin door will push open, and raised at the
foot of your small white bed, you will see the great beast; the huge
head; the bloodshot eyes.... And Madame, in the other little white bed
across the small white room will moan a little in her sleep....
“All the poor verses: the little lines! How shall they be the barbed
wire fence that shall keep the wolf from the door of the cottage?
Why, he could push the poor, tindery old walls down with his snout!
The poor verses! They halt ... or no, they do not halt. We are too
good a craftsman for that! But assuredly they do not run. And the
publisher! What shall he say? And Madame with such a need of a new
gown: it should have been of velvet, puffed in the arms, and slashed
to show an undercoat of crushed rose silk. And to tell the truth--your
_pantalons?_ How they shine in the seat, like a mirror! And the public!
Ah, the grim public that has no taste but for dominoes in the cafés of
an evening! How shall they care for the savor of lavender and rosemary
in your smaller verses? What, to them, are Melpomene and Mélisande and
Maleine and Musidore of your epic! And the cursed ‘machinery’ of the
enormous poem! What has become of your great device that was to take
the story forward from line 1100 to line 1424? Forgotten! O Apollo! O
Euterpe! Forgotten--gone--your brain is failing. Your diet of oatmeal
and junket is not enough to water your gray matter with rich red blood.
It is all over ... and the great wolf says ‘Hou!... hou!’ upon the
mountains, though the mists are rising. And Madame, you can see, is
smiling in her sleep! Ah! When you are suspended by your cravat from
the old thorn tree, she will marry the rich son of the apothecary....
“And then ... suddenly you remember! Maleine became a rose tree, and
the slipper of glass was hidden in a bath.... Yes: it was like that.
The device has come back to you. Hurray! Hurray! And the verses shall
glow and sparkle. And damn the public and damn and damn the publisher,
and Madame is a sweet, plump angel.
“And you spring from your bed, oh Gringoire, but with the footfall of a
panther for fear the creaking of the very old oak floor boards should
awaken your own Sélysette. And quick and quick to your dressing room,
which is on state occasions the spare bedroom. Then you wash in the
brick-floored kitchen. And how crisp and reviving is the cold water on
the skin--just as it used to be when you came out of the tent or the
dugout or the hut, down before Péronne in the old days. And there is no
war.
“No war to awaken the birds that are still sleeping in the massed
shadows of trees all unmoving in the deep mists. A noble, long,
quiet, warm day of September is before you. A day of _moissons_ and
_vendanges_, ripening securely, still; with line added to line in
the morning; and nothing to do in that rich little garden of yours;
and line added to line of the epic all the afternoon. And a stroll
in the level, sinking rays of the sun with Madame Sélysette, like a
mysterious _jeune fille_ once more, to sing to you, in the carefreedom
of her heart, the song of the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh....
‘Oh what care I for my goose-feather-bed
The sheets turned down so bravely oh!
Tonight I’ll sleep on a cold open heath
Along with the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh!’
as she was used to sing it in the days when she left the roof of her
father, the so very rich goldsmith of Toulouse, to take up with you, oh
my so very poor poet. _Vogue la galère!_ I hear you say. For are there
not fine cabbages in the garden; and the haricots and the tomatoes
all a-ripening! And does not Madame make an incomparable _potage
bonne femme_ with these things and a few little bones! A fig for the
wolf! And if she cannot have her gown of velvet--when do her dark
eyes sparkle more vivaciously than when in her black hair she wears a
coronal of the scarlet berries of bryony? And if the _pantalons_ shine
in the seat, let them shine till they wear through! And then there will
be a piece of sacking to insert, whose remainder shall stuff up the
holes of the so very old roof. And Melpomene and Mélisande and Musidore
shall dance to the tune of green sleeves round the rose tree that was
Maleine! Aye, they shall dance in the sun till the crystal slipper
falls out of the bath of dew. And already Phœbus Apollo has chased into
the farthest recesses of the Alpilles the craven old wolf....
“And, fastening your collar, you rush into the room where Madame is
asleep, and you shout out:
“‘I have it! We will put Sweet Williams, and behind them Canterbury
Bells, and behind them Hollyhocks, in the bed along the path. And
tulips before the door!’
“It is true that the Hollyhocks will then be to the south of
the Canterbury Bells, and they again to the south of the Sweet
Williams--the tall plants standing in the light of the short ones,
which is against the maxims of safe gardeners. But we must chance
something, as we chance life when we are so very poor and so very
simple and have to adventure down the years with no stores of gold,
under a very old roof with half the tiles off. And besides: maybe next
summer will be a very dry summer, and then the shade of the Hollyhock
on the Canterbury Bells, and of the Canterbury Bells on the Sweet
Williams will be a positive benefit....
“And, truly, in all the gardening year--which is all pleasure except
for such lets and hindrances as God decrees to you in order that
you may remember that you are human--there is no pleasure to equal
the pleasures of a mid-September day. For there is promise in the
chrysanthemums; the asters, petunias, and geraniums are still bright;
marrows, pumpkins, gourds, maize, plums, apples, pears, damsons are
drinking in the sun and turning all the colors from rich green to
orange and tomato-scarlet. There are still flowers on the roses and on
the sweet-pea hedge. And, if those foliages are thinning, through their
silver and yellow haze you can see the bright mosaic of next summer’s
beds! Ah, brave mid-September!”
* * * * *
To this Gringoire answered--a little grimly:
In a mid-September twilight, the rain poured down on Pont-de-Nieppe.
Depressed Highlanders lounged along the street in front of the row
of villas that ran from the church to the rear of the town--taking
our own lines as the front. One’s horse and one’s orderly’s horse
slipped disagreeably on the wet granite setts of the pavé, and one
seemed to have gone backwards and forwards, in a deluge over greasy
roads for hours and hours--for a whole lifetime. One seemed never
to have done anything else. It was a billeting job that we had been
sent upon. And, when we had billeted everything we could think of,
there still remained some disreputable other ranks connected with the
divisional canteen, for whom we had not found holes, corners, and a
shop. And the division we were relieving had apparently vanished and
so had the Town Marshal, whilst the _Maire_ was so obliging that he
placed the whole, empty town at our disposal. It would have helped
us more if he had been less obliging and had dictatorially provided
us with one shop into which to stick the canteen and its confounded
sutlers. And it poured, and we continued to wander about the empty
streets. And it poured--and, in the most unexpected places, the
disreputable Acting Lance Corporal in charge of Divisional Canteen
would bob up, touch his cap like a London cab-runner and exclaim,
always in three breaths: “Xcusemesir; may-I-speak-to-you-sir;
have-you-found-a-billet-for-the-Divisional-Canteen-sir?” He was a
most annoying person, a London music hall “turn” in peace time. He
occupied his leisure moments behind the Canteen Counter in writing
“sketches” for London Halls, like the Hoxton Empire, at fifty pounds a
time. Sometimes he would appear alone or would emerge alone from the
chalk-rubbish and festoons of wallpaper of an empty shop. Sometimes he
would have behind him a disreputable French country cart loaded with
sardine tins, sticks of shaving soap, cigarette packets, cratesful of
wet dates, writing tablets--God knows what. And the horse--or it may
have been a mule--seemed to be a hundred years old. And rain dripped
from its ears. And rain poured on the disagreeable objects in the tilt
cart and on the three impossible Tommies who went with it. And they
would have backgrounds of black, wet houses, without roofs, but with
lace window curtains dripping in all the empty window spaces; and wet,
smashed chairs and commodes and wardrobes hung drunkenly over holes
in the floors of houses that had no front walls. And it poured. And
twilight deepened.
Then a battalion came in along the Bailleul road; a poor, smashed
battalion, with men limping and men under whose tin hats there gleamed
white bandages, very conspicuous in the rain and the mud and the dark,
wet khaki. And a battalion looks grim indeed when it has been hammered
by artillery, on a Macadam road without chance of retaliation--owing
to a blunder of a staff officer. They had, I think, 160 men killed in
one company--pretty well the whole strength as battalions were in those
days. I don’t like to think of it, much.
And yet, such is poor human nature, that both I and my companion
said, “Thank God!”--as we had never said, “Thank God” in our lives
before. At least I know that I said “Thank God” as I had never in my
life said it before--and as I never shall again. For it wasn’t our
battalion that had been smashed by direct shell-fire on the Macadam
road--Loire--Dranoutre--Neuve Eglise--Plugstreet--Nieppe. Imagine
such a route--in full view of the Hun trenches! Why, riding that
way the day before, to prospect next day’s billets, I and another
officer had had three shells directed to us alone by the German
artillery--between Dranoutre and Neuve Eglise! So imagine what it
would be for a battalion. And we had seen orders which said that _our_
people were to leave Loire at such and such an hour and to march by
Companies--presumably in column of route!--in the Dranoutre-Neuve
Eglise-Plugstreet road! And the Divisional Transport Officer had told
us early in the afternoon that, as we had _known_ would be the case,
our battalion had been hammered to pieces. A whole Company had been
wiped out on that road--marching in column of route.[10] “A” Company,
he had said, our own company!
Half the time during the afternoon, the other officer and
myself--soaked to the skin and pestered by the farcical Lance-Corporal
in Charge of Canteens--who, poor devil, was only doing his duty--had
said, from horse to horse: “I wonder if Johnny A-- has gone west! I
wonder if Fred B-- has copped it!...” It is horrible, that!
And then, in the rain, under the castle wall, we heard from a very
bleeding man of the other Battalion that our own people, after all
those of the W-- Regiment had been murdered, had been diverted from the
Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road to the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières highway,
which was, in those days, as safe as a church.
So we two, watching the men of the other Battalion march resentfully
by, could say “Thank God” to ourselves.
Relief, naturally, manifested itself in the two of us, according to our
separate temperaments. My friend--he was an Irish Nationalist, almost
a Sinn Feiner--said:
“G ..., old dear. You’re Division. I’m only Battalion. The canteen is
your job. I think I’ll get to my digs.” He added, a bit bashfully, that
in his digs there was a French girl who was going to give him lessons
in her difficult tongue. I said, “All right. ’Op it.” [I remembered
saying ‘’Op it!’ in an intense weariness.] But, as I turned my tired
old horse once more down the road to find a billet for that accursed
corporal of Divisional Canteen, I was, I remember, thinking innumerable
things, all at once.
Firstly: my shirtcuffs were very frayed, and the rain had made them
more diabolically wet and cold than you can imagine. Then I was
actually bothering about the wretched staff officer who had murdered
all those men. I was worried about him. You see, it would be such
a trifling thing to do--as easy as forgetting--as every human soul
has done in its day--to post a letter. He would have an ordnance map
and a pencil. The map would show the contours, but probably it would
not show the German trenches or the German artillery emplacements.
He would rule a pencil line from Locre to Armentières, he would see
that the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road was nearly level, running
indeed along the flat at the edge of Flanders. On the other hand the
Locre-Bailleul-Armentières road went up steeply from the Belgian
frontier to Bailleul--a road in the dusty sunlight, the rough
unshaded country, between tobacco and grain fields. And it was 1500
yards longer. So, in the kindness of his heart, he had saved the
men the extra distance, the shadelessness, and the dust of a road
over the foothills bordering Flanders. He had forgotten the Hun
artillery--_just_ as you or I might forget to post a letter!
And, as I rode past the workmen’s villas, for the hundredth time, I
was imagining that poor Acting Assistant Brigade Major, with his pink
cheeks and his red hat, being strafed to hell by our frightful General
of Division. He might almost cry!... But I daresay it wasn’t at all
like that, really.
Anyhow, I was being dreadfully sorry for him. At the same time, I was
trying--if I may use a professional novelist’s word--to psychologize
the German gunner. He wouldn’t believe his luck. He _couldn’t_
believe his luck. He would believe it was some accursed scheme of the
diabolically cunning English to discover his position. There, through
his telescope, he would see a solid cube of wet-brown, moving slowly
along a perfectly visible road. He would see it with his naked eye--a
cubical caterpillar as large as a whole range of farm buildings. It
would be incredible to him. No doubt he would ring up his immediate
superior, and they would confer over the telephone. He would tremble
for his battery. The English were no doubt drawing some sort of
canvas wind-screen, camouflaged to look like a company, along that
Macadam road. They would be trying to draw his fire so as to discover
his position. Then they would blow his battery to hell with new,
unimaginable High Explosive Shells, or mines, or anything. So he would
fire--and see 160 men killed. “Drum fire,” I think the Germans called
it. The complete Company would be wiped out--a mark such as a German
gunner would hardly dare to pray for in his dreams. And nothing would
happen to him. Nothing. He would wait. But nothing!
Then he would thank the Creator....
I don’t know really what happened to me then. I have said that that
deluge of a twilight seemed to last a thousand years. I was wrong: it
seemed to last two thousand years. I remember meeting the Divisional
Transport Officer out in an immense expanse of mud near an incredibly
dirty farmhouse--in a sea of brown liquid that was supposed to
be the Station Road. And I know that the field stank. It smelled
unimaginably--though I don’t know why a field should smell. I can still
smell it.
The Transport Officer said that that was the field allotted to him by
Division. He said to hell with the lake of mud. _He_ was going to put
the Transport on the Bailleul-Steenewerck road. He gave the number on
the map, “R. 14,” I think it was. I said I should take the field for
the Divisional Canteen. There were, scattered--possibly floating--about
it some Connaught huts that resembled Noah’s Arks adrift in a sewage
farm. The Transport Officer said all right. I fancy he was not
interested in the Divisional Canteen.
As we rode slowly, again past the workers’ villas, the Lance-Corporal
in Charge of Divisional Canteen again waylaid me, springing up
apparently out of the mud. He said: “Xcusemesir, may I speak to you,
sir ... I’ve fahnd a ’ouse be’ind the Ch’ch for the D’vish’n’l C’nteen.”
I think I went mad at that point, and the Transport Officer rode slowly
away. I don’t remember what I said to the Lance-Corporal. I hope I
never shall.
The trouble was that, in that town, there was a danger zone. For the
last four days, the Germans had been shelling the church. From 6:00
P.M. until midnight, in their methodical manner, every quarter of an
hour they had dropped a 5–9 shell into the sacred edifice. The danger
zone was therefore perfectly circumscribed and perfectly definite.
But, unfortunately for me, though I had been warned that there _was_
an official danger zone, no one that I met knew where it was. The
town marshal had gone; the Divisional Police who were already working
typewriters in his office were our Divisional Police, not those of the
Division that had gone too. They knew nothing about the dangerous area.
And some Australian humorist had removed all the cautionary boards that
should have surrounded the church and had grouped them round a large
iron public convenience which was the chief architectural adornment of
the main street. There they looked alarming but improbable.