white face just touched by the slanting moonlight; and her voice came
again, slow and soft and bitter:
"Well, look here, ni-ice boy, what sort of a world is it, where millions
are being tortured--horribly tortured, for no fault of theirs, at all? A
beautiful world, isn't it! 'Umbug! Silly rot, as you boys call it. You
say it is all 'Comrade'! and braveness out there at the front, and
people don't think of themselves. Well, I don't think of myself veree
much. What does it matter--I am lost now, anyway; but I think of my
people at home, how they suffer and grieve. I think of all the poor
people there and here who lose those they love, and all the poor
prisoners. Am I not to think of them? And if I do, how am I to believe
it a beautiful world, ni-ice boy?"
He stood very still, biting his lips.
"Look here! We haf one life each, and soon it is over. Well, I think
that is lucky."
He said resentfully:
"No! there's more than that."
"Ah!" she went on softly; "you think the war is fought for the future;
you are giving your lives for a better world, aren't you?"
"We must fight till we win," he said between his teeth.
"Till you win. My people think that, too. All the peoples think that if
they win the world will be better. But it will not, you know, it will be
much worse, anyway."
He turned away from her and caught up his cap; but her voice followed
him.
"I don't care which win, I despise them all--animals--animals--animals!
Ah! Don't go, ni-ice boy--I will be quiet now."
He took some notes from his tunic pocket, put them on the table, and
went up to her.
"Good-night."
She said plaintively:
"Are you really going? Don't you like me, enough?"
"Yes, I like you."
"It is because I am German, then?"
"No."
"Then why won't you stay?"
He wanted to answer: "Because you upset me so"; but he just shrugged his
shoulders.
"Won't you kees me once?"
He bent, and put his lips to her forehead; but as he took them away she
threw her head back, pressed her mouth to his, and clung to him.
He sat down suddenly and said:
"Don't! I don't want to feel a brute."
She laughed. "You are a funny boy, but you are veree good. Talk to me a
little, then. No one talks to me. I would much rather talk, anyway. Tell
me, haf you seen many German prisoners?"
He sighed--from relief, or was it from regret?
"A good many."
"Any from the Rhine?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Were they very sad?"
"Some were--some were quite glad to be taken."
"Did you ever see the Rhine? Isn't it beaudiful? It will be wonderful
to-night. The moonlight will be the same here as there; in Rooshia too,
and France, everywhere; and the trees will look the same as here, and
people will meet under them and make love just as here. Oh! isn't it
stupid, the war?--as if it was not good to be alive."
He wanted to say: "You can't tell how good it is to be alive, till
you're facing death, because you don't live till then. And when a whole
lot of you feel like that--and are ready to give their lives for each
other, it's worth all the rest of life put together." But he couldn't
get it out to this girl who believed in nothing.
"How were you wounded, ni-ice boy?"
"Attacking across open ground--four machine-gun bullets got me at one go
off."
"Weren't you veree frightened when they ordered you to attack?" No, he
had not been frightened just then! And he shook his head and laughed.
"It was great. We did laugh that morning. They got me much too soon,
though--a swindle!"
She stared at him.
"You laughed?"
"Yes, and what do you think was the first thing I was conscious of next
morning--my old Colonel bending over me and giving me a squeeze of
lemon. If you knew my Colonel you'd still believe in things. There _is_
something, you know, behind all this evil. After all, you can only die
once, and if it's for your country all the better."
Her face, with intent eyes just touched with bistre, had in the
moonlight a most strange, otherworld look. Her lips moved:
"No, I believe in nothing. My heart is dead."
"You think so, but it isn't, you know, or you wouldn't have been crying,
when I met you."
"If it were not dead, do you think I could live my life--walking the
streets every night, pretending to like strange men--never hearing a
kind word--never talking, for fear I will be known for a German. Soon I
shall take to drinking, then I shall be 'Kaput' very quick. You see, I
am practical, I see things clear. To-night I am a little emotional; the
moon is funny, you know. But I live for myself only, now. I don't care
for anything or anybody."
"All the same, just now you were pitying your people, and prisoners, and
that."
"Yes, because they suffer. Those who suffer are like me--I pity myself,
that's all; I am different from your Englishwomen. I see what I am
doing; I do not let my mind become a turnip just because I am no longer
moral."
"Nor your heart either."
"Ni-ice boy, you are veree obstinate. But all that about love is 'umbug.
We love ourselves, nothing more."
Again, at that intense soft bitterness in her voice, he felt stifled,
and got up, leaning in the window. The air out there was free from the
smell of dust and stale perfume. He felt her fingers slip between his
own, and stay unmoving. Since she was so hard, and cynical, why should
he pity her? Yet he did. The touch of that hand within his own roused
his protective instinct. She had poured out her heart to him--a perfect
stranger! He pressed it a little, and felt her fingers crisp in answer.
Poor girl! This was perhaps a friendlier moment than she had known for
years! And after all, fellow-feeling was bigger than principalities and
powers! Fellow-feeling was all-pervading as this moonlight, which she
had said would be the same in Germany--as this white ghostly glamour
that wrapped the trees, making the orange lamps so quaint and
decoratively useless out in the narrow square, where emptiness and
silence reigned. He looked around into her face--in spite of bistre and
powder, and the faint rouging on her lips, it had a queer, unholy,
touching beauty. And he had suddenly the strangest feeling, as if they
stood there--the two of them--proving that kindness and human fellowship
were stronger than lust, stronger than hate; proving it against meanness
and brutality, and the sudden shouting of newspaper boys in some
neighbouring street. Their cries, passionately vehement, clashed into
each other, and obscured the words--what was it they were calling? His
head went up to listen; he felt her hand rigid within his arm--she too
was listening. The cries came nearer, hoarser, more shrill and
clamorous; the empty moonlight seemed of a sudden crowded with
footsteps, voices, and a fierce distant cheering. "Great victory--great
victory! Official! British! Defeat of the 'Uns! Many thousand
prisoners!" So it sped by, intoxicating, filling him with a fearful joy;
and leaning far out, he waved his cap and cheered like a madman; and the
whole night seemed to him to flutter and vibrate, and answer. Then he
turned to rush down into the street, struck against something soft, and
recoiled. The girl! She stood with hands clenched, her face convulsed,
panting, and even in the madness of his joy he felt for her. To hear
this--in the midst of enemies! All confused with the desire to do
something, he stooped to take her hand; and the dusty reek of the
table-cloth clung to his nostrils. She snatched away her fingers, swept
up the notes he had put down, and held them out to him.
"Take them--I will not haf your English money--take them." And suddenly
she tore them across twice, three times, let the bits flutter to the
floor, and turned her back to him. He stood looking at her leaning
against the plush-covered table which smelled of dust; her head down, a
dark figure in a dark room with the moonlight sharpening her
outline--hardly a moment he stayed, then made for the door....
When he was gone she still stood there, her chin on her breast--she who
cared for nothing, believed in nothing--with the sound in her ears of
cheering, of hurrying feet, and voices; stood, in the centre of a
pattern made by fragments of the torn-up notes, staring out into the
moonlight, seeing, not this hated room and the hated square outside, but
a German orchard, and herself, a little girl, plucking apples, a big dog
beside her; a hundred other pictures, too, such as the drowning see. Her
heart swelled; she sank down on the floor, laid her forehead on the
dusty carpet, and pressed her body to it.
She who did not care--who despised all peoples, even her own--began,
mechanically, to sweep together the scattered fragments of the notes,
assembling them with the dust into a little pile, as of fallen leaves,
and dabbling in it with her fingers, while the tears ran down her
cheeks. For her country she had torn them, her country in defeat! She,
who had just one shilling in this great town of enemies, who wrung her
stealthy living out of the embraces of her foes! And suddenly in the
moonlight she sat up and began to sing with all her might--"_Die Wacht
am Rhein_."
1916.
III
FLOTSAM AND JETSAM
A REMINISCENCE
The tides of the war were washing up millions of wrecked lives on all
the shores; what mattered the flotsam of a conscripted deep-sea Breton
fisherman, slowly pining away for lack of all he was accustomed to; or
the jetsam of a tall glass-blower from the 'invaded countries,' drifted
into the hospital--no one quite knew why--prisoner for twenty months
with the Boches, released at last because of his half-paralysed
tongue--What mattered they? What mattered anything, or any one, in days
like those?
Corporal Mignan, wrinkling a thin, parchmenty face, full of suffering
and kindly cynicism, used to call them '_mes deux phenomenes_.' Riddled
to the soul by gastritis, he must have found them trying roommates, with
the tricks and manners of sick and naughty children towards a
long-suffering nurse. To understand all is to forgive all, they say;
but, though he had suffered enough to understand much, Mignan was
tempted at times to deliver judgment--for example, when Roche, the
Breton fisherman, rose from his bed more than ten times in the night,
and wandered out into the little courtyard of the hospital, to look at
the stars, because he could not keep still within four walls--so
unreasonable of the '_type_.' Or when Gray, the tall glass-blower--his
grandfather had been English--refused with all the tenacity of a British
workman to wear an undervest, with the thermometer below zero,
Centigrade.
They inhabited the same room, Flotsam and Jetsam, but never spoke to one
another. And yet in all that hospital of French soldiers they were the
only two who, in a manner of speaking, had come from England. Fourteen
hundred years have passed since the Briton ancestors of Roche crossed in
their shallow boats. Yet he was as hopelessly un-French as a Welshman of
the hills is to this day un-English. His dark face, shy as a wild
animal's, his peat-brown eyes, and the rare, strangely-sweet smile which
once in a way strayed up into them; his creased brown hands always
trying to tie an imaginary cord; the tobacco pouched in his brown cheek;
his improperly-buttoned blue trousers; his silence eternal as the stars
themselves; his habit of climbing trees--all marked him out as no true
Frenchman. Indeed, that habit of climbing trees caused every soul who
saw him to wonder if he ought to be at large: monkeys alone pursue this
pastime. And yet,--surely one might understand that trees were for Roche
the masts of his far-off fishing barque, each hand-grip on the branch of
plane or pine-tree solace to his overmastering hunger for the sea. Up
there he would cling, or stand with hands in pockets, and look out, far
over the valley and the yellowish-grey-pink of the pan-tiled town-roofs,
a mile away, far into the mountains where snow melted not, far over this
foreign land of '_midi trois quarts_,' to an imagined Breton coast and
the seas that roll from there to Cape Breton where the cod are. Since he
never spoke unless spoken to--no, not once--it was impossible for his
landsmen comrades to realise why he got up those trees, and they would
summon each other to observe this '_phenomene_,' this human
ourang-outang, who had not their habit of keeping firm earth beneath
their feet. They understood his other eccentricities better. For
instance, he could not stay still even at his meals, but must get up and
slip out, because he chewed tobacco, and, since the hospital regulations
forbade his spitting on the floor, he must naturally go and spit
outside. For '_ces types-la_' to chew and drink was--life! To the
presence of tobacco in the cheek and the absence of drink from the
stomach they attributed all his un-French ways, save just that one
mysterious one of climbing trees.
And Gray--though only one-fourth English--how utterly British was that
'arrogant civilian,' as the '_poilus_' called him. Even his clothes,
somehow, were British--no one knew who had given them to him; his short
grey workman's jacket, brown dingy trousers, muffler and checked cap;
his long, idle walk, his absolute _sans-gene_, regardless of any one but
himself; his tall, loose figure, with a sort of grace lurking somewhere
in its slow, wandering movements, and long, thin fingers. That wambling,
independent form might surely be seen any day outside a thousand British
public-houses, in time of peace. His face, with its dust-coloured hair,
projecting ears, grey eyes with something of the child in them, and
something of the mule, and something of a soul trying to wander out of
the forest of misfortune; his little, tip-tilted nose that never grew on
pure-blooded Frenchman; under a scant moustache his thick lips,
disfigured by infirmity of speech, whence passed so continually a
dribble of saliva--sick British workman was stamped on him. Yet he was
passionately fond of washing himself; his teeth, his head, his clothes.
Into the frigid winter he would go, and stand at the '_Source_' half an
hour at a time, washing and washing. It was a cause of constant
irritation to Mignan that his '_phenomene_' would never come to time, on
account of this disastrous habit; the hospital corridors resounded
almost daily with the importuning of those shapeless lips for something
clean--a shirt, a pair of drawers, a bath, a handkerchief. He had a
fixity of purpose; not too much purpose, but so fixed.--Yes, he was
English!
For '_les deux phenomenes_' the soldiers, the servants, and the 'Powers'
of the hospital--all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the
point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast,
wandering each in a dumb world of his own, each in the endless circle of
one or two hopeless notions. It was irony--or the French system--which
had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see
nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish. And God
knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood,
for his stumbling speech simply could not make it plain. '_Les
Boches--ils vont en payer cher--les Boches_,' muttered fifty times a
day, was the burden of his song. Those Boches had come into his village
early in the war, torn him from his wife and his '_petite fille_.' Since
then he had 'had fear,' been hungry, been cold, eaten grass; eyeing some
fat little dog, he would leer and mutter: '_J'ai mange cela, c'est
bon!_' and with fierce triumph add: '_Ils ont faim, les Boches!_' The
'arrogant civilian' had never done his military service, for his
infirmity, it seemed, had begun before the war.
Dumb, each in his own way, and differing in every mortal thing except
the reality of their misfortunes, never were two beings more lonely.
Their quasi-nurse, Corporal Mignan, was no doubt right in his estimate
of their characters. For him, so patient in the wintry days, with his
'_deux phenomenes_,' they were divested of all that halo which
misfortune sets round the heads of the afflicted. He had too much to do
with them, and saw them as they would have been if undogged by Fate. Of
Roche he would say: '_Il n'est pas mon reve. Je n'aime pas ces types
taciturnes; quand meme, il n'est pas mauvais. Il est marin--les
marins--!_' and he would shrug his shoulders, as who should say: 'Those
poor devils--what can you expect?' '_Mais ce Gray_'--it was one bitter
day when Gray had refused absolutely to wear his great-coat during a
motor drive--'_c'est un mauvais type! Il est malin--il sait tres bien ce
qu'il veut. C'est un egoiste!_' An egoist! Poor Gray! No doubt he was,
instinctively conscious that if he did not make the most of what little
personality was left within his wandering form, it would slip and he
would be no more. Even a winter fly is mysteriously anxious not to
become dead. That he was '_malin_'--cunning--became the accepted view
about Gray; not so '_malin_' that he could 'cut three paws off a duck,'
as the old grey Territorial, Grandpere Poirot, would put it, but
'_malin_' enough to know very well what he wanted, and how, by sticking
to his demand, to get it. Mignan, typically French, did not allow enough
for the essential Englishman in Gray. Besides, one _must_ be _malin_ if
one has only the power to say about one-tenth of what one wants, and
then not be understood once in twenty times. Gray did not like his
great-coat--a fine old French-blue military thing with brass
buttons--the arrogant civilian would have none of it! It was easier to
shift the Boches on the Western front than to shift an idea, once in his
head. In the poor soil of his soul the following plants of thought alone
now flourished: Hatred of the Boches; love of English tobacco--'_Il est
bon--il est bon!_' he would say, tapping his Virginian cigarette; the
wish to see again his 'petite fille'; to wash himself; to drink a '_cafe
natur_' and bottled beer every day after the midday meal, and to go to
Lyons to see his uncle and work for his living. And who shall say that
any of these fixed ideas were evil in him?
But back to Flotsam, whose fixed idea was Brittany! Nostalgia is a long
word, and a malady from which the English do not suffer, for they carry
their country on their backs, walk the wide world in a cloud of their
own atmosphere, making that world England. The French have eyes to see,
and, when not surrounded by houses that have flatness, shutters, and
subtle colouring--yellowish, French-grey, French-green--by cafe's, by
plane-trees, by Frenchwomen, by scents of wood-smoke and coffee roasted
in the streets; by the wines, and infusions of the herbs of France; by
the churches of France and the beautiful silly chiming of their
bells--when not surrounded by all these, they know it, feel it, suffer.
But even they do not suffer so dumbly and instinctively, so like a wild
animal caged, as that Breton fisherman, caged up in a world of hill and
valley--not the world as he had known it. They called his case
'shell-shock'--for the French system would not send a man to
convalescence for anything so essentially civilian as home-sickness,
even when it had taken a claustrophobic turn. A system recognises only
causes which you can see; holes in the head, hamstrung legs, frostbitten
feet, with other of the legitimate consequences of war. But it was not
shell-shock. Roche was really possessed by the feeling that he would
never get out, never get home, smell fish and the sea, watch the
bottle-green breakers roll in on his native shore, the sun gleaming
through wave-crests lifted and flying back in spray, never know the
accustomed heave and roll under his feet, or carouse in a seaport
cabaret, or see his old mother--_la veuve_ Roche. And, after all, there
was a certain foundation for his fear. It was not as if this war could
be expected to stop some day. There they were, in the trenches, they and
the enemy set over against each other, 'like china dogs,' in the words
of Grandpere Poirot; and there they would be, so far as Roche's ungeared
nerves could grasp, for ever. And, while like china dogs they sat, he
knew that he would not be released, not allowed to go back to the sea
and the smells and the sounds thereof; for he had still all his limbs,
and no bullet-hole to show under his thick dark hair. No wonder he got
up the trees and looked out for sight of the waves, and fluttered the
weak nerves of the hospital 'Powers,' till they saw themselves burying
him with a broken spine, at the expense of the subscribers. Nothing to
be done for the poor fellow, except to take him motor-drives, and to
insist that he stayed in the dining-room long enough to eat some food.
Then, one bright day, a 'Power,' watching his hands, conceived the idea
of giving him two balls of string, one blue, the other buff, and all
that afternoon he stayed up a single tree, and came down with one of his
rare sweet smiles and a little net, half blue, half buff, with a handle
covered with a twist of Turkey-red twill--such a thing as one scoops up
shrimps with. He was paid for it, and his eyes sparkled. You see, he had
no money--the '_poilu_' seldom has; and money meant drink, and tobacco
in his cheek. They gave him more string, and for the next few days it
rained little nets, beautifully if simply made. They thought that his
salvation was in sight. It takes an eye to tell salvation from
damnation, sometimes.... In any case, he no longer roamed from tree to
tree, but sat across a single branch, netting. The 'Powers' began to
speak of him as 'rather a dear,' for it is characteristic of human
nature to take interest only in that which by some sign of progress
makes you feel that you are doing good.