I am sitting between Mr. Riley and Miss Ashley-Smith. Mr. Riley is ill;
he has got blood-poisoning through a cut in his hand. Every now and then
I remember him, and draw the rug over his knees as it slips. Miss
Ashley-Smith, tired with her night watching, has gone to sleep with her
head on my shoulder, where it must be horribly jolted and shaken by my
cough, which of course chooses this moment to break out again. I try to
get into a position that will rest her better; and between her and Mr.
Riley I forget for a second.
Then the obsession begins again, and I am shut in between the blond
walls with the wounded man.
I feel his hand and arm lying heavily on my shoulder in the attempt to
support me as I kneel by his bed with my arms stretched out together
under the hollow of his back, as we wait for the pillow that never
comes.
It is quite certain that I have betrayed him.
It seems to me then that nothing that could happen to me in Ghent could
be more infernal than leaving it. And I think that when the ambulance
stops to put down the Belgian soldier I will get out and walk back with
him to Ghent.
Every half-mile I think that the ambulance will stop to put down the
Belgian soldier.
But the ambulance does not stop. It goes on and on, and we have got to
Ecloo before we seem to have put three miles between us and Ghent.
Still, though I'm dead tired when we get there, I can walk three miles
easily. I do not feel at all insane with my obsession. On the contrary,
these moments are moments of exceptional lucidity.[33] While the
Commandant goes to look for the Convent I get out and look for the
Belgian soldier. Other Belgian soldiers have joined him in the village
street.
I tell him I want to go back to Ghent. I ask him how far it is to walk,
and if he will take me. And he says it is twenty kilometres. The other
soldiers say, too, it is twenty kilometres. I had thought it couldn't
possibly be more than four or five at the outside. And I am just sane
enough to know that I can't walk as far as that if I'm to be any good
when I get there.
We wait in the village while they find the Convent and take the wounded
men there; we wait while the Commandant goes off in the dark to find his
friend's house.
The house stands in a garden somewhere beyond the railway station, up a
rough village street and a stretch of country road. It is about four in
the morning when we get there. A thin ooze of light is beginning to leak
through the mist. The mist holds it as a dark cloth holds a fluid that
bleaches it.
There is something queer about this light. There is something queer,
something almost inimical, about the garden, as if it tried to protect
itself by enchantment from the fifteen who are invading it. The mist
stands straight up from the earth like a high wall drawn close about the
house; it blocks with dense grey stuff every inch of space between the
bushes and trees; they are thrust forward rank upon rank, closing in
upon the house; they loom enormous and near. A few paces further back
they appear as without substance in the dense grey stuff that invests
them; their tops are tangled and lost in a web of grey. In this strange
garden it is as if space itself had solidified in masses, and solid
objects had become spaces between.
When your eyes get used to this curious inversion it is as if the mist
was no longer a wall but a growth; the garden is the heart of a jungle
bleached by enchantment and struck with stillness and cold; a tangle of
grey; a muffled, huddled and stifled bower, all grey, and webbed and
laced with grey.
The door of the house opens and the effect of queerness, of inimical
magic disappears.
Mr. E., our kind Dutch host, and Mrs. E., our kind English hostess, have
got up out of their beds to receive us. This hospitality of theirs is
not a little thing when you think that their house is to be invaded by
Germans, perhaps to-day.[34]
They do not allow you to think of it. For all you are to see of the
tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and
perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over
their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they
are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats.
They have only one spare bedroom, which they offer; but they have filled
their drawing-room with blankets; piles and piles of white fleecy
blankets on chairs and sofas and on the floor. And they have built up a
roaring fire. It is as if they were succouring fifteen survivors of
shipwreck or of earthquake, or the remnants of a forlorn hope. To be
sure, we are flying from Ghent, but we have only flown twenty kilometres
as yet.
However, most of the Corps have been up all night for several nights,
and the mist outside is a clinging and a biting mist, and everybody is
grateful.
I shall never forget the look of the E.s' drawing-room, smothered in
blankets and littered with the members of the Corps, who lay about it in
every pathetic posture of fatigue. A group of seven or eight snuggled
down among the blankets on the floor in front of the hearth like a camp
before a campfire. Janet McNeil, curled up on one window-seat, and
Ursula Dearmer, rolled in a blanket on the other, had the heart-rending
beauty of furry animals under torpor. The chauffeurs Tom and Bert made
themselves entirely lovable by going to sleep bolt upright on
dining-room chairs on the outer ring of the camp. The E.s' furniture
came in where it could with fantastic and incongruous effect.
I don't know how I got through the next three hours, for my obsession
came back on me again and again, and as soon as I shut my eyes I saw the
face and eyes of the wounded man. I remember sitting part of the time
beside Miss Ashley-Smith, wide-awake, in a corner of the room behind
Bert's chair. I remember wandering about the E.s' house. I must have got
out of it, for I also remember finding myself in their garden, at
sunrise.
And I remember the garden, though I was not perfectly aware of it at the
time. It had a divine beauty, a serenity that refused to enter into, to
ally itself in any way with an experience tainted by the sadness of the
retreat from Ghent.
But because of its supernatural detachment and tranquillity and its no
less supernatural illumination I recalled it the more vividly
afterwards.
It was full of tall bushes and little slender trees standing in a
delicate light. The mist had cleared to the transparency of still water,
so still that under it the bushes and the trees stood in a cold, quiet
radiance without a shimmer. The light itself was intensely still. What
you saw was not the approach of light, but its mysterious arrest. It was
held suspended in crystalline vapour, in thin shafts of violet and gold,
clear as panes; it was caught and lifted upwards by the high bushes and
the slender trees; it was veiled in the silver-green masses of their
tops. Every green leaf and every blade of grass was a vessel charged. It
was not so much that the light revealed these things as that these
things revealed the light. There was no kindling touch, no tremor of
dawn in that garden. It was as if it had removed the walls and put off
the lacing webs and the thick cloths of grey stuff by some mystic
impulse of its own, as if it maintained itself in stillness by an inner
flame. Only the very finest tissues yet clung to it, to show that it was
the same garden that disclosed itself in this clarity and beauty.
The next thing I remember is the Chaplain coming to me and our going
together into the E.s' dining-room, and Miss Ashley-Smith's joining us
there. My malady was contagious and she had caught it, but with no
damage to her self-control.
She says very simply and quietly that she is going back to Ghent. And
the infection spreads to the Chaplain. He says that neither of us is
going back to Ghent, but that he is going. The poor boy tries to arrange
with us how he may best do it, in secrecy, without poisoning the
Commandant[35] and the whole Ambulance with the spirit of return. With
difficulty we convince him that it would be useless for any man to go.
He would be taken prisoner the minute he showed his nose in the
"Flandria" and set to dig trenches till the end of the War.
Then he says, if only he had his cassock with him. They would respect
_that_ (which is open to doubt).
We are there a long time discussing which of us is going back to Ghent.
Miss Ashley-Smith is fertile and ingenious in argument. She is a nurse,
and I and the Chaplain are not. She has friends in Ghent who have not
been warned, whom she must go back to. In any case, she says, it was a
toss-up whether she went or stayed.
And while we are still arguing, we go out on the road that leads to the
village, to find the ambulances and see if any of the chauffeurs will
take us back to Ghent. I am not very hopeful about the means of
transport. I do not think that Tom or any of the chauffeurs will move,
this time, without orders from the Commandant. I do not think that the
Commandant will let any of us go except himself.
And Miss Ashley-Smith says if only she had a horse.
If she had a horse she would be in Ghent in no time. Perhaps, if none of
the chauffeurs will take her back, she can find a horse in the village.
She keeps on saying very quietly and simply that she is going, and
explaining the reasons why she should go rather than anybody else. And I
bring forward every reason I can think of why she should do nothing of
the sort.
I abhor the possibility of her going back instead of me; but I am not
yet afraid of it. I do not yet think seriously that she will do it. I do
not see how she is going to, if the chauffeurs refuse to take her. (I do
not see how, in this case, I am to go myself.) And I do not imagine for
one moment that she will find a horse. Still, I am vaguely uneasy. And
the Chaplain doesn't make it any better by backing her up and declaring
that as she will be more good than either of us when she gets there, her
going is the best thing that in the circumstances can be done.
And in the end, with an extreme quietness and simplicity, she went.
We had not yet found the ambulance cars, and it seemed pretty certain
that Miss Ashley-Smith would not get her horse any more than the
Chaplain could get his cassock.
And then, just when we thought the difficulties of transport were
insuperable, we came straight on the railway lines and the station,
where a train had pulled up on its way to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith got
on to the train. I got on too, to go with her, and the Chaplain, who is
abominably strong, put his arms round my waist and pulled me off.