PART TWO 2 страница

“But surely, sergeant-majah…”

Old Cowley might as well have said “madam” as “sir” to the red hat-band… The four-hundred had come with only what they stood up in. The unit had had to wangle everything: boots, blankets, tooth-brushes, braces, rifles, iron-rations, identity disks out of the depot store. And it was now only twenty-one twenty… Cowley permitted his commanding officer at this point to say:

“You must understand that we work in circumstances of extreme difficulty, sir…”

The graceful colonel was lost in an absent contemplation of his perfectly elegant knees.

“I know, of course…” he lisped. “Very difficult…” He brightened up to add: “But you must admit you're unfortunate… You must admit that…” The weight settled, however, again on his mind.

Tietjens said:

“Not, I suppose, sir, any more unfortunate than any other unit working under a dual control for supplies…”

The colonel said:

“What's that? Dual… Ah, I see you're there, Mackenzie… Feeling well… feeling fit, eh? ”

The whole hut stood silent. His anger at the waste of time made Tietjens say:

“If you understand, sir, we are a unit whose principal purpose is drawing things to equip drafts with…” This fellow was delaying them atrociously. He was brushing his knees with a handkerchief! “I've had, ” Tietjens said, “a man killed on my hands this afternoon because we have to draw tin-hats for my orderly room from Dublin on an A. F. B. Canadian from Aldershot… Killed here… We've only just mopped up the blood from where you're standing…”

The cavalry colonel exclaimed:

“Oh, good gracious me! …” jumped a little and examined his beautiful shining knee-high aircraft boots. “Killed! … Here! … But there'll have to be a court of inquiry… You certainly are most unfortunate, Captain Tietjens… Always these mysterious… Why wasn't your man in a dug-out? … Most unfortunate… We cannot have casualties among the Colonial troops… Troops from the Dominions, I mean…”

Tietjens said grimly:

“The man was from Pontardulias… not from any Dominion… One of my orderly room… We are forbidden on pain of court martial to let any but Dominion Expeditionary Force men go into the dug-outs… My Canadians were all there… It's an A. C. I. local of the eleventh of November…”

The Staff Offcer said:

“It makes of course, a difference! … Only a Glamorgan-shire? You say… Oh well… But these mysterious…”

He exclaimed, with the force of an explosion, and the relief:

“Look here… can you spare possible ten… twenty… eh… minutes? … It's not exactly a service matter… so per…”

Tietjens exclaimed:

“You see how we're situated, colonel…” and like one sowing grass seed on a lawn, extended both hands over his papers and towards his men… He was choking with rage. Colonel Levin had, under the chaperonage of an English dowager, who ran a chocolate store down on the quays in Rouen, a little French piece to whom he was quite seriously engaged. In the most naï ve manner. And the young woman, fantastically jealous, managed to make endless insults to herself out of her almost too handsome colonel's barbaric French. It was an idyll, but it drove the colonel frantic. At such times Levin would consult Tietjens, who passed for a man of brains and a French scholar as to really nicely turned compliments in a difficult language… And as to how you explained that is was necessary for a G. S. O. II, or whatever the colonel was, to be seen quite frequently in the company of very handsome V. A. D. 's and female organizers of all arms… It was the sort of silliness as to which no gentleman ought to be consulted… And here was Levin with the familiar feminine-agonized wrinkle on his bronzed-alabaster brow… Like a beastly soldier-man out of a revue. Why didn't the ass burst into gesture and a throaty tenor…

Sergeant-Major Cowley naturally saved the situation. Just as Tietjens was as near saying Go to hell as you can be to your remarkably senior officer on parade, the sergeant-major, now a very important solicitor's most confidential clerk, began whispering to the colonel…

“The captain might as well take a spell as not… We're through with all the men except the Canadian Railway batch, and they can't be issued with blankets not for half an hour… not for three-quarters. If then! It depends if our runner can find where Quarter's lance-corporal is having his supper, to issue them…! ” The sergeant-major had inserted that last speech deftly. The Staff officer, with a vague reminiscence of his regimental days, exclaimed:

“Damn it! … I wonder you don't break into the depot blanket store and take what you want…”

The sergeant-major, becoming Simon Pure, exclaimed:

“Oh, no, sir, we could never do that, sir…”

“But the confounded men are urgently needed in the line, ” Colonel Levin said. “Damn it, it's touch and go! … We're rushing…” He appreciated the fact again that he was on the gawdy Staff, and that the sergeant-major and Tietjens, playing like left backs into each other's hands, had trickily let him in.

“We can only pray, sir, ” the sergeant-major said, “that these 'ere bloomin' 'Uns has got quartermasters and depots and issuing departments, same as ourselves. ” He lowered his voice into a husky whisper. “Besides, sir, there's a rumour… round the telephone in depot orderly room… that there's a W. O. order at 'Edquarters… countermanding this and other drafts…”

Colonel Levin said: “Oh, my God! ” and consternation rushed upon both him and Tietjens. The frozen ditches, in the night, out there; the agonized waiting for men; the weight upon the mind like a weight upon the brows; the imminent sense of approaching unthinkableness on the right or the left, according as you looked up or down the trench; the solid protecting earth of the parapet then turns into pierced mist… and no reliefs coming from here… The men up there thinking naï vely that they were coming, and they not coming. Why not? Good God, why not? Mackenzie said:

“Poor —— old Bird… His crowd had been in eleven weeks last Wednesday… About all they could stick…”

“They'll have to stick a damn lot more, ” Colonel Levin said. “I'd like to get at some of the brutes…” It was at that date the settled conviction of His Majesty's Expeditionary Force that the army in the field was the tool of politicians and civilians. In moments of routine that cloud dissipated itself lightly: when news of ill omen arrived it settled down again heavily like a cloud of black gas. You hung your head impotently…

“So that, ” the sergeant-major said cheerfully, “the captain could very well spare half an hour to get his dinner. Or for anything else…” Apart from the domestic desire that Tietjens' digestion should not suffer from irregular meals he had the professional conviction that for his captain to be in intimate private converse with a member of the gawdy Staff was good for the unit… “I suppose, sir, ” he added valedictorily to Tietjens, “I'd better arrange to put this draft, and the nine hundred men that came in this afternoon to replace them, twenty in a tent… It's lucky we didn't strike them…”

Tietjens and the colonel began to push men out of their way, going towards the door. The Inniskilling-Canadian, a small open brown book extended deprecatingly, stood, modestly obtrusive, just beside the door-post. Catching avidly at Tietjens' “Eh? ” he said:

“You'd got the names of the girls wrong in your copy, sir. It was Gwen Lewis I had a child by in Aberystwyth that I wanted to have the lease of the cottage and the ten bob a week. Mrs Hosier that I lived with in Berwick St. James, she was only to have five guineas for a soovneer… I've took the liberty of changing the names back again. ”

Tietjens grabbed the book from him, and bending down at the sergeant-major's table scrawled his signature on the bluish page. He thrust the book back at the man and said:

“There… fall out. ” The man's face shone. He exclaimed:

“Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly, captain… I wanted to get off and go to confession. I did bad…” The McGill graduate with his arrogant black moustache put himself in the way as Tietjens struggled into his British warm.

“You won't forget, sir, …” he began.

Tietjens said:

“Damn you, I've told you I won't forget. I never forget. You instructed the ignorant Jap in Asaki, but the educational authority is in Tokyo. And your flagitious mineral-water company had their headquarters at the Tan Sen spring near Kobe… Is that right? Well, I'll do my best for you. ”

They walked in silence through the groups of men that hung around the orderly room door and gleamed in the moonlight. In the broad country street of the main line of the camp Colonel Levin began to mutter between his teeth:

“You take enough trouble with your beastly crowd… a whole lot of trouble… Yet…”

“Well, what's the matter with us? ” Tietjens said. “We get our drafts ready in thirty-six hours less than any other unit in this command. ”

“I know you do, ” the other conceded. “It's only all these mysterious rows. Now…”

Tietjens said quickly:

“Do you mind my asking: Are we still on parade? Is this a strafe from General Campion as to the way I command my unit? ”

The other conceded quite as quickly and much more worriedly:

“God forbid. ” He added more quickly still: “Old bean! ”, and prepared to tuck his wrist under Tietjens' elbow. Tietjens, however, continued to face the fellow. He was really in a temper.

“Then tell me, ” he said, “how the deuce you can manage to do without an overcoat in this weather? ” If only he could get the chap off the topics of his mysterious rows they might drift to the matter that had brought him up there on that bitter night when he should be sitting over a good wood fire philandering with Mlle Nanette de Bailly. He sank his neck deeper into the sheepskin collar of his British warm. The other, slim, was with all his badges, ribands and mail, shining darkly in a cold that set all Tietjens' teeth chattering like porcelain. Levin became momentarily animated:

“You should do as I do… Regular hours… lots of exercise… horse exercise… I do P. T. every morning at the open window of my room… hardening…”

“It must be very gratifying for the ladies in the rooms facing yours, ” Tietjens said grimly. “Is that what's the matter with Mlle Nanette, now? … I haven't got time for proper exercise…”

“Good gracious, no, ” the colonel, said. He now tucked his hand firmly under Tietjens' arm and began to work him towards the left hand of the road: in the direction leading out of camp. Tietjens worked their steps as firmly towards the right and they leant one against the other. “In fact, old bean, ” the colonel said, “Campy is working so hard to get the command of a fighting army—though he's indispensable here—that we might pack up bag and baggage any day… That is what has made Nanette see reason…”

“Then what am I doing in this show? ” Tietjens asked. But Colonel Levin continued blissfully:

“In fact I've got her almost practically for certain to promise that next week… or the week after next at latest… she'll… damn it, she'll name the happy day. ”

Tietjens said:

“Good hunting! … How splendidly Victorian! ”

“That's, damn it, ” the colonel exclaimed manfully, “what I say myself… Victorian is what it is… All these marriage settlements… And what is it… Droits du Seigneur? … And notaires… And the Count, having his say… And the Marchioness… And two old grand aunts… But… Hoopla! …” He executed with his gloved right thumb in the moonlight a rapid pirouette… “Next week… or at least the week after…” His voice suddenly dropped.

“At least, ” he wavered, “that was what it was at lunchtime… Since then… something happened…”

“You've not been caught in bed with a V. A. D.? ” Tietjens asked.

The colonel mumbled:

“No… not in bed… Not with a V. A. D… Oh, damn it, at the railway station… With… The general sent me down to meet her… and Nanny of course was seeing off her grandmother, the Duchesse… The giddy cut she handed me out…”

Tietjens became coldly furious.

“Then it was over one of your beastly imbecile rows with Miss de Bailly that you got me out here, ” he exclaimed. “Do you mind going down with me towards the I. B. D. headquarters? Your final orders may have come in there. The sappers won't let me have a telephone, so I have to look in there the last thing…” He felt a yearning towards rooms in huts, warmed by coke-stoves and electrically lit, with acting lance-corporals bending over A. F. B. 's on a background of deal pigeon-holes filled with returns on buff and blue paper. You got quiet and engrossment there. It was a queer thing: the only place where he, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, could be absently satisfied was in some orderly room or other. The only place in the world… And why? It was a queer thing…

But not queer, really. It was a matter of inevitable selection if you came to think it out. An acting orderly-room lance-corporal was selected for his penmanship, his power of elementary figuring, his trustworthiness amongst innumerable figures and messages, his dependability. For this he differed a hair's breadth in rank from the rank and file. A hairbreadth that was to him the difference between life and death. For, if he proved not to be dependable, back he went—returned to duty! As long as he was dependable he slept under a table in a warm room, his toilette arrangements and washing in a bully-beef case near his head, a billy full of tea always stewing for him on an always burning stove… A paradise! … No! Not a paradise: the paradise of the Other Ranks! … He might be awakened at one in the morning. Miles away the enemy might be beginning a strafe… He would roll out from among the blankets under the table amongst the legs of hurrying N. C. O. 's and officers, the telephone going like hell… He would have to manifold innumerable short orders on buff slips on a typewriter… A bore to be awakened at one in the morning, but not unexciting: the enemy putting up a tremendous barrage in front of the village of Dranoutre: the whole nineteenth division to be moved into support along the Bailleul-Nieppe road. In case…

Tietjens considered the sleeping army… That country village under the white moon, all of sackcloth sides, celluloid windows, forty men to a hut… That slumbering Arcadia was one of… how many? Thirty-seven thousand five hundred, say for a million and a half of men… But there were probably more than a million and a half in that base… Well, round the slumbering Arcadias were the fringes of virginly glimmering tents… Fourteen men to a tent… For a million… Seventy-one thousand four hundred and twenty-one tents round, say, one hundred and fifty I. B. D. 's, C. B. D. 's, R. E. B. D. 's… Base depots for infantry, cavalry, sappers, gunners, airmen, anti-airmen, telephone-men, vets, chiropodists, Royal Army Service Corps men, Pigeon Service men, Sanitary Service men, Women's Auxiliary Army Corps women, V. A. D. women—what in the world did V. A. D. stand for? —canteens, rest-tent attendants, barrack damage superintendents, parsons, priests, rabbis, Mormon bishops, Brahmins, Lamas, Imams, Fanti men, no doubt, for African troops. And all ready dependent on the acting orderly-room lance-corporals for their temporal and spiritual salvation… For, if by a slip of the pen a lance-corporal sent a Papist priest to an Ulster regiment, the Ulster men would lynch him, and all go to hell. Or, if by a slip of the tongue at the telephone, or a slip of the typewriter, he sent a division to Westoutre instead of to Dranoutre at one in the morning, the six or seven thousand poor devils in front of Dranoutre might all be massacred and nothing but His Majesty's Navy could save us…

Yet, in the end, all this tangle was satisfactorily unravelled; the drafts moved off, unknotting themselves like snakes, coiling out of inextricable bunches, sliding vertebrately over the mud to dip into their bowls—the rabbis found Jews dying to whom to administer; the vets, spavined mules; the V. A. D. 's, men without jaws and shoulders in C. C. S. 's; the camp-cookers, frozen beef; the chiropodists, ingrowing toe-nails; the dentists, decayed molars; the naval howitzers, camouflaged emplacements in picturesquely wooded dingles… Somehow they got there—even to the pots of strawberry jam by the ten dozen!

For if the acting lance-corporal, whose life hung by a hair, made a slip of the pen over a dozen pots of jam, back he went, Returned to duty… back to the frozen rifle, the ground-sheet on the liquid mud, the desperate suction on the ankle as the foot was advanced, the landscapes silhouetted with broken church towers, the continual drone of the planes, the mazes of duckboards in vast plains of slime, the unending Cockney humour, the great shells labelled Love to Little Willie… Back to the Angel with the Flaming Sword. The wrong side of him! … So, on the whole, things moved satisfactorily…

He was walking Colonel Levin imperiously between the huts towards the mess quarters, their feet crunching on the freezing gravel, the colonel hanging back a little; but a mere light-weight and without nails in his elegant bootsoles, so he had no grip on the ground. He was remarkably silent. Whatever he wanted to get out he was reluctant to come to. He brought out, however:

“I wonder you don't apply to be returned to duty… to your battalion. I jolly well should if I were you…”

Tietjens said:

“Why? Because I've had a man killed on me? … There must have been a dozen killed to-night. ”

“Oh, more, very likely, ” the other answered. “It was one of our own planes that was brought down… But it isn't that… Oh, damn it! … Would you mind walking the other way? … I've the greatest respect… oh, almost… for you personally… You're a man of intellect…”

Tietjens was reflecting on a nice point of military etiquette.

This lisping, ineffectual fellow—he was a very careful Staff officer or Campion would not have had him about the place! —was given to moulding himself exactly on his general. Physically, in costume as far as possible, in voice—for his lisp was not his own so much as an adaptation of the general's slight stutter—and above all in his uncompleted sentences and point of view…

Now, if he said:

“Look here, colonel…” or “Look here, Colonel Levin…” or “Look here, Stanley, my boy…” For the one thing an officer may not say to a superior whatever their intimacy was: “Look here, Levin…” If he said then:

“Look here, Stanley, you're a silly ass. It's all very well for Campion to say that I am unsound because I've some brains. He's my godfather and has been saying it to me since I was twelve, and had more brain in my left heel than he had in the whole of his beautifully barbered skull… But when you say it you are just a parrot. You did not think that out for yourself. You do not even think it. You know I'm heavy, short in the wind, and self-assertive… but you know perfectly well that I'm as good on detail as yourself. And a damned sight more. You've never caught me tripping over a return. Your sergeant in charge of returns may have. But not you…”

If Tietjens should say that to this popinjay, would that be going farther than an officer in charge of detachment should go with a member of the Staff set above him, though not on parade and in a conversation of intimacy? Off parade and in intimate conversation all His Majesty's poor —— officers are equals… gentlemen having his Majesty's commission: there can be no higher rank and all that Bilge! … For how off parade could this descendant of an old-clo' man from Frankfurt be the equal of him, Tietjens of Groby? He wasn't his equal in any way—let alone socially. If Tietjens hit him he would drop dead; if he addressed a little sneering remark to Levin, the fellow would melt so that you would see the old spluttering Jew swimming up through his carefully arranged Gentile features. He couldn't shoot as well as Tietjens, or ride, or play a hand at auction. Why, damn it, he, Tietjens, hadn't the least doubt that he could paint better water-colour-pictures… And, as for returns… he would undertake to tear the guts out of half a dozen new and contradictory A. C. I. 's—Army Council Instructions—and write twelve correct Command Orders founded on them, before Levin had lisped out the date and serial number of the first one… He had done it several times up in the room, arranged like a French blue-stocking's salon, where Levin worked at Garrison headquarters… He had written Levin's blessed command order while Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle de Bailly… and curled his delicate moustache… Mlle de Badly, chaperoned by old Lady Sachse, had tea by a clear wood fire in an eighteenth-century octagonal room, with blue-grey tapestried walls and powdering closets, out of priceless porcelain cups without handles. Pale tea that tasted faintly of cinnamon!

Mlle de Bailly was a long, dark high-coloured Provenç ale. Not heavy, but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep arm-chair, saying the most wounding, slow things to Levin, she resembled a white Persian cat luxuriating, sticking out a tentative pawful of expanding claws. With eyes slanting pronouncedly upwards and a very thin hooked nose… almost Japanese… And with a terrific cortege of relatives, swell in a French way. One brother a chauffeur to a Marshal of France… An aristocratic way of shirking!

With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social equal of a Staff colonel: but you jolly well had to keep from showing that you were his superior. Especially intellectually. If you let yourself show a Staff officer that he was a silly ass—you could say it as often as you liked as long as you didn't prove it! —you could be certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English as possible… So a Staff officer would take it out of such a regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way. You would never imagine the hash headquarters warrant officers would make of your returns. Until you were worried and badgered and in the end either you were ejected into, or prayed to be transferred to… any other command in the whole service…

And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him… Still, he was fond of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent as you could be in contact with… if you had to be in contact with your kind… So he just said:

“Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass, ” and left it at that, without demonstrating the truth of the assertion.

The colonel said:

“Why, what have I been doing now? … I wish you would walk the other way…”

Tietjens said:

“No, I can't afford to go out of camp… I've got to come to witness your fantastic wedding-contract to-morrow afternoon, haven't I? … I can't leave camp twice in one week…”

“You've got to come down to the camp-guard, ” Levin said. “I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold… though she is in the general's car…”

Tietjens exclaimed:

“You've not been… oh, extraordinarily enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me? ”

Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear:

“It isn't Miss de Bailly! ” Then he exclaimed quite aloud: “Damn it all, Tietjens, haven't you had hints enough? …”

For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens' mind that it must be Miss Wannop in the general's car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp guard-room. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost. And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly deucedly afraid…

For a minute Tietjens' backbone stiffened. He didn't intend to interfere between Mlle de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a mistress… Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a married woman… He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn't be… An immense waft of calm, sentimental happiness had descended upon him. Merely because he had imagined her! He imagined her little, fair, rather pug-nosed face: under a fur cap, he did not know why. Leaning forward she would be, on the seat of the general's illuminated car: glazed in: a regular raree show! Peering out, shortsightedly on account of the reflections on the inside of the glass…

He was saying to Levin:

“Look here, Stanley… why I said you are a silly ass is because Miss de Bailly has one chief luxury. It's exhibiting jealousy. Not feeling it; exhibiting it. ”

“Ought you, ” Levin asked ironically, “to discuss my fiancé e before me? As an English gentleman. Tietjens of Groby and all. ”

“Why, of course, ” Tietjens said. He continued feeling happy. “As a sort of swollen best man, it's my duty to instruct you. Mothers tell their daughters things before marriage. Best men do it for the innocent Benedict… woman…”

“I'm not doing it now, ” Levin grumbled direly.

“Then what, in God's name, are you doing? You've got a cast mistress, haven't you, down there in old Campion's car? …” They were beside the alley that led down to his orderly room. Knots of men, dim and desultory, still half filled it, a little way down.

“I haven't, ” Levin exclaimed almost tearfully. “I never had a mistress…”

“And you're not married? ” Tietjens asked. He used on purpose the schoolboy's ejaculation “Tummy! ” to soften the jibe. “If you'll excuse me, ” he said, “I must just go and take a look at my crowd. To see if your orders have come down. ”

He found no orders in a hut as full as ever of the dull mists and odours of khaki, but he found in revenge a fine upstanding, blond, Canadian-born lance-corporal of old Colonial lineage, with a moving story as related by Sergeant-Major Cowley:

“This man, sir, of the Canadian Railway lot, 'is mother's just turned up in the town, come on from Eetarpels. Come all the way from Toronto where she was bedridden. ” Tietjens said:

“Well, what about it? Get a move on. ”

The man wanted leave to go to his mother who was waiting in a decent estaminet at the end of the tramline just outside the camp where the houses of the town began.

Tietjens said: “It's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. You know that. ”

The man stood erect and expressionless; his blue eyes looked confoundedly honest to Tietjens who was cursing himself. He said to the man:

“You can see for yourself that it's impossible, can't you? ” The man said slowly:

“Not knowing the regulations in these circumstances I can't say, sir. But my mother's is a very special case… She's lost two sons already. ”

Tietjens said:

“A great many people have… Do you understand, if you went absent off my pass I might—I quite possibly might—lose my commission? I'm responsible for you fellows getting up the line. ”

The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbebile. Yet it was so. He said to the man:

“You said good-bye to your mother, didn't you, in Toronto, before you left? ”

The man said:

“No, sir. ” He had not seen his mother in seven years. He had been up in the Chilkoot when war broke out and had not heard of it for ten months. Then he had at once joined up in British Columbia, and had been sent straight through for railway work, on to Aldershot where the Canadians had a camp in building. He had not known that his brothers were killed till he got there and his mother, being bedridden at the news, had not been able to get to Toronto when his batch had passed through. She lived about sixty miles from Toronto. Now she had risen from her bed like a miracle and come all the way. A widow: sixty-two years of age. Very feeble.

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