As to Stella, she was a sort of Whizbang. With a treachery worthy of a Hun, Nature tempted him towards her. He was drugged with delicious appetites. Very well! He would hoist the Unseen Powers with his own petard. He could throw back Stella where she was discharged from (if it were allowable, now, to change her into a bomb) first having relieved himself of this humiliating gnawing and yearning in his blood.
As to Stella, considered as an unconscious agent, all women were contaminated with Nature's hostile power and might be treated as spies or enemies. The only time they could be trusted, or were likely to stand up to Nature and show their teeth, was as mothers. So he approached Stella with as much falsity as he could master.
At their third meeting he brought her a ring. Her melting gratitude was immediately ligotted with long arms, full of the contradictory and offending fire of Spring. On the warm earth consent flowed up into her body from all the veins of the landscape.
That night he spat out, in gushes of thick delicious rage, all the lust that had gathered in his body. The nightingale sang ceaselessly in the small wood at the top of the field where they lay. He grinned up towards it as he noticed it, and once more turned to the devouring of his mate. He bore down on her as though he wished to mix her body into the soil, and pour his seed into a more methodless matter, the brown phalanges of floury land. As their two bodies shook and melted together, he felt that he was raiding the bowels of Nature: he was proud that he could remain deliberately alcx?f, and gaze bravely, like a minute insect, up at the immense and melancholy night, with all its mad nightingales, piously folded small brown wings in a million nests, night-working stars, and misty useless watchmen. —They got up at last, she went furtively back to her home: Cantleman on his walk to camp, had a smile of severe satisfaction on his face. It did not occur to him that his action might be supremely unimportant as far as Stella was concerned. He had not even asked himself if, had he not been there that night, someone else might have been there in his place. He was also convinced that the laurels were his, and that Nature had come off badly.—He was still convinced of this when he received six weeks afterwards in France, a long appeal from Stella, telling him that she was going to have a child. She received no answer to that or any subsequent letter. Cantleman received with great regularity in the trenches, and read them all through from beginning to end, without comment of any sort.—And when he beat a German's brains out it was with the same impartial malignity that he had displayed in the English night with his Spring-mate. Only he considered there too that he was in some way outwitting Nature, and had no adequate realization of the extent to which evidently the death of a Hun was to the advantage of the world.
CHAPTER X
The War Baby
The West Berks Hotel dominated a Military Avenue. Fifty yards from its door was the Guard Room of the Flying Corps. A boy sentry marched up and down its twenty yards of covered porch. When an officer passed, he faced the front with a series of stamps, stepped forward, and slapped the pistol holster at his side. At the conclusion of this rumpus, at which he did not look, the Officer would raise his hand languidly in front of his right eye. The boy sentry then stamped loudly as though in anger, and walked fiercely up and down for several minutes as though to work off his discontent. He then stood at ease and waited for the next Officer, when the same scene was repeated.
The Hall of the West Berks Hotel was like a theatrical store. It contained a variety of military properties. There were airmen's leather helmets, perpendicular Russian infantry caps, swords of all sorts, airy khaki forage caps. The Russian army air students were as proportionately more picturesque than their slogging earth comrades as our airmen are more picturesque than more venerable corps. But with the Russians it was veritably a plumage. Long cavalry swords and scimitars hung from pegs by slender slings in gorgeous braid and bead work, with dazzling and sinuous silver tassels. There were Circassian dirks, with jewels about the handles. The gay medals, of course, were not in the hall, but hanging all over the breasts of the heroes.
Hurried bursts of expostulatory buzzing came from behind some curtains where a lounge was, a language that was like a new situation to unfamiliar ears. Impetuous or dilatory forms left now the door leading to the dining-room, now the curtains, and took vociferously or softly the road to the Bar, the bedrooms or the smoking-room. At the back of the hall was a large office, in the middle of which sat a sulkily handsome elderly flapper of twenty-four summers. A mass of dark juiceless hair hung pompously over her eyes. She was swarthy, sophisticated and robust; sat like a big delicate watch-dog in her illuminated dug-out in the body of the Hotel. Whenever the front door opened she shot a black glance of inquiry in the hall; sometimes rang a bell. At present she had two glances, though; the dark one, and a soft variety like a furtive cuddle, which she cast a yard to the right and some fifteen yards nearer than the door, at a long stout figure lounging at the window of her room. A subaltern remained leaning on a ledger, his round head stuck well inside the Hotel office, his spurred field boots at an angle of thirty degrees with the vertical without. He was quietly sniffing the fragrance that her handkerchief and person filled the office with, and conversing on topics likely to fan the second of the two glances. His eyes ran steadily and blandly over her figure, returning from its round, that is from her ankles up to her face again, almost always in time to absorb her recurring glance, burning lighthouse-like, its regulation moment. Their conversation picked its way more or less among the visitors' accounts which she was checking.
T can do figures with anybody now,' she said. 'It's funny, because when I was at school I was always bottom of the class. I was very bad at arithmetic.'
She breathed little airy numerals all over an immense page, and then gathered them up in aggregates with attentive eye, registering the result at the bottom of the column.
'I think your mathematical accomplishment is wonderful,' the artillery subaltern said, looking at the centre of her loose high-waisted skirt at the back, trying to disinter the Kirchner beneath it: especially one Kirchner pinned to the wall in his room, a concession to the military life, not a diagnostic of the commonness of his mind.
'I wish I could play with figures like that.' With hopeless intensity he gazed at her figure, the incommensurable feminine chiffre, which also he considered it desirable to master.
But despite her tardily acquired skill, she got into difficulties, seemingly, at the bottom of each page, until at last she was about a couple of pounds out. She hunted back through the columns for the slip or slips.
'What margin of error do they allow you?' her admirer asked, delicately, lisping a little.
'Oh! nothing, none. We are supposed to get it—'
'You just stick it on to somebody else's bill?'
'Yes!'
The young man wondered if he might take it as a hopeful sign that the little airy figures for once had bested her: or whether the old arithmetical incompetence really still lingered on in the prestigious accountant.
A woman's occupation was important in deciding her quality as a sweetheart. These millions of little blue figures that she dwelt among were, he decided, quite wholesome; an abstract and inoffensive sort of gnat. They, after all, had only attacked her comparatively late in life.
'Oh! I've got Major Kirkpatrick's bill wrong! D'you know, I'm terrified of that man!'
'It's his name I expect.'
'Yes, that's it, I expect!'
A small man with a hairy, deeply fresh-complexioned, spectacled face came into the front door and drifted quickly across the hall, then towards the drawing-room, taking his coat off as he went. He wore an infantry coat, but artillery cap badge. This was probably in order to have red edges to his shoulder straps in addition to his two gold stars. Richard Beresin—the figure adhering to the ledge of the office—knew him, through having seen him at the hut where he worked with regard to a batch of men in his battery down with measles. He had a permanent job at Paynes.
'I hate that man,' the young lad
y had followed him with a surly eye. 'I hate that family. I don't know why.'
'It's his mother, isn't it: and his wife?'
'No, it's his mother and sister. They seem to think that we have nothing to do but run after them. I'll tell you how, for instance. All their letters come here together to the office in the morning. The sister will come down and ask for the letters. She'll say, "Oh, these are my brother's—keep them for him." She'll put them down and take her own away. The mother does the same. And the mother won't take her daughter's letters either! It's so silly. Why can't they take all their letters together? They're one family. Oh, I don't know. I hate people like that.
Then they go to the front door with him at night and see him off. "Good night, my darling boy," for fear he should go to the left when he ought to go to the right! You'll see: here they are! No, it's my darling this, and my darling that. I'm sure he does not like it. Could a man?'
'I don't know.'
'Oh, but that's different'
The mistress of the Bar came into the office and sat down, saying 'Swish!'
Her elderly figure was emphasized by a slack silk jersey. She stared with an energetic smile at the subaltern. 'Perhaps I am de trop?
'Don't be silly,' her colleageue said.
'Of course I know I am not young and attractive/ She drawled the last word. The watcher at the window was surprised at the strength of her voice.
'She is always saying that! Why are you always saying that?' the other lady asked her.
The Bar lady looked down, and affectedly picked at her dress.
'Why do you part your hair in the middle?' the subaltern asked.
'Because it's straight: like yours.'
It was black and straight, and he saw the resemblance too. Also he thought she looked rather like him in other ways. Her good-natured aggressiveness, her straight mouth, the dark creases under the eyes, were points of resemblance. He did not say this, however, because he thought that the younger woman would then also see it, and that he would not benefit by this comparison.
He had been leaning there for an hour and ten minutes, he found, on pulling his sleeve back. It was twenty past ten. Gathering himself up, he walked with the least unsteadiness— a few glasses of whisky taking advantage of his stiffness— towards his hat, cane and coat. Over his shoulder, as he left, he said 'Tra-la-la!' He went upstairs to the left.
Ten minutes later he was standing in a slack attitude, a long white bulk in front of a large glass, stroking his sides and thighs, and wondering whether to immerse himself across the passage, or roll his hot, unclothed body in the sheets and cool gradually into sleep.
Next day Richard Beresin considered whether he could afford to remain at the West Berks. He found that he could not. Yet he wanted to live out of camp. The Mess was bad. A passion for civilian ease grew in him daily. Three months previously he had left hospital and was at the most boring period of the training of a new battery.
Beresin was the son of a well-to-do city merchant, and had only left Haileybury one year before the outbreak of war. His father had sent him to Paris to learn the French language. The public-school idea, its tenacious middle-class snobberies, had held him with a poor slouch and drawl for some months. Then he had grown Parisian, but kept the Anglo-Saxon prerogatives of gait and manner somewhat for the prestige they had among his French companions. In England, after six months on a holiday, he was very parlez-vous. On the other hand with the Frenchman he was a little bleak, dumb and ironical.
In the midst of a captivating and increasingly careless life, in which he had begun to cut a figure, begun to sleek himself in front of the mirror of his fellows, discover with a nimble science the resources of his civilized spots, particular physique, the war harshly and suddenly burst on him. It received a mixed welcome at his hands. He saw at once that it was no friend of his. Patron of some, bloody Father Christmas to many a Spartan child, bringing hundreds of little lead soldiers to drill and damage, toy guns and sabretaches, it was bringing him nothing, with good instinct he felt, as he first saw it. Certain things were expected of him, he was in the home of noisy Gallic nationalism—although it was, in other moods, the home of his dream of cheap elegances and pleasures. He became a soldier early in the war. Paris soon grew distant, and he looked towards it even with a grudge and a grimace. France became the 'France' of the sentimental soldier song, with its inseparable sententious 'somewhere', the romance country of death and naif steadfastness. France with all its pageant of history was less important than this intense localized France of four years, of the
English imagination, with its belts of graves and trenches; this narrow gash of a France, five-miles-deep incredible landscape developing an ephemeral species. To belong to this male, elect, death-facing genus he accepted dourly as a consolation for his vision of desirable life foregone. He took all that on, as he had affected Paris. But he wasn't so sure a man and his reactions became of a more original type, more experimental. His struggle with this endless adventure that did not suit him spinning sometimes rather wildly. Meantime the years went on, and he was young enough to thrive, although thwartly, on his new destiny. In this idle, hectic existence he made the most of his short past, and developed its more flattering veins. He became a little literary—snubbed, in a schoolboy way, with an impermeable contempt, his fellows with less fortunate histories. He wore a bracelet, read Huysmans in his dug-out, wore mufti whenever opportunity offered, acquired a settled consciousness of the aristocratic idea. He began to visualize himself as a young blood—he sought in his ancestry for the bluest seeming streams, courted imaginary ghosts. His Nietzschean illusion almost broke the heart of his subservient soldier-servant. The leather of riding-breeches pipeclayed, buttons burnished, no spot on boot or belt neglected, ever, in the line, even—during pulling out or pulling in, weeks of battles, even, when all stores were lost in retreat? He was liked all the better for that. He was a gentleman. Both he and his soldier-servant saw the same popular image of a perfection.
But war grew more and more a sinister phantom. The death-line was always there, crackling, thumping away. He could not take his aristocratic ideal to his bosom, and luxuriate with it, so near to a harsh extinction.
Enteric took him to hospital for some time, however; now he was experiencing a tantalizing lease of leisure. So extravagant were his tastes that it had its stoppages and drags.
Beresin had fixed nicely his sense of what dwelling he should choose: how comfortable, spacious, and above all, not disgustingly suburban! South fronting (gaya scienza, of course) with mulberry bushes, laurels, and one rose if possible.
The village of Paynes had had its camp for a long time. A dismal barrack look pervaded it. Beresin knocked at last at the door of a decent, but very, very mediocre house, whose rooms, he was sure, contained nothing colossal or comfortable. It was the best that presented itself. The landlady appeared a precarious creature. She was almost certainly never warmed by the sun. All the windows were at the front, which faced north. He made many arrangements, inquired about this and that: then surprised her by saying he 'would come back when he had considered what she had told him'. What had she told him? She did not know! She stared at his back with fear.
He left too bored to continue further, and put off his search until the following day.
At the Hotel his groom was waiting for him. It was a question of leave for this soldier, necessitated a walk down to the Battery office. Back from that, three-quarters of an hour separated him from dinner. Stripping, the evening process to which he had accustomed his orderly began. Two bath mats, a bristling loofah a jug of scented and tepid water arranged by Misrow, awaited this young, apolaustic patrician of theory. The orderly was a sleeply-looking boy with a face like an artist. He wore a truss, grumbled at military duties. Beresin lay stomach down, his white fat springing into luminous strawberry pink beneath the massage. Misrow used to grooming horses, as he got to the back of his master's thighs his free hand seized the leg behind the knee from instinct.
'What are you up to, Misrow? Are you afraid I shall kick?'
Misrow had tickled his master.
'No, sir.' Misrow smiled his quattrocento smile, and sleep seemed to be pumped out of his eyelids, like a stagnant mist, having the effect of a barber's spray, but redolent of delicate demarcated life. Beresin rolled over. The front of his body was a series of close drifts of dark hair, with a wide central vein of dull verdure. Terminating this hairy column, raised on the best thing about him, a rather rigid and disciplined neck, his round, closely-knit head was exquisite, harsh and stone-like, reminding you of a snake's sling-like extremity. The muscles gathered up beneath the skin as he moved, like the hundred parts of a child's block puzzle coming together by cinematographic magic.
He scratched his close-cropped head, slowly hissed a rag between small opaque teeth. Particularly unaffected by experimental disquiet of the senses, he yet enjoyed the rather anomalous figure of Misrow. It was incumbent on him to live up to the Nietzschean, the Greek, picture, have this what might be decadent panel occur somewhere in the series of his day's tableaux. Excuses had to be found, with subtleties to explain the rather degrading scene where we first have seen him figuring.
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