“Tell me about it,” he said.
He learned that she lived alone with her mother, that she was attached to a stationary hospital at a place called Hocqmaison, between Doullens and Arras, that she had a Scotch terrier at home named Tim, that she brought the Mess President into Doullens once a week to buy stores, that she loved tennis and hated bridge, that she had a brother at Oundle, that she had seen Chu Chin Chow twice, and loved George Robey, though he was rather low, and that she was going to see a divisional concert party that was giving a show in Hocqmaison on Friday.
Suddenly she glanced at her wrist-watch and sprang up. “I must simply fly,” she cried. “Captain Grant said that he would be ready to go back by a quarter-past five.”
They left the pâtisserie and walked down the street thronged with civilian carts, army cars, limbers and motor lorries. Her ambulance was in the square, parked with half a dozen other British vehicles, staff cars, box bodies, and a R.A.F. tender. Beside it stood a middle-aged R.A.M.C. captain. Berney began to apologize for being a minute or two late, but he cut in with, “Not a bit, Miss Travers. I have only just arrived, and there is no hurry, anyway.” And there was a twinkle in the eye that met Rawley’s as he added, “Can I give you a lift anywhere, Gunner?”
“Thanks very much, but I have a four-footed one of my own waiting for me,” answered Rawley.
Berney climbed into the driving-seat, and with a wave of her hand to Rawley, drove out of the square towards the Arras road.
Rawley jogged homeward on Lucy through the amber light of the sinking sun which gilded the leafy woods that crowned every hill. The drone of a homing aeroplane served only to emphasize the calm that attends the dying of a summer day. In the A.S.C. billet at the fork roads outside the village an unseen man was singing in the soothing contented manner that betokens pleasant fatigue, a day’s work behind and leisure ahead—the way men sing when polishing their boots before walking out for the evening. Round the last bend in the narrow road the first yellow-washed cottages of the village lay bathed in golden glory. Two men of the battery passed him with clinking spurs, whitened lanyards, and soldierly salutes. He rode slowly up the streets and mounted the short, steep lane to the mess.
His canvas bath stood ready filled on the red-brick floor of his billet, and he had a cold sponge down before changing into slacks for mess. Altogether a successful day he mused as he stood clean and clothed, brushing his damp hair before his steel travelling mirror.
IV
The Major, Whedbee, and Piddock were in the mess talking to a stranger who was introduced as Rumbald, a reinforcement from Havre, posted to the battery. The Major asked about the collars he had commissioned Rawley to get him from ordnance, and Piddock asked facetiously whether he had been to the opera or attended a thé dansant at the Ritz. Rawley told them of his meeting Tankard at the Quatre Fils, but said nothing of Berney Travers. That would have been to invite facetious remarks, and he felt that it had been too nice an occurrence to become the subject of Piddock’s chaff.
The conversation drifted back to London which Rumbald had left only a fortnight previously; and Rawley drew up a chair and covertly appraised this new-comer, who was to share that close intimacy that war had imposed upon them.
He was a big man, probably in the early thirties, though the girth of his waist, which compelled him to buckle his Sam Browne in the last hole, made him appear almost middle-aged. He had the comfortable, well-fed air of a man who finds much in life that is agreeable, and does not spoil his enjoyment of it by vain yearnings for the unattainable. His pink and slightly fleshy face suggested much soap and warm water, and the dark hairs imparted to the well-shaven cheeks a faint, luminous blue gleam. There were little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and Rawley pictured him in civil life wearing a tight blue suit and a bowler hat on the back of his head. He lounged in the old horsehair armchair, his head sunk in his massive shoulders, a glass of whisky resting on his crossed knees, and his great buttocks pressing the springs flat; and Rawley, remembering his own shyness as a newcomer to the mess, envied this man for his easy assurance.
He had a humorous blunt way of talking about men and things, and he had, it appeared, a great number of acquaintances in London and scattered up and down England, to whom he referred bewilderingly as old George Kemp, young Tom Conolly, Sam Tatam’s missus, or that little armful Patsy Green. Evidently he was very popular in this wide circle of acquaintances, though it did not appear to which particular strata of society they belonged.
He had managed to enjoy life, even in Havre where, it appeared, reinforcement officers were hampered by endless ridiculous regulations. But he had not allowed these to cramp his optimism or opportunism. Evidently he was a very good hand at driving a coach and four through an Act of Parliament, or any other troublesome regulation. He had a breezy, persuasive, “Come-old-fellow,-but-of-course-these-ridiculous-regulations-don’t-apply-to-me” manner that had procured him sugar in a land of saccharine, meat without a ration card, and drinks in public-houses after hours. A useful fellow to send to brigade or division when they and the battery did not see eye to eye.
CHAPTER IV
The battery was enjoying its rest in the village after its long and arduous spell in the Line. In the manner of British troops the world over it had made itself at home within ten minutes of the guns being parked beneath the trees of the square. Within an hour it was known throughout the battery which farm sold the cheapest eggs and at which estaminet the beer was least insipid, and more than one gunner had taken his place in a French kitchen, with the family, to drink a cup of the coffee that seemed to be ready at any hour.
Two guns had gone to ordnance for repairs, and apart from the routine exercise, stables, and feeds that are inseparable from a horse unit, duties were light. And the weather, as if in expiation of its recent vagaries, was excellent. The dusty white surface of the village street was scolloped with the clear-cut shadows of gables and chimneys. The wood that climbed the slope behind the village street looked cool and inviting, and beyond the houses the heat shimmered above the swelling slopes of ripening corn that undulated to the hazy distance, unbroken by hedge or tree except for an occasional wood upon a hill-top, and in the low ground the winding green ribbon of trees that marked the road.
A football match had been arranged between the battery and the motor transport workshop that was quartered at the cross-roads, and Rawley played in his old school position at right half and fed Piddock, who made a very fast outside right. Rumbald, on the touch-line, proved to be an enthusiastic supporter of his new unit, and his periodic mighty bellow of “Come on, B Battery,” sent the birds eddying above the poplars.
He showed a liking for Rawley’s company, and Rawley was a little flattered by this tribute from a man older and more worldly wise than himself. They went riding together in the afternoon, following, perhaps not entirely by accident, the route Rawley had taken two days previously when he had met Berney Travers on the road to Doullens. Rumbald was in a confidential mood and spoke of his wife.
“Writes to me every other day, Pete,” he said. “Sends me lashings of cigarettes, marching chocolate, and any damn thing the shop people can kid her we want out here. That’s the sort of wife to have, Pete, my lad, one that looks after the bed and the board. That’s a wife’s job—a wife that is a wife.”
He took a photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to Rawley. “Not a high stepper, mind you, but a nice little armful all the same.”
Rawley made some suitable comment and handed back the photograph. Rumbald gazed at it sentimentally for a moment before returning it to his pocket.
“That’s the sort we shall have to find for you one of these days,” he continued. “How would you like a nice little girl of your own?” and he made a stab at Rawley’s ribs with his crop. “Half the trouble in this life is caused by fellows who want a woman and don’t know it, or by females who get a kink on religion or uplift or some damn nonsense, when all they really want is a few b
abies. God never intended a man or a woman to live alone, and He ought to know.”
Swaying gently to the motion of his mare, Rawley silently agreed. He tilted his cap over his eyes to look at an aeroplane droning overhead, but his mind’s eyes was occupied with the picture Rumbald’s words had conjured up—the picture of a little woman of one’s own, someone so much a part of oneself that one was never alone, even when separated from her. Someone with whom one could share all the extraordinary thoughts and ideas and emotions that made up life—particularly life in this baffling time of war. Someone who would welcome one even though one came muddy and sweaty and unshaven straight from a gun-pit. And he recalled the daintily dressed girl he had seen at Victoria station, who when the leave train came in had flung her arms round the neck of her muddy husband and had been lifted off her feet and hugged before the world.
His mare half-stumbled in a rabbit hole and curveted affectedly. He soothed her with a little clucking noise while his thoughts ran on.
Of course it was not often that a cultured English girl showed her feelings like that; but it did give one a glimpse into hidden heavens so to speak. Her eyes shining like stars and seeing only one muddy man among all the khaki crowd. There was no mistaking that look—or forgetting it. Lucky devil that infanteer, whoever he was.
Clean, healthy English girls seemed very pally and unemotional, but after that revelation at Victoria one knew that behind their calm eyes that radiant look lay waiting for some man.
He glanced covertly at Rumbald riding beside him and eyed his plump profile with new interest. He had not merely surprised such a look as a slightly envious onlooker; he must know what it felt like to be that muddy infanteer. When he went on leave a girl would be waiting for him with that look in her eyes.
He turned his eyes away and patted his mare’s neck. How little one really knew about the lives of others; less than the half. Here was this fellow Rumbald, ordinary looking chap, nothing heroic or—or Hamlet-like about him to give a clue, and yet he had been through all that. And that infanteer no doubt seemed just as ordinary to his fellow officers who had not seen his wife meet him at Victoria.
On the way back Rumbald asked, “Ever been to Amiens?”
“No,” answered Rawley. “Have you?”
Rumbald shook his head. “Good spot, I’m told—like Havre, only better.” He tapped Rawley’s knee with his crop and asked mysteriously, “Like to come in with me tomorrow?”
Rawley thought it would be worth doing if it could be managed.
Rumbald shut one eye and nodded mysteriously. “So you shall then,” he said. “I’ve fixed it all up. A nice little dinner and the sights of the town. Like me to tackle the Major for you?”
“Oh no, I’ll ask him,” said Rawley. “He won’t object. He’s awfully decent about that sort of thing when we’re in rest. But how are we to get there? It must be over thirty kilometres.”
Rumbald winked again mysteriously. “Trust your Uncle Sammy,” he said. “Know Penhurst?”
“That’s the M.T. fellow at the cross-roads, isn’t it?”
Rumbald nodded. “Yes. Well, he’s going to take us in his car tomorrow afternoon.”
CHAPTER V
I
Penhurst of the A.S.C. arrived on the following afternoon to take Rawley and Rumbald into Amiens. Rawley was in a sight-seeing mood and was anxious to be off. Rumbald, however, insisted upon a preliminary drink, and they retired to the mess and shouted for the mess corporal. Rawley disliked drinking whisky on a hot afternoon, but his objections were overruled by Rumbald, whose persuasive, hail-fellow-well-met manner was always difficult to resist.
“Come on, Pete,” he said. “You must have just one little spot. You can’t see Amiens properly unless you’ve had at least one drink first. Isn’t that so, Penhurst?”
Penhurst nodded agreement.
“Well, so long as I don’t see two cathedrals,” murmured Rawley doubtfully.
“That’s right,” boomed Rumbald. “A good stiff whisky for Mr. Rawley, corporal. Puts you in the right mood to appreciate architecture or any other sort of beauty.” This with a wink at Penhurst. And so they all settled down into chairs, and it was two drinks later in the case of Rumbald and Penhurst or twenty minutes before they went out into the sunlight and started up the grey Vauxhall car.
They drove along the now familiar shady road into Doullens and turned south past the old grass-covered citadel up the straight, steep Amiens road that climbed over the bare downs. Penhurst drove, and he drove fast, so that Rawley had little opportunity of seeing the country as he would have wished to do, and he absorbed only a vague impression of a straight white road switch-backing over corn-covered downs, hedgeless and treeless, except for a wood-shrouded village here and there on a hill top, and punctuated by villages with hideous new red-brick churches which changed later to picturesque though poverty-stricken wattle-and-daub cottages girdled with fruit trees.
Then the car shot over the low crest of a hill, and he saw the city below him straddling the green Somme valley, a wide sweep of jumbled roofs and chimneys and trees glimmering silver-grey in the sunlight, and the great cathedral, with its long, grey roof and pinnacles towering cliff-like from the tree-shaded quays and bridges where the glassy Somme was shivered into a number of gleaming canals. The view was lost a moment later as they swept into a suburb down a long, straight pavé road bordered by trees and broad sidewalks on which dirty urchins played and bedraggled women filled cracked ewers at the stand-pipes spaced before dreary flat-fronted houses. The road narrowed suddenly, and canals, stone quays, and markets opened to right and left. The western towers of the cathedral soared above the houses terraced on the slope ahead. The car bumped over two or three narrow bridges and climbed a steep, winding cobbled street.
They left the car in the courtyard of the Hôtel de la Paix and walked back across the Place Gambetta.
“What’s the programme?” asked Rumbald.
“Well, I think that Charley’s Bar is indicated.”
“Oh Lord!” groaned Rawley. “We are not going to spend the whole day on a pub crawl, surely.”
“Well, what did you think of doing, Pete?” asked Rumbald good-humouredly.
“Oh, I don’t know. Look round the place—register on the cathedral and all that.”
“Righto, Pete. You get the cathedral off your chest while Penhurst and I register on Charley’s Bar. Where do we go afterwards, Penhurst?”
“Oh, we’ll get tea at Odette’s; Rawley can meet us there.”
“Oh, and I want to get a bath,” put in Rawley. “Where does one bath?”
“Come on, I’ll show you,” said Penhurst. “This is the three-pebbles street, the local Bond Street, where one can buy anything from a camisole to a smutty post card. That’s Odette’s.” He pointed across the road to a pâtisserie. “Where we meet for tea. And these are the baths.”
He turned in under a low archway where second-hand books were displayed on shelves. “That’s the gentleman’s lavatory as we call it euphemistically in English,” he said, and murmured “bonjour, madame” to an old dame seated on a stool. “These are the baths.” He pushed open a glass door on the right.
“Want us to come in and hold the soap or tickle your back?” asked Rumbald. “No? Then cheerio. We’ll meet at Odette’s anon.”
Rawley was led up a broad staircase and ushered into a small room containing a short deep metal tub covered with a sheet, into which steaming water was gushing. He took off his belt and tunic and hung them on the door hook and turned with arms akimbo to examine the unfamiliar type of bath. It seemed a sanitary idea if the sheet were clean, which it was, and anyway, the hot, deep water was an improvement upon the few tepid inches in his folding canvas bath.
II
Feeling comfortably clean and civilized he wandered out past the old woman still seated on her stool, into the crowded Rue des Trois Cailloux. Staff cars, mess-carts, and military motor-cycles moved in a continuous stream along the road, an
d on the pavements the number of British officers was hardly less than that of the native civilians. The civilized shop windows were enticing, and he lingered at one or two of them before turning down a side street towards the grey pinnacles of the cathedral. The street was narrow, winding, and cobbled, and at each turn he caught a new glimpse of the great grey rampart of stone and glass rising higher and higher above the roofs. He found himself at length in the open space before the west front. The great carved buttresses and recessed door arches were neatly sandbagged to a height of eighty feet or more to protect them from bomb splinters, but above the rampart of bleached sandbags the two great chiselled towers rose in naked splendour.
Rawley gazed upwards till his neck ached, and then he mounted the steps and passed into the lofty tunnel of the nave. The silence and dimness and spaciousness were restful he decided. Rumbald was a good fellow, but his persistent joviality rather swamped one’s efforts at intelligent thought.
He found Odette’s filled to overflowing with British officers of every age and rank, and among them Rumbald and Penhurst in a corner clapping tea-spoons on plates to attract his attention. He was anxious to see the famous Odette, and when she herself arrived to take their order he was surprised to find not the spoiled and painted beauty he had expected, but a quiet, pleasant-faced girl who had a smile and a friendly word for everyone, and repelled the advances of her too ardent admirers with disarming tact and competence. The ogling glances which several officers of high rank and grey hairs directed at her he found highly ludicrous and a little beastly; but she moved about the room as though unconscious of them and showed favour to none. A very competent little person he decided. Fame had exaggerated her beauty, but did bare justice to her character.
Penhurst greeted her jovially as an old friend, and so did Rumbald, though he had never seen her before. The familiarity annoyed Rawley. How she must hate them all, he thought, though she betrayed no sign of it. She said, “Bonjour, messieurs” with disarming naturalness, and a smile that included him though he had not spoken; and he could have sworn that she had divined his annoyance and that her eyes, which for a moment met his, were the kinder on that account.
Behind the Lines Page 4
