Strange Tales (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Rudyard Kipling

  A Madonna of the Trenches

  Gipsy Vans

  Whatever a man of the sons of men

  Shall say to his heart of the lords above,

  They have shown man, verily, once and again,

  Marvellous mercies and infinite love.

  * * *

  O sweet one love, O my life’s delight,

  Dear, though the days have divided us,

  Lost beyond hope, taken far out of sight,

  Not twice in the world shall the Gods do thus.

  Swinburne, Les Noyades

  Seeing how many unstable ex-soldiers came to the Lodge of Instruction (attached to Faith and Works E.C. 5837*) in the years after the war, the wonder is there was not more trouble from Brethren whom sudden meetings with old comrades jerked back into their still raw past. But our round, torpedo-bearded local Doctor – Brother Keede, Senior Warden – always stood ready to deal with hysteria before it got out of hand; and when I examined Brethren unknown or imperfectly vouched for on the Masonic side, I passed on to him anything that seemed doubtful. He had had his experience as medical officer of a South London Battalion, during the last two years of the war; and, naturally, often found friends and acquaintances among the visitors.

  Brother C. Strangwick, a young, tallish, new-made Brother, hailed from some South London Lodge. His papers and his answers were above suspicion, but his red-rimmed eyes had a puzzled glare that might mean nerves. So I introduced him particularly to Keede, who discovered in him a Headquarters Orderly of his old Battalion, congratulated him on his return to fitness – he had been discharged for some infirmity or other – and plunged at once into Somme memories.

  ‘I hope I did right, Keede,’ I said when we were robing before Lodge.

  ‘Oh, quite. He reminded me that I had him under my hands at Sampoux in ’Eighteen, when he went to bits. He was a Runner.’

  ‘Was it shock?’ I asked.

  ‘Of sorts – but not what he wanted me to think it was. No, he wasn’t shamming. He had jumps to the limit – but he played up to mislead me about the reason of ’em . . . . Well, if we could stop patients from lying, medicine would be too easy, I suppose.’

  I noticed that, after Lodge-working, Keede gave him a seat a couple of rows in front of us, that he might enjoy a lecture on the Orientation of King Solomon’s Temple, which an earnest Brother thought would be a nice interlude between Labour and the high tea that we called our ‘Banquet.’ Even helped by tobacco it was a dreary performance. About halfway through, Strangwick, who had been fidgeting and twitching for some minutes, rose, drove back his chair grinding across the tessellated floor, and yelped ‘Oh, My Aunt! I can’t stand this any longer.’ Under cover of a general laugh of assent he brushed past us and stumbled towards the door.

  ‘I thought so!’ Keede whispered to me. ‘Come along!’ We overtook him in the passage, crowing hysterically and wringing his hands. Keede led him into the Tyler’s Room, a small office where we stored odds and ends of regalia and furniture, and locked the door.

  ‘I’m – I’m all right,’ the boy began, piteously.

  ‘’Course you are.’ Keede opened a small cupboard which I had seen called upon before, mixed sal volatile and water in a graduated glass, and, as Strangwick drank, pushed him gently on to an old sofa. ‘There,’ he went on. ‘It’s nothing to write home about. I’ve seen you ten times worse. I expect our talk has brought things back.’

  He hooked up a chair behind him with one foot, held the patient’s hands in his own, and sat down. The chair creaked.

  ‘Don’t!’ Strangwick squealed. ‘I can’t stand it! There’s nothing on earth creaks like they do! And – and when it thaws we – we’ve got to slap ’em back with a spa-ade ! ’Remember those Frenchmen’s little boots under the duckboards? . . . What’ll I do? What’ll I do about it?’

  Some one knocked at the door, to know if all were well.

  ‘Oh, quite, thanks!’ said Keede over his shoulder. ‘But I shall need this room awhile. Draw the curtains, please.’

  We heard the rings of the hangings that drape the passage from Lodge to Banquet Room click along their poles, and what sound there had been, of feet and voices, was shut off.

  Strangwick, retching impotently, complained of the frozen dead who creak in the frost.

  ‘He’s playing up still,’ Keede whispered. ‘That’s not his real trouble – any more than ’twas last time.’

  ‘But surely,’ I replied, ‘men get those things on the brain pretty badly. ‘Remember in October – ’

  ‘This chap hasn’t, though. I wonder what’s really helling him. What are you thinking of?’ said Keede peremptorily.

  ‘French End an’ Butcher’s Row,’ Strangwick muttered.

  ‘Yes, there were a few there. But suppose we face Bogey instead of giving him best every time.’ Keede turned towards me with a hint in his eye that I was to play up to his leads.

  ‘What was the trouble with French End?’ I opened at a venture.

  ‘It was a bit by Sampoux, that we had taken over from the French. They’re tough, but you wouldn’t call ’em tidy as a nation. They had faced both sides of it with dead to keep the mud back. All those trenches were like gruel in a thaw. Our people had to do the same sort of thing – elsewhere; but Butcher’s Row in French End was the – er – show-piece. Luckily, we pinched a salient from Jerry just then, an’ straightened things out – so we didn’t need to use the Row after November. You remember, Strangwick?’

  ‘My God, yes! When the Buckboard-slats were missin’ you’d tread on ’em, an’ they’d creak.’

  ‘They’re bound to. Like leather,’ said Keede. ‘It gets on one’s nerves a bit, but – ’

  ‘Nerves? It’s real! It’s real!’ Strangwick gulped.

  ‘But at your time of life, it’ll all fall behind you in a year or so. I’ll give you another sip of – paregoric, an’ we’ll face it quietly. Shall we?’

  Keede opened his cupboard again and administered a carefully dropped dark dose of something that was not sal volatile. ‘This’ll settle you in a few minutes,’ he explained. ‘Lie still, an’ don’t talk unless you feel like it.’

  He faced me, fingering his beard.

  ‘Ye-es. Butcher’s Row wasn’t pretty,’ he volunteered. ‘Seeing Strangwick here, has brought it all back to me again. ’Funny thing! We had a Platoon Sergeant of Number Two – what the deuce was his name? – an elderly bird who must have lied like a patriot to get out to the front at his age; but he was a first-class Non-Com., and the last person, you’d think, to make mistakes. Well, he was due for a fortnight’s home leave in January, ’Eighteen. You were at B.H.Q. then, Strangwick, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I was Orderly. It was January twenty-first’; Strangwick spoke with a thickish tongue, and his eyes burned. Whatever drug it was, had taken hold.

  ‘About then,’ Keede said. ‘Well, this Sergeant, instead of coming down from the trenches the regular way an’ joinin’ Battalion Details after dark, an’ takin’ that funny little train for Arras, thinks he’ll warm himself first. So he gets into a dug-out, in Butcher’s Row, that used to be an old French dressing-station, and fugs up between a couple of braziers of pure charcoal! As luck ’ud have it, that was the only dug-out with an inside door opening inwards – some French anti-gas fitting, I expect – and, by what we could make out, the door must have swung to while he was warming. Anyhow, he didn’t turn up at the train. There was a search at once. We couldn’t afford to waste Platoon Sergeants. We found him in the morning. He’d got his gas all right. A machine-gunner reported him, didn’t he, Strangwick?’

  ‘No, Sir. Corporal Grant – o’ the Trench Mortars.’

  ‘So it was. Yes, Grant – the man with that little wen on his neck. ’Nothing wrong with your memory, at any rate. What was the Sergeant’s name?’

  ‘Godsoe – John Godsoe,’ Strangwick answered.

  ‘Yes, that was it. I had to see him next mornin’ – frozen stiff between the two braziers – an
d not a scrap of private papers on him. That was the only thing that made me think it mightn’t have been – quite an accident.’

  Strangwick’s relaxing face set, and he threw back at once to the Orderly Room manner.

  ‘I give my evidence – at the time – to you, sir. He passed – overtook me, I should say – comin’ down from supports, after I’d warned him for leaf. I thought he was goin’ through Parrot Trench as usual; but ’e must ’ave turned off into French End where the old bombed barricade was.’

  ‘Yes. I remember now. You were the last man to see him alive. That was on the twenty-first of January, you say? Now, when was it that Dearlove and Billings brought you to me – clean out of your head?’ . . . Keede dropped his hand, in the style of magazine detectives, on Strangwick’s shoulder. The boy looked at him with cloudy wonder, and muttered: ‘I was took to you on the evenin’ of the twenty-fourth of January. But you don’t think I did him in, do you?’

  I could not help smiling at Keede’s discomfiture; but he recovered himself. ‘Then what the dickens was on your mind that evening – before I gave you the hypodermic?’

  ‘The – the things in Butcher’s Row. They kept on comin’ over me. You’ve seen me like this before, sir.’

  ‘But I knew that it was a lie. You’d no more got stiffs on the brain then than you have now. You’ve got something, but you’re hiding it.’

  ‘ ’Ow do you know, Doctor?’ Strangwick whimpered.

  ‘D’you remember what you said to me, when Dearlove and Billings were holding you down that evening?’

  ‘About the things in Butcher’s Row?’

  ‘Oh, no! You spun me a lot of stuff about corpses creaking; but you let yourself go in the middle of it – when you pushed that telegram at me. What did you mean, f’rinstance, by asking what advantage it was for you to fight beasts of officers if the dead didn’t rise?’

  ‘Did I say “Beasts of Officers”?’

  ‘You did. It’s out of the Burial Service.’

  ‘I suppose, then, I must have heard it. As a matter of fact, I ’ave.’ Strangwick shuddered extravagantly.

  ‘Probably. And there’s another thing – that hymn you were shouting till I put you under. It was something about Mercy and Love. Remember it?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said the boy obediently, and began to paraphrase, as nearly as possible thus: ‘“Whatever a man may say in his heart unto the Lord, yea, verily I say unto you – Gawd hath shown man, again and again, marvellous mercy an’ – an’ somethin’ or other love.” ’ He screwed up his eyes and shook.

  ‘Now where did you get that from?’ Keede insisted.

  ‘From Godsoe – on the twenty-first Jan . . . . ’Ow could I tell what ’e meant to do?’ he burst out in a high, unnatural key – ‘Any more than I knew she was dead.’

  ‘Who was dead?’ said Keede.

  ‘Me Auntie Armine.’

  ‘The one the telegram came to you about, at Sampoux, that you wanted me to explain – the one that you were talking of in the passage out here just now when you began: “O Auntie,” and changed it to “O Gawd”, when I collared you?’

  ‘That’s her! I haven’t a chance with you, Doctor. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with those braziers. How could I? We’re always usin’ ’em. Honest to God, I thought at first go-off he might wish to warm himself before the leaf-train. I – I didn’t know Uncle John meant to start – ’ouse-keepin’.’ He laughed horribly, and then the dry tears came.

  Keede waited for them to pass in sobs and hiccoughs before he continued: ‘Why? Was Godsoe your Uncle?’

  ‘No,’ said Strangwick, his head between his hands. ‘Only we’d known him ever since we were born. Dad ’ad known him before that. He lived almost next street to us. Him an’ Dad an’ Ma an’ – an’ the rest had always been friends. So we called him Uncle – like children do.’

  ‘What sort of man was he?’

  ‘One o’ the best, sir. ’Pensioned Sergeant with a little money left him – quite independent – and very superior. They had a sittin’-room full o’ Indian curios that him and his wife used to let sister an’ me see when we’d been good.’

  ‘Wasn’t he rather old to join up?’

  ‘That made no odds to him. He joined up as Sergeant Instructor at the first go-off, an’ when the Battalion was ready he got ’imself sent along. He wangled me into ’is Platoon when I went out – early in ’Seventeen. Because Ma wanted it, I suppose.’

  ‘I’d no notion you knew him that well,’ was Keede’s comment.

  ‘Oh, it made no odds to him. He ’ad no pets in the Platoon, but ’e’d write ’ome to Ma about me an’ all the doin’s. You see’ – Strangwick stirred uneasily on the sofa – ‘we’d known him all our lives – lived in the next street an’ all . . . . An’ him well over fifty. Oh dear me! Oh dear me! What a bloody mix-up things are, when one’s as young as me!’ he wailed of a sudden.

  But Keede held him to the point. ‘He wrote to your Mother about you?’

  ‘Yes. Ma’s eyes had gone bad followin’ on air-raids. ’Blood-vessels broke behind ’em from sittin’ in cellars an’ bein’ sick. She had to ’ave ’er letters read to her by Auntie. Now I think of it, that was the only thing that you might have called anything at all – ’

  ‘Was that the Aunt that died, and that you got the wire about?’ Keede drove on.

  ‘Yes – Auntie Armine – Ma’s younger sister, an’ she nearer fifty than forty. What a mix-up! An’ if I’d been asked any time about it, I’d ’ave sworn there wasn’t a single sol’tary item concernin’ her that everybody didn’t know an’ hadn’t known all along. No more conceal to her doin’s than – than so much shop-front. She’d looked after sister an’ me, when needful – whoopin’ cough an’ measles just the same as Ma. We was in an’ out of her house like rabbits. You see, Uncle Armine is a cabinet-maker, an’ second-’and furniture, an’ we liked playin’ with the things. She ’ad no children, and when the war came, she said she was glad of it. But she never talked much of her feelin’s. She kept herself to herself, you understand.’ He stared most earnestly at us to help out our understandings.

  ‘What was she like?’ Keede enquired.

  ‘A biggish woman, an’ had been ’andsome, I believe, but, bein’ used to her, we two didn’t notice much – except, per’aps, for one thing. Ma called her ’er proper name, which was Bella; but Sis an’ me always called ’er Auntie Armine. See?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We thought it sounded more like her – like somethin’ movin’ slow, in armour.’

  ‘Oh! And she read your letters to your mother, did she?’

  ‘Every time the post came in she’d slip across the road from opposite an’ read ’em. An’ – an’ I’ll go bail for it that that was all there was to it for as far back as I remember. Was I to swing tomorrow, I’d go bail for that! ’Tisn’t fair of ’em to ’ave unloaded it all on me, because – because – if the dead do rise, why, what in ’ell becomes of me an’ all I’ve believed all me life? I want to know that! I – I – ’

  But Keede would not be put off. ‘Did the Sergeant give you away at all in his letters?’ he demanded, very quietly.

  ‘There was nothin’ to give away – we was too busy – but his letters about me were a great comfort to Ma. I’m no good at writin’. I saved it all up for my leafs. I got me fourteen days every six months an’ one over . . . . I was luckier than most, that way.’

  ‘And when you came home, used you to bring ’em news about the Sergeant?’ said Keede.

  ‘I expect I must have; but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was took up with me own affairs – naturally. Uncle John always wrote to me once each leaf, tellin’ me what was doin’ an’ what I was li’ble to expect on return, an’ Ma ’ud ’ave that read to her. Then o’ course I had to slip over to his wife an’ pass her the news. An’ then there was the young lady that I’d thought of marryin’ if I came through. We’d got as far as pricin’ things in the windows to
gether.’

  ‘And you didn’t marry her – after all?’

  Another tremor shook the boy. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘ ’Fore it ended, I knew what reel things reelly mean! I – I never dreamed such things could be! . . . An’ she nearer fifty than forty an’ me own Aunt! . . . But there wasn’t a sign nor a hint from first to last, so ’ow could I tell? Don’t you see it? All she said to me after me Christmas leaf in’ ’18, when I come to say goodbye – all Auntie Armine said to me was: “You’ll be seein’ Mister Godsoe soon?” “Too soon for my likings,” I says. “ Well then, tell ’im from me,” she says, “ that I expect to be through with my little trouble by the twenty-first of next month, an’ I’m dyin’ to see him as soon as possible after that date.” ’

  ‘What sort of trouble was it?’ Keede turned professional at once.

  ‘She’d ’ad a bit of a gatherin’ in ’er breast, I believe. But she never talked of ’er body much to anyone.’

  ‘I see,’ said Keede. ‘And she said to you?’

  Strangwick repeated: ‘“Tell Uncle John I hope to be finished of my drawback by the twenty-first, an’ I’m dying to see ’im as soon as ’e can after that date.” An’ then she says, laughin’: “But you’ve a head like a sieve. I’ll write it down, an’ you can give it him when you see ’im.” So she wrote it on a bit o’ paper an’ I kissed ’er goodbye – I was always her favourite, you see – an’ I went back to Sampoux. The thing hardly stayed in my mind at all, d’you see. But the next time I was up in the front line – I was a Runner, d’ye see – our platoon was in North Bay Trench an’ I was up with a message to the Trench Mortar there that Corporal Grant was in charge of. Followin’ on receipt of it, he borrowed a couple of men off the platoon, to slue ’er round or somethin’. I give Uncle John Auntie Armine’s paper, an’ I give Grant a fag, an’ we warmed up a bit over a brazier. Then Grant says to me: “I don’t like it”; an’ he jerks ’is thumb at Uncle John in the bay studyin’ Auntie’s message. Well, you know, sir, you had to speak to Grant about ’is way of prophesyin’ things – after Rankine shot himself with the Very light.’