Old Wine and New

by Warwick Deeping

  He got out of the ambulance. He felt a sudden urge towards one of those bolt-holes in the pyramids of broken brick. He stood in the middle of the road as though his feet had suddenly adhered to it; he felt unable to move; the conscious part of him seemed paralysed.

  The car orderly grinned, and thrust towards Scarsdale a half-empty packet of cigarettes.

  “Have a fag, old lad.”

  Scarsdale put out a hand, and was astonished to find that his fingers somehow appeared incapable of picking out one of the white paper tubes. He stared at his own fingers. The orderly gave the packet a shake, and a cigarette protruded.

  “Still on the job? You can take the next bus back.”

  Something inside Scarsdale winced and hardened. His tight bowels yearned.

  “No. I’m going up. Which way?”

  “Right along the road till you come to Hell Fire Corner.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Like? Oh, it’s just Hell Fire Corner, a bit messy. There’s a duck-board track on the left.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’ll take you up to Zonnebeke—if you feel like it. And if you get to Zonnebeke don’t stand messing about near the church or the soda-water factory. They’re bloody.”

  Scarsdale, with a cigarette between lips that were rather pale, nodded, and smiled a cracked smile.

  “Thanks. I’ll be getting on. Suppose there will be buses running back to No. 37 this evening?”

  “Sure. So-long, old lad.”

  “So-long.”

  Scarsdale walked down the road to Menin. He did not like the road to Menin, and he liked Hell Fire Corner less. My god, what a landscape! Desolation upon desolation! Horror, fear! The very shell-holes were mouths full of fear. They had crumbling, oozy lips. And there was rubbish everywhere, or an upheaval of things that suggested rubbish. The very earth seemed to have been torn to tatters. This blasted landscape, this atmosphere of anguish and of fear, while overhead the summer sky was big and blue with white clouds.

  Scarsdale got away suddenly from Hell Fire Corner. He ran; he had reason to run; he sighted the duck-board track and clattered along it, until a shell blew up a section of it somewhere behind him. He fell. It was his fear that fell. He found himself half in and half out of a shell-hole, and looking down at something that floated in water that was the colour of pea-soup. A pair of legs in puttees protruded from under a greatcoat. And Scarsdale was conscious of sudden intense nausea. He stared at those legs as though fascinated. His heart was beating a hundred a minute. He could feel it. Its throbbings seemed to shake his body.

  Presently he got up. Something made him get up, a little, thin, sneering pride. His lips felt razor-edged. He crammed his cap down and looked about him. His legs quivered, and he cursed them.

  “Damn you, keep still.”

  Abruptly he became aware of the loneliness of the landscape. There was not a human figure to be seen, no, not one. He alone seemed to be standing upright under that summer sky in a desolation of shell-holes and tumbled earth. He saw the duck-board track going on over the slope of a low hill like some immense tape-worm squirming from east to west.

  For the moment this sense of isolation frightened Scarsdale almost as much as did the ripping, metallic shell-bursts. Where was everybody? There were thousands of men somewhere. He hesitated. He wanted to go back as quickly as possible by the way he had come, and not to cease from going back until he was among the quiet, unshelled fields. He fought against the importunities of his fear. It was fierce, shameless, without honour. It would listen neither to reason nor to reproaches. It stood naked and unabashed.

  Yet, he went on. He forced himself on. He did not run, but plodded doggedly along the duck-boards. By the carcase of a dead tree and under the shelter of a mud bank he saw a row of guns crouching like strange beasts in pits. Not a soul was to be seen. Extraordinary! And over this seeming solitude a kind of sinister silence was stretched like a tense skin, a silence that reverberated when a shell burst where hundreds of other shells had fallen.

  5

  Scarsdale came to Zonnebeke. He saw the red excrescence which was the corpse of the church, some dead and broken trees, a low hill pitted with shell-holes and crowned with a little mound of red brick. A road, or what had been a road, ran between the church and the hill. Away on his left front a rusty gasometer lay tilted, huge and strange and ridiculous. A gasometer! What next?

  He avoided Zonnebeke. He skirted round it towards the north. He saw a few figures in khaki near the mound of broken bricks. A track led up to a little plateau. There were fewer shell-holes here, and some remnants of vegetation.

  Suddenly a man came running. He appeared from nowhere; he had his head down.

  Scarsdale spoke.

  “Is it far to the trenches?”

  The man did not stop. He slackened his pace for a moment and stared. His blue eyes had a strange, set look.

  “Straight on. Sunken road.”

  He ran on. If he felt any surprise at seeing Scarsdale there he did not show it. Loitering was unwholesome. And again Scarsdale was alone.

  This little plateau lay sheeted with sunlight, a study in brown against the blue of the sky. It was hot, very hot, and Scarsdale was sweating, yet down there on the duck-board track he had shivered. He went on. He felt a little less afraid, for this little plateau seemed more peaceful. Actually a lark was singing overhead.

  Scarsdale smiled. He stood still.

  “What do the birds think of our war?”

  What a fool was man! For man in the mass was fooled by a phrase, a mere catch-cry. And when the war was over would the crowd listen to other catch-cries, the apt little phrase from the lips of a demagogue? Thank God, the birds and the beasts were neither patriots nor politicians. He walked on; he came to the sunken road; he was passing a cutting in the brown bank when he saw a man sitting in the bottom of the trench. The man was all brown; so was the soil, but the sky was a blue sheet. The man had his back to the earth wall, and his grey shirt lay across his knees.

  Chapter Two

  Marwood.

  That was Scarsdale’s first glimpse of Marwood, a man in a brown cleft of the earth, intently and solemnly picking lice from his shirt. It was as though the clock of time had gone back to the days when there were no clocks, and man,—primitive and unadorned,—squatted in a hole, and scratched himself. Almost it was ape-like.

  Scarsdale entered the trench. It was no more than a sap cut in the earth for shelter. The man with the shirt sat in a patch of sunlight; he had slipped on his tunic while dealing with his shirt, and it being unbuttoned, showed the whiteness of his chest. So absorbed was he in the business of the moment that he remained unaware of Scarsdale’s presence until the visitor was close upon him.

  He glanced up. His face expressed neither surprise, not resentment, nor pleasure. It had a sallow darkness. The eyes were inarticulate, full of an infinite, dumb sadness; they were hopeless eyes, and as Scarsdale looked into them he remembered the cry of his inward voice. Broken souls.

  He said, “You’re busy.”

  The man with the shirt compressed something between thumb and finger.

  “Obviously. Must do something.”

  He looked up at Scarsdale, and for a moment his eyes lost their dead expression, for Scarsdale was unusual. He had no steel hat, no box-respirator, no flashes.

  “Where have you blown from?”

  “No. 37 C.C.S.”

  “What! What the devil are you doing up here?”

  “I’ve come up to see the real thing. I’ve only seen the other end of it.”

  “Good lord!”

  He let his shirt lie across his knees.

  “You must be damned innocent. How did you get up here?”

  “I had a lift on an ambulance, and then I walked.”

  “Took the day off, in fact, for a nice country ramble.”

  His slate-blue eyes were bitter. He had one of those large, sallow, flat faces that light up but rarely with a smile. He l
ooked as though he had never smiled. His hands were dirty; he had shaved himself indifferently, and yet he had some quality that saved him from being squalid.

  “Well, how do you like it?”

  Scarsdale stared at the man’s boots.

  “I’ve been afraid. I wanted to bolt. Everything’s so strange.”

  “Strange!”

  His echoing of the word mingled scorn and pathos.

  “Well, anyway, I’m damned. Did you meet anybody?”

  “One man—in a hurry. That’s what struck me as so extraordinary.”

  “What, the hurry?”

  “No, the solitude.”

  The man’s dark head went down; he seemed to become enveloped in darkness.

  “It’s nothing like the solitude inside you. Hell!”

  And suddenly he snarled at Scarsdale.

  “Sit down. You had better crawl under that ground-sheet there and hide in the hole if anybody comes along. You’d be for it.”

  “For it. Why?”

  “No tin hat, no respirator, no nothing. No business here—either. Got a fag on you?”

  Scarsdale had. He sat down with his back to the earth wall, but not too close to the grey shirt. The man’s dirty fingers picked a cigarette from the packet. He tapped it on the back of his hand, and groped in the right-hand pocket of his tunic for a match. Sullenly he contemplated the flame, and then lighting the cigarette, drew the smoke in deep.

  “Thanks. Nothing worth living for now but the rum and the cigs, though there’s a sort of filthy joy in a clean shirt and hot stew. What the devil made you come up here?”

  “I felt I ought to.”

  “Ought to! That sounds like the old brass band and music-hall stunt days. Like to stay here?”

  “No.”

  “That’s better. The sort of slush you get up here drowns all other sorts of slush. Pretty comfy where you are.”

  “Sometimes I’m ashamed. You see—I was over forty when I volunteered, and not too fit. They made me—”

  The sallow man cut in.

  “Don’t apologize. Thank your blighted stars. No false modesty. Married, are you?”

  “No.”

  He of the shirt fell into a kind of muse. His eyes stared. He inhaled smoke and blew it through his nostrils, and his nostrils seemed to sneer. Then he unbuttoned the breast pocket of his tunic and drew out a wad of old letters and photographs. He spread them on his shirt, and selecting a photograph, passed it to Scarsdale.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Your wife?”

  “No, daughter. Good kid. Should like to see her again, but I shan’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “My number’s up. I know.”

  Scarsdale glanced at him as though to say—“O, rot,” but he did not say it, for the man’s eyes had a hopelessness. So Scarsdale looked at the photograph, and saw a girl with a plain, square face, and a cloud of jet-black hair. She resembled her father, and her eyes were like her father’s, save that they were young and bright, and without that lamentable hopelessness. She looked determined, and rather too square about the chin and forehead for a girl, but the face had a clarity. Across a corner of the photo was written, “Daddy, with Julia’s love.”

  Scarsdale had the feeling that he ought to say something about the photograph, something that would please the man, but while he was still looking at it he heard the other’s voice suddenly blurting out words that sounded inconsequential and incongruous.

  “Women! O, lord women! Seeing ’em makes you mad. Silk stockings or high boots,—and the little aprons the French girls wear. And my wife’s a—O, well that’s that!”

  He looked sideways at Scarsdale and held out his hand for the photograph.

  “Good kid. Only live thing I care a damn about. And I shan’t see her again. Funny, isn’t it?”

  Scarsdale felt himself penetrated by this other man’s sadness. Here in the trenches you were in contact with elemental things, and men became fatalists. They were chained to an idea. Even while cursing the war, and dragging their feet through the mud, or sharing their food with the flies, they accepted the inevitableness of the bloody business. And from being dumb and desperate they laughed, just as the man with the shirt threw his head back suddenly and laughed.

  “Funny, isn’t it! Millions of men squatting in trenches and shell-holes, just because—Makes one marvel. Why don’t we all walk home? And yet when Jerry goes for us or we go for Jerry—we are just like a lot of mad beasts. Fastened up in cages, and then let out to tear each other.”

  He threw away the end of his cigarette.

  “You’re a Londoner.”

  Scarsdale nodded.

  “Same here. Chelsea. Clerk in an estate agent’s office. Used to be. Quite a sober sort of fellah. And you?”

  “Canonbury Square.”

  “Upper Street—Islington. O, God! Something in the city, are you?”

  “What they used to call a literary gent.”

  “Going back to it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  There was silence between them, a staring, heavy silence. Across the strip of blue sky an aeroplane flying high passed like a faint, silvery moth. A piece of earth slithered down with a dry, rattling sound. The man began to finger his shirt.

  “My name’s Marwood. Look here, if you take my advice, you’ll cut and run.”

  “Why?”

  “Why! Because it’s nice and quiet. Fritz’s dinner-hour you know. Later he’ll get busy. If I were you I’d shin it.”

  “That sounds rather like—”

  “Sense, old lad. I’d cut and run—now, if I wasn’t sure I should be caught and shot.”

  Said Scarsdale, drawing in his long legs.

  “No, you wouldn’t. Some of us stick things out.”

  He got up. He felt a sort of shame in leaving this other man there chained to his fate.

  “Perhaps we’ll meet in London.”

  “In hell, more likely, or your old C.C.S. Well, good luck. If Fritz starts a hate go flat on your belly. No use doing the heroic stunt with H.E. flying about.”

  His sallow face cracked in a grin, but his eyes retained their intolerable sadness, and Scarsdale, dropping his packet of cigarettes on the grey shirt, walked suddenly away and did not look back.

  2

  Scarsdale raised his hand to the knocker of the door, but again he hesitated. His hand sank to his side. His consciousness was both here and there, divided and yet joined together. He seemed to see both this dark door in a London street and that bed in a ward, and Marwood’s dying face.

  Yes, it had been a strange coincidence, and the eyes of the man with the shirt had retained their intolerable sadness. His eyes had beckoned Scarsdale, and the orderly had bent over him.

  “Look in my pocket. Letters and a photo. Don’t want strangers messing about with them. No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace. Julia.”

  Scarsdale had understood.

  “You want me—?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do it when I go on leave.”

  Marwood had smiled a pinched and tragic smile at him, and had gulped a few more words.

  “Damned silly. Muddle. No more lice and cold feet. O, my God, what a muddle!”

  And in a little while he had died.

  Scarsdale’s eyes came back to the dark door, and if a door can have eyes, its eyes were the eyes of Marwood; a man who had died believing in nothing, hoping for nothing. There was no mystery other than that of knowing that man did not know what lay behind the closed door of his consciousness. God had withdrawn himself, even the gentle god of man’s own creating, and man’s cleverness had created another god of steel and powder and gas. Cleverness and chaos. Had man ever shown himself more callously and cunningly cruel?

  But this dark door in this dark street? Was there nothing behind it, no light that was not an illusion, no glimmer of faith in something or someone? For the war had rent the bowels of the world’s compassion, and left an emptiness. There had b
een too much death, too much dirt to dirt, and though humanity might put on the old garments of sentiment it did not feel itself to be in any sacred place. A slaughter-house and a scavenger’s cart, and people trying to be callous and nice and efficient. He could not efface the memory of Marwood’s eyes, for they were so much like the eyes of his own pre-war self staring at a pock-marked earth instead of at a picture by Millet. Scarsdale had been a sentimentalist. He had believed in love and the lamb and the lily. He had read his Matthew Arnold and his Ruskin in front of a bachelor fire in Canonbury Square while eating buttered toast. He had been a gentle, credulous sort of creature.

  Again, Scarsdale raised his hand to the knocker. The rattat had more emphasis than he had intended to give it, and he stood back a little from the door like a shy man who has heard his own voice raised too loudly. He had not greatly wanted to come to No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace, or to get himself mixed up with other people’s emotions. But he had promised Marwood. He listened. He heard a sound of movement on the other side of the door. A key was turned.

  The door was opened, but not too widely. He saw a dim face and a dark figure. He was conscious of being looked at, and unwelcomingly so. He raised his hand to the peak of his cap.

  “I beg your pardon, is this Mrs. Marwood’s?”

  The dim face had an uncompromising stillness. He was very conscious of being scrutinized.

  “We don’t want any of you beasts here.”

  He realized that the door was being closed, and that the face was being eclipsed by the dark edge. Beasts! But why beasts? His astonishment protested.

  “Excuse me, my name’s Scarsdale. I was with Marwood—”

  The edge of the door remained motionless.

  “You have come from France?”

  “Yes. Are you Mrs. Marwood?”

  “No. I’m the daughter.”

  3

  But the door remained for a moment like a half-closed barrier between them, while Scarsdale stood and wondered. He wondered at her silence and at her unfriendliness, and at the way she had uttered that scathing, whip-like word. He was puzzled too by her hesitation. But was it hesitation? The dimly defined figure of her youth had a deliberate solidity, and he remembered the face of the photograph, broad and open, with its squareness of chin and forehead. She could not be much more than twenty. And she was keeping him upon the doorstep as though she mistrusted life, and was in no hurry to compromise or to surrender.