Love and the Loveless
Page 9
*
“Bad luck we’ll just miss Christmas at home,” said Hobart, back in the company lines. “When d’you want to take your embarkation leave, Sticks?”
Phillip had anticipated the question, and many times had rehearsed the answer; but when the time came, he found he could not reply. Reserve had grown upon him, the habit of saying what came into his mind was broken; and the nascent personality felt reluctance to enter again the old world wherein he had been defeated. Home-life, such as it was—love, friendship—all were of the past. The present was endurable, in that activity stopped thought. Only at the front, where everything was different, even the sun and the moon, would he be able to live his new life.
“Oh, I don’t think I want any leave, thanks all the same, Skipper.”
Jack Hobart had suspected a youthful love-affair gone wrong, nothing more, but had asked no questions. Now he felt that he knew Phillip well enough to be of help.
“My dear fellow! All work and no play! Won’t your people want to see you?” He knew that Phillip had a father, by the record of next-of-kin: though the address was 63 Haybundle Street, E.C., apparently an office.
“I don’t think they particularly want to see me.”
What a liar he was. Eyes directed on the floor, he felt pain as he imagined his Mother’s face. But it had always been the same: under childhood love for her had been a broken-glass feeling to hurt her by running away, to be lost. Why, why had she once tried to whip him, his knickerbockers down, with Father’s cane?
Hobart saw that he was twisting his signet ring.
“Do forgive my asking, Sticks, but haven’t you any friends?”
“Not really.”
“Well, I’m in much the same boat. Very nearly the lonely soldier. Most of my pals have gone west. How about spending an evening, or perhaps a couple, with me in town? Sergeant Rivett knows enough to carry on, doesn’t he? Good! That’s a deal, then! We go tomorrow! I’ve managed to get twenty cans of juice, so we’ll go in the old Merc, what? We’ll dine and do a show, and stay at Flossie Flowers’ pub. Plenty of life there, Sticks, my boy!”
The journey down the Great North Road was through air on the edge of frost, but the cold was endurable because unheeded. Phillip knew the road from motor-biking days in that remote time before July the First. They had lunch at Huntington, then blinded on down Ermine Street. At the Caxton Gibbet cross-roads an aeroplane came down low and raced them. It passed over them easily, wheels six feet above them, while the pilot leaned over the cockpit to jerk with two fingers of a gloved hand challenging insults at the driver. All Weather Jack pressed down the accelerator pedal and the blue needle of the brass speedometer wavered at 70. A mile ahead the biplane zoomed, did an Immelman turn, and dived again, to approach with lower wings almost touching the plashed hedges on either side of the straight road as he ran his wheels on the macadam. The bus pulled up fifty feet away and roared over them with a whiff of castor oil.
“That’s an altogether new type of bus,” shouted Jack.
“It can hop it!”
“Rotary engine. Passed us doing a hundred and ten! You all right?”
“Rather!”
The sixteen plugs of the 4 cylinder 4½-litre Grand Prix Mercédès were all firing, the cut-out was open; the blue needle crept up to 95. This was the life!
Chapter 5
EMBARKATION LEAVE
Flowers’ Hotel had a narrow entrance between a hat shop and a boot-shop. The mahogany door was reinforced with much brass, smooth and almost featureless from polishing. The proprietor, Miss Flora Flowers, was said to combine a sharp awareness for social distinctions with a liking for la vie bohême. One of her favourite remarks was said to have been made originally by a young Canadian soldier from Toronto, with some pretensions to be an opera singer—“I believe in ‘the aristocracy of thought’.”
Breeding, she explained in her underground boudoir, on the second night of All Weather Jack’s visit with one of his subalterns, was vertical and not horizontal.
“My dear Flossie, is your autobiography to begin at last?” Fixing her eyes upon the playwright who had spoken, she said in her deep voice, “I do not mean what you mean, Freddy.”
“Surely, Flossie my dear, both conditions are required? Or should it be planes?”
Phillip listened with bewilderment to the talk of the famous. Jack had told him that Freddy, in the uniform of a private soldier, had written The Maid of the Mountains. How could he be so entirely different? He seemed to be waiting for something,and yet not to care if it came, all pointed nose and wry mouth, pale eyes in expressionless face.
“Certainly not! Breeding is vertical, Freddy.”
“But park palings are so cold for the girl, Flossie.”
Phillip felt depressed as the beautiful Maid of the Mountains, which he and Jack had seen the night before, became unreal, made-up.
“You have a common mind, Freddy. I said that breeding is vertical, not horizontal. One is bred after one is born. A terrace house in Brixton can produce an aristocrat of thought, and a palace the most common of minds.” She turned to Phillip beside her, and patted his hand. “Such a nice boy! Sensitive, quiet, self-possessed! I know breeding when I see it. Do you know, you’re the first friend All Weather Jack has brought here, and I’ve known him nearly twelve months? Those eyes and eyelashes should belong to a girl. Don’t take any notice of me, Boy. Here, let’s have a little drink.” She clapped her hands. An aged jockey-like figure appeared, in black stove-pipe trousers and yellow-striped waistcoat with sleeves, a grey quiff plastered upon his brow. “Bring some good wine. Take it from Lord Wyre’s bin.” To Phillip she said, “Bertie Wyre’s making a second fortune out of his camp contracts, so let’s do the right thing for him, and share his good luck. All soldier boys who come to Flowers’ are in the family. Now you’re one of the family, see? Don’t forget to let me have a photo of you before you go out, will you, dear?”
All Weather Jack had said, when he came into his bedroom before dinner the night before, “If Flossie tells you you’re one of the family, it means she accepts you. Don’t be put off by her painted face—she’s been on the stage. Flossie’s the best sort in the world. But don’t call her ‘Flossie’ until she invites you to.”
“Of course not. Is she Miss Flowers, or Mrs.?”
“Miss Flora Flowers. That wonderful Gaiety chorus, when many of the fillies were entered into the stud book, y’know. Somebody set her up here—well, one doesn’t mention it. I’ll see you later, downstairs. Now I’m going to shave and bathe. I’ll show you the bathroom.”
Phillip took the hint; and having shaved and had a bath, he went downstairs, and walked down an uneven corridor covered by a carpet as soft as sand. SMOKING ROOM. He entered an atmosphere of cremated cigars, bald heads, chubby cheeks, and moustaches like the tips of gull’s wings. There were khaki uniforms, some with red tabs; dark blue sailor jackets, ringed with gold above the cuffs; a grey beard and a high-lapelled jacket or two. Many pairs of hands held Pall Mall Gazette, Blackwood’s, or Strand magazines in armchairs beside little tables with tumblers on them under green-shaded electric lamps. No head moved as he looked cautiously about him. The walls were lined with framed SPY cartoons of the famous. He sat upon a chair near the door to await Jack Hobart, wondering if he had come to the wrong room as he became aware of subterranean or intermural noises, as of hot water pushing bubbles along pipes. He listened. The noises were in the room, coming from figures fallen asleep in the heat of the broad coal fire. He tip-toed out, and went back to his bedroom, fighting back a mild frenzy. Empty, lifeless! Nothing had life. Remembering the three Francis Thompson volumes in his haversack, he read for some minutes; and finding the phrase, I am an icicle, whose thawing is its dying, thought that was exactly his own condition, set apart for ever from his fellows. Desperation animated him; he went downstairs again. Nothing. Nobody. But if he left, where could he go? What do? Then a porter appeared and directed him along a corridor. He went down some sta
irs, along a further passage, and across a covered courtyard to a room where between thirty and forty young officers of the two services were sitting at tables, having tea with their girls. A string orchestra on a raised platform at the end, among tubs of large-leaved plants, was tuning up.
Thinking that Jack had told the porter to take him there to wait until he came, he sat at a vacant table, hoping not to be noticed in his solitariness. He put on an expectant expression, as though it were only a moment before a brilliant party, coming in, would hail him as the one they were looking for. Casually, as though deeply interested in thought, he looked around when the orchestra began to play a waltz. Couples arose and glided upon the parquet floor between tables. There were a number of guardees, all looking calm, and amused. They laughed slightly with their girls, who seemed to be more than at ease, as though all their thoughts were assured, like their world. How did it feel to belong to such circles?
An elderly woman, dressed in a black skirt sweeping the floor, and fitted bodice with sleeves to her wrists, came and stood before him, smiling pleasantly. Would he like some tea? Did he prefer Indian or China tea? He stopped himself from saying that he was waiting for someone. “Oh, China! Thank you.” A tray was brought by a younger waitress, who did not smile. It was the first time he had seen slices of the thinnest lemon arranged in a circle, and almost equally thin rolled bread and butter. Should he give her a tip? Before he could decide, she said, “Thank you, sir,” and went away. The hot tea and lemon, the delicious bread and butter made him feel better. He became interested in the couple at the next table.
An officer, with his back to him, was facing a girl wearing a sort of military forage cap, of dark blue material with red piping and small yellow tassels. When he dared to glance at her, Phillip saw a gaze of very bright blue eyes upon himself. She sat with her chin resting in the palm of one hand, and thinking that she was smiling at someone beyond him, after awhile he turned round casually and saw no one there. He kept his eyes on his table, thinking that he must have been mistaken; she probably hadn’t noticed him, thinking her own thoughts. Even so, he felt her gaze still upon him, and looking up again to watch the dancing, found himself held in her smile.
The waltz ended, there was polite clapping, through which a man and girl made for her table, and sat down. When the music began again the girl with the bright eyes got up to dance with the man who had just been dancing, leaving the man with his back turned still sitting there. Watching her, he saw that the cap she wore went with a uniform tunic of dark blue with red facings, round brass buttons, and epaulettes. A short skirt, half way between knee and shoe, completed the military effect.
“Hullo,” she said, as the dance brought her past his table. “Aren’t you with All Weather Jack?”
“Yes,” he said, half rising.
“Ours is the next dance!” and with a flutter of fingertips she swung away to the strains of Destiny Waltz. He felt devastated. He couldn’t dance. Oh hell, why hadn’t he learned?
When the next dance began he got up with a feeling almost of being in no-man’s-land in daylight. She opened her arms and he was for it. “I can’t dance!”
She laughed. It was like a story in Nash’s Magazine, he said to himself, rejoicingly.
“I’ve been driving in a Voluntary Ambulance Unit attached to the Belgian Army, and now I’m having a spell at home. I take out wounded officers from Dolly Hill-Walker’s hospital in Regent’s Park. Dolly is a cousin, and a neighbour of Jack H’b’rt’s parents, that’s how I met him. Now you know all about me!”
“My name is Phillip Maddison.”
“And you’re a two striper!”
“Well——”
She hugged him impulsively. “I am Sasha! And you—Phillip! What more do we need to know?”
While she was talking, he saw that the man sitting still at the table had lost both legs.
“Oh, I forgot! Of course, we are dinner partners tonight, Phillip. Ah, there’s All Weather Jack. My word, isn’t he smart!”
Hobart wore blues. They all sat at Sasha’s table, and had a bottle of champagne, then another. It was time, she said, to take her two lambs back to Dolly in Regent’s Park. An hour later—most pleasantly spent by Phillip with Jack at a downstairs cellar-bar, she returned wearing a light blue evening frock the colour of her eyes. Another girl arrived, Bobo, to make a foursome. They drank sherry. So far Phillip had not seen the fabulous Flossie; but he had found out a little more about the place, from Jack. The old boys in the room he had gone into were collectively known as The Club. They were, or had been, particular friends of Flossie at one time or another. In fact, said Jack, talking through his back teeth, Flossie at one time was The Club.
“Strictly between ourselves, of course. And never in the good lady’s hearing it need hardly be said. You know the form—‘Kiss and never tell’.”
“Certainly.” All the same, he thought, in the past he had told everything to Desmond and Mrs. Neville. Jack went on, “In fact, the pass-word, I’m told, used to be ‘Are you going to the Club today?’ Not a word! Marvellous woman, Flossie. She’s asked us to her party after the theatre tonight.”
How suddenly life could change: two hours before, the place was lifeless, and now—— No, he had been lifeless. Friendship, or love, made all the difference. And yet—something more was needed. Poetry—the spirit of beauty—the faith that Lily had. There would never be anyone like Lily again.
“A penny for them?” Sasha smiled into his eyes. “Darling Phillip,” she breathed, and took his hand when they went in to dinner.
Afterwards, four stalls at the Alhambra. The Bing Boys Are Here. They were, and so am I, Phillip Maddison! Marvellous, wonderful! Warmth, light, colour, lovely people! On the stage the funniest couple, George Robey and Alfred Lester, and adorable (Jack’s word) Vi Lorraine. Jack said, “I’ve seen this show fifteen times!” During the interval he told a story about ‘Duggie’ Haig, who had come to see the show with his children.
“George Robey told me this. Saying a few words of thanks to the principal artistes afterwards, the great man said, ‘I had to come and see the performance, everyone in France talks about your “Bing Bong Brothers”.’ ‘Sir,’ replied Robey, ‘if we are the Bings, your men are certainly the Bongs’.”
Sasha held Phillip’s hand tightly during the last scene. He saw tears in her eyes. Alone with her in the taxi back to the hotel—Jack and Bobo, both in huge fur coats, returned in the ‘Merc’ after the show—Sasha held his hand to her bosom, saying, “Oh, I cannot help thinking of all the boys who have been there, sitting in the very same seats, laughing and clapping, who——” She wept a little, and recovered. He sat still. Peering into his face, “Phillip, darling, you do understand, don’t you? I love them all, I must love everyone I see, it is me, it is the life in me, nothing to do with ‘Sasha’! I must give, give, give while I can! Do you, who love poetry, understand? Tell me you do?”
“Yes, I do, Sasha. Oh God, yes——”
“You too have tears! I knew, I knew! Darling, darling, darling Phillip! I loved you as soon as I saw you. I felt you were dreadfully lost and unhappy. I won’t ask questions, of course. What are words, anyway? It is feelings that matter. My husband understands, thank God. Oh, I love him so dearly! We are everything to one another. Does that shock you, darling?”
“No, I think that love creates love.”
“You understand! Of course you do, with your fine feelings! Darling, darling Phillip! Kiss me if you want to. If you don’t want to, then don’t! What is a kiss, anyway? It is the spirit that matters. Life is a spirit, I am sure of it! One either knows, or one does not know. My sisters are shocked at the way I behave. When I was still in the schoolroom they called me ‘the prostitute’! What does it matter? Love creates love, hate generates hate, which is sin, and hurts the soul. Darling, you are so sweet!” She kissed his hand as the taxi drew up by the brass-bound mahogany door, with its dim rows of service caps on one side, and field boots on the other.
“They know the form, Sasha. Once they belonged to sheep, and to bullocks. They were taken away by men——”
“Isn’t life hell for everything, darling? Simply hell!”
They laughed, and went in through the door.
A party was going on in Flossie’s air-raid cellar, got up as a boudoir. Champagne. Smears of what looked like jellified tar on little thin “captain” biscuits turned out to be caviare, given to her, said Flossie, by the Grand Duke Nicolas on his last (incognito) visit to London. Sitting on a chair with its tall and narrow back curving over her head like a shell, among her boys in blues and her girls in their “glad rags” sitting on the floor around her, she did not so much hold court as assume matriarchal benevolence over them. To Phillip she was a slightly frightening figure behind a painted face with gummed-on eyelashes and brows and wig of auburn hair by Willie Clarkson, a theatrical outfitter whose own face, as he leaned over her squeaking a funny story, seemed to be adorned with what paint had been left over from his work upon Flossie Me Darlin’, as he called her, while telling his story.
“It’s every word of it true, every word, I swear it! There was the Dook of Connaught, and several Ladies of the Court invitin’ me, me Me Darlin’, to the Palace, to tell them all how to make-up for Charades at Christmas! Up and down the Throne Room we steps, the Dook and me, his arm in mine, while I try to keep step. Such big boots he wore, and spurs, my word, he’d been turnin’ out the Guard, or somethin’. Well, Flossie Me Darlin’, there we were, or there was I, all mixed up, the Dook holding me by the arm, like I was pinched by a copper, walking me up and down, up and then down, me knees knocking, me toes turned first in then out, the Throne Room it was, too, like an ambassador, me all the while tryin’ to kip step wiv ’im in Field Marshal’s costume! Me Darlin’,” he quipped, “I did me best to suggest you for the part of Britannia, but the Honourable Mrs. You Know Who said ‘No, Definitely No!’ I could have sunk into the floor at me floater! Oh blime! I’ve bored you! Sorry!”