Sir Pompey And Madame Juno

by Martin Armstrong

  Dixon looked up at him. ‘Good luck!’ he said, ‘and mind you don’t forget to have every post warned that you’re going out.’

  ‘I’ve already told Sergeant Sims to have that done,’ Freen answered as he went out.

  At the foot of the dugout stairs Sergeant Sims was waiting for him. ‘Are the men ready?’ Freen asked.

  ‘They’re waiting up in the trench, sir.’

  Freen lowered his voice. ‘Look here, Sims, I’m not taking out all the men. We’re to leave four of them in the trench.’

  ‘And a good job too, sir. It’s pretty light upstairs.’

  ‘Is it? How light?’

  ‘Well, as you’ll see, sir, a good bit too light for the job.’

  Freen was silent for a moment. ‘Then we’ll not take the other four either,’ he said. ‘We’ll dump them just outside our wire to wait till we come back. You and I can manage much better alone. What do you think?’

  ‘I’m all for going out alone, sir.’

  ‘Good. Then hadn’t you better leave your rifle and get a revolver? Do as you like about your hat and gas-bag. I’m leaving mine: they’re a damned nuisance when you crawl.’

  As he climbed the dugout stair Freen saw a pale, translucent square of sky waiting for him at the top of it. He climbed with his body bent forward to avoid the low roof which threatened his hatless head. It was a relief, when he had stepped out into the trench, to stretch his back and shoulders and breathe in the fresh air. The evening was clear and green: he looked at his watch and saw that even the second-hand was clearly visible. The eight men, a conglomeration of restless, murmuring shapes, stood waiting near the dugout entrance. Freen divided them into two parties and put each in charge of its senior man. Then he gave to each its orders – the one to remain on guard in the trench, the other to lie down outside our wire and keep quiet till he and the Sergeant returned. ‘And remember,’ Sims warned them, ‘if you shoot us, you’re for it,’ Freen was aware, whether by sympathy or some still undefined power of perception, of a slackening of tension among the men, of something like an inaudible sigh of relief, and the sense of it aroused a similar feeling in himself. He led them along the winding trench to the point from which he was to start, and having posted the party which was to remain in the trench, he and Sims with the remaining four climbed on to the parapet and began with infinite caution to pick their way through the thick tangles of wire. Every sound – each small click of a buckle against the wire, even the breathing and occasional sniffing of the men – seemed, in the night stillness, as if it must be audible for miles. It was as if the whole world were listening for them alone. How slow and clumsy they seemed, as Freen, who was the first to get through the wire, stood watching the five swaying shapes sharply defined in the clear green light. ‘It’s a wonder,’ he thought, ‘that they haven’t spotted us already.’

  At last, thank God, all were through and, finding an old shell-hole a few yards in front of the wire, Freen settled them down in it and gave them their final instructions. ‘Now we’re all right,’ he whispered to Sims. Having got those fellows safely through the wire, the worst, he felt, was over. He and Sims began slowly to move forward, and Freen felt, as he always felt in No-Man’s Land, that he was walking in some high place, exposed, as if under a searchlight, to hundreds of eyes.

  After they had gone about fifty yards he stopped and Sims, who followed behind, glided up beside him like ghost meeting ghost.

  ‘There’s a hole just ahead there,’ Freen whispered: ‘a bit of trench. You see the chalk? May be a sap. Better get down. Follow me and if I waggle my heel, lie still.’

  They dropped quietly to their hands and knees and crept forward in single file. When he was within a few yards of the chalk Freen stopped again. From where he lay he could see down into the hole. It was a small isolated trench, a motionless confusion of glimmering whiteness and black shadow. He was watching one of the shadows. It seemed, as he stared at it, to stand out detached, blacker and more solid than the rest. Sims slid up beside him and they lay for an age, watching together. But the shadow never moved, and they began to crawl forward again. And as he crawled, Freen was thinking to himself: ‘The waiting’s over. Here we are, doing the job. The hour’s actually running its course’; and it seemed to him that he was engaged in the performance of something unreal. He felt detached, incredulous, and, except for a sort of physical tension somewhere about the pit of his stomach, perfectly calm. He stared into the darkness ahead and it seemed to him that he could detect a vague grey hedge stretched across the world in front of him. They must be getting somewhere near the enemy wire. But next moment, at a point much farther ahead, a light shot up out of the ground and in one brief flash Freen saw the Boche wire clearly outlined against it. It was much farther away than he had thought. In an instant the light had soared upwards, filling all No-Man’s Land with a staring brilliance scarred by great slashes of trembling shadows. Then it drooped and dived winking to the earth, where it lay pulsating like a dying thing ten yards from where they lay. In the ebbing brightness Freen saw a long stretch of silver-washed foreground spread out before him.

  When the darkness came back it seemed much deeper than before and they crawled ahead, feeling for the first time that they were invisible. Progression by crawling is slow, and it seemed that they had covered a great distance when Freen came upon a shallow shell-hole overgrown with grass. He slid into it to rest, for the crawling was laborious work, and Sims slid in after him. ‘Rest a bit,’ Freen whispered in his ear, ‘and see where we are.’

  But it was difficult now to see anything, and Sims sat up on his heels and began to look about him. Freen, glancing up at him, saw the dark mass of his head and shoulders sway across the background of green sky.

  Next minute there came three loud reports out of the darkness to their right and, following them, the hum of a flying fragment, low overhead. Hand-grenades! Had the Boche too seen something? Freen felt suddenly amused. There was something laughable in that symptom of apprehension among the invisible and inaudible folk in front of them. ‘Damned bad shots, anyhow!’ he whispered to Sims. But Sims was fumbling for his revolver, and it seemed to Freen extraordinary that he should be taking the thing so seriously. But next moment another flickering light shot up – how surprisingly close the wire was now – and, immediately after, a terrific pulsating din burst upon them. It stopped, and Freen heard an electric bell jangling loudly and furiously. It filled the night. He was astounded, terrified. It was the unaccountableness of the thing that terrified him. But in a few seconds he had understood, for the sound was already becoming less real. It was his ear, his right ear, ringing and jangling, half-deafened by the splitting noise of the machine-gun. He could feel the numbness of it now, thick, wadded, as if filled with clay.

  They lay flattened on to the ground, immovable, waiting. But they had not to wait long. After a brief pause the machine-gun opened up again. It was immediately in front of them and, it seemed, only a few yards away. Freen could feel a beating in the grass a few inches from his head. It was the bullets striking the earth. They lay, he and Sims, flattened into their shell-hole like two large fish in a soup-plate. Then again there came silence – vast, overwhelming silence – and they listened with all their ears for what might happen next. Would a party be sent out through the wire to look for them? If it came to that they would have to run for it. For the first time the thought came to Freen that this was deadly earnest and it was quite likely that he and Sims would never get back to the company. But no new sound came: only a sense that eyes were riveted on the spot where they lay, watching for the smallest movement. They lay still as dead men and time flowed over their heads: how much time they never knew. But at last, when all had been quiet for an age and the length of time for which a man would continue to watch seemed to be past, Freen turned his head and whispered to Sims, ‘We’ll crawl! Keep quite flat!’ and he began to slue himself round like a snake. Slowly and noiselessly they drew themselves along with their arms,
crooking the right leg sideways and sliding their bodies along with the right knee pivoted on the ground.

  And so they crawled till they were exhausted. After a short rest they rose on their hands and knees and did another fifty yards. By that time it seemed that the Boche was far behind them, and they rose stiffly to their feet and walked upright. How secure they felt now: and yet at that point on their way out they were creeping carefully on hands and knees. Freen kept bearing to his right. By doing so, he knew he would strike a broken railway which ran straight back to their own wire; and soon they struck it and walked boldly ahead following the line of it.

  Suddenly there was a movement and a hiss in front of them.

  ‘All right! All right! It’s us!’said Freen aloud, for he had heard a sharply-whispered ‘Who’s that!’ and knew at once that they were already reaching their first party of men. He chuckled to himself. The fellow, by the sound of his whisper, had been quite scared. And yet what was there to be scared about at that distance from the Boche? ‘Come on!’ he said to them. ‘Get up! What’s the matter with you?’

  The men climbed stiffly to their feet and Freen led the way through the wire. Five minutes later he was through it and stood on the parapet. White faces under helmets stared up at him: he saw the gas-masks on their chests and their bayonets pointing sharp out of the trench, and it seemed to him extraordinary that men should be watching, alert and fully armed, in a place which seemed to him now so absolutely secure. He stooped forward and, putting one hand on the shoulder of the sentry below him, jumped down on to the fire-step beside him. Bare-headed, stripped of everything but his revolver, he felt happy, careless, secure. Life pulsed in a warm flood through his body and limbs. He stretched himself and breathed-in the familiar, earthy smell of the trench. The night air was cool and fresh on his face, and it seemed to him at that moment that he was at the very summit of health and manhood. He waited till the last man had jumped down into the trench and then turned with Sims towards Company Head-quarters. ‘What we want now, Sims,’ he said, ‘is a drink.’

  When they had scrambled down into the snug, good-smelling dugout, Freen took a deep breath. ‘Well,’ he said to the Sergeant, ‘that’s done!’,’ and he groped along the dim tunnel to the officers’ mess. Dixon was sitting at the table waiting for the end of the war. He looked up as Freen entered. ‘Well, thank God for that!’ he said in his quiet, tired voice. ‘I was beginning to wonder if I ought to expect you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not? Well, we heard you having high jinks out there. When the sentry heard those bombs he came down and mentioned it to me, and I got up in time for the machine-gun display. I’ve been hanging about up there for an hour. I gave you an hour and a half. After that I began to think you’d stopped a packet.’

  ‘What I want,’ said Freen, ‘is a drink. Is there anything?’

  ‘There’s a bottle of vin rouge that the Quartermaster-Sergeant brought up with the rations. You can have that.’

  Freen opened the bottle, poured out two tumblers full, and carried them out. ‘Sims!’ he shouted into the dark.

  Sims’s voice answered down the tunnel and, a moment after, he appeared. Freen handed him one of the tumblers, and drank off his own at a single gulp.

  Sir Pompey and Madame Juno

  Everybody – all the staff, that is, and the regular customers – knew Sir Pompey. For years he had dined at the Langouste. He had his own sacred table there, a little table for two which he occupied alone, except when he brought a guest. His entry and his exit always made a little stir. As he toddled in, he paused ceremoniously to grasp with the tips of his fingers the hand of the patronne, who sat enclosed like a coloured wax bust in her glass-case, before he passed on to where Jean, his own particular waiter, would relieve him of his coat, and Henri, the wine-waiter, of his hat and cane. It was always as if he had just returned from a long absence. And always, either before sitting down at his own table or, afterwards, before going out, he would turn to exchange a word or two at one of the other tables – first a few general remarks to all and then half-whispered confidences with the ladies, sympathetic inquiries, understanding advice, it seemed, about private feminine matters; and always, to finish with, a comic remark accompanied by a gesture or a grimace, under cover of which he took flight, leaving titters behind him.

  His name and occupation were unknown. It was one of the other old stagers who had, years before, christened him Sir Pompey, because that was obviously his fitting name – so obviously that it spread inevitably from group to group and had long since become the common property of every one excepting Sir Pompey himself. The theories about him were various. Some would have it that he was a retired actor, still vaguely connected with the theatre; others that he was a baronet of ancient family who had wildly squandered a fortune and now lived a secluded life in a flat in Shaftesbury Avenue; others again that he ‘travelled’ in the more expensive varieties of ladies’ underwear. His appearance partly supported all these views. He was under the average height, and in the matter of age he hovered indefinitely between fifty and seventy. Beneath his iron-grey hair, with its wide pink parting, a deeply grooved forehead sloped out to two bushy eyebrows. Two small, sharp eyes kept watch on either side of a fine proboscis of a nose. It was the lower part of his face that alternately shook all the theories about him, for his clean-shaved mouth was large and unstable, and now Sir Pompey would set it sternly into a line of legal determination, now he would allow it as it were to fall to pieces, loosely, baggily, into a spectacle of pathetic weakness. His chin struck you at once by its absence. In the rapidly retreating slope from his nether lip to his collar stud there was a small convex pouch: nothing more. His tailor was obviously a good one, and he was conspicuous always for his immaculate collar and cuffs, the small diamond pin in his black satin tie, and his light-grey bowler and spats. A great problem, vague, baffling but for that inspired certainty that his ideal name, whatever his actual name, was Sir Pompey.

  Another element in the mystery was his occasional absences for a month or six weeks and his intimate references in conversation to Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Constantinople. A conundrum! A prodigy! But faithful always to the Langouste. And the Langouste was faithful to him. If it was his own particular restaurant, he was its own particular customer. No wonder, then, that Jean appeared conscience-stricken when Sir Pompey toddled in, punctual to the second, on that memorable evening.

  ‘Very sorry, sir. Very full to-night, sir,’ Jean, murmuring in his broken English, paused while Sir Pompey presented his fingers to the patronne and then followed him to his accustomed corner.

  There the reason for his embarrassment was immediately obvious. A large and resplendent lady occupied one of the two chairs at Sir Pompey’s sacred table – a lady like a queen, though (to define her more closely) a touring-company queen rather than a reigning sovereign. She was one of those women who sit very high: upright, formidable, over-decorated, like some Indian goddess. She was enclosed, it seemed, in coat upon coat, scarf upon scarf, all thrown liberally open to display the well-filled jumper. Only a painter could do justice to her hat. She seemed, enthroned there, to involve the whole table: it appeared unlikely that there would be any room at all for Sir Pompey.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind, sir!’ Jean whispered, drawing out Sir Pompey’s chair for him.

  ‘Mind, my good friend?’ replied Sir Pompey aloud, with a little bow to the queen. ‘How could I mind when you invite me to sit opposite a lady who, I see, is both beautiful and virtuous!’

  The lady smiled with dignity, shrugged, and glanced away to the left.

  ‘But does the lady mind, Jean?’ continued Sir Pompey. ‘That, surely, is what we should ask ourselves.’ He glanced at the queen with another little bow. ‘Does the lady mind?’ he repeated.

  The lady pursed a large, flamboyant mouth. ‘Oh, no. Not at all,’ she replied detachedly on a subdued chest-note.

  Sir Pompey sat down, rubbing his hands together and sucking in his
breath between closed teeth. Then, fixing an eyeglass into his right eye, he scanned the menu which Jean had set before him. ‘What do you recommend, my friend?’ he asked.

  Jean, bending to Sir Pompey’s ear, murmured advice.

  ‘Or perhaps you, madam, will advise me?’ Sir Pompey suddenly raised his head and screwed up his face so that the eyeglass fell out of his eye. The lady gave a little contralto shriek, followed by a brief giggle; but the eyeglass was safely attached to a ribbon, and Sir Pompey was staring at her, awaiting the answer to his question.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure I don’t know, what with these French words and the bad writing.’

  ‘Quite! Quite!’ Sir Pompey sympathized. ‘But what, if I may ask, have you ordered? That … er … would surely … er …’

  ‘Me? Oh, I’m having one of these Chatto Breeongs. It’s just steak, you know.’

  ‘Ah! So you’re plunging at once in medias res, so to speak?’

  The lady shook her head. ‘’Fraid I don’t speak it. But the steak’s good here; I know that much.’

  ‘Very true. Very true, madam. But I feel, I really do feel, that you were wrong not to begin with a sole Colbert.’

  The lady lifted condescending eyebrows. ‘And what is that, if I may arsk?’

  ‘Well …! Well …!’ Sir Pompey peered about as if hoping to find a written description of sole Colbert ready to hand. ‘Well, imagine to yourself, my dear lady, a sole exquisitely fried, in which, during the … er … the process of frying, an incision has been made. Into this incision just before serving, they drop a lump of grr … eeen butter. The result, believe me, is …!’ and Sir Pompey, with both palms raised, made as if to push away from him something too rapturous to contemplate. ‘Now, if I might advise,’ – he became intimately confidential – ‘you will postpone your … your Châteaubriand and order, as I am doing, a sole Colbert.’