Hammersly, following half a step behind Janet, felt the mystery of the place overspreading him like a shade of destiny. This wood of pines had seen the very beginnings of their love, and Hammersly found himself wondering whether it was to see the end and ruin of it.
Then he was aware of Janet speaking to him.
“Do you remember those days in June?”
“Yes—I remember them.”
She paused and looked into his face.
“I was very happy then, even though you were going away, even though I knew that I might never see you again.”
“Perhaps I have suspected it.”
“Is that all that you came to say?”
He hung his head, and remained motionless, dumb, and suddenly she began to speak with passionate sincerity.
“Do you never think of us? Oh, my dear, what a terrible thing it is to be such an egoist! Our love has come to the crossroads, and I cannot follow your road any farther.”
Still he said nothing.
“And yet—I have a feeling—that you will not let us go on bearing everything with a servile, doting pity. Do you want us to pretend forever and ever that our pride in you does not matter—that we are almost as selfish as we seem? I know that man was a beast to you out there; that the other men were fawning cads; but, oh, my dear, haven’t we all of us been punished?”
She was striking home, and he did not try to defend himself. His defiant spirit lay broken.
“Good God, I ought never to have come home. I ought to have shot myself.”
“Oh, man, man, what blindness! Is love nothing; has it no promise, no second awakening?”
Her soft and choking voice was a wounded cry in the darkness, and for a moment Pierce Hammersly stood very still. But in a little while he began to tremble like a man who has struck out wildly in a moment of madness and found blood upon his hand.
“Janet, tell me——”
“What can I tell you? That you are crucifying my love——”
“Crucifying! Good God, yes!”
He fell on his knees at her feet, clasped her, and hid his face in her dress.
“Help me; help me!”
She bent over him in a passion of tenderness.
“Oh, I want to be proud of you, and I can’t, I can’t!”
CHAPTER XXVIII
The mere common man may become a god when some very human cry rings utterly right and true, and so this great thing happened to Pierce Hammersly in that pine wood under the winter stars. A presence that was very near and wonderful bent over him in the darkness, a pride that was bleeding, a compassion that wept strange tears. For she was no weakling, no silly, doting girl, this Janet of his, and he was awed and amazed that she should care so fiercely.
“Good God, what a selfish beast I have been!”
She did not contradict him, for contradiction was not the thing he needed when his pride and his perversity were melting in the white heat of a new humility. She bent over him, clasping his head between her hands, and trembling with an exultant tenderness.
“And now—I can begin to love you again. Yes, I know how it all happened; I am like you, sensitive and rebellious. But then——”
“I was mad, Janet, mad—and most damnably miserable.”
“Dear heart, I should have hated that man, that Barnack, just as you hated him; he is one of the horrors of this war. And now, I want you to forget that man, dear, or change the thought of him for something else.”
“I have been thinking too much of myself, and thinking of you—in the wrong way.”
She gave a little shiver of excitement.
“How cold it is!”
“You have not got your furs! What a self-absorbed fool! Come home.”
He stood up and put an arm about her, nor did she repulse him now, for his vanity had deserted him, and he no longer thought of her love as the thing that he need not strive for.
“How is it that I was so blind?”
“If my man’s eyes are open—now——”
“Yes. But you have opened them. Good heavens, what have I been doing; what sort of fool have I been making of myself? You will have to help me, dear; we have got to go down into the deeps together.”
“I want you to trust me—always.”
“I trusted myself too much. You did well to take away that portrait of old Gerard.”
They passed out of the wood into the starlight and across the strip of common to Heather Cottage. Janet went up for a few moments to see her mother, leaving Pierce alone in the little sitting-room before the unlit fire. He found matches on the mantelpiece and lit it, and kneeling before it, watched the flames grow and spread, and hearing above the crackling of the wood Janet’s voice and footsteps in the room above. While watching the gradual kindling of that fire he fell into a great and tender tranquillity, and felt a glow within him as though life and love had been reborn.
Hearing her footsteps on the stairs, he stood up and turned to meet her.
“Why, there is no light!”
She came in with a sort of mystery, closing the door as though she were shutting out the world.
“I lit the fire for you. It is what you have done for me.”
He took her hands and kissed them.
“I have never learnt so much in so short a time, just while I have been alone here.”
They stood and looked into each other’s eyes.
“If I have hurt you, dear, forgive me.”
“I needed it,” he said quietly; “and I think no other hand could have given me such an honest wound.”
They did not light the lamp, but were content with the half-darkness and the glow of the fire.
Janet sat on a cushion before the hearth, with her man’s head in her lap, her hands holding his, and they talked, or rather Pierce talked, though now and again she prompted him. He talked like a man who had had a bad smash in the hunting field and wanted to explain to himself and to her how it had happened. He seemed to discover a healing force in his new humiliation, for it allowed him to be utterly and humanly natural; it justified his surrender to her, and gave birth to a new and finer spirit of sincerity.
“That is how it strikes me, dear. I did not grasp the bigness of this business. I was just the old sort of young sentimentalist pretending to be a soldier for a year or so. I resented all sorts of things that I ought not to have resented; I hadn’t any proper sense of proportion; I didn’t make allowances for the size of the job we have in hand. In short, I was a selfish brute.”
She took his face between her hands.
“We were all of us growing too selfish, and then the war came.”
“I know. It was not easy for a fat and self-satisfied country like ours to strip itself for a great sacrifice. I have been an England in miniature. There are thousands of men who have gone through the same hell, hating it, hating everything. I think I should have pulled through but for Barnack. I might have behaved like Dick Hansard. Good God! I wonder when I shall have the courage to meet Grace!”
She fondled him.
“Quite soon; yes, I believe it. And, dear man——”
“Yes.”
“I think we women realise that this war is big and splendid. It convinces me——”
“You mean—it is destiny?”
“Yes. Aren’t we fighting organised brutality; a nation of horrible megalomaniacs, and—most horrible of all—a nation that has no sense of humour, none of the spirit of playfulness?”
His eyes flashed up at her.
“That’s true. We may be a bit fatuous in our sporting ideas, but it is better than calculated blackguardism. We have got to make Germany pass through the hell she has created for other people; she will have to be made so heartsick and weary that she will shut the Blond Beast up in a cellar. Yes, I hadn’t realised the bigness of the business any more than most other people. You know now what was wrong with me?”
“You did not think of me, perhaps, as having a share in it; that I had had to face the thou
ght of sacrificing you. And—and I faced it.”
“Janet, now I begin to understand! Tell me more of that——”
She bent over him and her voice died to a whisper, but Pierce Hammersly’s face began to burn with a new inspiration. He gathered her hands in his and kissed them.
“How utterly right you are! And to think of the pestilent, ill-bred fool I have been! I’ll take my orders from you, Janet.”
“Pierce, I’d love you to be just a plain soldier; just a crusader. You would carry such a cross of splendour.”
“Dear heart——”
“I know what the sacrifice would be—bitter hardships and danger; but you would have given yourself, and I should be so proud.”
He twisted round and knelt before her with shining eyes.
“By God, I’ll do it! I believe I can deserve your pride!”
This emotional experience, which many men would have called heroic rot, sent Pierce Hammersly out into the night a changed man. The great part of life is make-believe; eating and begetting come naturally enough, but all the more complex reactions which we call sentiment depend upon the interplay of the various vanities that civilisation has developed in us. We have to be shown ourselves in mirrors; taught to imitate the fine attitudes and noble gestures of historic or literary heroes. We invent decorations, honours, shames, penalties, and so subtle does the game become that we end by forgetting that all our make-believe is not real. The ape is there behind the mirror, and in Europe the German has taken the place of the ape.
So Pierce Hammersly went high-stepping back to Orchards, full of the fine spirit of honour and self-renunciation poured into him by the generous love of a woman. She had held up a magic mirror to him, and taught him to see in it what she desired him to see.
He found his father dozing in front of the fire, and he tried to be casual—an English cult that has puzzled foreigners.
“I want your opinion, Pater.”
Porteous Hammersly rescued his pince-nez from the depths of the chair.
“Opinion? Of course; what is it?”
“I have made rather a mess of life, Dad, and I think of starting over again. Janet put it into my head. I’m going to enlist.”
“My dear boy!”
And Porteous Hammersly did a most un-English thing. He caught his son by his shoulders and kissed him.
CHAPTER XXIX
At six o’clock the bugles blew the réveillé, and the wooden huts became alive with the stirring of many men. The whole camp hailed the grisly darkness of a winter morning with coughings, sneezings, and much unnecessary throwing about of boots. Men lit odd ends of candle and dressed with grudging haste.
Corporal Palk, in charge of D Hut, glanced at the closed doors of the sergeants’ cubicles, and bellowed at sundry figures that had not yet emerged from their blankets.
“Now then, tumble up. You, Faggin; the Orderly Room for you, my toff, if you’re late on parade again. Curse it! but I’ve bust my blazing braces!”
Corporal Palk was a characteristic type of the New Army—a plump, stocky Londoner in khaki, by no means up to the Chelsea standard in the matter of physical smartness. He bulged. His legs were too short and too fat about the calves; there was no definite line of demarcation between his chest and his stomach; his neck was short and stubby, and his head too big. He had a round, red, cheerful face, rather pimply, and a wicked humorous nose. But there was the proper sort of manhood in Corporal Palk; he was irrepressible, a cheerful wag, with a wonderfully shrewd knowledge of men and their weaknesses. D Hut knew what discipline meant, for Corporal Palk’s tongue was equal to any emergency.
Private Hammersly sat on the end of his bed putting on his puttees. His bed was next to Corporal Palk’s.
“I’ve got a spare pair of braces, Corporal.”
“Blimy, didn’t I always says that ’ammersly was born to be a universal provider. I’ll take ’em on the ’ire purchase. What!”
Someone was sneezing vigorously.
“’Allo, the geyser’s got it as usual! Why don’t you get the doctor bloke to burn the hinside of your nose out, Wiggins?”
“I was born with it,” said a blue-nosed youth.
“You’d be useful in summer, layin’ the dust!”
The brown figures streamed out in the dusk to the first parade, with a raw wind blowing, and the mud sucking at their boots. Half an hour’s brisk drill saw the sun beginning to send a suspicion of a red face above the pine woods of Wiledon Camp. With the blood running warmer in them, and with discipline served by that early discarding of army blankets, the parade was dismissed, and there was a rush for the ablution sheds, where the men washed at long wooden benches, using zinc basins.
“B-r-r-r—it’s damned cold!”
So said the late ship’s cook, one of Hammersly’s pals, a fair, florid, honest soul who had lost two brothers at Loos, and whose one idea in life seemed to be that it was his business to fit himself to bomb, shoot, or bayonet unlimited numbers of Germans.
“Lord, but I wouldn’t quarrel with half a day in the Red Sea, with the bacon all juice, and men hating their own shirts!”
Hammersly was washing the soap out of his hair.
“What’s for breakfast?”
“Bacon, my boy, and bread and margarine.”
“I don’t care what it is so long as it’s hot.”
The D Hut shaved, a dismal and grim affair of concentrated grimacings and set stares. The day touched its limit of discomfort. D Hut felt better after it had shaved, and turned about to attack beds and kits to make the place shipshape. They knew that the cook-house was busy with great cauldrons full of tea and dishes of bacon. Some silly devil, stupid with the cold, would be slicing off the ball of his thumb with the breadcutter. No matter. Breakfast was due.
So Hammersly sat on a wooden form at a deal table between McVittie, the ship’s cook, and Lambourne, the gamekeeper, eating bacon off a tin plate, and gloating over his mug of tea. Hundreds of other men were being equally primitive. The great slabs of bread and margarine vanished most healthily. The crowd was cheery and warm and strong. As yet there were no conscripts among them—none of those poor things with “heart trouble,” the spiritless victims of the shop and the office.
Then the hard business of the day began, and since the English climate has no sympathy for soldiers in training, unlimited mud and rain helped to tame the habitual grouser. There was abundance of variety in the day’s work, for specialisation has made mere infantry drill but a small part of the “recrooty’s” education; he bombs, he wears a gas-helmet, he digs dug-outs and trenches, he is taught to cook in his mess-tin, he is inoculated, vaccinated, inspected, lectured, hardened with physical drill. He is trained in musketry, he attacks stuffed sacks with his bayonet, he has to learn to carry his pack and to stick fifteen miles in full marching order. He must dubbin his boots, polish his buckles and buttons, keep his rifle spotlessly clean, or be crimed and given C.B. His hair is cut short; his company officer is interested in his tooth-brush; he is sent to the dentist if his teeth are not what they should be. He is taught how to use his first field dressing, and told what to do and what not to do when he is wounded. The doctor lectures him on flies and lice, on sanitation and trench feet, and all the little cleanlinesses that mortal man is apt to ignore. He draws his pay once a week across a deal table, and attends Church parade on a Sunday. The windows of his hut must be kept in varying degrees of openness at night; he must not talk after lights out, but he is not forbidden to snore.
Pierce Hammersly went good-temperedly through experiences that would have made him rage less than a year ago. He had his bad days, and there had been occasions when he had had to fight his food and smother a fierce feeling of nausea. But he was still exalted spiritually, and Janet’s letters helped to keep him so.
“It is doing me good,” he wrote her; “and I keep your proud eyes like a light in front of me. After all, this is the real thing; the men are fine chaps, most of them. I used to be much too stuck up
and selfish, but now we are all men together.”
As for his past—no one seemed to bother about it, and he played the game so cunningly that he was not suspected of having served before. He even made an ass of himself on occasions, and let himself be cursed by a particularly hot-tongued sergeant-instructor. And being determined to be a good fellow and to find his comrades good fellows he was surprised at his own success, though he had had the luck to be grouped with a very cheery, clean-living crowd. He discovered a real human zest in the fun and the good fellowship and the hearty, hungry cheerfulness. He made friends, two in particular—McVittie, the ex-ship’s cook, and big Lambourne, the gamekeeper—and these friendships were a revelation to him, the men were such warm-hearted, generous beggars. The spirit of camaraderie was so splendid that Hammersly would have gone hot with shame if he had caught himself putting on side.
And in a while he was surprised to find himself popular. It was Corporal Palk who gave public utterance on such matters.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with the Prince of Panonia. ’E’s a sport, and there ain’t no flies on ’im neither.”
The nickname stuck to Pierce. D Hut called him “Prince,” or “Old Prince,” the hall-mark of affection. He had a well-filled, warm feeling inside of him; he was not afraid of meeting men’s eyes, and he had never been so physically fit in his life.
D Hut was a little world in itself, full of strange, vivid happenings that Hammersly was never likely to forget. There was that day when Garner, the little blacksmith from some East Anglian village, heard the news that his wife and kiddies had been wiped out by a Zeppelin bomb. Hammersly remembered seeing him sitting on the end of his bed, with a sallow, dazed, expressionless face, his hands clenched on his knees, and his nose looking pinched and blue. The men had left him alone, though their eyes had looked at him with a grim wistfulness. And then Garner had gone off to that village for a day or two, and come back curiously silent and strange and self-absorbed. D Hut knew what had happened to him, and one day he told them what he hoped would happen over yonder in France.
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