The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (13 page)

‘Is it true that?' asked his great friend who sat opposite, a big red-faced chap with a black beard and large moist eyes and hair that looked as though it had been cut with a sewing-machine.

‘Well, not quite true,' said I.

‘
Si
,
si
,' cried the blue-eyed soldier. ‘I ought to know. I'm in business. English travellers come to my place, and it's always the same thing.'

‘Bah, I can't stand whisky,' said the little corporal. ‘It's too disgusting the morning after. Do you remember,
ma fille
, the whisky in that little bar at Montmartre?'

‘
Souvenir tendre
,'
²³
sighed Blackbeard, putting two fingers in the breast of his coat and letting his head fall. He was very drunk.

‘But I know something that you've never tasted,' said the blue-eyed soldier, pointing a finger at me; ‘something really good.'
Cluck
he went with his tongue. ‘
É-patant
!
²⁴
And the curious thing is that you'd hardly know it from whisky except that it's'– he felt with his hand for the word –‘finer, sweeter perhaps, not so sharp, and it leaves you feeling gay as a rabbit next morning.'

‘What is it called?'

‘
Mirabelle
!' He rolled the word round his mouth, under his tongue. ‘Ah-ah, that's the stuff.'

‘I could eat another mushroom,' said Blackbeard. ‘I would like another mushroom very much. I am sure I could eat another mushroom if Mademoiselle gave it to me out of her hand.'

‘You ought to try it,' said the blue-eyed soldier, leaning both hands on the table and speaking so seriously that I began to wonder how much more sober he was than Blackbeard. ‘You ought to try it, and tonight. I would like you to tell me if you don't think it's like whisky.'

‘Perhaps they've got it here,' said the little corporal, and he called the waiting-boy. ‘
P'tit!
'

‘
Non
,
Monsieur
,' said the boy, who never stopped smiling. He served us with dessert plates painted with blue parrots and horned beetles.

‘What is the name for this in English?' said Blackbeard, pointing. I told him ‘Parrot'.

‘Ah,
mon Dieu
!… Pair-rot…' He put his arms round his plate. ‘I love you,
ma petite
pair-rot. You are sweet, you are blonde, you are English. You do not know the difference between whisky and
mirabelle
.'

The little corporal and I looked at each other, laughing. He squeezed up his eyes when he laughed, so that you saw nothing but the long curly lashes.

‘Well, I know a place where they do keep it,' said the blue-eyed soldier. ‘Cafê des Amis. We'll go there – I'll pay – I'll – I'll pay for the whole lot of us.' His gesture embraced thousands of pounds.

But with a loud whirring noise the clock on the wall struck half past eight; and no soldier is allowed in a cafê after eight o'clock at night.

‘It is fast,' said the blue-eyed soldier. The little corporal's watch said the same. So did the immense turnip that Blackbeard produced and carefully deposited on the head of one of the horned beetles.

‘Ah, well, we'll take the risk,' said the blue-eyed soldier, and he thrust his arms into his immense cardboard coat. ‘It's worth it,' he said. ‘It's worth it. You just wait.'

Outside, stars shone between wispy clouds and the moon fluttered like a candle flame over a pointed spire. The shadows of the dark plume-like trees waved on the white houses. Not a soul to be seen. No sound to be heard but the
Hsh! Hsh!
of a far-away train, like a big beast shuffling in its sleep.

‘You are cold,' whispered the little corporal. ‘You are cold,
ma fille
.'

‘No, really not.'

‘But you are trembling.'

‘Yes, but I'm not cold.'

‘What are the women like in England?' asked Blackbeard. ‘After the war is over I shall go to England. I shall find a little English woman and marry her – and her pair-rot.' He gave a loud choking laugh.

‘Fool!' said the blue-eyed soldier, shaking him; and he leaned over to me. ‘It is only after the second glass that you really taste it,' he whispered. ‘The second little glass and then – ah! – then you know.'

Cafê des Amis gleamed in the moonlight. We glanced quickly up and down the road. We ran up the four wooden steps, and opened the ringing glass door into a low room lighted with a
hanging lamp, where about ten people were dining. They were seated on two benches at a narrow table.

‘Soldiers!' screamed a woman, leaping up from behind a white soup-tureen – a scrag of a woman in a black shawl. ‘Soldiers! At this hour! Look at that clock, look at it.' And she pointed to the clock with the dripping ladle.

‘It's fast,' said the blue-eyed soldier. ‘It's fast, Madame. And don't make so much noise, I beg of you. We will drink and we will go.'

‘Will you?' she cried, running round the table and planting herself in front of us. ‘That's just what you won't do. Coming into an honest woman's house this hour of the night – making a scene – getting the police after you. Ah, no! Ah, no! It's a disgrace, that's what it is.'

‘Sh!' said the little corporal, holding up his hand. Dead silence. In the silence we heard steps passing.

‘The police,' whispered Blackbeard, winking at a pretty girl with rings in her ears, who smiled back at him, saucy. ‘Sh!'

The faces lifted, listening. ‘How beautiful they are!' I thought. ‘They are like a family party having supper in the New Testament…' The steps died away.

‘Serve you very well right if you had been caught,' scolded the angry woman. ‘I'm sorry on your account that the police didn't come. You deserve it – you deserve it.'

‘A little glass of
mirabelle
and we will go,' persisted the blue-eyed soldier.

Still scolding and muttering she took four glasses from the cupboard and a big bottle. ‘But you're not going to drink in here. Don't you believe it.' The little corporal ran into the kitchen. ‘Not there! Not there! Idiot!' she cried. ‘Can't you see there's a window there, and a wall opposite where the police come every evening to –'

‘Sh!' Another scare.

‘You are mad and you will end in prison – all four of you,' said the woman. She flounced out of the room. We tiptoed after her into a dark smelling scullery, full of pans of greasy water, of salad leaves and meat-bones.

‘There now,' she said, putting down the glasses. ‘Drink and go!'

‘Ah, at last!' The blue-eyed soldier's happy voice trickled through the dark. ‘What do you think? Isn't it just as I said? Hasn't it got a taste of excellent –
ex-cellent
whisky?'

It was a long room. The irresistible tide of the night ran into the most distant part of it, where the whispering of a man's voice, passionately interrupted and passionately renewed, seemed to plead against the answering murmurs of infinite sadness.

At last no answering murmur came. His movement when he rose slowly from his knees by the side of the deep, shadowy couch holding the shadowy suggestion of a reclining woman revealed him tall under the low ceiling, and sombre all over except for the crude discord of the white collar under the shape of his head and the faint, minute spark of a brass button here and there on his uniform.

He stood over her a moment, masculine and mysterious in his immobility, before he sat down on a chair near by. He could see only the faint oval of her upturned face and, extended on her black dress, her pale hands, a moment before abandoned to his kisses and now as if too weary to move.

He dared not make a sound, shrinking as a man would do from the prosaic necessities of existence. As usual, it was the woman who had the courage. Her voice was heard first – almost conventional while her being vibrated yet with conflicting emotions.

‘Tell me something,' she said.

The darkness hid his surprise and then his smile. Had he not just said to her everything worth saying in the world – and that not for the first time!

‘What am I to tell you?' he asked, in a voice creditably steady. He was beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her tone which had eased the strain.

‘Why not tell me a tale?'

‘A tale!' He was really amazed.

‘Yes. Why not?'

These words came with a slight petulance, the hint of a loved woman's capricious will, which is capricious only because it feels itself to be a law, embarrassing sometimes and always difficult to elude.

‘Why not?' he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent, as though he had been asked to give her the moon. But now he was feeling a little angry with her for that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotion as easily as out of a splendid gown.

He heard her say, a little unsteadily with a sort of fluttering intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly's flight:

‘You used to tell – your – your simple and – and professional – tales very well at one time. Or well enough to interest me. You had a – a sort of art – in the days – the days before the war.'

‘Really?' he said, with involuntary gloom. ‘But now, you see, the war is going on,' he continued in such a dead, equable tone that she felt a slight chill fall over her shoulders. And yet she persisted. For there's nothing more unswerving in the world than a woman's caprice.

‘It could be a tale not of this world,' she explained.

‘You want a tale of the other, the better world?' he asked, with a matter-of-fact surprise. ‘You must evoke for that task those who have already gone there.'

‘No. I don't mean that. I mean another – some other – world. In the universe – not in heaven.'

‘I am relieved. But you forget that I have only five days' leave.'

‘Yes. And I've also taken a five days' leave from – from my duties.'

‘I like that word.'

‘What word?'

‘Duty.'

‘It is horrible – sometimes.'

‘Oh, that's because you think it's narrow. But it isn't. It contains infinities, and – and so –'

‘What is this jargon?'

He disregarded the interjected scorn. ‘An infinity of absolution, for instance,' he continued. ‘But as to this “another world” – who's going to look for it and for the tale that is in it?'

‘You,' she said, with a strange, almost rough, sweetness of assertion.

He made a shadowy movement of assent in his chair, the irony of which not even the gathered darkness could render mysterious.

‘As you will. In that world, then, there was once upon a time a Commanding Officer and a Northman. Put in the capitals, please, because they had no other names. It was a world of seas and continents and islands –'

‘Like the earth,' she murmured, bitterly.

‘Yes. What else could you expect from sending a man made of our common, tormented clay on a voyage of discovery? What else could he find? What else could you understand or care for, or feel the existence of even? There was comedy in it, and slaughter.'

‘Always like the earth,' she murmured.

‘Always. And since I could find in the universe only what was deeply rooted in the fibres of my being there was love in it, too. But we won't talk of that.'

‘No. We won't,' she said, in a neutral tone which concealed perfectly her relief – or her disappointment. Then after a pause she added: ‘It's going to be a comic story.'

‘Well –' He paused, too. ‘Yes. In a way. In a very grim way. It will be human, and, as you know, comedy is but a matter of the visual angle. And it won't be a noisy story. All the long guns in it will be dumb – as dumb as so many telescopes.'

‘Ah, there are guns in it, then! And may I ask – where?'

‘Afloat. You remember that the world of which we speak had its seas. A war was going on in it. It was a funny world and terribly in earnest. Its war was being carried on over the land,
over the water, under the water, up in the air, and even under the ground. And many young men in it, mostly in wardrooms and messrooms, used to say to each other – pardon the unparliamentary word – they used to say, “It's a damned bad war, but it's better than no war at all.” Sounds flippant, doesn't it?'

He heard a nervous, impatient sigh in the depths of the couch while he went on without a pause.

‘And yet there is more in it than meets the eye. I mean more wisdom. Flippancy, like comedy, is but a matter of visual first-impression. That world was not very wise. But there was in it a certain amount of common working sagacity. That, however, was mostly worked by the neutrals in diverse ways, public and private, which had to be watched; watched by acute minds and also by actual sharp eyes. They had to be very sharp indeed, too, I assure you.'

‘I can imagine,' she murmured, appreciatively.

‘What is there that you can't imagine?' he pronounced, soberly. ‘You have the world in you. But let us go back to our Commanding Officer, who, of course, commanded a ship of a sort. My tales if often professional (as you remarked just now) have never been technical. So I'll just tell you that the ship was of a very ornamental sort once, with lots of grace and elegance and luxury about her. Yes, once! She was like a pretty woman who had suddenly put on a suit of sackcloth and stuck revolvers in her belt. But she floated lightly, she moved nimbly, she was quite good enough.'

‘That was the opinion of the Commanding Officer?' said the voice from the couch.

‘It was. He used to be sent out with her along certain coasts to see – what he could see. Just that. And sometimes he had some preliminary information to help him, and sometimes he had not. And it was all one, really. It was about as useful as information trying to convey the locality and intentions of a cloud, of a phantom taking shape here and there and impossible to seize, would have been.

‘It was in the early days of the war. What at first used to amaze the Commanding Officer was the unchanged face of the waters, with its familiar expression, neither more friendly nor
more hostile. On fine days the sun strikes sparks upon the blue; here and there a peaceful smudge of smoke hangs in the distance, and it is impossible to believe that the familiar clear horizon traces the limit of one great circular ambush.

‘Yes, it is impossible to believe, till some day you see a ship not your own ship (that isn't so impressive), but some ship in company, blow up all of a sudden and plop under almost before you know what has happened to her. Then you begin to believe. Henceforth you go out for the work to see – what you can see, and you keep on at it with the conviction that some day you will die from something you have not seen. One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and blood from their faces, counting the dead fallen to their hands, looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it – the taste of primitive passion – the ferocious frankness of the blow struck with one's hand – the direct call and the straight response. Well, the sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was nothing the matter with the world.'

She interrupted, stirring a little.

‘Oh, yes. Sincerity – frankness – passion – three words of your gospel. Don't I know them!'

‘Think! Isn't it ours – believed in common?' he asked, anxiously, yet without expecting an answer, and went on at once: ‘Such were the feelings of the Commanding Officer. When the night came trailing over the sea, hiding what looked like the hypocrisy of an old friend, it was a relief. The night blinds you frankly – and there are circumstances when the sunlight may grow as odious to one as falsehood itself. Night is all right.

‘At night the Commanding Officer could let his thoughts get away – I won't tell you where. Somewhere where there was no choice but between truth and death. But thick weather, though it blinded one, brought no such relief. Mist is deceitful, the dead luminosity of the fog is irritating. It seems that you
ought
to see.

‘One gloomy, nasty day the ship was steaming along her beat in sight of a rocky, dangerous coast that stood out intensely black like an India-ink drawing on grey paper. Presently the
second in command spoke to his chief. He thought he saw something on the water, to seaward. Small wreckage, perhaps.

‘“But there shouldn't be any wreckage here, sir,” he remarked.

‘“No,” said the Commanding Officer. “The last reported submarined ships were sunk a long way to the westward. But one never knows. There may have been others since then not reported nor seen. Gone with all hands.”

‘That was how it began. The ship's course was altered to pass the object close; for it was necessary to have a good look at what one could see. Close, but without touching; for it was not advisable to come in contact with objects of any form whatever floating casually about. Close, but without stopping or even diminishing speed; for in those times it was not prudent to linger on any particular spot, even for a moment. I may tell you at once that the object was not dangerous in itself. No use in describing it. It may have been nothing more remarkable than, say, a barrel of a certain shape and colour. But it was significant.

‘The smooth bow-wave hove it up as if for a closer inspection, and then the ship, brought again to her course, turned her back on it with indifference, while twenty pairs of eyes on her deck stared in all directions trying to see – what they could see.

‘The Commanding Officer and his second-in-command discussed the object with understanding. It appeared to them to be not so much a proof of the sagacity as of the activity of certain neutrals. This activity had in many cases taken the form of replenishing the stores of certain submarines at sea. This was generally believed, if not absolutely known. But the very nature of things in those early days pointed that way. The object, looked at closely and turned away from with apparent indifference, put it beyond doubt that something of the sort had been done somewhere in the neighbourhood.

‘The object in itself was more than suspect. But the fact of its being left in evidence roused other suspicions. Was it the result of some deep and devilish purpose? As to that all speculation soon appeared to be a vain thing. Finally the two officers came to the conclusion that it was left there most likely by accident, complicated possibly by some unforeseen necessity; such, perhaps,
as the sudden need to get away quickly from the spot, or something of that kind.

‘Their discussion had been carried on in curt, weighty phrases, separated by long, thoughtful silences. And all the time their eyes roamed about the horizon in an everlasting, almost mechanical effort of vigilance. The younger man summed up grimly:

‘“Well, it's evidence. That's what this is. Evidence of what we were pretty certain of before. And plain, too.”

‘“And much good it will do to us,” retorted the Commanding Officer. “The parties are miles away; the submarine, devil only knows where, ready to kill; and the noble neutral slipping away to the eastward, ready to lie!”

‘The second-in-command laughed a little at the tone. But he guessed that the neutral wouldn't even have to lie very much. Fellows like that, unless caught in the very act, felt themselves pretty safe. They could afford to chuckle. That fellow was probably chuckling to himself. It's very possible he had been before at the game and didn't care a rap for the bit of evidence left behind. It was a game in which practice made one bold and successful, too.

‘And again he laughed faintly. But his Commanding Officer was in revolt against the murderous stealthiness of methods and the atrocious callousness of complicities that seemed to taint the very source of men's deep emotions and noblest activities; to corrupt their imagination which builds up the final conceptions of life and death. He suffered –'

The voice from the sofa interrupted the narrator.

‘How well I can understand that in him!'

He bent forward slightly.

‘Yes. I, too. Everything should be open in love and war. Open as the day, since both are the call of an ideal which it is so easy, so terribly easy, to degrade in the name of Victory.'

He paused; then went on:

‘I don't know that the Commanding Officer delved so deep as that into his feelings. But he did suffer from them – a sort of disenchanted sadness. It is possible, even, that he suspected himself of folly. Man is various. But he had no time for much
introspection, because from the south-west a wall of fog had advanced upon his ship. Great convolutions of vapours flew over, swirling about masts and funnel, which looked as if they were beginning to melt. Then they vanished.