A Test to Destruction (24 page)

“You don't have to worry, son.”

With slow articulation, “What—day—is it?”

“Still the same, buddy. Sunday, April fourteen, I guess.”

“Any—news of—the Peckham line?”

“I'll ask when the night relief comes on dooty. Now just you try resting up, colonel.”

Aeons of flaming suns rolled in the orbits of his eyes.

“That place, what was it now, White Sheet Hill? Yeah, the British have gone back some more, I guess. Now you don't have
to worry yourself, buddy, that White Sheet Hill is taken by the Heinies.”

When the orderly had gone Phillip sobbed within the flaming hell of his bandage mask, but no relieving tears fell, only gummy stabs of 6o-pounder flame.

Thomas Turney was standing, as he had stood many times before, just inside the kitchen of No. 11 Hillside Road.

He never sat down in there; nor did he enter front- or sitting-room when he went in to see his daughter; for the old man went next-door only when he had a problem on his mind.

Nowadays he had ceased to talk about the decline in value of his stocks and shares: that was inevitable, accepted as part of the common burden of the war which those behind the fighting men must accept.

On this April morning he stood just by the larder door, his watery eyes fixed upon his daughter’s face.

“Don’t you think we should go, Hetty? The poor boy is all alone——”

“Oh, I don’t see how I could possibly leave Dickie, Papa!”

He said “Oh,” and then summoned himself to say, “Doris, isn’t she home now for the Easter vacation, Hetty? Couldn’t she be left to look after the house for a day or two?”

Hetty looked unhappy. For so long had she been accustomed to worrying about her husband that it had become a habit; and like all habits, good or bad, hard to break.

“I have seen Dawson,” he said, referring to the local branch of the London, City, and Midland Bank, where he drew cheques for his housekeeping—his main account was near his stationery and printing works off High Holborn—“Dawson says that all can be arranged through the Y.M.C.A. The Government provides tickets, and also rations, the Y.M.C.A. looks after everything else. I’ve asked him to try to get two tickets reserved, for the time being. He’ll telephone Whitehall.”

Thomas Turney had had a telegram the day before, informing him that his grandson, Tommy, Charley’s boy, was on the
Dangerously Ill list at the South African hospital at Abbeville. A letter had arrived that morning, inviting him to visit the wounded soldier.

“I think I ought to wait to hear what Dickie has to say, Papa.”

“Yes, of course, Hetty.” He constrained himself from remarking that Dickie might for once think of others before himself; but for many years now the old man had learned to submit, to accept things as they were. So he checked his thought: of course Hetty must wait to consult Dickie. Poor fellow, he had been nervy ever since he had been blown into the gutter by that Zeppelin aerial torpedo which had fallen in Nightingale Grove, and been covered with powdered glass, when on duty as a ‘Special’. In any case they couldn’t go before the next morning, there was no hurry, the tickets were reserved.

Richard objected at once. The thought of having to look after himself dismayed him. Then there was, to reinsure his protest, the thought of submarine danger in the Channel, Gotha raids on all bases mentioned in the communiqués from G.H.Q. It was out of the question! He could not face the blankness of coming back to a silent house, of having to prepare his own meals after arriving home, fagged out, late from the office. Besides, there was his allotment to think of. England might soon be starving! He was about to put his foot down, as he thought of it, when Hetty said first, “Elizabeth and Doris will see to things, I am sure, Dickie.”

“Oh, you are, are you?”

Elizabeth, he thought, could be relied upon to do nothing that did not please herself, while in the presence of his younger daughter, Doris, with her taciturn reserve and curt manner of addressing him, he never felt comfortable.

“I think I might manage for myself, if the girls would rather be alone. Why can’t they go next door, if Mr. Turney’s mind is set on taking you away?”

“Oh, I am sure everything will be quite all right, Dickie. Doris will be able to manage, I will tell her all there is to be done.”

After supper of fried cod steaks and bread-and-margarine pudding (with currants) his thoughts had come round to the idea of a few days of freedom. He and Zippy the cat would enjoy themselves, and he could always play his gramophone!

“Well, take care of yourself, old girl! We don’t want to lose you, you know, if you think you ought to go!” he joked, varying the words of a popular song.

At 9 o’clock the post-girl’s double knock came on the front door. Before the war there had been six deliveries between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m.; now there were only three. Doris, sitting silent at the table (she was reading Modern English History) got up quietly and went to the door. There was a letter to her from Willoughby, and a telegram addressed to Richard Maddison. She returned with composed face, to give the telegram to her father.

“The girl is waiting to see if there is any answer.”

Richard opened his ivory-handled pen-knife, and with the back of the long blade carefully slit the orange envelope, then as carefully removed the folded message. He glanced at it; laid it on his knee; stared ahead at nothing, before saying, “Good God.” Then, he found, he was unable to speak.

“What is it, Father?”

“Read it,” he sighed, passing the bit of paper, which half-folded itself, held so lightly in the limp fingers of the long thin hand.

“It says only ‘blinded temporarily’, don’t forget, Father! Anyway it must be a mistake, for it says ‘Lieutenant-colonel P. S. T. Maddison’, and Phill’s only a full loot. Oh yes, and look there—it has been re-directed from Beau Brickhill, so it obviously went to Aunt Liz’s first! They’ve got Phil mixed up with someone else.”

Richard examined the form, then decided to send a reply asking for confirmation: but on second thoughts he considered that the War Office would be closed, or the department which dealt with such routine matters.

“Now, if you please, do not tell Mother about this matter, until I am able to make enquiries tomorrow, and find out the facts.”

“Then shall I tell the girl there’s no reply, Father?”

“Yes, if you please.”

Doris returned to her study of the Chartist riots and Reform Bill. But the words had no meaning. Nor was Richard able to take in what the leader of
The
Daily
Trident
was about. Could there have been a clerical error? The initials were correct; only the rank and address were in error. ‘
Temporarily
blinded and
in hospital’. Might that not be a gentle let-down? Then the awful thought. Supposing he
is
blind … it would mean having Phillip on his hands, living at home, for the rest of his life. Terrible! A variation of Hugh Turney always about the place! He shrank from the word
burden
; poor fellow, he had done his duty, and was lucky to have got out of it with his life. Of course. Even so, the thought persisted, to be brushed aside as unworthy, but to recur again and again: he would no longer be able to call his home his own!

But—the boy, blinded in battle! Whatever was he thinking of?

He tried to read his newspaper, but the words meant little or nothing; he left the room, and went into the scullery, to wash up what Hetty always called the tea-things. He had not done this for years, while his wife was at home; now, in the light of a candle, he lived again a scene of his early married life, when Phillip was a baby and he had nursed him during many anxious nights because his mother was ill and could not feed him; so he had taken on the little fellow, while addressing envelopes, by the light of his dark lantern, and Hetty slept upstairs. The little fellow had been comforted and once had smiled at him! The years of misprision fell away; Phillip was still his boy—and now he was blind. Oh, how could he have been so selfish as to think that he would be a burden in his own home, after all he had gone through?

He went back to the sitting room, having washed and wrung out the dish cloth and hung the drying cloth neatly on the clothes-horse—leaving the place cleaner than he had found it—with new resolutions.

“I suppose you wouldn’t care for a game of chess, Doris?”

“No thank you, Father.”

Silence. Then, “You’ve heard about your Mother’s proposal, I suppose?”

“Yes, Father. I think she ought to go.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“Yes, Father, I do. Mother deserves a little respite sometimes.”

“From what, pray?”

“From all of us.”

Richard was rebuffed. He had intended to ask her advice, but now retired behind
The
Daily
Trident,
wherein he read that
many soldiers were being
temporarily
blinded by mustard gas. This relieved him greatly, and when Hetty came back from her nightly game of bezique—it had alternated every week with picquet throughout the war—with ‘Mr. Turney’, he told her the good news, adding that ‘her best boy’ had somehow got himself described as a Colonel. Elizabeth had come in with Hetty, and she said, “I bet he gave that rank to some orderly, and sent the telegram himself, just to swank! How like Phillip!’’

“But you don’t know that, dear,” replied Hetty. “I hope you won’t go telling people that.”

“Well, it
is
just what he’d do!” she cried querulously. “You
always
make excuses for him, don’t you?”

She turned and went out of the room, leaving the door open. At once Richard got up and shut it, to sit down again without a word. Just like that selfish creature, always strutting about in new clothes, thinking only of her own appearance! He snorted when Hetty said, “Mavis, I mean Elizabeth is very tired, Dickie. She has been to the Spring Sales, and needs her supper. I’d better go and see to it.”

Hetty had hardly left the room when Doris got up, closed her book, put back her chair, opened the door, “Good night, Father,” and shutting it with a slight bang—she could never remember to turn the handle first—went upstairs to bed.

Not one thought had she taken about her correspondent in France, Willoughby, that evening, except vaguely in connexion with the face of Percy Pickering. Now in the darkness of her bed she lay and wept silently, as she had wept during many of the past five hundred and sixty-seven nights, the coming of which she had longed for during each day since Percy had been killed.

*

Thomas Turney and Henrietta his younger daughter travelled with about a hundred other civilians in what looked to be a very important boat, for beyond the railings shutting off the forward part of the boat were to be seen many red-banded caps among the officers. They landed at Boulogne in the late afternoon, after a queasy journey for her (
mal
de mer
,
as Hetty had thought of it since Convent schooldays in Belgium) and were taken to the Hotel Bras d’Or, which was run by the British for relatives of the D.I.—as the Dangerously Ill were spoken of.

Hetty was almost like a girl again, travelling with her father ‘on the Continent’; only now the scenes no longer had for her a
background of gaiety. A slow train took them along the coast to Abbeville, outside which was the 1st South African hospital. It was late when they arrived at the relatives’ hostel in a poor-looking street in which, surprisingly, was a small château within a courtyard out of which rose a great chestnut tree.

Within the
salle
à
manger
was a long table, or series of tables, at which was served a plain dinner of meat, cabbage, and watery black potatoes on a soiled table cloth, its presence there contrasting with the former life of the house, as shown by the tapestries upon the walls, the
armoires
holding delicate glass and china, the candelabra hanging from the ceiling, and—so reminiscent of Thildonck days—sacred poems, written in purple ink, in delicate thin Italian handwriting, others woven in silken thread on perforated white card-paper. The presence of the shabby tablecloth was soon explained: the guests were of all classes, only a very few being of what she thought of as good families; the majority were working-class people. Poor things, she thought, all of them.

She could not sleep in the strange bedroom, but lay awake, the candle burning beside her for company. Would it last through the darkness, this little gleam, so faithful that it seemed to have a soul? Once she blew out the flame, to save the candle’s life, and became aware of the rolling of trains passing continuously, far away, an undertone of the war which now seemed so vast and terrible, an evil spirit controlling millions of men and women, something quite apart from themselves; and somehow the lost light of the candle was as though she had killed a friend. Kind, thoughtful Dickie had given her a box of matches to bring with the candle, saying that both would be scarce in France. She revived the flame, and it was Dickie’s kind thought in the rising gleams; the thoughts of others, too, for the small flame was trembling all the time with the distant gun-fire; then it was blinking at the nearer
thump-thumthump-thump
of bombs. She could bear it, with the flame of loving-kindness glowing upon the
prieu-dieu
on the wall and the tapestry of the four-poster bed which reminded her of
Mère
Ambroisine
and her schooldays at Thildonck.

And yet—and yet—was there a strange smell in the room? Or was it her imagination? She sat up, and it seemed to be stronger. At last she could bear it no longer, and getting out of bed, began to search about the room. Tracing the smell to a cupboard, she opened the door to see, staring at her with glass
eyes glinting in candlelight, a stuffed spaniel. This was a shock; but it became horror when she saw, running out of various holes in the body, at least a dozen mice. She shut the door at once, and put a chair against it; even so, she could not stop herself from thinking what would happen if it opened in the night.

It now became a matter of endurance, centred round the life of the candle. Would it last the night? The darkness seemed congealed behind the heavy curtains across the shuttered windows. She felt she could not breathe, while the image of the stuffed dog being slowly pulled apart under its hair by restless tiny mice was, in some way she could not determine, part of the war.

She prayed, and feeling calmer, dropped asleep, to awaken with the candle still burning beside the bed-head. Its light was welcome, and she got up happily and pulling back the curtains saw that it was already day, with the sun shining on the leaves of the chestnut tree, and flowers in white-washed tubs around the courtyard. German prisoners were down below, sweeping the cobbles; she peeped at them, strange objects from another world in their lead-grey uniforms into which large blue patches were sewn, and their small round grey caps with red piping. She felt a slight fear, but when one smiled up at her, and touched his cap, his eyes nearly as blue as Phillip’s, the remoteness of vague war-conceived ideas left her, and she smiled back happily, thinking that they had mothers, too.