Behind the Lines (34 page)

So intent had he been upon his plan that it was not till he saw an ambulance standing among a number of cars in the little square that he realized that this was the Doullens he had visited in happier circumstances, and that Berney might actually be in the town at that moment. The thought filled him with momentary panic, and he asked himself whether she would recognize him, changed and clean-shaven as he was. He was torn between a desire to avoid
her and a great longing to see her, and yet not be seen; and as he strode briskly along the street he scanned the faces of the passers-by with eager dread.

But he reached the Ordnance depôt without any misadventure, and here, as he told himself, it was as easy as taking milk from a baby. He produced the field-cashier's book, signed the form as Captain Parker, A.S.C., and selected his kit. He took a brown Wolseley valise, a trench coat, underclothes and other articles of small kit. He rolled them up in the valise, and gave a passing Tommy five francs to carry it to the Amiens road. A lorry dropped him on the outskirts of Amiens in something over an hour and a half, and he left the valise with an old woman in a chandler's shop. He walked back to his billet and, when Bull came in, sent him to fetch the valise. That night he dined at the Hôtel de la Poste and afterwards enjoyed the luxury of reading in bed in a comfortable room with an electric light switch over his bed.

CHAPTER XXII

I

In the course of the following days Rawley settled down to his new life. The canteen was flourishing, and he went one morning with Bull in a borrowed limber to the Expeditionary Force Canteen to buy a fresh stock. Every morning at breakfast he went through the accounts of the previous day. Every evening he dined at one or other of the hotels or cafés of the town. And laden with delicacies of food, drink or tobacco, he paid flying visits to Alf in the cellar near Albert.

He was no longer ignorant of the course that events were taking. He bought an English paper every day, and from the officers he met in cafés or hotels he learned both what the men in the Line and the people at home were discussing. Among the troops the topic of the moment was the expected German attack. It was generally agreed that it was coming, that it was coming soon, and that when it did come, it would be the father and mother of all the pushes that ever were. Some went so far as to prophesy the date and exact frontage of the attack. Most were optimistic, but there were others who professed distrust of the new defence system of isolated redoubts with a battle zone in rear.

One afternoon he was sitting on the red plush seat of a café in the Rue des Trois Cailloux with an engineer officer he had met casually a few minutes before. “Good spot, old
Armeens!” eulogized the sapper, sipping his drink and eyeing the passers-by. “Take my advice, padre, and make the most of it while you can; it won't be for long.”

“You mean this Bosche push is going to upset things,” said Rawley.

“Well yes, I suppose it will when it comes,” said the sapper, fishing a cigarette case from his breast pocket. “But I wasn't thinking of that.” He glanced suspiciously to right and left and added in a low voice. “Amiens is going to be closed to the troops!”

“Why, what is the idea?” asked Rawley, as casually as he could.

The other took a gulp at his glass, and continued in a low voice, “Another spy scare. I was up at Army this morning, and I heard them discussing it. I remember they did it once before, just before the Somme show. No one allowed in or out without a pass. I was going on leave at the time, and the M.P.s wouldn't even let me off the station to get breakfast. They collared some fellow and shot him. He was running one of the hotels, the Du Rhin, I believe.”

Rawley began slowly to fill his pipe. “How long is this going to last?” he asked.

“Oh, I don't know, a week, a fortnight or a month—till they get whoever they're after. Meantime, I shall have to do without my oysters at Josephine's—blast them! But I'm coming in tomorrow night to have a final bust if I have to desert for it.”

“Is tomorrow the last day then?” asked Rawley.

The sapper nodded. “According to what I heard at Army. Come in tomorrow, padre, and do yourself well. After that you won't get in without a special pass.”

Rawley went straight back to his billet as soon as he had parted from the engineer officer, and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe as he strode along. Obviously he would have to leave Amiens tomorrow if what had been told him were true. He would have to leave his comfortable bed and billet to go back to the cellar. It was a great nuisance, and the necessity of moving could not have come at a more awkward time. He had restocked the canteen only yesterday. He was therefore rather low in funds and burdened with stock that he could neither sell nor take with him. Perhaps the best thing would be to get Bull to pack up the stock in two or three old wooden cases, trusting that in the course of a few days he might be able to borrow a limber and get the cases sent up to the M.T. people at Albert, where he, Rawley could call for them.

He hunted up Bull in his billet and gave him instructions. He said he had been ordered to join a division on the Cambrai front and was leaving tomorrow. The train left at such an unearthly hour in the morning that he had decided to lorry-jump to Albert and Bapaume. He would therefore want Bull to carry his valise to the Albert road.

He went back into the town and had tea. He might as well make the most of his last day in Amiens, and the shops and lights and people seemed to have grown brighter and more attractive now that he was leaving them. He had
not very much money, but he would make the most of it; he would pay a final visit to all the haunts which he had frequented during the course of his enforced role of a man-about-town.

II

Early in the evening he went into the l'Univers and ordered a drink. Two or three officers were sitting in the cane chairs in the little lounge. He looked down at the rose coloured carpet and wondered if ever again he would have a carpet beneath his feet. He finished his drink and prepared to go. A girl was coming round the bend of the stairs, and as he crossed towards the door, they met. She glanced at him casually, but her look of frank self-possession changed swiftly to one of startled interest. His heart pounded against his ribs.

This was the meeting he had dreaded—and longed for.

Her eyes widened slowly; her face was paper white. “PE-TER!” The word came in an intense vibrant whisper, and she clutched his sleeve for support. “They told me you were—DEAD.”

To him it seemed that the lounge was revolving rapidly, forming a coloured shining frame encircling her pale face and eyes, but he kept his head, and with one hand under her elbow, piloted her to the door. She went unresisting. The cool air outside cleared his brain a little. She was speaking; whispering; “I know it's you, Peter. I know it's you—really you, but tell me it is. Tell me.”

“Yes—it's me,” he answered in a strangled voice.

“Thank God!” she whispered. “Thank God.”

Her hand still clutched his arm. He stole a look at her. Her face was flushed and her eyes were bright. His brain was clearing. He led her down a side street where there was little light and no traffic. “If you know . . .” he began. “But I can see you don't. Aren't you—aren't you wondering . . . don't you want to know. . . .”

She hugged his arm. “No. Not now. I know that you are alive. Nothing else matters.”

They walked on in silence. Ahead the moonlight glinted on water. They sat down beneath a plane-tree on that bench whereon he had rested that night of his first visit to Amiens. He took her hands and held them close against his face. “Berney,” he began. “Berney, it's such a long and dismal story. . . .”

She laid her cheek against the hand that held hers. “Let us leave it till tomorrow. Tonight I am content to know that you are alive and still love me.”

He kissed the palms of her hands. “But tomorrow I must leave Amiens,” he said.

“I can bear even that now I know that you are safe,” she murmured.

“But we must be practical,” he insisted, “though God knows I wish we could sit here for ever, you and I. But our time is so short. Tell me—tell me what you know. What did you think—what did you do when I—I. . . .”

“I had no reply to my letters, and I was terribly afraid,” she said in a voice that quivered with the remembrance of
that fear. “I wrote to Mr. Piddock to ask if anything terrible had happened to you.”

“Ah!”

She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, Peter, it was dreadful. I tried so hard to carry on and be—be worthy of you, but I was all dead inside. Mr. Piddock's letter was so kind and sympathetic, but he said you had been killed.”

“Ah!” Rawley nodded his head slowly. “Dear old Piddock. That was the kindest thing he could say.”

“He said that you had been buried in a dug-out with another man—killed instantaneously when a shell went through it. Why did he say it, Peter? Why did he say it? And why, oh why, did you leave me all this time in agony without a word, without one tiny little word just to say that you were alive! It was cruel—cruel of you, darling. When I saw you in the hotel there I thought I was suffocating; and then I saw that it was really you, and all sorts of things went rushing through my head. I thought that perhaps you had grown tired of me and had kept away on that account, but then your eyes told me that wasn't true, and I didn't care about anything alse—you were alive and had the same dear look in your eyes. I'm so happy—so happy.”

He held her shoulder closely and mumbled incoherently.

“But why, Peter, why did you let me suffer so long?” she murmured.

“I—I thought it best that you should forget me,” he mumbled. He felt her body stiffen slightly in his arms and he went on quickly. “I had to leave the battery—I ran
away—deserted. You see, there was a fellow there—Rumbald, you've heard me speak of him before—a shirker—we were always quarrelling. In the Line you get on each other's nerves—hate each other. It went on working up and up. One day it came to a head. He was going to give another fellow a job that he ought to have done himself and funked doing. We'd had two officers killed that day already. We were both mad with rage. We were alone in the dug-out and we started fighting and I killed him. And so I cleared out.”

He had released his grip in anticipation of her shrinking, but her body did not move. “But why—why,” she asked in a low puzzled voice, “didn't you write to me or see me?”

He laughed hoarsely. “Well—I mean—a fellow who's a deserter and killed another man. . . .!”

“But isn't that what everybody is trying to do, and didn't he deserve to be killed?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, I dare say. He deserved it a good deal more than most of the Germans we have been doing our best to kill—but the authorities wouldn't take that view.”

She sat up suddenly. “Peter! You—you are in danger then!”

“I expect they would shoot me if they caught me,” he said easily.

She clung to him, fearfully. “Oh, Peter!” She shook his arm insistently. “You must hide. Where can you go.”

He soothed her. “I'm safe enough here for the moment,” he assured her. “So long as I'm out of Amiens
before tomorrow night. And I have a safe enough place to go to. Too safe! My risk would have been much greater had things been different and I had been—been with the battery. Don't let that worry you, sweetheart. What worries me is you—and what will be the end of it all.” He took her hands and held them tightly. “You, see,” he went on quickly and doggedly, “I had to live somehow after that—that business in the dug-out, and that's why I'm dressed up as a Padre and living like a mountebank—by my wits. And before that I lived out there.” He swung an arm. “In the devastated area . . . in old dug-outs and trenches . . . like a savage . . . with other miserable wretches . . . bandits. And . . . Oh, Berney, dear, don't you see, I'm an outcast . . . a deserter . . . there's no hope . . . no future. . . .”

She clung to his arm. “My poor, poor Peter.” She went on earnestly. “But Peter, darling, there must be hope. I can't believe that finding you alive after all this terrible time of sickening fear . . . I can't, can't believe it's just a cruel joke. There must be a future. There must. There shall be.”

He shook his head sadly. And then, with a swift change of thought, she cried in alarm, “Where are you going tomorrow . . . not, not back to that terrible life?”

He reassured her and told her about Alf and the cellar, painting the account in bright colours to comfort her. “It's really quite snug,” he concluded. “You need not worry on that score. Why, we draw rations, and it's far more comfortable and safe than being with a battery on the Line.”

She was silent for a few moments, and then she said in a low voice, “It's terrible for you, Peter, terrible, I know, but I can't, I simply can't be depressed about it now; I'm too thankful and glad to find you alive. I can face anything now that I know that. Something will turn up. Something must happen. I feel it will. Anyway we have had this time together. No one can take that away from us. Whatever happens we shall have this memory and the knowledge that we—that we love one another.”

“I have lived on memories,” he said huskily. “I never thought to see that dear look in your eyes again. I dreaded meeting you . . . dreaded seeing another look . . . after what has happened I thought . . . a fellow . . . an outcast. . . .”

She laughed happily. “You old goose,” she murmured and snuggled against his shoulder.

The March night air was chilly and he felt her shiver. “Selfish brute, I am,” he said. “You are getting cold and you've had no food. We will go and have a meal, a real bust. Do you remember the last we had together? That lunch in the orchard?”