Behind the Lines (5 page)

She held out her hand for the package.

“May I carry it for you?” he asked.

Her eyebrows went up slightly, and she looked at him with candid eyes. “Are we going the same way?” she asked, with a droll smile that he found very attractive.

He rubbed his chin in a characteristic manner, and smiled a little ruefully at the rebuff.

“The fact is,” he answered frankly, “I thought perhaps we might foregather in some tea-shop if there is such a thing in this metropolis. After all, it's war time, we are fellow dumplings in a foreign land and all that.”

“I suppose that does make some difference,” she answered with a smile.

“All the difference in the world,” he asserted.

“But how did you know. . . . Oh, you saw the address on that package!” she said severely.

He nodded and grinned. “Yes, it was a lucky guess,” he acknowledged cheerfully.

“And how am I to know that you, too . . .”

“I dunno, Barney bor, these bunks do cut sumfen haard!” he drawled in broad Norfolk.

“That's proof positive!” she laughed.

“And my name is Peter Rawley,” he added.

“I am Berney Travers,” said she.

“And now that we are properly introduced, how about that teashop!”

III

“I rather like this French game of ‘Come choose you east, come choose you west, come choose the one that you
love best,' ” said he, as they stood plate in hand before the tempting piles of confectionery on the
pâtisserie
counter. “Much simpler than our English system of six standard articles on a plate—you know: bun, cream, one; meringue, one; éclair, chocolate, one; conserve, one; cake, fruit, slice of, one; ditto, seed, slice of, one—and the waitress counts up on her fingers what's left and does mental arithmetic with furrowed brow.”

The girl laughed and speared to her plate a puffy confection, oozing cream. Rawley knit his brows and eyed it with mock aversion. “I'm afraid you have depraved tastes,” he said with a sigh.

“There are plenty more, if you want one,” she retorted.

“That's the beauty of the system,” he answered, as he calmly transfixed one of the same fearsome confections. “In England you all sit like kids at a party with one eye on the cakes, gobbling up your bread and butter as fast as you can lest someone should finish first and bag the one you've had your eye on.”

They sat down at their table. “I'm afraid you were a greedy child,” she said reprovingly.

“I was,” he avowed unashamedly. “All healthy kids are. And I bet you were, too.”

She handed him his cup. “Bulls'-eyes were my vice,” she confessed.

He nodded. He liked her clear, low-pitched voice. “I was catholic in my tastes,” he admitted. “I don't think I ever ran to a
grande passion
, though I did have an affair with doughnuts.”

Her fork was poised half way to her mouth. “Stoge!” she said, with crinkled nose.

It was a graceful hand that held the fork, small and white, but neither incapable nor delicate. And the finger nails suited it. They were not blunt and black, like those of the pretty farm girl at the mess, nor long and pointed, like those of the little girl in black who had laid her hand on his sleeve in the corridor of the Quatre Fils; they had little cream half moons on them, and were nice and honest looking.

“It's good to be drinking out of a cup again,” he remarked. “But I miss the eternal chloride of lime.”

“It's very good for one,” she mocked.

“Which? Cups or lime?”

“Both—one for the tummy and the other for the soul!”

She had a slow, charming smile, that was free from malice, and gave promise of a great sense of harmless fun. He noticed how her lashes curved upwards when her head was bent. She had steady, candid eyes, and talked in a natural, friendly way.

Her hand came across the table for his cup. “More tea?”

“And no sugar, please,” he said.

“Sorry! Did I give you some? Patient man. Why didn't you shout?”

“Icklingham is near Thetford, isn't it?” he asked, glancing down at the parcel beside him.

She nodded and put down her cup. “Um—on the outskirts of the heath.”

“I've been across it on my motor-bike—rabbits by the thousand and heather and pines.”

She nodded her head vigorously. “I love it.”

That was rather refreshing. Most people dismissed the country as dull, or thought their own town slow.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

He learned that she lived alone with her mother, that she was attached to a stationary hospital at a place called Hocqmaison, between Doullens and Arras, that she had a Scotch terrier at home named Tim, that she brought the Mess President into Doullens once a week to buy stores, that she loved tennis and hated bridge, that she had a brother at Oundle, that she had seen
Chu Chin Chow
twice, and loved George Robey, though he was rather low, and that she was going to see a divisional concert party that was giving a show in Hocqmaison on Friday.

Suddenly she glanced at her wrist-watch and sprang up. “I must simply fly,” she cried. “Captain Grant said that he would be ready to go back by a quarter-past five.”

They left the
pâtisserie
and walked down the street thronged with civilian carts, army cars, limbers and motor lorries. Her ambulance was in the square, parked with half a dozen other British vehicles, staff cars, box bodies, and a R.A.F. tender. Beside it stood a middle-aged R.A.M.C. captain. Berney began to apologize for being a minute or two late, but he cut in with, “Not a bit, Miss Travers. I have only just arrived, and there is no hurry, anyway.” And there was a twinkle in the eye that met Rawley's as he added, “Can I give you a lift anywhere, Gunner?”

“Thanks very much, but I have a four-footed one of my own waiting for me,” answered Rawley.

Berney climbed into the driving-seat, and with a wave of her hand to Rawley, drove out of the square towards the Arras road.

Rawley jogged homeward on Lucy through the amber light of the sinking sun which gilded the leafy woods that crowned every hill. The drone of a homing aeroplane served only to emphasize the calm that attends the dying of a summer day. In the A.S.C. billet at the fork roads outside the village an unseen man was singing in the soothing contented manner that betokens pleasant fatigue, a day's work behind and leisure ahead—the way men sing when polishing their boots before walking out for the evening. Round the last bend in the narrow road the first yellow-washed cottages of the village lay bathed in golden glory. Two men of the battery passed him with clinking spurs, whitened lanyards, and soldierly salutes. He rode slowly up the streets and mounted the short, steep lane to the mess.

His canvas bath stood ready filled on the red-brick floor of his billet, and he had a cold sponge down before changing into slacks for mess. Altogether a successful day he mused as he stood clean and clothed, brushing his damp hair before his steel travelling mirror.

IV

The Major, Whedbee, and Piddock were in the mess talking to a stranger who was introduced as Rumbald, a reinforcement from Havre, posted to the battery. The Major asked about the collars he had commissioned Rawley to
get him from ordnance, and Piddock asked facetiously whether he had been to the opera or attended a
thé dansant
at the Ritz. Rawley told them of his meeting Tankard at the Quatre Fils, but said nothing of Berney Travers. That would have been to invite facetious remarks, and he felt that it had been too nice an occurrence to become the subject of Piddock's chaff.

The conversation drifted back to London which Rumbald had left only a fortnight previously; and Rawley drew up a chair and covertly appraised this new-comer, who was to share that close intimacy that war had imposed upon them.

He was a big man, probably in the early thirties, though the girth of his waist, which compelled him to buckle his Sam Browne in the last hole, made him appear almost middle-aged. He had the comfortable, well-fed air of a man who finds much in life that is agreeable, and does not spoil his enjoyment of it by vain yearnings for the unattainable. His pink and slightly fleshy face suggested much soap and warm water, and the dark hairs imparted to the well-shaven cheeks a faint, luminous blue gleam. There were little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and Rawley pictured him in civil life wearing a tight blue suit and a bowler hat on the back of his head. He lounged in the old horsehair armchair, his head sunk in his massive shoulders, a glass of whisky resting on his crossed knees, and his great buttocks pressing the springs flat; and Rawley, remembering his own shyness as a newcomer to the mess, envied this man for his easy assurance.

He had a humorous blunt way of talking about men and things, and he had, it appeared, a great number of acquaintances in London and scattered up and down England, to whom he referred bewilderingly as old George Kemp, young Tom Conolly, Sam Tatam's missus, or that little armful Patsy Green. Evidently he was very popular in this wide circle of acquaintances, though it did not appear to which particular strata of society they belonged.

He had managed to enjoy life, even in Havre where, it appeared, reinforcement officers were hampered by endless ridiculous regulations. But he had not allowed these to cramp his optimism or opportunism. Evidently he was a very good hand at driving a coach and four through an Act of Parliament, or any other troublesome regulation. He had a breezy, persuasive, “Come-old-fellow,-but-of-course-these-ridiculous-regulations-don't-apply-
to-me
” manner that had procured him sugar in a land of saccharine, meat without a ration card, and drinks in public-houses after hours. A useful fellow to send to brigade or division when they and the battery did not see eye to eye.

CHAPTER IV

The battery was enjoying its rest in the village after its long and arduous spell in the Line. In the manner of British troops the world over it had made itself at home within ten minutes of the guns being parked beneath the trees of the square. Within an hour it was known throughout the battery which farm sold the cheapest eggs and at which
estaminet
the beer was least insipid, and more than one gunner had taken his place in a French kitchen, with the family, to drink a cup of the coffee that seemed to be ready at any hour.

Two guns had gone to ordnance for repairs, and apart from the routine exercise, stables, and feeds that are inseparable from a horse unit, duties were light. And the weather, as if in expiation of its recent vagaries, was excellent. The dusty white surface of the village street was scolloped with the clear-cut shadows of gables and chimneys. The wood that climbed the slope behind the village street looked cool and inviting, and beyond the houses the heat shimmered above the swelling slopes of ripening corn that undulated to the hazy distance, unbroken by hedge or tree except for an occasional wood upon a hill-top, and in the low ground the winding green ribbon of trees that marked the road.

A football match had been arranged between the battery and the motor transport workshop that was quartered at the cross-roads, and Rawley played in his old school position at right half and fed Piddock, who made a
very fast outside right. Rumbald, on the touch-line, proved to be an enthusiastic supporter of his new unit, and his periodic mighty bellow of “Come on, B Battery,” sent the birds eddying above the poplars.

He showed a liking for Rawley's company, and Rawley was a little flattered by this tribute from a man older and more worldly wise than himself. They went riding together in the afternoon, following, perhaps not entirely by accident, the route Rawley had taken two days previously when he had met Berney Travers on the road to Doullens. Rumbald was in a confidential mood and spoke of his wife.

“Writes to me every other day, Pete,” he said. “Sends me lashings of cigarettes, marching chocolate, and any damn thing the shop people can kid her we want out here. That's the sort of wife to have, Pete, my lad, one that looks after the bed
and
the board. That's a wife's job—a wife that is a wife.”

He took a photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to Rawley. “Not a high stepper, mind you, but a nice little armful all the same.”

Rawley made some suitable comment and handed back the photograph. Rumbald gazed at it sentimentally for a moment before returning it to his pocket.

“That's the sort we shall have to find for you one of these days,” he continued. “How would you like a nice little girl of your own?” and he made a stab at Rawley's ribs with his crop. “Half the trouble in this life is caused by fellows who want a woman and don't know it, or by females who get a kink on religion or uplift or some damn
nonsense, when all they really want is a few babies. God never intended a man or a woman to live alone, and He ought to know.”

Swaying gently to the motion of his mare, Rawley silently agreed. He tilted his cap over his eyes to look at an aeroplane droning overhead, but his mind's eyes was occupied with the picture Rumbald's words had conjured up—the picture of a little woman of one's own, someone so much a part of oneself that one was never alone, even when separated from her. Someone with whom one could share all the extraordinary thoughts and ideas and emotions that made up life—particularly life in this baffling time of war. Someone who would welcome one even though one came muddy and sweaty and unshaven straight from a gun-pit. And he recalled the daintily dressed girl he had seen at Victoria station, who when the leave train came in had flung her arms round the neck of her muddy husband and had been lifted off her feet and hugged before the world.

His mare half-stumbled in a rabbit hole and curveted affectedly. He soothed her with a little clucking noise while his thoughts ran on.

Of course it was not often that a cultured English girl showed her feelings like that; but it did give one a glimpse into hidden heavens so to speak. Her eyes shining like stars and seeing only one muddy man among all the khaki crowd. There was no mistaking that look—or forgetting it. Lucky devil that infanteer, whoever he was.