Love and the Loveless (47 page)

It would hardly do for Teddy, who would think he was blotto; so he threw the copy in the fire, and went outside. He sat on the shingle, in the roar of the waves; and coming back again, walked towards the hutments. Music of a brass band was playing somewhere. Of course, it was Guest Night. He had cut Guest Night, he supposed.

*

At half-past eleven Allen returned.

“Thank you for letting me use your chair.”

“No, no, please sit down! I’m just going to bed.” Allen undressed, washed, cleaned his teeth, knelt to say prayers, and was winding up his watch when there was a tap on the door. A senior subaltern stood there. “My name is Sisley,” he said to Phillip. “Will you come with me?”

They went together down the terrace to the camp. “I thought I’d have a word with you,” said the other. “We can talk best in the card-room, now the bridge-players have knocked off.”

I’m going to get a ragging for cutting Guest Night, thought Phillip. How events in life repeated themselves! And always due to his own faults. It was the spirit of a man’s life that recurred, for events had no assembly upon him, as it were, apart from a man’s own pattern in life. Death was outside that pattern. Well, he would face whatever was coming, quietly. Nothing really mattered. No excuses!

“The others have gone to pull Father out of bed,” said Sisley, stepping back before the ante-room door. Was someone going to spring upon him, a scrum? Phillip walked in; the room was empty. “We won’t be disturbed in the card room when they lug in Father. He always goes to bed early on Guest Nights, which is a bore, when he is wanted to play the piano. Do you play, by any chance?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What will you drink?” Sisley rang the bell. With the order he said, “And ask the mess sergeant for the sandwiches, will you?” When the tray came, he raised his glass to Phillip. “Here’s luck! Do help yourself to sandwiches. Now I’ll come to the point. Some of us here know that you’ve had bad luck, and we want you to know that you’re among friends.” He raised his glass again, said “Good health!” and swallowed the rest of his whiskey and soda.

Phillip could not speak. He just managed to drink.

“We know,” went on Sisley, “how well you did at Loos after
‘Spectre’ was hit. He had bad luck, too, before July the First, you may remember.” More drinks arrived. “Now get outside these sandwiches. We appreciate your reasons for not coming into mess tonight, although had we known in time, we could have fixed you up with a pair of slacks.”

“Well, thanks very much, Sisley.”

Voices without, door barged open, half a dozen subalterns coming in, lugging a large amiable figure with the droll face of a clown. A red grenade on his sleeve showed “Father” to be the Bombing Officer. He looked like a farmer; but when he had given, after repeated demands, his patter on how to sell a gilded brass watch at a Fair, Sisley told Phillip that was how “Father” had earned his living before the war.

Followed a sing-song around the piano, Father vamping on the keys. When the assistant adjutant arrived, Father got up, swallowed his beer, said “Thank God for small mercies”, and departed. The newcomer sat at the piano, the sheet music of
Roses
of
Picardy
having been placed before him. He sang in a sweet tenor voice, reminding Phillip of the singer—who was it now? what was his name?—over two years ago at Grey Towers, Hornchurch—what
was
his name?—he had become engaged to the C.O.’s daughter, and was killed on July the First. What
was
his name? It worried him that he could not remember. Was his brain going? What
was
the name? He could hear the voice, see the face, the smile, the brushed-up Kaiser-moustache. He tried desperately to remember. He had sung
Rosebud
in
my
Lady
’
s
Hair.
There were no roses in Picardy, only poppies, most of them in no-man’s-land. Francis Thompson, doped with laudanum, on the Embankment, broken boots and all, sleeping at night on a newspaper, under the arch of Waterloo bridge, and writing his poem on the poppy by day, when not holding horses’ heads for a copper.

In June the periscope showed a level red of poppies fringing shell-holes, wire, and the emptying uniforms of the dead. Roses in Picardy, Flanders, or Artois! Christ, what civvy-songwriter rubbish! What did they know about the truth? Then came the old and hopeless longing for Lily.

He was too old for them; he who had known Lily in the gaslight among the yews of St. Mary’s churchyard, long ago. In their eyes, unfocused from the present, was still the dream of hope. If only he could feel like them. Arms on one another’s shoulders, warm with comradeship, buoyed by mutual esteem, they lived in the words and music—brother officers, come together for a cause in which few could now believe, but which had been made into something greater than themselves—the spirit of a regiment, the instinct of service one to another, the selflessness of love. If he could not live for them, he could at least die with them. He fortified himself by thinking of the two lines from
The
Mistress
of
Vision
:

On Christmas morning there was church parade. He wore infantry knickerbockers made in the town, with new brown boots and Fox’s puttees. From the tailor, too, he had got a piece of the new watered rainbow riband of the Mons Star, sewn on his left breast. Two-thirds of the battalion not on leave marched with the regimental band to and from the parish church. On the way back they passed the pier, and the last houses of the town, and came to a row of beach huts behind an asphalt promenade which ended the watering-place. Beyond was the brown ridge of shingle. On the ragged horizon of the North Sea was visible a tiny lightship. Approaching the camp, companies were called to attention: and then, six feet above the sea’s edge, a Camel single-seater scout flew past, the pilot waving a hand. Eyes remained to the front, arms swinging in unison, boots breaking upon the road rhythmically. At the head of the column, behind the drums,
rat-a-plan-plan
—
rat-a-plan-plan
—
walked the tall, bearded figure of the Colonel. Then the fifes ceased to shrill;
boom-boom-boom
of the bass drum: brass music of regimental march arose in frosty air, with glints of the sun upon the drum-major’s whirling stick.

By tradition, the officers were invited to the Sergeants’ Mess before luncheon. The Colonel, the first cousin of the Duke of Gaultshire, six feet four inches tall, famous oarsman and once a Viceroy, genial, blue-eyed, spoke to every sergeant in turn. He appeared to know every name, to remember every personal detail—village, wife or mother, family history. Moving among the sergeants, the Colonel spoke to every man. Likewise he seemed to remember the name of every officer, and all that previously had been replied in answer to his genial questions. It was said that when, in his quarters within Fort House at night, he dictated letters to his secretary concerning his Estate, his Grand Mastership of Freemasons, and other public affairs, he wrote private letters upon his knee at the same time. In the Orderly Room, dealing with defaulters, he never raised his voice, but spoke quietly, with impersonal ease, in the same tones with which he praised others on occasion—always detached, remotely paternal, equable. The spirit of service to thousands of acres of land and nearly a thousand years of English history was in his blood.

Phillip watched the amiable Viking figure, with the full blue eyes—a caricature of whom by Spy he had seen on the walls of Flowers’ hotel—drinking a pint of beer with the Regimental Sergeant Major. This was another, if not majestic, certainly terrific figure with three wound stripes, Military Cross, and Distinguished Service Medal. And when he talked with the sergeant he had spoken to at Charing Cross station fourteen months before, Phillip began to feel really at home for the first time in the war, and trills of joy moved in him as he told himself, These men are from the countryside that my mother and grandfather belonged to, and still belong, and now I am with the Gaultshires!

And yet—with a pang—I have come with an adverse report—all in the Orderly Room and the mess must know it by now: and through my fault entirely Pinnegar has been sent home, too, in disgrace.

*

Under the green baize board, to which Orders and other notices were pinned, there was a table, and on it a thick leather-bound
book containing photographs of officers of the Regiment. Looking through it, he saw ‘Spectre’ West, as a second-lieutenant, standing before a painted roll of scenery. He looked very young, but with the same expression of directness under his high white forehead. The flat service hat looked strangely old-fashioned. The photograph had been taken in Gaultford, the capital town. Allen had told him that West had been a junior master at the school, when it had grown from the county grammar to a public school. Allen had been at the school, where he had won a Classical scholarship to Balliol. He hoped to go up when the war was over.

An envelope came, addressed to Lieut. P. S. T. Maddison, to report to the Orderly Room immediately. Thumping heart, drying mouth.
Resigns
his
commission,
the
King
having
no
further
use
for
his
services.

Phillip had spent a week drilling with others on the square. The Colonel asked him how he would move a platoon, without halting it, through a gateway from one field to another, when it was advancing in line towards the gate. The Colonel had a little sketch of the gateway, the two fields, and the platoon in line.

“What order would you give your platoon, Mr. Maddison?” Phillip could not think. He remained silent.

“Would you not mark time, Mr. Maddison?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then what would you do?”

Silence.

“Your men are marking time, Mr. Maddison. How to get them through the gate?”

“I would form fours, sir.”

“What then?”

“I would order left turn, then forward march, sir.”

“Surely ‘Forward march’ is a cavalry order, is it not?”

“Yes, sir.”

He could not remember.

“Your men are still marking time, Mr. Maddison.”

“I would order, By the left, lead on, sir.”

“Yes, I think that would get them through. That will be all, Maddison.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The assistant adjutant later told him that a favourable report had been returned, with his dossier, to Eastern Command,
together with the C.O.’s recommendation that he be gazetted as attached to the 1st Battalion.

“The
first
battalion?”

“You served with the first at Loos, surely? But you’ll probably remain with us here until your next medical board in March. By the way, you’re down for four days’ Christmas leave on the thirty-first.”

Happily he returned to the ante-room. A full moon was shining over the parade ground; first warning had been sounded. He was looking at the book of photographs when the electric light was cut off. Derisive cheers came from the bridge-players, with loud calls for candles.

*

Passing through the immovable iron gate, he saw chinks of light through the shrouded windows of the front room. Could ‘Spectre’ be back? It was a shaking thought. Quietly he pushed open the front door and crept past to his room, where Allen was reading by fire-light. The borrowed bed was gone; in its place, a faded green stretch of wood and canvas. He went out to see his servant.

“Mr. Oliver-Jones, when he went out, gived it to me, sir,” said the batman. “He told me to sell it if I wanted to.”

“How much d’you want?”

“Would ten and a kick be too much, sir?”

“Too little! I’ll give you a pound for it.”

“Very good, sir. The major was asking after you, sir. He’s in the front room now, sir.”

Back in his room, he sat down on the little beer barrel, with a cushion on it, which his batman had scrounged from the mess sergeant. Allen went on reading. Phillip remained still, deeper entoiled. The front door opened; there were greetings in loud voices. Evidently a party was going on in ‘Spectre’s’ room. He felt he could not face them.

“I think you are expected,” said Allen, at last. “Major West has just returned from an Investiture at the Palace. He looked in here about half an hour ago, and asked for you.”