Non-combatants and Others Part 2

4

After dinner they got out a map of the western front and spread it on a table and made John say, so far as he knew, in which parts of the line the various battalions at the moment were, and Dorothy wrote their names, very small, all down the line. Alix slipped away while they were doing this, to smell the garden. Soon they began to sing in the drawing-room. Margot sang, 'When we wind up the watch on the Rhine,' a song popular among soldiers just then. She was no doubt practising for canteen concerts. John joined in the chorus, in a baritone voice somewhat marred by trench life.

Alix went indoors and up to bed. She was s.h.i.+vering, as if she was cold, or very tired, or frightened....

She undressed hastily, whistling shrilly, and got into bed and pulled the bedclothes up round her neck and read Mr. Give Bell's last book, with much of which she differed violently, so violently that she made marginal and unsympathetic notes on it in pencil as she lay.

'I'll send it to Basil and see what he thinks,' she thought.

Then Dorothy and Margot came up, merry and talking.

'You _are_ a lazy little unsociable slacker,' Margot told her. 'John was telling us such ripping stories, too. Make him tell you to-morrow about the sergeant-major and the pheasant and the barbed wire. It was awfully funny.'

Dorothy yawned. 'Oh, I'm sleepy. Thank goodness it's Sunday to-morrow, so we can lie in. Margot, you've pinched my slippers.... Oh no, all right.'

Alix lay and read. Her cousins undressed and said their prayers and got into bed.

'Ready, Alix?' asked Margot, her finger on the switch.

'Right,' said Alix, putting Mr. Clive Bell under her pillow, where, deeply as she differed from him, he seemed to lie as a protection against something.

The switch clicked, and the room was in darkness.

Margot and Dorothy murmured on drowsily, dropping remarks about the hospital, the canteen, things John had said.... The remarks trailed away into sleep.

5

Alix lay awake. Her forehead was hot and her feet were cold. She was tense, and on the brink of s.h.i.+vering. Staring into the dark she saw things happening across the seas: dreadful things, ugly, jarring, horrifying things. War--war--war. It pressed round her; there was no escape from it. Every one talked it, breathed it, lived in it. Aunt Eleanor, with her committees, and her terrible refugees; Mademoiselle Verstigel, with her round robin's eyes that had looked horror in the face so near; Uncle Gerald, with his paper and his intelligent city rumours; Dorothy and Margot with their soldiers, who kept coming to tea, cheerful, charming, and maimed; John, damaged and stammering, with his nervous eyes and his quiet, humorous trench talk; Basil, writing from his dug-out of Boche and sh.e.l.ls ... little Paul out there in the dark ... they were all up against the monster, being strangled ... it was like that beastly Laoc.o.o.n....

There was a balcony running along outside the bedrooms at the front of the house. The moonlight lay palely on it; Alix watched it through the long open window. Through the window came a sound of quiet crying; gasping, choked sobbing, as if a child were in despair. Alix sat up in bed and listened. Margot and Dorothy breathed softly, each a peace-drugged column of bedclothes.

Alix, pale and frowning, scrambled out of bed, shuddered, and pattered on thin, naked feet to the window and out on to the moon-bathed stone balcony floor.

Outside his own window, John, barefooted, in pink pyjamas, stood, gripping with both hands on to the iron bal.u.s.trade, his face turned up to the moon, crying, sobbing, moaning, like a little child, like a man on the rack. He was saying things from time to time ... muttering them ... Alix heard. Things quite different from the things he had said at dinner. Only his eyes, as Alix had met them between the daffodils, had spoken at all like this; and even that had not been like this. His eyes were now wide and wet, and full of a horror beyond speech. They turned towards Alix and looked through her, beyond her, unseeing. John was fast asleep.

Alix, to hear no more, put her hands over her ears and turned and ran into the bedroom. She flung herself upon Dorothy and shook her by the shoulders, shook her till she sat up startled and awake.

Alix stammered, 'John--John. He's walking in his sleep ... out there....

He's crying--he's talking ... go and stop him.'

Dorothy, efficient and professional in a moment, sprang out of bed into her two waiting slippers, and ran into the balcony. Alix heard her, gentle, quiet, firm, soothing John, leading him back to bed.

Alix was most suddenly and violently sick.

When Dorothy came back, twenty minutes later, she was huddled under the bedclothes, exhausted, shuddering and cold.

'He's quiet now,' said Dorothy, taking off her slippers. 'Poor old boy.

They often do it, you know. It's the nervous shock. I must listen at nights.... I say, don't tell him, Alix; he wouldn't like it. Specially to know he was crying. Poor old Johnny. Just the thing he'd never do, awake, however far gone he was. Nor talking like that; he was saying awful things.... Did you hear?'

'Yes,' said Alix, in a small, faint voice.

Dorothy looked at her curiously, and saw her grey pallor and shut eyes.

'Why, you're ill too: I believe Johnny's upset you.' She spoke with a kindly pity and contempt. 'Is that it, kiddie?'

'Don't know,' said Alix. 'No. Should think it was too many walnuts at dinner. Let's go to sleep now.'

Dorothy, before she did this, turned her head on the pillow towards Alix's corner and said kindly, 'You'll never be any use if you don't forget _yourself_, Alix. You couldn't possibly nurse if you were always giving in to your own nerves. After all, what they can bear to go through, we ought to be able to bear to hear about. But of course you're not used to it, I know. You should come to the hospital sometimes.

Good-night. If you feel rotten in the morning, don't get up.'

Dorothy went to sleep.

Alix lay and watched the shadows s.h.i.+fting slowly round on the balcony, and listened for sobbing, but heard only the quiet murmur of the pines.

'What they can bear to go through.... But they can't, they can't, they can't ... we can bear to hear about ... but we can't, we can't, we can't....'

It was like the intolerable ticking of a clock, and beat itself away at last into a sick dream.

On the other side of the wall, John started and sat bolt upright in bed, with wide staring eyes.... John, like many thousand others, would perhaps never sleep quietly through a night again. Yet John had been a composed sleeper once.

CHAPTER III

ALIX GOES

1

It was Sunday next day. Dorothy and Margot conducted a party of wounded soldiers to matins. Mrs. Orme, who thought it time Mademoiselle Verstigel went to Ma.s.s again, sent her over to Wonford, where there was a church of her persuasion. She herself had to go up to town to the Sunday club where soldiers' and sailors' families were kept out of the streets and given coffee, news, friends.h.i.+p, music, and the chance to read good books, a chance of which Mrs. Orme, a sanguine person, hoped undiscouraged that they would one day avail themselves. (Hope, faith, and love were in her family. Her sister, Daphne Sandomir, when in England, held study circles of working women to instruct them in the principles which make for permanent peace, and hoped with the same fervour that they would read the books and pamphlets she gave them.)

Mr. Orme and John walked over to the links to play golf. Alix, not having either the church, club, or golf habit, and being unfitted for much walking, sat in the wood, tried to paint, and failed. She felt peevish, tired, cross and selfish, and her head ached, as one's head nearly always does after being sick in the night. The pines were no good: stupid trees, the wrong shape. What sort of pictures would one be painting out there? Mud-coloured levels, mud-coloured men, splashes of green here and there ... and red.... And blue sky, or mud-coloured, with sh.e.l.ls winging through it like birds, singing, 'Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd.'... The sort of picture Basil would be painting and the way he would be painting it she knew exactly. Only probably he wasn't painting at all to-day. It was Sunday-hate day.

Whizz-bangs, pom-poms, trench-mortars spinning along and bouncing off the wire trench roof.... Minnie coming along to blow the whole trench inside out ... legs and arms and bits of men flying in the air ... the rest of them buried deep in choking earth ... perhaps to be dug out alive, perhaps dead.... What was it John had said on the balcony--something about a leg ... the leg of a friend ... pulling it out of the chaos of earth and mud and stones which had been a trench ...

thinking it led on to the entire friend, finding it didn't, was a detached bit.... Had John cried at the time? Been sick? Probably not; John was a self-contained young man. He had waited till afterwards, when he was asleep.

Alix, seeing her friends in scattered bits, seeing worse than that, seeing what John had seen and mentioned with tears, turned the greenish pallor of pale, ageing cheese, and dropped her head in her hands.

Painting was off for that morning. Painting and war don't go together.

2

Mrs. Orme came home in the afternoon, tired but still energetic. Mr.

Orme and John came in to tea too, with Sunday papers and having seen telegrams about the German offensive being stopped at Ypres. Callers dropped in to tea. They worried John by their questions. They kindly drew out Mademoiselle Verstigel, in French worse than her English.

Directly after tea Margot had to hurry away up to town to the canteen.