If Winter Comes Part 42

"Yes, do, High. That's fine."

He held out his arm and the two girls pinned to advantage the splendid sign of his splendid triumph.

"There, sir. Now it shows. And won't we be proud of you, just, in khaki and all!"

He laughed delightedly. "I'm jolly proud of myself, I tell you! Now, then, Thumbs, I don't want bayonets in me yet!"

Glorious! Glorious! And what would not Nona say!

CHAPTER IX

I

Life, when it takes so giant a hand in its puppet show as to upturn a cauldron of world war upon the puppets, may be imagined biting its fingers in some chagrin at the little result in particular instances. As vegetation beneath snow, so individual development beneath universal calamity. Nature persists; individual life persists. The snow melts, the calamity pa.s.ses; the green things spring again, the individual lives are but approached more nearly to their several destinations.

Sabre was called up in his Derby Cla.s.s within eight weeks of his enrolment,--at the end of February, 1916. He was nearly two years in the war; but his ultimate encounter with life awaited him, and was met, at Penny Green. It might have been reached precisely as it was reached without agency of the war, certainly without partic.i.p.ation in it. Of the interval only those few events ultimately mattered which had connection with his life at home. They seemed in the night of the war transient as falling stars; they proved themselves lodestars of his destiny. They seemed nothing, yet even as they flashed and pa.s.sed he occupied himself with them as the falling star catches the attention from all the fixed and constant. They were of his own life: the war life was life in exile.

And, caught up at last in the enormous machinery of the war, his feelings towards the war underwent a great change. First in the training camp in Dorsets.h.i.+re, afterwards, and much more so, in the trenches in Flanders, it was only by a deliberate effort that he would recapture, now and then, the old tremendous emotions in the thought of England challenged and beset. He turned to it as stimulant in moments of depression and of dismay, in hours of intense and miserable loathing of some conditions of his early life in the ranks, and later in hours when fatigue and bodily discomfort reached degrees he had not believed it possible to endure--and go on with. He turned to it as stimulant and it never failed of its stimulation. "I'm in it. What _does_ this matter?

This is the war. It's the war. Those infernal devils.... If these frightful things were being done in England! Imagine if this was in England! Thank G.o.d I'm in it. There you are! I'm absolutely all right when I remember why I'm here." And enormous exaltation of spirit would lift away the loneliness, remove the loathing, banish the exhaustion, dissipate the fear. The fear--"And thy right hand shall show thee terrible things"--He was more often than once in situations in which he knew he was afraid and held fear away only because, with his old habit of introspection, he knew it for fear,--a horrible thing that sought mastery of him and by sheer force of mental detachment must be held away where it could be looked at and known for the vile thing it was. In such ordeals, in Flanders, he got the habit of saying to himself between his teeth, "Six minutes, six hours, six days, six months, six years. Where the h.e.l.l will I be?" It somehow helped. The six minutes would go, and one could believe that all the periods would go,--and wonder where they would find one.

But more than that: now, caught up in the enormous machinery of the war, he never could accept it, as other men seemed to accept it, as normal and natural occupation that might be expected to go on for ever and outside of which was nothing at all. His life was not here; it was at home. He got the feeling that this business in which he was caught up was a business apart altogether from his own individual life,--a kind of trance in which his own life was held temporarily in abeyance, a kind of transmigration in which he occupied another and a very strange ident.i.ty: from whose most strange personality, often so amazingly occupied, he looked wonderingly upon the ident.i.ty that was his own, waiting his return.

And it was when, in thought or fleeting action, he came in touch with that old, waiting ident.i.ty, that there happened the things that seemed transient as falling stars but moved into his horoscope as planets,--and remained.

II

He first went to France, in one of the long string of Service battalions that had sprung out of the Pinks, in the June following his enlistment.

Mabel had not wished to make any change in her manner of life while he was still in England in training and she did not wish to when, at home three days on his draft leave, he discussed it with her. She much preferred, she said, to go on living in her own home. She was altogether against any idea of going to be with her father at Tidborough, and there was no cousin "or anybody like that" (her two sisters were married and had homes of their own) that she would care to have in the house with her. Relations were all very well in their right place but sharing the house with you was not their right place. She had plenty to do with her war work and one thing and another; if, in the matter of obviating loneliness, she did make any change at all, it might be to get some sort of paid companion: if you had any one permanently in the house it was much better to have some one in a dependent position, not as your equal, upsetting things.

The whole of these considerations were advanced again in a letter which Sabre received in July and which gave him great pleasure. Mabel had decided to get a paid companion--it was rather lonely in some ways--and she had arranged to have "that girl, Miss Bright." Sabre, reading, exclaimed aloud, "By Jove, that's good. I am glad." And he thought, "Jolly little Effie! That's splendid." He somehow liked immensely the idea of imagining Bright Effie about the house. He thought, "I wish she could have been in long ago, when I was there. It would have made a difference. Some one between us. We used to work on one another's nerves. That was our trouble. Pretty little Effie! How jolly it would have been! Like a jolly little sister."

He puckered his brows a little as he read on to Mabel's further reflections on the new enterprise: "Of course she's not our cla.s.s but she's quite ladylike and on the whole I think it just as well not to have a lady. It might be very difficult sometimes to give orders to any one of one's own standing."

He didn't quite like that; but after all it was only just Mabel's way of looking at things. It was the jolliest possible idea. He wrote back enthusiastically about it and always after Effie was installed inquired after her in his letters.

But Mabel did not reply to these inquiries.

III

He was writing regularly to Nona and regularly hearing from her. He never could quite make out where she was, addressing her only to her symbol in the Field post-office. She was car driving and working very long hours. There was one letter that he never posted but of the existence of which he permitted himself to tell her. "I carry it about with me always in my Pay-book. It is addressed to you. If ever I get outed it will go to you. In it I have said everything that I have never said to you but that you know without my saying it. There'll be no harm in your hearing it from my own hand if I'm dead. I keep on adding to it.

Every time we come back into rest, I add a little more. It all could be said in the three words we have never said to one another. But all the words that I could ever write would never say them to you as I feel them. There! I must say no more of it. I ought not to have said so much."

And she wrote, "Marko, I can read your letter, every line of it. I lie awake, Marko, and imagine it to myself--word by word, line by line; and word by word, line by line, in the same words and in the same lines, I answer it. So when you read it to yourself for me, read it for yourself from me. Oh, Marko--

"That I ever shall have cause to read it in actual fact I pray G.o.d never to permit. But so many women are praying for so many men, and daily--.

So I am praying beyond that: for myself; for strength, if anything should happen to you, to turn my heart to G.o.d. You see, then I can say, 'G.o.d keep you--in any amazement.'"

IV

Early in December he wrote to Mabel:

"A most extraordinary thing has happened. I'm coming home! I shall be with you almost on top of this. It's too astonis.h.i.+ng. I've suddenly been told that I'm one of five men in the battalion who have been selected to go home to an Officer Cadet battalion for a commission. Don't jump to the conclusion that I'm the Pride of the Regiment or anything like that. It's simply due to two things: one that this is not the kind of battalion with many men who would think of taking commissions; the other that both my platoon officer and the captain of my company happen to be Old Tidburians and, as I've told you, have often been rather decent to me. So when this chance came along the rest was easy. I know you'll be glad. You've never liked the idea of my being in the ranks. But it's rather wonderful, isn't it? I hope to be home on the third and I go to the Cadet battalion, at Cambridge, on the fifth."

Two days later he started, very high of spirit, for England. As he was leaving the village where the battalion was resting--his immediate programme the adventure of "lorry-jumping" to the railhead--the mail came in and brought him a letter from Mabel. It had crossed his own and a paragraph in it somehow damped the tide of his spirits.

"I was very much annoyed with Miss Bright yesterday. I had been kept rather late at our Red Cross Supply Depot owing to an urgent call for accessories and when I came home I found that Miss Bright had actually taken what I consider the great liberty of ordering up tea without waiting for me. I considered it great presumption on her part and told her so. I find her taking liberties in many ways. It's always the way with that cla.s.s,--once you treat them kindly they turn on you. However, I have, I think, made it quite clear to her that she is not here for the purpose of giving her own orders and being treated like a princess."

It clouded his excitement. His thought was, "d.a.m.n it, I hope she isn't bullying Effie."

He had the luck almost at once to jump a lorry that would lift him a long bit on his road, and the driver felicitated him with envious cheerfulness on being off for "leaf." He would have responded with immense heartiness before reading that letter. With Mabel's tart sentences in his mind a certain gloom, a rather vexed gloom, bestrode him. Her words presented her aspect and her att.i.tude and her atmosphere with a reminiscent flavour that took the edge off his eagerness for home. On the road when the lorry had dropped him, on the interminable journey in the train, on the boat, the feeling remained with him.

England--England!--merged into view across the water, and he was astonished, as his heart bounded for joy at Folkestone coming into sight, to realise from what depression of mind it bounded away. He was ashamed of himself and perturbed with himself that he had not more relished the journey: the journey that was the most glorious thing in the dreams of every man in France. He thought, "Well, what am I coming home to?"

The train went speeding through the English fields,--dear, familiar, English lands, sodden and bare and unspeakably exquisite to him in their December mood. He gazed upon them, flooding all his heart out to them.

He thought, "Why should there be anything to make me feel depressed? Why should things be the same as they used to be? But dash that letter....

Dash it, I hope she's not been bullying that girl."

V

He made rather a boisterous entry into the house on his arrival, arriving in the morning before breakfast. He entered the hall just after eight o'clock and announced himself with a loud, "Hullo, everybody!" and thumped the b.u.t.t of his rifle on the floor. An enormous crash in the kitchen and a shriek of "It's the master!" heralded the tumultuous discharge upon him of High Jinks and Low Jinks. Effie appeared from the dining room. He was surrounded and enthusiastically shaking hands.

"Hullo, you Jinkses! Isn't this ripping? By Jove, High--and Low--it's famous to see you again. Hullo, Effie! Just fancy you being here! How jolly fine, eh? High Jinks, I want the most enormous breakfast you've ever cooked. Got any kippers? Good girl. That's the stuff to give the troops. Where's the Mistress? Not down yet? I'll go up. Low Jinks--Low Jinks, I'm dashed if you aren't crying! Well, it is jolly nice to see you again, Low. How's the old bike? Look here, Low, I want the most boiling bath--"

He broke off. "Hullo, Mabel! Hullo! Did you get my letter? I'm coming up."

Mabel was in a wrapper at the head of the stairs. He ran up. "I'm simply filthy. Do you mind?" He took her hand.

She said, "I never dreamt you'd be here at this hour. How are you, Mark?

Yes, I got your letter. But I never expected you till this evening. It's very annoying that nothing is ready for you. Sarah, something is burning in the kitchen. I shouldn't stand there, Rebecca, with so much to be done; and I think you've forgotten your cap. Miss Bright,--oh, she's gone."

Just the same Mabel! But he wasn't going to let her be the same! He had made up his mind to that as he had come along with eager strides from the station. She turned to him and they exchanged their greetings and he went on, pursuing his resolution, "Look here, I've got a tremendous idea. When I get through this cadet business I shall have quite a bit of leave _and_ my Sam Browne belt. I thought we'd go up to town and stick up at an hotel--the Savoy or somewhere--and have no end of a bust.

Theatres and all the rest of it. Shall we?"

That chilly, vexed manner of hers, caused as he well knew by the uproar of his arrival, disappeared. "Oh, I'd love to. Yes, do let's. Now you want a bath, don't you? I'm annoyed there was all that disturbance just when I was meeting you. I've been having a little trouble lately--"

"Oh, well, never mind that now, Mabel. Come and watch me struggle out of this pack. Yes, look here, as soon as ever I know for certain when the course ends we'll write for rooms at the Savoy. I hear you have to do it weeks ahead. We'll spend pots of money and have no end of a time."

She reflected his good spirits. Ripping! He splashed and wallowed in the bath, singing l.u.s.tily one of the songs out there:

"Ho, ho, ho, it's a lovely war!"

VI