The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  It was a Cameronian sergeant, four days in a shell hole between the wire—four days of sun and rain. The letter T had been painted on his forehead with iodine. They had done that much for him at the aid post: antitetanus serum, no more than that. A self-applied dressing under his right armpit bulged over the festering wound beneath. She cut the dressing away with difficulty, dried blood holding the edges like tar. Pus flowed yellow green, and then, boiling up out of the suppurating depths of the shell-chewed cavity, a mass of living things, a churning, undulating ball of fat white maggots, creeping onto her fingers along the blades of the scissors, up her fingers, squirming blindly along the back of her hand.

  She screamed and could not stop screaming. She screamed as she stumbled to her feet, kicking the bottle of chloroform. She screamed as she staggered, retching, toward the door. A sister grabbed her arms and then slapped her hard across the face, once, twice—stiff-fingered blows. She felt nothing, saw nothing as she slipped down into a misty, comforting darkness.

  It was peaceful in the back of the ambulance. Around her in the blackness were silent forms, drugged, still as death. She pulled her warm cloak up to her chin. Someone out there in the inky night was calling her name. She could hear it softly . . . softly: Alex . . . Alex . . . She stared fixedly at the bottom of a stretcher laid on the brackets above her.

  Alex . . . Alex . . .

  The ambulance began to move, creaking and lurching slowly across the compound. Taking away the wounded. Yes, she thought dully. Taking them away. And she was one of them, just one of the wounded. Perhaps even one of the dead.

  BOOK THREE

  God knows ’twere better to be deep

  Pillowed in silk and scented down,

  Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,

  Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

  Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .

  But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

  At midnight in some flaming town,

  When spring trips north again this year

  —ALAN SEEGER (1888–1916)

  14

  The Most Honorable Winifred Sutton walked slowly up from Sloane Square, her Bedlington terrier no longer tugging at the leash but plodding wearily ahead, eyes half closed against the granulated snow that swept up from the pavement. It was a clear morning, but cold and blustery, the leafless trees in Cadogan Square swaying crazily. She had been walking for two hours or more through Chelsea and along the river on this December day of arctic winds and pale, heatless sun. The wind whined through the iron palings enclosing the strip of parkland flanking Sloane Street. No nursemaids pushing baby carriages along the paths today, only the wild trees and the sleet-scoured grass.

  The dog perked up, sensing the nearness of home and its bed beside the kitchen fire, but Winifred approached her house with the usual feeling of dread. She hated London, but her father had donated Lulworth Manor to the Red Cross for the duration of the war. Life had always seemed less complicated in the country and problems more easily coped with. She knew for certain that her mother would have been better off there, less frenetic, more reconciled to the finality of death. The war was too pervasive in London—the daily newspapers with their endless stories of battles and lists of casualties, the soldiers everywhere, the infrequent but unnerving Zeppelin raids. She yearned for the quiet fields, the ordered landscape of Dorset.

  She had hoped to avoid her mother’s “group,” but the front door opened as she came up the steps and there they were, half of them reluctant to leave, still orbiting, keyed up and vocal, about the exotic figure of Madame Nestorli, Princess Pearl.

  “Oh, Winifred,” the Duchess of Ascombe said, still dabbing at her tear-filled eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Oh, my dear, it was so wonderful today. Too marvelous for mere words to express.”

  Winifred moved to one side, pulling the terrier closer to her leg to keep it from being stepped on as the ladies began to descend to the pavement, the Sutton family butler hurrying ahead of them to whistle for their cars, which were parked up and down the street. At last only Princess Pearl was left, talking to Lady Mary Sutton in the hall, her voice whisper-soft. A dozen gold bracelets jingled as she moved her hands to emphasize her words, words that Winifred had no interest in hearing. She wished it were possible for her to move past the two women and go up to her room unseen, but that was clearly not to be. Lady Mary blocked the way to the stairs, her bird-claw hands gripping the cold fur of her daughter’s coat.

  “I do so wish you had been here, Winifred. We made such a significant breakthrough. Both of my dear boys were in the room . . . and Clarissa’s young George moved the counter to say he was content.”

  She looked away from her mother’s impassioned, gleaming eyes. The eyes of Princess Pearl were inscrutable stones. The most-sought-after medium in London reached into a pearl-encrusted bag and removed a gold and jade cigarette holder and a cigarette. A Capstan, Winifred noticed. Raising spirits for twenty pounds a corpse had made the woman rich, but she had not lost her plebeian tastes.

  “We were successful, yes,” Madame Nestorli whispered in her odd, difficult-to-define accent (Romanian? Greek? Welsh, perhaps). “But no, we have not broken through the veil quite yet. We have not touched the outer reaches of the void.”

  “But we shall . . . we shall!” Lady Mary cried. “I know you have reservations, Winifred, but had you only been with us today!”

  She managed to break away and hurried up to the second floor; her terrier, trailing its leash, scampered down the corridor toward the kitchen stairs.

  Her bedroom was a private refuge, and she shut the door, then leaned against it for a moment as though barring it from assault. Anger and bitterness choked her and it was a struggle to draw a deep breath. Her mother attended three or four séances a week, most of them in the mahogany-paneled dining room downstairs, a room that Madame Nestorli, the great Princess Pearl, had found unusually conducive to reaching her personal spirit, her envoy to the realm of the dead, a Nubian prince named Ram, who had been sealed alive in a wall at Thebes one thousand years to the day before Christ’s birth. Ram spoke amazingly like Madame Nestorli, but no one seemed to question that in the least.

  “Oh, God . . . such rot.” She removed her coat and tossed it over the back of a chair, then flopped on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Her rage slowly subsided into a dull pity for her mother and all the other pathetic women who tried so desperately to bring back their loved ones. Two of her brothers were dead. Andrew buried somewhere in France and Timothy in the family plot at Lulworth churchyard. She could understand to some degree her mother’s refusal to accept the finality of Andrew’s passing. She had not seen him die nor talked to anyone who had. A short letter from his colonel was all the proof she had. But Timothy was another matter. He had been hit in the throat by a shell fragment in June and, after being kept alive by rubber tubes inserted in the mangled cavity of his neck, had finally died in a London hospital in September. But then it wasn’t the body that mattered, according to Madame Nestorli. The body was nothing, a mere shell of common clay containing the elusive spirit. The spirit never died. It was simply released when the body gave it up and could be enticed back from eternity if one knew how to go about it. It was merely a question of time, patience, fervent belief—and money.

  There was a gentle knock on the inner door that led to her sitting room, and then the door opened a crack and one of the maids peeked in.

  “I drew a nice warm bath for you, Miss Winifred.”

  “Thank you, Daphne.”

  There was nothing she could do about her mother’s obsession. Her mother had always been inclined to the mystic, and the war had given this inclination impetus. She lay back in the warm tub and touched her heavy breasts with soapy hands. She was pleased with her body. Long, brisk walks, and a total abstinence from sweets, cakes, custards, and other fattening foods had slimmed her hips, flattened her tummy, and firmed her legs. Only her breasts left something to be desired. They were so big
and round and pink-nippled. Perhaps Robert Herrick would have found them enchanting, she thought wryly, recalling the amorous poet’s hymn to the nipples of his Julia:

  Have ye beheld (with much delight)

  A red rose peeping through a white?

  But large breasts were out of fashion. Women flattened them now for the new styles coming out of Paris. She had found binding her breasts uncomfortable. Not that it did much good anyway.

  She had dried herself and was slipping on a silk dressing gown when Daphne tapped on the door and said, “Colonel Wood-Lacy on the telephone, miss. Shall he ring back?”

  She drew the robe around her body and fastened the cord. “Tell him I’m . . . indisposed and that . . . yes, he may ring back in half an hour.”

  Fenton in London. She hadn’t seen him since the war started—fifteen months. He had never taken a leave in England, but her brother John, who had enlisted in the Rifle Brigade, had told her that few regulars had been able to get back to England unless carried on a stretcher. He had written to her, once in a while.

  She sat at her dressing table and idly brushed her hair, soft brown waves touching her shoulders. The slender stack of his letters was in her dressing-table drawer. They were letters that were suitable reading for the entire family. Informative letters:

  “Today we moved up to the line and took over trenches recently held by the French. Quite messy, I’m afraid, with the wire in a shocking state of neglect. . . .”

  Not love letters, by any means, and yet she had kept them neatly together as though they were. They all began with “Dear Winifred” and were signed “Affectionately, Fenton.” Like letters from an uncle who was traveling abroad.

  His portrait in pastels and charcoal looked down at her from the wall, her portrait beside his. Done so long ago. Not just in time, although a year and a half was a long time—she had just turned eighteen then—but almost a different era. Mario’s in King’s Road in July of 1914, with painters and writers, actors and poets, and the wine bottles and candles. . . . It was all gone now. Shuttered and padlocked. Closed by the police because pacifists and radicals had been suspected of gathering there. Captain Fenton Wood-Lacy, his portrait showed, was dressed in mufti then—a striped blazer, straw skimmer in his right hand. Now he was Lieutenant Colonel Fenton Wood-Lacy, DSO. She had read of his new rank and his decoration in the Times. One always read the lists—the dead, the wounded, the missing . . . and the promoted. “Lieut. Col. F. Wood-Lacy” would call back within half an hour. Whatever would they talk about?

  His voice was the same as she remembered it, a deep, throaty timbre.

  “Ah, Winifred, I hope I’m not inconveniencing you by calling.”

  “Not at all, Fenton. How nice to hear your voice.”

  “I got in last night . . . staying at the Guards’ Club.”

  “Oh? Did you give up your flat?”

  “Yes, a long time ago. Sublet it to a brigadier at the War Office. He’s a major general now so I can hardly boot him out of the place, can I?”

  “No,” she said, forcing a tiny laugh. “Hardly. Do you have a long leave?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “And then back to France?”

  “No . . . up to Yorkshire.” There was a slight pause. “I thought we might have tea together somewhere . . . that is, if you’re free this afternoon.”

  “I would enjoy that, yes.”

  “Shall we say four-thirty?”

  “That would be fine.”

  How correct and proper he was, she thought bitterly as she hung up the phone. Honor bound to at least see her. After all, he had taken the first step that long-ago July in the ritual of courtship. That ritual was now as archaic as the pavane, one of the lesser casualties of the war, but he was too much of a gentleman to totally ignore it. So he would take her to tea. Not to dinner and the theater, with dancing afterward at the Cafe Royal, but to tea! Ices and petits fours and an apologetic, avuncular pat on the hand.

  The Guards’ Club was crowded, and it was depressing to Fenton to see such a vast number of men whom he didn’t know. So many of his friends and brother officers had gone west that he felt uncomfortably conspicuous for still being alive, like a lone survivor of some dreadful catastrophe, pointed at, whispered about: “There goes Wood-Lacy, last of the Sandhurst class of 1908.”

  Well, hardly. He finally bumped into enough of his peers in the bar to assure himself that his mortality wasn’t unique. But he found their conversations morbid. All shared the same experiences in much the same places at the same times—rue du Bois and Festubert, Auchy and the dismal approaches to Loos. Their words nagged at old pains and still raw nerves.

  “Must be off,” he said, draining a whiskey and soda after glancing at his watch. He walked briskly out of the club and along Pall Mall toward the taxi stand in St. James’s Square. Tattered sheets of gray cloud scudded overhead. The streaming fragments reminded him of shrapnel bursts and he could see his last command in the wind: B Company, struggling through cratered ground, whizz-bangs and machine guns catching them. The first platoon lurching toward the ridge, stopped by the German wire, dozens of them hanging in the rusty thickets for days. Ragged husks, blackened clods against the skyline. . . .

  The taxicab door closed with a comforting chunky sound. Although sealed from the counterbarrage by solid Austin walls, he sat stiffly on the edge of the seat all the way to Cadogan Square.

  The war had touched half a million English homes, an avalanche of letters or telegrams pushed through letter slots telling of dead or wounded men, missing men, captured men. Number 24 Cadogan Square was such a home. Two dead sons. Two living sons anxious to get over to France and . . .

  “Scupper Boche,” Lord Sutton remarked heatedly as he poured whiskey into two glasses. “By gad, Fenton, that’s all young John and Bramwell think about . . . getting up to the line and killing the blighters.”

  He had never met them, but they were probably like Andrew and Timothy had been—recklessly brave. Their father’s sons. He glanced past the portly red-faced man. A full-length portrait of him hung on one wall of the library. The young marquess in hussar uniform. The painter had captured that look of zeal and arrogance that had sent Victorians galloping heedlessly toward the guns: “Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell. . . .”

  “It pays to be cautious in France,” Fenton said quietly.

  If Lord Sutton heard him, he paid no attention to the remark.

  “A mere dollop of soda water. Too fine a whiskey to spoil. Pure malt, sir. From my own distillery in Kinlochewe. No contaminating neutral spirits, which I wouldn’t rub on a horse.” He handed Fenton a glass and raised his own. “To your decoration and your rise in rank. I suppose this means you’ll be commanding a battalion now, eh?”

  “Yes, sir . . . one of the New Army mobs. I’m to train it and have it in France by next spring.”

  “As part of which regiment?”

  “The Green Howards.”

  “I was with the Eleventh Hussars . . . Prince Albert’s own . . . the Cherry Pickers, sir!”

  Lord Sutton was not really looking at him, Fenton realized as he sipped his drink. The eyes were glazed and fixed on some point in the distant past. They were the eyes of a man who was fortunate to have his own distillery. He talked ceaselessly, leaping from one disconnected subject to the next until Lady Mary entered the room, and then he sat down and lapsed into a moody silence.

  “Ah, my dear Fenton! Most noble heart!” She came toward him like some gaunt predatory bird. Her hands never stopped moving, and long ropes of jade and jet beads swung from around her throat. “Dear little Winifred will be ready shortly . . . fussing with her hair, poor child. I am quite vexed with her today . . . quite vexed, really I am. Her own brothers crying out from that awful void, anxious to come home, and she won’t lift a finger to help them. But of course you understand, I’m sure.”

  He listened with growing apprehension to Lady Mary’s talk of the spirit world, of Ouija boards and Ram
the Nubian. He pitied Winifred living amid such irrationality. She’d always been under her mother’s thumb, and her refusal to take part in this nonsense was bound to have its repercussions. He expected to see a mousy, half-beaten creature, so he barely recognized the tall, beautiful woman who entered the library.

  In the back of the taxi, as they drove to Mayfair, he couldn’t keep from staring at her. The change in her was dramatic. He had remembered her, with twinges of shame, as a schoolgirl of touching eagerness, whose gratitude for his attentions had been almost embarrassing. And yet there had been a quality about her even then that had intrigued him. He had truly enjoyed being with her and he felt that same sense of ease now.

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was trying to recall the Winifred I knew.”

  “Have I changed that much?”

  “Well, you’re older, of course.”

  “So are you, for that matter.”

  “Yes, about a century older.” He didn’t want to appear rude, and so he deliberately looked away from her and stared at the back of the driver’s neck. “You’re a very lovely young woman, Winifred.”

  “Thank you . . . and you’re still a very . . .” A smile barely teased her lips. “I was going to say ‘lovely-looking’ man. But that’s hardly the correct word, is it? The word to describe a colonel would be ‘distinguished.’ Yes, you’re very distinguished.” She glanced out the side window. It was getting dark and crowds streamed across Hyde Park Corner toward the Underground station in Piccadilly. “Must we go to tea?”

  “Don’t you feel like having tea?”

  “Not especially.”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “Oh . . . go to Madame Tussaud’s. I’ve always wanted to see the chamber of horrors . . . Sweeney Todd cutting throats and Jack the Ripper. Father would never take me to see that section of the waxworks, but I had a friend in school, Rose Collins. She’s seen it several times. Her uncle used to take her.”