“Yes, I’ll have leather buttons.”
“Small leather buttons, Mr. Brown. I think that covers all for the moment. We’ll have everything ready for fitting when you come up to town, on your way through to Cornwall.”
At the door Phillip heard the distant thumping of drums, and a waft of brazen music.
“There’s a parade of some of the girls in war jobs in Hyde Park this afternoon,” said Mr. Kerr. “It should be quite a sight. More war babies to follow, I suppose——” He looked blandly at his customer. “Well, who is to blame them, sir?” as he bowed out his customer.
Phillip went to Hyde Park and saw rank upon rank of regiments of girls—in uniforms brown, grey, white, red, and khaki. One company were Little Red Riding Hoods, covered from head to foot in scarlet. “They make our gas-masks, sir,” explained a constable. Others wore red caps with white jackets and loose white trousers, others the same garb with blue caps. “Also from Woolwich Arsenal,” explained the constable. Phillip knew the V.A.D. nurses with their blue dresses and white aprons, the bus-conductors in dark blue trousers and brown holland jackets, the Post Office girls with bags slung over shoulders, other girls in dark blue uniforms from the electric trams. There was the Land Army—might Doris be with them? He went close, but could not see her, then along a line of Foresters in brown jackets and bright green caps. He drew smiles and glances from some W.A.A.C.s, but hauteur from the senior service (female) W.R.E.N.s, as he looked for blue eyes and fair hair, a soft glance to feed him, the more beautiful the more that the hunger for love weighed upon him, for the face of—a Lily.
Older women officer’d them.
“Company! For-r-rm—fours! Right tur-r-rn! Quick—march!” The drum thumped out its boom-boom-boom—boom, boom, boom—from the brass instruments curled sunflower-petal music; he walked, fifty yards distant, beside the marching column that led the way to the broad walk under tall and spreading elms, where pigeons strutted and coo’d.
“Mind the low railings, girls!” said a smart young lady W.R.E.N. officer. He watched them go.
It was June, it was high summer, nobody there heard the guns, nobody saw rifles thrown forward as ghosts left bodies sinking at the knees, heads falling forward upon ruined fields under the Monts de Flandres, or among old and rotting heaps of sandbags from which the chalk had long since broken, above the Somme and the Marne.
Chapter 14
ALGERIAN WINE PARTY
Phillip went up to London again, while awaiting authority and railway warrant to proceed to Falmouth. It was towards the second week in June when he said goodbye to the Duke and Duchess, and was driven away in one of the half-dozen 1907 Silver Ghost landaulettes. He told himself that he must not tip the chauffeur, having seen the notices put up on many of the walls beyond the red baize doors asking guests not to give money to the servants. He was a sort of guest, so the pound note folded in his trousers pocket was creased and recreased as he rode behind the glass partition to Bleachley junction, where the London train was stopped whenever the Duke requested it, since the line ran through his land.
A luncheon basket had been provided; it was put in the carriage for him by the chauffeur. Out came the pound note; the grateful smile made it a pleasant journey, familiar as far as Exeter; then it was strange country onwards beside the estuary of the Exe, and the railway continuing along the coast to the red rocks of Dawlish to Teignmouth; and along another estuary where salmon fishermen were hauling their nets. After Newton Abbot was green country with cider-apple orchards, giving way, as the train rushed westwards, to purple and yellow tracts of moorland about which he recognised, with excitement, the granite tors of Dartmoor, with their memories of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the blue paper-covered Strand Magazines in the drawer below the linen-cupboard in his bedroom at home.
The sun was beginning to descend ahead of the engine; and seemingly drawing the train in its descent to lower fields, until the slate roofs and towers of Plymouth came into view. Over another bridge, more salt water, and he was in Cornwall at last! The engine was throwing out smoke; he closed the windows, while the laboured piston-thrusts indicated another ascent to the western redoubts of Dartmoor, and then, running freely, descending once more to a strange country which reminded him of Loos, only these heaps towering into the sky were white: they must be the china clay learned about in geography books in that remote time called schooldays. He imagined battle among the near-impregnable spoil heaps with their muffling effect on high explosive shells, and safety for the machine-gunners in their deep dug-outs. Then the slaughter: it would be like the slaughter around Kemmel Hill, where the German dead had lain in thousands, after Wytschaete had been evacuated. And living in the past with the imagination, he found that the train was slowing before St. Austell station; and puffing onwards into the sun, still high, they came to Truro, and a country of woods and green pastures, and near the end of the journey, for here were wooden ships, beside the muddy saltings of a creek over which the train rattled.
And so at last to Falmouth, and crimson rambler roses along the station railings, where a fluttery old lady (as he thought of her) came smiling obliquely, as with shyness, towards him.
“Can you be Colonel Maddison? But you are so young! Do forgive me, but I was expecting someone quite different, and wearing uniform. I do hope you had a pleasant journey? Jack will take your bags. It is rather a long way round by motor to Tregaskis, so I do hope you will not mind crossing over by the ferry? I have a taxi waiting, to take us to the pier. How very nice to see you, Mr.,—I mean Colonel—Maddison.”
“Well, I was only an acting colonel, so I am really only a ‘Mister’, my substantive rank is lieutenant, Miss Shore.”
It was a brief run down to the pier, where the fresh-faced Jack, who wore a sailor suit and round cap with white band, smilingly took his bag. Phillip was delighted with the idea of crossing over the harbour in a small steamboat, with its vertical boiler and open furnace door glowing with logs, thrown in by a boy. The ferryman was obviously an old sailor, with a peaked cap and white beard. And looking about him as the boat beat its way across a few hundred yards of water, he saw out to sea, in the broader area of the harbour, two old wooden men o’ war, relics of Nelson’s day. Miss Shore explained to him, in her gentle fluttering voice, that the nearer vessel was a school for sailor boys, run by someone with a name sounding like Mr. Barley Swann.
“He is so good with the poor boys he looks after, many of them without fathers since the war,” she said happily. “I do hope you will like our little place, Colonel Maddison—no, Mr. Maddison, of course, I must remember not to say ‘Colonel’ mustn’t I? Here we are, Jack will drive the governess cart.”
They moved slowly up a street past white-washed cottages, and entering a drive, arrived at a stone-built house among the trees on the top of the hill.
“I am afraid we cannot let you have a room to yourself, but you will find Major Wetley quiet and understanding. Would you like tea? I am sure you must be famished after such a long journey. Now tell me, I have been simply longing to ask you, are you musical? You are! There, I felt sure you were! Let me play you a beautiful record, while they are bringing tea.”
Miss Shore wound up a cabinet H.M.V., and from the open doors came the strains of In a Monastery Garden. “Would you care to control the tone?” She held out a black cable, with a sort of plunger on the end. “If you push, it will play softer, or louder if you pull out the plug. It’s so much more like the real thing then, I always think. Now I will leave you awhile, to amuse yourself with it.”
Phillip softened the music, then for an experiment pulled out the nob, so that the mixture of organ strains, bird-notes, bells, and chanting voices swelled out, filling the room. He tried to push in the control, but found it was stuck. While he was wondering how to free it without breaking anything, a tall captain in trews came thudding down the stairs, glengarry on head, and crossed over the room to stand above him, and say, “Must you make that hideous row! It’s time those blast
ed monks were called up!” and going to the gramophone, the scowling captain jerked the needle off the record. “I’ve had enough of that bloody old woman’s sentimentality,” he muttered, as he strode out of the house.
“Ah,” said Miss Shore, coming back a minute or two later, while he was still trying to free the plunger. “It was so kind to stop the record. It is so beautiful, I think, don’t you. So peaceful.”
“It’s my mother’s favourite record, Miss Shore.”
“How wonderful! Yes, it belongs to a time gone by, when there was peace in the world. Ah, here’s Nurse with tea! Let me introduce you—Miss Goonhilly—Mr. Maddison. Now do you prefer cream or lemon with your tea? Lemon? Help yourself to sandwiches—these are cucumber, and those patum—and tell me all about your journey!”
After tea, Miss Shore said she thought he looked tired, and he ought to go to bed. Nurse Goonhilly would bring up his dinner on a tray at half-past seven. “I shall be dining out tonight, with Mr. Barley Swann, in the Foudroyant, his training ship, you know. The more distant ship you saw is the Implacable. Mr. Barley Swann is hoping, after the war, to fit that up too, for the older sailor boys. Tomorrow morning Doctor Bull has promised to come and see you; there are plenty of books for you to read meanwhile. Now if you will come with me and Nurse, we will show you your room. I do hope you will like it.”
The room was large, facing west. Its white walls were glowing with the sun still high over the trees beyond the lawn. After the northern outlook of the Tennis Ward, it was blankly open to Phillip.
“Have you many other patients here, Miss Shore?”
“Oh yes, all our beds are now filled; we can only have fourteen patients at a time. The others are out and about somewhere; this is Liberty Hall, but we ask for notice if anyone is going to be out for luncheon and dinner, for the sake of the staff, you know. Lights out are at half-past ten, with all our guests, as we think of them, in by ten. That is one of the conditions imposed by the authorities, you know. Nurse will show you the bathroom. Dressing gowns and bathrobes you will find in this cupboard, with towels. Would you like a glass of hot milk, or some Benger’s Food, to stay you until dinner? Do ring if you want anything, won’t you? We shall meet again after breakfast! Ah, here is Jack to unpack your things. Until tomorrow morning, au revoir, and pleasant dreams!”
He was unable to read; a feeling of claustrophobia grew with unbearable thoughts of ‘Spectre’; he stuck it until dinner arrived—vegetable soup, fillets of plaice cooked in milk, and chicken with new potatoes and small carrots—and then began to put on his clothes while trying to control an inner trembling, which spread to his hands, while he sweated coldly. He must get out of the place. Why the hell had he submitted to being sent to bed? He could not breathe; no wonder the tall Scotch captain had been so sullen. Why did they always shove one into bed as soon as one arrived at a convalescent home? If you were fit to walk about in hospital, surely to God a man was fit to walk about in a country house?
The blatant sun, burning the treetops, glared into the room. It was all he could do to unknot his shoelaces. His finger stuck in the back of a shoe, he pulled it out violently, and shoved on the shoe with a knife-blade, afterwards throwing away the knife; then forcing himself to pick it up he put it back on the tray and tip-toed to the door, opening it to listen. It was like Alice Through the Looking Glass—Nurse Goonhilly—Mr. Barley Swann—Major Wetley. What a collection! He sat down in a chintz-covered armchair, and tried to breathe deeply, to find calm. It was no good. He must get away. Damn the old woman, what was the point of sending him to bed? He dared not leave the room, and sat there trembling.
The sun had gone down, with gulls flighting silently over the trees, when he opened the door and, with invisible sparks running through him, went down the stairs. Voices came from a room beyond the large hall where he had had tea; he listened outside, then dared to open the door.
Inside was a pianola and a half-sized billiard table, looking as though they had been hired in the town by an elderly spinster lady to “keep your boys at home”, as the pre-war advertisements ran in popular magazines. Beyond the billiard table three men were sitting at cards. Wine glasses stood on the table. As soon as the door opened the glasses were removed, while heads turned in his direction. “It’s all right,” he said, much relieved. “I’m only one of the patients. Came this afternoon.”
“Ah, you’ve got out of bed without the Goonhilly knowing, you naughty boy!” replied one of the card-players, an elegant youth with gold hair parted down the middle. “We’re playing cut-throat. How about a foursome, Major?” to the dark-haired elderly man opposite.
“Anything you like, Swayne.” Major Wetley turned to Phillip. “Do you play?”
“I play auction. I don’t play poker.”
“Nor do I,” said the dark man, in a Midland accent. “Come and take a pew. How about a glass of wine?”
“Not at the moment, thank you, sir.”
“I don’t blame you,” said the gold-haired youth, with a mock simper.
Phillip kept his amiable expression at this remark. They drew for partners. He and the elegant young officer drew highest. Sitting opposite his partner, Phillip noticed that Swayne wore a service uniform similar to that of the Foot Guards. Remembering the Guards officers of 1914, it was therefore with some surprise that he heard the young ensign say, after the major had cut to him, “The senior officer present having neglected to introduce us, partner, let me do it for him. My name is Swayne. This extraordinary-looking fat cove here is called Coupar, otherwise Copper Nob. Have some Algerian wine. It’s the major’s birthday, so he’s responsible. God, it’s filthy muck you’ve bought, major! I’d rather drink the Goonhilly’s disinfectants!”
“I told you, it’s all that shop ’ad, Swayne.”
“But why buy wine at a grocer’s, major?”
“This is Falmouth, not London, Swayne.”
“And this is red-ink, not wine, major.”
“You’re drinking it, I notice.”
“Worse luck,” with a simper in Phillip’s direction.
“You don’t ’ave to drink it, Swayne. Any as wants to can help themselves. There are four more bottles.”
“You old poisoner!”
Phillip said to the major, “I should of course have told you that my name was Maddison before I sat down, sir.”
“Oh, we don’t stand on ceremony ’ere,” said Major Wetley’s mild Midland voice. “’Elp yourself to a glass when you fancy one. There’s a spare glass o’er there.”
“The major comes from a place where they had no names, only numbers, didn’t you, major?”
“Anything you say, Swayne. Whose call? Oh yours, Swayne, since you dealt.”
“Well, give us a chance to look at my bloody cards, major!” Swayne gulped some wine and said, “I’ve got a hand like a foot, so no bid.”
The major studied his hand for some time. At last, “I’ll venture one diamond.”
The fourth player, Coupar, had a fat body below waves of oily copper-coloured hair crowning a big face with thick features. He sat biting his nails as he stared at his cards, then said musingly, “I wonder what you meant by calling a diamond, partner.”
The major was still studying his cards. “My original call was only a conventional feeler, you know, partner,” he said across the table.
“A ‘conventional feeler’, is that what you are, you dirty old man?” said Swayne.
“Now now!” said the major.
“Surely during your sojourn in Aly Sloper’s Cavalry you have learned that Portland Club rules forbid information being passed to a partner directly?”
“Very well, I pass, Swayne,” said the major.
“The correct phrase is, ‘No’, or ‘No bid’, major,” said Swayne.
“Two no trumps,” said Phillip.
“Three diamonds,” said Coupar.
“I’ll double three diamonds,” said the major.
“But you’re my partner!” exclaimed Coupar, indig
nantly. “You can’t do that!”
“The major can do what he likes. He’s the senior officer present,” tittered Swayne.
“Why can’t I double my partner’s three diamonds if I want to?” said the major, mildly.
“It’s not in the rules of the Portland Club,” said Swayne.
“Three no trumps,” said Phillip, filling his glass again, and draining it.
“Do you usually toss off your liquor as quickly as that?” enquired Swayne.
“Usually much faster, partner.”
“Good man, ’elp yourself to more,” said the major.
“I double three no trumps,” Coupar said.
“No interest.”
“Content,” said the major.
“Four no trumps!”
“What are you used to, poker?” asked Swayne, across the table.
“He pokes anything,” said Coupar.
“Are you trying to be offensive to my partner, you nail-biting dogsbody? You Aly Sloper’s Cavalry cad!” asked Swayne.
“Did you hear that, major? He’s insulting the Army Service Corps!”
Phillip got a little slam, and while the scores were being written, offered to fill the glasses for Major Wetley. A drop fell on the sleeve of Swayne’s jacket.
“Mind my uniform, you four-flushing card-sharper!”
“Swayne’s a fop, an immaculate base-wallah, did you know?” remarked Coupar.
“Who the hell are you calling a base-wallah?”
“That’s just what you are, Swine,” said Coupar. “‘Mind my uniform’. D’you call that a uniform? Where did you get it from? Willie Clarkson’s?”
“I happen to be an ensign in the Honourable Harquebus Corps.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?”
“Only the oldest corps in the City of London, you ignorant fart.”
A Test to Destruction Page 29