by John Masters
She went to her room to compose herself before entering the drawing-room. There was no need to get hysterical. There was a definite need to keep tight hold of herself, for nothing irrevocable had happened yet. Peter would eventually come back to Rudwal; Gerry would not--because he would be killed the first time he went into action. The bullets would seek him out, recognizing gold, and shatter him. So he must not be allowed to volunteer--or, if he did, only for the Medical Corps. Gerry must not be allowed to come near glory. She would have allies--people had talked, garbled rumours flown about. He was supposed to be a coward now because he had refused to go to Meru. Good.
Oh, Peter, Peter, the dagger is always ready in my hand, but I love you too; I love you.
Chapter 21
June 12, 1915. London. Yesterday morning she had been thinking that this was ‘the middle of next year’ and Peter would be due at any moment if he were to keep up with his forecast, insolently careless in the face of this terrible war. This morning the telegram had come. Sent from Cairo five days earlier, it told her that he was on his way, should arrive about June 16, had won a D.S.O., sent her his love.
But where could he have won a D.S.O.? In the East? Mesopotamia? East Africa? It didn’t matter. He was on his way, rushing towards London with the speed of the fastest liners and express trains.
Alice should have brought in that telegram, murmuring, ‘Tar a-gya,’ like the chuprassi on that dreadful day in Rudwal--the Day of the Telegrams, as she remembered it. Those oblong slips of buff paper carried messages from the gods, and there ought to be a familiar messenger to bring them in, lay them before the human beings whose lives were to be turned about by them, and say: ‘What answer?’
But it was Alice’s day off today, when she would take her elderly angularity out into the streets and be winked and whistled at by hundreds of soldiers, and return hot with lust and scorn--’Men, ma’am!’ The war was a great thing for her, but Emily was sure she had kept and would keep her militant Welsh virginity through all temptations and corruptions.
Rodney and Elizabeth were asleep, the house on Minden Square warm with the scent of London in June, the windows open to the blossoms of night, and the pale sky powdered with silver stars.
What answer?
The answer was the old one, of love and reluctant pride in his exploits--and a warning bell. Gerry was living here with her in her father’s house. The Wilcot town house had been commandeered by the Admiralty for the duration, and she would not allow him to try and find other accommodation. There had probably been some gossip about it, but she did not care, and her father, rather to her surprise, had supported her. He had spent a week with them soon after they reached Tilbury, late in October 1914. At the end of the week he had returned to Llyn Gared and his increasingly numbed studies of the casualty lists. Peggy also had been firm against worrying about possible scandal. She had been very helpful on the journey back to England and if it had not been for her rather obvious tact in leaving Emily alone with Gerry whenever possible Emily might have thought that the roots of the old Llyn Gared relationships had been refound. Now Peggy was living in Mayfair, and they saw her about once a week at one house or the other. Harry was a lieutenant in France, with a battalion of infantry.
Peter’s telegram she had burned in the empty fireplace. She stared, unseeing, at the grey ashes and thought, as dispassionately as she could, of Gerry.
He too was in uniform--Lieutenant the Earl of Wilcot, Royal South Wiltshire Yeomanry. He had not been sent to France after training at Salisbury, though his regiment had gone in November of ‘14. They had instead posted him to the War Office, where his main task seemed to be to have lunch at the Savoy with American journalists and occasionally take them in large automobiles to training establishments outside, but not too far outside, London. She had kept him at his medical books, and he had made contacts with a senior member of the medical school at Edinburgh University. He had not been able to bring himself, yet, to apply to resign his commission, in spite of the already evident and rapidly growing shortage of doctors for the armies abroad and the people at home. He was not happy as a soldier, especially not in the gilded role they had given him, and she had felt for some weeks that only some small incident, one extra push, was needed to make him take the step and go to Edinburgh.
There had been progress in another, more dangerous direction. The relationship between them had become so obviously different from the old brother-sister comradeship that Gerry had been forced to recognize it. He said nothing, but she knew he admitted to himself that he loved her. There was nothing more, nothing at all, for both of them had been rigorously trained in self-control, and Emily, for her part, had lived long enough with the knowledge so that she was able to control its effect to an exact degree. She wondered whether Gerry was happier with the love and the acknowledgement of it--but there was no answer to that. She had thought of interesting him in other women, and had tried to do so, in spite of an unwilling jealousy; but Gerry remained polite, friendly, and untouched.
She had used the intimacy with delicate ruthlessness to plant in Gerry’s mind the seed of a critical awareness of Peter. It had been most subtly done, with so sure a hand (did anyone know Gerry, or Peter, as she did?) that although Gerry had lost none of his admiration of Peter’s tremendous qualities he had admitted to himself, in the same loyal secrecy with his admission of his love for her, that Peter Savage was a leader and not a guide; that, knowing Peter’s ability to force a path up any cliff, yet a man must decide for himself whether he needed and wanted to go up that particular cliff to that particular summit. This she had done without Gerry’s knowing where the seed had come from, and without changing anything of her attitude towards either man. Only one doubt fretted in her mind. Had she really done it only for Gerry’s sake? Or was it also jealousy that had lent her such cunning? If so, of whom was she jealous?
To these questions, too, there was no answer.
Now Peter was on his way, and again: ‘What answer?’ the voices asked, and this time there must be one. It would have to depend, but certainly she must arise at once, now, from the relaxed lethargy which had been her prevailing mood, tinged with energy where Gerry’s future was concerned, since their return from India.
She went to her room, made up her face lightly, kissed the children in their cots, said good night to Nanny, who was reading a shilling shocker in her room, and went downstairs.
Gerry came in. She gauged his expression carefully. There might be a sign there. He would have heard, perhaps, if not of the return, then of the D.S.O., since he worked in the War Office. Because he was Gerry Wilcot his uniform fitted him with casual perfection, as though he had never worn anything else.
‘Dinner with four journalists,’ he said wearily when they were in the drawing-room.-’At the Cecil this time. And they were Swedes.’
He was pale, and the hand he had brushed across her bare arm when he came in was as cold as a fish.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said, smiling. ‘You feel as though you’ve just come from the North Pole, and it’s a warm night. Are you sickening for something?’
‘Good heavens, no, old girl. Fit as a fiddle. I’m going to have a peg. I feel a little tired, that’s all.’
She said calmly: ‘That’s not all, Gerry. What’s happened?’ ‘Oh, nothing.’ He glanced up, met her eyes, and looked down into the big glass full and dark with whisky in his hand. ‘I tried to get to France again. Got turned down again. They said they couldn’t spare me. I suppose it’s partly my title. They think I’m just the man to impress the Americans--though I think it would be better if those chaps went to France and saw a few earls being killed.’
‘Is that all? I know you think you ought to go to the front, Gerry, but you don’t want to, do you? You want to go to Edinburgh. I certainly don’t think you ought to go to France, whatever I’m supposed to think. We must be honest with ourselves.’
He glanced up with a vaguely warning look. No, she thought, we had b
etter not be too honest.
‘Well, there was something else,’ he said, gulping down his drink. ‘I met Mrs Lyon in Whitehall today. Lunch-time. Her brother’s dead now, died of wounds yesterday. Been in hospital since Neuve Chapelle.’
She said nothing. Lyon had fallen from Needle Five, and they’d recovered his mangled body.
He said: ‘Mrs Lyon had a big bonnet on with a kind of sweeping feather--white. There were a lot of silly flappers there, giving feathers to men in mufti. She ripped the feather out of her hat and gave it to me. The flappers started to call her names--I was in uniform, of course--but she said: “He knows,” and walked off.’ He unbuttoned his tunic pocket and drew out the crumpled feather and looked at it.
‘Throw it away,’ she said angrily. ‘Here.’ She snatched it from his hand and threw it out of the window.
‘But she’s right, in a way,’ Gerry said wearily. ‘Lyon was killed because of me. It’s not the only reason no one’ll have me in a regiment in France, but it’s one of them.’
She sat still, watching him, thinking. The authorities had thought they could pick and choose their officers until Neuve Chapelle. Now that was changing as the war opened its mouth wider and wider, and the people began to have a terrified feeling that there would be no limit to it, that it would gape larger and hungrier until it swallowed everything.
She said: ‘This settles it, Gerry. You must see that. You’ve got to resign your commission at once and go to Edinburgh. Could you do it?’
He said: ‘Oh, yes. To become a doctor. They’d let me go, anyway. House of Lords . . . And no one being very anxious to have me in their uniform. Didn’t Peter say he’d be back about now?’
She nodded and said steadily: ‘I haven’t had any news.’ ‘Not much point in waiting for him then, I suppose. I’d have liked to see him before I threw my hand in. Tell him about it.’
‘Yes.’
He sat with his hands in his lap, staring into the empty fireplace. ‘It hasn’t worked out the way we thought it was going to, has it? My going to fight for King and Country. No one wants me to. They will next year. Then I’d be able to--show them.’ ‘Show them what?’ she said sharply. She felt a tinge of exasperation at all the race of men. ‘Prove to people you don’t care for that you can do something you don’t want to? If you want to show real courage to people who do care, and who do mean something to you--Peter and me, for instance--you’ll send in your papers tomorrow.’
Gerry nodded. ‘I’m going to,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing else for it.’
She said: ‘Tomorrow. And leave London the next day. There’s not a day to waste. The hospital’s finished and waiting for you.’ Gerry got up. ‘I know,’ he said, his voice firmer. ‘I keep thinking about it. Parkash writes to me every week. There’s a man called Wibley officiating as D.C. No one likes him. I’m off to bed.’
She held up her mouth, and after a brief pause he kissed her gently on the lips. ‘There’s no one like you in the world, Emily,’ he said gravely. ‘I suppose you know that’s what I feel.’
She nodded.
‘I’ll hurry up and get myself to Edinburgh,’ he said. ‘Then one day we’ll all be together in Rudwal again, and it’ll be different. I’ll find a pretty nurse up there in Scotland and take her out to India.’ He laughed quite naturally, and she thought: He really might; peace is settling on him, and he really might; he’s got enough love, and to spare, for it to come out right.
Then he left her, and, after an hour alone, she went to bed.
But Gerry had not gone to Edinburgh by the fifteenth, for there was a scornful delay in releasing him from the War Office, and that afternoon a telegram arrived from Peter, in Dover, presaging his arrival at the house at six o’clock, and at six o’clock a taxi wheezed up to the door and Peter stepped lightly out. Knowing that there were still needs for caution and alertness, still she could not stop herself from running out and down the steps and into his arms while he was in the act of paying the taxi driver.
‘Peter, Peter,’ she cried. ‘You’re back--a day early.’ His brief kiss tingled electrically on her mouth.
‘Flew from Marseilles to Paris in a French Army bombing aeroplane,’ he said, smiling down at her.
When they were inside--he carried nothing but a small, dusty valise--she looked at him more closely. Uniform patched, clean, not too well-fitting; blue and red ribbon on his left breast; captain’s rank badges on his sleeve; cap soft, racy-looking; black belt and shoulder straps polished like glass-- he must have been working at them on the train from Dover--white teeth flashing in a face tanned deep golden brown; eyes like points of ice under a gay sun; his movements lithe and flowing--a blue, puckered scar on his wrist.
‘What’s that?’ she asked quickly.
‘Bullet wound,’ he said. ‘I had a bad time for a week. Where are the children?’
‘Upstairs, having their supper. We’ll go up in a moment. But where have you been? How did you become a captain so quickly?’ For the moment nothing mattered except the blaze of his eager personality in the room.
‘I’ll be a major tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and a lieutenant-colonel by autumn. Where’s Gerry? I’ve got to see him urgently.’
She sat back slowly, and the warmth from the blaze drained away. She said: ‘Gerry’s at the War Office. Today’s his last day there. Do you want to see him about anything special?’
Peter nodded.
‘Tell me--quick,’ she said, her voice straining. ‘Before he comes in.’
Peter looked at her for a time and then said: ‘This is secret, and I’m not supposed to tell anyone not already in it, but I can see you think you’ve got to know, so I’ll tell you.’
She heard the front door open and close, and Gerry’s step in the passage. A moment later he came into the room and stopped dead as he saw Peter by the window.
Peter stepped forward, his hand jumping out. ‘Gerry! Just the man I’m looking for! You’re a bit pale. Are you all right otherwise? Are you fit?’
Their hands were still clasped. Astonishment, delight, anxiety, and enquiry had chased themselves across Gerry’s face. Now he said: ‘Fit enough. They’ve got a gym at one of my clubs.’
Peter said: ‘Good. I was just going to tell Emily. This is very hush-hush, Gerry. I’m going on a secret reconnaissance to the Italian front, starting next week. I’ve asked for you to come with me.’
‘You’re going away again in a week!’ she cried.
Peter said: ‘This is war. There are plenty of men who haven’t seen their families since August, and plenty who never will . . . It’s in the mountains, Gerry. That’s why I wanted to know if you were fit.’
‘He’s not,’ Emily said.
‘Yes, I am,’ Gerry said.
She said: ‘Do you remember me telling you this was Gerry’s last day at the War Office, Peter? That’s because he has sent in his papers and is going to Edinburgh, to the medical school.’
‘After the white feather that woman gave you the other day in Whitehall?’ Peter said keenly. ‘That’s guts, Gerry. Yes, I heard about it--in Paris. Battle intelligence doesn’t travel half as fast as gossip. You can go to Edinburgh when we’ve done this.’
‘I can’t, Peter,’ Gerry said in anguish. ‘They’re expecting me the day after tomorrow. I’ve promised.’
Peter said forcefully: ‘Edinburgh University is not going to care one small damn whether one middle-aged medical student arrives the day after tomorrow or two months hence. It’s only two months, Emily.... I can just about guarantee you an M.C. out of it, Gerry--not because I have strings to pull, but because I know you and because you’re going to earn it.’
So Gerry would have the purple and white ribbon, which could be earned only by gallantry in the face of the enemy, to wear on his breast, and the letters to put after his name, to stop any other foolish woman from giving him a white feather, any other stupid man from whispering that ‘Wilcot’s got a streak.’ It was all beautifully thought out, for Gerry’s good.
Only, at any cost, it must not happen.
She said quite calmly: ‘Gerry is not going with you, Peter. It’s disgraceful of you to ask him when you know he’s trying to become a doctor, and you know how much that means to him. You agreed once in Rudwal that that is what he ought to do, and we’ve found since we came home that it’s the only life left for him. Now please don’t speak of your expedition again.’
Peter said fiercely: ‘There’s a war on. I’ve got a very important job to do for England. I don’t know how many lives might be saved or lost through our information. A hundred thousand, perhaps--Harry Walsh’s life, my own, those men walking into the pub on the corner. If we risk our lives to climb Meru, how much more should we risk them for England--for India, Gerry; for Rudwal, and the hospital you’re going back to?’
Gerry had been standing, stiffer and stiffer, his head going back and his jaw coming up under the vicious, accurate thrusts. ‘I’ll come, Peter,’ Gerry said. ‘Of course I’ll come.’
Peter shook his hand again, and Emily thought the bright eyes were almost damp--but that was impossible.
‘Now let’s go and see the children,’ Peter said. ‘Good heavens, they must think you’re their father by now, Gerry.’