Sir Pompey And Madame Juno

by Martin Armstrong

  The memory of that feeling was so acutely awful that Miles awoke from his reverie and found himself in the teashop actually sweating with apprehension. Good Lord! How long had he been dreaming there and how, in the intensity of his unconsciousness, had he been behaving? He glanced stealthily round the shop. The same people were there and none of them was looking at him. He took out his watch. Only a quarter of an hour had passed since he came in … a quarter of an hour in which he had relived a whole brilliant, breathless, unbelievable evening. And at the end of that evening, as if in answer to his sudden chilling realization that he would probably never meet her again, she had invited him to go and see her, any afternoon, any evening, at her small house in Hampstead. She asked him, as she gave him her address, if he was sure he would remember it. ‘Quite sure!’ Miles had replied emphatically, and their eyes had met and they had laughed with a delicious, amused understanding. And then, almost before he could realize what was happening, she had left him standing there, and he saw her shaking hands with Mrs. Fielding. His eyes followed her bright head flitting like a flame among the crowded heads till it was suddenly extinguished by the doorway.

  Miles had never in his life felt so utterly forsaken. He stood there shipwrecked, as it were, among that crowd of formal savages, ashamed to feel himself publicly exposed with the glow of his abandonment still upon him. A small group of guests was bidding good night to Mrs. Fielding. He seized the opportunity, joined the group and, shaking hands with his hostess, unobtrusively slid out.

  Viewed in the cold light of the next morning, his previous night’s experience had seemed ridiculous – a fever, a drunkenness – and he felt, when he thought of it, humiliated and ashamed. But the feeling faded like morning mist, and for the rest of the day and for many days afterwards the memory of it remained like a glowing focal point in his consciousness, so that, in the middle of the habitual intercourses of his daily life, he would suddenly detach himself and, as he listened to his companion of the moment, would think to himself delightedly: ‘Ah, if only you knew …’ During those days he wore a coat and hat usually reserved for smart occasions, and he twice stopped on his way home to buy himself a new tie. At home he appeared absent and distracted.

  It was on the eighth day that the disaster had occurred, the day on which his chief had sent him on a special errand into the country. It was a wet, stormy morning and Miles had set off in old clothes, clumsy boots, a bedraggled waterproof and a shapeless hat. When he got back to Pad-dington in the afternoon the weather had cleared, and surely it was by the special malevolence of Fate that, as he tramped home across the Park, her voice suddenly stopped him on the bridge across the Serpentine. He had been so buried in his thoughts that he was visibly and absurdly startled, and when he had, so to speak, focused her and realized her presence his embarrassment was so patent that Elinor too was embarrassed. For a dreadful moment they faced one another in silence. Then, When they spoke, a wall of stale and commonpladb politeness rose between them, across which their eyes gazed despairingly at one another like lovers divided by a rapidly widening river. It was cruel, agonizing, such a trivial yet such a tragic accident; and when they had shaken hands politely and parted, Miles went on his way chilled and disillusioned, more miserable, more humiliated than, in his short life, he had ever believed possible. What a hopeless, helpless fool he was! Naturally she must have thought that he did not want to speak to her. Even now, as he sat in the teashop, turning over page after page of his book, his heart ached with remorse, and a sudden burden in his chest made him catch his breath in a deep sigh. Then, a few days later, had come that invitation to dinner from the Ravens. Young Raven was a school friend of Miles’s, but they had never yet asked him to dine with them. The Ravens knew Elinor, and young Raven had been at the Fieldings’ party. Hence, decided Miles, putting two and two together, Elinor would be at the Ravens to-night. That undoubtedly was why they had asked him and that, certainly, was why he had accepted. He had forced himself to accept. It was, he felt, his only chance to repair their lamentable disaster. But, as the day approached, his trepidations and misgivings had increased. How unbearable it would be if again they should fail to get back to one another, if he should have to sit all evening watching her talking to strangers, meet her eyes across the dinner-table, stand near her but hopelessly apart from her in the drawing-room, see her at the end of the evening, with despair in his heart, vanish without a word or a smile. And all at once, as he lingered over his cold cup of tea, he was seized with hatred for the Ravens, for parties in general, for all well-mannered, confident, chattering people who separated him, in his idiotic shyness, from the wonderful Elinor. No, he would not go to the party: he could not face it. Besides, what would be the good? But he could not go home: that was equally certain. He would have to dine alone in town. He looked at his watch. It was twenty to seven. The tea-shop was empty: even the sad-faced man had gone. Miles paid his bill and took his miseries out into the street, where the endless procession still drifted monotonously onwards and the snow-flakes still fell effortlessly into the mud of the roadway.

  In a corner of a small Soho restaurant Miles nursed his misery. He felt tired now and his misery was gradually fading into apathy. Life became a complete, but a comparatively endurable, blank. But the physical part of him felt an interest in food, and he indulged it – he felt, in his self-pity, that he had a right to – in choosing the strangest and most appetizing dishes. He also ordered – a thing he had never before done – half a bottle of Sauterne. And under the influence of food and drink his youthful confidence began to reassert itself. He began to pull himself together, to compel himself to face the situation practically and unflinchingly. Something definite must be done. It was too late now to go to the Ravens, but to-morrow he must screw up his courage to the point of calling on Elinor. The thought of doing so was disturbing in the extreme, and when he let his imagination play upon it, it became an agony. But he checked his imagination: he decided quite coldly that it must be done. Desperately and with his head down, as it were, he would act, ignoring all misgivings, all disturbing fancies, and chancing the result. And then for the first time it entered his mind that possibly Elinor was not at the Ravens’ dinner-party. Very possibly she was at home. Why should he not go to see her to-night? now? Yes, he would go to-night. He would simply take himself by the scruff of the neck and dump himself on her doorstep. What better opportunity could there be than this, when his emotions were tired out and this fierce, reasoned determination was upon him? Elinor might be there or not: it was a gamble, he said to himself calmly, a sporting chance. No one in the restaurant, seeing that fresh and calm young man seated there, could have guessed how old and worldly and cynical Miles felt at that moment: all the warmth, all the humanity seemed to have been frozen out of his love-affair.

  The snow had stopped when he went out into the street. The road and pavements shone wetly, and high above, under the stars, the snow-covered roofs showed grey and unsubstantial. During the journey in the tube he rigorously closed his mind to all thoughts, sitting like a stock, a stone, hard, patient, and impervious. But when the lift at Hampstead had deposited him upon the surface, the shock of a wonderfully changed external world demolished that other passionless, artificial world in which he had so carefully encased himself. For he stepped out of the station into a soft, pure world glistening whitely under a thick mask of snow, beautiful and unbelievable as the delicate fancies of a fairy-tale. He felt the sharp, clean air on his face, in his throat; the muffling cushion of the snow under his feet. A silent, pure, ecstatic quietude held the place in a trance that seemed immovable, eternal, and as Miles plodded noiselessly up the hill, trees, snow-laden to their smallest twigs, wove an intricate, soft filigree roof above him like the glistening crystal growths in some fabulous and unvisited cavern. And Miles, glowing and breathless with healthy exertion, felt himself released from the entanglements of his fears and despairs, changed into a bold, vigorous and happy creature with all its impulses at liberty. Ev
en if Elinor were not at home, he thought, he would try again to-morrow, and the next day, and the next day. There was to be no trifling, no misgiving this time. He came to the little green door in the wall which she had described to him, with the name of the house painted neatly across it, and pushed it open, scraping, as he did so, a deep, fan-shaped depression in the white floor of the path. And as he shut the door again and found himself in the little square garden with its shrubs and trees, he seemed to have shut himself into a Chinese pavilion, delicately and intricately carved out of ivory and crystal, at the far end of which lighted window-panes shone warm and yellow through the icy air like tropical fruit. The little place stood there like some exquisite fabrication of the frost, a miraculous flower of the snow, which would dissolve before the dawn. It seemed to Miles sacrilegious to intrude on its fragile quietude and to spoil the newly strewn, immaculate floor with his footprints. On tiptoe, with fluttering heart, he followed the straight path and knocked at the door. Light footsteps ran downstairs and the door was opened by Elinor herself.

  ‘May I come in?’ asked Miles, almost in a whisper.

  Elinor peered out at the dark figure and then, as he moved into the light from the hall, recognized him.

  ‘You?’ she said. ‘How delightful I Come in, come in: you must be frozen!’

  She closed the door and stood before him, her bright, Dresden-china beauty ensphered in the yellow light of the hall. It was the same delicious voice, too, to which he had listened at the Fieldings so long ago, and with a sudden release of all his doubts Miles realized that all was restored to him.

  ‘I was afraid …’ he began hesitatingly: ‘I was afraid …’

  ‘You were afraid?’ said Elinor. ‘So was I. I was afraid, so afraid, that you were never coming, after all!’

  On Patrol

  The air in the dugout was flat, stale, and earthy, and neither warm nor cool. A single candle burned on a table, shedding a melancholy light which hardly reached to the walls of the square, low-roofed room. Along one of the walls was built a rough wooden structure, like a large, three-storied rabbit-hutch open in front, which comprised three sleeping-bunks. The beds were shallow hammocks of wire-netting, stapled along each edge to the wooden framework. The two upper bunks were empty except for a blanket and a kit-bag: in the bottom one lay a young man rolled up in a brown blanket with a coat thrown over his feet. Nothing was exposed except his brown head and a fraction of khaki shoulder. His name was Freen, and he was a platoon commander.

  In a dugout it is always night. There that sense of the time of day which, under normal life, a man derives intuitively from the varied routine of his day and the degree of light or darkness, is lost. Time has stood still, it seems, at some unknown hour not far from midnight. Young Freen opened his eyes and, shaking a wrist clear of the blanket, saw that his watch was near upon seven o’clock. Up above, the sun must have set an hour ago: the men in the trench would be feeling that desolate, homeless sensation which comes with returning nightfall in the line, and at the thought of it Freen felt it too. He had been trying to get a little sleep before eight-thirty, when it was his duty to take out a patrol consisting of a sergeant and eight men, to examine the state of the Boche wire. But he could not sleep. He lay with his eyes closed, trying to keep his mind empty of thought; and when thoughts came none the less, he opened his eyes and stared with a sort of sick hatred at the crass reality of the things that stood before him. Like some hateful being that no effort of his could make to flinch, each thing stared back at him, loathsome and oppressive in its inescapable familiarity. Time after time he fell into a brief doze from which he woke to a sense of something which oppressed his mind like a physical weight, and with wearying reiteration, as his mind cleared, he once again found himself faced by the impending patrol. It was horrible. Freen was not a coward. He was just as able as any of his fellow-officers to disguise his feelings under a calm exterior, and now he had not the smallest doubt that when the moment arrived he would be perfectly competent to carry out the job. In fact, he kept wishing that the moment would arrive. It was the suspense which was so horrible – the long inaction which separated him from the moment, leaving him at the mercy of the physical protests which the vigorous life in him was making against the threat of extinction. He was cold, and reaching out one arm he felt for the coat at his feet and drew it up over him. That coldness, he knew well enough, was simply honest terror; and he knew too that if he did not keep his teeth clenched they would chatter, and if he relaxed the muscles of his legs they would shudder in a continuous palsy. And suddenly he felt that he was weary of keeping up this restraint. What, after all, was the point in pretending to himself? He relaxed his leg-muscles and felt a kind of relief in letting them obey their impulse. But he still kept his teeth clenched, for fear that, if he were to let them chatter, Dixon, his company-commander, should hear.

  That reminded him of Dixon: he had forgotten that he was there; and he opened his eyes once again and glanced towards the table. Dixon was still in exactly the same attitude as half an hour ago. He was sitting, a dark heap, on the bench that divided the table from the wall: his elbows were on the table and his head in his hands. He was not reading or writing or even dozing. He was doing nothing at all but simply existing in that state of torpor which the air of a dugout always induces. It seemed to Freen, as he watched him, that he was waiting, patiently waiting … for what? For the end of the war, no doubt. Freen closed his eyes once more and began to run over again the orders for the patrol. Eight men! They expected him-those damned fools at Headquarters – to take eight men. It was easy enough to sit in a comfortable dugout or hut, well behind the front line, and issue orders; but if they would try taking a patrol or two themselves, or even come and live in the line for a day or two and get to know something about it, they would discover that to take eight men racketing about in that particular place would be sheer lunacy. The Boche was barely two hundred yards away – a bit to the left he was not more than fifty yards away and you could hear him coughing – and No-Man’s Land just there was as flat as a billiard-table. Besides, anyone who had done the thing before knew what a row eight men made, even when they were trying their hardest to be quiet. ‘Examine the enemy wire,’ those were the orders, ‘and report on its condition and whether there are any gaps,’ And eight-thirty! What an hour to choose! Last night at eight-thirty it had been still clear twilight. A pretty sort of lunatic he would look leading eight men along the Boche wire, all clearly outlined against a green sky like a lot of cardboard birds and beasts in a shooting-gallery. Yes, a shooting-gallery: that’s just what it would be! His mind boiled with impotent rage against the unknown writer of the orders. Damned swine! Bloody fool! ‘Skipper!’ he broke out aloud, urged into speech by the violence of his feelings. ‘Eight men’s simply absurd!’

  ‘What eight men?’ murmured the immovable shape of Dixon.

  ‘Why, the eight men I’m supposed to take on this damned Cook’s tour along the Boche wire. I might just as well line them up in the trench and shoot them before we start.’

  Dixon’s only reply was a sound which might have been either a laugh or a grunt.

  ‘They’ll only be in my way,’ Freen went on. ‘I’d much better leave them all behind and just take Sergeant Sims.’

  The object of this statement was to sound Dixon, but Dixon was not to be drawn, and so Freen went on:

  ‘It’s not as if we were supposed to be a fighting patrol. What’s the good of eight men when you’ve got to be noiseless and invisible and keep out of trouble? Eh, Skipper?’

  ‘To protect you, my son.’

  ‘Protect? Why, they’ll give the show away for a certainty before we get within fifty yards of the Boche line.’

  Dixon made no reply. He sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, waiting for the end of the war.

  ‘But really, Skipper,’ came the voice from the bed again, ‘mayn’t I leave the men behind?’

  ‘What about orders?’
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br />   ‘But, as you must admit, the orders are absurd. I can’t think,’ he broke out in exasperation, ‘why they don’t just tell us to get the information they want and leave it to us, who know something, how and when we are to get it.’ He lay on his side, his head propped on his left hand, staring at Dixon. A feeling of despair was coming over him, for Dixon looked as if he were paying no attention to his troubles.

  But after a moment’s silence Dixon slowly raised his head. ‘Well, look here,’ he said. ‘Take four men and leave the other four in the trench. Tell them they’re to be a sort of extra sentry-post and keep a special look-out in the direction you go in.’

  Freen heaved a sigh of relief. He was too tired to argue any more: but why even four men? It was just like old Dixon, always so cautious about orders, whether he saw that they were impossible or not. However, something at least had been achieved. The weight on his mind had been lightened and he turned wearily away from the light of the candle and closed his eyes again. After all, he reflected, it was a short job. In two hours he would actually be back, lying where he was now, the whole business over. Looked at like that, the thing seemed simple. For one hour he had merely to lie still and do nothing, and during the next he had to crawl about cautiously in the dark, playing a sort of grim hide-and-seek. Yes, it was simple enough. The thought of having to take a lot of men with him had been the only trouble.

  At a quarter-past eight, feeling cold and tired, he got up and began to get ready. He handed his pocket-case to Dixon and took off his identity-disc and shoulder-badges, so that if the Boche got hold of him there would be nothing on him to identify the battalion. ‘My home-address is in the pocket-case,’ he remarked casually. ‘I shan’t take my tin-hat and gas-bag: they only get in the way when it comes to crawling’; and bareheaded, with nothing but his revolver and a handful of extra rounds in his pocket, he turned to go.