Porteous removed his glasses and polished them, just for the sake of having something to do.
“That sounds very good.”
She looked at him affectionately, and with a little glimmer of moisture in her eyes.
“It is good, utterly good. And he’s happy; quite different in some ways. No, no, I’m not a prig; I’m very proud of him—prouder than I can say.”
“God bless you both.”
He tried to put his glasses on and dropped them on the floor, and then spent quite a long time repolishing them, while Janet pretended to be looking out of the window.
“What a fine show of tulips you are going to have!”
“Tulips? Yes—I believe so. You had a fine day, dear, did you, down at Melling! I know the country slightly—heather and pines. And Pierce looks well as a Tommy?”
“So much bigger and better looking.”
“But he couldn’t have grown!”
“But he looks bigger. It’s the air of him; the way he walks. Father—I’m very much in love——”
“My dear child——”
He blundered over, patted her shoulder, and kissed her in a shamefaced sort of way.
“I think we both owe you—everything.”
“Don’t. I want to forget all that. And just now—I am very happy.”
“Of course. I might tell you I expect his mother back next week; her health is much improved.”
And for once in his life Porteous Hammersly lapsed into undoubted sarcasm.
In May, Pierce Hammersly became a trained man, a good shot and an expert bomber. He could wear his gas-helmet for an hour and run in it for five minutes; a fifteen-mile route march left him healthily thirsty, but sound as to heart and feet. He was the best bayonet fighter in D Hut, and he had gained a stone in weight. McVittie and Lambourne were both down with him for the next draft, and Palk had been chosen as one of the corporals—to his very great satisfaction.
On the 10th May, Janet and old Porteous each received a wire:
“Expect me to-morrow evening by six o’clock train.
“Pierce.”
It was Janet who met him at Scarshott Station and saw him climbing out of a third-class carriage with his white canvas kit-bag under his arm. There was nothing of the prodigal about him; he looked brown and fit and confident, and he kissed her under the very eyes of two very prominent Scarshott ladies who had put it about that he had hidden himself in Spain.
“You haven’t got the car, have you?”
“No.”
“That’s right. I’ll just bundle this thing into the office and have it sent for.”
He seemed amused, and his eyes had an audacious glitter.
“Well, here goes. You don’t feel shy, Janet?”
“I never felt less shy in my life.”
“Brazen young woman. Do you know, I look on Scarshott as rather a joke—and the serious way I took the place last winter! What a consummate fool!”
People stared at them—turned on the pavements and stared at them, but Hammersly went through Scarshott with a smile. He was invulnerable, and he knew it now that there was no shadow of shame in Janet’s eyes. He looked at nobody, but just marched calmly through the town, shoulders squared, head up, a man who was at peace with himself, and too happy to feel apologetic.
“I suppose you know, Pierce?”
“What?”
“Your mother is back.”
He laughed—wicked laughter—and yet there was no sting in it.
“Then the sun must be shining! Poor old mater! It was a bit of a test, I’ll admit. I wonder how she fancies me as a private. Janet, I have a notion that three months at a training camp would do the mater all the good in the world. I speak from experience.”
“Don’t blame the individual, dear man.”
“No, it’s the class. And yet if I were to tell the mater that I had become a Socialist, she would take the next train back to Harrogate. But I am playing the critical beast again. I say—that’s some hat you are wearing.”
“Do you like it?”
“Well, I suppose it is partly the face under it. No, don’t be frightened; I won’t kiss you in Scarshott High Street.”
The garden at Orchards was famous for its spring flowers, anemones, tulips, narcissi, and great masses of wallflower and forget-me-not. Porteous Hammersly was almost a Dutchman in his love of tulips; he had collected every shade of colour and every combination of colour, from cerise and rose to black and gold. He liked blood red in his gilly-flowers, and a deep blue in his myosotis. And to Pierce the place had never looked so rich and flowery, nor had it ever smelt so sweet. The cedars threw their great shadows over the vivid grass, and the old beech trees in the park were mountains of green splendour.
“By George, the old place is rather lovely. Things seem to smell sweeter than they did. Perhaps it is contrasts.”
“Doesn’t one hear of men growing flowers in the trenches?”
“Yes, poor devils. And I could do it myself, and get sentimental over a scarlet-runner. Hallo! there’s the old man.”
Janet slipped away towards the house, and left the men to meet alone. Porteous had been sitting under one of the cedars, a man grown plump and debonair again, and spruce as a well-preened bird.
“Hallo, Dad!”
“My dear boy——”
They kissed like Frenchmen, or like father and son in some Eastern tale. And then a quite ridiculous muteness fell on both of them; they walked up and down, deeply moved, but saying little.
“I have never seen the old garden looking better. I like that splash of cerise and white over there.”
“Some new bulbs I bought last year. Rather disgraceful in war time, eh!”
“Dear old Dad, nonsense! There is so much filthiness in this war that a man ought to be blessed who remembers to give us something beautiful. I suppose there are people who would say we ought to make a salad of those tulips. We English are like that; we save the string and the odd bits of sealing wax, and let half the land go to grass. And how is the mater?”
“Much better, Pierce.”
“That’s good.”
They did not hurry into the house where Mrs. Sophia waited in her heavily furnished drawing-room, but wandered all round the garden and halfway across the park. Old Hammersly’s eyes gloated over his son, remarking all those physical details that make a young man’s body fine and convincing. As Janet had put it, Pierce looked bigger. He had lost his air of restiveness and that hypercritical gleam in his eyes. There was a fresh-skinned, muscular optimism about him; the poise of perfect health.
“So you are going out soon?”
“In a week or two. And I am not worrying. I am a very much simpler soul than I was last year.”
“Where will it be?”
“France, I expect. I hope it will be France; that is the real thing. It’s very strange, Pater, that though I know I shall have some perfectly hellish times, I shall be quite glad to go, and not a little proud of it, too—perhaps.”
“The country realises what the war means.”
“That’s it. I used to think I should play at the game for a few months—and my thoughts were all in the future, a future that was to be much like the pre-war past, but now I never think of the future; there is no future till we have cleared up this mess.”
“That’s so, my boy.”
“One just goes out into the unknown and the unknowable, leaving all that is sacred and dear behind, living on the consciousness that it is there, but not tempting weakness by letting one’s hopes run riot. It’s just the eternal spirit of sacrifice, and the more cheerful one is about it—well—the sooner we shall be out of the mud.”
Pierce’s meeting with Mrs. Sophia was a somewhat formal affair. He kissed her, and felt that he had nothing whatever to say—nothing that mattered—to this woman who was his mother. She had not changed; she had only adapted her egotism to summer conditions; she had emerged from winter quarters, so to speak, realising that her dignity could take the f
ield again in Scarshott.
“Have you had a bath, Pierce?”
“Not yet, Mater.”
“Having to live with all those common men, and catching all those horrible creatures!”
“Oh, we are a very clean lot, Mater. I have to show my feet once a week.”
“Show your feet! What an indignity! Just as though you were a tramp in a workhouse!”
Those four days, full of the green of the spring, and all tremulous with the singing of birds, passed like a dream in the night—a dream that was unforgettable, rich with sweetness and strength. Pierce hardly showed himself again at Scarshott. He spent the hours in the Orchards garden, or in the pine woods beyond Heather Cottage. There was no shadow over those days, save the shadow of parting, and even this imminent sadness hid a glow of quiet exultation. Love was making the great sacrifice, and love lives upon sacrifices.
They said good-bye on a May morning in one of the sunlit glades of the pine woods, with the young bracken springing under their feet, and the yellow broom all gold against the dark trunks of the pines.
“I won’t come to the station with you, dear.”
“That’s wise. There’s something ghastly about those public partings. I would like to remember you here in the sunlight, where it’s so soft and green.”
He was aware of a questioning, pensive look in her eyes as though she were trying to see into the future.
“Don’t worry, my Janet. I shall not fail you this time.”
She drew very close to him.
“Dear man, don’t think that I fear for you in that way. It is so much—so much finer than last year. But I was wondering—how can I help wondering?”
“Darling!”
“Oh, my dear, it’s hard, though I’m proud, so very proud. Supposing——No, that’s cowardly.”
He just held her in his arms, so firmly that she could hardly breathe.
“I feel that I am coming back to you, but I won’t promise myself anything, or count on such a desire. I know you will be with me, even as I shall be with you. I want to win a badge of honour. And I love you, dear; I love you with all my heart.”
CHAPTER XXXII
The bugles blew before dawn, while a black hush still covered the Wiledon woods. Lights gleamed out in the windows of the wooden huts, and there was a stirring of many men, a deep murmur of voices. The cooks were at work in the kitchen, and transport horses were being harnessed, for the draft was going, going overseas to France.
A few people who were awake in Wiledon village heard the bugles sounding in the grey of the dawn. Faint, mysterious and plaintive, a mere thin cry in the breaking of the day, it waxed and grew, winding down through the misty, dew-wet woods, till it became clangorous and challenging. The bugles and the drums were playing the draft to Wiledon Station, while the transport rumbled in the rear, with a little crowd of men who followed for a last handshake and a last cheer. The men of the draft were in marching order—figures whose khaki looked grey in the mist, stepping with a swing behind drums and bugles, rifles sloped, heads in the air. No officers went with them save a subaltern who was to take them to the French coast, and no farther. The draft was just a brown chunk of manhood, cut out of Wiledon Camp and shipped over the sea to patch some other brown and bigger chunk that had had big splinters knocked off it somewhere in France.
So the draft went down to Wiledon Station, and the awakened sleepers in the village heard the bugles growing fainter and ever fainter and more plaintive in the grey of the morning—death music, strange and sad. Then there was silence, and later a little distant sound of cheering followed by the panting and rattle of a train. And presently the empty transport wagons rumbled back up the road, and the men of the bugles and the drums and the cheering voices tramped back in silence to the camp.
The draft had gone, and the birds were singing.
In the corner of a third-class carriage, Pierce Hammersly sat watching the sun rise, with a slight frown on his forehead, and a stiff upper lip. Packs and rifles had been piled in the racks. McVittie was eating the unconsumed portion of an interrupted breakfast. Lambourne, the married man, sat stiffly erect, staring straight at the opposite wall of the carriage, his lips shaping themselves for a whistle that never came. One man had dropped asleep. Three youngsters were smoking cigarettes and parading an immense cheerfulness. A fellow in the far corner was trying to blink something out of his eyes, while he swallowed hard at an emotional substance in his throat.
A mouth organ was being played in the next carriage, and they heard Corporal Palk strike up and lead a chorus.
“The boys seem cheery.”
McVittie, who had lit a pipe, turned his face to the rising sun.
“A braw day for the picnic. I wonder where we’ll be this time—next year.”
“Dead, most likely,” said the emotional man.
“You wait till you’re dead before you begin to grouse about it,” said someone, with Irish impulsiveness.
Pierce Hammersly wondered how these men really felt about the great adventure, what their thoughts were, whether they thought at all. Most of them were without imagination; they viewed the affair ahead of them as though it were a glorified firework show, with an abundance of noise and other little excitements. They were innocent, whereas the man who has been under fire suffers from no illusions. He knows that he will wish himself home again, and wonders how he could have been such a damned fool as to imagine that he would like a second sojourn in that human hell.
But Hammersly was going out to France with no ordinary spirit to inspire him. He meant to keep smiling, and to maintain a stiff lip, even though his face were the colour of chalk. He knew his own weaknesses, and how insidiously fear may make itself felt, in petulances, and little selfish shirkings, till some grosser treachery seizes its chance. He knew that a highly-strung man is saved by holding to a high ideal and by grimly smothering the first querulous complainings of his weaker self. A grudging spirit means a tortured spirit. To the uttermost; a cheerfulness that refuses to be dismayed; the thought of honouring eyes and the pride of some loved one at home. A man must see such virtues in the mirror of his own mind and fiercely refuse to see aught else.
So the day passed, with much cheering and crowding at windows, much singing and smoking of cigarettes. England drifted away behind them, and there were men who grew silent, and some who grew sentimental, and some who wanted to drink. By nightfall they were a sobered, tired crowd, lying stretched beside their kits on the cobbled paving of a big quay. The black flank of a ship loomed over them. Steam derricks were hard at work, and brown streams of men were pouring up and down the great gangways with stores and baggage and all the lesser gear of war.
That swift dash across the sea to France was one of the most impressive pictures that Hammersly took away with him. The darkness, the silence, the silent putting forth into the night, those black sea-wolves picking them up and racing on either side with a great smother of smoke! The sudden solemnity that seemed to fall upon the men as they squatted or lay close together in their cork jackets, talking in low voices, when they talked at all! The throbbing of the engines, the stars and the rolling smoke overhead, the calm and swarthy sea, the gliding and dim swiftness of the destroyers who guarded them!
They sighted the French coast just as the first greyness of the dawn spread over the waters. Most of the men were asleep, but Pierce Hammersly stood and watched the breaking of the day, and the grey line that was France rising like Fate ahead of them. And presently he found Corporal Palk at his side, but a strangely transfigured and spiritualised Palk, with a solemn face and shining eyes.
“Seems sort o’ queer and fine, don’t it, Prince?”
“Yes, just that.”
“Us standin’ ’ere and thinkin’ of all the chaps that ’as gone in front of us and all the chaps that’ll come after. An’ the guns and the shells goin’ over, and the wounded comin’ back, and the fellers that’ll never come back, and the women carryin’ on at ’ome. Blimy, but
it’s sort of grand, and we’re in it, my boy, you and me.”
And that morning the draft landed in France, and refreshed itself with hot coffee and sausage rolls at the disembarkation canteen. It was a good draft, and trained to the last detail, and Wiledon Camp heard with satisfaction that this bit of itself had been handed over within a fortnight to the 53rd Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment, a battalion of “pukka soldiers,” who were critical of riff-raff when it came.
The Sussex Regiment was out of the firing line for a month, resting in billets in a little old French village, a quaint, grey place with a river running through it, and all around it rich meadows and tall woods of beech and oak. It was a green and flowery spot, and absolutely blemishless as to its straggling, single street. The war seemed very far away, and yet if you went over the next hill, you saw things that would amaze you—a vast activity, an immense and patient co-ordination. In the village of St. Just the children played where they would; the women and the old men worked in the fields; cattle grazed; the bells rang in the slate-covered steeple, and people went to church. The river ran placidly between the poplars and willows, and the men of the Sussex Regiment fished and bathed in it when they had nothing else to do—which was seldom. There was a mill lower down the river, a mill that worked night and day, and its rumbling and the rush of the water had a fascination for the men. Sometimes an aeroplane whirred overhead, and it was always an English aeroplane. The children were forgetting to look for the black cross.
“Well, if this ain’t a bit of all right!”
So said Corporal Palk, lying flat on his back under an apple tree in a little orchard, and staring at the blue of the sky. A small Frenchwoman was sitting near him, and he was trying to teach her some English and to pick up some French in return. It was a great game, and much appreciated by Hammersly and McVittie who lay on their stomachs with their chins propped on their crossed forearms. Palk’s English was somewhat base coin, but he flung it into the child’s lap as though it were the English of Shakespeare.
“What’s this, eh?” and he pulled out a handkerchief; “nose-wipe, that’s what that is; nose-wipe, sweet and simple. No haffectation abart that. And see that hanimal over there; that’s what we call a Jock—a Scotch beast.”
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