The Impregnable Women, page 24
Out of the press of triumphant women came a wild creature with raven hair and darkly glowing eyes. She was white-skinned – but her cheek was torn and bloody – and she wore a faded kilt and a tattered plaid pinned with a great silver brooch across her shoulder. ‘It was I,’ she said proudly, in a high clear voice. ‘I am Catriona MacLeod of Rhidorroch.’
‘You’re very lucky to have got here, Miss MacLeod.’
‘I have come from Stirling. There is a Highland army there, of five thousand women. They are ready to help you in any way you like.’
‘How long would it take them to come here?’
‘The time to march forty miles.’
‘But how can we send word to them?’ asked Delia, who, since pricking a bombardier with her pike, felt herself a soldier in earnest, and ready to cope with a soldierly problem. ‘We’re closely beleaguered now.’
‘Come up to the battlements and let’s have a look.’
Following Lady Oriole, they presently looked down from the upper ramparts, and saw soldiers bivouacked in the gardens between Princes Street and the Castle; soldiers in all the roads that girded the Rock; and a column marching to reinforce the defeated troops on the Esplanade.
‘We’re tied up like a parcel,’ said Mrs Graham.
‘Somebody will have to get through their lines,’ said Lady Oriole.
‘I suppose we had better tell Lysistrata, and see what she thinks,’ suggested Mrs Curle.
‘Yes,’ said Lady Oriole thoughtfully. ‘Yes, we ought to tell her at once. It’s a pity, the way things have happened. She got bad news an hour ago, and it rather knocked her up. An old friend of hers – she used to think she was in love with him at one time – died in hospital yesterday. He’d been badly wounded, and death was probably the kindest thing that could happen to him. But she was too damned cut-up about it to see that when I left her. Still, the news of a Highland army at Stirling ought to make her feel more cheerful.’
XII
It was news of the death of Eliot Greene that had taken away Lysistrata from the conference. He had died the night before, and a nurse who had been with him had come to tell of the good end he made. She was waiting in the orderly-room in the Governor’s House. She was a pretty fair-haired girl, and she cried at intervals during her story. She had never seen anyone look so happy as Eliot at the moment of his death, she said, and sobbed through a flood of tears: ‘He was laughing! He was laughing just before, and then the only difference was that the look on his face got more like someone remembering a joke.’
Lysistrata sent word to dismiss the Ministers.
There had been three of them round his bed, said the little fair-haired nurse. There had been herself, and Sister Bliss, and Nurse Fell, and they had all been telling stories of the strike, and laughing like anything. Nurse Fell could make anyone laugh. She was a Cockney. She herself belonged to Glasgow, and Sister Bliss came from Yorkshire. So they heard stories from all over the country, and the whole country was full of jokes about the state the men were in, and the way the women were leading them a dance. You could say anything to Mr Greene. He loved a good joke, and sometimes when Sister used to complain that that wasn’t the sort of thing to say before a gentleman hough she was just as bad herself – he would tell them, Every time you laugh you kill a knave or fox a fool. But perhaps they made him laugh too much. According to the doctors he died of heart-failure. But Sister said afterwards that from the look on his face you wouldn’t think it was failure, but success. . . .
If only he could have lived to see the finish of it, and the war at an end, thought Lysistrata; and realized, as the wish came to her, that she had always shrunk from any serious consideration of Eliot’s future. She had never seen him without wondering how he was going to adapt himself, so greatly mutilated, to a life where all his friends were active and afoot; but always, with dismay, she had put the problem from her. She had never been able to visualize him in any picture of the future, nor integrate him in the design for peace that her mind was drawing and re-arranging every day. Even while he was still alive, his place had been receding into the past. He was a country detail in that English landscape which the war had ravished, and he had died to an English sound, of women tattling through the ages on the village green. He had died to a music that would outlast all principalities and powers, to the tumbling echoes of Chaucerian laughter. The little nurse – her eyes were red and her cheeks wet with tears – was right when she would not believe that he had died of the failure of his heart. He had died of his heart’s abundance.
XIII
In the narrow lobby of a small house in Leith, two garish and misshapen beings stood irresolute in a discoloured light. There was a hat-stand in the lobby, a toppling piece of furniture hung thickly with coats and ancient waterproofs, and among them a panel of mirror. Looking in the dark glass they saw two faces, grotesque and not their own. They uttered little whimpering noises of fear and protest. One of the figures half-opened the door into the street, but they were still afraid to go out.
They wore fantastic clothes. The one was dressed in a fashion of 1900: a pleated blouse ham-full at the shoulders and high-collared, a long dark dress of ample cut, bell-shaped below a constricted waist, and a pale straw boater skewered to a brown wig. The other was a pantomine figure, the Widow Twankey in a plaid bodice and a cameo brooch, draggle-skirted, long-shawled, wigged in black horse-hair with a white parting half an inch broad. But their faces were alike. – They had been newly shaved, so their cheeks were smooth. – From brow to throat they were the pretty warm white of a girl, with a little red rubbed in below the cheek-bones, and carefully drawn full red lips. Their eyebrows had been shaved, and thin dark crescents drawn above their yellow-flecked but well-mascara’d eyes. But this daintiness, this allure of women’s colouring, was shocked and shouted down by their outrageous noses. In the dim light they shone like brothel lamps. They were red as blood, and they seemed to snuffle of sins like scarlet. They were the noses of Gin Lane and the battered clown.
It was McCombie who had painted their noses. His humour was broader than Lawless’s, and not so terrible. Lawless had shaved their cheeks and eyebrows, and sprinkled them with perfume.
They had wakened, crapulous both of them, in McCombie’s house, already dressed and decorated. Gradually they had recalled the events of the night before. . . . Hogpool had recovered by the time they reached his flat, and they had had a good lot to drink there. Then there had been a quarrel. Hogpool had accused his old friend Small of taking bribes. His old friend Small retorted that Hogpool sold munitions to the enemy. – Hogpool specified a bribe or two that Small had taken. Small described in detail the latest piece of Hogpool’s treachery. – Buffet about, like clowns in a circus, they had smacked each other with base disclosure and fragments of disgraceful truth. Then Lawless, for no apparent reason save a sudden madness – a hank of yellow hair hung down his forehead like a fever pennant, and his empty mouth was snarling – Lawless, jumping to his feet, lifted a punch to Hogpool’s aching jaw that knocked him out; and McCombie, pulling Small nearer to reach him the better, dealt a blow that was the very marrow of the other.
When they returned to consciousness they were being driven, in Hogpool’s car, to McCombie’s house in Leith; and Lawless, shouting like a devil at the wheel, was patching with rags of poetry a ruinous device of torture. But then he had taken to laughing – to a fit of laughing wilder than his rage – and no sooner were they bundled into the house than he emptied from a wicker basket a great assortment of female raiment and ordered them to strip. They refused, and were beaten. They were dressed in abominable clothes, painted, and mocked. The savage humour of Lawless frightened them, and when he was tired of their antics they went willingly to bed in a room under the roof. The door was locked, and they slept drunkenly.
But they woke to a day like a nightmare. They were made to scrub floors and cook uneatable messes. There were three children in the house, who jeered at them wherever they went, and tripped them with broom-handles. And Lawless stood over them, with wild hair and a crack-jawed toothless grin, whisky in one hand and a play-book in the other, declaiming of the breeding sun, of bawds and gold, hoar leprosy and sluts with aprons mountant. They grew certain that he was mad, and burnt their own clothes when he told them to. In the early evening, while McCombie held them down, Lawless shaved them and painted them thickly with grease-paint. He shaved their scalps, and stuck wigs on them with hot glue. A little before dark he and McCombie went out and left them. But they had no clothes except the female garments they were wearing, and they were afraid of the streets. Three times they went irresolute to the door, but stood in the lobby and dared not make their escape. Then at last, their jaws slack with terror, they went stumbling out.
A thin rain was falling out of low skies, and the dark street was empty. But they ran, breathlessly, pursued by fear of themselves, for they had been driven out of their familiar shell and were houseless in the rain-swept street. They heard the padding of their printless feet and felt on their necks the hoarse breathing of what they were. A little gangling thieving boy, who had grown into the shabby likeness of a circus lion, and a whimpering gluttonous whelp who had put on the cunning of a hyena and found its stinking appetite, were vagrant now; and clutching their ungirt bellies they clawed at the skirts of their flying hosts. They felt their sides contracting over a void of fear.
They turned into a lane, and a great slouch-hatted figure, leaning against the wall, straightened himself and came roaring after them. The night air scorched their lungs like steam, but they doubled their pace and came into another street where light shone through pale curtains out of plump little taut bow-windows, and looking round they saw that the giant Australian soldier, mad as a rutting camel, was still close behind. Crazy for refuge of any kind, they pushed open a small iron gate and hammered at a pale brown varnished door. It opened, and a bespectacled man with sandy hair and a stringy throat asked what they wanted. ‘Safety,’ they hoarsely told him. ‘Let us in, and we’ll tell you.’
There were five other men sitting round a table covered with a thick green cloth with an ornamental fringe. They were knitting. ‘You see, we are trying to make the best of things,’ said the man with sandy hair.
Hogpool and Small sat on a green sofa that was tightly resilient over hard springs. They were so distressed that they had forgotten their appearance. But the other men stared at them, aghast with a dreadful curiosity. Three were bespectacled and thin, two were bald and soft with pre-senile fat. They looked like home-keeping men. They had been knitting bright wool of different colours, but now they sat staring at Small and Hogpool.
‘We are trying to make the best of things,’ repeated the man with sandy hair. ‘You see, our wives have all left us, so we are studying the domestic arts.’ He sniggered uneasily.
Small muttered, ‘We were chased by a man. An Australian.’
There was another silence in which Hogpool’s laboured breathing sounded like a smithy bellows. Then one of the bespectacled men – he had scanty wet-looking hair over a tall thin forehead – reached tentatively from his chair, and laid a nervous hand on Small’s knee. With a dreadful shout Small jumped to his feet, and Hogpool scrambled after him. Nobody tried to stop them, but in their hurry they knocked a vase off the fumed-oak side-board, and wrenched the handle from the outer door. In the street they again took to their heels.
Now they felt that the peopled houses were full of peril, and thought they saw great hairy hands pull back the blind, and cunning eyes stare out. There was danger in the minds of men, and beneath the sober trappings of a town lay darkly a moving jungle where shaggy brutes went prowling through the streets, and panthers crouched upon a window-ledge. When nature littered monsters she concealed their birth in the midst of the flock and clad them in a general fleece, but if their clothes were burnt they ran free, and lycanthropy was no joke.
The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. In a vaporous bay a few stars were rutilant. Bright red and yellow beneath a pavement lamp they saw a hawker’s barrow – Brachiano in scarlet letters on the side – and a leash of children, hungry still, buying pennyworths of ice-cream to cool the hot night. They tried avoidance, but the children saw them and came whooping after, and chased them into a juncture of narrow alleys black between the high walls of a factory. There the children grew frightened also. Their last cat-call modulated to a trembling shriek, and leaving their shapeless quarry they went running back to the lighted barrow. But Hogpool and Small stayed in the shadows, and slunk soft-footed through the viewless dark.
Doubtfully they stopped at the corner of a broader road, and peering round saw in the crack-veined glass of a rubber-shop their faces glazed and brightly haggard. They chattered like apes at a reflection in moving water, and hurried clumsily, scarcely seeing where they went, till the shouting of a dozen loiterers, idle against the walls of a shuttered pub, startled them into running again, and they ran for cover. They were leg-weary, weak in the knees, and their bodies were a marsh of sweat, but they dared not stop. Limping and shuffling, they fled from street to lane, past the pale blind faces of empty shops, and narrow little sombre gardens, and dead grimy walls. Then they came to a road so broad that it seemed in the darkness like the sallow water of a great river, the unhurried Amazon huge and lustreless between forest walls. Hesitant, they began to cross it, but in the middle halted, their spirit draining into empty space.
Their selves, that had been dispossessed, became a circling air that hemmed them in. A host of invisible small mouths whispered of greed beyond the scope of swine, and lechery, and shabby lust for power. The darkness was alive and conscious, and the pale unhurried river slid mumbling underfoot. They stumbled to the other side, and in the blind shop fronts their lurching shadows kept uneasy pace with them.
They were nearing home now, and the shortest way was through a sombre crooked lane to the right. But they were frightened away from that by a noise like the trampling of male brutes in a stable. They would have to go into the light. They must risk the breadth and naked side of Princes Street. Here, where the road narrowed and curved uphill to enter its eastern mouth, there were people on both pavements, and they hurried head-down in the middle of the street. There was some shouting, and a few men turned to follow, but did not molest them.
They had no longer the strength to run. They gathered a little crowd who half encircled them, peering into their faces, and shouting coarsely. They crossed to the open side of Princes Street, and the crowd grew, and followed. But they had made a mistake, for now the mischievous crowd was pressing forward and would not let them cross again to reach any of the streets that led to Hogpool’s flat. At the Mound there was a group of men gathered about an all night coffee-stall. They turned to see what the shouting meant, and headed the quarry. An old man offered Hogpool a mutton-pie. He knocked it out of his hand, and the crowd grew angry. They looted the coffee-stall and threw pies and slabs of cake at the fugitives. They were running again now, but slowly and uphill. It was Small who thought first of the Castle. It was their only refuge. The street behind them was full of jeering pelting men. They had nowhere else to go, and their skirts might get them in.
On the steepness of Ramsay Lane, Hogpool fell, and someone kicked him. Small dragged him to his feet, and they stumbled on, pushed and jostled by the mob. They had reached the last of their strength, they were sobbing for breath, and their knees were trembling. But they had only a little way to go now.
Where Castle Hill opens into the Esplanade, they were stopped by a picket of soldiers. They were cut off from their refuge. More soldiers hurried up, and drove back the mob. A sergeant peered closely into their faces. In the heat of their sweat the paint had run, and they were smeared with garish colour. He tugged at their wigs, but they were stuck tight with glue. He prodded them in the ribs. ‘By God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they’re men!’
‘Spies,’ said a corporal.
‘Spies!’ roared the illogical and excited soldiers.
‘You’re under arrest,’ said the sergeant.
The news travelled to the crowd, and someone shouted, ‘They’re to be shot at dawn.’
‘Shot at dawn!’ bellowed the crowd with unmannerly glee, while Hogpool and Small, speechless and utterly exhausted, hung limply in the grasp of two unsympathizing privates.
XIV
In the State Prison, over the old Portcullis Gate, Julian sat alone and disconsolate on a wooden bench. A couple of blankets on the floor, a light hanging from the roof, a cup and a dirty plate were all the other furniture of his cell. There was a spider’s web in the corner of the roof, but apparently no spider.
Though sorely wounded, Julian’s spirit had not been humbled by capture. He felt that he had suffered a gross injustice in being taken prisoner, and he was very angry with the women. He was also angry with himself when he remembered how, for a little while, his heart had been turned to water by the savage spectacle of the garrison in their nightrails running swiftly to guard the walls. It was an ancient fear that he had suffered then – the night-fear of a Roman sentry surprised by women in the Icenian marsh – and irritably he banished the thought of it. He discounted it, for it meant nothing. But he nursed his anger against the women, for it was intolerable that a temporary lieutenant-colonel decorated with the D.S.O. and the M.C., should be prisoner in a hold of petticoats. – He recalled, against his will, that his old ambition was to be a great lover. How unpleasantly ironical to be in the midst of three thousand women, nearly all young, and spending the night alone! – They needed a pretty lesson. Humble pie and the dregs of the cup of humiliation and the smallest of singing should be their lot; and Scrymgeour would deal it to them.
He got up and paced furiously, to and fro, the three yards of his cell. There was only one thing that gave him satisfaction, and that was the way he had rebuffed Rose Armour. He had told her plainly what he thought of her when she came so smooth and friendly to learn the purpose of his venture. He had called her a traitor, and refused to answer a single question. Or one only, to be truthful, and that had nothing to do with the military situation, nor had his answer been what she expected. But he would give her the same reply if she came back, and tell her without mincing words that he wanted nothing to do with a mutineer.
