The Impregnable Women, page 9
The ground between the huts was a water-logged marsh, spanned and intersected by duck-boards. Eliot, who had been writing to Lysistrata when the iron walls of the camp were shaken by the first explosion, stumbled along one of these slippery tracks with the half-finished letter in his hand. He had found a few sullen and disdainful men still in their beds, and ordered them out. He turned a corner and dimly saw a figure struggling in the mud and trying to haul something out of a slimy pool. He thrust the letter into his pocket and went quickly to help.
His boots slithered and sank in the soft earth. He stooped, and putting his hand into the filthy pool felt a cold and naked limb. He repressed his nausea. ‘Who is it?’ he demanded.
The young soldier beside him, hauling away and sobbing with the effort he was making, said tearfully, ‘It isn’t a who, sir. It’s rations.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was carrying it from the Quartermaster’s store, sir, and when that whizz-bang came over I got a bit of a fright, and let it fall. It’s beef, sir, the ’ind leg of a cow, and if I leave it ‘ere I’ll be crimed for losing it.’
Eliot, in a violent revulsion of feeling, began to laugh, but the boy was still serious. He had a clean crime-sheet, and his only military ambition was to keep it clean. The loss of a quarter of beef would be a serious offence, and he was most reluctant to abandon it. Eliot spoke sharply to him, but the boy answered triumphantly, ‘I’ve got it now, sir!’ and dragged the lump of filthy meat on to the duck-board.
Eliot with a slight shudder stooped to look at it, and at that moment heard the whinnying of another shell, the whining irregular crescendo of its approach.
‘Get down!’ he shouted, and they drew themselves flat beside the quarter of dead cow.
In the fraction of a second the whine rose to a vivid shriek that burst into thunder as it met the ground, and into the ribboned air hurled a black mephitic fountain. Eliot was thrown from the earth as if by a giant wave, and through the shock came a scarlet flash of pain. He felt the mud again, cold and wet to his hand, and with the lurching of an earthquake in his head, consciousness left him.
VIII
Lysistrata woke with a start. She had come home, tired out, and fallen asleep in a chair....
For the last month she had been living in Edinburgh. The Government had successfully transferred itself, with all its apparatus and appendages, to the Scottish capital, and none could deny that in appearance at least the city was more congenial than Blackpool to imperial and warlike administration; though many found the climate uncomfortably severe. Edinburgh from her high place overlooks the windy estuary of the Forth, and is sometimes buried under a cold sea fog. She stares northward to the nearer Highlands, and frequently is pelted by a Highland snowstorm. The Castle, crowning the great crag that rises in the midst of the city, is like a challenge to all the winds of the sky; and often the challenge is answered. But it was a portion of Edinburgh’s climate – a kindly fog – that had saved her unscathed from the air-raids; and the high-set Castle had a look of authority that was very welcome after the Flip-flaps and Giant Wheel of Blackpool. It was agreed that on the whole the migration had been a wise one....
Lysistrata’s dinner was ready. The maid who announced it was a middle-aged woman, sharp-featured and of yellowish complexion, whose apparently sour temper concealed a character that was capable of the most violent and contradictory sentiment. Horrocks had been in Lysistrata’s service since her marriage, and before that in her mother’s house. She was devoted to her mistress, and for several years had been passionately in love with a hand on General Scrymgeour’s yacht, a long-armed melancholy-looking man called Bulmer. It was her misfortune to believe that she was necessary to the happiness of both, and in order to satisfy the wholy different demands that each made on her time, she had been compelled to practise a duplicity that was abhorrent to her intensely respectable aspirations. Under cover of the fiction that Bulmer was her nephew – which Lysistrata very dubiously accepted – they had for long been illicit lovers, and the more frequent their misdemeanours the more fervidly loyal grew Horrocks to her mistress. When shortly after the outbreak of war Lysistrata dispersed her household, Horrocks refused to leave her, and now, in a small flat in Edinburgh, she was maid, housemaid, butler and occasionally cook.
Lysistrata did not linger over her dinner. Her V.A.D. command had accompanied the great migration to Edinburgh, and its rehabilitation was still giving her a lot of extra work. Every night she carried home a sheaf of documents and conscientiously attended to problems of organization, economy and discipline, and to the ever-present possibilities of reform. She took her duty seriously, and harshly criticized herself if she allowed her own feelings to interfere with her work. But she was finding it more and more difficult to keep her feelings in the background.
Horrocks brought coffee, and said in a flat uninterested way, ‘Buhner’s been sent to that place Rosyth. He says it isn’t very far from here.’
‘That will be nice for you.’
‘Yes, madam. He’s in a destroyer now, and his captain is Commander Lawless, who won the V.C. He says it’s a big change from a battleship, where they didn’t use to do anything but gardening and drill.’
In addition to some ill-natured criticism there was much sympathy for the predicament of the Navy. The stoppage of oil supplies had not seriously affected it; for the Admiralty had accumulated an enormous fuel reserve, and many of the ships were capable of burning coal-oil, which was being produced in increasing quantities. But the submarine menace, the danger of floating mines, and the extravagant price of capital ships, had made it impossible, or at least impolitic, for a battleship to leave port without the protection and preliminary manoeuvring of cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, smaller destroyers, coastal motor-boats, and mine-sweepers. The larger cruisers themselves required, in the rare event of their going to sea, the very extensive cooperation of ancillary craft, and in certain quarters it was thought that even the latest sort of destroyer, which was a large and expensive vessel, should not be allowed to leave harbour without at least a preliminary reconnaissance by sweepers and the new sort of boats called Pilot Fish, to see that conditions were reasonably safe. But as all the smaller vessels were needed for the protection of convoys the capital ships were unable to secure protection, and were consequently immobilized. They had become, in fact, a string of floating forts, principally on the south coast, and their crews spent much of their time in foot-drill and the cultivation of allotments. The French fleet, in similar circumstances, had been forced into comparable inactivity.
Among the general populace, which was wholly ignorant of the difficulties of naval warfare, there had at one time been manifest a feeling that the Navy was not living up to its reputation; but this had happily been dispelled by the gallantry of various junior officers commanding small craft, and in particular by a dramatic affair off Cherbourg. A certain Lieutenant Lawless, in command of a flotilla of the fast motor-boats called Pilot Fish, had torpedoed a small French cruiser which had had the temerity to leave harbour, and closing in on the partially disabled ship he had, with the genius of his kind, given the perfect order: ‘Out cutlasses and board!’ Cutlasses, of course, had long ceased to be an official weapon, but Lawless, who had the courage of his convictions and a small private income, had bought a hundred at a sale of surplus stores and issued them to his crews. His foresight was amply justified. His men, ennobled by his faith in them and fired by the apostolic touch of steel, had boarded the astonished Frenchman, and sweeping to victory with irresistible valour, had completed the operation by bringing their prize triumphantly into Portsmouth. This heart-of-oak exploit had restored the wavering faith of Britain in its fleet. The spirit of Nelson, if not his strategy, was still alive, and again the French had yielded to the Nelson touch. That was the news that the people needed, and the moral effect of the action was probably worth a new Army Corps....
‘A lot of them were sick the first time they went to sea,’ continued Horrocks, ‘but Bulmer was all right, of course, being used to yachting.’
Lysistrata thought of her last cruise in the Freya, on that morning in July, and saw for a moment, in the decisive clarity with which memory sometimes unhoods the past, the huge arch of the peaceful sky; and heard herself saying to Eliot, ‘Nothing is worth while that upsets our peace.’ Was that true? she wondered. It could not be wholly true, or the war was merely a waste of life and effort and the fruits of time; and to admit that was to be torn at the roots from the very soil of credence. She could not believe that.... Yet for Eliot, if one thought of him as an individual and not as a subaltern in the army, it had been waste and nothing else. He had lost nearly everything. His life lay in ruins, that had been the expression of a long and prosperous culture, pleasant to himself and not unprofitable to the community. He had inherited a tradition of public service which he had exercised in fact to the best of his large ability, and minimized in conversation with agreeable cynicism; his birth and education had given him ideals which he would neither have forgotten in the excitement of self-aggrandizement, nor overestimated in the emotional habit of the intellectual arriviste; he had been humane because he knew the way of humanity, and witty because he was aware of its deviations; he had the faculty of pleasure and a mind to criticize it. But like a tidal wave the war had swept him from his habitation, and now he was a maimed and legless derelict.
They had expected him to die, but with amazing tenacity he had held on to life, and now with bitter irony he was said to be out of danger. He might keep what was left of life. He had lost his legs, and therefore could not go again into battle. He had paid the price of safety.
To Lysistrata the news of his being wounded had come as a confirmation of her continual fear for him. For him the peril of war had always seemed curiously aggravated, and death or some close congener inevitable. He had been more obviously vulnerable than most, more certainly a destined victim, and day after day she had read the casualty lists with a growing dread, that had almost become a morbid eagerness, of finding Eliot’s name among the killed or wounded. It had been a relief to find it among the latter, and despite her sorrow and in the midst of a grief more poignant than she had ever expected, she was conscious of relaxation and freedom from strain. Fear had gone, and for a night or two she slept as soundly as though the world were at peace. But then, with the mysterious imperceptible motivity of a snake, fear returned; and now she was afraid for Tony.
She had never feared for him before. He had seemed to her as immune from danger as Eliot was vulnerable to it. But her fear for Eliot had been cut off and now, as though it were a spring that flowed without ceasing and must find a channel somewhere, it ran towards Tony. His imagined security disappeared, and again she lived in the shadow of imminent disaster.
He had come home on short leave at Christmas, and for a few days they had enjoyed intense but hatefully imperfect happiness. Even when on leave Scrymgeour’s time was not his own, and he had had to attend conferences at the War Office, to visit training camps, and dine with political hostesses. The war was still his master, and what little time he had alone with Lysistrata was like illicit hours with a mistress. His ardency, indeed, had been the passion of a lover, and she had said nothing of her desire, so lately born and so importunate, to have children; but had met him in the fashion of the time, which was a desperate engagement – attack and surrender all in one – with the fleeting minute. It was no season for begetting, no world for bearing. Peace must come, with its calm horizon, and promise of long months ahead, before hope and love could set to breeding. Peace must come. . . . And now for the first time she was conscious that her wish for peace was stronger than any desire for victory. Peace was the first necessity, and such a peace as would be consonant with England’s greatness in the past.
It seemed to her that the English heritage was above all characterized by abundance. It was a tale of plenty, and the nation with such a history should be generous. Its sailors had circled the globe and brought into common parlance the gold and musk of the Orient, the coral names of the huge Pacific. Its soldiers had given to every childhood the colour and clash and chivalry of Agincourt and Malplaquet and Waterloo. Its poets had rivalled God with their creation, and made of English speech a treasury richer than Golconda. Its common people, in whose veins ran the blood of easy Saxon, the proud and sharp-edged Norman, the unpredictable dark Celt, had bred mysteriously liberty and the love of liberty; justice, and a high regard for it; and their innocent delight in gardens. Its destiny had given it material wealth to which half the world contributed. – Its heritage was abundance, and therefore its obligation was the bequeathing of plenty. The heirs of Drake and Raleigh should explore the mind for new worlds of richness and delight; the sons of Blenheim and Trafalgar should make a peace more glorious than any battle; the people for whom Shakespeare and Donne had written, whose penny poets were Milton and Blake and Shelley, should leave a wealth of life for their wealth of verse; and the heritors of the transient riches that came of trade and industry should buy with the brevity of their fortune the enduring name of good deeds. Let England spend its abundance in generosity. Let its future be as splendid as its past, but very different. Let England realize its strength, and its history to come should sound more gloriously than all the trumpet-pages that were turned....
It was a noble vision. Its splendour was so bright that Lysistrata could not work for thinking of it.
IX
‘I nearly forgot my words the other night,’ said Rose, ‘because I kept thinking of you, and it was so exciting just to think of being with you again, that nothing else seemed to count.’
‘Nothing has ever counted more than love.’
‘And we’ve got so short a time! Less than a week. And if I was just a few years older, you wouldn’t be able to love me like this, would you?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘You wouldn’t. You think you would, Julian, but you wouldn’t really.’
Turning wantonly from her contentment, Rose looked with open eyes – but only for a minute – at the old sorrow of fleeting time and life that slips so fast away. It was a perverse indulgence, the result perhaps of an overdose of happiness; for Julian was on leave, and for a little time they could be together. He had come straight to Edinburgh, where for the past two months Rose had been playing in a musical piece called Red, White, and You. Edinburgh, since becoming the seat of Government, had apparently doubled in size, and despite the war multiplied its gaiety tenfold. Rose found it a pleasant town to live in, though a little cold; but since Julian’s arrival the climate had been heavenly. Yet stubbornly now, for a little while, she would uncover her heart and shiver at the sadness of youth, and love that is short-lived.
‘I’ve seen it happen,’ she mournfully continued. ‘I mean I’ve seen a man and a girl who were desperately in love, and they got married, and then two or three years later she was older looking, she had a different kind of look, and he was tired of her, because it was only her being young that he’d fallen in love with. That’s true, Julian. It’s being young that matters, and now, because of the war, even that’s wasted; because your man’s away, and he may never come back.’
‘My darling....’
‘Yes, I know. I’m being silly, aren’t I?’
‘You’re being adorable.’
‘I don’t often get like this. It was just the strain of waiting for you, and I’ve got an awful lot to do in this new show, and I suppose I’m a bit tired.’
‘Then we’ll have a long rest, shall we?’
‘It must be terribly late. We ought to be getting up.’
‘There’s no hurry.’
‘Julian! You don’t care a bit what other people think, do you?’
‘Well, I’ve learnt some useful lessons in the last few months, and one of them is to take my own line, as far as possible, and use my own judgement. It pays every time.’
‘Tell me about the war.’
‘You said last night you didn’t want to hear a word about it.’
‘Well, I do now.’
‘Really?’
‘Really and truly. How long is it going to last?’
‘Another couple of years at least. We’re doing well, better than could be expected perhaps, but we can’t get guns.’
‘But everyone says we’re making thousands of guns nowadays.’
‘Yes, and we need still more. The problem’s simple enough: we’ve got to smash our way through the French, and to do that we need artillery and plenty of it. The men are simply grand, but you mustn’t expect them to work miracles. In modern warfare the infantry can’t go forward without artillery preparation, and even the politicians ought to have learnt that by this time. But they haven’t. It’s they who are letting us down, the politicians and the people at home.’
With a comfort-seeking movement Rose wriggled nearer to him. She had very little interest in the actual conduct or problems of the war. To her it was only an emotional experience, something that filled her alternately with gloom or a glorious excitement. It had given her a lover, and kept him away from her. In the very hour of its beginning, when her heart was softened and distressed by the death of her mother and the world was literally falling about her, Julian had been there, strong and capable, to take charge of everything. She had seen him use his authority and exact obedience. The war had not daunted him. His confidence had been like a place of shelter, and then, when he declared his love and pleaded with her to become his lover, his confidence had vanished, and he was shy and clumsy and dependent on her. She had loved him all the more because of that, for it gave her the mastery and made him her very own. Even now, when he was no longer diffident, she felt a proud sense of possession, almost of creation. It delighted her to see and hear his assurance, for much of it was what she had given him. The war, of course, had hardened his manner and exercised him in authority. She could see a difference in his appearance. But it was she as well as the war who had made him what he was, and she grew a little jealous as he continued to speak of guns and brigadiers and the virtues of his men. He had six days’ leave, six little days, and surely for so short a time he could forget about his soldiering. She pulled him towards her and kissed him on the lips.
