A Test to Destruction (27 page)

“Well, we all work hard. I work hard, but I don’t complain! I do what I am supposed to do, as a normal thing, and accept what comes along with as good a grace as I can.”

“I think you are right about her working on the land, Dickie. It will tone her up.”

“I never said that, but I certainly hope it will. Where’s she gone now?”

“I expect next door.”

“No doubt complaining to Mr. Turney!”

“Oh no, she wouldn’t do that. Doris is very loyal, you know.”

He sat down again, and took up the paper. “Loyal, is she? I had not noticed it when she was here a moment ago.”

“It’s her nerves, I think. She also feels she isn’t wanted.”

“By whom, pray?”

Hetty felt a desire to laugh. It would be fatal. “I’ll get your supper, Dickie. It’s all ready in the oven.”

“In the oven? What, an omelette? What am I supposed to do with it, pray? Repair the soles of my boots?”

She could laugh now. Richard was mollified by the success of his joke.

“The gas is turned very low, Dickie.”

“Well, I haven’t had a herb omelette for many years now. Where did the herbs come from?”

“Doris brought them with the eggs.”

“Oh, she did, did she? Well, I expect she will do well on the land. After all, it’s in her blood, on both sides of the family. Now let us see what this celebrated herb omelette looks like, old girl.”

While Hetty was out of the room he looked at the Roll of Honour. Under
Infantry
his eye ran down to the words
Gaultshire
Regt.
Nothing about Phillip; it would be too early; the lists were delayed, he had heard, lest information be given to the Germans. But there was one name which held his sight in that column of small print under KILLED: (
temp
)
Lieutenant
H.
F.
Turney.
Some relation of Hetty’s, no doubt. It raised her in his eyes;
and when he heard her coining, he got up quickly and opened the door for her, allowing her to pass, before closing it, as though he were still a young man, and she were the young woman he had wanted to marry.

Later, Doris apologised, formally and stiffly. He had meant to be affable about it, but her curt manner discomposed him. He could say nothing until she was almost out of the door, when he said, “Please try to close the door gently this time. Each time the lock is banged it is like hitting it with a hammer.”

Noiselessly the door was shut; he gave a sigh, and found that he was reading Bonar Law’s Budget Speech again without any feeling about what he was reading.

*

Day in the Royal Tennis Court ward of the Duchess of Gaultshire’s hospital meant relief from night—but day brought another kind of endurance, voices talking, talking.

“—as I was saying, Garfield chucked himself at the machine-gun, and that’s how he lost his testicles——”

“They’re off, as the monkey said, sitting on the circular saw——”

“That’s not funny, Brill.”

“—hard luck on his wife——”

“Steady on, you fellows, Garfield’s just coming——” Silence. Then the voice of Major Henniker-Sudley continued, “No, I couldn’t agree that that war correspondent’s account was propaganda. I saw the New Zealanders arrive on the 27th of March. They were in tremendous form—shaved, boots polished, webbing equipment khaki-blanco’d, even tin hats oiled. The wounded called out from the ambulances, ‘Gawd ’elp Jerry now’.”

The man in the next bed, Brill, was always discussing someone called Colin. “Colin slept with the Admiral’s wife when he went on leave. She told him he reminded her of her son. Any old excuse——”

The fool didn’t understand. He thought of Sascha, ‘all things to all men’, she had said.

The gramophone on the end table was a relief. It played always about this time, and the same record, sung by Clarice Mayne, accompanied by ‘That’ at the piano.

Give
me
a
little
cosy
corner,
and
the
boy
that
I
love
——

But why didn’t the fool change the needle, and put back the regulator to 78, instead of playing at 84?

—
And
the
boy
that
I
love.

The record began again, the needle grating as it jabbed the wax.

It was a relief when it stopped.

“I hand it to the doctors in this war. It was hell for them at the C.C.S. at Merville. Rasp, rasp, rasp with the silver saws, filling a tall wicker basket every quarter of an hour, legs and arms taken away by orderlies, who looked as though
they’d
had the treatment! They had the
effect,
without the action, if you understand my meaning.”

“I saw one of those young soldiers come in who’d shot himself through the wrist. The bloody fool didn’t know enough to do the job properly by putting a sandbag over it, before pulling the trigger. The M.O. saw the scorchmarks, halfway up his elbow.”

“What happened?”

“The doc took off his forearm, before the A.P.M. came round and spotted an S.I.W.”

“He deserved a court-martial. Why should that little tick get home to tell the tale ever afterwards, with a pension?”

“I don’t quite see it like that, you know, Brill. He shouldn’t have been sent out in the first place, in my opinion. You can’t
put
guts into a man if nature hasn’t done it first.”

“You’ve been reading that book again. What the hell you see in poetry beats me.”

“It’s damned good stuff, the first to tell the truth in this war. Haven’t you felt like that, during a counter-attack?”

“Of course I have, but I don’t talk about it, let alone bleat about it afterwards. Who is he, anyway? Sounds like a Jew to me.”

The voice of Henniker-Sudley said, “The Sassoons are Parsees, Bombay merchants, I fancy.”

His mind wandered, came back with a start when at the other end of the ward, another voice said, “‘Spectre’s’ old man dropped a farthing in the grave as they fired the volley. Curious custom, that, to start the dead man off with something in the next world. It’s in all races, they still put out food for the pixies on Dartmoor, and the fairies in the Isle of Man.”

“The last pay of a soldier, when he’s for the town’s end,” said the voice of the man who had been reading the book.

Phillip wondered what ‘the book’ was, as he lay with eyeballs stung by tears. He dreaded the time coming when the bandages would be off, he could not face things again.

Eleven o’clock beef-tea came round. In fifteen minutes the Duchess would arrive.

“If they give us any more of this bloody broth, I’ll cat my heart up. They say the Duke has had nine and a half pounds of beef shin brought into the kitchen every day for the past thirty years. No wonder he looks like something out of a cave.”

“I’m told it’s mostly bison meat now. Too strong for my taste. Still, mustn’t grumble. You should taste the grub in Devonport Military Hospital.”

“Couldn’t be worse than Netley, old man. I was there last time I was hit. It was——”

“I was at Osborne first, in the Isle of Wight, but got the shove to Devonport. Robert Loraine, the actor, was there. Flying bloke. I got the push after three of us had got lost down a passage, and found ourselves in the Royal Family wing. Then the Queen came along. We didn’t recognise who she was until she sailed up to us, and said ‘Out of my way’.”

“Doesn’t sound like Queen Mary to me. Are you sure it wasn’t Queen Alexandra, I’ve heard she was always late for any appointment? They usually say, ‘Make way’, the equivalent of a Commanding Officer’s order when passing through troops.”

A rough voice came loudly from the other end of the ward, “The man who wrote that book is a f——g good man, and don’t you forget it, Brill!”

In the silence the voice of Henniker-Sudley said equably, “Do you mind being more careful with your language, Garfield?”

“I thought you told me there wasn’t no rank in ’ospital, major.”

“It’s a question of manners, particularly if one wears the riband of the Victoria Cross.”

“They can keep the bloody thing for all I trouble, I didn’t arst for it!”

“You’re too good a soldier to let yourself down like that Garfield. There are young ladies working in this ward.”

Distant voices, a door opening; shuffle of carpet slippers as those up, in dressing-gowns, stood by their beds. The low, bird-like voice of the Duchess, shy, remote, carefully quiet because she was partly deaf, coming down the ward, saying, “Good morning—Good morning.” Murmurs where she stopped. “Good morning.” She was coming nearer.

“Good morning. How are you today?”

“Much better, thank you, your Grace.”

“Are you sleeping well?”

“Yes thank you, ma’am.”

The Good-mornings receded, the far door shut.

*

The scabs on neck, face, and chest had ceased to crack and weep, the cuckoo was singing all night and all day when he was allowed to get up. After two days of shuffling about he knew his way blindfold around the ward, knowing his whereabouts by the various angled patterns of voices, and thereby what to avoid, and, always with relief, to find his way by rubber-shod stick, down the flag-stone corridor to the lavatory, the throne as the high, box-like apparatus was called.

Then to laze about on the terrace in the sun; to be taken for a walk by one of the V.A.D.s, as he thought. At first his arm was lightly held, a delightful voice asking questions about birds, as though she were greatly interested.

Across the open spaces of the grass he stopped to listen to the off-tune calling of a cuckoo. The notes came clear as air, no longer muted by the glass windows and walls of the ward.

“That’s a queer sort of call, don’t you think?”

“In what way does it seem queer?”

“The notes seem flattened, somehow.”

“Perhaps the cuckoo feels flat.”

“You’re laughing at me!”

“Why should I laugh at you?”

The tone of her voice made him uneasy, and he attempted to pay her a compliment. “Wordsworth wrote of the cuckoo as a wandering voice. Now, I suppose, I am wandering like a cuckoo, but guided by a more charming voice.”

She ignored this pretentiousness, and said, “Doesn’t a cuckoo lay its eggs in other birds’ nests?”

“Well, some naturalists think it lays its egg
first, then carries it in its bill to the selected nest of its dupe.”

“That can’t be much fun for the cuckoo, surely?”

“On the other hand, I’ve actually seen a cuckoo squatting across a hedge-sparrow’s nest, and when it had flown away, I found a larger grey egg
among the hedge-sparrow’s smaller blue eggs.”

“I think it’s much more sensible to lay one’s egg
in a nest already warmed for one.”

He felt foolish; and had to resist the impulse to say something
startling, to break the restraint. They walked on in silence, while he wondered how he could get away. No longer was his arm held, obviously a sign that he had bored her. At last they turned back, to his relief, and as they approached the great hollow square of buildings, which increased the sound of their feet on gravel, she said, with a return of her former resilience, “You know, I fancy that Uncle Boo’n would be most interested in your cuckoo theory.” At the door of the ward she said, “You know, as a family we’re rather inclined to be that way!” She said, in her original gay voice, modulated and charming, “It has been a
most
interesting talk. Au revoir!”

“I must thank you——”

Thank heaven he had not asked her name, or any questions of a personal nature. Obviously she was one of the family. Left alone, he was dejected by what he felt to be his dullness. Of course she had not asked his name, or given her own; he was only one of scores of temporary members of the regiment; such people were not introduced to their class. The walk for her had been but routine duty, ‘walking’ a patient in the same way that a hound puppy might be ‘walked’—looking after it until it was strong enough to join the pack—back to the regiment and the war in France. And the sooner, the better.

He wanted to scream—he had made a fool of himself.

*

Night was broken dark rocks which he could never cross to the other side. Always the same dream, his legs dragging and finally held in black glue, a nightmare from which he awakened in terror, his body slippery with sweat, while his mind began to writhe through scenes which he tried to straighten, to find their true meaning, to connect them coherently, to resolve them into one simple sentence of truth. He must begin again. Now face up to what had happened. Begin at the Kabaret Staenyzer. How far was Bill Kidd’s refusal due to an obvious lack of respect, in turn due to his lie about his next-of-kin living in Gaultshire? How had Bill Kidd found out? Surely not through ‘Spectre’? No, ‘Spectre’ would never betray a confidence. But had it been a confidence? Was a reply to what in effect was an official question a matter of confidence? Leave that for the moment. Begin again at the Kabaret Staenyzer.

If he had insisted that Bill Kidd come back, used his authority instead of drinking whiskey with Bill Kidd and being matey
he would not have needed to go and see ‘Spectre’ about it. But had he gone to see ‘Spectre’ at Byron Farm at his request, or had ‘Spectre’ asked him to go down, perhaps for another purpose? To tell him that he was being relieved of his command, that he was a washout for not enforcing his, ‘Spectre’s’, order. Whichever way it was, he was to blame.

Black depression weighed him down. He was on the rocks. What would they think of him in the regiment when they found out? It would be almost a relief, then he could resign his commission, and volunteer to go back in the ranks. In any case he must ask to resign his commission, ‘for private reasons’, then they would ask no questions. As soon as his bloody eyes were all right. But—would that not be going too far in the other direction? Was it not a sort of sho wing-off, a kind of inverted bravado, like the bicycle ride on Christmas Day, 1914? But had that been bravado? It had seemed a simple possibility, while the other fellows and the Germans were all streaming back to play a football match. Other scenes, at Heathmarket … disastrous exhibitions of bad form. O God. Oh, what a fool he had been all his life, a prey to sudden mental picturing, so that he did silly things which he never really wanted, or even meant, to do.
Picturing,
a pale word like rolled warm putty, breaking off when rolled thin, Father’s putty taken to make little balls, to fire out of his brass cannon at Mr. Bigge’s window next door, pale putty-picturing like a pale snake, moving without purpose through the dark rocks of the ward shattered by silence until the pale snake of his thoughts was twisted in desperation by the longer snake of the snoring of Brill in the next bed, Brill who was always talking about Colin this and Colin that. It went on and on, he tried to resist it by breathing deeply, but the air indrawn would not go in easily, he could take only small breaths, as though a part of the lungs were shut off. He must lie limp, and pray. The battle of the brain was so much more deadly than the battle of physical movement; perhaps all battle came first in the mind? Clear the mind, and there is no battle. ‘Be still, and know that I am God’. But the snoring sawed through all resolutions, and he shouted silently at Brill to stop.