The Well of Loneliness (39 page)

Pierre said: ‘All things shall be done as you would wish, Mademoiselle.’ And she knew that it would be so.

That evening she told Puddle of her decision, and Puddle’s face brightened: ‘I’m so glad, my dear, when war comes one ought to stand by one’s country.’

‘I’m afraid they won’t want my sort…’ Stephen muttered.

Puddle put a firm little hand over hers: ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, this war may give your sort of woman her chance. I think you may find that they’ll need you, Stephen.’

3

There were no farewells to be said in Paris except those to Buisson and Mademoiselle Duphot.

Mademoiselle Duphot shed a few tears: ‘I find you only to lose you, Stévenne. Ah, but how many friends will be parted, perhaps for ever, by this terrible war—and yet what else could we do? We are blameless!’

In Berlin people were also saying: ‘What else could we do? We are blameless.’

Julie’s hand lingered on Stephen’s arm: ‘You feel so strong,’ she said, sighing a little, ‘it is good to be strong and courageous these days, and to have one’s eyes—alas, I am quite useless.’

‘No one is useless who can pray, my sister,’ reproved Mademoiselle almost sternly.

And indeed there were many who thought as she did, the churches were crowded all over France. A great wave of piety swept through Paris, filling the dark confessional boxes, so that the priests had now some ado to cope with such shoals of penitent people—the more so as every priest fit to fight had been summoned to join the army. Up at Montmartre the church of the Sacré Coeur echoed and re-echoed with the prayers of the faithful, while those prayers that were whispered with tears in secret, hung like invisible clouds round its altars.

‘Save us, most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Have pity upon us, have pity upon France. Save us, 0 Heart of Jesus!’

So all day long must the priests sit and hear the time-honoured sins of body and spirit; a monotonous hearing because of its sameness since nothing is really new under the sun, least of all our manner of sinning. Men who had not been to Mass for years, now began to remember their first Communion; thus it was that many a hardy blasphemer, grown suddenly tongue-tied and rather sheepish, clumped up to the altar in his new army boots, having made an embarrassed confession.

Young clericals changed into uniform and marched side by side with the roughest Poilus, to share in their hardships, their hopes, their terrors, their deeds of supremest valour. Old men bowed their heads and gave of the strength which no longer animated their bodies, gave of that strength through the bodies of their sons who would charge into battle shouting and singing. Women of all ages knelt down and prayed, since prayer has long been the refuge of women. ‘No one is useless who can pray, my sister.’ The women of France had spoken through the lips of the humble Mademoiselle Duphot.

Stephen and Puddle said goodbye to the sisters, then went on to Buisson’s Academy of Fencing, where they found him engaged upon greasing his foils.

He looked up, Ah, it’s you. I must go on greasing. God knows when I shall use these again, tomorrow I join my regiment.’ But he wiped his hands on a stained overall and sat down, after clearing a chair for Puddle. ‘An ungentlemanly war it will be,’ he grumbled. Will I lead my men with a sword? Ah, but no! I will lead my men with a dirty revolver in my hand. Parbleu! Such is modern warfare! A machine could do the whole cursed thing better—we shall all be nothing but machines in this war. However, I pray that we may kill many Germans.’

Stephen lit a cigarette while the master glared, he was evidently in a very vile temper: ‘Go on, go on, smoke your heart to the devil, then come here and ask me to teach you fencing! You smoke in lighting one from the other, you remind me of your horrible Birmingham chimneys—but of course a woman exaggerates always,’ he concluded, with an evident wish to annoy her.

Then he made a few really enlightening remarks about Germans in general, their appearance, their morals, above all their personal habits—which remarks were more seemly in French than they would be in English. For, like Valérie Seymour, this man was filled with a loathing for the ugliness of his epoch, an ugliness to which he felt the Germans were just now doing their best to contribute. Buisson’s heart was not buried in Mitylene, but rather in the glories of a bygone Paris, where a gentleman lived by the skill of his rapier and the graceful courage that lay behind it.

‘In the old days we killed very beautifully,’ sighed Buisson, ‘now we merely slaughter or else do not kill at all, no matter how gross the insult.’

However, when they got up to go, he relented: ‘War is surely a very necessary evil, it thins down the imbecile populations who have murdered their most efficacious microbes. People will not die, very well, here comes war to mow them down in their tens of thousands. At least for those of us who survive, there will be more breathing-space, thanks to the Germans—perhaps they too are a necessary evil.’

Arrived at the door Stephen turned to look back. Buisson was once more greasing his foils, and his fingers moved slowly yet with great precision—he might almost have been a beauty doctor engaged upon massaging ladies’ faces.

Preparations for departure did not take very long, and in less than a week’s time Stephen and Puddle had shaken hands with their Breton servants and were driving at top speed en route for Havre, from whence they would cross to England.

4

Puddle’s prophecy proved to have been correct, work was very soon forthcoming for Stephen. She joined The London Ambulance Column, which was well under way by that autumn; and presently Puddle herself got a job in one of the Government departments. She and Stephen had taken a small service flat in Victoria, and here they would meet when released from their hours of duty. But Stephen was obsessed by her one idea, which was, willy-nilly, to get out to the front, and many and varied were the plans and discussions that were listened to by the sympathetic Puddle. An ambulance had managed to slip over to Belgium for a while and had done some very fine service. Stephen had hit on a similar idea, but in her case the influence required had been lacking. In vain did she offer to form a Unit at her own expense; the reply was polite but always the same, a monotonous reply: England did not send women to the front-line trenches. She disliked the idea of joining the throng who tormented the patient passport officials with demands to be sent to France at once, on no matter how insufficient a pretext. What was the use of her going to France unless she could find there the work that she wanted? She preferred to stick to her job in England.

And now quite often while she waited at the stations for the wounded, she would see unmistakable figures—unmistakable to her they would be at first sight, she would single them out of the crowd as by instinct. For as though gaining courage from the terror that is war, many a one who was even as Stephen, had crept out of her hole and come into the daylight, come into the daylight and faced her country: ‘Well, here I am, will you take me or leave me?’ And England had taken her, asking no questions—she was strong and efficient, she could fill a man’s place, she could organize too, given scope for her talent. England had said: ‘Thank you very much. You’re just what we happen to want…at the moment.’

So, side by side with more fortunate women, worked Miss Smith who had been breeding dogs in the country; or Miss Oliphant who had been breeding nothing since birth but a litter of hefty complexes; or Miss Tring who had lived with a very dear friend in the humbler purlieus of Chelsea. One great weakness they all had, it must be admitted, and this was for uniforms—yet why not? The good workman is worthy of his Sam Browne belt. And then too, their nerves were not at all weak, their pulses beat placidly through the worst air raids, for bombs do not trouble the nerves of the invert, but rather that terrible silent bombardment from the batteries of God’s good people.

Yet now even really nice women with hairpins often found their less orthodox sisters quite useful. It would be: ‘Miss Smith, do just start up my motor—the engine’s so cold I can’t get the thing going’; or: ‘Miss Oliphant, do glance through these accounts, I’ve got such a rotten bad head for figures’; or ‘Miss Tring, may I borrow your British Warm? The office is simply arctic this morning!’

Not that those purely feminine women were less worthy of praise, perhaps they were more so, giving as they did of their best without stint—for they had no stigma to live down in the war, no need to defend their right to respect. They rallied to the call of their country superbly, and may it not be forgotten by England. But the others—since they too gave of their best, may they also not be forgotten. They might look a bit odd, indeed some of them did, and yet in the streets they were seldom stared at, though they strode a little, perhaps from shyness, or perhaps from a slightly self-conscious desire to show off, which is often the same thing as shyness. They were part of the universal convulsion and were being accepted as such, on their merits. And although their Sam Browne belts remained swordless, their hats and their caps without regimental badges, a battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded. War and death had given them a right to life, and life tasted sweet, very sweet to their palates. Later on would come bitterness, disillusion, but never again would such women submit to being driven back to their holes and corners. They had found themselves—thus the whirligig of war brings in its abrupt revenges.

5

Time passed; the first year of hostilities became the second while Stephen still hoped, though no nearer to her ambition. Try as she might she could not get to the front; no work at the actual front seemed to be forthcoming for women.

Brockett wrote wonderfully cheerful letters. In every letter was a neat little list telling Stephen what he wished her to send him; but the sweets he loved were getting quite scarce, they were no longer always so easy to come by. And now he was asking for Houbigant soap to be included in his tuck-box.

‘Don’t let it get near the coffee fondants or it may make them taste like it smells,’ he cautioned, ‘and do try to send me two bottles of hair-wash, “Eau Athénienne”, I used to buy it at Truefitt’s.’ He was on a perfectly damnable front, they had sent him to Mesopotamia.

Violet Peacock, who was now a V.A.D. with a very imposing Red Cross on her apron, occasionally managed to catch Stephen at home, and then would come reams of tiresome gossip. Sometimes she would bring her overfed children along, she was stuffing them up like capons. By fair means or foul Violet always managed to obtain illicit cream for her nursery—she was one of those mothers who reacted to the war by wishing to kill off the useless aged.

‘What’s the good of them? Eating up the food of the nation!’ she would say, ‘I’m going all out on the young, they’ll be needed to breed from.’ She was very extreme, her perspective had been upset by the air raids.

Raids frightened her as did the thought of starvation, and when frightened she was apt to grow rather sadistic, so that now she would want to rush off and inspect every ruin left by the German marauders. She had also been the first to applaud the dreadful descent of a burning Zeppelin.

She bored Stephen intensely with her ceaseless prattle about Alec, who was one of London’s defenders, about Roger, who had got the Military Cross and was just on the eve of becoming a major, about the wounded whose faces she sponged every morning, and who seemed so pathetically grateful.

From Morton came occasional letters for Puddle; they were more in the nature of reports now these letters. Anna had such and such a number of cases; the gardeners had been replaced by young women; Mr. Percival was proving very devoted, he and Anna were holding the estate well together; Williams had been seriously ill with pneumonia. Then a long list of humble names from the farms, from among Anna’s staff or from cottage homesteads, together with those from such houses as Morton—for the rich and the poor were in death united. Stephen would read that long list of names, so many of which she had known since her childhood, and would realize that the stark arm of war had struck deep at the quiet heart of the Midlands.

BOOK FOUR

A stump of candle in the neck of a bottle flickered once or twice and threatened to go out. Getting up, Stephen found a fresh candle and lit it, then she returned to her packing-case upon which had been placed the remnants of a chair minus its legs and arms.

The room had once been the much prized salon of a large and prosperous villa in Compiegne, but now the glass was gone from its windows; there remained only battered and splintered shutters which creaked eerily in the bitter wind of a March night in 1918. The walls of the salon had fared little better than its windows, their brocade was detached and hanging, while a recent rainstorm had lashed through the roof making ugly splotches on the delicate fabric—a dark stain on the ceiling was perpetually dripping. The remnants of what had once been a home, little broken tables, an old photograph in a tarnished frame, a child’s wooden horse, added to the infinite desolation of this villa that now housed the Breakspeare Unit—a Unit composed of Englishwomen, that had been serving in France just over six months, attached to the French Army Ambulance Corps.

The place seemed full of grotesquely large shadows cast by figures that sat or sprawled on the floor. Miss Peel in her Jaeger sleeping-bag snored loudly, then choked because of her cold. Miss Delmé-Howard was gravely engaged upon making the best of a difficult toilet—she was brushing out her magnificent hair which gleamed in the light of the candle. Miss Bless was sewing a button on her tunic; Miss Thurloe was peering at a half-finished letter; but most of the women who were herded together in this, the safest place in the villa and none too safe at that be it said, were apparently sleeping quite soundly. An uncanny stillness had descended on the town; after many hours of intensive bombardment, the Germans were having a breathing-space before training their batteries once more upon Compiegne.

Stephen stared down at the girl who lay curled up at her feet in an army blanket. The girl slept the sleep of complete exhaustion, breathing heavily with her head on her arm; her pale and rather triangular face was that of someone who was still very young, not much more than nineteen or twenty. The pallor of her skin was accentuated by the short black lashes which curled back abruptly, by the black arched eyebrows and dark brown hair—sleek hair which grew to a peak on the forehead, and had recently been bobbed for the sake of convenience. For the rest her nose was slightly tip-tilted, and her mouth resolute considering her youth; the lips were well-modelled and fine in texture, having deeply indented corners. For more than a minute Stephen considered the immature figure of Mary Llewellyn. This latest recruit to the Breakspeare Unit had joined it only five weeks ago, replacing a member who was suffering from shell-shock. Mrs. Breakspeare had shaken her head over Mary, but in these harassed days of the German offensive she could not afford to remain shorthanded, so in spite of many misgivings she had kept her.