PART EIGHTEEN

RESPITE

§ 1

Francis Gordon was not killed at the disaster of Loos. A stretcher-bearer wheeled him, unconscious of whistling shrapnel, to the casualty-clearing station at Vermelles; and thence, still unconscious, he came by Ford ambulance and Red Cross train and yet another ambulance to a great bare hospital at Rouen.

For three days he knew nothing. Life ebbed and flowed back again in waves as of morphia: pain throbbed and receded through the torn body it could not awaken. On the fourth day, very dimly, he grew conscious of his suffering self. It seemed to him that he lay in a four-poster bed, round which figures moved vaguely. He heard one of the figures speaking: “It’s time for his injection”; felt something prick his fore-arm; drowsed off again into unconsciousness.

Next morning he awoke to pain. Some one was questioning him. The some one had a board in her hand; wanted to know who he was. (For secret service men wear no “identity discs”; and Nurse Prothero had been ordered to find out the name of the patient). He told her: “Gordon, Francis, Captain, Intelligence Corps.” “Religion?” she asked. “Church of England, sister.”

The nurse, a comely middle-aged creature, smiled down at him; and he slept. But gradually, the morphia ebbed away from him. Pain called to consciousness. . . .

It took his drugged mind three whole days to grasp its new realities. He had been wounded, badly wounded. (How, he could not yet remember.) His left thigh-bone was shattered; his right foot badly smashed. The thing above him—which made the bed seem like a four-poster—was a “super-structure”: a frame-work with a pulley arrangement whereby his left leg, a mass of bandages, could be hauled up and down for dressing. Both left leg and right foot were “septic”: in the wounds, had been inserted indiarubber-tubing—Carrel-Dakin tubes—to drain them. The changing of these tubes caused him constant pain.

The screens round his bed prevented him from seeing the other patients in the ward. But he knew them to be many; and, lying awake at night, he could hear the orderlies shuffling round in their list slippers: their “Are you awake, sir?” sounded an unceasing chorus to his dreams.

For the alert clean-shaven doctor had only reduced, not stopped, the morphia: and Francis had many dreams. They came as the morphia-wave surged over him in comfortable pain-killing warmth; receded as the wave ebbed, leaving him prey to suffering. And always, in his dreams, he saw Beatrice, a gracious figure vignetted in silver radiance against the background of his thought. It seemed as though her spirit watched over him, tender, infinitely solicitous. . . .

He had been in hospital eight days before it was borne in on his dazed intellect that he must write to her. They fought him, sisters and doctor, for three weary hours. “He was too ill to write letters,” said the doctor. “Let me write for you,” begged Sister Prothero. But Francis insisted. They could neither persuade nor coerce him. He would write a letter; write it with his own hand. Lying there, feverish, broken, not even certain of the exact words his lips uttered, he forced them to his will. At last, they yielded—for they knew his chance of life still hung by a hair: and an orderly brought him paper, an envelope, an indelible pencil.

The sister propped him with pillows. As she lifted him, he felt his head turning, spinning. . . . Yet he wrote, tracing each word with pain. A letter of lies, of glorious lies. He was in hospital, wounded—only slightly wounded, she must understand—in a few days, he would be about again—would write her a long letter—meanwhile, he sent his “very kind regards.” He folded the sheet himself; put it in the envelope; wrote the address; signed in the left-hand bottom corner. . . . Then he fainted; and, for a week, doctor and sisters blamed themselves for their yielding, fearful lest the man should die.

As a “case,” he puzzled them. The wounds were healing, slowly, very slowly. Thinking to cheer him, they told him of his progress. It appeared to have no interest for him. He was content to drowze away the hours: watching his leg move up and down for its dressing; listening to the murmur of the ward. For he had lived in a year, this broken man who lay there so quietly, a thousand aeons of terror. He had walked, unarmed and alone, through countless caverns of fear. Now, fear had departed; and the mind took its revenge for long coercion, refused to function. The mind knew that its body would not die; and with that knowledge, was content. . . .

They pronounced him “out of danger.” Nurse Prothero brought him many letters. He read them languidly. It appeared that Peter had been moving heaven and earth to find out if he lived: Patricia wrote asking him if he wanted books, cigarettes: Prout wrote and sent on a package of press-cuttings: his name had been in the “Roll of Honour”: the literary press of England noticed him, praised him, printed his photograph in their columns. But Francis Gordon cared for none of these old things. He wanted Beatrice!

He used to lie there, hour after hour, screened from the world, thinking of her. His mind went back to days before the War, and he saw himself as he had been: the tango-dancing champagne-bibbing egotist, very proud of his little literary achievements, neither good nor bad, merely a drifter. He saw himself, ruined financially, miserable. And he met her again, in his dreams; sailed with her, once again, the tropic seas of their delight.

Beatrice, the Woman Denied! Surely that God who had once denied her to him, calling him unworthy, would not refuse her to him now. Surely, now, he might say to himself, in clean pride: “I have done my Work; paid full price for any happiness this world can offer me?” . . .

And then, five weeks after he had written, came her cable: “Am anxious,” she wired, “have you told me the truth about your wounds.” He spread the cablegram on his bed; read it again and again. Intuition, sounder than judgment, told him the truth. To this girl, five thousand miles removed from the cataclysm of Europe, he stood for “heroism”—a vague figure dowered with all the virtues of war. It needed only a word, a _weak_ word, to make her love him.

The mere thought was a flaring temptation. Why not? If ever man had earned woman. . . .

When the doctor made his midday visit, Francis—looking down at his swathed legs—asked one straight question.

“You mean,” said the doctor, “is there any reason, any physical reason, why you should not marry?”

“Exactly, doctor.”

“None whatever.”

“But I shall always be more or less a cripple?”

“You will walk with a limp—a slight limp. That isn’t being a cripple.”

Alone, he fought the problem out again: and decision came to him, clear-cut, obvious. She was twenty, rich, beautiful: he, a cripple—and a pauper cripple into the bargain. Leaving God out of the question, to take her in marriage would not be the act of a gentleman. . . . Chivalrous, stubborn, a fool if you will but no weakling, he traced the answer to her cablegram: “Much better thanks writing.”

* * * * *

In the middle of December, 1915, they shipped him—still a “stretcher-case”—to England.

§ 2

In those early days, the Endsleigh Gardens Hospital for officers was a place of easy discipline, comely V.A.D. nurses and frolicsome patients. Francis, still unable to walk, could not be frolicsome: but they gave him a room to himself, a tiny room, linoleum-carpeted, high up on the sixth floor; and in a funny introspective way, he was happy.

The “faithful Prout,” overjoyed at his master’s return, insinuated himself somehow or other into the Hospital; brought meals; ran errands as of yore. A new doctor substituted “B.I.P.”—a saffron ointment of bismuth, iodoform and petroleum—for the Carrel-Dakin treatment; and pain departed. His kit arrived from France. He began to read, omnivorously, old books and new: dreamed even of working. But no poem came, only vague inspirations which refused to materialize. Beatrice wrote—a chatty letter; was answered in the same strain. And, of course, there were visitors, flowers, cigarettes, well-wishes from admirers. For, among a limited circle, Francis enjoyed “celebrity.” . . .

It was early afternoon of Christmas Eve. He lay in bed, wicker cage over his legs, propped on multitudinous pillows. Through the open window by the glowing fire-place, he could see the high hills of outer London, tree-fringed, blue against gray skies. He had been alone all day, visioning once again that great poem of Anglo-Saxondom which always eluded him. For now that he had—as he thought—definitely put aside all hope of Beatrice, this belief in a Federation of the English-speaking races, with which she had inspired him, seemed somehow a consolation.

“Mrs. Jameson to see you, sir,” announced Prout. Patricia followed the little man into the room. She had been driving the car: and the dark motoring-furs accentuated the blond tallness of her. He had thought, once or twice, that the strain of Peter’s absence was telling on his cousin’s wife, graving little lines round eyes and chin. But today she looked young, radiant.

“Peter’s coming home,” she said. “On leave.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Isn’t it splendid?”

They talked Peter for a while. Prout brought them tea on a little wicker-table.

“I heard all about his Brigade the other day,” said Patricia, bringing a second cup to the bedside. “Captain Torrington—you met him I think, he’s a V.C.—told me. They must have had a dreadful time at Loos.”

“Torrington?” Francis thought the name over. “Yes. I remember him. He was there the night I dined with them. Where did you meet him? Is he on leave too?”

“No. He’s home for good. He never ought to have gone out, you know. But he insisted—and broke down. You men are so stupid about that sort of thing. I suppose _you’ll_ want to do something again as soon as your leg’s right. . . .”

“I wonder,” said Francis. “You see, I’ll never be any good at my own job again. A man with a limp is too easily spotted. And as for office jobs, there seem to be enough stay-at-home heroes without me. . . .”

“I wonder why it is”—Patricia lit herself a cigarette—“that you are all so bitter against the people who stay at home. Everybody can’t go to the front.”

“It isn’t _everybody_ who wants to,” commented Francis acridly.

She changed the topic; produced the Christmas present she had brought—a Whytwarth fountain-pen, gold-mounted and of enormous ink-capacity. He eyed it doubtfully at first; till she shewed him the simplicity of its action. Then he began to take professional interest; screwed it up and down again; tested the nib on the fly-leaf of one of the many books at his bed-side.

“By Jove, Pat,” he said at last, “I believe you’ve discovered the only fountain-pen. . . . And I never thought you a clever woman!”

Remembering old animosities, she blushed at that, and they laughed together like two children.

“And when does Peter arrive?” he asked.

“Late, I’m afraid. Not before midnight anyway.”

“Are you going to meet him?”

“Of course.”

He began to tease her aimlessly; called her the “expectant bride.” “Do you know, Pat, that I believe you’re madly in love with that cousin of mine. After nine years of matrimony, too. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Said Patricia, arranging her veil for the street: “I shouldn’t chaff people _too much_ about being in love, if I were you, Francis”: and with a meaning glance at Beatrice’s photograph on the mantelpiece, departed.

§ 3

As Patricia paced up and down the cold, scarce-lit platform, the great vault of Victoria Station seemed like a tomb. Already the leave-train from France had been announced. But it was half-past two on Christmas morning; and, except for herself and two ordered taxis, none waited. England had not yet troubled to organize any reception for her weary fighting-men. They would arrive, as Patricia and a few voluntary motor-drivers had so often seen them arrive, cheerlessly, unfed, unwelcomed, to sleep the night as best they might in fireless waiting-rooms, or tramp the streets till dawn.

“Didn’t expect to see you here tonight, mum,” said a porter who knew her of old, touching his cap.

She told him she was waiting for her husband; and he bustled off in search of information.

“Another five minutes, mum. They must have had a bad crossing. She didn’t get to Folkestone till nearly one o’clock.”

A bell clanged; she saw the glow of smoke and sparks; the train slid alongside the platform, stopped, began to disgorge its khaki. She had met that train so often; knew so exactly what to expect; but always before, she had watched the third-class carriages. Now, she had eyes only for the Pullman. Excitedly, she scrutinized the descending officers. . . . Last of them all, very calm, cigar-butt between his lips, coat-collar pulled up to the eyes, cane under his arm, came Peter.

Obviously, he did not expect her. She let him saunter a yard or two along the platform; noticed the cleanliness of his boots, the sheen of his spurs. Then she touched him on the arm, said: “Taxi, sir?”

He turned round; began to say something; recognized her; burst out, “Good God, Pat, what on earth are you doing here?”

“Meeting lonely soldiers,” she laughed: and put up her lips to be kissed. He took her in his arms. . . .

“But you ought to be in bed,” he protested, as they made way arm-in-arm along the crowded platform.

“My dear, if I can drive Tommies home four nights a week, surely I can devote one to meeting my own husband. Have you had anything to eat?”

“Rather. And a bath at Boulogne. And a cabin to myself on the boat. It’s quite a comfortable journey if only one knows the ropes. I say, what are these poor devils going to do?” He looked at the crowd of men, mud-stained, kit-loaded.

“Sleep in the waiting-rooms till the trains start running.”

He let go her arm; stood still. “Supposing I weren’t here,” he said, “what would you do?”

“Oh, we usually try and find two or three who live fairly close, not more than five miles out. Then we drive them home.”

Husband and wife looked at each other; then Peter said: “Damn it all, Pat. . . .”

“As you like, dear,” she answered: but the heart grew heavy within her. She wanted him to herself, to herself: and he was away from her already, striding here and there among the men.

“Any of you men live in London?” asked P.J.

“Yes, sir. I do, sir. So do I, sir,” a dozen voices answered the question.

“West London? Marylebone? Regent’s Park?”

“Albany Street, sir.” A heavy-laden infantryman detached himself from the crowd; looked up expectantly.

“Right. I’ll drive you home. Any one else live that way?”

“My mate was coming ’ome with me. Could you take ’im too, sir?” asked the infantryman.

“Very well. Hurry up, though.” Peter turned to the crowd; said: “Sorry you chaps. I can’t manage more than two. Merry Christmas to you all.”

“Merry Christmas, sir,” answered a dozen voices. . . .

“I’ve got a brace,” he told her, “and they both want to go to Albany Street. It’s hardly out of our way at all.”

The two men followed them under the gloomy archway into the blue-lit gloom without; climbed stolidly to the rear seat of the open cabriolet. Pat took the wheel; Peter cranked up; and the Crossley crawled out into the dark canyon of Grosvenor Gardens. She was a very different car now from the royal-blue garnished plaything which Peter had hurled along the Bath Road in August 1914: countless muddy boots had left their mark on her varnish; countless accoutrements had torn her gray cord lining: but the engine still purred sweetly as of old, bore them smoothly past the dark bulk of Hyde Park Corner, up Park Lane, homewards.

As she drove, Patricia’s momentary spasm of discontent vanished. They were so pathetically grateful, the comments she caught from the passengers behind; and when she stopped the car at a shuttered house in Albany Street; when there came—from the mysterious lower regions—a woman who said, “Why, Alf, is it really you? I’ve been waiting up just on the off chance you might get home tonight”; when—with a grateful “Merry Christmas to you, sir”—the two weary men stumbled down the steps out of sight; it seemed to her as though, by parting with those few moments of her own selfish happiness, she had somehow earned the right to enjoy every moment of the seven days during which Peter would be hers.

Peter’s comment, as they sat over the little supper prepared for them in her father’s library, is characteristic. “I hated doing it,” he said, “but somehow one feels one ought to do all one can for them. Compared with us, the men have a pretty thin time.” . . .

§ 4

In the ordinary workaday life of the peacetime individual, a week seems a distinct interval of time: but to the men and women of the recent War, who snatched their respite from long months of anxiety in a few brief hours of happiness, the allotted seven days used to pass like a quickly-flashing dream.

Still, for her one week, Patricia was happy; and much of that happiness came from the knowledge that this man whom War had sent back to her, was no longer the same creature whom she had given to War. He had left her a civilian in khaki; he came back a member of the British Expeditionary Force.

She found the change in him difficult of analysis. The old absorbed Peter still lived—a reticent animal; unwilling to tell her of his life “out there”; though eager enough to explain the changes in his Brigade: how Major Lethbridge had been promoted Lieutenant Colonel, and Conway given “C” Battery in his stead: how Torrington’s successor, Captain Sandiland, was inclined to take unto himself too much credit for the work done by his subalterns: how Little Willie still flourished. But of Loos, of trench-warfare, of Reninghelst and Dickebusch, and the three weeks’ rest at Acquin which the Fourth Southdown Brigade had been enjoying when he left—he told her little or nothing. “It was really not so bad,” seemed the limit of his descriptive powers.

But, grafted onto the old Peter, there existed a new Peter, irresistibly young, who amazed his wife. He seemed to have acquired a capacity for enjoyment, a carelessness about money-matters, a delight in petty personal comforts, utterly out of keeping with his civilian self.

Formerly, the theatre had not appealed to him; now, he wanted to go every night. He disliked eating at home; seemed happiest in some gaudy restaurant, some rag-time night-club. He took taxis everywhere; bought expensive presents for her, for the children, for himself. When she attempted to expostulate, he laughed at her—and taxi’d to Cox’s Bank to draw another cheque.

Then too, he had become quaintly tolerant. On Boxing-Day Heron Baynet gave a family dinner-party. Rawlings and Violet came in their new car: Violet overdressed and overbearing; her husband, who had been promised a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours list, full of it and of himself. Peter, in evening-dress, new enamel buttons in his white waistcoat, welcomed the pair like long lost friends; congratulated Hubert; flattered Violet. “Hubert,” said Peter to his face, “was a devilish clever fellow. Perhaps when Hubert got his Knighthood, he could find him, Peter, some soft job at home. . . .”

“But I thought you didn’t like Hubert,” Pat said to him when they were alone in their bed-room.

“Oh, he’s not a bad chap,” laughed Peter, “not our _class_ of course—I mean, one can’t have any respect for him—still, I daresay he’s all right.”

When she pressed him further on the subject, he said—after a little hesitation: “It’s a question of caste, I think, Pat. One looks upon those sort of people—you know, politicians and the Whitehall gang—as one used to look on the lower orders. One doesn’t dislike them: one’s just sorry for them.”

Arthur Jameson, a taller blonder edition of his brother, came to town on two days’ leave; and she let them make one night of it together. From their boyhood, Arthur and Peter had quarrelled; but now they seemed to see eye to eye on a hundred subjects. As the flying-man—he had passed for his “wings” and was next on the roster for active service—confided to Patricia: “That husband of yours always wanted a good shaking up; and this War seems to have done it for him.”

The swift days fled. They visited Francis; took the delighted children to the Pantomime. She drove him to the City; sat in the office while he talked away half-an-hour with Simpson; whirled him westwards again. . . . “And will you ever go back to Lime Street?” she asked as they sat down to lunch. “I suppose so,” he answered, “if this War ever gets itself over. What shall we do this afternoon, old thing?” . . .

“Was he in love with her?” Patricia asked herself that question more than once during those breathless days: but found no answer to it. Obviously, her companionship, the physical joy of her, moved him as never before. They were pals again, better pals than ever. She told herself to be content with that.

And yet, reason was not content. Reason said: “This is excitement, pleasure at being back with the accustomed luxuries. After what he has gone through—almost any woman of his own class could give him what you are giving him.”

She hated that thought. Moreover something sounder than reason, the instinct of matehood, told her that she misjudged him. In so far as the average man can love the woman he has been married to for nine years, Peter did love her. There had been no other woman in his life. Only, only, she wanted more from him than the average husband gave to the average wife!

And so once again, they came to the last twenty-four hours.

§ 5

It was raining when they woke; very good to potter about in dressing-gowns and slippers, to dawdle through their baths, and take late breakfast leisurely in the roomy library. (For Heron Baynet’s patients already waited round the book-strewn table in the long dining-room facing Harley Street.) Among her letters, Patricia found one from Alice Stark—the first since her confinement. She wrote from Devonshire: the boy flourished, had red hair like his father; Douglas had enjoyed his leave; she had heard from him that day; the Brigade had been ordered into action again; he hoped Peter was enjoying himself.

Said Peter: “You would have laughed to see the old man when the wire arrived. He sent out for three bottles of champagne. Morency rode ten miles for them; and we had to drink the youngster’s health. I wish _we_ had a boy, Pat.”

She knew the chance remark almost meaningless—long ago, they had abandoned the hope of a son: nevertheless, it depressed her. All that day—when the children came in to be played with, at lunch with her father, through the matinée which followed—she thought of it. For now, he seemed almost gone again. And it had been so good to have him home. If only she could feel that he would come back safe. If only she had given him a son.

“_The Optimist! And the Pessimist!_” sang the two comedians on the stage in front of her. Patricia looked round the auditorium. Everywhere, she saw excited men, smiling women. Once she had envied such joyous couples. Now she only wondered, if, like herself, all the women were hiding, stifling, drugging-away somewhere, the sorrows at their heart. “But we must laugh,” she said to herself. “_They_ mustn’t think of us as unhappy.”

And again, as on that last day at Deepcut, Patricia played out her comedy to the end. But for the first time in her life—she admitted as much to her father after Peter had gone—she let alcohol share her troubles.

Cowardly? Perhaps it was cowardly: but she couldn’t face the prospect of spoiling his last night by tears. And the alcohol helped her to put a brave face on things. The cocktails which he offered after tea, she took; and the whisky-and-soda when they got home; and the champagne for dinner, the night-cap of _crême-de-menthe_.

Poor Pat! She was only a very human, very loving woman, sending her man back to the lands of no-tomorrow. And the warmth of those harmless drinks helped her through, helped her to hide the misery behind her eyes. . . . Let the self-righteous, the uncomprising ones who have never known unhappiness, cast the first stone!

§ 6

He would not let her see him off from the station; and she lay in bed, watching him as he laced his high-boots, straightened his spur-chains, pinned khaki collar.

“Anyway, old thing,” he said, “we’ve had a great time together. And in four or five months, well make another week of it. . . .”

He went down to his early breakfast; came back again; kissed her good-bye.

“Take care of yourself, Peter,” she smiled at him. And again he answered “Trust me, old thing. . . .”

But as she listened to the taxi purring down Harley Street, to the slam of the closing front-door, it seemed to Patricia as though there were no Power, either heavenly or earthly, in whom a woman of those days might put her trust.