PART TWENTY-SIX

BROKEN MEN

§ 1

Charlie Tebbits, faithless to all traditions of the building trade, kept his promised date; and Patricia moved into Sunflowers by the end of June. She “moved in” without servants or children; assisted only by a great grenadier of a woman who came from Arlsfield Village just too late to prepare breakfast and left just too early to prepare dinner. But Patricia had been homeless eighteen months, long enough to revel even in the discomforts of home-making—scamped meals, chairs without loose-covers, curtainless windows, floor-boards minus carpets, workmen all day and solitude all night.

The more she grew to know this house she had fallen in love with, the more she fell in love with it. Compared to Lowndes Square, Sunflowers was tiny—she loved it for its tininess. Sunflowers possessed no second staircase—she found she had never really approved of second staircases. Sunflowers had no wine-cellar—she decided wine-cellars inevitably harboured black-beetles. All through ten unhampered days, she delivered herself up, hand and brain, to this new infatuation.

Still, infatuation apart, it really was a jolly house; and by the time that Charlie Tebbits, assisted by Harry Tebbits, old man Tebbits, Miss Tebbits, and an amazing handyman from Little Arlsfield, had laid carpets, tacked down linoleum, hung curtains, arranged old furniture and carried up new; Patricia could honestly look round and say to herself: “This is just how I planned things the day I first saw it.”

She spent a whole twenty-four hours wandering from the berugged cream-papered hall into Peter’s little study, (for which Charlie Tebbits was still making her walnut bookshelves to match Peter’s writing-table), through the dining-room and the servants’ quarters; up the balustered dark-blue-carpeted staircase, (stopping always to look out from the window-seat on the half-landing) to the nurseries, gay with Cecil Aldin hunting-friezes, with chintz curtains and shiny white furniture; and from there (giving only a casual glance at the spare room) into her own bedroom and Peter’s dressing-room—white-papered both, both looking out across the orchard towards the river.

Her own room, except for the blue carpet saved from the cupidity of M. Van Woumen, contained no relics of Lowndes Square: the low gray-painted Empire bedstead of carved wood and basket-work, she had “looted” from her father’s house in Harley Street; Tebbits’ ingenuity provided flounced dressing-table to match; artfully enclosed wall-spaces evaded the difficulties of a wardrobe; the fireplace (as all the fireplaces at Sunflowers) was of irreproachable white tilework, devoid of unnecessary brass and iron. But Peter’s dressing-room contained all Peter’s own familiar furniture—his mahogany bow-fronted wardrobe, his brass bedstead, the glass-doored wall-case of guns and hunting-crops and fishing-rods, his collection of hunting prints.

“He must like the place,” she kept saying to herself, “he _will_ like it.”

For Sunflowers represented—though Patricia would never have admitted the fact—her last bid for Peter’s love. Their house in Lowndes Square had been a ready-made residence, full of Peter’s inherited chattels: entering it, she too had become his chattel—mere Mrs. Jameson. Whereas Sunflowers was of her own finding, her own creating; the house she, Patricia, would make “home” for her man against his return from the wars.

§ 2

Rainy June turned to a glorious July. Patricia found two servants; engaged a gardener; sent for the children; dismissed their governess; was “called on” by the vicar and half-a-dozen neighbours—and began to buy her experience of life on a moderate income in the English home-counties.

Peter’s wife possessed all the town-dweller’s illusions about living in “the country”: one took a “little place”—and banished care automatically; one’s servants smiled and sang about their deft work; one’s garden grew by itself (“the man does everything, my dear”), provided vegetables, eggs, fruit and flowers as a department-store provides groceries; while one wandered about in a floppy hat with a pair of scissors, or went for long walks in green lanes where one met the most attractive people—the Squire, the sporting parson, peasant women who curtsied and farmers’ boys who touched their hats. And in this paradise—chiefly owing to the honesty of the country-folk as compared with the rascality of town—one spent literally nothing at all!

Strong in that last belief, Patricia came like a godsend to the hungry village of Arlsfield: and Arlsfield robbed her as the country mouse robs the town mouse—with effective simplicity. Roger Fry the gardener,—a hulking fellow with a sly smile—acted principal go-between. “The Grounds,” said Roger Fry, “needed a lot of seeing to.” Patricia agreed. Roger Fry saw to them: he made her a sunk lawn at the foot of the paddock, near the walnut tree—and pouched a week’s extra wages over the price of turf; he regravelled the “drive” and extracted 5/-a load commission from the gravel-supplier; he re-fenced the orchard—on the same financial basis.

Then she desired chickens—and Roger Fry found them for her, (“ten and sixpence each, Madam, and the best little lot I’ve seen for a long time”). Also, Roger Fry arranged with a friend of his for the supply of chicken-corn—and by a judicious admixture of maize contrived to keep the four-year-old birds in lay for nearly six weeks.

Grocer, greengrocer (she had arrived too late to plant her summer vegetables), butcher and baker, ironmonger and laundrywoman—all joined the league of plunder: keeping back their accounts till such time as memory would find it impossible to check them.

Still it was a joyous conspiracy, a conspiracy of smiles and “Thank you, Madams”—and, at the outset, none of the conspirators enjoyed it half so much as their victim.

For nearly two months Patricia was happy as husbandless woman can be. She had her disappointments, of course: the servants who made her long for the efficient Smith of Lowndes Square days, the Vicar’s oleaginous questing after charity subscriptions, the persistence of callers when she wanted to be by herself: but these were very minor flies in the ointment of a sunlit existence. . . .

She began the re-education of her children; finding them hopelessly backward in everything except parrot-knowledge. She gossiped with old man Tebbits, who sold her a piglet at the exact market-price of the day, provided her with milk and butter; but kept shut mouth about the delinquencies of “the Arlsfielders.” She entertained her father for a week-end, and her brother Jack—still only a Gunner Captain and rather disgruntled at having been transferred to a Kitchener battery—for half his leave. She superintended Fry’s greasing and oiling of the Crossley, which the Standard Oil Company’s price for petrol had put out of commission till “after the war”; and explored the country afoot.

She got up at seven and went to bed at ten, living every minute of the fifteen wonderful hours.

Towards the end of August, Francis Gordon arrived to stay for a week, while Prout engaged what he called a “female,” and got Glen Cottage ready for occupation. Patricia had not seen her cousin for two months; and the first sight of him, stepping carefully down from the hired trap, shocked her. It was not his physical infirmities she noticed at that first meeting, but his face. She remembered him a smooth-faced boy, she saw him now a middle-aged man. His hair had grayed at the temples; his eyes had lost their laughter. He walked easily enough, using only one stick; but he no longer held himself upright; his shoulders drooped as though he carried a burden on them.

She led him to a deep chair in the hall; brought him tea; began to question him.

“So they invalided you out after all.”

“Yes. I could have got an office-job; but I wouldn’t take it.”

“Why not?”

“Frankly, Pat, I don’t know. Somehow or other, I feel done in. It wasn’t so bad in hospital, you see one had other”—he looked down at his legs—“cripples to talk to. But London. . . . No, I don’t think I could stick London. The streets, you know; and getting in and out of tubes. People jostle one.”

“But what _are_ you going to do?”

“Oh, write, I suppose.”

The last sentence struck Patricia as the most hopeless words she had ever heard from human lips. She felt desperately sorry—yet furiously angry with him. She said to herself: “Here is a man who is almost whole. He has enough money to live on. He has brains. The one thing that he cares for in the world is literature, there is nothing to prevent him. . . .”

But at that, Patricia’s anger vanished: for intuition, and her own love for Peter, told her clearly that “literature” was not the one thing in the world for which Francis Gordon most cared. She remembered the photograph incident at Mecklinburgh Square, the postcard she had read unwittingly at Brighton, his look when she chaffed him about being in love at the end of her Christmas Eve visit to Endsleigh Gardens. Her curiosity itched to ask him about this mysterious girl in America. Why didn’t he marry her? Or was she already married? Wouldn’t she have anything to do with him? Had they quarrelled? Couldn’t they make it up? . . .

But Francis, during his stay at Sunflowers, repelled every attempt to extract confidences; kept conversation rigidly to the impersonal. Somehow, he frightened Patricia. It seemed to her as though he had lost all interest in life. Except for his own writing-room, he left all arrangements at Glen Cottage to Prout. The war, he never mentioned: “as far as I’m concerned,” he said, “it’s over.” Literature, he referred to contemptuously as “the last resource of people who hadn’t the capacity for doing real things.”

Even the children noticed this change. “What’s the matter with Uncle Francis?” asked Evelyn, now a precocious long-legged creature of eight. “He always used to talk such a lot, and now he hardly talks at all.”

“He’s got a bad leg, dear,” explained her mother.

“But he doesn’t talk with his leg, Mummy,” put in precocity; and Patricia was driven to the usual: “Go on with your lessons, darling. Uncle Francis will be quite well again soon.”

But would Francis ever be well again; well in mentality; able to reconstruct his life? Patricia’s reason said “Yes” to those questions; Patricia’s instinct said “No.” She had thought once, long ago at Wargrave, that he might yet do great things, make a name for himself: there seemed a force in him then, a power behind his self-absorption. But this new Francis was not even self-absorbed: there was nothing so positive as self-absorption about him: he might have been anybody. And when he finally shuffled off through Tebbits’ cow-yard, started down the meadow path to his new home, Patricia’s fantasy pictured him a stricken beast, crawling away to die in solitude. . . .

But next day’s telegram from the War Office dispelled all fantasies! Peter was wounded, back in England, in London: the world, for Patricia, shrank to the size of her husband’s left arm.

§ 3

Patricia had waited thirteen months for that telegram; and once her anxious eyes deciphered its exact meaning, she knew no feeling except relief. Her man was home again, out of it, not for a week’s exeat but for months, perhaps for good! They would give him leave. He would see Sunflowers. She would nurse him back to health. . . .

She sent Fry into Arlsfield with telegrams to her father and the invalid; she packed her bag; she urged the children to behave themselves during her absence; she borrowed Tebbits’ trap, and caught the 3:45 from Henley with exactly one minute to spare. Neither in the trap, the train, nor the taxi which whirled her through unfamiliar streets to her destination, did she panic.

At the entrance to the hospital—a great barrack of a building, set foursquare round a gravel courtyard—difficulties began. An R. A. M. C. Sergeant, standing stiffly to attention, informed Patricia that visitors were allowed only between two and four P. M. She asked to see the Matron, and was conducted down a cold stone corridor to an unfriendly waiting-room. After ten minutes, appeared a forbidding woman of uncertain age, dressed in the Regulation Red Cross uniform, who said: “She knew of no patient named Jameson in the Officers’ Ward; but would make enquiries.”

Patricia waited another ten minutes. The Matron returned. She had discovered Peter: he was as well as could be expected: Mrs. Jameson could come to see him the following afternoon.

“But I want to see him at once,” insisted Patricia.

“I’m afraid we can’t allow that.” The Matron smiled a superior smile. “It’s against orders.”

“Then you must disobey orders.”

“My dear Mrs. Jameson . . .” began the woman.

But at that, Patricia’s temper exploded.

“Don’t ‘dear Mrs. Jameson’ me,” she flashed out. “He may be your patient. But he’s my husband. And I’m going to see him.”

“The Registrar _might_ let you. I can’t.”

“Then please go and fetch the Registrar.”

There appeared, after a further twenty minutes during which Patricia’s annoyance rose to fever-point, a pompous but kindly individual with drooping moustaches, who peered at her through gold pince-nez, and said:

“The Matron tells me you want to see your husband. We really oughtn’t to allow it, you know. Really, we oughtn’t. Of course, if he were in any danger, it would be a different thing.”

“It’s rather natural I should want to see him, isn’t it?”

“Entirely, my dear young lady, entirely. But we have to think of the other patients, you see. Still, as a great favour, and just for ten minutes. . . .”

He led her up stone-staircases, down endless miles of corridors where blue-clad patients shuffled and limped on noiseless slippers, till they came to a white-painted doorway marked, “Officers Only”; up yet another staircase to a stone half-landing. Here a capped nurse met them.

“This is Mrs. Jameson,” said the Registrar. “I’ve promised her she may see her husband. But only for ten minutes, Sister. Only for ten minutes.”

“Is he very bad?” asked Patricia.

“He’s asleep, I think,” said the Sister.

The Registrar made his adieux; clattered off downstairs. The two women passed into the ward: a long bare room of ten beds whose occupants looked up incuriously at the accustomed swish of the Sister’s linen skirt, displaying scarcely more interest on sight of Patricia.

The last bed of all was screened.

“He’s in here,” whispered the Sister. She shifted one of the screens noiselessly; and Patricia tip-toed in.

For a moment, the joy of seeing him eclipsed judgment. Then it was no longer merely the loving woman, Peter’s wife, who looked down on him; but Patricia Baynet the doctor’s daughter, sickness-wise by inheritance!

He lay on his back, bandaged arm outside the coverlet. In the shadow cast by the screens, his unshaved face showed thin and fine-drawn. She hardly noticed these symptoms; she had expected and discounted them. She noticed something else—his breathing. It came spasmodically, in quick uneven jerks through half-opened lips. Twice, during the ten minutes she stood watching him, he seemed about to awaken; moaned in his sleep. . . . The Sister signalled to her that it was time to leave him. Very quietly, she withdrew; and they passed out of the ward again.

“Well,” asked the Sister, “what do you think of him?”

Patricia looked doubtfully at the unintelligent eyes under the white cap. “How long has he been here?” she asked.

“Two days, I think. I’ve only just come to this ward.”

“Could I see the doctor who’s attending him?”

“He’s left, I think. But the Orderly Officer’s in his room. I’ll take you to him if you like.”

They found the Orderly Officer, an ascetic-looking young man, seated at a large desk, telephone in front of him, fountain-pen in hand. He offered Patricia a seat, listened carefully to her questions.

“Yes,” said Captain Territt, “your husband’s been here two days. I saw him when he came in. He told me that a piece of shrapnel hit him on the helmet. Slight case of concussion, I expect. He’ll soon get over that. And he’s got a touch of bronchial catarrh. Exposure, you know.”

“When did you take his temperature last?”

“Five o’clock, I expect.” He turned to the nurse. “When was it, Sister?”

The girl hesitated. “I—I didn’t take it. He seemed so sound asleep.”

“Well, please go and do so at once.”

The girl hurried out of the room. “We’re frightfully understaffed, you know,” explained the doctor. Patricia looked at him, summed him up. She was half mad with anxiety; but she spoke without a trace of emotion. “May I use your telephone, doctor?” “Certainly.” She pulled the instrument towards her; called up her father’s number. . . .

The nurse, returning white-faced, thermometer in hand, heard her say:—“Is that Jenkins speaking? . . . This is Mrs. Jameson. . . . Then you must put me through to his consulting-room. . . . Is that you, pater? . . . Did you get my wire? . . . I’m at the hospital now. . . . No, he’s very ill, and I want you to come down at once. . . . It’s pneumonia, I think. . . . In half-an-hour. . . . Thanks awfully, pater.”

She hung up the receiver; turned to Captain Territt. “It _is_ pneumonia, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so. The temperature’s rather high.”

“How high?”

“A hundred and four point one, under the arm.” Doctor and Sister hurried out of the room. . . .

She waited their return; waited miserably; visioned Peter fighting for breath as she had seen her brother Jack fighting for breath, years and years ago, in the night-nursery at Harley Street. And she, his wife, could do nothing; must sit there powerless. All the relief at knowing him saved from the firing-line, all the rosy expectations of his coming to Sunflowers, faded like silly dreams. Supposing they had only brought him home to die!

Heron Baynet, entering with the quiet unhurried step of the professional consultant, hardly recognized his daughter: her face was so drawn with agony—love-agony of which he had never dreamed her capable.

“Am I in time?” he asked, doubting the answer.

She rose, tottered towards him. “I don’t know, pater, I don’t know anything. . . .” He caught the panic in her voice, hardened to it. “Don’t be hysterical, Pat. It does you no good: and it may harm Peter. Now, tell me exactly what has happened, and why you telephoned.”

At the sound of his voice, nerve came back to her; and she told him of her suspicions, of their confirmation.

“He was asleep, you say?” asked Heron Baynet.

“Yes.”

“On his back, or propped up?”

“On his back.”

“Oh, you women!” Heron Baynet smiled at his daughter. “You know so much, and yet you know so little. If it had been as bad as you’ve imagined for the last half-hour, do you think he could have slept? Why, Pat, he’d have been bolt upright, breathing fifty to the minute. . . .”

She said, very quietly: “But supposing I hadn’t insisted on seeing him. Supposing that idiot of a sister. . . .”

A step sounded outside. Captain Territt came in; stiffened at sight of the civilian; was introduced; wilted at mention of the civilian’s name; answered the technical questions with the deference due to a consultant. Yes, the patient had bronchial pneumonia. At least, in Doctor Territt’s opinion, it was bronchial pneumonia. Perhaps Doctor Baynet would prefer to form his own opinion. . . .

The two members of the closest Labour Union in England passed out together, leaving Patricia again alone.

Supposing they had only brought Peter back to die! . . .

§ 4

But Peter Jameson did not die. The pneumonia ran its course—two days of choking misery for him, of mad anxiety for his wife—then the passing of crisis—the slow return to painless breath and solid foods.

For the first forty-eight hours, Patricia stayed by him. The hospital-staff, knowing her Heron Baynet’s daughter, made full amends: Matron grew kindly; neglectful Sister was unremitting in service. On the third day, Peter said very weakly, “Hello, old thing, what are you doing here?”—and she went back to Harley Street a happy woman.

Followed a week of daily visits, during which she talked and he listened. Temperature dropped to ninety-nine point three. Wound in arm drained away its poison. She grew nervous about her children left alone with the servants; ran down to Sunflowers for the day; found chaotic idleness; stayed the night; straightened things out; returned to town.

At the end of the second week, her father pronounced his patient definitely out of danger; persuaded her to leave London. She yielded hesitatingly, realizing for the first time the handicaps of reduced income—lack of car, lack of governess for the children, of efficient servants; torn between her love for the man and her duty to his home. . . .

Peter himself, during that first fortnight, was too ill for emotion. To be in bed, to be under a solid roof, to be washed—these sensations contented him. He rather liked waking at night to hear rain outside, turning to sleep with the thought, “Well, I’m not in that anyway.” He liked having his meals brought to him on clean china, the sounds of women’s voices. He experienced a profound relief at the absence of danger. . . .

But as Peter passed from illness to convalescence, he grew aware of new dangers. These dangers were manifold, and each terrifying. Never, at the Front, had he known fear as he knew fear at home. There was the Fear in Sleep—a horror which woke him, sodden with sweat, from visions of Lindsay still dying in Trônes Wood, still dying but not yet dead. . . . There was the Fear in Daylight—a visionless misery, an immense black cap which the soul donned or doffed at its own bitter will. While that Fear lasted, the soul under the cap prayed ingratiatingly for death. . . . There was the Fear of the Future, in which the future held no hope beyond the present: and the Fear of the Present, when the present held no hope save the future. . . . There was the Fear of Time—where time hung dead through eternity or spun so fast that none might accomplish a second’s labour between his cradle and his grave. . . . There was the Fear of Pain, and the Fear of Poverty, the Fear of being Sent Back to the Front, and the Fear of having to Stop at Home: but strangest, strongest of all the fears Peter learned in those first days was the Fear of Consumption.

He used to lie for hours remembering Rolleston’s story of the gassed Canadian, hearing Rolleston’s words about tubercle, till every little cough seemed a warning of death: then the Fear in Daylight would come to him, whispering, “Perhaps that is best,” and the Fear of Poverty would mutter, “There’ll be the insurance money for them if you die.” . . .

Peter did not realize that these fears were among the commonest symptoms of neurasthenia. Peter knew nothing about neurasthenia, except that “Pat’s governor made rather a hobby of it”; nothing about shell-shock beyond the Army dictum of the period, “that it meant a chap got rather shocked at being shelled.” His fears shamed him; and so he hid them away, as decent men hide uncleanly impulses; never dreamed of associating them with that theory about the “Limit of Human Endurance” which Heron Baynet had once propounded to him over their brandy and cigars.

This almost impossible battle, the battle of the neurasthenic with his own soul, Peter Jameson entered on unaided—feeling himself lost to all honour, coward and traitor in sight of his own manhood. Yet at the outset he fought well; so well that, so long as he remained in hospital, not even Heron Baynet suspected his condition. . . .

At the end of his first month, came letters from Garton, from Sandiland and Purves. The Brigade had been moved northwards (“quite close to where we first went into action,” wrote the censor-wise Garton): “Mr. Henry” was riding Little Willie and had taken Jelks for groom: “Captain Lodden was home, ‘sick.’” It all seemed very far away from the bare echoing hospital, from the gossip of the ward. . . .

Passed another month of aimless existence, varied only by Patricia’s weekly visits, by a letter from his brother Arthur, by a box of cigars from Maurice Beresford, by a state-call of Sir Hubert and Lady Rawlings. . . .

His arm healed rapidly. They took away his sling, allowed him “down” to meals—where he learned the Fear of Eating in Public. He went for his first walk—and discovered the Fear of Traffic. Then, quite unexpectedly, he was summoned to a Medical Board: at which three kindly men examined his arm, tested his lungs, and asked him how he “felt in himself.”

“Quite all right,” said Peter, “but of course I’d like to go home for a bit.”

They gave him three months’ leave, and advised him to take care of himself. “One never knows with lungs, you know,” said the President. . . . And Peter, the Fear of Consumption eating out his last remnant of will power, took train to the home Patricia had planned for him.