Part 9
"But I'm not Church of anything, any more than you and Maurice or the Lee-Levysons--or anybody!--belonging to the set of people we visit and meet and dine.... Nice, pleasant, sociable heathens--that's what we are, every one of us! We have plum-pudding at Christmas; and salt-fish with egg-and-oyster sauce on Good Fridays; and we drop in at Westminster Abbey to hear the Carols; and at Westminster Cathedral or Farm Street for the Passion Music;--or the Greek Church near the Russian Embassy, because the singing is worth hearing,--and other people go! And we scrum into St. Paul's for a Public Thanksgiving--or a Day of Humiliation, or a big Funeral or any other kind of Function.... And St. George's Hanover Square for Society weddings,--or the Brompton Oratory.... But religion.... Have any of us got it? ... 'You can search me!' as the American fellow says in the revue.... Still, if you'd like me to alter the letters on my disc I don't mind doing it. Only--instead of '_Nil_' there'll be a big 'J' for Jew!"
She waxed shrill, driven beyond herself, used words long forgotten:
"But you're not one. You've never even set foot inside a Synagogue. We don't observe the Shabbos--I mean the Sunday!--we eat _triphah_ meat like Gentiles. We're _Meshumad_--apostates, don't you understand? Orthodox Jews wouldn't even speak to us!--aren't we well enough as we are?"
"Would my grandfathers have thought so? Or my father?" ...
She caught her breath and clutched at her bosom, the deep, slow voice was so unlike the younger John's. Unobservant of the consternation in her face, he went on speaking, gradually recovering the manner and tone most usual with him:
"Alive, they'd have disowned us. Not being alive--what we observe or don't observe, can't affect them! The notion of a dead man stretching out a hand from the grave, and grabbing hold of his son by the scruff to drive the unlucky beggar on in the ancient ruts of his own prehistoric prejudices is exploded. For the dead are DEAD. There's no getting over that! And to let their thoughts, feelings, desires, convictions, influence us in Anything is to my mind, sheer sentimental piffle." John blew himself out importantly and waved away the subject, but came back, having something more to say: "I'm an ambitious chap in my way.... I'd like to make enough money on the Stock Exchange to buy the freehold of Covent Garden; and turn the Market,--the Arcades,--the shops and the Opera House into a Pleasure City,--run on American lines. But I've no ambition to live after I'm dead,--that I know of! ... If I get wiped out at the Front it won't make any difference to me whether they stick a cross over me--or a shield with some Hebrew letters painted on a white deal board.... Beryl can get married the day after if she wants to! ... _I_ shan't ever know she's being kissed by another man. Nor shall I be one jot worse or better off because of the Good or Bad marks set against me. It matters how you live your life, because Morality is necessary--to preserve Health and maintain Decency, and so uphold the Law. But when one dies one's done with!--and the wisest rule of existence is, to live as long as possible, and enjoy things while one can! To succeed, to become famous, that's the only immortality--and to leave a son to carry on your name is a way of cheating Death!" He ended this confession of his creed by saying rather wistfully: "I meant to ask you.... Do you--do you think there's any chance of Beryl's marrying me before I go?"
"To the Front! ... Why shouldn't there be? Why not ask her?" ...
"Thanks awfully for the tip. I will!"
He was cheered by her absolute belief that he could not but prevail. For if she had forgotten her faith, and turned her back upon her people; she was a mother and a loving one. There was motherhood in her face and in her voice as she asked John:
"Haven't you even told Beryl--what you--where you're going, dear?"
"No! so if she's got a white feather keeping up her sleeve for me, she'll be disappointed, that's all! My hat!--listen to that clock striking! Do you understand it's gone two! You won't have any beauty-sleep,--and I've got to be at Regimental Headquarters at ten sharp to-morrow, to get my kit with the rest of the Fourth Battalion, and weigh in at Eaton Square at 11.30 to break the great news and show myself to the girl."
But when Mrs. Hazel had finally departed, John got out of bed, switched on a light and searched on the shelf that contained his private library, for a fat one-volume Encyclopædia that had been a School Prize. After some delving in this mine of knowledge, he emerged the wiser by the information appended:
"JEWS, an Asiatic race (Semitic), descended from the Hebrew Patriarch Abraham. Original stock migrated 2,000 B.C. from Ur in Chaldea, an important centre of civilisation, to the land of Canaan (Phœnicia) and from thence in time of scarcity to the rich pasture-lands of Egypt; from whence tradition has it that their leader and lawgiver, Moses, was divinely inspired to lead them, by way of the Red Sea Gulf and the Sinaitic Wilderness. Through his teachings they renounced polytheism and adopted a monotheistic form of worship. Language, Hebrew, a variant of the Canaanitish branch of the Semitic Group, approximating closely to Phœnician or Moabite."
The richer by this gem, John put back the book, switched off the light and got back into bed.
Sleep delayed in coming. As he stared wide-eyed into the darkness, fragmentary recollections of that long-dead father formed fresh pictures in his brain. He saw a room, with a table laid for dinner with white napery and glittering silver, the high child's chair by which he stood, a chubby boy in petticoats, waiting for strong, gentle arms to lift him to the seat. While the owner of the arms, a tall man, dark and grave, washed his hands at a shining metal laver hanging on the dining-room wall beside the door. The tall man wore his hat during this ceremony, and the towel he used was long and narrow, and had embroidered ends....
A similar laver had hung on the wall in his grandmother's private sitting-room, John remembered; carefully dusted, but never used by anybody as far as he had known. And over the laver had hung a plaque of metal, embossed with Hebrew characters: such a _mezusah_ as one saw affixed to doorposts in the City: thickening as one got nearer to Houndsditch: becoming dense in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel Road and the Commercial Road, E....
He was destined to enjoy no beauty-sleep that night.
For this materialistic, hard-headed, commonplace young City insurance-broker was loyal of nature, capable of warm attachments; faithful in friendship and honourable; according to his somewhat narrow Code. And the country in which he had been reared, the home in which Life had unfolded for his infant consciousness, the associations amongst which he had developed from a gawky boy into a tall young man, were English: and he had not known previously how much that meant to him.
England was John Hazel's England, the City of London his by choice and adoption; the Tom Tiddler's Ground where he, a citizen and a patriot, had meant to pick up as much of the good stuff Money as he possibly could get. He loved Great Britain, her history, traditions, rulers and institutions with a love blind, instinctive, and deeply rooted, that embraced her Colonies and the Dominions Beyond the Seas. He had never lumbered up on his huge feet to do honour to the National Anthem; or cheered the King and Queen and the Prince of Wales, and other notabilities passing in procession to the Guildhall or elsewhere,--or listened to a patriotic speech at a City dinner,--or a West End public charity-function, without a big lump rising in his throat.
And since the blizzard of War had burst upon this, his mother-country, and the new, strange, dreadful life had replaced the pleasant, easy-going old one, his love for England had become a rage. The tramp of martial boots going through the darkened streets; the heavy roll of guns, ammunition and baggage-lorries; the columns of bronzed faces under khaki cap-peaks, streaming under arches of railway stations; the dreadful news bruited by the newspapers, shouted in the streets, clubbing you when you opened your Latest Edition;--the mourning weeds on the backs of strangers and friends; the darkness of streets and restaurants and public places; the thickly-curtained windows of one's own home and one's neighbours' houses; the Spy Scare--and the hovering, haunting menace of Invasion by Aircraft--increased his patriotic fever day by day. Great tears had splashed upon the dirty drab paper he had signed when he enlisted. And they were the tears of an Asiatic;--a Semite whose ancestors had come out of Ur in Chaldea--and whose native language was a variant of the Canaanitish thingumbob. Perhaps no genuine Englishman would have shed them. And yet, some pathetic parting-scenes at Railway Stations had removed John's previous impression that hefty, hardy, masculine Britons are never known to cry.
One is sorrowful to remember that beyond the narrow range of this young man's prejudices, and the stultifying influences of his environment, extended boundless vistas of which a more liberal and comprehensive range of reading;--fuel for the engines of the winged chariot of Thought and Imagination--might have made John Hazel free....
But he lay prone, dull and unimaginative; staring over the bedclothes at the pale watery gleam of the dressing-mirror opposite, while out of the mighty Past--reverberating and flashing to this hour with the thunders and lightnings of Sinai,--Patriarchs, Law-giver, Judges, Prophets and Sages, Poets, Kings, Statesmen, Patriots, Preachers, Warriors, Artificers and Craftsmen of vanished Israel and living Judæa--dominated by One Figure, unspeakably more benign and glorious--looked down in solemn pitying wonder on the young City insurance-broker, who was depressed by the sudden discovery, that not only on the father's side but on the mother's,--he had been born a Jew.
"Never mind, Old J.B.H.!" he told himself encouragingly. "Even if your ancestors did come out of Egypt with Moses, you're a pup of the Big Bull Bitch. And I'll tell you what, my boy! Good old England may count herself thundering lucky, if she gets a few hundred thousand others of the same breed to fight for her in this War!"
II
Panoplied for battle, in shoddy--misnamed khaki--of a deadly stale-mustard hue, bound with braid of whitey-yellow, garnished with the customary brass badges, buttons and buckles, and completed with the brown leather belt, bayonet-sling and bandolier; Private John Hazel--with a wire stiffener in the crown of his cap, and his pampered flesh wincing from the contact of the single Army rasper supplied him (for which, in the first flush of patriotism he had discarded his customary underwear)--presented himself before Beryl, his betrothed.
"Oh, come now, Bur'l!" expostulated Muriel, Beryl's younger sister, compassionate of John's immense discomfiture, as Beryl subsided on the Rossmore couch in tears; and her unlucky lover, standing huge and awkward in the middle of the Wilton carpet, opposing his own full-length reflection in a wall-mirror, realised that the collar of his tunic was strangling, that his hands were bigger than he could have believed them; and that the boots supplied by a grateful country would have comfortably fitted a Brontosaur.
"Tell him," moaned Beryl, "to leave me to my misery!"
"She never used to mind poor Beechy in kharks," the chagrined lover somewhat heatedly protested, on being banished from the drawing-room.
"Beauchamp was so handsome," said Beryl's sister Muriel, with her dancing dark eyes suddenly softening in tears, "and then you know,--he was an Officer of Regular Cavalry--and you're only a Common Tommy. Of course at the bottom of her heart Bur'l loves and respects you--but that's what's the matter, John, old thing! Wangle a Commission as soon as you can manage it"--the term "wangle" was coming into use just then--"do something Frightfully Distinguished--and she'll be as right as rain with you, really she will!"
"Think so? ..." said John, with obviously artificial lightness. "Well, say good-bye to her for me for now, will you! And--my crowd were guarding the line of the South Western until a day or so back--and if I'd screwed myself up to the point of joining up before,--I might have wangled a D.C.M. by dropping on a German in the act of laying a time-fuse bomb in a tunnel. Now they've sent 'em out to Malta to train, and yours truly and a band of other Brave Hearts--late washouts!--are being sent after 'em! So by-by, little girlie--for I've got to buy a Cardigan jacket and a few other things I want. You might tell me Beryl's full Christian name--it's got to go down in my Will, naturally!--and be entered for reference with the Nearest of Kin, at the War Office--so that they can let the old thing know if I get wiped out!"
John felt in a baggy front-pocket for a pigskin note-book, a parting gift from Maurice, and produced it, with a gold-mounted fountain-pen. Muriel dimpled again roguishly, and said with her bright eyes daringly challenging his own:
"We've only one first name apiece--but they're not 'Beryl' and 'Muriel'; nor are they particularly Christian, that I'm aware...." Then the consciousness of their recent loss, and her new black lisse, displaying a generous amount of slender black silk-stockinged leg, failed to subdue her girlish sense of humour. She clapped her hands and broke into a fit of laughter while John stared at her uncomprehendingly, the fountain-pen suspended over the memorandum-book. "Oh, don't goggle at me like that!" cried the girl. "You're too killing for anything! And so is your mother, and so is Maury--and so are Dad and Mater, and nearly every one in our set. And yet I'm Miriam--and Beryl is Rebekah--and poor darling Beauchamp was Benjamin--though they aren't going to have it on his memorial card, or stone! Do we really forget we're Jews--or do we all pretend until it's second nature? And why do we pretend--unless we're ashamed!--and why on earth should we be ashamed, that's what I want to know?"
Thus Muriel, confessedly Miriam; and John had found no better answer than:
"Why you or any of us should be ashamed I'm hanged if I know myself! But if ever I find out I'll write and tell you."
"Don't forget!" said Muriel-Miriam. "I'm coming to the door to see you off. Good-bye for now, J. old Bean! Put one for Bur'l here;--" the tip of a pretty, well-manicured finger indicated a particularly peachy place on Muriel-Miriam's right cheek,--"and another of the same on this side, for me. Ta-ta! I'll send you lots of cigs, when I know where you're training--and parcels no end when you get out to the Front! And tell me you'll go in for a Commission, and get a V.C. or something,--just to brisk old Bur'l up!"
"Oh! Tell her," said John with somewhat forced and clumsy humour, masking the slowly-kindling resentment in his heart, "that I mean to finish up my service in this War a private in the ranks--where I began it. And that when I--if I come back, she'll hear me singing: 'They've All Got a Sam Browne But Me,'--long before I come in sight."
"I shall listen for you!" said Muriel-Miriam, bursting with laughter, "but you don't think I'm going to give that message, I hope!"
She did not pass it on; but her younger sister Ida, a sharp child aged thirteen, who happened to be lingering in the neighbourhood of the umbrella-stand, communicated to Beryl her lover's parting message; to which,--or to the superior attractions of a certain Captain Hawtin-Billson (back from the Front with a shattered left arm and a Mention in Despatches) may be attributed Beryl's subsequent breakage of the engagement between herself and John Hazel, and the return of his ruby and diamond ring....
During the strenuous period of training that followed on John Hazel's joining up, his large reserve-fund of conceit was lowered by the merciless chaff of the ranks, and the vigorous language of his platoon-Sergeant, whose little red-veined eyes, glaring into his own, reflected in their muddiness his puny insignificance.
He learned to put on his puttees properly, clean his accoutrements, make his bed and condense his pack to regulation limits, under the instruction of one Lance Corporal Harris,--an ex-Boy Scout of appalling efficiency--as well as to gulp down his morning mug of tea, in defiance of the probability of the fluid containing in solution an ounce of Epsom salts. And by the time the Fourth Battalion of the Fenchurch Street Fusiliers quitted their training-quarters at Malta, replaced there by a Fifth Battalion created in the interval--and were transferred to the fighting-line in Flanders; he had acquired the soldier's much-prized gift of summoning sleep at will. Also, he had learned to dispense with sleep, were the sacrifice required.... After months of bitter fighting at the Front he had learned to go unshaven, unwashed, and with unchanged linen,--endure the plagues of vermin in a crowded, unventilated dugout--share a fag with a man who had none; smoke the Army gasper in lieu of anything better,--and consume biscuit and bully mingled with dirt, and washed down with burnt-bread coffee; or Pimmington's Perfect Soup Substitute, boiled in a rusty jam-tin over a Tommy's Cooker,--with a gastronomic rapture that a dinner at the Carlton, the Ritz or the Savoy had previously failed to evoke.
Also, John Hazel had learned to hold the Battalion in limitless esteem; to regard the Regiment he had once despised as a mob of clerks, shop-boys and warehousemen--as the pick and pride of the Territorial Forces, and to graft on the slang of the modern Londoner, the polyglottic argot of the War.
Finally, and subsequently to Beryl's defection, he had reconstituted his standard of the Ideal in Woman, after what fashion and under what circumstances may now be set forth.
III
In the April of 1915, east of "that mad place called Ypres,"--a city of ruinous white towers reddened by an angry sunrise, lying ahead and to the left. A grim grey road leading from Divisional Headquarters to the battle-front, a double crescent of blown-in trenches ankle-deep in water, and bottomed with West Flanders mud. A road fanged with the stumps of trees shattered by H.E. and scarred by iron-shod wheels; pitted with shell-holes, and generally knee-deep in sludge of an adhesive character. A road along which progressed, under cover of the darkness, long columns of men, guns and Army-lorries; A.S.C. cars and motor-cycles carrying ammunition, supplies, mails and despatches for the advanced trenches; unless German star-shell or searchlights made it daylight, when traffic stopped dead, to move on when the menace passed.
Day found the road deserted as a rule, though German hate played on it regularly at intervals, with rifle and machine-guns and clouds of poison-gas. But sometimes under the leaden scowl of a rainy day, or the brassy glare of a sunny one, the road displayed a double moving line. This, when one of the myriad little wars, presently to be merged in Warfare,--demanded the attainment of some objective infinitely insignificant,--at the cost of some great sacrifice of human life.
On this particular April day, what time the British line from Ypres southwards was strengthened--in default of missing sandbags--with tins of uneatable jam of the apple-blackberry brand, and equally bad corned-beef: columns of muddy Londoners and Scotsmen with helmets and gas-respirators at the alert, were going up to Support-trenches. Afoot now,--having disembarked at a marked danger-point from the grey Army lorries--or green and yellow motor 'buses that had carried many of the Londoners to business in the days that seemed so dim and so far off. And as they went, though shrapnel burst about them, and High Explosive dug new craters beside old, and wiped out a platoon or so in doing it,--they sang to the accompaniment of mouth-organs; "_Keep the Home Fires Burning_," or "_Piccadilly_," or "_I Love a Lassie_," or excruciatingly-parodied hymns.
But the troops that were coming down from the fighting-line to rest-billets (mostly Canadians, red with rust, muddy to the eyebrows, marching raggedly in companies or jumbled up anyhow in the lorries), did not sing "_The Maple Leaf_" or "_My Little Grey Home_." Many wore First Aid bandages smeared with iodine; nine out of ten hobbled and coughed and vomited; and the mucus they wrenched from their labouring lungs was yellow and mingled not infrequently with blood. It was their first experience of a German gas-attack, and the horror of the strange and evil thing was upon them; and the reek of it was in their clothes and breath. Yet those who could--called out cheerfully to recognised friends; or grinned with their cracked and swollen mouths in answer to cheery hails. Their reddened eyes of sleeplessness stared out of haggard, unshaved faces, and their muddy shoulders humped under their muddy kit-packs, as though the muddy ground were drawing them to lie down upon it and sleep. And every now and then one would falter in his stride and smile stupidly; and heavily and soggily collapse in the gluey mush. A comrade who had energy enough left in him would kick and shake such a sleeper into temporary wakefulness; or one of the men who perched beside the drivers of the Hospital cars and ambulances,--R.A.M.C. orderlies or Red Cross bearers, would play the Samaritan thus, when the subject would stagger on, to fall again. Or room would be made for him in some omnibus or lorry where lightly-wounded or badly-gassed men were packed like bloaters in a barrel, and so the game went on.
Private John Hazel, crunching a muddy apple, trudged through the sticky mud as part of a somewhat straggling route-column representing the Fourth Battalion of the Fenchurch Street Regiment. One novel sensation had that morning thrilled the Terriers, stale with the deadly boredom of life in the rear lines. Necks were yet being twisted to get the last of it, and joyous comments tossed it from tongue to tongue. A cow,--hidden away for months by an ancient peasant in some subterranean stable in No Man's Land (whence her milk had been retailed at the price of Veuve Cliquot to the Canadians in the firing-line)--was being brought down to the rear by her proprietor; her late lodgings having been discovered and thoroughly spring-cleaned by a German H.E. shell....
"Moi hoi, if it be-ant a cow!" said a voice that had the roll and twang of Berkshire. "Coosh-coosh, Snowdrop, ole beauty!"
"My Gawd, she don't 'arf look natural, do 'er?" came from a Cockney tongue....
Not a human unit of all those trudging columns but had slewed his head to stare at Crummy, and sniff the homely odours of hay and farmyard-muck that shook from her muddy flanks as she kloop-klooped by. What though she had raw patches of mange upon her withers--testifying to the poorness of her diet and the closeness of her quarters! To men who had not seen a cow, pig, cock or hen for weeks, moving upon that devastated country of once prosperous farms, productive fields, fruitful orchards, and stately rural mansions, the sight was comforting; bringing reassurance that in regions as yet unscathed by the frightfulness of War, yet were to be found quiet and order, laughter and pleasure, savoury food, sleep in one's own bed, and the humble, harmless things of everyday use, that make life sweet by their very homeliness.
Another sensation was in store that day, and though the novelty of it wore off with retrospection, John Hazel's keen enjoyment of the episode never blunted....