If Kif was vaguely conscious that being one of a jolly party packing the present with its maximum content of joy could still leave him looking for he did not know what, gratitude to his hosts and his habitual lack of introspection smothered the thought. Had his leave been longer the soft wrappings that held him might have chafed and gratitude might not have been strong enough to melt entirely the intolerance of sentimental bonds that characterised him. As it was, Kif reached the end of his leave in a passion of gratitude to these people for their goodness to him. In his perambulations round town his mind had been exercised over the desire to give them something in return. He would have liked to give both Ann and her mother a souvenir, but the difficulty of finding the appropriate something confounded him. What did women like that like? Any ornament that he might buy, he decided, would almost certainly not find favour in their sight. He retired to the Park and analysed for the first time that outer shell that woman presents to the world. In the hour that he spent gaping at the passing show the only article that met with his approval was a pair of silver shoe-buckles. But he had never seen Ann wear anything like that. Perhaps they weren't in fashion. He took his problem to an A.B.C. shop and over sausage-and-mash considered it afresh. The crowd at the marble-topped tables were not productive of ideas in one devoid of them. It began to be borne in on him, however, that he lacked the courage to present even a box of chocolates in person—especially to Ann. He was shy about presenting anything at all to Ann, somehow. He wanted very badly to give her something, but she might not like it—the giving, not the gift. A remembrance of her cool matter-of-fact charm came to him and he saw in imagination the involuntary lift of her brows. He grew hot and decided that a sin of omission was better than one of commission.
He would make the gift to Mrs Barclay only. There couldn't be anything against that. He repaired forthwith to a Piccadilly fruit-shop and squandered what remained of his pay on a basket of fruit—Mrs Barclay did not eat sweets—with instructions that it was to be sent two days later, when he would be gone. He laid such stress on the condition that it was not to be delivered before the stipulated time that the amused assistant watched him out of the shop and speculated idly as to the nature of the intrigue.
Tim and Kif were due to leave in the early morning. Ann was to drive them to the station, but Mr and Mrs Barclay were to take leave of them at home. There had been dancing on the last evening, but the guests were gone. At the best of times a used and deserted room is a sorry spectacle: a desolation of crumpled cushions, cigarette-ends, and disarranged furniture; but when the end of the party is the imminent end of everything the situation is unbearable. Kif helped Ann to straighten things, patting cushions back to enticing plumpness with dreary assiduity, and then said good night. When he attempted to take leave of Mrs Barclay she said: 'I shall come in later and see that you have everything.' So Kif shook hands with his host, who was once more pompously shy, and left them.
As he sorted his kit on his knees on the amber carpet Ann came in and said: 'Anything I can do, Kif?' She was looking very lovely in some kind of green stuff that didn't shine Nothing shone about her but her eyes and her hair. He understood why she had come—partly because she was sorry for him, but mostly to give her parents their last while alone with Tim—and wished she would stay, but could think of nothing to keep her She picked up a pair of his socks, and finding an incipient hole sat down on the edge of the bed to darn it. Kif folded and arranged and placed and replaced while they dropped little friendly remarks into the quiet. Ann folded the socks carefully and saw them stowed in their appointed place. Then with the little gesture of her hand that was characteristic of her she said a smiling good night and was gone.
Alison succeeded her five minutes later. 'I' 's noa' such a big tin as I wid ha' liked,' she said. 'Sugar's gey hard t' come by. But I'll have some more to send you in a week or two.' She extended the tin of toffee to him in one hand while she put the hot-water bottle in its place with the other, and before he could thank her had taken her departure. 'I'll call you in good time in the morning,' she said at the door, 'so sleep sound.'
Lastly Mrs Barclay, her serene self, perhaps a little more deliberate than usual. Kif sat up in bed and attempted to give utterance to some of what he felt.
'I don't know how to thank you—' he began, but she laid a restraining hand on his arm.
'You are not to try,' she said. 'If you have been happy with us we are more than paid for the little we have done for you. To do something for some of you boys is surely nothing that we need thanks for. It would be our bounden duty if it were not our pleasure. So let us call it quits—with the debt decidedly on our side. And now, is there anything I can do for you?'
There wasn't.
'Well, I want you to promise me that if there is anything you want in France you will write to me and ask for it as if I were your—aunt, let us say. Is that a bargain?'
Kif promised, with his first faint definite feeling of rebellion against the gossamer toils of human obligation. She rose from the bed's edge. 'Au revoir, my dear boy,' she said. I hope you will come to us any time you feel inclined to. There will always be a bed for you, you know.' She bent over and kissed him lightly on the forehead. She made a remark about the electric lamp and went away.
Kif shoved a desperate palm against one eye which threatened to disgrace him, swore in a fierce whisper, and put out the light. But as he fell asleep, deep down beneath the level ache of parting and ending, were little sharp shoots of anticipation that he was going back.
It seemed to him that he had only just fallen asleep when Alison wakened him. Even washing did not dispel his lethargy. He stumbled into his uniform dazedly, devoid of thought, of emotion, almost of identity. He picked up his kit, switched off the light without a backward glance, and made his cautious way downstairs. Though everyone in the house was awake it was full of the subdued movement of those who are up betimes. He found Ann pouring out coffee and Tim helping out bacon and eggs. The glow of the shaded table light struck down on them, but through the uncurtained window the outline of roofs showed against a lightening sky. They ate in a business-like silence; light conversation in the dawn is usually a failure and on occasion may degenerate to hysteria. Neither the Barclays nor Kif had a hysterical side, and so no one attempted the ghastly farce of being amusing. Ann, who was once more in the V.A.D. uniform, since she was going on duty that morning, went out for the car and Tim went up to take leave of his parents. At the door Alison came to help Kif with his kit. As he shook hands with her she said: 'See and take care of yourself. And keep an eye on Mr Tim.'
As Ann let in the clutch both boys turned to wave to the dim white blur in the doorway that was Alison, and that typified to both of them all that they were leaving.
It was a damp morning and a wild red sky showed above the black housetops. The canon of the road was still in semi-darkness with the slender silver threads of the tram-lines stretching out into infinity. Nothing inhabited the world but a groaning dust-cart. Here and there a lighted window showed, a golden square in the flat neutrality of the house-fronts. It should have been a cheerful sight, a lighted window, but it was not. To Kif it was merely a suggestion of more early rising, a part of the complete joylessness of the hour. To Tim it spoke of the security and comfort he was leaving, the sweet safety of things dear and known. And Ann did not see them. She saw nothing but the long straight road stretching ahead of her—remorselessly. The mournful music of their horn floated out into the morning and was one with the red sky and the golden windows and the long dark road.
At the station the swarming khaki made it somehow easier. Bustle and the elbowing of a crowd covered up a little of the stark nakedness of fact; muddled a little their perceptions with thronging irrelevancies. Only at the last moment, as its way was, did the thing leap and tear them.
Kif's throat suddenly hurt him, so thar speech would not come. He faced Ann—Ann who looked as though she were going smiling to her death—fighting for words.
'You've been so decent to me! I can't thank—I—'
He shook her hand crushingly and left her with her brother.
CHAPTER NINE
Kif went back to summer conditions and a bereaved and indignant company. It was a new sensation to feel a soft carpet of dust underfoot after the ubiquitous mud. As for the company, it was indignant to the point of mutiny. The powers that be had given Murray Heaton a majority. This was looked on as a violation of their rights that nothing could condone. That Heaton had several times lately refused the honour did nothing to mitigate their bewilderment and wrath. And Heaton, who if his lot had been cast as a dustman would have been a prince of scavenging and who had been torn in two between love of his company and his ingrained ambition, understood the situation and went about his work at battalion headquarters looking, it was reported, like the sphinx with a toothache. That was some slight balm to the deserted company who rolled the information on their tongues and approved of it.
Jimmy also had gone up a step on the way to that proverbial baton; though Jimmy's highest ambition in life was the glory attached to a regimental sergeant-major. Than which, when one comes to consider it, there is no greater glory. A colonel certainly is nominally his superior. But a colonel is so far away as to be almost mythical in his power; no more terrifying than God. Whereas the R.S.M. is a very present and actual deity: omnipotent, awe-inspiring, omniscient. Oh, an R.S.M. every time! Jimmy had achieved his second stripe through a direct hit on the part of the enemy artillery. He was sorry about Fatty Roberts, and the other five who had gone west, of course. Fatty especially, as the company comedian, was a loss to be deplored. 'An' he occupied more than two men's place in a front line trench,' he said. 'What a goal-keeper he'd have made!' But it was all in the day's work, and things were 'cushier' now, he informed them, than the battalion had ever known them.
Apart from the change in weather conditions a change in scenery had also been vouchsafed to them. Instead of the utter desolation of the Flanders plains—a level sea of mud from sky to sky—they revelled in the gently rolling hills and little woods of Picardy; a kindly, pleasant land with the gold of the charlock over its fields and its white chalky roads rolling away into blue distances; a land in which war was an alien incongruity. At Loos, in the Salient, the earth was not the earth they knew; war had made it so much its own that the horror of it was one with the horror of war. But here death was an outrage. Billets had roses in the gardens, and up in the line grass waved and there were cornflowers, stitchwort, charlock and the red splashes of poppies. Always poppies! Who that knew Picardy in '16 will see poppies and not remember it? Larks sang in the hot skies. Aeroplanes droned in place of the absent bees. So when a man coughed and fell forward, and a little dark trickle ran along the earth like a dusty worm, minds waked to surprised protest against such an invasion.
Those were the days before the Somme country was a churned-up rubbish heap crowned with the broken skeletons of woods—those little fatal woods.
* * *
Kif sat on the bank with a writing-pad on his knee and a stub of indelible pencil stuck behind his ear and idly chucked little pebbles into the still water. The sun came through the high branches behind him and made little hot places on his back, and a movement of the warm air that was hardly a breeze retailed light fingers over his bare throat. The calm water curved away to his right, blue and green and silver, with its tall row of attendant poplars. On the opposite bank, further down, a few garments lately washed and stone-held now to dry made a little patch of motley. Somewhere an aeroplane droned and far away there was an intermittent murmur, but the world was very quiet. He looked again at the 'Dear Friend' that adorned in careful backhand letters the virgin page, and sighed lazily. He took the bit of pencil from behind his ear, cogitated a while, twisted the pencil propeller-wise once or twice between his fingers and put it back again. It was very warm.
He was seventeen to-day, but no one knew or remembered the fact but himself, and he was not at all inclined to sentimentalise over it. Retrospection he might indulge in at the prompting of such an event as an anniversary, but introspection never.
Footsteps came along the path, footsteps too light for army boots. Kif turned his head mechanically, and almost as mechanically smiled at the girl as she came. Her steps slowed to a stop. She hitched the basket she was carrying to a firmer position on her hip and regarded him with a grave little smile.
'You are lonlee,' she said. Her L's reminded him of Alison. His grin widened.
'I'm stuck,' he said. 'Come and help me write a letter.'
She moved slowly over the grass to him, her skirts falling away like water from each forward-swung limb. She was tall and broad-shouldered and firm-bodied, and her neck rose proudly to carry the round, dark head with its salient cheek and chin bones. She was clad in the age-old and ageless dress of the peasant—a fitting bodice and a full skirt, the latter part of the garment being several inches shorter than her grandmother's would have been, but still showing not more than a length of ankle.
'Stuck,' she repeated, ''ow stuck?'
'I don't know what to say.'
'Then it is not for me to say to you what to write.' She spoke English with a strong French accent, but very fluently.
'You might help a chap,' said Kif. The golden afternoon was made for dalliance.
'It is to your fiancée, perhaps, the letter?'
'Me? Gosh, no. I haven't got a girl.'
'Is it not to a lady that you write?' she asked, genuine surprise in her tone.
'Yes, it's to a lady, but she's old enough to be my mother.'
'Then write to her what you write to your own mother.'
'Haven't got one.'
'Ah!' She made a little sound of commiseration which embraced in its monosyllable the whole gamut of sympathy.
'It's too hot an afternoon to go carrying baskets that size about. Stay and help me.'
'I go to return the laundry of Monsieur le Colonel.'
'Well, but Monsieur le Colonel'—he mimicked her pronunciation—'won't need a clean shirt for another two hours at least. And this letter will have to be written by then.' He patted the grass beside him.
She laid down the basket and seated herself a foot or two away from him with the deliberate grace of a great lady and with complete unselfconsciousness.
'You speak awfully good English,' said Kif.
'Before the war English people come every year to the Chateau at my home, and the little girls I walk with them and they teach me English.'
'Where is your home?'
She nodded her head in the direction of the low murmur. 'Là-bas,' she said. 'It is not any more.'
'Rough luck!' said the boy to whom sticks and stones were nothing and the horizon everything.
'Eh bien,' she said, 'it is of no use to weep. I say like you, "Fat lot I care". The little Marjorie she say that continuellement.'
Kif gave a shout of laughter at the unexpected phrase in her charming accent, and she smiled in sympathy.
'You say that, no?'
'Very often,' Kif admitted. 'What is your name?'
'Marcelle Fleureau.'
'That's pretty. Mine is Archibald Vicar, but they call me Kif.'
'Keef,' she said, and Kif, who was looking at her cheerful brown eyes, saw nothing for a moment but the bare flagged interior of the kitchen at Tarn.
'You have been long in France?' she asked, and they talked the simple serious personalities of two simple beings while the pad lay neglected on the grass by his side and the sunlight grew more golden.
It was the redness of the light on the water that recalled her to the passing of time.
'Hélas!' she said. 'Le colonel!' and got hastily to her feet. Kif rose with her and took the basket.
'Ah, non, alors!' she protested, and held her hands out for it. But Kif carried it to the edge of the town.
'And you have not written your letter. That is too bad,' she said as she took it from him. 'I have hindered instead of helping.
'
'Help me to-morrow,' said Kif.
The battalion were out at rest, and for another fortnight Kif met Marcelle every evening, and every evening they walked by the water solemnly exchanging experiences and views of life through the long June sunsets. Kif was seized with an attack of diffidence that annoyed him. He had known her a week before he had summoned up courage enough to hold her hand. When he did she took the gesture so calmly that he was at a loss to know whether she had been expecting it, or whether she found it so unremarkable as not to be worthy of notice. She puzzled him and fascinated him. She was neither coy nor forthcoming, and she had none of the little airs that the girls of his acquaintance—with the exception of Ann—invariably used in the presence of men. And yet she was not in the least reminiscent of Ann. She was strangely self-sufficient, in the best sense of that mis-used term. She was deeply interested in Kif and all he had to tell her about himself, but she never wanted anything from him. Her unselfconsciousness hung like a veil between her and his eagerness. And Kif, who had made one of the bridge-head gatherings at Tarn and whose country upbringing had not inculcated in him any reverence for the female of the species, would go back to Barclay's twinkling eyes and Jimmy's pungent remarks wondering at himself, wondering about the girl, and swearing to himself to be bolder on the morrow. But on the morrow when face to face with her serenity the old diffidence drowned his resolution.