The hero protested faintly:
‘The R.A.S.C.’
Tietjens said kindly:
‘Yes. Yes. The Royal Army Service Corps.’
Obviously his mind until now had regarded his wife’s ‘Paddington’ as the definite farewell between his life and hers… . He had imagined her, like Eurydice, tall, but faint and pale, sinking back into the shades… . ‘Che faro senz’ Eurydice? …’ he hummed. Absurd! And of course it might have been only the maid that had spoken… . She too had a remarkably clear voice. So that the mystic word ‘Paddington’ might perfectly well be no symbol at all, and Mrs. Sylvia Tietjens, far from being faint and pale, might perfectly well be playing the very devil with half the general officers commanding in chief from Whitehall to Alaska.
Mackenzie – he was like a damned clerk – was transferring the rhymes that he had no doubt at last found, onto another sheet of paper. Probably he had a round, copy-book hand. Positively, his tongue followed his pen round, inside his lips. These were what His Majesty’s regular officers of to-day were. Good God! A damned intelligent, dark-looking fellow. Of the type that is starved in its youth and takes all the scholarships that the board schools have to offer. Eyes too big and black. Like a Malay’s… . Any blasted member of any subject race.
The A.S.C. fellow had been talking positively about horses. He had offered his services in order to study the variation of pink-eye that was decimating all the service horses in the lines. He had been a professor – positively a professor – in some farriery college or other. Tietjens said that, in that case, he ought to be in the A.V.C. – the Royal Army Veterinary Corps perhaps it was. The old man said he didn’t know. He imagined that the R.A.S.C. had wanted his service for their own horses… .
Tietjens said:
‘I’ll tell you what to do, Lieutenant Hitchcock… . For, damn it, you’re a stout fellow… .’ The poor old fellow, pushing out at that age from the cloisters of some provincial university … He certainly did not look a horsy sportsman… .
The old lieutenant said:
‘Hotchkiss …’ And Tietjens exclaimed:
‘Of course it’s Hotchkiss … I’ve seen your name signing a testimonial to Pigg’s Horse Embrocation… . Then if you don’t want to take this draft up the line … Though I’d advise you to … It’s merely a Cook’s Tour to Hazebrouck … No, Bailleul … And the sergeant-major will march the men for you … And you will have been in the First Army Lines and able to tell all your friends you’ve been on active service at the real front… .’
His mind said to himself while his words went on …
‘Then, good God, if Sylvia is actively paying attention to my career I shall be the laughing-stock of the whole army. I was thinking that ten minutes ago! … What’s to be done? What in God’s name is to be done?’ A black crape veil seemed to drop across his vision… . Liver …
Lieutenant Hotchkiss said with dignity:
‘I’m going to the front. I’m going to the real front. I was passed AI this morning. I am going to study the blood reactions of the service-horse under fire.’
‘Well, you’re a damn good chap,’ Tietjens said. There was nothing to be done. The amazing activities of which Sylvia would be capable were just the thing to send laughter raging like fire through a cachinnating army. She could not, thank God, get into France: to that place. But she could make scandals in the papers that every Tommie read. There was no game of which she was not capable. That sort of pursuit was called ‘pulling the strings of shower-baths’ in her circle of friends. Nothing. Nothing to be done… . The beastly hurricane lamp was smoking.
‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ he said to Lieutenant Hotchkiss.
Mackenzie had tossed his sheet of rhymes under his nose. Tietjens read: Death, moil, coil, breath … Saith – ‘The dirty Cockney!’ Oil, soil, wraith …
‘I’d be blowed,’ Mackenzie said with a vicious grin, ‘if I was going to give you rhymes you had suggested yourself …’
The officer said:
‘I don’t of course want to be a nuisance if you’re busy.’
‘It’s no nuisance,’ Tietjens said. ‘It’s what we’re for. But I’d suggest that now and then you say “sir” to the officer commanding your unit. It sounds well before the men… . Now you go to No. XVI I.B.D. Mess ante-room … the place where they’ve got the broken bagatelle-table… .’
The voice of Sergeant-Major Cowley exclaimed tranquilly from outside:
‘Fall in now. Men who’ve got their ring papers and identity discs – three of them – on the left. Men who haven’t, on the right. Any man who has not been able to draw his blankets tell Colour-Sergeant Morgan. Don’t forget. You won’t get any, where you’re going. Any man who hasn’t made his will in his Soldier’s Small Book or elsewhere and wants to, to consult Captain Tietjens. Any man who wants to draw money, ask Captain Mackenzie. Any R.C. who wants to go to confession after he has got his papers signed can find the R.C. padre in the fourth hut from the left in the Main Line from here… . And damn kind it is of his reverence to put himself out for a set of damn blinking mustard-faced red herrings like you who can’t keep from running away to the first baby’s bonfire you sees. You’ll be running the other way before you’re a week older, though what good they as asks for you thinks you’ll be out there God knows. You look like a squad of infants’ companions from a Wesleyan Sunday school. That’s what you look like and, thank God, we’ve got a Navy.’
Under cover of his voice Tietjens had been writing:
‘Now we affront the grinning chops of Death,’ and saying to Lieutenant Hotchkiss: ‘In the I.B.D. ante-room you’ll find any number of dirty little squits of Glamorganshires drinking themselves blind over La Vie Parisienne… . Ask any one of them you like… .’ He wrote:
‘And in between our carcass and the moil
Of marts and cities, toil and moil and coil… .’
‘You think this difficult!’ he said to Mackenzie. ‘Why, you’ve written a whole undertaker’s mortuary ode in the rhymes alone,’ and went on to Hotchkiss: ‘Ask anyone you like as long as he’s a P.B. officer… . Do you know what P.B. means? No, not Poor B — y, Permanent Base. Unfit … If he’d like to take a draft to Bailleul.’
The hut was filling with devious, slow, ungainly men in yellow-brown. Their feet shuffled desultorily; they lumped dull canvas bags along the floor and held in unliterary hands small open books that they dropped from time to time. From outside came a continuing, swelling and descending chant of voices; at times it would seem to be all one laugh, at times one menace, then the motives mingled fugally, like the sea on a beach of large stones. It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how shut in on oneself one was in this life… . He sat scribbling fast: ‘Old Spectre blows a cold protecting breath … Vanity of vanities, the preacher saith … No more parades, Not any more, no oil …’ He was telling Hotchkiss, who was obviously shy of approaching the Glamorganshires in their ante-room … ‘Unambergris’d our limbs in the naked soil …’ that he did not suppose any P.B. officer would object. They would go on a beanfeast up into the giddy line in a first-class carriage and get draft leave and command pay too, probably … ‘No funeral struments cast before our wraiths …’ If any fellow does object, you just send his name to me and I will damn well shove it into extra orders… .
The advanced wave of the brown tide of men was already at his feet. The extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives … A fellow was beside him … Private Logan, formerly, of all queer things for a Canadian private, a trooper of the Inniskillings; owner, of all queer things, of a milk-walk or a dairy farm, outside Sydney, which is in Australia. A man of sentimental complications, jauntiness as became an Inniskilling, a Cockney accent such as ornaments the inhabitants of Sydney, and a complete distrust of lawyers. On the other hand, with the completest trust in Tietjens. Over his shoulder – he was blond, upright, with his numerals shining like gold, looked a lumpish, café-au-lait, eagle-nosed countenance: a half-caste memb
er of one of the Six Nations, who had been a doctor’s errand boy in Quebec… . He had his troubles, but was difficult to understand. Behind him, very black-avised with a high colour, truculent eyes, and an Irish accent, was a graduate of McGill University who had been a teacher of languages in Tokyo and had some sort of claim against the Japanese Government… . And faces, two and two, in a coil round the hut … like dust, like a cloud of dust that would approach and overwhelm a landscape; every one with preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you personally with them … Brown dust… .
He kept the Inniskilling waiting while he scribbled the rapid sestet to his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what it all meant. Of course the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it, there was no room for swank, typified by expensive funerals. As you might say: No flowers by compulsion … No more parades! … He had also to explain, while he did it, to the heroic veterinary sexagenarian that he need not feel shy about going into the Glamorganshire Mess on a man-catching expedition. The Glamorganshires were bound to lend him, Tietjens, P.B. officers if they had not got other jobs. Lieutenant Hotchkiss could speak to Colonel Johnson, whom he would find in the mess and quite good-natured over his dinner. A pleasant and sympathetic old gentleman who would appreciate Hotchkiss’s desire not to go superfluously into the line. Hotchkiss could offer to take a look at the colonel’s charger: a Hun horse, captured on the Marne and called Schomburg, that was off its feed… . He added: ‘But don’t do anything professional to Schomburg. I ride him myself!’
He threw his sonnet across to Mackenzie, who with a background of huddled khaki limbs and anxious faces was himself anxiously counting out French currency notes and dubious-looking tokens… . What the deuce did men want to draw money – sometimes quite large sums of money, the Canadians being paid in dollars converted into local coins – when in an hour or so they would be going up? But they always did and their accounts were always in an incredibly entangled state. Mackenzie might well look worried. As like as not he might find himself a fiver or more down at the end of the evening for unauthorised payments. If he had only his pay and an extravagant wife to keep, that might well put the wind up him. But that was his funeral. He told Lieutenant Hotchkiss to come and have a chat with him in his hut, the one next the mess. About horses. He knew a little about horse-illnesses himself. Only empirically, of course.
Mackenzie was looking at his watch.
‘You took two minutes and eleven seconds,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it for granted it’s a sonnet … I have not read it because I can’t turn it into Latin here … I haven’t got your knack of doing eleven things at once… .’
A man with a worried face, encumbered by a bundle and a small book, was studying figures at Mackenzie’s elbow. He interrupted Mackenzie in a high American voice to say that he had never drawn fourteen dollars seventy-five cents in Thrasna Barracks, Aldershot.
Mackenzie said to Tietjens:
‘You understand. I have not read your sonnet. I shall turn it into Latin in the mess, in the time stipulated. I don’t want you to think I’ve read it and taken time to think about it.’
The man beside him said:
‘When I went to the Canadian Agent, Strand, London, his office was shut up …’
Mackenzie said with white fury:
‘How much service have you got? Don’t you know better than to interrupt an officer when he is talking? You must settle your own figures with your own confounded Colonial paymaster. I’ve sixteen dollars thirty cents here for you. Will you take them or leave them?’
Tietjens said:
‘I know that man’s case. Turn him over to me. It isn’t complicated. He’s got his paymaster’s cheque, but doesn’t know how to cash it and of course they won’t give him another… .’
The man with slow, broad, brown features looked from one to the other officer’s face and back again with a keen black-eyed scrutiny as if he were looking into a wind and dazed by the light. He began a long story of how he owed Fat-Eared Bill fifty dollars lost at House. He was perhaps half-Chinese, half-Finn. He continued to talk, being in a state of great anxiety about his money. Tietjens addressed himself to the cases of the Sydney Inniskilling ex-trooper and the McGill graduate who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese Educational Ministry. It made altogether a complicated effect. ‘You would say,’ Tietjens said to himself, ‘that, all together, it ought to be enough to take my mind up.’
The upright trooper had a very complicated sentimental history. It was difficult to advise him before his fellows. He, however, felt no diffidence. He discussed the points of the girl called Rosie whom he had followed from Sydney to British Columbia, of the girl called Gwen with whom he had taken up in Aberystwyth, of the woman called Mrs. Hosier with whom he had lived maritally, on a sleeping-out pass, at Berwick St. James, near Salisbury Plain. Through the continuing voice of the half-caste Chinaman he discussed them with a large tolerance, explaining that he wanted them all to have a bit, as a souvenir, if he happened to stop one out there. Tietjens handed him the draft of a will he had had written out for him, asked him to read it attentively and copy it with his own hand into his soldier’s small book. Then Tietjens would witness it for him. He said:
‘Do you think this will make my old woman in Sydney part? I guess it won’t. She’s a sticker, sir. A regular July bur, God bless her.’ The McGill graduate was beginning already to introduce a further complication into his story of complications with the Japanese Government. It appeared that in addition to his scholastic performances he had invested a little money in a mineral water spring near Kobe, the water, bottled, being exported to San Francisco. Apparently his company had been indulging in irregularities according to Japanese law, but a pure French Canadian, who had experienced some difficulties in obtaining his baptismal certificate from a mission somewhere in the direction of the Klondike, was allowed by Tietjens to interrupt the story of the graduate; and several men without complications, but anxious to get their papers signed so as to write last letters home before the draft moved, overflowed across Tietjens’ table.
The tobacco smoke from the pipes of the N.C.O.s at the other end of the room hung, opalescent, beneath the wire cages of the brilliant hurricane lamps hung over each table; buttons and minerals gleamed in the air that the universal khaki tinge of the limbs seemed to turn brown, as if into a gas of dust. Nasal voices, throat voices, drawling voices, melted into a rustle so that the occasional high, sing-song profanity of a Welsh N.C.O.: Why the hell haffn’t you got your 124? Why the — hell haffn’t you got your 124? Don’t you know you haff to haff your bleedin’ 124s? seemed to wail tragically through a silence… . The evening wore on and on. It astounded Tietjens, looking at one time at his watch, to discover that it was only 21 hrs. 19. He seemed to have been thinking drowsily of his own affairs for ten hours… . For, in the end, these were his own affairs… . Money, women, testamentary bothers. Each of these complications from over the Atlantic and round the world were his own troubles: a world in labour; an army being moved off in the night. Shoved off. Anyhow. And over the top. A lateral section of the world… .
He had happened to glance at the medical history of a man beside him and noticed that he had been described as C1… . It was obviously a slip of the pen on the part of the Medical Board, or one of their orderlies. He had written C instead of A. The man was Pte. 197394 Thomas Johnson, a shining-faced lump of beef, an agricultural odd jobman from British Columbia where he had worked on the immense estates of Sylvia Tietjens’ portentous ducal second cousin Rugeley. It was a double annoyance. Tietjens had not wanted to be reminded of his wife’s second cousin, because he had not wanted to be reminded of his wife. He had determined to give his thoughts a field day on that subject when he got warm into his fleabag in his hut that smelt of paraffin whilst the canvas walls crackled with frost and the moon shone… . He would think of Sylvia beneath the moon. He was determined not to now! But 197394 Pte. Johnson, Thomas, was otherwise a
nuisance and Tietjens cursed himself for having glanced at the man’s medical history. If this preposterous yokel was C3 he could not go on a draft … C1 rather! It was all the same. That would mean finding another man to make up the strength and that would drive Sergeant-Major Cowley out of his mind. He looked up towards the ingenuous, protruding, shining, liquid, bottle-blue eyes of Thomas Johnson… . The fellow had never had an illness. He could not have had an illness – except from a surfeit of cold, fat, boiled pork – and for that you would give him a horse’s blue ball and drench which, ten to one, would not remove the cause of the belly-ache… .
His eyes met the non-committal glance of a dark, gentlemanly thin fellow with a strikingly scarlet hat-band, a lot of gilt about his khaki and little strips of steel chain-armour on his shoulders… . Levin … Colonel Levin, G.S.O. II, or something, attached to General Lord Edward Campion… . How the hell did fellows get into these intimacies of commanders of units and their men? Swimming in like fishes into the brown air of a tank and there at your elbow – spies! … The men had all been called to attention and stood like gasping codfish. The ever-watchful Sergeant-Major Cowley had drifted to his, Tietjens’, elbow. You protect your orfcers from the gawdy Staff as you protect your infant daughters in lambswool from draughts. The dark, bright, cheerful staffwallah said with a slight lisp:
‘Busy, I see.’ He might have been standing there for a century and have a century of the battalion headquarters’ time to waste like that. ‘What draft is this?’
Sergeant-Major Cowley, always ready in case his orfcer should not know the name of his unit or his own name, said:
‘No. 16 I.B.D. Canadian First Division Casual Number Four Draft, sir.’
Colonel Levin let air lispingly out between his teeth.
‘No. 16 Draft not off yet … Dear, dear! Dear, dear! … We shall be strafed to hell by First Army… .’ He used the word hell as if he had first wrapped it in eau-de-Cologned cotton-wadding.