Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (602 page)

Those people, you know, with their private and official wires, found the war very terrible. They knew — which we were not allowed to — that at that moment a breathless, still drawn contest was going on, imminently: at that very moment. They said that if you listened hard enough you could hear the guns. I daresay that neither she nor that man were quite themselves.

Suddenly she said to him:

“Look here, Arthur... Pugh’s brother let
my
brother down. You know that better than any other man. But for Pugh’s brother my brother would have been now... Prime Minister! Anything! And am I going to let my brother’s children down? To-night! How could I dare to hope for my own son... To-night!”

She said to me:

“Have you any news of that boy?.... I feel my brother’s dead!”

Sir Arthur said:

“No! No!
No
!”

She said:

“I know it. They’d have let us know if he wasn’t. If he’d made the least visible or audible sign of life — they’d have let it through to us.
You
know!”

Sir Arthur said:

“But we’re at war.”

She said with a bitter contempt and such distress:

“Nonsense! Our class is never at war!”

Sir Arthur muttered:

“But your children!”

She said:

“Pugh may want his children to have titles. Very properly, no doubt! But I... I’m like my brother... Besides... the Second Coldstream Guards are at Givenchy now.”

He said, with a sudden, sharp ferocity:

“Don’t talk about that. I won’t stand it!”

She said to me:

“He’s got a telegram in his pocket that he won’t show me.”

As a matter of fact, that poor devil had in his pocket one of those accursed typed slips that were taken from official telephones in those days. It had been handed to him as he got into their car. It said that every officer but two of her son’s regiment had been killed in the last two days’ fighting. He showed me it, later, behind an enormous row of champagne bottles; the tears were pouring down his cheeks then, and he asked me, between sobs, if truly I believed in God. They were dancing to a gramophone just at our elbows and singing a low, sentimental waltz chorus. He just had not been able to go on without talking to someone....

But there, in that sacristy, he just had to be silent whilst she said two more things:

One was:

“Titles! Honours! What is Charles amongst now? You know. Tell me then!”

And suddenly she exclaimed:

“Kindness is the only thing that matters to-night. Or any night! Ever!”

At that moment my arm was gripped. I looked round into large shining glasses that reflected the incandescent lights. Miss Jeaffreson said:

“
My brother wants you to observe that she signed the register Marsden. This is a most important development!” My bewildered mind would not take in what she was talking about. In a corner behind innumerable surplices, mostly white, but some — I believe — scarlet, I found Mr. Jeaffreson. His eyes were really protruding behind his pince-nez. He said:

“This is a most important development for your sister-in-law.”

I said:

“What in God’s name is this all about?” I had — who in those days hadn’t! — a sense that black shapes hung over that building.

Mr. Jeaffreson said:

“Your sister-in-law signed the register ‘ Mary Elizabeth Marsden.’ Not Heimann! Marsden! And describes herself as Mary Elizabeth, daughter of the third Earl Marsden! And her aunt and that prominent statesman have witnessed the signature.”

I said: “For God’s sake don’t make a fuss about it here!” Miss Jeaffreson looked at me balefully: those two never forgave me.

“Do you imagine us to be capable of such a thing?” she exclaimed. And, as I did not answer, she went on, slowly: “To-morrow morning my brother writes to Mr. Pugh Gomme formally to announce Marie Elizabeth’s claim.”

I said:

“For God’s sake, not that! Think of all the mischief you are going to cause!”

She answered:

“My brother has
your
brother’s instructions. We allowed for this: we arranged it. And those two have fallen into the trap. We hold them! We hold them!”

You would have thought those people would have shown some decency with the shadow of death falling right across the land. But they didn’t.

CHAPTER IV

IT was not until the middle of March, 1915, that I again saw George Marsden. Then he was standing beside bed-boards, rather rigid, with boots relatively like coffins, blue-grey socks over the ends of green-brown, full trousers, a blueish-white shirt, and nothing more. He stood perfectly still, his head cropped and shining, his face clean-shaven and shining too. Without all his hair his eyes, which gazed straight before him, looked very large and dark. Beside him was laid out a waterproof sheet; on it his property — pairs of blue-grey socks, underclothing, brushes, a piece of soap. The room was very long, rigid and white; boards standing up in perspective along the walls, grey blankets in regimental dressing, men with their shirt-necks undone, coming in and going out with towels, their faces shining. An officer, sworded, with a black hatband and a superfluity of slacks bunching over his puttees, was standing in front of George Heimann, a pencil to his teeth, looking alternately at a large card in his hand and at the boy’s displayed property.

An N.C.O. led me up to this officer, saluted, turned to the right-about with a tremendous stamp, and went out. The officer continued to look at the property with engrossed eyes. He said to George, drily:

“Your toothbrush should be on the right and your button brush on the left. Don’t you know that, after six weeks’ service? Put them right.” The boy was down on his knees beside the waterproof sheet, as if he had fallen, and my mind said automatically: “Smart boy!”

The officer noticed me then, with the swift glance at the coat lapel and sleeve that one used in those days. He said to me:

“What do you want?” — and to the boy, who had fallen right back on to his heels: “Stand easy!” I said I was a connexion of Private Heimann’s. He told the boy to get his things together and dress. He said: “You can have a midnight pass if this officer wishes. You will report to the C.O. to-morrow at ten. Your button stick wants polishing.” He was a smallish man of thirty or so, with a keen, weaselish appearance and a little twisted moustache of a browny-yellow, that time from to time he bit. He said: “You want that boy to go out with you? I wish we weren’t going to lose him. He’s a damn smart boy. It’s a job to keep a company together these days.” He appeared resigned, and yet not resigned. He said that no doubt the army needed officers; but they ought to remember that their battalion needed men too. He added something that I did not understand, to the effect that you would think the evening papers wanted to eat them alive!

Then he said:

“You’re in the Orkneys, aren’t you? Not much time left out of your week-end leaves when you get here. I’ve a brother in your Second. Come and have a drink. I’ll have Heimann told to report at the Mess.” We were walking along the brick arcade beside the empty gravel and asphalte of the Square, in the grey London afternoon. I said:

“Who are you losing Private Heimann to?”

He handed me two slips of typewritten matter. He said:

“I thought you were getting him a commission. His people.”

I said they probably were; George had very gilded relatives and friends. I was only his sister’s brother-in-law. Resigned, and still unresigned, he commented:

“Ah, well! that would be so. He takes the good too good on earth to stay and leaves the bad too bad to take away. That’s what you learn in
our
company office. Look at that fellow. That’s what my company turns out nowadays.”

Those typewritten slips came both from Battalion Orderly Room to the Company Office of my friend. Peremptorily phrased documents. The one said that (a long number) Pte. Heimann G. was to report to C.O.’s Orderly Room at ten a in on the morrow for discharge, by order of the War Office (number of document) at the request of the Foreign Office (letter dated a fortnight before). The second slip ran:

“For the information of Special Dept., New Scotland Yard. (Letter of to-day’s date) you will ascertain whether (number again) Pte. Heimann G. is George Heimann, otherwise Pearson, late of....” (some street in Bloomsbury). This slip was scrawled across: “For your immediate compliance and report, please!”

When he saw I had read this, he said:

“You’d think the evening papers had got on to Bn. Headquarters!”

I said:

“Does that boy know he is going to be discharged?” He answered:

“I don’t know. You heard all I said to him. We’ve got, of course, his name and late address in the office. They are quite correct. But as to asking a man questions about his enlistment-name — I’d as soon ask him whether his mother was married to his father.”

That was part of the etiquette of the old regular army, when eighty per cent of the men enlisted under false names and it was indecent to ask a question. And that officer was quite incurious. The lives of too many men passed through his hands. He supposed it to be a case of the heir to the noble house of Pearson running away from home to enlist under a false name, and a titled papa wanting to shove him into the Foreign Office, and leaving the police to trace him. The police would naturally come along with enquiries a fortnight after he had been found by his family.

I didn’t enjoy his drink much, though, naturally, to be in their mess interested me. In the last three months I, too, had had the lives of many men passing through my hands, and the fortunes of George Heimann had come to occupy very little of my mind. There were so many men, all with tragic or with clumsy fortunes.

The first letter George had written me on arriving in London had reached me six weeks late. It had been posted to my rooms, re-addressed to a wrong battalion of my regiment, and finally had followed us down the coast that we were engaged in defending. It had seemed to read rather palely, telling me that he had arrived in London, was being questioned by the Foreign Office, had gone to Lady Ada’s house, where he had received a very bad shock. He wanted to consult me before going to see Marie Elizabeth, whose address he had got from Lady Ada. He supposed that I should not also shun him.

It had ended just like that, and of course I had not been pleased that it had come so late. I had written at once to his address in Bloomsbury, and had received a high-spirited reply. It gave his rank and regimental number, and was written from Chelsea Barracks. He said he felt fine after not having been outside a German parlour in seven months. And he ended up:

“Pray, Sir, let us give the ‘Marsden Case’ a miss till the end of the War. The Germans have, anyhow, got all my father’s papers. I want to tell you all about that. My sister resented bitterly my informing her that I was joining up, so I have not told her where I am. I feel sure she would move heaven and earth to get me out.” He added in a postscript that he supposed I knew that his poor father had committed suicide.

I found that letter the other day, mildewed in the pillow flap of my valise, and when I re-read it I remembered powerfully that, when those words first came to my eyes, I was standing in a corrugated iron hut, in the perpetual twilight of the North-east coast, with the wind blowing so through the walls that the illustrated papers, all damp as they were, were flying from the bamboo card tables on to the cokernut matting floors. And I remember thinking, with a sudden mental flash, that at one time I should not have been astonished if George himself had committed suicide. He seemed, however, to be in his real right place at last. I had my own work to do, and he rather dropped out of my mind. And we were then
too
overworked.

So it might have been the mere return of weariness, but the words “otherwise Pearson” from those typewritten sheets, stuck out in my mind. It seemed to me that the Civil Police could only have made that enquiry at the demand of Mr. Podd or someone of that sort; and it would be a pretty rotten business if they deprived His Majesty’s Foot Guards of so smart a recruit as George Heimann on such a pretext. One felt like that, also, in those days. On the other hand, there was the mysterious request for his discharge from the Foreign Office.

I tried, cautiously, to get pointers out of that weasel-like officer at my side. But he was too tremendously indignant with the
Evening Paper
— the excitable journal that George had sued — to take any interest in George. It appeared that that patriotic print, in the course of finding treachery in high places, imagined itself to have found a German Spy, well known to its representatives, actually in the mess of one of the Guards’ Battalions. So that reporters hung about outside the very barrack gates and the
Evening Paper
was demanding that all the Guards’ Battalions should be paraded before its two feminine representatives so that they might identify this enemy agent in the holy of holies of the British Army. That seemed to me to be so absurd that I hardly paid attention to my friend. He, however, took it very seriously, as I gathered did most of his regimental brothers in arms. He kept on explaining to me — as if it were necessary — how impossible it would be to parade a battalion in front of two women; and three other officers in that historic room were engaged in composing a letter in which they explained the same thing to the conductors of that journal and to the public in general. They seemed to be singularly fond of stock phrases. It was curious to hear them. A mess waiter told me at last that an orderly was waiting for me.

George Heimann, the tall, thin Guardsman, his buttons and numerals shining like gold, his thin legs stalking over the asphalt of the Square, behaved for five minutes like a young dog that you take out for a run after a long day in the house. He behaved like that, mentally of course, and with shining eyes, bending slightly to say, near my ear, but looking for all the world like an accomplished sergeant whispering words of command to an instructed superior in rank:

“You divine old fellow. You’re my brother in-law! I beg you, sir, for leave to speak. I’m most dreadfully grateful to you. I went almost out of my mind when Lady Ada told me about that letter the Jeaffresons wrote to her husband. I’m going to tell you all about the Huns. There’s our Adjutant. The company officer is putting my name forward for lance-stripe unpaid; so I may be in the corporals’ mess. After six weeks. Not bad..

He went on like that, rejoicing in his strength until we reached the archway. And a few yards from the gate he had a little car of his own, waiting in charge of a civilian. He said:

“It’s all right. I shall look like your orderly-chauffeur.” He added, shyly: “I always pick Clarice up for dinner and take her to the theatre. It’s only a two-seater, but we can squash in if you’ll come too. We’ve got four hours to talk in.”

We reached my rooms at half-past two. It was, I remember, a Saturday, and George’s Clarice had a matinée; that accounted for his freedom. George’s battalion was so madly busy at that time that the colonel transacted small business, like interviewing men for discharge, even on Sunday mornings. I was up to attend a course — an educational course — at Hounslow; I think it had to do with machine guns; so I expected to be in town for a week or two.

Whilst George was finding a garage for his car I rang up that fellow Carstones at the Foreign Office. He said:

“Hullo, you military! Always swaggering about unemployed. I shall be at work here till midnight.”

I said:

“It’s about George Heimann!”

The “Oh!” that he gave was one of perturbation. I said:

“Why the hell have you people got him out of the Guards without even telling him?”

He said: “Look here. I’m desperately busy. Desperately! Come and have breakfast with me to-morrow in the Boltons.”

I said:

“Is it you people that have put Scotland Yard on to him?”

He exclaimed:

“No! Oh, damn! Have
they
— I could hear him saying something exasperatedly to someone who must have been beside him. He began again to me:

“Sir Arthur, of course, got his discharge. Intending to procure a commission for him. But there’s a hitch. You don’t read the
Evening Paper
?....”

A sinister impression, rather of the imbecility of the whole of humanity than of anything else, made me simply not answer that fellow, though he kept on uttering ghostly “Hello’s!” Then I heard the click of my latch: I had lent George my key. I knew that fellow was sorry. I said: “I’ll come and see you to-morrow morning. When?” He said:

“I’m dreadfully sorry. We seem to have made a muddle of it!”