The Balliols (50 page)

“Would I? I might have. I think I should have. Possibly. Oh, I don't know. Why look backwards? It's as foolish as looking forward. We've this minute to live in. That's all we know. He was right. We ought to live like mayflies, in a mayfly world.”

She looked at him with that oddly wistful look that he was to remember afterwards.

It was on July the first that she said that, across a lunch-table. As he came out into a sunlit Piccadilly, the paper-boys were shouting the news of a great advance, across a thirty-five mile battle-front.

So it had come at last, then, the big push for which ever since Loos the higher commands had been preparing. It was appropriate that it should have come on such a day. It struck the right note of finality. This business was settled, and soon would be that other one. Already as likely as not his division would have been hurried south. He would return to the bustle of last minute preparations. There would be action, a curtain falling on a curtain. And afterwards a new world to be adjusted. A world where there was no “her” to dream about; where the half of his company would have been shot to pieces; where everything would have to be rebuilt. There would be time then to wonder what kind of future he must build himself. In the meantime there was battle waiting; and the last three days of a leave that had been divided completely into two divisions: the hours he had spent with Joyce, and those that he had spent with his family, and among his friends. So that in retrospect it seemed to him that there had been two leaves, not one; distinct, separate, consecutive. The story of his foiled love-affair and the resumed life of Ilex.

With his father he spent more time than sons did usually on their return from France in talks about the business, about their plans for the future; about the war; conducted on that note of impersonal intimacy that exists between fellow members of a club who speak openly with one another, welcome each other generously, sit at the same table when they are without a guest, consider themselves “bosom friends”; yet were one of them to take a two-year trip to the jungles of the Amazon the other would be unlikely to notice his absence from their club. Hugh and his father enjoyed each other's company, but there was no question of their being indispensable to one another.

One afternoon Hugh motored down to Tavenham. Victor had been slightly wounded in the shoulder. He was on sick leave. He did not expect to be sent back to France before the autumn. Ruth in the summer of her recovered health wore a beauty that he had never before suspected. She was transfigured by happiness and fulfilment. Victor and she were living in the glow of a second honeymoon. Hugh's nephew, a healthy, pop-eyed object was just becoming aware that it had fingers. Lying on its back it would play contentedly with them before its face, during the wakeful hours of the afternoon. He, anyhow, would be spared his uncle's and his father's fate.

Hugh had the same feeling about Helen, when he took her to the Zoo, watching her excited absorption in the squirrel house. She was six years old when the war had started. She would have no clear memories of pre-war England. She would never know what it was to handle a gold half-sovereign. Her early memories would be of war-time London. The world which had been destroyed in August 1914 would not be a personal memory, but a period in history. Between the men and women of his generation and of hers there would be a gulf that Francis's generation would find it hard to bridge. Francis had fallen between two worlds. He could remember pre-war England, his early ideas had been drawn from the conditions that existed then. He had been educated at the start, to fill a place in a world that would continue the traditions of pre-war England. His education was like the changing of horses in mid-stream. He was planted firmly in neither world. Hugh was not certain that after the war the business of self-adjustment would not be more difficult for him than for any of them.

The school authorities had allowed Francis one night in London in celebration of his brother's leave. Francis was at the typical fifteeen-year-old stage when one day a boy looks nearly a man, the next a grubby street urchin. He was incapable of sustained tidiness. He was able to smarten himself for one appearance; but within an hour or so his hair would be rumpled, or his collar dirty, his tie askew, his boots muddied, one trouser leg turned up, the other down; the collar of his coat rucked up. He was at the stage when a boy's public appearances do not confer credit on a parent. He was, however, alert, animated, talkative, with none of the sulky secretiveness that had made him as a child difficult and uncomfortable to approach. He was on the contrary definitely and outspokenly rebellious. He found his elder brother a fitting audience.

“Now tell me,” he would say, “how often did the Corps parade in your time?”

“Once a week.”

“Did you have section drill?”

“Hardly ever; an occasional one before a competition.”

“And what about P.T.?”

“There used to be an hour's P.T. a week, by forms.”

“There, that's what I tell them,” Francis expostulated. “Nowadays we have two parades a week. We have section drill twice a week. We have P.T. literally every morning before breakfast. Twenty minutes of it.”

“There's a war on.”

“Yes, I know. That's what they say every time they want us to do something we don't like. But it's such nonsense, and so illogical. We're told at one moment that the men who took commissions in 1914 straight from the public schools and universities were the perfect officer type; that they could walk straight from the cricket field to the parade ground. Well, if that's so, and I expect it is so, why can't they give us the same training as they gave you? What was good enough for you ought to be good enough for us. You didn't have to spend all your spare time on section drill and P.T. classes. Why should we?”

The indignation was so genuine and the argument so persuasive that Hugh declined to be lured into controversy.

“Everyone gets a bit hysterical in war-time. People want to do things even if they're not much use, just so that they can feel they're doing something. Schoolmasters who aren't at the war manage to calm their consciences by giving themselves a lot of trouble, supervising P.T. classes and section drill.”

“That may be all right for them. What about us?”

“Most of us are doing a good many things we don't much like just now.”

“I thought you'd say that. I'm so sick of having the war brought home to me.”

In spite of his rebellion he was making a very tolerable progress at the school. Balliol had been right in his prophecy that starting from scratch, released from scratch, released from the handicap of his blue cap education, he would amass prizes and promotion at an agreeable rate. He had already collected two war-savings certificates, and expected to be rewarded with at least one more at the end of the term. With dramatic pride he reserved this announcement for his mother's ears.

“I shall have a library by the time the war's over.”

Jane looked puzzled.

“After the war? I don't understand, my dear. Don't you get given your prizes when you win them?”

It was explained to her.

“We're given war-saving certificates instead of prizes, Mother. Or rather, the school authorities buy war-saving certificates with the prize money. When the war's over they'll sell the certificates and give us prizes.”

“That sounds a very sensible idea.”

The apathy with which she received the news of Francis's success
in contrast with the excitement she had displayed previously over his least achievement, typified for Hugh an odd change of manner in his mother.

“Is anything the matter?” he asked his father. “She seems quite different. She does not seem to be aware of what's going on around her. She only seems half here. Yet she looks very well, and happier really than I've ever seen her.”

“She's very busy now. That's made a difference. It's given her an occupation. It's taken her mind off things. Most women of our class are discontented because they haven't enough to do.”

He supposed that was the reason. But he could not help wondering whether his father, who had watched his mother day by day, was as conscious of the change in her as he, who after an interval of six months could compare the mother he found on his return with the mother he had said good-bye to.

“Yet she looks well. She looks happy. There can't be anything to worry over.”

Side by side, like trains running on parallel tracks, separate and distinct, his two leaves ran their way to the last rushed morning at Victoria: a day of blue sky and sunlight, with the air keen and fresh as he walked with his parents down the North End Road to the hill's foot; with the trees by the terrace scarcely moving; with the few dove-coloured clouds stationary against the arched backcloth of the sky; with the promise of a windless warmth; of the sea glass-like; with a haze of heat so that the white cliffs would be out of sight before the high column of Napoleon took shape above the clustered climbing houses. As the tube rushed into the dark tunnel below the hill, he craned his neck to catch a last glimpse of the low wide roof of Ilex. Then as the daylight was extinguished he spread out his
Times
. So the battle was continuing; the advance was continuing. It wouldn't be long before they had flung his division into it.

In every way this summer leave-taking was different from that bleak winter morning. There was no need for any impatient bullying of porters. He knew there would be room for him in the Pullman. He had arranged that the night before. If there was anyone he knew upon the train, he could wait till he was on the boat to find it out. There was no sense in buying a lot of papers. He would be fast asleep before they had passed Dulwich. There was nothing to be flustered over: nothing on his mind to prevent him standing in quiet talk beside his parents, till the guard's whistle blew, and the slamming of the doors started down the platform's length. No leave-taking could have been less like that other one.

Nor afterwards could anything have been less like. This time there was no long wait at Camières; no bother with R.T.O's. The blue-hatted captain at Boulogne had very precise instructions for all officers returning to recognized units from a leave. There was a night that he could spend in the officers' club, or some hotel or other if he preferred. At six” next morning a train would be leaving for the line. He had got to be on that. His time was his own till then. That evening after dinner he walked through the streets of
the upper town. Dusk was falling. Windows were tightly shuttered for fear of aircraft; lamps were dimmed, their tops painted so that no more than a cone of light was flung upon the pavement. There was hardly any traffic. Not only the sidewalks but the cobbled streets were crowded, with officers, with soldiers, with women who caught at the sleeve of the khaki tunics as they passed, flashing electric torches into their faces; with shabby down-at-heel civilians whispering the secrets of their sisters' charms. There was no longer any reason why Hugh should withhold himself as for six long months he had done. He might never again hear the sound of a woman's laughter. There was no reason now why he should stand back. But he shrugged his shoulders. A time would come for that; later, but not now. He turned back to the lower town, to the shipping that flanked the harbour's side, to the brasseries, and the kindly anodyne of wine.

Next morning he began the slow jolting journey to the line.

It was a different journey back, to a different landscape, to a part of France that was unscarred by warfare: a fertile well-tended countryside, with hayricks, windmills, cottages. Their camp was pitched in an open meadow, by a farm. Children ran along the fence, selling chocolates and cigarettes. The old madame at the farm had a liberal supply of eggs which she marketed at a fabulous profit with the manner of one who makes a present. There was nothing she would not do for the brave boys.

It was an ironically rural station for troops engaged upon their ten days of intensive training. For on that point there was no attempt at secrecy. Every man in the division knew that these long hours of parades, of marches, of manœuvres were a physical and military preparation for the Somme battlefields. The eminent divine who addressed them on their last Sunday before they were despatched south was in a valedictory mood.

A hot and sultry afternoon had followed upon a morning of dripping golden mists. The 305th brigade, formed up for Church Parade in hollow squares, listened listlessly to the repetition of the well-known prayers. Before the service there had been an inspection by the divisional general, and the only sentiments at all approaching the religious were those of the men who had come on parade with slightly dusty boots, of whom one half were thanking God that they had not had their names taken, while the others were cursing Him that they had.

At the words “Will you be seated, please?” a faint murmur of relief was whispered over the hollow square. The sermon at last, Gratefully the men stretched themselves on the warm, dry grass; lying on their backs, watching the fleecy clouds travel in leisurely procession across the sky.

Slowly the wind of words passed over them.

“You are fighting for all that is noblest in humanity; for all that distinguishes the human being from the beast. Your cause is glorious and just. Some of you will never return from the hazards that lie ahead of you. But in such a cause it is glorious for a man to lay down his life. With blessed banners you are entering the battle. You are fighting not only for your King, but for the King of Kings.…”

The flood of rhetoric flowed on. Hugh resting upon his elbow beside Frank Tallent scarcely listened. He was following the train of his own thoughts. To-morrow they were going south. There would be an end one way or the other to the suspense that ever since that last lunch had troubled him. That was settled. But till this was too, there could be no starting of a life afresh, no seeing of a way clear. There was an interval of marking time: a tense, nerve-strained interval.