Part 37 (1/2)
The next day the two did not allow any interruption from them to interfere with Henriette's walk with Phil, but rather gave their blessing of smiles. Henriette set the direction, which was to the same hill as before; and the quiet scene of Hamps.h.i.+re valleys in September had an appeal to him that it had not had before the war. For a remote ancestor of his had fought for this as the later one had fought for his New England valleys.
”I feel the call of both this and France,” said Henriette. ”How can one think of painting!” Indeed, the portrait lay with its back against the wall at Mervaux. She had forgotten to bring it and had never been more dissatisfied with anything that she had done.
The spell of the art in which she really excelled was upon Phil; a deeper one than ever, owing to her more serious mood and the serious business before him, and it grew all the way from valley to hilltop and afterward in the leisurely descent. He spoke of his fortune. All he had was his pay as a second lieutenant.
”You have fortune enough,” she said, pausing and giving him a long, full glance; ”the fortune of war! It is the same that it always has been. The man goes away to fight!”
”And the woman waits!” he said.
”Yes, she waits!” she replied. Her smile was gentle and wonderful.
”Isn't that enough?” she asked, giving him her hand in a prolonged clasp and then turning her cheek for the pressure of his lips.
”Quite!” he agreed.
She liked the way of it much better than a speech in the moonlight.
Anything but that!
CHAPTER XXVI
A DIRECT HIT
The letter which the Marquis of Truckleford wrote to the general who was a peg above ”Duggy” gave Phil an early introduction to Flanders mud. An upstanding man the major to whom he reported. Fresh from the retreat of Mons and the fighting on the Aisne, he had been brought home to mould human clay into gunners. Then there was Jaffers, the regular sergeant, who regarded all recruits as children of his strict parenthood. Treating fledgling young officers with the respect due to their rank, he would whisper to them the right thing to do, the while he stood stiff at the salute.
”They will learn fast under fire,” said Jaffers. ”It's the blooming Boche sh.e.l.ls that'll teach them to be quick about their lessons!”
By the hundred of thousands untrained men were drilling and waiting for uniforms and rifles. Every time that a gun was finished or a sh.e.l.l came out of the shops, a thousand hungry hands seemed to reach across the Channel for it. Phil became one of a myriad of units in a tiny orbit; a cog in one of the many little organisations which were to be a.s.sembled into a whole. His technical training stood him in good stead. At first, the battery drilled with heirlooms of the Victorian epoch, which might be useful for home defence against a bow-and-arrow invasion.
Then, one day somebody in the War Office signed a paper which meant that four tubes of steel were to give all the horse-drill and men-drill of Phil's battery a proud reality. New four-inch howitzers could not be kept long away from France in those days. They were needed in the Ypres salient, where the British were holding on by their teeth with their faces to the Germans and their backs to Calais.
Phil's letters about his daily existence ought to have cured an old pair in Longfield of any idea that he was fighting the whole war himself according to the methods of the revolutionary ancestor; though his mother to this day has never been convinced to the contrary.
”Mud--and sh.e.l.ls at the Germans and from the Germans; and more mud, a great deal more mud, and more sh.e.l.ls at the Germans and more from the Germans,” was the way that he described it. ”I know that I shall never choose to spend a winter holiday in Flanders after the war is over,” he said.
The business of the gunners was to hide their ”hows” from prying German eyes by land and air and on telephone summons to pump destruction at some unseen point on the map, according to tabular calculations. At other times they might walk about in the mud or sit in the mud inside their dug-outs. It was enough to make a bold knight of olden story, who carried a Toledo or a Damascus blade, fall in a fit, as Phil remarked. Should the Germans locate them, a tornado of ”krumps”
descended on their position and they sat in the dug-outs considering whether or not everybody there would be ”done in,” as the English say, by a direct hit.
Then they moved to another place through the mud and built more dug-outs in the mud and began the daily grind over again, the vacancies caused by casualties being filled by recruits. But they had intervals in billets, where they crowded together in peasants' houses out of the zone of sh.e.l.l-fire, and smoked and read and waited for the mail, and expatiated on how it would seem to have a real bath in a real tub in a land where there was no mud.
Spring did come, though there were soldiers in the British army who thought that it never would. They could not comprehend how anything so pleasant could ever happen in war time in Flanders. It found Phil with a bit of white and blue ribbon on his blouse, which had been given for what other people, including a division commander, said was a gallant deed showing exceptional initiative. He was willing to accept their view as official, though he could not honestly agree with it. However, it was the source of enormous happiness in Longfield and Truckleford.
Once he had been back at Truckleford on leave for a week; and, after the mud, he did not mind if the vicar and Mrs. Sanford made as much fuss over him as if he were a real hero. Madame Ribot had returned to Paris. He had seen neither Henriette nor Helen, though Henriette wrote to him regularly. She was at one of the hospital bases not more than three hours' motor ride away; but if he had had ten motors he could not have gone to see her. Each tiny cog of the machine must keep in its place. None may go moving about at will.
He came to watch for Henriette's handwriting and the postmarks of Longfield as the two links with the world; and Truckleford had also become a part of his existence. Henriette seemed the adjutant of Lady Truckleford, devoted to her work. Her letters ever revived the thousand pictures of her from Truckleford to Mervaux and back again and the spirit of them was expressed in the words: ”The woman waits while the man goes out to fight.” Her references to Helen, who seemed to be at the same base but with another unit, were the only news he had of the other cousin except her drawings, which continued to appear in the weeklies. Helen, Henriette said, was still trying to get used to the sight of blood.
People were coming to know Helen's name. Phil wrote to her in congratulation and the answer he received hardly invited further correspondence. It was unlike her, uncousinly, and it troubled him.
She was very busy and very happy. She made a point of that--very happy. New memories of Mervaux occurred to him with the peculiar distinctness of details appearing, after what seemed a long lapse of time, with the freshness of sudden discovery in some recess of the mind. He was thinking that he should not mind sitting again for his portrait on the terrace, with Henriette smiling at her easel and Helen laughing over her cartoons of his proud career.