Men, Women and Guns Part 22

PART TWO

THE LAND OF TOPSY TURVY

CHAPTER I

THE GREY HOUSE

You come on it unexpectedly, round a little spur in the side of the valley, which screens it from view. It stands below you as you first see it, not a big house, not a little one, but just comfortable. It seems in keeping with the gardens, the tennis courts, the orchards which lie around it in a hap-hazard sort of manner, as if they had just grown there years and years ago and had been too lazy to move ever since.

Peace is the keynote of the whole picture--the peace and contentment of sleepy unwoken England.

Down in the valley below, the river, brown and swollen, carries on its bosom the flotsam and jetsam of its pilgrimage through the country. Now and then a great branch goes bobbing by, only to come to grief in the shallows round the corner--the shallows where the noise of the water on the rounded stones lulls one to sleep at night, and sounds a ceaseless reveille each morning. On the other side of the water the woods stretch down close to the bank, though the upper slopes of the hills are bare, and bathed in the golden light of the dying winter sun. Slowly the dark shadow line creeps up--creeps up to meet the shepherd coming home with his flock. Faint, but crisp, the barks of his dog, prancing excitedly round him, strike on one's ears, and then of a sudden--silence. They have entered the purple country; they have left the golden land, and the dog trots soberly at his master's heels. One last peak alone remains, dipped in flaming yellow, and then that too is touched by the finger of oncoming night. For a few moments it survives, a flicker of fire on its rugged tip, and then--the end; like a grim black sentinel it stands gloomy and sinister against the evening sky.

The shepherd is out of sight amongst the trees; the purple is changing to grey, the grey to black; there is no movement saving only the tireless swish of the river....

To the man leaning over the gate the scene was familiar--but familiarity had not robbed it of its charm. Involuntarily his mind went back to the days before the Madness came--to the days when others had stood beside him watching those same darkening hills, with the smoke of their pipes curling gently away in the still air. Back from a day's shooting, back from an afternoon on the river, and a rest at the top of the hill before going in to tea in the house below. So had he stood countless times in the past--with those others....

The Rabbit, with a gun under his arm, and his stubby briar glowing red in the paling light. The Rabbit, with his old shooting-coat, with the yarn of the one woodc.o.c.k he nearly got, with his cheery laugh. But they never found anything of him--an eight-inch sh.e.l.l is at any rate merciful.

Torps--the naval candidate: one of the worst and most gallant riders that ever threw a leg across a horse. Somewhere in the depths of the Pacific, with the great heaving combers as his grave, he lies peacefully; and as for a little while he had gasped and struggled while hundreds of others gasped and struggled near him--perhaps he, too, had seen the hills opposite once again even as the Last Fence loomed in front and the whispered Kismet came from his lips....

Hugh--the son of the house close by. Twice wounded, and now out again in Mesopotamia. Did the sound of the water come to him as the sun dropped, slow and pitiless, into the west? The same parching, crawling days following one another in deadly monotony: the same....

"Dreaming, Jim?" A woman's voice behind him broke on the man's thoughts.

"Yes, lady," he answered soberly. "Dreaming. Some of the ghosts we knew have been coming to me out of the blue grey mists." He fell into step beside her, and they moved towards the house.

"Ah! don't," she whispered--"don't! Oh! it's wicked, this war; cruel, d.a.m.nable." She stopped and faced him, her breast rising and falling quickly. "And we can't follow you, Jim--we women. You go into the unknown."

"Yes--yours is the harder part. You can only wait and wonder."

"Wait and wonder!" She laughed bitterly. "Hope and pray--while G.o.d sleeps."

"Hush, lady!" he answered quietly; "for that way there lies no peace. Is Sybil indoors?"

"Yes--she's expecting you. Thank goodness you're not going out yet awhile, Jim; the child is fretting herself sick over her brother as it is--and when you go...."

"Yes--when I go, what then?" he asked quietly. "Because I'm very nearly fit again, Lady Alice. My arm is nearly all right."

"Do you want to go back, Jim?" Her quiet eyes searched his face. "Look at that."

They had rounded a corner, and in front of them a man was leaning against a wall talking to the cook. They were in the stage known as walking-out--or is it keeping company? The point is immaterial and uninteresting. But the man, fit and strong, was in a starred trade. He was a forester--or had been since the first rumour of compulsion had startled his poor tremulous spirit. A very fine, but not unique example of the genuine s.h.i.+rker....

"What has he to do with us?" said Jim bitterly. "That thing takes his stand along with the criminals, and the mental degenerates. He's worse than a conscientious objector. And we've got no choice. He reaps the benefits for which he refuses to fight. I don't want to go back to France particularly; every feeling I've got revolts at the idea just at present. I want to be with Sybil, as you know; I want to--oh! G.o.d knows!

I was mad over the water--it bit into me; I was caught by the fever.

It's an amazing thing how it gets hold of one. All the dirt and discomfort, and the boredom and the fright--one would have thought...."

He laughed. "I suppose it's the madness in the air. But I'm sane now."

"Are you? I wonder for how long. Let's go in and have some tea." The woman led the way indoors; there was silence again save only for the sound of the river.

CHAPTER II

THE WOMEN AND--THE MEN

When Jim Denver told Lady Alice Conway that he was sane again, he spoke no more than the truth. A few weeks in France, and then a shattered arm had brought him back to England with more understanding than he had ever possessed before. He had gone out the ordinary Englishman--casual, sporting, easy going, somewhat apathetic; he had come back a thinker as well, at times almost a dreamer. It affects different men in different ways--but none escape. And that is what those others cannot understand--those others who have not been across. Even the man who comes back on short leave hardly grasps how the thing has changed him: hardly realises that the madness is still in his soul. He has not time; his leave is just an interlude. He is back again in France almost before he realises he has left it. In mind he has never left it.

There is humour there in plenty--farce even; boredom, excitement, pa.s.sion, hatred. Every human emotion runs its full gamut in the Land of Topsy Turvy; in the place where the life of a man is no longer three-score years and ten, but just so long as the Great Reaper may decide and no more. And you are caught in the whirl--you are tossed here and there by a life of artificiality, a life not of one's own seeking, but a life which, having once caught you, you are loath to let go.

Which is a hard saying, and one impossible of comprehension to those who wait behind--to the wives, to the mothers, to the women. To them the leave-train pulling slowly out of Victoria Station, with their man waving a last adieu from the carriage window, means the ringing down of the curtain once again. The unknown has swallowed him up--the unknown into which they cannot follow him. Be he in a Staff office at the base or with his battalion in the trenches, he has gone where the woman to whom he counts as all the world cannot even picture him in her mind. To her Flanders is Flanders and war is war--and there are casualty lists.

What matter that his battalion is resting; what matter that he is going through a course somewhere at the back of beyond? He has gone into the Unknown; the whistle of the train steaming slowly out is the voice of the call-boy at the drop curtain. And now the train has pa.s.sed out of sight--or is it only that her eyes are dim with the tears she kept back while he was with her?

At last she turns and goes blindly back to the room where they had breakfast; she sees once more the chair he used, the crumpled morning paper, the discarded cigarette. And there let us leave her with tear-stained face and a pathetic little sodden handkerchief clutched in one hand. "O G.o.d! dear G.o.d! send him back to me." Our women do not show us this side very much when we are on leave; perhaps it is as well, for the ground on which we stand is holy....

And what of the man? The train is grinding through Herne Hill when he puts down his _Times_ and catches sight of another man in his brigade also returning from leave.

"Hullo, old man! What sort of a time have you had?"

"Top-hole. How's yourself? Was that your memsahib at the station?"

"Yes. Dislike women at these partings as a general rule--but she's wonderful."

"They're pulling the brigade out to rest, I hear."

"So I believe. Anyway, I hope they've buried that dead Hun just in front of us. He was getting beyond a joke...."

He is back in the life over the water again; there is nothing incongruous to him in his sequence of remarks; the time of his leave has been too short for the contrast to strike him. In fact, the whirl of gaiety in which he has pa.s.sed his seven days seems more unreal than his other life--than the dead German. And it is only when a man is wounded and comes home to get fit, when he idles away the day in the home of his fathers, with a rod or a gun to help him back to convalescence, when the soothing balm of utter peace and contentment creeps slowly through his veins, that he looks back on the past few months as a runner on a race just over. He has given of his best; he is ready to give of his best again; but at the moment he is exhausted; panting, but at rest For the time the madness has left him; he is sane. But it is only for the time....

He is able to think coherently; he is able to look on things in their proper perspective. He knows. The bits in the kaleidoscope begin to group coherently, to take definite form, and he views the picture from the standpoint of a rational man. To him the leave-train contains no illusions; the territory is not unknown. No longer does a dead Hun dwarf his horizon to the exclusion of all else. He has looked on the thing from close quarters; he has been mad with pa.s.sion and shaking with fright; he has been cold and wet, he has been hot and thirsty. Like a blaze of tropical vegetation from which individual colours refuse to be separated, so does the jumble of his life in Flanders strike him as he looks back on it. Isolated occurrences seem unreal, hard to identify.

The little things which then meant so much now seem so paltry; the things he hardly noticed now loom big. Above all, the grim absurdity of the whole thing strikes him; civilisation has at last been defined....

He marvels that men can be such wonderful, such super-human fools; his philosophy changes. He recalls grimly the particular night on which he crept over a dirty ploughed field and scrambled into a sh.e.l.l-hole as he saw the thin green streak of a German flare like a bar of light against the blackness; then the burst--the ghostly light flooding the desolate landscape--the crack of a solitary rifle away to his left. And as the flare came slowly hissing down, a ball of fire, he saw the other occupant of his hiding-place--a man's leg, just that, nothing more. And he laughs; the thing is too absurd.

It is; it is absurd; it is monstrous, farcical. The realisation has come to him; he is sane--for a time.

Sane: but for how long? It varies with the type. There are some who love the game--who love it for itself alone. They sit on the steps of the War Office, and drive their C.O.'s mad: they pull strings both male and female, until the powers that be rise in their wrath, and consign them to perdition and--France.

There are others who do not take it quite like that. They do not _want_ to go back particularly--and if they were given an important job in England, a job for which they had special apt.i.tude, in which they knew they were invaluable, they would take it without regret. But though they may not seek earnestly for France--neither do they seek for home. Their wants do not matter; their private interests do not count: it is only England to-day....

And lastly there is a third cla.s.s, the cla.s.s to whom that accursed catch-phrase, "Doing his bit," means everything. There are some who consider they have done their bit--that they need do no more. They draw comparisons and become self-righteous. "Behold I am not as other men are," they murmur complacently; "have not I kept the home fires burning, and ama.s.sed money making munitions?" "I am doing my bit." "I have been out; I have been hit--and _he_ has not. Why should I go again? I have done my bit." Well, friend, it may be as you say. But methinks there is only one question worth putting and answering to-day. Don't bother about having done your bit. Are you doing your _all_? Let us leave it at that.