Changing Winds Part 89

"The best of us can't do more than he did," Henry thought as he walked home. "A man can't give more than he's got, and Jimphy's given everything!"

7

He started up, and looked about the room, and while he listened, he could hear the big clock in the hall sounding three times. He was shivering, though he was not cold. In his dream, he had seen Jimphy, all b.l.o.o.d.y and broken....

"Oh, my G.o.d, how horrible!" he groaned.

He got up and went to the window, but he could not see beyond the high trees, which swayed and moaned and took strange shapes in the wind. His dream still held his mind, and as he looked into the darkness and saw the bending branches yielding and rebounding, it seemed to him that he saw the soldiers rushing forward and heard their cries, hoa.r.s.e with war l.u.s.t or stifled by the blood that gushed from their mouths as they staggered and fell ... and as he had seen him in his dream, so he saw Jimphy again, running forward and shouting as he ran, until suddenly with a queer wrinkled look of amazement on his face, he stopped, and then, clasping his hands to his head, tumbled in a shapeless heap on the ground ... but now it seemed to him that as Jimphy fell, his face changed: it was no longer Jimphy's face, but his own.

"My G.o.d, it's me!" he cried, shrinking away from the window, and clutching at the curtains as if he would cover himself with them. "My G.o.d, it's _me_!"

He shut his eyes tightly and stumbled back to bed. He bruised himself against a chair, but he was afraid to open his eyes, and he rolled into bed, covering himself completely with the clothes, and buried his face in his folded arms. In his mind, one thought hammered insistently: _I must live! I must live! I must live!_

8

"I'm run down," he said to himself in the morning. "That's what's the matter with me. I'm run down!"

His father's death had affected him, he thought, far more than he had imagined. He would be all right again after a rest in Devonshire. It was natural that he should be in a nervous state ... quite natural. He would go straight to Boveyhayne from Liverpool. He could catch the Bournemouth Express, and change at Templecombe. ... "That's what I'll do," he said, and he hurried downstairs to prepare for his journey.

THE SEVENTH CHAPTER

1

He changed his mind at Liverpool. "I'll go to London first," he said, "and see Roger and Rachel. I might as well hear anything there is to hear!" And so he had telegraphed to Roger who met him at Euston.

"Gilbert's going out in a few days," Roger said, when they had greeted each other.

"Out?"

"Yes. He's going to the Dardanelles!... This job's serious, Quinny!" he added grimly. "Our two months' estimate was a bit out, wasn't it? I suppose you haven't heard from Ninian lately? He hasn't written to me for a good while."

"Not lately," Henry answered, "but I shall hear of him to-morrow when I get to Boveyhayne. I'll write and let you know!"

"My Big Army book's gone to pot, of course!" Roger went on. "At present anyhow!..."

"The War's done for the Improved Tories, I suppose?"

"Absolutely. They've all enlisted. Ashley Earls is in the R.A.M.C. He went in last week. He couldn't go before ... he was ill. You remember Ernest Carr. He tried to enlist when the War began, but he was so crippled with rheumatism that they hoofed him out. Well, he's been living like a hermit ever since to get himself cured, and he says he's going on splendidly. He thinks he'll be able to join before long...."

"I wonder if I ought to join," he went on, more to himself than to Henry. "I've thought and thought about it ... but I can't make up my mind. I've got a decent connexion at the Bar now, and if I go into the Army, I shall lose it. The fellows who don't go will get my work. And if the War lasts as long as Kitchener reckons, I shall be forgotten by the time I get back ... and I shall have to begin again at an age when most men have either established themselves or cleared out of the profession altogether. I want to do what's right, but I can't reconcile my two duties, Quinny. I've a duty to England, of course, but I think I have a bigger duty to Rachel and Eleanor. If they'd only conscript us all, this problem wouldn't arise ... not so acutely anyhow. I suppose the Government is having a pretty hard time, but they do seem to act the goat rather! There's a great deal of talk about a man's duty to England, but very little talk about England's duty to the man. However!..." He did not finish his sentence, but shrugged his shoulders and looked away.

"I don't feel happy," he went on after a while, "when I see other men joining up, but I've got to think of Rachel and Eleanor.... When I was going to meet you, Quinny, I pa.s.sed a chap on crutches. His leg was off!... He made me feel d.a.m.ned ashamed. I suppose that's why they let the wounded go about in uniform so freely; to make you feel ashamed of yourself. That's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid I shall rush off to the recruiting office in a burst of emotion ... and I must think of Rachel and Eleanor!..."

"I don't see why you should go before I do, Roger," Henry interjected.

"Are you going, Quinny?"

Henry flushed. It hurt him that there should be any question about it.

"Yes," he said.

"I don't think of you as a soldier, Quinny!"

"I don't think of myself as one!" He paused for a moment, and then, impetuously, he turned to Roger.

"Roger," he said, "do you think I'm ... neurotic? Would you say I'm ...

well, degenerate?"

"Don't be an a.s.s, Quinny!"

"I'm serious, Roger. I'm not just talking about myself, and slopping over!"

"You're highly strung, of course, but I shouldn't say you were neurotic.

You're healthy enough, aren't you!"

"Oh, yes, I'm healthy enough, but I'm such a d.a.m.ned coward, Roger, and sometimes some perfectly uncontrollable fear seizes me ... silly frights. I never told you, did I, how scared I was when Mrs. Clutters died!..." He told Roger how he had trembled outside the door of the dead woman's room. "Things like that have happened to me ever since I was a kid. I make up my mind to join the Army, and then I suddenly get panicky, and I can almost feel myself being killed. I'm continually seeing the War ... me in it, crouching in a trench waiting for the order to go over, and trembling with fright ... so frightened that I can't do anything but get killed ... and it's worse when I think of myself killing other people ... I feel sick at the thought of thrusting a bayonet into a man's body ... squelching through his flesh ... My G.o.d!..."

"Yes, I know, Quinny!" Roger said. "One does feel like that. But when you're there, you don't think of it ... you're more or less off your head ... you couldn't do it if you weren't. They work you up to a kind of frenzy, and then you ... just let yourself go!"

"But afterwards! Don't you think a man 'ud go mad afterwards when he thought of it? I should. I know I should. I'd lie awake at night and see the men I'd killed!..."

A pa.s.senger in the train had told a story of the trenches to Henry, who now repeated it to Roger.

"One of our men got hold of a German in a German trench, and he bayonetted him, but he did it clumsily. There wasn't enough room to kill him properly ... he couldn't withdraw the bayonet and stick it in again and finish the man ... and there they were, jammed together ... and the German was squealing, oh, horribly ... and our men had to come and haul the British soldier out of the trench. He'd gone off his head!..."

"One oughtn't to think of things like that, Quinny!"

"But if you can't help it? What terrifies me is that I might turn funk ... let my lot down!..."

"You wouldn't. You're the sort that imagines the worst and does the best. I shouldn't think of it any more if I were you. A month at Boveyhayne'll pull you all right again...."

"It's dying that I'm most afraid of. Some of these papers write columns and columns of stuff about 'glorious deaths' at the front, but it doesn't seem very glorious to me to be dead before you've had a chance to do your job ... killed like that ... blown to bits, perhaps ... so that they can't tell which is you and which is some one else!..."

Roger nodded his head. "Our journalists contrive to see a great deal of glory in war ... from Fleet Street, don't they, Quinny!"

"Sometimes," Henry proceeded, "I think that the worst kind of cowardice is to love life too much. That's the kind of coward I am. I love living.

I used to cry when I was a kid at the thought that I might die and not be able to run about and look at things that I liked! And that makes you funky. You're afraid to take risks, for fear you should lose your life and have to give up the pleasure of living. I suppose that's what the Bible means when it says that 'whosoever shall lose his life, shall find it.' This hunt for security melts the marrow in your backbone!..."

"Perhaps," said Roger. "Where you go wrong, I think, is in imagining that courage consists in hurling yourself recklessly on things ... in not caring a d.a.m.n. I don't think that that's courage ... it's simply insensibility ... a sort of permanent imperceptiveness. Really, Quinny, if you don't feel fear, there's not much of the heroic in your acts.

That kind of man isn't much braver when he's plunging at Germans than he is when he's plunging at a motor-omnibus or getting into a 'scrum' at Rugger. He simply doesn't see any difference. It's something to plunge at, and so he plunges. I haven't much faith in the Don't-Care-a-d.a.m.n Brigade. They're more anxious to get V. C's than to get victories. Their courage is just egoism ... they're thinking, not of their country, but of themselves. The real hero, I think, is the man who makes himself do something that he's afraid to do, who goes into a thing, trembling with fright, but nevertheless goes into it. Did you ever meet Leon Lorthiois?" he said quickly.

"You mean the French painter who used to hang about the Cafe Royal?"