“The major, sir. He’s going on funny.”
“Funny?” Phantasmagoric memories came into Captain Fremantle’s quickening mind. “Going on funny?”
“Yessir. He’s been and got a little dog.”
“And he is going on funny with it?”
“Well, not a bit like a major, sir.”
“Perhaps I’d better go and see.”
“Perhaps you’d say ‘acting soft,’ ” Ardingly conceded.
Captain Fremantle had lain down to rest with the minimum of preparation. He had removed his boots, anklets and tunic. Now he arose and put on service dress and followed the corridor into Major Ludovic’s part of the house. Pausing outside the door he heard from inside a clucking noise, as though a countrywoman were feeding poultry. He knocked and entered.
The floor of Ludovic’s room was covered with saucers containing milk, gravy, Spam, biscuits, Woolton sausage, and other items of diet. Here and there the food had been rudely spilt; none of it seemed to have appealed to the appetite of the Pekinese puppy which crouched under Ludovic’s bed in a nest of shredded paper. It was a pretty animal with eyes as prominent as Ludovic’s own. Ludovic was on all fours making the noises which had been audible outside; he was, at first sight, all khaki trouser-seat, like Jumbo Trotter at the billiard-table; a figure from antiquated farce, “caught bending,” inviting the boot. He raised to Fremantle a face that was radiant with simple glee; there was no trace of embarrassment or of resentment at the intrusion. He wished to share with all the overflowing delight of his heart.
“Cor,” he said, “just take a dekko at the little perisher. Wouldn’t fancy anything I give him. Had me worried. Thought he was sick. Thought I ought to call in the M.O. Then I turned me back for a jiffy and blessed if he hasn’t polished off the last number of Survival. How d’you call that for an appetite?” Then falling into a fruity and, to Captain Fremantle, bloodcurdling tone of infatuation, he addressed himself to the puppy: “What’ll kind staff-captain-man say if you won’t eat his nice grub, eh? What’ll kind editor-man say if you eat his clever paper?”
*
Guy meanwhile lay in bed less than a mile from Ludovic and his pet. There were, as de Souza had remarked, oubliettes which from time to time opened and engulfed members of His Majesty’s forces. Thus it had happened to Guy. He was clothed in flannel pajamas not his own; his leg was encased in plaster and it seemed to him that he had lost all rights of property over that limb. He was left alone in a hut so full of music that the wind swept over it unheard. It was the Emergency Ward of the aerodrome. Here he had been delivered in an ambulance from the R.A.F. hospital, where a young medical officer had informed him that he required no treatment. “Just lie up, old boy. We’ll have another look at you in a few weeks and then take the plaster off. You’ll be quite comfortable.”
Guy was not at all comfortable. There were no fellow patients in the ward. Its sole attendant was a youth who, sitting on Guy’s bed, announced, as soon as the stretcher-party had left: “I’m a C.O.”
“Commanding Officer?” Guy asked without surprise.
Anything seemed possible among these inhabitants.
“Conscientious Objector.”
He explained his objections at length above the turmoil of jazz. They were neither political nor ethical but occult, being in some way based on the dimensions of the Great Pyramid.
“I could have lent you a book about it, but it got pinched.”
There was no malice in this youth nor was there the power to please. Guy asked for something to read. “There was a welfare bloke came with some books once. I reckon someone must have flogged them. They weren’t the sort of books anyone could read anyway. They don’t take in any papers in the R.A.F. Any news they want they hear on the blower.”
“Can’t you stop this infernal noise?”
“What noise was that?”
“The wireless.”
“Oh no. I couldn’t do that. It’s laid on special. Piped all through the camp. It isn’t wireless anyway. Some of it’s records. You’ll soon find you get so you don’t notice it.”
“Where are my clothes?”
The conscientious objector looked vaguely round the hut. “Don’t seem to be here, do they? Perhaps they got left behind. You’ll have to see Admin about that.”
“Who’s Admin?”
“He’s a bloke comes round once a week.”
“Listen,” said Guy. “I’ve got to get out of here. Will you telephone to the parachute school and ask Captain Fremantle to come here?”
“Can’t hardly do that.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Only Admin’s allowed to telephone. What’s the number of this school?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there you are.”
“Can I see Admin?”
“You’ll see him when he comes round.”
For an excruciating day Guy lay staring at the corrugated iron roof while the sounds of jazz wailed and throbbed around him. Very frequently the attendant brought him cups of tea and plates of inedible matter. During the watches of the second night he formed the resolution to escape.
The wind had dropped in the night. His fellows, he reflected, would now be starting for their fifth jump. With pain and enormous effort he hobbled across the ward supporting himself by the ends of the empty beds. In a corner stood the almost hairless broom with which the attendant was supposed to dust the floor. Using this as a crutch, Guy stumbled into the open. He recognized the buildings; the distance across the asphalt yard to the officers’ mess would have been negligible to a whole man. For the first time since his unhappy landing Guy felt the full pain of his injury. Sweating in the chill November morning he accomplished the fifty difficult paces. It was not an excursion which would have passed without notice at the Halberdier barracks. Here it was no one’s business either to stop him or to help him.
At length he subsided in an armchair.
One or two pilots gaped but they accepted the arrival of this pajama’d cripple with the same indifference as they had shown him when he had arrived in uniform with his batch of parachutists. He shouted to one of them above the noise of the music: “I want to write a letter.”
“Go ahead. It won’t disturb me.”
“Is there such a thing as a piece of paper and a pen?”
“Don’t see any, do you?”
“What do you fellows do when you want to write a letter?”
“My old man taught me: ‘Never put anything in writing,’ he used to say.”
The pilots gaped. One went out; another came in.
Guy sat and waited; not in vain. After an hour the party of parachutists arrived, led on this occasion by Captain Fremantle.
The staff-captain had slept (twice) on the problem of Guy’s disappearance. He now gave no notional assent to any of de Souza’s “hypotheses,” but an aura of mystery remained, and he was quite unprepared for the apparition of Guy in flannel pajamas waving a broom. He came cautiously towards him.
“Thank God you’ve come,” said Guy with a warmth to which Captain Fremantle was little accustomed.
“Yes. I have to see the A.O. about a few things.”
“You’ve got to get me out of here.”
Captain Fremantle had more than three years’ experience of the army and, as the facts of Guy’s predicament were frantically explained, the staff-solution came pat: “Not my pigeon. The S.M.O. will have to discharge you.”
“There’s no medical officer here. Only some kind of orderly.”
“He won’t do. Must be signed for by the S.M.O.”
The eleven “clients” were morose. Their former exhilaration had subsided with their fears. This last jump was merely a disagreeable duty. De Souza saw Guy and approached him.
“So you are safe and well, uncle,” he said.
Guy had served as the source of invention to beguile a wet day. That joke was over. De Souza now wished to finish his course early and get back to London and
a waiting girl.
“I’m being driven insane, Frank.”
“Yes,” said de Souza, “yes, I suppose you are.”
“The staff-captain says he can’t do anything about me.”
“No. No. I don’t suppose he can. Well, I’m glad to have seen you all right. It looks as if they wanted us to take off.”
“Frank, do you remember Jumbo Trotter in barracks?”
“No. Can’t say I do.”
“He might be able to help me. Will you telephone to him as soon as you get back? Just tell him what’s happened to me and where I am. I can give you his number.”
“But shall I get back? That is the question uppermost in my mind at the moment. We put our lives in jeopardy every time we go up in that aeroplane—or rather every time we leave it. Perhaps you’ll find me in the next bed to you insensible. Perhaps I shall be dead. I am told you dig your own grave—those are the very words of the junior instructor—if the parachute doesn’t open—burrow into the earth five feet deep and all they have to do is shovel the sides down on one. I keep reminding Gilpin of that possibility. In that rich earth a richer dust concealed. In my case a corner that shall be forever Anglo-Sephardi.”
“Frank, will you telephone to Jumbo for me?”
“If I survive, uncle, I will.”
Guy stumbled back to his bed.
“Wasn’t it a bit cold out there?” asked the conscientious objector.
“Bitterly.”
“I was wondering who’d got my brush.”
Guy lay on the bed, exhausted by his efforts. His plastered leg ached more than it had done at any time since his injury. Presently the conscientious objector came in with tea.
“Got some books out of the squadron leader’s office,” he said, giving him two tattered pictorial journals which, from their remote origin in juvenile humor, were still dubbed “comics”; but for their price they would have been more appropriately named “penny-dreadfuls” for the incidents portrayed were uniformly horrific.
An aeroplane came in to land.
“Was that the parachute flight?” Guy asked.
“Couldn’t say, I’m sure.”
“Be a good fellow. Go and find out. Ask if anyone was hurt.”
“They wouldn’t tell me a thing like that. Don’t suppose they’d know, anyway. They just drop them out and come back. Ground staff collect the bodies.”
Guy studied the squadron leader’s “comic.”
Wherever he went de Souza left his spoor of unreasonable anxiety.
*
Few things were better calculated to arouse Jumbo’s sympathies than the news that a Halberdier had fallen into the hands of the Air Force. Those who knew him only slightly would not have recognized him as a man of swift action. In Guy’s case his normal gentle pace became a stampede. Not Jumbo alone with his car, driver and batman, but the Transit Camp Medical Officer in his car with his orderly, and an ambulance and its crew all sped out of London into Essex. The right credentials were produced, the right manumissions completed; Guy’s clothes were collected from the hospital, his remaining baggage from the Training Center, Guy himself from the emergency ward, and he was back in London in his quiet room before de Souza, Gilpin and their fellows had been marshaled into the bus for their return to the “dispersal center.”
*
Next morning Captain Fremantle reported to his commandant with the customary sheaf of confidential reports. He found Ludovic at a desk clear of all papers. The Pekinese puppy was in sole occupation of that oaken surface on which had been indited so many of Ludovic’s pensées; he gave intermittent attention to the efforts being made to divert him with a ping-pong ball, a piece of string and an india-rubber.
“What are you going to call him, sir?” Captain Fremantle asked in the obsequious tones which usually provoked a rebuff. This afternoon he was received more kindly.
“I’m giving it a lot of thought. Captain Claire called his dog Freda. That name is precluded by the difference of sex. I knew a dog called Trooper once—but he was a much bigger animal of quite different character.”
He looked with distaste at the documents offered him. “Work,” he said. “Routine. All right, leave them here.” He tenderly bore the puppy to its basket. “Stay there,” he said. “Daddy’s got to earn you your din-din.”
Captain Fremantle saluted and withdrew. Ludovic found the necessary forms and began his work of editing.
“De Souza O.K.” he read, and baldly translated: The above named officer has satisfactorily completed his course and is highly recommended for employment in the field.
Of Gilpin he wrote: Initial reluctance was overcome but with evident effort. It is recommended that further consideration should be given to the stability of this officer’s character before he is passed as suitable.
With deliberation he left Guy to the last. The chief instructor had written: N.B.G. Too old. Spirit willing—flesh weak. Ludovic paused, seeking the appropriate, the inevitable words for the sentence he was determined to pronounce. As a child he had been well grounded in Scripture and was familiar with the tale of Uriah the Hittite in its resonant Jacobean diction, but though tempted, he eschewed all archaisms in composing this pensée. A slight accident, he wrote, in no way attributable to this officer’s infirmity or negligence, prevented him completing the full course. However he showed such outstanding aptitude that he is recommended for immediate employment in action without further training.
He folded the papers, marked them Most Secret, put them in a nest of envelopes and summoned his staff-captain.
“There,” he said to the puppy. “Daddy’s finished his horrid work. Did you think you’d been forgotten? Was you jealous of the nasty soldier-men?”
When Captain Fremantle reported, he found Ludovic with the puppy on his heart, buttoned into his tunic, only its bright white head appearing.
“I’ve decided what to call him,” Ludovic said. “You may think it rather a conventional name but it has poignant associations for me. His name is Fido.”
IX
The Transit Camp, despite all Jumbo’s manifest will to give Guy a position of privilege there—he had come during the last year to regard him almost as a contemporary; no longer as an adventurous temporary officer but as a seasoned Halberdier cruelly but unjustly relegated like himself to an unheroic role—was not an ideal place for the bedridden. It had served well as a place to leave in the early morning and to return to late. It was not the place to spend day and night—particularly such nights as Guy now suffered, made almost sleepless by the throb and dead weight of his plastered knee. For two days the relief from music and from the attentions of the conscientious objector was solace enough. Then a restless melancholy began to afflict him. Jumbo noticed it.
“You ought to see more fellows,” he said. “It’s awkward here in some ways. Can’t have a lot of women coming in and out. Oughtn’t really to have civilians at all. Isn’t there anyone who’d take you in? Nothing easier than to draw lodging allowances.”
Guy thought: Arthur Box-Bender? He would not be welcome. Kerstie Kilbannock? Virginia was living there.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe there is.”
“Pity. How would it be if I sent a message to your club? Your porter might send some fellows round. How’s the knee today by the way?”
Guy was not seriously injured—something had been cracked, something else twisted out of place; he was in slightly worse condition than he had been after the Halberdier guest night; no more than that—but he was hampered and in pain. His calf and ankle were swollen by the constriction of the plaster.
“I believe I shall be a lot more comfortable without this thing on it.”
“Who put it on?”
“One of the Air Force doctors.”
“Soon get that off,” said Jumbo. “I’ll send my man up at once.”
Obediently the R.A.M.C. major attached to the camp—one of the lighter posts of that busy service—came to Guy’s room with a pair of s
hears and laboriously removed the encumbrance.
“I suppose it’s all right doing this,” he said. “They ought to have sent me the X-ray pictures, but of course they haven’t. Does it seem more comfortable like that?”
“Much.”
“Well, that’s the important thing. I daresay a spot of heat might help. I’ll send along a chap with a lamp.”
This reincarnation of Florence Nightingale did not appear. The swelling of calf and ankle slightly subsided; the knee grew huge. Instead of a continuous ache Guy suffered from frequent agonizing spasms when he moved in the bed. They were on the whole preferable.
The immediate result of Jumbo’s appeal to Bellamy’s was a visit from Lieutenant Padfield. He came in the morning, when most men and women in London were ostensibly busy, bearing the new number of Survival and a Staffordshire figure of Mr. Gladstone; also a fine bunch of chrysanthemums, but these were not for Guy.
“I’m on my way to the Dorchester,” he explained. “Ruby had rather a misfortune last night. One of our generals over here is a great admirer of Peter Pan. Ruby asked him to dinner to meet Sir James Barrie. She kindly asked me too. I was surprised to learn Barrie was still alive. Well, of course, he isn’t. We waited an hour for him and when at last she rang for dinner they said room-service was off and that there was a red warning anyway. ‘That’s what it is,’ she said. ‘He’s gone down to a shelter. Ridiculous at his age.’ So we got no dinner and the general was upset and so was Ruby.”
“You do lead a complicated life, Loot.”
“The same sort of thing is happening all the time in New York, they tell me. All the social secretaries are in Washington. So I thought, a few flowers…”
“You might take her Mr. Gladstone too, Loot. It was a very kind thought but, you know, I’ve nowhere to put him.”
“Do you think Ruby would really like it? Most of her things are French.”
“Her husband was in Asquith’s Cabinet.”
“Yes, of course he was. I’d forgotten. Yes, that would make a difference. Well I must be going.” The lieutenant dallied at the door uncertainly regarding the earthenware figure. “The Glenobans sent you many messages of condolence.”