Behind the Lines (6 page)

Clean, healthy English girls seemed very pally and unemotional, but after that revelation at Victoria one knew
that behind their calm eyes that radiant look lay waiting for some man.

He glanced covertly at Rumbald riding beside him and eyed his plump profile with new interest.
He
had not merely surprised such a look as a slightly envious onlooker; he must know what it felt like to be that muddy infanteer. When he went on leave a girl would be waiting for him with that look in her eyes.

He turned his eyes away and patted his mare's neck. How little one really knew about the lives of others; less than the half. Here was this fellow Rumbald, ordinary looking chap, nothing heroic or—or Hamlet-like about him to give a clue, and yet he had been through all that. And that infanteer no doubt seemed just as ordinary to his fellow officers who had not seen his wife meet him at Victoria.

On the way back Rumbald asked, “Ever been to Amiens?”

“No,” answered Rawley. “Have you?”

Rumbald shook his head. “Good spot, I'm told—like Havre, only better.” He tapped Rawley's knee with his crop and asked mysteriously, “Like to come in with me tomorrow?”

Rawley thought it would be worth doing if it could be managed.

Rumbald shut one eye and nodded mysteriously. “So you shall then,” he said. “I've fixed it all up. A nice little dinner and the sights of the town. Like me to tackle the Major for you?”

“Oh no, I'll ask him,” said Rawley. “He won't object. He's awfully decent about that sort of thing when we're in rest. But how are we to get there? It must be over thirty kilometres.”

Rumbald winked again mysteriously. “Trust your Uncle Sammy,” he said. “Know Penhurst?”

“That's the M.T. fellow at the cross-roads, isn't it?”

Rumbald nodded. “Yes. Well, he's going to take us in his car tomorrow afternoon.”

CHAPTER V

I

Penhurst of the A.S.C. arrived on the following afternoon to take Rawley and Rumbald into Amiens. Rawley was in a sight-seeing mood and was anxious to be off. Rumbald, however, insisted upon a preliminary drink, and they retired to the mess and shouted for the mess corporal. Rawley disliked drinking whisky on a hot afternoon, but his objections were overruled by Rumbald, whose persuasive, hail-fellow-well-met manner was always difficult to resist.

“Come on, Pete,” he said. “You must have just one little spot. You can't see Amiens properly unless you've had at least one drink first. Isn't that so, Penhurst?”

Penhurst nodded agreement.

“Well, so long as I don't see two cathedrals,” murmured Rawley doubtfully.

“That's right,” boomed Rumbald. “A good stiff whisky for Mr. Rawley, corporal. Puts you in the right mood to appreciate architecture or any other sort of beauty.” This with a wink at Penhurst. And so they all settled down into chairs, and it was two drinks later in the case of Rumbald and Penhurst or twenty minutes before they went out into the sunlight and started up the grey Vauxhall car.

They drove along the now familiar shady road into Doullens and turned south past the old grass-covered citadel up the straight, steep Amiens road that climbed
over the bare downs. Penhurst drove, and he drove fast, so that Rawley had little opportunity of seeing the country as he would have wished to do, and he absorbed only a vague impression of a straight white road switch-backing over corn-covered downs, hedgeless and treeless, except for a wood-shrouded village here and there on a hill top, and punctuated by villages with hideous new red-brick churches which changed later to picturesque though poverty-stricken wattle-and-daub cottages girdled with fruit trees.

Then the car shot over the low crest of a hill, and he saw the city below him straddling the green Somme valley, a wide sweep of jumbled roofs and chimneys and trees glimmering silver-grey in the sunlight, and the great cathedral, with its long, grey roof and pinnacles towering cliff-like from the tree-shaded quays and bridges where the glassy Somme was shivered into a number of gleaming canals. The view was lost a moment later as they swept into a suburb down a long, straight
pavé
road bordered by trees and broad sidewalks on which dirty urchins played and bedraggled women filled cracked ewers at the stand-pipes spaced before dreary flat-fronted houses. The road narrowed suddenly, and canals, stone quays, and markets opened to right and left. The western towers of the cathedral soared above the houses terraced on the slope ahead. The car bumped over two or three narrow bridges and climbed a steep, winding cobbled street.

They left the car in the courtyard of the Hôtel de la Paix and walked back across the Place Gambetta.

“What's the programme?” asked Rumbald.

“Well, I think that Charley's Bar is indicated.”

“Oh Lord!” groaned Rawley. “We are not going to spend the whole day on a pub crawl, surely.”

“Well, what did you think of doing, Pete?” asked Rumbald good-humouredly.

“Oh, I don't know. Look round the place—register on the cathedral and all that.”

“Righto, Pete. You get the cathedral off your chest while Penhurst and I register on Charley's Bar. Where do we go afterwards, Penhurst?”

“Oh, we'll get tea at Odette's; Rawley can meet us there.”

“Oh, and I want to get a bath,” put in Rawley. “Where does one bath?”

“Come on, I'll show you,” said Penhurst. “This is the three-pebbles street, the local Bond Street, where one can buy anything from a camisole to a smutty post card. That's Odette's.” He pointed across the road to a
pâtisserie
. “Where we meet for tea. And these are the baths.”

He turned in under a low archway where second-hand books were displayed on shelves. “That's the gentleman's lavatory as we call it euphemistically in English,” he said, and murmured “
bonjour, madame
” to an old dame seated on a stool. “These are the baths.” He pushed open a glass door on the right.

“Want us to come in and hold the soap or tickle your back?” asked Rumbald. “No? Then cheerio. We'll meet at Odette's anon.”

Rawley was led up a broad staircase and ushered into a small room containing a short deep metal tub covered with
a sheet, into which steaming water was gushing. He took off his belt and tunic and hung them on the door hook and turned with arms akimbo to examine the unfamiliar type of bath. It seemed a sanitary idea if the sheet were clean, which it was, and anyway, the hot, deep water was an improvement upon the few tepid inches in his folding canvas bath.

II

Feeling comfortably clean and civilized he wandered out past the old woman still seated on her stool, into the crowded Rue des Trois Cailloux. Staff cars, mess-carts, and military motor-cycles moved in a continuous stream along the road, and on the pavements the number of British officers was hardly less than that of the native civilians. The civilized shop windows were enticing, and he lingered at one or two of them before turning down a side street towards the grey pinnacles of the cathedral. The street was narrow, winding, and cobbled, and at each turn he caught a new glimpse of the great grey rampart of stone and glass rising higher and higher above the roofs. He found himself at length in the open space before the west front. The great carved buttresses and recessed door arches were neatly sandbagged to a height of eighty feet or more to protect them from bomb splinters, but above the rampart of bleached sandbags the two great chiselled towers rose in naked splendour.

Rawley gazed upwards till his neck ached, and then he mounted the steps and passed into the lofty tunnel
of the nave. The silence and dimness and spaciousness were restful he decided. Rumbald was a good fellow, but his persistent joviality rather swamped one's efforts at intelligent thought.

He found Odette's filled to overflowing with British officers of every age and rank, and among them Rumbald and Penhurst in a corner clapping tea-spoons on plates to attract his attention. He was anxious to see the famous Odette, and when she herself arrived to take their order he was surprised to find not the spoiled and painted beauty he had expected, but a quiet, pleasant-faced girl who had a smile and a friendly word for everyone, and repelled the advances of her too ardent admirers with disarming tact and competence. The ogling glances which several officers of high rank and grey hairs directed at her he found highly ludicrous and a little beastly; but she moved about the room as though unconscious of them and showed favour to none. A very competent little person he decided. Fame had exaggerated her beauty, but did bare justice to her character.

Penhurst greeted her jovially as an old friend, and so did Rumbald, though he had never seen her before. The familiarity annoyed Rawley. How she must hate them all, he thought, though she betrayed no sign of it. She said, “
Bonjour, messieurs
” with disarming naturalness, and a smile that included him though he had not spoken; and he could have sworn that she had divined his annoyance and that her eyes, which for a moment met his, were the kinder on that account.

“Nice bit of goods that,” asserted Rumbald, gazing appreciatively at her retreating high heels. “Keep nice and warm at night with that wrapped round you.”

Penhurst grunted agreement. “She doesn't wrap too easily, though,” he grumbled.

Rumbald guffawed. “So she has given you the frozen optic, Pen, has she?”

“Not only me,” growled Penhurst hastily, in self-defence. “I declare I believe the damned woman is a virgin.”

Rumbald laughed incredulously. “Particular, is she! That's half the attraction. She's got a head on her shoulders. All the same, if I was a betting man—” He finished by throwing out his chest and giving his tunic a little tug downwards, an affectation which in a man of Rumbald's figure Rawley thought ridiculous.

After tea Penhurst led the way to the Galleries to do some shopping. Rumbald insisted on doing all the talking, and boisterously fanned the amusement which his rusty fourth-form French created among the shop girls. When at a loss for a word in French his method was to say the English equivalent in a louder tone and with what he considered was a French accent. Thus a walking-stick was asked for as “
un steek promanader
,” accompanied by dumb show, purporting to mimic a man-about-town twirling his cane in the park. His expression and antics were so absurd that Penhurst and Rawley were reduced to speechless laughter, and assistants flocked from the other departments to watch the fun and join in the game of guessing what it was he was trying to say.

Out again into the Rue des Trois Cailloux they came at last, and led by Rumbald turned automatically, it seemed, into a café. He settled down with a long complaining of springs on the red plush seat and called loudly in his execrable French, “
Garcong
! Garcong!” And there they stayed till Penhurst announced that it was time for dinner.

He led them up a mean and narrow street branching from the Rue des Trois Cailloux and stopped before a small, white-painted shop-front where a few fly-blown pastries were displayed against a background of black-and-white check wall-paper.

“Bloody looking hole outside,” he explained; “but they give you a good meal, and it's quiet.”

They found dinner laid in a long, boarded room, painted white, with frosted-glass windows high up along one wall and palms and a piano in one corner. A tall, dark girl, dressed in a black-and-white striped frock, whose pallor was emphasized by heavy powdering, took their caps and sticks.

Rumbald moved straight to the piano, called for a drink, and began to play a spirited syncopated tune; and Rawley found himself seized by Penhurst and fox-trotted down the narrow lane between the table and the wall. As he turned at the top by the piano he saw with surprise that there were now a number of women standing at the other end of the room watching him. One of them clapped her hands and cried, “Bravo! Vair-e good, M'sieu,” and Rumbald, hearing this exclamation of surprise, looked up and exclaimed, “Oh, the fairies have arrived.” He sang, to the piano accompaniment,
the first few bars of “If you were the only girl in the world;” then took a long gulp from his glass, stood up, straightened his Sam Browne with a tug and shouted, “Party—'shun! The C.O. will now inspect the parade.”

The girls giggled, and arranged themselves in exaggerated attitudes of attention, while Rumbald stumped down the room in the manner of the stage colonel, twirling an imaginary moustache.

Rawley thought them the most depressing and pitiable collection of women he had ever seen. There were six of them. None had any pretensions to good looks, and only two of them were at all young. Deep lines seamed their heavily painted and powdered faces, and their black-pencilled eyes glittered metallically through their thickened lashes like those of a starved cat. And their frocks were the cheapest of tawdry finery.

Rumbald stamped down the line in his facetious mockery of a military inspection, here making a coarse joke about chest measurement, there lifting a skirt ostensibly to check the position of the feet; while the girls tittered and uttered coquettish squeals of dismay. But there was an anxious competitive look in their eyes, which showed that the mock inspection was more than mere foolery to them.

Like a cattle market, thought Rawley in disgust.

Rumbald reached the end of the line and bawled, “Stand at ease! Stand easy!” He turned to Rawley. “Come on, Pete, take your pick.”

“But—well,” demurred Rawley, to whom this development was a complete surprise.

Rumbald misunderstood his diffidence. “Oh, that's all right. You're the guest. First pick,” he cried magnanimously.

The ladies had exchanged their absurd military postures for attitudes of languorous ease. Their mask-like faces smiled beguilingly at him, and they signalled invitingly with their bold eyes.