Jim Brent Read online

  “Take care of him, Jerry; he and Pat are all we’ve got.” It was Mrs Delawnay speaking, standing there with the setting sun on her sweet face and her husband’s arm about her.

  “I’ll be all right, mater,” answered Jack gruffly. “Buck up! Back for Christmas!”

  “I’ll look after him, Mrs Delawnay,” answered Jerry, but his eyes were fixed on Pat, and for him the world held only her.

  As the car swung out of the gate, we looked back the last time and saluted, and it was only I who saw through a break in the hedge two women locked in each other’s arms, while a grey-haired gentleman sat very still on a garden seat, with his eyes fixed on the river rolling smoothly by.

  It was on the Aisne I took it. Through that ghastly fourteen days we had slogged dully south away from Mons, ever getting nearer Paris. Through the choking dust, with the men staggering as they walked – some asleep, some babbling, some cursing – but always marching, marching, marching; digging at night, only to leave the trenches in two hours and march on again; with ever and anon a battery of horse tearing past at a gallop, with the drivers lolling drunkenly in their saddles, and the guns jolting and swaying behind the straining, sweating horses, to come into action on some ridge still further south, and try to check von Kluck’s hordes, if only for a little space. Every bridge in the hands of anxious-faced sapper officers, prepared for demolition one and all, but not to be blown up till all our troops were across. Ticklish work, for should there be a fault, there is not much time to repair it.

  But at last it was over, and we turned north. A few days later, in the afternoon, my company crossed a pontoon bridge on the Aisne, and two hours afterwards we dug ourselves in a mile and a half beyond it. The next morning, as I was sitting in one of the trenches, there was a sudden, blinding roar – and oblivion.

  I will pass rapidly over the next six weeks – over my journey from the clearing hospital to the base at Havre, of my voyage back to England in a hospital ship, and my ultimate arrival at Drayton Hall, the Delawnays’ place in Somerset, where I had gone to convalesce.

  During the time various fragments of iron were being picked from me and the first shock of the concussion was wearing off, we had handed over our trenches on the Aisne to the French, and moved north to Flanders.

  Occasional scrawls came through from Jack and Jerry, but the people in England who had any knowledge at all of the fighting and of what was going on, grew to dread with an awful dread the sight of the telegraph boy, and it required an effort of will to look at those prosaic casualty lists in the morning papers.

  Then suddenly without warning, as such news always does, it came. The War Office, in the shape of a whistling telegraph boy, regretted to inform Mr Delawnay that his son, Lieutenant Jack Delawnay of the Royal Downshire Regiment, had been killed in action.

  Had it been possible during the terrible days after the news came, I would have gone away, but I was still too weak to move; and I like to think that, perhaps, my presence there was some comfort to them, as a sort of connection through the regiment with their dead boy. After the first numbing shock, the old man bore it grandly.

  “He was all I had,” he said to me one day as I lay in bed, “but I give him gladly for his country’s sake.” He stood looking at the broad fields. “All his,” he muttered; “all would have been the dear lad’s – and now six inches of soil and a wooden cross, perhaps not that.”

  And Pat, poor little Pat, used to come up every day and sit with me, sometimes in silence, with her great eyes fixed on the fire, sometimes reading the paper, because my eyes weren’t quite right yet.

  For about a fortnight after the news we did not think it strange; but then, as day by day went by, the same fear formulated in both our minds. I would have died sooner than whisper it; but one afternoon I found her eyes fixed on mine. We had been silent for some time, and suddenly in the firelight I saw the awful fear in her mind as clearly as if she had spoken it.

  “You’re thinking it too, Winkle,” she whispered, leaning forward. “Why hasn’t he written? Why hasn’t Jerry written one line? Oh, my God I don’t say that he has been–”

  “Hush, dear!” I said quietly. “His people would have let you know if they had had a wire.”

  “But, Winkle, the colonel has written that Jack died while gallantly leading a counter-attack to recover lost trenches. Surely, Jerry would have found time for a line, unless something had happened to him; Jack was actually in his company.”

  All of which I knew, but could not answer.

  “Besides,” she went on after a moment, “you know how dad is longing for details. He wants to know everything about Jack, and so do we all. But oh, Winkle! want to know if my man is all right. Brother and lover – not both, oh, God – not both!” The choking little sobs wrung my heart.

  The next day we got a wire from him. He was wounded slightly in the arm, and was at home. He was coming to us. Just that – no more. But, oh! the difference to the girl. Everything explained, everything clear, and the next day Jerry would be with her. Only as I lay awake that night thinking, and the events of the last three weeks passed through my mind, the same thought returned with maddening persistency. Slightly wounded in the arm, evidently recently as there was no mention in the casualty list, and for three weeks no line, no word. And then I cursed myself as an ass and a querulous invalid.

  At three o’clock he arrived, and they all came up to my room. The first thing that struck me like a blow was that it was his left arm which was hit – and the next was his face. Whether Pat had noticed that his writing arm was unhurt, I know not; but she had seen the look in his eyes, and was afraid.

  Then he told the story, and his voice was as the voice of the dead. Told the anxious, eager father and mother the story of their boy’s heroism. How, having lost some trenches, the regiment made a counter-attack to regain them. How first of them all was Jack, the men following him, as they always did, until a shot took him clean through the heart, and he dropped, leaving the regiment to surge over him for the last forty yards, and carry out gloriously what they had been going to do.

  And then the old man, pulling out the letter from the colonel, and trying to read it through his blinding tears: “He did well, my boy,” he whispered; “he did well, and died well. But, Jerry, the colonel says in his letter,” and he wiped his eyes and tried to read – “he says in his letter that Jack must have been right into their trenches almost; as he was killed at point-blank range with a revolver. One of those swine of German officers, I suppose.” He shook his fist in the air. “Still, he was but doing his duty. I must not complain. But you say he was forty yards away?”

  “It’s difficult to say, sir, in the dark,” answered Jerry, still in the voice of an automatic machine. “It may have been less than forty.”

  And then he told them all over again; and while they, the two old dears, whispered and cried together, never noticing anything amiss, being only concerned with the telling, and caring no whit for the method thereof, Pat sat silently in the window, gazing at him with tearless eyes, with the wonder and amazement of her soul writ clear on her face for all to see. And I – I lay motionless in bed, and there was something I could not understand, for he would not look at me, nor yet at her, but kept his eyes fixed on the fire, while he talked like a child repeating a lesson.

  At last it was over; their last questions were asked, and slowly, arm-in-arm, they left the room, to dwell alone upon the story of their idolised boy. And in the room the silence was only broken by the crackling of the logs.

  How long we sat there I know not, with the firelight flickering on the stern set face of the man in the chair. He seemed unconscious of our existence, and we two dared not speak to him, we who loved him best, for there was something we could not understand. Suddenly he got up, and held out his arms to Pat. And when she crept into them, he kissed her, straining her close, as if he could never stop. Then, without a word, he led her to the door, and, putting her gently through, shut it behind her. Still
without a word he came back to the chair, and turned it so that the firelight no longer played on his face. And then he spoke.

  “I have a story to tell you, Winkle, which I venture to think will entertain you for a time.” His voice was the most terrible thing I have ever listened to. “…Nearly four weeks ago the battalion was in the trenches a bit south of Ypres. It was bad in the retreat, as you know; it was bad on the Aisne; but they were neither of them in the same county as the doing we had up north. One night – they’d shelled us off and on for three days and three nights – we were driven out of our trenches. The regiment on our right gave, and we had to go too. The next morning we were ordered to counter-attack, and get back the ground we had lost. It was the attack in which we lost so heavily.”

  He stopped speaking for a while, and I did not interrupt.

  “When I got that order overnight Jack was with me, in a hole that passed as a dugout. At the moment everything was quiet; the Germans were patching up their new position; only a maxim spluttered away a bit to one flank. To add to the general desolation a steady downpour of rain drenched us, into which, without cessation, the German flares went shooting up. I think they were expecting a counter-attack at once…”

  Again he paused, and I waited.

  “You know the condition one gets into sometimes when one is heavy for sleep. We had it during the retreat, if you remember – a sort of coma, the outcome of utter bodily exhaustion. One used to go on walking, and all the while one was asleep – or practically so. Sounds came to us dimly as from a great distance; they made no impression on us – they were just a jumbled phantasmagoria of outside matters, which failed to reach one’s brain, except as a dim dream. I was in that condition on the night I am speaking of; I was utterly cooked – beat to the world; I was finished for the time. I’ve told you this, because I want you to understand the physical condition I was in.”

  He leaned forward and stared at the fire, resting his head on his hands.

  “How long I’d dozed heavily in that wet-sodden hole I don’t know, but after a while, above the crackle of the maxim, separate and distinct from the soft splash of the rain, and the hiss of the flares, and the hundred and one other noises that came dimly to me out of the night, I heard Jack’s voice – at least, I think it was Jack’s voice.”

  Of a sudden he sat up in the chair, and, rising quickly, he came and leant over the foot of the bed.

  “Devil take it,” he cried bitterly, “I know it was Jack’s voice – now. I knew it the next day when it was too late. What he said exactly I shall never know – at the time it made no impression on me; but at this moment, almost like a spirit voice in my brain, I can hear him. I can hear him asking me to watch him. I can hear him pleading – I can hear his dreadful fear of being found afraid. As a whisper from a great distance I can hear one short sentence – ‘Jerry, my God, Jerry – I’m frightened!’

  “Winkle, he turned to me in his weakness – that boy who had never failed before, that boy who had reached the breaking-point – and I heeded him not. I was too dead-beat; my brain couldn’t grasp it.”

  “But, Jerry,” I cried, “it turned out all right the next day; he…” The words died away on my lips as I met the look in his eyes.

  “You’d better let me finish,” he interrupted wearily. “Let me get the whole hideous tragedy off my mind for the first and the last time. Early next morning we attacked. In the dim, dirty light of dawn I saw the boy’s face as he moved off to his platoon; and even then I didn’t remember those halting sentences that had come to me out of the night. So, instead of ordering him to the rear on some pretext or other, as I should have done, I let him go to his platoon.

  “As we went across the ground that morning, through a fire like nothing I had ever imagined, a man wavered in front of me. I felt it clean through me. I knew fear had come. I shouted and cheered – but the wavering was spreading; I knew that too. So I shot him through the heart from behind at point-blank range, as I had trained myself to do – in that eternity ago – before the war. The counter-attack was successful.”

  “Great heavens, Jerry!” I muttered, “whom did you shoot?” though I knew the answer already.

  “The man I shot was Jack Delawnay. Whether at the time I was actively conscious of it, I cannot say. Certainly my training enabled me to act before any glimmering of the aftermath came into my mind. This is the aftermath.”

  I shuddered at the utter hopelessness of his tone, though the full result of his action had not dawned on me yet; my mind was dazed.

  “But surely Jack was no coward,” I said at length.

  “He was not; but on that particular morning he gave out. He had reached the limit of his endurance.”

  “The colonel’s letter,” I reminded him; “it praised the lad.”

  “Lies,” he answered wearily; “all lies, engineered by me. Not because I am ashamed of what I did, but for the lad’s sake, and hers, and the old people. I loved the boy, as you know, but he failed, and there was no other way. And where the fiend himself is gloating over it is that he knows it was the only time Jack did fail. If only I hadn’t been so beat the night before; if only his words had reached my brain before it was too late. If only… I think,” he added, after a pause – “I think I shall go mad. Sometimes I wish I could.”

  “And what of Pat?” I asked, at length breaking the silence.

  The hands grasping the bed tightened, and grew white.

  “I said goodbye to her before your eyes, ten minutes ago. I shall never see her again.”

  “But, great heavens, Jerry!” I cried, “you can’t give her up like that. She idolises the ground you walk on, she worships you, and she need never know. You were only doing your duty after all.”

  “Stop!” he cried, and his voice was a command. “As you love me, old friend, don’t tempt me. For three weeks those arguments have been flooding everything else from my mind. Do you remember at Henley, when she said, ‘He might have answered to your voice’? Winkle, it’s true, Jack might have. And I killed him. Just think if I married her, and she did find out. Her brother’s murderer – in her eyes. The man who has wrecked her home, and broken her father and mother. It’s inconceivable, it’s hideous. Ah! don’t you see how utterly final it all is? She may have been right; and if she was, then I, who loved her better than the world, have murdered her brother, and broken the old people’s hearts for the sake of a theory. The fact that my theory has been put into practice, at the expense of everything I have to live for, is full of humour, isn’t it?” And his laugh was wild.

  “Steady, Jerry,” I said sternly. “What do you mean to do?”

  “You’ll see, old man, in time,” he answered. “First and foremost, get back to the regiment, arm or no arm. I would not have come home, but I had to see her once more.”

  “You talk as if it was the end.” I looked at him squarely.

  “It is,” he answered. “It’s easy out there.”

  “Your mind is made up?”

  “Absolutely.” He gave a short laugh. “Goodbye, old friend. Ease it to her as well as you can. Say I’m unstrung by the trenches, anything you like; but don’t let her guess the truth.”

  For a long minute he held my hand. Then he turned away. He walked to the mantelpiece, and there was a photograph of her there. For a long time he looked at it. and it seemed to me he whispered something. A sudden dimness blinded my eyes, and when I looked again he had gone – through the window into the night.

  I did not see Pat until I left Drayton Hall after that ghastly night, save only once or twice with her mother in the room.

  But an hour before I left she came to me, and her face was that of a woman who has passed through the fires.

  “Tell me, Winkle, shall I ever see him again? You know what I mean.”

  “You will never see him again, Pat,” and the look in her eyes made me choke.

  “Will you tell me what it was he told you before he went through the window? You see, I was in the hall waitin
g for him,” and she smiled wearily.

  “I can’t, Pat, dear; I promised him,” I muttered. “But it was nothing disgraceful.”

  “Disgraceful!” she cried proudly. “Jerry, and anything disgraceful. Oh, my God! Winkle, dear,” and she broke down utterly, “do you remember the waltz they were playing that day – ‘Destiny’?”

  And then I went. Whether that wonderful woman’s intuition has told her something of what happened, I know not. But yesterday morning I got a letter from the colonel saying that Jerry had chucked his life away, saving a wounded man. And this morning she will have seen it in the papers.

  God help you, Pat, my dear.

  Spud Trevor of the Red Hussars

  It would be but a small exaggeration to say that in every God-forsaken hole and corner of the world, where soldiers lived and moved and had their being, before Nemesis overtook Europe, the name of Spud Trevor of the Red Hussars was known. From Simla to Singapore, from Khartum to the Curragh his name was symbolical of all that a regimental officer should be. Senior subalterns guiding the erring feet of the young and frivolous from the tempting paths of nightclubs and fair ladies, to the infinitely better ones of hunting and sport, were apt to quote him. Adjutants had been known to hold him up as an example to those of their flock who needed chastening for any of the hundred and one things that adjutants do not like – if they have their regiment at heart. And he deserved it all.

  I, who knew him, as well perhaps as anyone; I, who was privileged to call him friend, and yet in the hour of his greatest need failed him; to whose lot it has fallen to remove the slur from his name, state this in no half-hearted way. He deserved it, and a thousand times as much again. He was the type of man beside whom the ordinary English gentleman – the so-called white man – looked dirty-grey in comparison. And yet there came a day when men who had openly fawned on him left the room when he came in, when whispers of an unsuspected yellow streak in him began to circulate, when senior subalterns no longer held him up as a model. Now he is dead: and it has been left to me to vindicate him. Perchance by so doing I may wipe out a little of the stain of guilt that lies so heavy on my heart; perchance I may atone, in some small degree, for my doubts and suspicions; and, perchance too, the whitest man that ever lived may of his understanding and knowledge, perfected now in the Great Silence to which he has gone, accept my tardy reparation, and forgive. It is only yesterday that the document, which explained everything, came into my hands. It was sent to me sealed, and with a short covering letter from a firm of solicitors stating that their client was dead – killed in France – and that according to his instructions they were forwarding the enclosed, with the request that I should make such use of it as I saw fit.