The train travelled, as troop trains do, in a series of impetuous rushes between long delays. At length in the middle of the forenoon they arrived at their destination and marched through a little seaside town of round fronted stucco Early Victorian boarding-houses, an Edwardian bandstand, and a modern, concrete bathing pool, three feet deep, blue at the bottom, designed to keep children from the adventure and romance of the beach. (Here there were no shells or star-fish, no jelly-fish to be melted, no smooth pebbles of glass to be found, no bottles that might contain messages from shipwrecked sailors, no wave which, bigger than the rest, suddenly knocked you off your feet. The nurses might sit round this pool in absolute peace of mind.) Two miles out, through a suburb of bungalows and converted railway carriages, there was a camp prepared for them in the park of what, in recent years, had been an unsuccessful holiday club.
That night Alastair summoned Sonia by telephone and she came next day, taking rooms in the hotel. It was a simple and snug hotel and Alastair came there in the evenings when he was off duty. They tried to recapture the atmosphere of the winter and spring, of the days in Surrey when Alastair’s life as a soldier had been a novel and eccentric interruption of their domestic routine; but things were changed. The war had entered on a new and more glorious phase. The night in the train when he thought he was going to action stood between Alastair and the old days.
The battalion were charged with the defence of seven miles of inviting coastline, and they entered with relish into the work of destroying local amenities. They lined the sands with barbed wire and demolished the steps leading from esplanade to beach; they dug weapon pits in the corporation’s gardens, sandbagged the bow-windows of private houses and with the co-operation of some neighbouring sappers blocked the roads with dragons’-teeth and pill-boxes; they stopped and searched all cars passing through this area and harassed the inhabitants with demands to examine their identity cards. Mr. Smallwood sat up on the golf course every night for a week, with a loaded revolver, to investigate a light which was said to have been seen flashing there. Captain Mayfield discovered that telegraph posts are numbered with brass-headed nails and believed it to be the work of the fifth column; when mist came rolling in from the sea one evening, the Corporal in command of Alastair’s section reported an enemy smoke screen, and for miles round word of invasion was passed from post to post.
“I don’t believe you’re enjoying the Army any more,” said Sonia after three weeks of Coastal Defence.
“It isn’t that. I feel I could be doing something more useful.”
“But, darling, you told me your mortar was one of the key points of the defence.”
“So it is,” said Alastair loyally.
“So what?”
“So what?” Then Alastair said, “Sonia, would you think it bloody of me if I volunteered for special service?”
“Dangerous?”
“I don’t suppose so really. But very exciting. They’re getting up special parties for raiding. They go across to France and creep up behind Germans and cut their throats in the dark.” He was excited, turning a page in his life, as, more than twenty years ago lying on his stomach before the fire, with a bound volume of Chums, he used to turn over to the next instalment of the serial.
“It doesn’t seem much of a time to leave a girl,” said Sonia, “but I can see you want to.”
“They have special knives and Tommy-guns and knuckle dusters; they wear rope-soled shoes.”
“Bless you,” said Sonia.
“I heard about it from Peter Pastmaster. A man in his regiment is raising one. Peter’s got a troop in it. He says I can be one of his section commanders; they can fix me up with a commission apparently. They carry rope ladders round their waists and files sewn in the seams of their coats to escape with. D’you mind very much if I accept?”
“No, darling. I couldn’t keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the rope ladder I couldn’t. I see that.”
Angela had never considered the possibility of Cedric’s death. She received the news in an official telegram and for some days would speak to no one, not even to Basil, about the subject. When she mentioned it, she spoke from the middle rather than from the beginning or the end of her progression of thought.
“I knew we needed a death,” she said. “I never thought it was his.”
Basil said, “Do you want to marry me?”
“Yes, I think so. Neither of us could ever marry anyone else, you know.”
“That’s true.”
“You’d like to be rich, wouldn’t you?”
“Will anyone be rich after this war?”
“If anyone is, I shall be. If no one is, I don’t suppose it matters so much being poor.”
“I don’t know that I want to be rich,” said Basil, after a pause. “I’m not acquisitive, you know. I only enjoy the funnier side of getting money not having it.”
“Anyway it’s not an important point. The thing is that we aren’t separable any more.”
“Let nothing unite us but death. You always thought I was going to die, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The dog it was that died…Anyway this is no time to be thinking of marrying. Look at Peter. He’s not been married six weeks and there he is joining a gang of desperadoes. What’s the sense of marrying with things as they are? I don’t see what there is to marriage, if it isn’t looking forward to a comfortable old age.”
“The only thing in wartime is not to think ahead. It’s like walking in the blackout with a shaded torch. You can just see as far as the step you’re taking.”
“I shall be a terrible husband.”
“Yes, darling, don’t I know it? But you see one can’t expect anything to be perfect now. In the old days if there was one thing wrong it spoiled everything; from now on for all our lives, if there’s one thing right the day is made.”
“That sounds like poor Ambrose, in his Chinese mood.”
Poor Ambrose had moved West. Only the wide, infested Atlantic lay between him and Parsnip. He had taken rooms in a little fishing town and the great waves pounded on the rocks below his windows. The days passed and he did absolutely nothing. The fall of France had no audible echo on that remote shore.
This is the country of Swift, Burke, Sheridan, Wellington, Wilde, T. E. Lawrence, he thought; this is the people who once lent fire to an imperial race, whose genius flashed through two stupendous centuries of culture and success, who are now quietly receding into their own mists, turning their backs on the world of effort and action. Fortunate islanders, thought Ambrose, happy, drab escapists, who have seen the gold lace and the candlelight and left the banquet before dawn revealed stained table linen and a tipsy buffoon!
But he knew it was not for him; the dark, nomadic strain in his blood, the long heritage of wandering and speculation, allowed him no rest. Instead of Atlantic breakers he saw the camels swaying their heads resentfully against the lightening sky, as the caravan woke to another day’s stage in the pilgrimage.
Old Rampole sat in his comfortable cell and turned his book to catch the last, fading light of evening. He was absorbed and enchanted. At an age when most men are rather more concerned to preserve familiar joys than to seek for new, at, to be exact, the age of sixty-two, he had suddenly discovered the delights of light literature.
There was an author on the list of his firm of whom Mr. Bentley was slightly ashamed. She wrote under the name of Ruth Mountdragon, a pseudonym which hid the identity of a Mrs. Parker. Every year for seventeen years Mrs. Parker had written a novel dealing with the domestic adventures of a different family; radically different that is to say in name, exhibiting minor differences of composition and circumstance, but spiritually as indistinguishable as larches; they all had the quality of “charm”; once it was a colonel’s family of three girls in reduced circumstances on a chicken farm, once it was an affluent family on a cruise in the Adriatic, once a newly-married doctor in Hampstead; all the permutations and combinations of upper-middle-class life had been methodically exploited for seventeen years; but the charm was constant. Mrs. Parker’s public was not vast, but it was substantial; it lay, in literary appreciation, midway between the people who liked some books and disliked others, and the people who merely liked reading, inclining rather to the latter group. Mr. Rampole knew her name as one of the authors who were not positively deleterious to his pocket, and consequently when his new manner of life and the speculative tendencies which it fostered caused him to take up novel reading, he began on her. He was transported into a strange world of wholly delightful, estimable people whom he had rightly supposed not to exist. With each page a deeper contentment settled on the old publisher. He had already read ten books and looked forward eagerly to rereading them when he came to the end of the seventeenth. Mr. Bentley was even engaged to bring Mrs. Parker to visit him at a future, unspecified date. The prison chaplain was also an admirer of Mrs. Parker’s. Old Rampole gained great face from disclosing her real name. He half-promised to allow the chaplain to meet her. He was happier than he could remember ever having been.