Читать книгу: «Far-away Stories», страница 13
MY SHADOW FRIENDS
My gentle readers have been good enough to ask me what some of the folk whose adventures I have from time to time described have done in the Great War. It is a large question, for they are so many. Most of them have done things they never dreamed they would be called upon to do. Those that survived till 1914 have worked, like the rest of the community in England and France, according to their several capacities, in the Holiest Crusade in the history of mankind.
Well, let me plunge at once into the midst of things.
About a year ago the great voice of Jaffery came booming across my lawn. He was a Lieutenant-Colonel, and a D.S.O., and his great red beard had gone. The same, but yet a subtly different Jaffery. Liosha was driving a motor-lorry in France. He told me she was having the time of her life.
I have heard, too, of my old friend Sir Marcus, leaner than ever and clad in ill-fitting khaki, and sitting in a dreary office in Havre with piles of browny-yellow army forms before him, on which he had checked packing-cases of bully-beef ever since the war began. And if you visit a certain hospital – in Manchester of all places, so dislocating has been the war – there you will still see Lady Ordeyne (it always gives me a shock to think of Carlotta as Lady Ordeyne) matronly and inefficient, but the joy and delight of every wounded man.
And Septimus? Did you not know that the Dix gun was used at the front? His great new invention, the aero-tank, I regret to say, was looked on coldly by the War Office. Now that Peace has come he is trying, so Brigadier-General Sir Clem Sypher tells me, to adapt it to the intensive cultivation of whitebait.
And I have heard a few stories of others. Here is one told me by a French officer, one Colonel Girault. The scene was a road bridge on the outskirts of the zone of the armies. His car had broken down hopelessly, and with much profane language he swung to the bridge-head. The sentry saluted. He was an elderly Territorial with a ragged pair of canvas trousers and a ragged old blue uniform coat and a battered kepi and an ancient rifle. A scarecrow of a sentry, such as were seen on all the roads of France.
"How far is it to the village?"
"Two kilometres, mon Colonel."
There was something familiar in the voice and in the dark, humorous eyes.
"Say, mon vieux, what is your name?" asked Colonel Girault.
"Gaston de Nérac, mon Colonel."
"Connais pas," murmured the Colonel, turning away.
"Exalted rank makes Gigi Girault forget the lessons of humility he learned in the Café Delphine."
Colonel Girault stood with mouth agape. Then he laughed and threw himself into the arms of the dilapidated sentry.
"Mon Dieu! It is true. It is Paragot!"
Then afterwards: "And what can I do for you, mon vieux?"
"Nothing," said Paragot. "The bon Dieu has done everything. He has allowed me to be a soldier of France in my old age."
And Colonel Girault told me that he asked for news of the little Asticot – a painter who ought by now to be famous. Paragot replied:
"He is over there, killing Boches for his old master."
Do you remember Paul Savelli, the Fortunate Youth? He lived to see his dream of a great, awakened England come true. He fell leading his men on a glorious day. His Princess wears on her nurse's uniform the Victoria Cross which he had earned in that last heroic charge, but did not live to wear. And she walks serene and gracious, teaching proud women how to mourn.
What of Quixtus? He sacrificed his leisure to the task of sitting in a dim room of the Foreign Office for ten hours a day in front of masses of German publications, and scheduling with his scientific method and accuracy the German lies. Clementina saw him only on Sundays. She turned her beautiful house on the river into a maternity home for soldiers' wives. Tommy, the graceless, when last home on leave, said that she was capable of murdering the mothers so as to collar all the babies for herself. And Clementina smiled as though acknowledging a compliment. "Once every few years you are quite intelligent, Tommy," she replied.
I have heard, too, that Simon, who jested so with life, and Lola of the maimed face, went out to a Serbian hospital, and together won through the horror of the retreat. They are still out there, sharing in Serbia's victory, and the work of Serbia's reconstruction.
In the early days of the war, in Regent Street, I was vehemently accosted by a little man wearing the uniform of a French captain. He had bright eyes, and a clean shaven chin which for the moment perplexed me, and a swaggering moustache.
"Just over for a few hours to see the wife and little Jean."
"But," said I, "what are you doing in this kit? You went out as a broken-down Territorial."
"Mon cher ami," he cried, straddling across the pavement to the obstruction of traffic, and regarding me mirthfully, "it is the greatest farce on the world. Imagine me! I, a broken-down Territorial, as you call me, bearded a lion of a General of Division in his den – and I came out a Captain. Come into the Café Royal and I'll tell you all about it."
His story I cannot set down here, but it is not the least amazing of the joyous adventures of my friend Aristide Pujol.
What Doggie and Jeanne did in the war, my gentle readers know. Their first child was born on the glorious morning of November 11, 1918, amid the pealing of bells and shouts of rejoicing. When Doggie crept into the Sacred Room of Wonderment, he found the babe wrapped up in the Union Jack and the Tricolour. "There's only one name for him," whispered Jeanne with streaming eyes, "Victor!"
To leave fantasy for the brutal fact. You may say these friends of mine are but shadows. It is true. But shadows are not cast by nothingness. These friends must live substantially and corporeally, although in the flesh I have never met them. Some strange and unguessed sun has cast their shadows across my path. I know that somewhere or the other they have their actual habitation, and I know that they have done the things I have above recounted. These shadows of things unseen are real. In fable lies essential truth. These shadows that now pass quivering before my eyes have behind them great, pulsating embodiments of men and women, in England and France, who have given up their lives to the great work which is to cleanse the foulness of the Central Empires of Europe, regenerate humanity, and bring Freedom to God's beautiful earth.
