Читать книгу The Battle Within - Philip Gibbs - Страница 12

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A young American sergeant named Edward D. Haddon from Taunton, Massachusetts, observed with watchful eyes the scene at Waterloo station on a Saturday morning while waiting for a train to Farningham. He was a tall young man with deep-set eyes, a straight nose and a square chin with a cleft in it, and in British uniform he would have looked English or Scottish, or even Irish, according to the indistinguishable strains of the British race. Standing straight-backed by one of the bookstalls he had ascertained that the train for Farningham went from Platform 7—he watched a crowd of blue-jackets shouldering their kit before moving off to a Portsmouth train, and the hurly burly of the station in war-time England which was still new to him, though he had been over here for nearly three months. Everyone looked warm, cheerful and hurried. A party of A.T.S. girls—he was not sure what those letters stood for—lunched round a canteen, getting tea and cakes from a girl who refused to be hurried and said “I can’t wait on everybody at once. Take your turn, can’t you?” Mothers with children made a dash for soldiers arriving at one of the platforms. There were greetings and embraces.

“ ’Ullo, Molly, ’Ullo, Bert.”

A naval petty officer, who had been standing by the bookstall motionless, suddenly strode forward and held a girl in his arms.

Two military police, with their red caps, scrutinized the assembly as though it might contain German spies. The music of a military band blared out of a microphone. Officers and men of the Tank Corps in black berets made their way to a moving staircase. A lady at the bookstall asked for the Psychic News and was annoyed at not getting it.

Two nurses asked a porter to get them a taxi-cab.

“You’ll ’ave to queue up, ladies,” said the porter. “A bit of a curse, I know, but there’s a war on.”

“We’ve heard that before,” said one of the nurses. “It’s an excuse for red tape and a lot of damn nonsense.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you ain’t right, lady,” said the porter with a laugh.

Edward D. Haddon, of Taunton, Massachusetts, looked and listened. He liked to hear the Cockney dialect. The people who spoke it had been through the London Blitz. They had known how to take it. Friends of his in Taunton boasted of having Cockney ancestors.

Edward D. Haddon, having no one to talk to in this crowd, talked to himself inside his head.

“These people don’t take the war grimly. They certainly are a cheerful crowd. They look as though they’re winning this war and know the worst is over. Well, I guess that’s right, though there’s still a long way to go. That’s why I’m here. I guess we’ll have to do a hell of a lot of fighting before the Germans crack. British and Americans fighting together. That kills the Ancient Grudge, and time enough, too. It’s a hell of a long time since George Three and the Declaration of Independence. Some of our Isolationists still want to fan up that old stuff. Some of my bunch come over with their old school-book prejudices which break down mostly when they’ve seen the inside of an English home. We’re turning over a page in history, I guess. Maybe I’ll see what’s on the next page. I’ll be glad to know. That’s a striking-looking girl over there. I wonder why she looked at me like that. I like her brown eyes and her straight little nose. She looks like Rosalind in As You Like It. She walks with a long free stride like so many English girls. And she’s going toward Platform 7, which is mine, I’m told.”

He moved towards Platform 7 and found the train already packed with sailors and civilians. He did not see the brown-haired girl like Rosalind in As You Like It until he found her in the bus going to Ashleigh Heath. She was sitting in the front seat with another girl.

The bus passed out of Farningham into the countryside, going through little old villages with timbered houses here and there, and in one of them an old English inn with black beams and white plaster and a weathered roof of red tiles with wavy lines.

“This is England as I’ve read about it,” thought Edward D. Haddon from Taunton. Massachusetts. “Maybe those houses stood there in Elizabeth’s time. And I like the way all those cottages keep their gardens full of flowers. Shakespeare’s flowers. What’s that line:

“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows!”

He had a pleasant sentimental journey to Ashleigh Heath. He knew when he came to it by a nod from the young woman in blue trousers who had given him his ticket.

“Now what?” he thought, standing on the edge of the Green. Perhaps someone could tell him where Dr. Haddon lived.

Someone told him. It was the brown-haired girl whom he had seen at Waterloo.

“Are you looking for Dr. Haddon’s house?”

“How did you guess it?” asked the American sergeant, touching his cap and smiling into her brown eyes.

“I’m Pearl Haddon. I spotted you at Waterloo.”

The American was astonished at being spotted in all that crowd. He was also pleased.

“Well, this is wonderful,” he said. “I call it a real bit of good fortune. My name is Edward D. Haddon. Your ancestors way back were also mine, according to the family Bible. In a way we’re sort of cousins.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Pearl. “Isn’t that the right thing to say to an American?”

“It goes with me, Miss Pearl,” answered Edward D. Haddon. “I’m more than pleased to meet you. This is a great day in my life. I’ve been looking forward to it for quite a time. This old village is just as I pictured it. Queen Anne, aren’t they—those little houses?”

“Queen Victoria mostly,” answered Pearl, who refused to pamper to his sentiment. “The rest are rather faked up by jerry builders.”

“That’s a new one on me,” said the American. “But I’m not going to be robbed of my historical romance. Those little hills were there all right when your ancestors and mine rode around this countryside, and fought with Harry at Agincourt.”

“Did they?” asked Pearl. “I think it’s more likely that they were keeping pigs in Sussex and scratching themselves in filthy hovels.”

Edward D. Haddon laughed and looked with smiling eyes at this representative of the English Haddons.

He liked the look of her. He liked her straight way of speech.

“There was a Haddon,” he said, “who was mixed up with the murder of a fellow in the Tower—Sir Thomas Overbury. That’s where I come in. Young Haddon took a boat to Boston, married Martha Plaskett and had many descendants—of whom I am one.”

“Lucky for you,” said Pearl. “But my mother and father are waiting for you. Our house is at the end of the village. You mustn’t expect rich food or much of it. You won’t find an ancestral castle or anything like that.”

Edward D. Haddon did not expect much food. He felt guilty, anyhow, in poaching on their rations. Nor did he crave for an ancestral castle. He was easily satisfied. Just to get into an English home would give him very great pleasure. He would have to make an apology for inviting himself.

“That’s all right,” said Pearl. “Hands across the sea and all that.”

Presently she stopped in front of a two-storied house, long and low, lying back from the road with a pleasant garden in front.

“This is our hovel,” said Pearl.

“It’s a good-looking hovel,” said the American. “It’s like a poem by Wordsworth, or a picture by Cecil Alden.”

“Yes, it is rather sweet,” admitted Pearl grudgingly. She was not going to play up to a sentimental American in search of antiquity and false romance. She took him into the house she called a hovel.