Читать книгу The Battle Within - Philip Gibbs - Страница 7

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Pearl Haddon strode quickly through the crowd at Waterloo Station. The ticket collector said, “Good morning, Miss,” knowing her as the owner of a season. She outflanked a party of blue-jackets waiting for the Portsmouth train and followed a group of khaki-clad girls making for the moving stairway to the Underground. They all looked plump and cheerful and warm carrying their bundles of kit.

“Oh, sergeant,” cried one of them, “there’s my brother at the bookstall. May I fall out and have a word with him?”

“Be your age, kid,” said the female sergeant. “Come on, now.”

In front of Pearl was a very small soldier in battle-dress, laden with a heavy kit-bag and other burdens including a rifle which jabbed Pearl as she stepped on to the escalator.

“Sorry, Miss,” said the small soldier. “And I’m very sorry for myself, you know. What I want is cooling breezes and a nice long drink.”

She made a dash for a waiting train on the Underground and was nearly caught by its closing doors and was pulled in by a young sergeant in the Tanks on the outside edge of the standing crowd inside.

“You nearly got guillotined that time,” he remarked.

“Thanks,” said Pearl.

“Lovely morning,” said the young sergeant in a friendly way.

“Quite nice,” answered Pearl, who did not encourage these conversations with Underground passengers—not that she resented them, but they were cut short abruptly by the next station or the one after the next. At Charing Cross the train gave a jerk and she staggered back against a naval officer who was supported from behind by a compact mass of passengers.

“Sorry,” said Pearl.

“Quite all right,” said the naval officer.

So it always happened, this last lap of the journey from Ashleigh Heath between Waterloo and Charing Cross where she had to change for St. James’s Park. She had to walk now across the Park to the Palace. That was pleasant on such a morning as this, though not so pleasant in rain or sleet. Crowds of girls and some men were striding along ahead of her on their way to offices and shops. She could hear the girls chattering to each other brightly. Nothing seemed to damp their spirits. Not even air-raids.

“Bert said to me ... and I said to him ...”

“Oh, he’s a cough-drop, but quite a dear.”

“I said ‘not likely. I’m not one of those girls, you know, so get that right in your own mind, if you have such a thing’.”

All the flowers in the Park were out very early this year. There was a scent of may-blossom from a tree overhanging the lake.

“I suppose one ought to be glad to be alive,” thought Pearl Haddon. “I’m glad Myra Lehmann didn’t drown herself. It’s a surrender—suicide. Father is right when he says courage is the greatest of human qualities.”

One of the sentries outside St. James’s Palace winked at her and grinned.

He would grin on the wrong side of his face if she reported him. However, it amused him.

She went through the archway in the Palace yard. When she had first come here to work for the Prisoners of War she had been thrilled by the thought that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn had often passed under this arch. So had Charles II and his ladies and many other ghosts of history. She sat at her table in a room where the initials of Henry and Anne were carved on the fire-place and where the Royal Arms were above the panelled walls. Mary Winchester had sworn that she had seen the ghost of Anne Boleyn when she worked overtime one night. But Mary Winchester was a merry little liar.

Mary Winchester was also a merry conversationalist when one was in a mood for it. She was at her table now with a pile of files in front of her, looking very neat in her black frock with a Toby collar. She raised her face to smile at Pearl Haddon.

“Hullo, Pearl. You look a bit white about the gills. Was the morning sausage a bit off colour or did you get suffocated in the subterranean struggle?”

“I’m all right,” said Pearl. “How are you?”

“Excited by the morning’s mail,” said Mary Winchester. “One of my Dunkirk officers writes to say that his wife has run off with her paying guest. He wants to know what he can do about it in the way of a divorce. I happen to know his wife slightly. She’s a slut.”

“I’m sorry about that,” said Pearl.

“Then there’s a boy in the Durhams. He says he hasn’t heard from his wife for three months. He asks us to get in touch with her. Meanwhile, he seems more worried about a safety razor sent him by his auntie. It hasn’t arrived.”

“Any news of Anthony Harding?” asked Pearl. “I suppose his name hasn’t come through?”

“You must ask Phœbe Sturton about that,” answered Mary Winchester. “She has the list of missing men. Every time one turns up she gives a whoop of joy. Yesterday she had a bit of luck that way. A man in the Desert Army was notified in an Italian camp. He had been missing for five months and there didn’t seem a hope.”

“That’s great,” said Pearl. “Still a chance for Faith ...”

She turned to her own file D. to F. She would have to write to a woman in Norfolk to tell her that her husband had gone insane. There were several letters from prisoners of war whose wives had changed their addresses without notification. Could the Red Cross and St. John’s get in touch with them somehow? There were many human documents in these letters from prisoners of war. Sometimes they gave her a bit of a heart-ache. Home-sickness was the prevalent malady. These men craved to see their wives and children, and their mothers and sweethearts. Some of the letters pretty tragic. Some incredibly comic.

She looked along the big room, once the banqueting chamber of English Kings. On the tables were long rows of cards, each one representing a prisoner of war—thousands and thousands of them. The line had lengthened out after Tobruk. Sometimes in her imagination they seemed to stretch to infinity, and instead of the cards with their index numbers she saw an army of young men marching wearily in endless battalions—all prisoners of war—all dog-tired—all dreaming back to the women they had left—hungry for home again.

She liked her job.