Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 21

Table of Contents

Late in the month of March Spenser Scarsdale was packed into a goods-wagon with some twenty other men and transported to a demobilization camp at Dunkirk. This train carried eight hundred men and a dozen officers, and the whole process suggested to Scarsdale the entraining and detraining of a herd of cattle. This brown crowd of men, gathered from various branches of the service, had lost its compactness but not its cohesion. The brown blobs cohered, and tried to arrange themselves in order when shouted at by an hectoring and somewhat scornful young major. It was a docile crowd; it was going home; but already it was ceasing to be a military formation and displaying the characteristics of a mob.

The major shouted.

“Don’t crowd, don’t crowd. Form up, by the right. Two deep. Damn you, I said two deep. You’re not a lot of sheep.”

The brown mass slowly sorted itself.

“Number. As you were. I said number.”

Scarsdale, crowded in the front rank, and watching the major’s face, saw it express impatience and scorn.

“Just like cattle!”

But at last the uneasy, jostling mass was formed into fours, and marched off to the camp. Scarsdale had a little, peaky-faced R.A.M.C. private on his right, and obviously the man was feeling bitter.

“I’ve ’ad enough of being shouted at by bloomin’ toffs. What price Lenin?”

The camp was a comprehensive affair, hutments and marquees in a big flat field that had been a meadow. The organization was admirable. Mass-man in the making was paraded and distributed, housed and fed. Hot meals were ready. The huts were scrupulously clean. Scarsdale, correctly documented, and feeling most strangely like a bale of cloth that was being handled for export, wondered how the souls of his fellow-men reacted to the process. Here was bureaucracy in action, efficient, impersonal, clean, and yet somehow damnable.

In an immense hut a variety show was provided, and it was by no means a paltry show. An infantry lance-corporal with the face of a girl, sang the old songs, and sang them to the soul of the home-going crowd.

“I’m in love—I’m in love.”

Scarsdale was strangely moved. He slipped out and wandered up and down between two dark and empty huts, with a clear, cold sky overhead stippled with stars. The night air had the tang of the sea and the spring, and he was conscious of a strange unrest, a yearning for—what? “I’m in love,—I’m in love.” Like these other and younger men he was in love with life, and with the vision of the new world that was to be, England in the spring of the year, the freedom to do this and that, youth, woman. He was going back to work, and to the earning of a living, but almost these verities were old, forgotten things grown dusty. He felt strangely and poignantly young that night, and his youth went out towards the youth of the new world.

He found himself thinking of Marwood’s daughter. A dark, handsome, and rather inscrutable creature! Her face had remained with him.

But the morrow brought other realities, and the significance of them worked in Scarsdale’s mind like leaven. He and other men were paraded, and marched, carrying their kits, to a group of huts in which the Goddess Hygeia presided over the initiation at the gate of the new freedom. Kits were handed in over a counter. The men stripped, and their clothes were taken to be baked. Naked they passed to the baths. They washed. They waited in nakedness for the final judgment.

“Next,” said a voice.

The orderly in charge gave Scarsdale a nudge, and Scarsdale, as nature had made him, passed through a canvas doorway, and found himself in the presence of a medical officer seated on a kitchen chair. He was scrutinized, and the scrutiny was keen, efficient, impartial. He was told to stretch out his hands and spread his fingers. He was examined for any sign of venereal disease. The doctor’s blue eyes were bright and hard, and when they met Scarsdale’s eyes there was no friendliness in them.

“Right. Next.”

Scarsdale was shepherded away to another compartment where clean clothes and a disinfected uniform was ready for him. He felt chilly, both within and without. He had been passed in nakedness to the new world. The cold and observant eyes of the doctor had stabbed into him a consciousness of himself as an insignificant and anonymous body, mere flesh, a carcase. The war had stripped him of spiritual garments, and peace had insisted upon seeing him stripped again before admitting him to its world for heroes. It was all very sensible and sound, but somehow the secret soul of him felt humiliated. Possibly his pride was hurt. He found himself wondering what would have happened to him had the examiner found him unclean.

He sat on a bench, and pulled on a pair of pants.

A voice said—“Last bloomin’ baby show, chum.”

Another voice spoke—“Well,—I call it damned good business. Sending you home clean.”

Scarsdale glanced at the last speaker, and beheld a florid, wholesome, blond young man buttoning up a khaki shirt. He had the scar of an old wound on his left forearm, but his face had no wounded look.

“Yes, jolly good business. The war’s taught me a thing or two.”

The less sanguine person on the other side was pulling on socks.

“Lot of blasted red tape.”

“Bosh. Got a wife to go to?”

“O, plenty, you bet.”

“Well, I suppose a girl won’t quarrel with getting her man back clean. Sound sense.”

“I’m fed up with bein’ messed about.”

Both of them looked at Scarsdale who sat between them, and appeared to be in a position to give a casting vote. Scarsdale was staring at his own naked feet; they were clean feet.

He said—“Yes, it’s a sound idea, but in the future I’d rather do my own inspecting.”

“Quite so,” said the blond young man; “but some people like being dirty. That’s what the doctors are up against I guess.”