1
JEREMY sat with the Speaker in the parlor of a rude farmhouse at the edge of the little village of Slough. It was now a week since the army had taken the field, and during that time they had not once come to grips with the enemy. The President of Wales had lingered unaccountably at Oxford, and Jeremy had pitched his camp in the neighborhood of Windsor, not daring to move further from London. He could not tell whether the Welshmen would follow the windings of the north bank of the river or cross at Reading and approach the capital from the south, or march by Thame around the top of the Chilterns. The Speaker, judging the enemy by his own strategical notions, had affirmed that they would advance towards Windsor if they supposed that battle could be joined there; and he wished to go straight on, as far as Oxford if necessary. But Jeremy, determined to be in truth what the old man had forced him to be, refused to move. They spent a weary week of doubt and anxiety, receiving every day a dozen contradictory reports, and occasionally moving out the troops to the west or the north on a wild-goose chase.
This state of affairs told heavily on them both. Jeremy ceased to be able to sleep, and he felt inexpressibly tired. The Speaker grew irritable and the ardor of his spirit, confined by delay, daily corroded his temper. The Canadian, who attended them faithfully, never refused to give Jeremy his advice; but he never suggested less than two possible courses of action, and he never failed to make it clear that either might bring success, and that either might involve complete disaster. On this day at last Jeremy’s patience had worn very thin. He had just explained to the Speaker for the twentieth time his objection to moving up the river direct on Oxford, and a dissatisfied silence had fallen between them. Jeremy sighed, and let his hands fall on the table, across the crude, inaccurate maps which were all that he had been able to obtain.
The dispute between them had grown so bitter that he felt unwilling to encounter the Speaker’s gaze, fearing lest his own weariness and disgust and resentment should show too obviously. But as he glanced cautiously at the old man he saw that he was leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap. In this attitude of rest he betrayed himself more than was common with him. The air of fire and mastery had gone out of his face, the lines of power were softened, the thick lips, instead of expressing pride and greed, drooped a little pathetically, and showed a weary resignation. Not only his features, but also the thick-veined old hands, seemed to have grown thinner and frailer than they were. He looked to Jeremy like a lamp inside which the flame is slowly and quietly dying. Jeremy’s heart suddenly softened towards him and he felt more unbearable than ever the fate in which they were all thus entangled.
But his tired brain refused to grapple with it any more, and he fell to making pictures. When they had marched out he alone in the whole army had felt despondent. The people of London wished them good luck with as much enthusiasm as, a few days before, they had welcomed them home. The troops marched off down Oxford Street and along the winding valley-road, covered again with flowers, which they stuck in their hats or in the muzzles of their rifles, singing odd uncouth snatches of boasting defiance in curious cadences which had suddenly sprung up among them and passed rapidly from mouth to mouth. Most of these praised Jeremy and his guns: some of them exalted him as a necromancer and credited him with supernatural powers. Even the Speaker chanted one of them in a rumbling, uncertain bass, somewhat to Jeremy’s discomfort. The discomfort was greater when Thomas Wells hummed another below his breath, with a satirical grin directed at the horizon before them.
The Lady Eva at their parting shared Jeremy’s distress but not his doubts. They had a few moments alone together on the morning of setting out, before the public ceremony at which she and the Lady Burney were to wish the army God-speed. She clung to him speechlessly, begging him with her eyes and her kisses to confess that he looked cheerfully to the result. Jeremy, shamefacedly conscious of having felt some resentment towards her since he had yielded to her entreaties, comforted her as well as he was able, and yet could not bring himself to say what she wanted to hear. Their short time ran to an end: the minutes ticked inexorably away; below in the courtyard he could hear the servants bringing around the horses. A dozen times his mind framed a pleasant lie for her which his tongue would not speak. Then they parted with this between them, and Jeremy went down into the courtyard with a heavy spirit. A few minutes later he and the Speaker and Thomas Wells were riding up Whitehall towards Piccadilly, the Lady Burney and the Lady Eva going before them in a carriage. There, on the spot where once the poised Cupid had stood, the Lady Eva kissed him again before the cheering people, and the army set out. Jeremy rode dully with it, wishing that his obstinate fixity in his own opinion could have given way for a moment and let him part without reserve from his beloved. He wondered much whether he would ever see her again, and the thought was exceedingly bitter.
Then followed this week of confusion and wretchedness, a depressing contrast with the lightning brilliance of the campaign against the Yorkshiremen. Jeremy’s resolution, braced for a swift and single test of it, withstood the strain hardly. It seemed to him that the moments in which good luck might carry him through were fast running away; he felt them like material things melting out of his hands. Still at Oxford, the President maintained his enigmatical immobility. Slowly the spirit of the troops faded and withered, like the trail of flowers they had left behind them on the march. Jeremy preserved the stolidity of his expression, grew slower of speech every day, and hid the bewildering turmoil of his thoughts. Only the Canadian went about the camp with an unaltered cheerfulness of demeanor. He behaved like an onlooker who is always willing to do what he can when the players of the game invoke his help. He talked with the officers, rode out often in front of the lines, seemed always busy, always in a detached manner interested in what was going on. Jeremy grew to hate him as much as he feared him....
“Jeremy! Jeremy!”
He started up from his meditation and found that the old man was speaking to him.
“Listen! Wasn’t that firing ... a long way off?”
He listened intently, then shook his head. “No, I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Jeremy, how much longer is it going to be?”
He was seized with surprise at the pitifulness of the Speaker’s tone. “God knows, sir,” he answered slowly, and added in an exhausted voice. “We haven’t enough men to go on adventures and force the business.”
“No ... no, I suppose not.” And then, losing some of this unusual docility, the Speaker burst out: “I am sick of this hole!”
“Campaigning quarters!” Jeremy replied as humorously and soothingly as he could. He was sick of it himself. The Speaker had desired that they should establish themselves in Windsor Castle; but much of the old building had been burnt down in the Troubles, and what was left had been used as a quarry. It was not possible to go anywhere in the neighborhood without seeing the great calcined stones built into the walls of house or barn. Hardly anything of the Castle was left standing; and the poor remains, in fact, were used as a common cart-shed by the inhabitants of the village of Windsor. In all this countryside, which was held and cultivated by small men, there was no great house; and they had been obliged to content themselves with a poor hovel of a farm, which had only one living-room and was dirty and uncomfortable. Jeremy grew to hate it and the wide dusty flats in which it stood. It seemed to him a detestable landscape, and daily the scene he loathed grew intertwined in his thoughts with his dread of the future. His feverish brain began to deal, against his will, in foolish omens and premonitions. He caught himself wondering, “Will this be the last I shall see of England?” He remembered, shuddering, that when he had first joined the Army in 1914 and had complained of early morning parades, a companion had said, “I suppose we shall have to get up at this time every morning for the rest of our lives!”
While he was trying to drive some such thoughts as these out of his mind, he was conscious of a stir outside the farmhouse, and presently an orderly entered and announced, “A scout with news, sir.”
“Bring him in,” said Jeremy wearily. He hardly glanced up at the trooper who entered, until the man began to speak. Then the tones of the voice caught his attention and he saw with surprise that it was Roger Vaile who stood there, his head roughly bandaged; his face smeared with blood and dust, his uniform torn and stained.
“Roger!” he cried, starting up.
Roger hesitated. The Speaker, who was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his face between his hands, muttered sharply, “Go on, man, go on!”
Roger straightened himself a little, disregarded Jeremy’s outstretched hand, and began again. “I went out alone, sir, three days ago,” he said, looking at neither of his listeners, “and went on upstream as far as a place called Dorchester. I saw a patrol of the enemy there coming out of the village, and to get away from them I had to leave my horse and swim across the river. There’s a hill on the other side that you can see the road from——”
“I know it!” Jeremy jerked out. “It’s called Sinodun!” The mere name as he pronounced it almost took his breath away. How well, in old journeys up the river, he had once known Sinodun!
“Is it?” Roger asked indifferently. “I didn’t know. Well, I stayed on top of the hill under a bush that night. The next morning about eleven I saw a lot of cavalry coming into the village from the Oxford road and soon after that infantry. It looked to me like the whole of the President’s army. There must have been ten or twelve thousand men altogether. So I started off to come back as fast as I could. I had some difficulty because when I got across the river again at Wallingford I was right among their patrols, and I couldn’t get away from them till they camped at Marlow last night.”
“At Marlow!” Jeremy cried, starting up. “Are you quite sure the whole army came as far as Marlow?”
“Absolutely sure,” Roger replied. “I was hiding just outside the village while they pitched their camp.”
“Then God be praised,” Jeremy breathed, “they’ve come past Reading and they’re marching straight at us. They can’t cross the river between here and there. Ten or twelve thousand, you say? Then we’re about equal in numbers and I believe we shall be equal to them in spirit—let alone the guns. And, Roger,” he finished, “are you hurt?”
“Nothing much—only a cut,” Roger assured him with his gentle smile. “Luckily I ran into one of their scouts and got his horse away from him—or I might not have been here so soon.”
“Come, Jeremy,” growled the Speaker, rising. “The battle is on us. We must get ready.” Jeremy would have stayed to speak to Roger and to see that he was provided with food; but the old man was insistent, and he found himself outside the house before he could protest.
It was about eleven o’clock of a fine, dry day, and the variable wind was blowing clouds of dust this way and that over the flat fields. All around them stretched the tents of the encampment in slovenly, irregular lines; and the soldiers, on whom, untrained as they were, the period of idleness had had an unlucky effect, were lounging here and there in careless groups. Jeremy’s attempt to make use of this week in drilling them had been for the most part unsuccessful. Officers and men alike were too much flushed with victory for his orders or appeals to have any effect. They were not so much impatient of discipline as negligent of it.
Jeremy sighed a little as he looked at the camp; but his spirits immediately revived. The Speaker was taking short steps up and down, rubbing his hands together and lifting up his nostrils to snuff the sweet, dry air. A kind of exhilaration seemed to fill him and to restore him to his former self. Jeremy caught it from him, and his voice was lively when he shouted to a servant to fetch thither the principal officers.
The council of war had hardly gathered when a new report came that the enemy were marching on Hitcham, following the main road that had once crossed the river at Maidenhead and now came around by the north bank. Jeremy’s plans were prepared, and he rapidly disposed his army, with the right wing resting on the slightly-rising ground of Stoke Park, the center running through Chalk Hill and Chalvey, and the left, guarding the bridge, in the empty fields where Eton once had been.
As he gave his orders, with some show of confidence and readiness, he tasted for a moment the glories of a commander-in-chief; but when he detailed to Thomas Wells his duties as the leader of the right wing of the army, his heart unreasonably sank and he faltered over his words.
“I understand,” the Canadian replied gravely, with an inscrutable expression. “I am to stand on the line between Stoke and Salt Hill until you give the word. Then you will send up the reserves and I am to advance, wheel around, and force them against the river.”
“That’s it,” said Jeremy with a heartiness he did not feel.
“So be it ... sir,” Thomas Wells assented lingeringly; then, with an air of hesitation, he murmured: “I suppose you’re quite certain ... that they’ll mass against our left ... that they won’t attack me and try to drive us into the river?”
“I’ll take the chance, anyway,” Jeremy answered stoutly; and, nodding, he rode off to look at the guns, which were under the command of Jabez, immediately behind the center of the line.
“We’ll do them in, master,” said Jabez reassuringly. “Never you fear. You leave that to us.” As he spoke a sharp crackling of rifle fire arose by the river-bank near Queen’s Eyot.
“Well, we’ve started, Jabez,” Jeremy smiled at him. “I must go back.” As he rode again towards his chosen point for directing the battle his breath came regularly and his heart was singularly at rest.