Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

And all the while her eyes were on the soldier. And all this boundless slippery exuberance was for the soldier—at the soldier—it did not matter upon what pretext it vented itself. Warmth and excitement to spare for Deb too ... Deb felt this, or she would have torn herself away from the embrace ... but Jenny was wholly unconscious that she was making love to a man with a girl as the intermediary; she was no self-analyst. But the soldier and Deb, in one look exchanged, established that mental kinship which exists between those who see things alike introspectively and from the outside view; with meaning duplicated and tripled; made grotesque by circumstance or contrast; backwards from the future, and twisted this way and that by imps of irony; kinship of those who can see with the chill impersonality of gods on Olympus, and also with pointed application to their own tiny scheme of things; restless subtle kinship of those who dream and those who question.

And even as they silently hailed each other, he smiling a little under his fair drawn eyebrows, and she very serious; hailed each other through the froth and tumble of Jenny’s excited talk, the white light which rayed the ceilings and walls of the room, was sucked into soft inky chokiness....

“Little beast has gone out,” commented the soldier, in disrespectful reference to Cora. “Light her again, and let’s sit round and be comfortable.”

II

Of course Deb did not sell Cora.

Round Cora they hacked a sort of intimate privacy, with privileges for their trio alone. Cora was their excuse, the ostentatious cause of their withdrawal from the rest of the boarding-house: they were going to smoke a cigarette with Cora; they were going to fry potatoes on Cora; Cora was depressed, and needed the instalment of a fresh wick. Perhaps they rather overdid Cora; but the intangible need binding them together needed to solve itself into tangible expression. Cora, whether as an exaggerated joke or a temperamental goddess, was ... convenient. “Are you coming home to Cora to-night?” or “I saw Cora was lit, so I walked in!” Deb was High Priestess of the Oil-can; Jenny, principal engineer and mechanic; and the soldier serenely enjoyed results, as was typical of him.

And then Stella Marcus crystallized their dependence on the Cora legend into a pun. They took up the nickname—“The Chorus meets to-night!”—schoolgirlish methods of allusion ... but Jenny and the soldier had been battered by realities, and welcomed the silliness of their present relapse. And Deb, her soul a responsive barometer, sank alternately to the soldier’s semi-humorous apathy of nothing-worth-while, and leapt again to Jenny’s soaring irresponsibility.

The soldier had been thus labelled by Deb in the spirit of irony, when he told her that he had been twenty-three years in the army, and was not, as she had at first imagined, one of that gallant mushroom crop raised by the call of war. He had been in India and South Africa, Aden, Singapore, Malta and Gibraltar. It was difficult to conceive of anyone less of the accepted military type: an individualist of the let-me-alone order; an atheist; a keen but destructive logician; a hopelessly romantic pessimist; he could not understand ready-made standards of conduct, of honour, of conviviality; would not conform to the prevalent disposition to flock together, pray together, stand or fall together. A soldier, even a good soldier, without esprit de corps, was a deplorable spectacle; hardly likely to prove an acquisition to the mess. His fellow-officers, after a perplexed interval of acquaintance, were wont to pronounce him a rum beast. To which, very occasionally, was made the resentful addition: “Tries to be funny”—when Burton Ames unleashed his weary but mordant form of humour. He was more popular with his men, who appreciated the eccentric interest he was prone to waste on them singly and as persons, however much he depreciated them collectively.

Fitly, he should have been apprenticed to some trade or profession which combined the essentials of a sailor, an explorer, a landed proprietor, a hermit and a carpenter. The career of Robinson Crusoe answered all requisites to perfection....

Out of Deb’s little crowded room, made vivid by her own books and pictures, he created for himself a sort of amateur desert island, away from the gregarious herd in the smoking-room and lounge and drawing-room downstairs. His own room was bare and uncomfortable, as only a soldier’s can be who has many times shifted camp, and without a woman to look after him. And Jenny’s larger room was liable to intrusions from Dolph and Bobby. But in Deb’s room he hung curtains, and fiddled with Cora, and altered furniture, and smoked his pipe, and examined books, and listened to Deb’s wicked imitations of their fellow-boarders, and cooked potatoes by his own home-made method of so many heart-beats to the moment and so many moments to the boil, and confided in Deb and Jenny his love of complete solitude, with ever-deepening tranquillity of mood. Sometimes they all went out together on some impromptu ramble leading to Hampstead Heath or a cinema or a coffee-stall. But usually they were to be found in a careless group round Cora; Burton Ames lumbering in the only armchair; one figure a-sprawl on the bed; the other flopped on the floor; accommodation of the soldier’s huge inert limbs reducing to nil the already limited space. A clammy February and bleak March urged a desire to huddle, morally and actually. It was scarcely possible for one of them to make a movement without brushing against one of the others.... Sometimes Dolph would meander into the room in funereal quest of his wife; and sometimes Aunt Stella left her rubber of bridge to exchange a few jokes with Major Ames. But for the most part they were tacitly left alone, or unjustly alluded to as a “noisy gang” by Mr Gryce, whose room was below theirs.