She blew him a kiss. The taxi drove off, and Doggie went back into the house with leaden feet. The meeting, which he had morbidly dreaded, had brought him no comfort. It had not removed the invisible barrier between Peggy and himself. But Peggy seemed so unconscious of it that he began to wonder whether it only existed in his diseased imagination. Though by his silences and reserves he had given her cause for resentment and reproach, her attitude was nothing less than angelic. He sat down moodily in an arm-chair, his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his legs stretched out. The fault lay in himself, he argued. What was the matter with him? He seemed to have lost all human feeling, like the man with the stone heart in the old legend. Otherwise, why had he felt no prick of jealousy at Peggy’s admiring comprehension of Oliver? Of course he loved her. Of course he wanted to marry her when this nightmare was over. That went without saying. But why couldn’t he look to the glowing future? A poet had called a lover’s mistress “the lode-star of his one desire.” That to him Peggy ought to be. Lode-star. One desire. The words confused him. He had no lode-star. His one desire was to be left alone. Without doubt he was suffering from some process of moral petrifaction.
Doggie was no psychologist. He had never acquired the habit of turning himself inside-out and gloating over the horrid spectacle. All his life he had been a simple soul with simple motives and a simple though possibly selfish standard to measure them. But now his soul was knocked into a chaotic state of complexity, and his poor little standards were no manner of use. He saw himself as in a glass darkly, mystified by unknown change.
He rose, sighed, shook himself.
“I give it up,” said he, and went to bed.
Doggie went to France; a France hitherto undreamed of, either by him or by any young Englishman; a France clean swept and garnished for war; a France, save for the ubiquitous English soldiery, of silent towns and empty villages and deserted roads; a France of smiling fields and sorrowful faces of women and drawn patient faces of old men—and even then the women and old men were rarely met by day, for they were at work on the land, solitary figures on the landscape, with vast spaces between them. In the quiet townships, English street signs and placards conflicted with the sense of being in friendly provincial France, and gave the impression of foreign domination. For beyond that long grim line of eternal thunder, away over there in the distance, which was called the Front, street signs and placards in yet another alien tongue also outraged the serene genius of French urban life. Yet our signs were a symbol of a mighty Empire’s brotherhood, and the dimmed eyes that beheld the Place de la Fontaine transformed into “Holborn Circus,” and the Grande Rue into “Piccadilly,” smiled, and the owners, with eager courtesy, directed the stray Tommy to “Regent Street,” which they had known all their life as the Rue Feuillemaisnil—a word which Tommy could not pronounce, still less remember. It was as much as Tommy could do to get hold of an approximation to the name of the town. And besides these renamings, other inscriptions flamed about the streets; alphabetical hieroglyphs, in which the mystic letters H.Q. most often appeared; “This way to the Y.M.C.A. hut”; in many humble windows the startling announcement, “Washing done here.” British motor-lorries and ambulances crowding the little place and aligned along the avenues. British faces, British voices, everywhere. The blue uniform and blue helmet of a French soldier seemed as incongruous though as welcome as in London.
And the straight endless roads, so French with their infinite border of poplars, their patient little stones marking every hundred metres until the tenth rose into the proud kilometre stone proclaiming the distance to the next stately town, rang too with the sound of British voices, and the tramp of British feet, and the clatter of British transport, and the screech and whir of cars, revealing as they passed the flash of red and gold of the British staff. Yet the finely cultivated land remained to show that it was France; and the little whitewashed villages; the curé, in shovel-hat and rusty cassock; the children in blue or black blouses, who stared as the British troops went by; the patient, elderly French Territorials in their old pre-war uniforms, guarding unthreatened culverts or repairing the roads; the helpful signs set up in happier days by the Touring Club of France.
Into this strange anomaly of a land came Doggie with his draft, still half stupefied by the remorselessness of the stupendous machine in which he had been caught, in spite of his many months of training in England. He had loathed the East Coast camp. When he landed at Boulogne in the dark and the pouring rain and hunched his pack with the others who went off singing to the rest camp, he regretted East Anglia.
“Give us a turn on the whistle, Doggie,” said a corporal.
“I was sea-sick into it and threw it overboard,” he growled, stumbling over the rails of the quay.