As suddenly as the first wave from the wash of a great liner breaking on
the shore of a tranquil sea, a billow of utter loneliness reared itself
up and thundered over Helen Grote. It came without warning, for she had
not been looking seawards.
* * * * *
Robin had just left her with a very troubled face, but with his
determination absolutely unshaken. On the morning after the declaration
of war he had come straight up to town from Cambridge, and had been
given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. That had met with her entire
approval, she loved to think that her son had been among the very first
to answer to the call, even anticipating it. Then she had done her part,
and had got a promise for him of a staff appointment, which implied
useful and necessary work, would give scope to his excellent abilities,
and, above all, would not plunge him after a few months of training into
the fiery hell, which, having by now burned its way almost within
gun-range of Paris, had at length been stayed, and the edges of it
turned back upon itself. But there was other work to do in the service
of the country, just as important, just as primarily essential as being
plunged into that inferno of shot and shell, and this appointment, so
entirely suitable to Robin’s capabilities, was his if he chose to take
it: it would be offered him in answer to his grateful assent. Instead,
he had given an ungrateful negative, and had left her in order to
request that the offer might not be made him in any form that obliged
him to accept it.
She had looked forward to this interview with the most delighted
anticipations, for she knew what Robin’s feelings with regard to his
duty were. He, personally, hated and loathed the idea of war, and all
that military service implied. He was a peaceful, easy-going young
gentleman, fond of friends, and cricket, and Cambridge and the sunshine
of the secure and pleasant life into which he had been born. But the
moment the call had come, he had responded to it, he had put everything
else aside, habit, and inclination and security, and had been among the
earliest to present himself, never contemplating it as possible to do
anything else. Surely, then, he had done his part: he had said, “Here am
I, take me,” and they had taken him. Now, as if in reward of that, had
come this offer, which she had procured for him.... But at the back of
her delighted anticipation of telling Robin about it, there had been a
doubt lurking in the dark, which she trusted would never open its
baleful mouth in discourse, but sit there dumb. Instead, the doubt had
instantly leaped out into the light, and instead of being dumb, had
expressed itself with great lucidity through Robin’s mouth.
“It’s awfully good of you,” he had said, “to take so much trouble, but
don’t you see--I’m sure you do--that for me it would be mere shirking to
take it? It’s a job which a fellow with four fingers on his hand could
do. I’ve got five.”
Even while he spoke some instinct within her cordially agreed. But she
did not intend to heed that instinct: she slammed the door on it.
Mightn’t a mother avert a great peril from her only son?...
“Shirking, darling?” she said, still only faintly doubting his eventual
acquiescence. “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know much about war,
any more than you do, but I’m sure it doesn’t merely consist in having
men with guns and rifles. There have to be supplies, haven’t there,
brought up? Armies have got to be fed; there must be lines of
communication, there must be organization behind them, transport,
intelligence.”
A little soft crease appeared between Robin’s eyebrows, which she knew.
It appeared there when he was proposing to be obstinate about something,
and familiarly it was known as the mule-face.
“Of course there must,” said he, just as if there wasn’t such a thing in
the world as a mule.
“Well, then, don’t make the mule-face, Robin,” she said. “Listen to what
I am saying. All that organization is the brain behind the mere
mechanism. When you doubt about taking this appointment, it is the same
as if you were not sure that you would not sooner be a puff of steam
that came from an engine, than part of the intelligence of the man who
drives it.”
For a moment the “mule-face” vanished, and Robin laughed with boyish
appreciation.
“Oh, mother, you are clever!” he said. “That’s just like you.”
“My dear, I’m not clever in the least: it’s the plainest common sense.”
He shook his head.
“No, it was clever,” he said. “I am bound to admit the excellence of
your simile. But you can’t convince people by similes.”
“You can if the simile is just,” she said, “and if people are logical.”
He got up, the creased forehead outlining itself again, and pulled at
his sword strap and belt which were still not quite familiar, as if he
was wearing some new sort of cuff or collar.
“Well, the simile is just, and I am logical,” he said. “If I choose to
think, I see your logic. But as well as thinking, I feel. I don’t say
that I choose to feel, but I have to feel. I wonder if you understand
that.”
Suddenly she became aware of the immense change between the Robin of two
months ago and the Robin who stood before her now. He was still the same
Robin, too; the change, immense though it was, was not due to any new
characteristic that had come to him: it was but the emergence and
revelation of what she had known was there all along. The secure
prosperity of his active, unreflective boyhood had but veiled it over as
with thin ice: that bright, dazzling covering had caused a glitter on
the surface, and you had not been able actually to see below it. But now
that had melted and she could see into the deep water that lay so
tranquilly beneath. Yet it was not that he had become a man: he was just
as young as ever....
“Yes, darling,” she said, “but feeling is no guide. If we all did what
we felt, the world would become a madhouse. It is the control of reason
that keeps it sane.”
He looked at her with a sort of humorous interrogation.
“I wondered if you would say something of the sort,” he said. “You don’t
believe it, you know, in so far as it applies to my choice now!”
She thought over her simile about the engine’s puff of steam and the
engine’s driver. It seemed to her extremely apt.
“I do believe it,” she said. “It is mere common sense.”
“Then I’ll ask you another question. You would be very much relieved if
I took this appointment. But shouldn’t I lose a little of your respect?”
She fancied she could quibble that away.
“Respect?” she said. “What a word to use. As if that had got anything to
do with love!”
He laughed outright, and in the fashion that was so common with him, sat
down on the arm of her chair.
“That’ll never do,” he said. “You must learn to respect me.”
“I do,” she said hurriedly, for the instinct on which she had slammed
the door asserted itself. “I respected your joining up as you did. You
did all you could do.”
“And hasn’t it got anything to do with love?” he asked.
She paused before replying and Robin went on:
“It’s not only your respect,” he said. “It’s the respect of everybody
who is serious. They wouldn’t tell me I had lost their respect: they
would only congratulate me on getting a staff-appointment. But what
would Jim feel, or Badders, or Jelf?”
“But you told me that Mr. Jelf was a pacifist,” she said. “You said that
he loved the Germans and hated the English.”
“That was all his way of talking. I haven’t told you what he’s done. He
has not applied for a commission at all: he has joined as a private.”
She made another appeal.
“Robin, you are all I have got,” she said simply.
She looked up at him, and saw that the soft, firm crease still sat
between his eyebrows.
“So don’t make the mule-face,” she added.
He shook his head.
“Can’t help it,” he said. “I’m going to be a mule: I--I must look like
one.”
“Will you think it over then, first,” she asked, “before you do
anything?”
“I have thought it over. Will you think it over? I know you agree with
me really, but I can’t get at the part of you that agrees. It’s there,
though.”
She knew that just as well as he did, but made no promise, and with a
face troubled and yet determined he left her.
It was that which started the wave of loneliness far out on the sea, and
she sat there idly, after he had gone, not yet aware of its approach,
but only of the deadly, bored depression that had settled down on her,
never lifting, since the day that she had driven down to Grote alone and
late on a Saturday night in July. She no longer wanted to see him who
should have been her companion then, though for a day or two after that,
she would have forgiven even that monstrous letter of his revelation of
himself, could her forgiveness have brought him back. And yet Robin had
said that respect had something to do with love....
When he had said it she, or some part of her, had acquiesced, and yet
when she read Kuhlmann’s letter, though there was no one in the world
for whom she had so profound a contempt, she still longed for his
presence. Was that, then, another sort of love, something possibly not
less real, certainly not less insistent, but more animal, essentially
lower? She had always hated seeing Robin and Kuhlmann together, and had
rather laughed at herself for her sentimentality, her squeamishness.
And then, by degrees almost imperceptible, any other feeling for the man
who had so grossly insulted her, but mere contempt, had been distilled
away, leaving just that sediment which unemotionally despised him.
But that draining away of the boiling, bubbling liquid which had filled
her heart, had left it totally apathetic to all the myriad interests and
diversions of her life. Even the tremendous impact of the breaking-out
of war had failed to rouse her from it, her whole soul seemed drugged
into a drowsy, depressed somnolence. She cared for nothing, and she
disliked nothing, except only that which concerned Robin. The live
tissues of the mind that record the emotions were not dead: she still
wanted to want, wanted to enjoy, wanted to feel, but they lay as if
under some opiate that deprived them of sensation.
The only thing that for these last days had in the least interested her
was the obtaining for Robin the post that would keep him in town, doing
work which undeniably must be done, dressed in khaki as every
self-respecting young man was, with little red tabs on his shoulders and
a red band on his cap to show that he was not merely a puff of steam
from the engine, but part of the intelligence that directed it. All that
was alive in her clung to the sound sense of the simile, which Robin
himself had admitted.... But somewhere in the drowsed, drugged part of
her mind some instinct within her despised that sound sense as
completely as Robin himself despised it. He, too, had drawn the
distinction between “thinking” and “feeling,” wondering if she
understood. Good heavens, did she not understand? Was not three quarters
of life a battle between thinking and feeling?
She was not one of those optimistic lunatics who talked about the
exposure of the enemy’s lengthening lines of communication, when day by
day the tide of the black advance swept across the map towards Paris and
the Channel ports, nor did she number herself with the large mass of
folk who cheerfully maintained that the great steam-roller from the East
was now giving forth encouraging hoots, as a signal for its starting on
its relentless journey to Berlin. But at present, though not cheerful,
she _cared_ about the war as little as they, because she could not care
about anything. It had broken out at a time when she was still stunned
by the greatest emotional blow, delivered with every circumstance of
insult and contempt, that she had ever experienced. It had taken away
all her power of keen feeling, except as regards Robin. All but that
slim passage between her emotions and life was choked with dead leaves.
She took up the morning paper, at which she had not yet cared to look.
The black line had not moved either backwards or forwards, but there was
a long list of casualties. She read it, and found that it contained
notices of intimate bereavement for some half-dozen of her friends, to
whom she must write a line of condolence. Then, in imagination, she saw
herself reading some similar list, on a morning but a few months ahead,
and finding it contained the beloved name concerning which she had
already received communication from the War Office. At that the great
wave of loneliness soared high above her and engulfed her.
On that day, so vivid at the moment to her imagination, that she felt
that it was already actually here, there would be nothing whatever left
for which she cared to live. She made no sentimental pictures of herself
as a mother bereaved of her only son, or of the blow killing her, for a
blow, in order to kill, has to strike some vital place, and there was
nothing vital in her to strike. She would just go on living, if that
could be called life, which had not enough keenness of edge to it to be
termed either happy or unhappy, until the dark door opened, or, as she
had phrased it once to herself, the great fish gulped down the fly that
floated, water-logged on the stream, and she went back into the
nothingness out of which she came.
What had it all been about, this tedious story, which she had once read
with such intense interest? Hitherto life had denied her nothing which
she cared to take, and she had taken freely, grasping it by the armful,
and sucking out of it the utmost of its sweetness. But henceforth life
seemed to hold nothing that was worth taking; she no longer cared what
it gave her or denied her, since “desire had failed.” No longer had she
any part in it: all those who hitherto had been active with herself in
its pageants and movements, seemed no longer to be alive, but to be mere
marionettes, bobbing about in meaningless antics, while she had become
the one spectator of the show, quite alone in this infinite array of
empty benches....
* * * * *
By a violent effort she pulled herself together: she was meeting trouble
before it came, in imagining what the world would be to her when there
was Robin’s name in the daily list of casualties. She knew it was
utterly unlike her to indulge in that sort of profitless speculation,
but the billow of loneliness had for the moment completely submerged
her, blotting out all else but the consciousness of itself. Now it had
broken, and her head was above water again, and there was still a beach
somewhere near, a shore to which she might struggle, and the engrained
habit of life, the eager planning of the hours so as to fill them in a
manner as diversified and entertaining as possible, came back to her a
little, striking feeble pulses in the arteries of her emotions. Perhaps
the apathy of these last weeks had been leading up to a crisis like that
she had just passed through; perhaps now the worst was over, and some
hint of recuperation and of returning vitality was coming back to her.
Yes, faintly but unmistakably she wanted to be interested in the world
again, until such time as the great fish gulped her down. So few months
ago, without egotism and conceit, there had been nobody she knew who had
more than a fraction of the intensity of interest with which the world,
just the human race, inspired her. All sorts and conditions of men held
for her their own talisman: once she had bidden to dinner a black
bishop, a lion tamer and a suffragette, and had passed an entrancing
evening, in the effort to realize what was the fascination of converting
cannibals, of cowing lions and of destroying works of art in order to
show how fit you were to have a hand in the government of the country.
None, literally none, had excelled her in the cult of mankind; never had
there been a more ardent worshipper.
Then suddenly, owing in the main to an emotional shock, life had lost
its coherence for her: instead of its being a clamour of entrancing
topics, it had become a meaningless babble. On the top of that had come
this detestable war. If she was to win her way back to the ranks of the
living, to enable herself to realize the world again as something more
than a mere congregation of marionettes watched drowsily by a single
spectator, she must somehow escape from this paralyzing influence of the
war, which was sapping the intelligence just as it was monopolizing the
entire energies of bishop, lion-tamer and suffragette alike. Of the
women she knew there was scarcely one who was not knitting or sewing or
learning to nurse: they were dead to every form of human interest except
counting stitches, and to every pursuit except that of dropping them and
beginning again with a pulled-out heap of crinkled wool.
Gracie Massingberd was a ringleader among these. She had taken
possession of Ardingly House, and had established her Sewing and
Knitting Society there. The ballroom was full of small tables round
which sat little parties of her workers who made shirts all day and
turned out yard after yard of woollen scarves. It seemed to give them a
sense of doing something for their country, and there they sat and
knitted and talked all day in a pessimistic manner about the war,
hatching as in the warmth of an incubator a hundred rumours of peril and
disaster. Helen had attended these gatherings for two or three days, but
instead of finding an anodyne to her dull aching in manual employment,
she merely found a physical and emotional atmosphere that were equally
intolerable. These ladies ate sandwiches out of little paper packets at
lunch-time, and consumed a good deal of tea, and Gracie moved among them
with the air of a high-priestess. And all seemed to think that their
personal discomfort, the sitting on high chairs and eating disgusting
food, and turning out woollen scarves, somehow helped the war.
In the drawing-room next door was a depot for packing the fruits of
their labours and old clothes of all sorts which were sent them in vast
numbers. But after some three days in this rag and bone shop Helen had
judged it better to retire, while, in case those woollen scarves were
really of use to somebody, she left a standing order at a shop for a
woollen scarf to be sent to Lady Massingberd’s depot every other day,
with her compliments. She was delighted to supply them, provided she was
not obliged to make them, and did so with a greater prodigality than
that with which they would have materialized under her unaccustomed
fingers. But she thought with a sort of contemptuous envy of the type of
mind which can evolve an approving conscience out of knitting and
lugubrious conversation. In her it only produced a longing for fresh air
and an escape from the nightmare that it wove about her. If all that she
could do was to knit scarves, and admire Gracie standing waist high in a
rubbish heap of old shoes and darned trousers, she would sooner admire
and wonder at Gracie’s notion of what she called “personal service” at a
distance, and buy scarves that were much better made than any she could
herself make.
All this for the past week or two had formed the drab curtain of
loneliness and depression in front of which her life had been enacted.
All the relief from it that she had got lay in her exertions to obtain a
post for Robin which would give him some useful and necessary job and
prevent his exposure to the grim Moloch that sat in flaming hunger along
the battle-line in France. But this morning, when Robin had passed by
with a shake of his head what she had procured for him, there had come
this crisis of loneliness which, when it subsided again, left her not
dully, drowsily aching any more, but had stabbed her, though with a
piercing point, into some sort of vitality.
Hitherto, she had just let the hours go on guttering away to form days,
the days accumulate into weeks, content that time should waste itself,
provided only that it definitely ran away. But now that dull ache passed
into a pain that awoke her, from which somehow it was necessary to
escape: it was as if she had been dreaming of pain, and awoke in a
sweat of anguish, encompassed by the added terror of the dark--dark, and
the faint outline of Robin against it, as against a drawn blind behind
which burns some remote and terrible conflagration. At all costs she
must turn on, here in the room of her own heart, some light that would
blot out and extinguish that lurid smouldering of flame from without.
But even this sharp anguish and the horror of the dark were welcome to
her, since they brought to her again something of the poignancy of life
and the desire to live. Into her benumbed self as into a benumbed limb
there came the prickings of returning sensation: it was beginning to be
usable again, capable of grasping and of feeling. But there was a
certain change already perceptible to herself in the quality of the life
that was beginning to flow through it.
Hitherto, pleasure-seeking, self-centred, self-indulgently extravagant
though her life had been, it had yet had this redeeming feature that she
delighted in the delights of others, glowed with their joys, and gave
herself to their pleasures. Though she never had risen to that higher
altruism which equally rejoices in being associated with the troubles
and sorrows of those it loves, and mourns for those who mourn even more
sincerely than it plays for those who dance, she had always taken
pleasure in spending her time, her money and herself on the enjoyment of
others, and had found her reward in such application. The gem-like
brilliance of her life had ever been undimmed by the softer fires of
pity and compassion: she had had no use for the failures and the
ineffectives of this world. She was sorry--vaguely--for any who were not
soaked in success, but they had never received from her more than a
dropped “Poor thing,” and an averted gaze: people in pain and distress
had much better go away and hide themselves, as she herself would
undoubtedly have done in similar circumstances, and not bring their
damping and depressing influence among those whose privilege it was to
live in sunlight....
But now the quality of her reviving desire for life was changed
infinitely for the worse: little as she had previously cared for the
sorrows of others, now she found herself awaking to an equal
indifference to their joys. The great point was to extract for oneself
all that life could possibly hold of pleasurable experience, and no
longer to find pleasure in giving it. Robin had rejected the fruits of
her efforts for his well-being; another had returned her gift with
outrageous contumely.
Here were the rewards of the well-wisher! And more paramount than ever
was the necessity of turning the back on all that was painful and
distressing. Life did not last long, nor was she desirous that it
should, but while the burden of consciousness was there, it was the only
sanity to make it as light a weight as possible. It would soon be
removed altogether, and for that interval, reason and feeling alike
advised the decking of it with ribands and flowers. It mattered not from
where they came: the flowers could be plucked, if need be, from the
wreaths left on graves. It was only necessary that they should hide the
burden of life.
A more immediate necessity was to shut out from herself all that
reminded her of this horror of war. She hated and deplored it, and
already she saw it, in some future not far off, assuming an aspect much
more intimately menacing. It was out of her power (already she had done
her vain best) to avert that, and now the only possibility of avoiding
that this awakening of hers should be but the awakening from stupor
into nightmare lay in banishing from her mind and from her sight all
that could recall to her the grim reality. It was in a sort of
self-protection that she framed her House of Life afresh: pity had long
been banished from it, and now she must veil the face of love.
She had lived far too cosmopolitan a life to have much sense of
patriotism, if by patriotism is implied the blind preference for one
country above the sum of all other countries. The roots of her culture
were too widely planted to enable her to say, “It is from here my life
comes, or from there.” Though in a very different sense to that in which
John Wesley spoke, the world was her parish: she found that in all the
enthusiasms of her life there had been no touchstone applied that would
record a permanent nationality. Just as she had never cared for class,
so she had never cared for blood. It only mattered that it beat, and in
her roused a beat in answer.
London in these psychical circumstances had become impossible. Wherever
you went, war in some form confronted you or pounced out on you
screaming: whether in Robin’s khaki, or in Gracie’s knitting
establishment, or in the headlines of a paper, or in the innumerable
appeals that, still unopened, littered her table.
What sense of patriotism had Gracie until Germany announced her most
reasonable intention of invading France by the shortest possible route?
That was a mere matter of common sense: the politics of a nation were
exactly those of an individual. Certainly Germany had promised not to do
so, but so for that matter had every married woman (herself included)
promised to love, honour and obey her husband. But what in each case did
that promise mean? It only meant that for convenience of a contract of
international or personal importance, you declared yourself ready to
enter into obligations without which no contract would have been
possible. It fitted the facts for the moment, but if the facts changed,
you acted as if you denied the authenticity of your signature. You felt
like that then, or otherwise you would not have signed. But if you felt
differently afterwards, if a question of national existence or of
private happiness were at stake, naturally you said, “I feel so no
longer.” Contracts only bound such as were willing to observe them. If a
godfather vowed that his godchild renounced the devil and all his works,
was he responsible, or for that matter was the unconscious godchild
responsible, for the complete observance of that contract?
How did the jargon run? “The pomps and vanities of this wicked world and
all the sinful lusts of the flesh.” All that had been renounced for her,
very solemnly. Surely her poor godmother had not perjured herself in
guaranteeing these things. She had only hoped for the best, just in the
same way as Germany had done when she promised not to invade Belgium.
She hoped the necessity might not arise for her doing so, just as
H.R.H., who had been so pleasant a guest at Lady Gurtner’s party the
other day, had hoped for the best in promising that Helen Grote should
renounce all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. For both an
internal necessity had arisen: it had become a condition of life that
the promises, written or spoken, should become waste paper or wasted
breath. It was ridiculous to keep a promise that was made in other
circumstances. And it was over this that England had gone to war, that
Moloch’s fires were heated. And yet it was this, neither more nor less,
that had turned Robin into that grave-gay boy who had preferred to face
shot and shell rather than be sensible and stay at home, and live at
ease like a few other fortunate contemporaries who had taken advantage
of the facilities which influence had procured for them.
Well: she had done her best for him, and now she must look after herself
a little, and learn to enjoy and to be alive again. It was no use, so
she had lately ascertained, to care too much for other people; they left
you and went after their own devices, and brought upon you this
intolerable sense of loneliness and of absolute indifference to the
manifold joys of the world. But in order to appreciate these she must
put away from her the thought of the war, which spoiled every hour into
which it was permitted to intrude. Her own individuality was the final
court of appeal: she must satisfy its imperious need of banishing the
things that wearied and distressed it. Surely there must be other people
of intelligence, who, realizing their impotence to help or hinder, had
got away from the ugliness of turmoil and the waste of profitless and
anxious hours.
There was Aline Gurtner, for instance, with whom she was to have stayed
in that week when first war knocked all plans on the head. She had put
her visit off, promising, however, to propose herself as soon as she
could manage to get away from London. Aline, with her amazing joy in
life, would be just the sort of person who would not permit
international complications to get between her and her pleasures. Helen
would telegraph to her at once and propose a visit.
She hesitated a moment after her telegram was written before she rang
the bell to order it to be sent, and stood looking out of the window on
to the square that basked in the September sunlight. Some instinct
within her lifted up a rebellious voice reminding her of tedious things
like duty and the root from which duty sprang, not arid morality, but
love....
At this moment there crossed the road two wounded soldiers. One had his
face bound round with bandages that crossed flat from cheek to cheek
instead of projecting where his nose should be: the other, on crutches,
trailed a dragging foot. Perhaps some day Robin would cross the square
like that, or some day perhaps he would not cross it at all.... She
turned back into the room with her written telegram in her hand, and
rang the bell.