likely to last. Dick supported life somehow. Then came the menace of
conscription. The _Weekly International_ organized a great
anti-conscription campaign, in which Hyman and Dick were the leading
spirits. Dick was almost happy. This kind of active work was new to
him and he enjoyed it, finding it exciting and at the same time
sedative. For a self-absorbed and brooding mind, pain itself is an
anodyne. He enjoyed his incessant journeys, his speechmaking to queer
audiences in obscure halls and chapels; he liked talking with earnest
members of impossible Christian sects, pacifists who took not the
faintest interest in the welfare of humanity at large, but were wholly
absorbed in the salvation of their own souls and in keeping their
consciences clear from the faintest trace of blood-guiltiness. He
enjoyed the sense of power which came to him, when he roused the
passion of the crowd to enthusiastic assent, or breasted the storm of
antagonism. He enjoyed everything--even getting a bloody nose from a
patriot hired and intoxicated by a great evening paper to break up one
of his meetings. It all seemed tremendously exciting and important at
the time. And yet when, in quiet moments, he came to look back on his
days of activity, they seemed utterly empty and futile. What was left
of them? Nothing, nothing at all. The momentary intoxication had died
away, the stirred ant's-nest had gone back to normal life. Futility of
action! There was nothing permanent, or decent, or worth while, except
thought. And of that he was almost incapable now. His mind, when it
was not occupied by the immediate and actual, turned inward morbidly
upon itself. He looked at the manuscript of his book and wondered
whether he would ever be able to go on with it. It seemed doubtful.
Was he, then, condemned to pass the rest of his existence enslaved to
the beastliness and futility of mere quotidian action? And even in
action his powers were limited; if he exerted himself too much--and
the limits of fatigue were soon reached--Pearl Bellairs, watching
perpetually like a hungry tigress for her opportunity, leapt upon him
and took possession of his conscious faculties. And then, it might be
for a matter of hours or of days, he was lost, blotted off the
register of living souls, while she performed, with intense and
hideous industry, her self-appointed task. More than once his
anti-conscription campaigns had been cut short and he himself had
suddenly disappeared from public life, to return with the vaguest
stories of illness or private affairs--stories that made his friends
shake their heads and wonder which it was among the noble army of
vices that poor Dick Greenow was so mysteriously addicted to. Some
said drink, some said women, some said opium, and some hinted at
things infinitely darker and more horrid. Hyman asked him point-blank
what it was, one morning when he had returned to the office after
three days' unaccountable absence.
Dick blushed painfully. "It isn't anything you think," he said.
"What is it, then?" Hyman insisted.
"I can't tell you," Dick replied desperately and in torture, "but I
swear it's nothing discreditable. I beg you won't ask me any more."
Hyman had to pretend to be satisfied with that.
IX
A TACTICAL move in the anti-conscription campaign was the foundation
of a club, a place where people with pacific or generally advanced
ideas could congregate.
"A club like this would soon be the intellectual centre of London,"
said Hyman, ever sanguine.
Dick shrugged his shoulders. He had a wide experience of pacifists.
"If you bring people together," Hyman went on, "they encourage one
another to be bold--strengthen one another's faith."
"Yes," said Dick dyspeptically. "When they're in a herd, they can
believe that they're much more numerous and important than they really
are."
"But, man, they are numerous, they are important!" Hyman shouted and
gesticulated.
Dick allowed himself to be persuaded into an optimism which he knew to
be ill-founded. The consolations of religion do not console the less
efficaciously for being illusory.
It was a longtime before they could think of a suitable name for their
club. Dick suggested that it should be called the Sclopis Club. "Such
a lovely name," he explained. "Sclopis--Sclopis; it tastes precious in
the mouth." But the rest of the committee would not hear of it; they
wanted a name that meant something. One lady suggested that it should
be called the Everyman Club; Dick objected with passion. "It makes one
shudder," he said. The lady thought it was a beautiful and uplifting
name, but as Mr. Greenow was so strongly opposed, she wouldn't press
the claims of Everyman. Hyman wanted to call it the Pacifist Club, but
that was judged too provocative. Finally, they agreed to call it the
Novembrist Club, because it was November and they could think of no
better title.
The inaugural dinner of the Novembrist Club was held at Piccolomini's
Restaurant. Piccolomini is in, but not exactly of, Soho, for it is a
cross between a Soho restaurant and a Corner House, a hybrid which
combines the worst qualities of both parents--the dirt and
inefficiency of Soho, the size and vulgarity of Lyons. There is a
large upper chamber reserved for agapes. Here, one wet and dismal
winter's evening, the Novembrists assembled.
Dick arrived early, and from his place near the door he watched his
fellow-members come in. He didn't much like the look of them. "Middle
class" was what he found himself thinking; and he had to admit, when
his conscience reproached him for it, that he did not like the middle
classes, the lower middle classes, the lower classes. He was, there
was no denying it, a bloodsucker at heart--cultured and intelligent,
perhaps, but a bloodsucker none the less.
The meal began. Everything about it was profoundly suspect. The spoons
were made of some pale pinchbeck metal, very light and flimsy; one
expected them to melt in the soup, or one would have done, if the soup
had been even tepid. The food was thick and greasy. Dick wondered what
it really looked like under the concealing sauces. The wine left an
indescribable taste that lingered on the palate, like the savour of
brass or of charcoal fumes.
From childhood upwards Dick had suffered from the intensity of his
visceral reactions to emotion. Fear and shyness were apt to make him
feel very sick, and disgust produced in him a sensation of intolerable
queasiness. Disgust had seized upon his mind to-night. He grew paler
with the arrival of every dish, and the wine, instead of cheering him,
made him feel much worse. His neighbours to right and left ate with
revolting heartiness. On one side sat Miss Gibbs, garishly dressed in
ill-assorted colours that might be called futuristic; on the other was
Mr. Something in pince-nez, rather ambrosial about the hair. Mr.
Something was a poet, or so the man who introduced them had said. Miss
Gibbs was just an ordinary member of the Intelligentsia, like the rest
of us.
The Lower Classes, the Lower Classes . . .
"Are you interested in the Modern Theatre?" asked Mr. Something in his
mellow voice. Too mellow--oh, much too mellow!
"Passably," said Dick.
"So am I," said Mr. Thingummy. "I am a vice-president of the
Craftsmen's League of Joy, which perhaps you may have heard of."
Dick shook his head; this was going to be terrible.
"The objects of the Craftsmen's League of Joy," Mr. Thingummy
continued, "or rather, one of the objects--for it has many--is to
establish Little Theatres in every town and village in England, where
simple, uplifting, beautiful plays might be acted. The people have no
joy."
"They have the cinema and the music hall," said Dick. He was filled
with a sudden senseless irritation. "They get all the joy they want
out of the jokes of the comics and the legs of the women."
"Ah, but that is an impure joy," Mr. What's-his-name protested.
"Impure purple, Herbert Spenser's favourite colour," flashed
irrelevantly through Dick's brain.
"Well, speaking for myself," he said aloud, "I know I get more joy out
of a good pair of legs than out of any number of uplifting plays of
the kind they'd be sure to act in your little theatres. The people ask
for sex and you give them a stone."
How was it, he wondered, that the right opinions in the mouths of
these people sounded so horribly cheap and wrong? They degraded what
was noble; beauty became fly-blown at their touch. Their intellectual
tradition was all wrong. Lower classes, it always came back to that.
When they talked about war and the International, Dick felt a hot
geyser of chauvinism bubbling up in his breast. In order to say
nothing stupid, he refrained from speaking at all. Miss Gibbs switched
the conversation on to art. She admired all the right people. Dick
told her that he thought Sir Luke Fildes to be the best modern artist.
But his irritation knew no bounds when he found out a little later
that Mr. Something had read the poems of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke.
He felt inclined to say, "You may have read them, but of course you
can't understand or appreciate them."
Lower Classes . . .
How clear and splendid were the ideas of right and justice! If only
one could filter away the contaminating human element. . . . Reason
compelled him to believe in democracy, in internationalism, in
revolution; morality demanded justice for the oppressed. But neither
morality nor reason would ever bring him to take pleasure in the
company of democrats or revolutionaries, or make him find the
oppressed, individually, any less antipathetic.
At the end of this nauseating meal, Dick was called on to make a
speech. Rising to his feet, he began stammering and hesitating; he
felt like an imbecile. Then suddenly inspiration came. The great
religious ideas of Justice and Democracy swept like a rushing wind
through his mind, purging it of all insignificant human and personal
preferences or dislikes. He was filled with pentecostal fire. He spoke
in a white heat of intellectual passion, dominating his hearers,
infecting them with his own high enthusiasm. He sat down amid cheers.
Miss Gibbs and Mr. Thingummy leaned towards him with flushed, shining
faces.
"That was wonderful, Mr. Greenow. I've never heard anything like it,"
exclaimed Miss Gibbs, with genuine, unflattering enthusiasm.
Mr. Thing said something poetical about a trumpet-call. Dick looked
from one to the other with blank and fishy eyes. So it was for these
creatures he had been speaking!
Good God! . . .
X
DICK'S life was now a monotonous nightmare. The same impossible
situation was repeated again and again. If it were not for the fact
that he knew Pearl Bellairs to be entirely devoid of humour, Dick
might have suspected that she was having a little quiet fun with him,
so grotesque were the anomalies of his double life. Grotesque, but
dreary, intolerably dreary. Situations which seem, in contemplation,
romantic and adventurous have a habit of proving, when actually
experienced, as dull and daily as a bank clerk's routine. When you
read about it, a Jekyll and Hyde existence sounds delightfully
amusing; but when you live through it, as Dick found to his cost, it
is merely a boring horror.
In due course Dick was called up by the Military Authorities. He
pleaded conscientious objection. The date of his appearance before the
Tribunal was fixed. Dick did not much relish the prospect of being a
Christian martyr; it seemed an anachronism. However, it would have to
be done. He would be an absolutist; there would be a little buffeting,
spitting, and scourging, followed by an indefinite term of hard
labour. It was all very unpleasant. But nothing could be much more
unpleasant than life as he was now living it. He didn't even mind very
much if they killed him. Being or not being--the alternatives left him
equally cold.
The days that preceded his appearance before the Tribunal were busy
days, spent in consulting solicitors, preparing speeches, collecting
witnesses.
"We'll give you a good run for your money," said Hyman. "I hope
they'll be feeling a little uncomfortable by the time they have done
with you, Greenow."
"Not nearly so uncomfortable as I shall be feeling," Dick replied,
with a slightly melancholy smile.
The South Marylebone Tribunal sat in a gloomy and fetid chamber in a
police station. Dick, who was extremely sensitive to his surroundings,
felt his fatigue and nervousness perceptibly increase as he entered
the room. Five or six pitiable creatures with paralytic mothers or
one-man businesses were briskly disposed of, and then it was Dick's
turn to present himself before his judges. He looked round the court,
nodded to Hyman, smiled at Millicent, who had so far thawed their
wartime coolness as to come and see him condemned, caught other
friendly eyes. It was as though he were about to be electrocuted. The
preliminaries passed off; he found himself answering questions in a
loud, clear voice. Then the Military Representative began to loom
horribly large. The Military Representative was a solicitor's clerk
disguised as a lieutenant in the Army Service Corps. He spoke in an
accent that was more than genteel; it was rich, noble, aristocratic.
Dick tried to remember where he had heard a man speaking like that
before. He had it now. Once when he had been at Oxford after term was
over. He had gone to see the Varieties, which come twice nightly and
with cheap seats to the theatre after the undergraduates have
departed. One of the turns had been a Nut, a descendant of the bloods
and Champagne Charlies of earlier days. A young man in an alpaca
evening suit and a monocle. He had danced, sung a song, spoken some
patter. Sitting in the front row of the stalls, Dick had been able to
see the large, swollen, tuberculous glands in his neck. They wobbled
when he danced or sang. Fascinatingly horrible, those glands; and the
young man, how terribly, painfully pathetic. . . . When the Military
Representative spoke, he could hear again that wretched Nut's
rendering of the Eton and Oxford voice. It unnerved him.
"What is your religion, Mr. Greenow?" the Military Representative
asked.
Fascinated, Dick looked to see whether he too had tuberculous glands.
The Lieutenant had to repeat his question sharply. When he was
irritated, his voice went back to its more natural nasal twang. Dick
recovered his presence of mind.
"I have no religion," he answered.
"But, surely, sir, you must have some kind of religion."
"Well, if I must, if it's in the Army Regulations, you had better put
me down as an Albigensian, or a Bogomile, or, better still, as a
Manichean. One can't find oneself in this court without possessing a
profound sense of the reality and active existence of a power of evil
equal to, if not greater than, the power of good."
"This is rather irrelevant, Mr. Greenow," said the Chairman.
"I apologize." Dick bowed to the court.
"But if," the Military Representative continued--"if your objection is
not religious, may I ask what it is?"
"It is based on a belief that all war is wrong, and that the
solidarity of the human race can only be achieved in practice by
protesting against war, wherever it appears and in whatever form."
"Do you disbelieve in force, Mr. Greenow?"
"You might as well ask me if I disbelieve in gravitation. Of course, I
believe in force: it is a fact."
"What would you do if you saw a German violating your sister?" said
the Military Representative, putting his deadliest question.
"Perhaps I had better ask my sister first," Dick replied. "She is
sitting just behind you in the court."
The Military Representative was covered with confusion. He coughed and
blew his nose. The case dragged on. Dick made a speech; the Military
Representative made a speech; the Chairman made a speech. The
atmosphere of the court-room grew fouler and fouler. Dick sickened and
suffocated in the second-hand air. An immense lassitude took
possession of him; he did not care about anything--about the cause,
about himself, about Hyman or Millicent or Pearl Bellairs. He was just
tired. Voices buzzed and drawled in his ears--sometimes his own voice,
sometimes other people's. He did not listen to what they said. He was
tired--tired of all this idiotic talk, tired of the heat and smell.
. . .
* * * * *
Tired of picking up very thistly wheat sheaves and propping them up in
stooks on the yellow stubble. For that was what, suddenly, he found
himself doing. Overhead the sky expanded in endless steppes of
blue-hot cobalt. The pungent prickly dust of the dried sheaves plucked
at his nose with imminent sneezes, made his eyes smart and water. In
the distance a reaping-machine whirred and hummed. Dick looked blankly
about him, wondering where he was. He was thankful, at any rate, not
to be in that sweltering court-room; and it was a mercy, too, to have
escaped from the odious gentility of the Military Representative's
accent. And, after all, there were worse occupations than harvesting.
* * * * *
Gradually, and bit by bit, Dick pieced together his history. He had,
it seemed, done a cowardly and treacherous thing: deserted in the face
of the enemy, betrayed his cause. He had a bitter letter from Hyman.
"Why couldn't you have stuck it out? I thought it was in you. You've
urged others to go to prison for their beliefs, but you get out of it
yourself by sneaking off to a soft alternative service job on a
friend's estate. You've brought discredit on the whole movement." It
was very painful, but what could he answer? The truth was so
ridiculous that nobody could be expected to swallow it. And yet the
fact was that he had been as much startled to find himself working at
Crome as anyone. It was all Pearl's doing.
He had found in his room a piece of paper covered with the large,
flamboyant feminine writing which he knew to be Pearl's. It was
evidently the rough copy of an article on the delights of being a
land-girl: dewy dawns, rosy children's faces, quaint cottages, mossy
thatch, milkmaids, healthy exercise. Pearl was being a land-girl; but
he could hardly explain the fact to Hyman. Better not attempt to
answer him.
Dick hated the manual labour of the farm. It was hard, monotonous,
dirty, and depressing. It inhibited almost completely the functions of
his brain. He was unable to think about anything at all; there was no
opportunity to do anything but feel uncomfortable. God had not made
him a Caliban to scatter ordure over fields, to pick up ordure from
cattle-yards. His rôle was Prospero.
"Ban, Ban, Caliban"--it was to that derisive measure that he pumped
water, sawed wood, mowed grass; it was a march for his slow, clotted
feet as he followed the dung-carts up the winding lanes. "Ban, Ban,
Caliban--Ban, Ban, Ban . . ."
"Oh, that bloody old fool Tolstoy," was his profoundest reflection on
a general subject in three months of manual labour and communion with
mother earth.
He hated the work, and his fellow-workers hated him. They mistrusted
him because they could not understand him, taking the silence of his
overpowering shyness for arrogance and the contempt of one class for
another. Dick longed to become friendly with them. His chief trouble
was that he did not know what to say. At meal-times he would spend
long minutes in cudgelling his brains for some suitable remark to
make. And even if he thought of something good, like--"It looks as
though it were going to be a good year for roots," he somehow
hesitated to speak, feeling that such a remark, uttered in his
exquisitely modulated tones, would be, somehow, a little ridiculous.
It was the sort of thing that ought to be said rustically, with plenty
of Z's and long vowels, in the manner of William Barnes. In the end,
for lack of courage to act the yokel's part, he generally remained
silent. While the others were eating their bread and cheese with
laughter and talk, he sat like the skeleton at the feast--a skeleton
that longed to join in the revelry, but had not the power to move its
stony jaws. On the rare occasions that he actually succeeded in
uttering something, the labourers looked at one another in surprise
and alarm, as though it were indeed a skeleton that had spoken.
He was not much more popular with the other inhabitants of the
village. Often, in the evenings, as he was returning from work, the
children would pursue him, yelling. With the unerringly cruel instinct
of the young they had recognized in him a fit object for abuse and
lapidation. An outcast member of another class, from whom that class
in casting him out had withdrawn its protection, an alien in speech
and habit, a criminal, as their zealous schoolmaster lost no
opportunity of reminding them, guilty of the blackest treason against
God and man--he was the obviously predestined victim of childish
persecution. When stones began to fly, and dung and precocious
obscenity, he bowed his head and pretended not to notice that anything
unusual was happening. It was difficult, however, to look quite
dignified.
There were occasional short alleviations to the dreariness of his
existence. One day, when he was engaged in his usual occupation of
manuring, a familiar figure suddenly appeared along the footpath
through the field. It was Mrs. Cravister. She was evidently staying at
the big house; one of the Manorial dachshunds preceded her. He took
off his cap.
"Mr. Greenow!" she exclaimed, coming to a halt. "Ah, what a pleasure
to see you again! Working on the land: so Tolstoyan. But I trust it
doesn't affect your æsthetic ideas in the same way as it did his.
Fifty peasants singing together is music; but Bach's chromatic
fantasia is mere gibbering incomprehensibility."
"I don't do this for pleasure," Dick explained. "It's hard labour,
meted out to the Conscientious Objector."
"Of course, of course," said Mrs. Cravister, raising her hand to
arrest any further explanation. "I had forgotten. A conscientious
objector, a Bible student. I remember how passionately devoted you
were, even at school, to the Bible."
She closed her eyes and nodded her head several times.
"On the contrary----" Dick began; but it was no good. Mrs. Cravister
had determined that he should be a Bible student and it was no use
gainsaying her. She cut him short.
"Dear me, the Bible. . . . What a style! That alone would prove it to
have been directly inspired. You remember how Mahomet appealed to the
beauty of his style as a sign of his divine mission. Why has nobody
done the same for the Bible? It remains for you, Mr. Greenow, to do
so. You will write a book about it. How I envy you!"
"The style is very fine," Dick ventured, "but don't you think the
matter occasionally leaves something to be desired?"
"The matter is nothing," cried Mrs. Cravister, making a gesture that
seemed to send all meaning flying like a pinch of salt along the
wind--"nothing at all. It's the style that counts. Think of Madame
Bovary."
"I certainly will," said Dick.
Mrs. Cravister held out her hand. "Good-bye. Yes, I certainly envy
you. I envy you your innocent labour and your incessant study of that
most wonderful of books. If I were asked, Mr. Greenow, what book I
should take with me to a desert island, what single solitary book, I
should certainly say the Bible, though, indeed, there are moments when
I think I should choose _Tristram Shandy_. Good-bye."
Mrs. Cravister sailed slowly away. The little brown basset trotted
ahead, straining his leash. One had the impression of a great ship
being towed into harbour by a diminutive tug.
Dick was cheered by this glimpse of civilization and humanity. The
unexpected arrival, one Saturday afternoon, of Millicent was not quite
such an unmixed pleasure. "I've come to see how you're getting on,"
she announced, "and to put your cottage straight and make you
comfortable."
"Very kind of you," said Dick. He didn't want his cottage put
straight.
Millicent was in the Ministry of Munitions now, controlling three
thousand female clerks with unsurpassed efficiency. Dick looked at her
curiously, as she talked that evening of her doings. "To think I
should have a sister like that," he said to himself. She was
terrifying.