Louvain was burnt on the 19th of August. The Germans entered Brussels
on the 20th. Longres, though farther east than Louvain, was not
occupied till two or three days later--for the town lay off the direct
route to Brussels and the interior. One of the first acts of the
German commandant was to put my Uncle Spencer and M. Alphonse under
arrest. It was not that they had done anything; it was merely to their
existence that he objected. The fact that they were British subjects
was in itself extremely incriminating.
“Aber wir sind,” my Uncle Spencer protested in his rather rudimentary
German, “im zwanzigsten jahrhunderd. Und der--or is it das?--krieg wird
nicht lang....” he stammered, searched hopelessly for the word, “well,
in any case,” he concluded, relapsing into his own language and happy
to be able to express his astonished protest with fluency, “it won’t
last a week.”
“So we hope,” the commandant replied in excellent English, smiling.
“But meanwhile I regret....”
My Uncle Spencer and his fellow-Briton were locked up for the time
being in the lunatic asylum. A few days later they were sent under
escort to Brussels. Alphonse, my Uncle Spencer told me afterwards,
bore his misfortune with exemplary and oriental patience. Mute,
uncomplaining, obedient, he stayed where his captors put him, like a
large brown bundle left by the traveller on the platform, while he goes
to the buffet for a drink and a sandwich. And more docile than a mere
bundle, mutely, obediently, he followed wherever he was led.
“I wish I could have imitated him,” said my Uncle Spencer. “But I
couldn’t. My blood fairly boiled.”
And from what I remembered of him in the sugar-making season I could
imagine the depth, the fury of my Uncle Spencer’s impatience and
irritation.
“But this is the twentieth century,” he kept repeating to the guards.
“And I have nothing to do with your beastly war. And where the devil
are you taking us? And how much longer are we to wait in this damned
station without our lunch?” He spoke as a rich man, accustomed to being
able to buy every convenience and consideration. The soldiers, who had
the patience of poor men and were well used to being ordered hither
and thither, to waiting indefinitely in the place where they were told
to wait, could not understand this wild irritation against what they
regarded as the natural order of things. My Uncle Spencer first amused
them; then, as his impatience grew greater instead of less, he began to
annoy them.
In the end, one of his guards lost patience too, and gave him a great
kick in the breech to make him hold his tongue. My Uncle Spencer
turned round and rushed at the man; but another soldier tripped him
up with his rifle, and he tumbled heavily to the ground. Slowly he
picked himself up; the soldiers were roaring with laughter. Alphonse,
like a brown package, stood where they had put him, motionless,
expressionless, his eyes shut.
In the top floor of the Ministry of the Interior the German authorities
had established a sort of temporary internment camp. All suspicious
persons--dubious foreigners, recalcitrant natives, any one suspected
by the invaders of possessing a dangerous influence over his
neighbours--were sent to Brussels and shut up in the Ministry of the
Interior, to remain there until the authorities should have time to
go into their case. It was into this makeshift prison that my Uncle
Spencer and his Dravidian compatriot were ushered, one sweltering
afternoon towards the end of August. In an ordinary year, my Uncle
Spencer reflected, the kermesse at Longres would now be in full swing.
The fat woman would be washing her face with her bosom, the Figaros
would be re-enacting amid sobs the Passion of Our Saviour, the armless
lady would be drinking healths with her toes, the vendor of raw mussels
would be listening anxiously for the first hoarse sound that might
be taken for a cough. Where were they all this year, all these good
people? And where was he himself? Incredulously he looked about him.
In the attics of the Ministry of the Interior the company was strange
and mixed. There were Belgian noblemen whom the invaders considered it
unsafe to leave in their châteaux among their peasantry. There were a
Russian countess and an anarchist, incarcerated on account of their
nationality. There was an opera singer, who might be an international
spy. There was a little golden-haired male impersonator, who had been
appearing at a music-hall in Liége, and whose offence, like that of my
Uncle Spencer and the Dravidian, was to have been a British subject.
There were a number of miscellaneous Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, caught
on the wrong side of the border. There was an organ-grinder, who had
gone on playing the “Brabançonne” when told to stop, and a whole
collection of other Belgians, of all classes and both sexes, from every
part of the country, who had committed some crime or other, or perhaps
had contrived merely to look suspicious, and who were now waiting to
have their fate decided, as soon as the authorities should have time to
pay attention to them.
Into this haphazardly assembled society my Uncle Spencer and the
Dravidian were now casually dropped. The door closed behind them;
they were left, like new arrivals in hell, to make the best of their
situation.
The top floor of the Ministry of the Interior was divided up into one
very large and a number of small rooms, the latter lined, for the most
part, with pigeon-holes and filing cabinets in which were stored the
paper products of years of bureaucratic activity.
In the smaller chambers the prisoners had placed the straw mattresses
allotted to them by their gaolers; the men slept in the rooms at one
end of the corridor, the women in those at the other end. The big room,
which must once have housed the staff of the Ministry’s registry, still
contained a number of desks, tables, and chairs; it served now as the
prisoners’ drawing-room, dining-room, and recreation ground. There was
no bathroom, and only one washing-basin and one _chalet de nécessité_,
as my Uncle Spencer, with a characteristic euphemism, always called it.
Life in the attics of the Ministry of the Interior was not particularly
agreeable.
My Uncle Spencer noticed that those of the prisoners who were not
sunk in gloom and a sickening anxiety for the future, preserved an
almost too boisterous cheerfulness. You had, it seemed, either to take
this sort of thing as a prodigious joke, or brood over it as the most
horrible of nightmares. There seemed to be no alternative. In time, no
doubt, the two extremes would level down to the same calm resignation.
But confinement had still been too short for that; the situation
was still too new, dream-like, and phantasmagorical, and fate too
uncertain.
The cheerful ones abounded in japes, loud laughter, and practical
jokes. They had created in the prison a kind of private-school
atmosphere. Those whose confinement was oldest (and some had been in
the Ministry for nearly a week now, almost from the day of the German
entry into Brussels) assumed the inalienable right of seniors to
make the new arrivals feel raw and uncomfortable. Each freshman was
subjected to a searching cross-examination, like that which awaits the
new boy at his first school. Sometimes, if the latest victim seemed
particularly ingenuous, they would play a little practical joke on him.
The leader of the cheerful party was a middle-aged Belgian
journalist--a powerful, stout man, with carroty red moustaches and a
high crimson complexion, a huge roaring voice and a boundless gift for
laughter and genial Rabelaisian conversation. At the appearance of the
meek Dravidian he had fairly whooped with delight. So great, indeed,
was his interest in Alphonse that my Uncle Spencer escaped with the
most perfunctory examination and the minimum of playful “ragging.”
It was perhaps for the best; my Uncle Spencer was in no mood to be
trifled with, even by a fellow-sufferer.
Round poor Alphonse the journalist immediately improvised a farce.
Sitting like a judge at one of the desks in the large room, he had
the Dravidian brought before him, giving him to understand that
he was the German commissary who had to deal with his case. Under
cross-examination the Dravidian was made to tell his whole history.
Born, Madras; profession, cobbler--a clerk took down all his answers
as he delivered them. When he spoke of devil dancing, the judge made
him give a specimen of his performance there and then in front of the
desk. The question of his marriage with Louiseke was gone into in the
most intimate detail. Convinced that his liberty and probably his
life depended on his sincerity, Alphonse answered every question as
truthfully as he possibly could.
In the end, the journalist, clearing his throat, gravely summed up and
gave judgment. Innocent. The prisoner would forthwith be released. On
a large sheet of official paper he wrote _laissez passer_, signed it
Von der Golz, and, opening a drawer of the desk, selected from among
the numerous official seals it contained that with which, in happier
times, certain agricultural diplomas were stamped. On the thick red wax
appeared the figure of a prize shorthorn cow with, round it, the words:
“Pour l’amélioration de la race bovine.”
“Here,” roared the journalist, handing him the sealed paper. “You may
go.”
Poor Alphonse took his _laissez passer_ and, bowing at intervals almost
to the ground, retreated backwards out of the room. Joyously he picked
up his hat and his little bundle, ran to the door, knocked and called.
The sentry outside opened to see what was the matter. Alphonse produced
his passport.
“Aber wass ist das?” asked the sentry.
Alphonse pointed to the seal: for the amelioration of the bovine race;
to the signature: Von der Golz. The sentry, thinking that it was he,
not the Dravidian, who was the victim of the joke, became annoyed. He
pushed Alphonse roughly back through the door; and when, protesting,
propitiatively murmuring and smiling, the poor man advanced again to
explain to the sentry his mistake, the soldier picked up his rifle
and with the butt gave him a prod in the belly, which sent him back,
doubled up and coughing, along the corridor. The door slammed to.
Vainly, when he had recovered, Alphonse hammered and shouted. It did
not open again. My Uncle Spencer found him standing there--knocking,
listening, knocking again. The tears were streaming down his cheeks;
it was a long time before my Uncle Spencer could make him understand
that the whole affair had been nothing but a joke. At last, however,
Alphonse permitted himself to be led off to his mattress. In silence
he lay down and closed his eyes. In his right hand he still held the
passport--firmly, preciously between his thick brown fingers. He would
not throw it away; not yet. Perhaps if he went to sleep this incident
at the door would prove, when he woke up, to have been a dream. The
paper would have ceased to be a joke, and when, to-morrow, he showed
it again, who knew? the sentry would present arms and he would walk
downstairs; and all the soldiers in the courtyard would salute and he
would walk out into the sunny streets, waving the signature, pointing
to the thick red seal.
Quite still he lay there. His arm was crossed over his body. From
between the fingers of his hand hung the paper. Bold, as only the
signature of a conquering general could be, Von der Golz sprawled
across the sheet. And in the bottom right-hand corner, stamped in
the red wax, the image of the sacred cow was like a symbol of true
salvation from across the separating ocean and the centuries. _Pour
l’amélioration de la race bovine._ But might it not be more reasonable,
in the circumstances, to begin with the human race?
My Uncle Spencer left him to go and expostulate with the journalist on
the barbarity of his joke. He found the man sitting on the floor--for
there were not enough chairs to go round--teaching the golden-haired
male impersonator how to swear in French.
“And this,” he was saying, in his loud, jolly voice, “this is what
you must say to Von der Golz if ever you see him.” And he let off a
string of abusive words, which the little male impersonator carefully
repeated, distorted by her drawling English intonation, in her clear,
shrill voice: “Sarl esspayss de coshaw.” The journalist roared with
delighted laughter and slapped his thighs. “What comes after that?” she
asked.
“Excuse me,” said my Uncle Spencer, breaking in on the lesson. He was
blushing slightly. He never liked hearing this sort of language--and
in the mouth of a young woman (a compatriot too, it seemed) it sounded
doubly distressing. “Excuse me.” And he begged the journalist not to
play any more jokes on Alphonse. “He takes it too much to heart,” he
explained.
At his description of the Dravidian’s despair, the little male
impersonator was touched almost to tears. And the journalist, who, like
all the rest of us, had a heart of gold whenever he was reminded of
its existence--and, like all the rest of us, he needed pretty frequent
reminders; for his own pleasures and interests prevented him very often
from remembering it--the journalist was extremely sorry at what he had
done, declared that he had no idea that Alphonse would take the little
farce so seriously, and promised for the future to leave him in peace.
The days passed; the nightmare became habitual, followed a routine.
Three times a day the meagre supply of unappetising food arrived and
was consumed. Twice a day an officer with a little squad of soldiers
behind him made a tour of inspection. In the morning one waited for
one’s turn to wash; but the afternoons were immense gulfs of hot time,
which the prisoners tried to fill with games, with talk, with the
reading of ancient dossiers from the files, with solitary brooding
or with pacing up and down the corridor--twenty steps each way, up
and down, up and down, till one had covered in one’s imagination the
distance between one loved and familiar place and another. Up and down,
up and down. My Uncle Spencer sometimes walked along the poplar-lined
high road between Longres and Waret; sometimes from Charing Cross along
the Strand, under the railway bridge and up the hill to St. Paul’s,
and from St. Paul’s to the Bank, and from the Bank tortuously to the
Tower of London, the river, and the ships. Sometimes he walked with his
brother from Chamonix to the Montanvert; from Grenoble over the pass to
the Grande Chartreuse. Sometimes, less strenuously, he walked with his
long-dead mother through the glades of Windsor Forest, where the grass
is so green in early summer that it seems as though each blade were an
emerald illumined from within; and here and there among the oak trees
the dark-leaved rhododendrons light their innumerable rosy lamps.
In the evening the cheerful ones, with the journalist at their head,
organised entertainments for the amusement of the company. The
journalist himself recited poems of his own composition about the
Kaiser. One of the Frenchmen did some amateur conjuring with packs of
cards, handkerchiefs, and coins. The opera singer bawled out at the top
of his prodigious tenor, “La donna è mobile,” “O sole mio,” and when
something more serious was called for, César Franck’s “Dieu s’avance à
travers la lande”; which last, however, he sang in so richly operatic a
style that my Uncle Spencer, who was very fond of this particular song,
could hardly recognise it. But the most popular turn was always that of
“the celebrated diva, Emmy Wendle,” as the journalist called her, when
he introduced her to the company. The enthusiasm was tremendous when
Emmy Wendle appeared--dressed in an Eton jacket, broad starched collar,
striped trousers, and a top hat, and carrying in her hand a little
cane--did two or three rattling clog dances and sang a song with the
chorus:
“We are the nuts that get the girls
Ev-ery time;
We get the ones with the curly curls,
We get the peaches, we get the pearls--
Ev-ery time.”
And when, at the end of the turn, she took off her top hat, and,
standing rigidly at attention, like a soldier, her childish snubby
little face very grave, her blue eyes fixed on visions not of this
world, sang in her tuneless street-urchin’s voice an astonishingly
English version of the “Brabançonne,” then there was something more
than enthusiasm. For men would suddenly feel the tears coming into
their eyes, and women wept outright; and when it was over, everybody
violently stamped and clapped and waved handkerchiefs, and laughed,
and shouted imprecations against the Germans, and said, “Vive la
Belgique!” and ran to Emmy Wendle, and took her hand, or slapped her
on the back as though she had really been a boy, or kissed her--but
as though she were not a girl, and dressed in rather tight striped
trousers at that--kissed her as though she were a symbol of the
country, a visible and charming personification of their own patriotism
and misfortunes.
When the evening’s entertainment was over, the company began to
disperse. Stretched on their hard mattresses along the floor, the
prisoners uneasily slept or lay awake through the sultry nights,
listening to the steps of the sentries in the court below and hearing
every now and then through the unnatural silence of the invaded town,
the heavy beat, beat, beat of a regiment marching along the deserted
street, the rumble and sharp, hoofy clatter of a battery on the move
towards some distant front.
The days passed. My Uncle Spencer soon grew accustomed to the strange
little hell into which he had been dropped. He knew it by heart. A
huge, square room, low-ceilinged and stifling under the hot leads. Men
in their shirt-sleeves standing, or sitting, some on chairs, some on
the corner of a desk or a table, some on the floor. Some leaned their
elbows on the window-sill and looked out, satisfying their eyes with
the sight of the trees in the park across the street, breathing a purer
air--for the air in the room was stale, twice-breathed, and smelt of
sweat, tobacco, and cabbage soup.
From the first the prisoners had divided themselves, automatically
almost, into little separate groups. Equal in their misery, they
still retained their social distinctions. The organ-grinder and the
artisans and peasants always sat together in one corner on the floor,
playing games with a greasy pack of cards, smoking and, in spite of
expostulations, in spite of sincere efforts to restrain themselves,
spitting on the floor all round them.
“Mine!” the organ-grinder would say triumphantly, and plank down his
ace of hearts. “Mine!” And profusely, to emphasise his satisfaction,
he spat. “Ah, pardon!” Remembering too late, he looked apologetically
round the room. “Excuse me.” And he would get up, rub the gob of
spittle into the floor with his boot, and going to the window would
lean out and spit again--not that he felt any need to, having spat only
a moment before, but for the sake of showing that he had good manners
and could spit out of the window and not on the floor when he thought
of it.
Another separate group was that of the aristocracy. There was the
little old count with a face like a teapot--such shiny round cheeks,
such a thin, irrelevant nose; and the young count with the monocle--the
one so exquisitely affable with every one and yet so remote and aloof
under all his politeness; the other so arrogant in manner, but, one
could see, so wistfully wishing that his social position would permit
him to mingle with his spiritual equals. The old count politely laughed
whenever the journalist or some other member of the cheerful party made
a joke; the young count scowled, till the only smooth surface left
in his corrugated face was the monocle. But he longed to be allowed
to join in the horse-play and the jokes. With the two counts were
associated two or three rich and important citizens, among them during
the first days my Uncle Spencer. But other interests were to make him
abandon their company almost completely after a while.
On the fringes of their circle hovered occasionally the Russian
countess. This lady spent most of the day in her sleeping apartment,
lying on her mattress and smoking cigarettes. She had decided views
about the respect that was due to her rank, and expected the wash-house
to be immediately evacuated whenever she expressed a desire to use it.
On being told that she must wait her turn, she flew into a rage. When
she was bored with being alone, she would come into the living-room to
find somebody to talk to. On one occasion she took my Uncle Spencer
aside and told him at great length and with a wealth of intimate detail
about the ninth and greatest love-affair of her life. In future,
whenever my Uncle Spencer caught sight of her turning her large, dark,
rather protruding eyes round the room, he took care to be absorbed in
conversation with somebody else.
Her compatriot, the anarchist, was a Jewish-looking man with a black
beard and a nose like the figure six. He associated himself with none
of the little groups, was delighted by the war, which he gleefully
prophesied would destroy so-called civilisation, and made a point of
being as disagreeable as he could to every one--particularly to the
countess, whom he was able to insult confidentially in Russian. It
was in obedience to the same democratic principles that he possessed
himself of the only arm-chair in the prison--it must have been the
throne of at least a _sous chef de division_--refusing to part with it
even for a lady or an invalid. He sat in it immovably all day, put it
between his mattress and the wall at night, and took it with him even
into the wash-house and the _chalet de nécessité_.
The cheerful party grouped itself, planet fashion, round the radiant
jollity of the journalist. His favourite amusement was hunting
through the files for curious dossiers which he could read out, with
appropriate comments and improvised emendations to the assembled group.
But the most relished of all his jokes was played ritually every
morning when he went through the papers of nobility of the whole Belgic
aristocracy (discovered, neatly stowed away, in a cupboard in the
corridor), selecting from among the noble names a few high-sounding
titles which he would carry with him to the chalet of necessity. His
disciples included a number of burgesses, French and Belgian; a rather
odious and spotty young English bank clerk caught on his foreign
holiday; the Russian countess in certain moods; the male impersonator,
on and off; and the opera singer.
With this last my Uncle Spencer, who was a great lover of music and
even a moderately accomplished pianist, made frequent attempts to talk
about his favourite art. But the opera singer, he found, was only
interested in music in so far as it affected the tenor voice. He had
consequently never heard of Bach or Beethoven. On Leoncavallo, however,
on Puccini, Saint-Saëns, and Gounod he was extremely knowledgeable.
He was an imposing personage, with a large, handsome face and the
gracious, condescending smile of a great man who does not object
to talking even with you. With ladies, as he often gave it to be
understood, he had a great success. But his fear of doing anything that
might injure his voice was almost as powerful as his lasciviousness
and his vanity; he passed his life, like a monk of the Thebaid, in a
state of perpetual conflict. Outwardly and professedly a member of the
cheerful party, the opera singer was secretly extremely concerned about
his future. In private he discussed with my Uncle Spencer the horrors
of the situation.
More obviously melancholy was the little grey-haired professor of
Latin who spent most of the day walking up and down the corridor like
a wolf in a cage, brooding and pining. Poor Alphonse, squatting with
his back to the wall near the door, was another sad and solitary
figure. Sometimes he looked thoughtfully about him, watching his
fellow-prisoners at their various occupations with the air of an
inhabitant of eternity watching the incomprehensible antics of those
who live in time. Sometimes he would spend whole hours with closed eyes
in a state of meditation. When some one spoke to him, he came back to
the present as though from an immense distance.
But, for my Uncle Spencer, how remote, gradually, they all became! They
receded, they seemed to lose light; and with their fading the figure
of Emmy Wendle came closer, grew larger and brighter. From the first
moment he set eyes on her, sitting there on the floor, taking her
lesson in vituperation from the journalist, my Uncle Spencer had taken
particular notice of her. Making his way towards the pair of them, he
had been agreeably struck by the childishness and innocence of her
appearance--by the little snub nose, the blue eyes, the yellow hair,
so stubbornly curly that she had to wear it cut short like a boy’s,
for there was no oiling down or tying back a long mane of it; even
in her private feminine life there was a hint--and it only made her
seem the more childish--of male impersonation. And then, coming within
earshot, it had been “sarl esspayss de coshaw” and a string besides
of less endearing locutions proceeding from these lips. Startling,
shocking. But a moment later, when he was telling them how hardly poor
Alphonse had taken the joke, she said the most charming things and with
such real feeling in her cockney voice, such a genuine expression of
sympathy and commiseration on her face, that my Uncle Spencer wondered
whether he had heard aright, or if that “sarl coshaw” and all the
rest could really have been pronounced by so delicate and sensitive a
creature.
The state of agitation in which my Uncle Spencer had lived ever since
his arrest, the astonishing and horrible novelty of his situation,
had doubtless in some measure predisposed him to falling in love.
For it frequently happens that one emotion--providing that it is not
so powerful as to make us unconscious of anything but itself--will
stimulate us to feel another. Thus danger, if it is not acute enough
to cause panic, tends to attach us to those with whom we risk it, the
feelings of compassion, sympathy, and even love being stimulated and
quickened by apprehension. Grief, in the same way, often brings with
it a need of affection and even, though we do not like to admit it to
ourselves, even obscurely a kind of desire; so that a passion of sorrow
will convert itself by scarcely perceptible degrees, or sometimes
suddenly, into a passion of love. My Uncle Spencer’s habitual attitude
towards women was one of extreme reserve. Once, as a young man, he
had been in love and engaged to be married; but the object of his
affections had jilted him for somebody else. Since then, partly from a
fear of renewing his disappointment, partly out of a kind of romantic
fidelity to the unfaithful one, he had avoided women, or at least
taken pains not to fall in love any more, living always in a state of
perfect celibacy, which would have done credit to the most virtuous
of priests. But the agitations of the last few days had disturbed all
his habits of life and thought. Apprehension of danger, an indignation
that was a very different thing from the recurrent irritability of
the sugar-making season, profound bewilderment, and a sense of mental
disorientation had left him without his customary defences and in a
state of more than ordinary susceptibility; so that when he saw, in
the midst of his waking nightmare, that charming childish head, when
he heard those gentle words of sympathy for the poor Dravidian, he was
strangely moved; and he found himself aware of Emmy Wendle as he had
not been aware of any woman since the first unfaithful one of his youth
had left him.
Everything conspired to make my Uncle Spencer take an interest in
Emmy Wendle--everything, not merely his own emotional state, but the
place, the time, the outward circumstances. He might have gone to see
her at the music-hall every night for a year; and though he might have
enjoyed her turn--and as a matter of fact he would not, for he would
have thought it essentially rather vulgar--though he might have found
her pretty and charming, it would never have occurred to him to try to
make her acquaintance or introduce himself into her history. But here,
in this detestable makeshift prison, she took on a new significance,
she became the personification of all that was gracious, sweet,
sympathetic, of all that was not war. And at the end of her performance
(still, it was true, in poorish taste, but more permissible, seeing
that it was given for the comfort of the afflicted) how profoundly
impressive was her singing of the “Brabançonne”! She had become great
with the greatness of the moment, with the grandeur of the emotions to
which she was giving utterance in that harsh guttersnipe’s voice of
hers--singing of exultations, agonies, and man’s unconquerable mind. We
attribute to the symbol something of the sacredness of the thing or
idea symbolised. Two bits of wood set cross-wise are not two ordinary
bits of wood, and a divinity has hedged the weakest and worst of kings.
Similarly, at any crisis in our lives, the most trivial object, or a
person in himself insignificant, may become, for some reason, charged
with all the greatness of the moment.
Even the “sarl coshaw” incident had helped to raise my Uncle Spencer’s
interest in Emmy Wendle. For if she was gentle, innocent, and young,
if she personified in her small, bright self all the unhappiness
and all the courage of a country, of the whole afflicted world,
she was also fallible, feminine, and weak; she was subject to bad
influences, she might be led astray. And the recollection of those
gross phrases, candidly, innocently, and openly uttered (as the most
prudish can always utter them when they happen to be in an unfamiliar
language, round whose words custom has not crystallised that wealth of
associations which give to the native locutions their peculiar and,
from age to age, varying significance), filled my Uncle Spencer with
alarm and with a missionary zeal to rescue so potentially beautiful and
even grand a nature from corruption.
For her part, Emmy Wendle was charmed, at any rate during the first
days of their acquaintance, with my Uncle Spencer. He was English, to
begin with, and spoke her language; he was also--which the equally
English and intelligible bank clerk was not--a gentleman. More
important for Emmy, in her present mood, he did not attempt to flirt
with her. Emmy wanted no admirers, at the moment. In the present
circumstances she felt that it would have been wrong, uncomely, and
rather disreputable to think of flirtation. She sang the “Brabançonne”
with too much religious ardour for that; the moment was too solemn,
too extraordinary. True, the solemnity of the moment and the ardour of
her patriotic feelings might, if a suitable young man had happened to
find himself with her in the attics of the Ministry of the Interior,
have caused her to fall in love with a fervour having almost the
religious quality of her other feelings. But no suitable young man,
unfortunately, presented himself. The bank clerk had spots on his
face and was not a gentleman, the journalist was middle-aged and too
stout. Both tried to flirt with her. But their advances had, for Emmy,
all the impropriety of a flirtation in a sacred place. With my Uncle
Spencer, however, she felt entirely safe. It was not merely that he had
white hair; Emmy had lived long enough to know that that symbol was no
guarantee of decorous behaviour--on the contrary; but because he was,
obviously, such a gentleman, because of the signs of unworldliness and
mild idealism stamped all over his face.
At first, indeed, it was only to escape from the tiresome and
indecorous attentions of the bank clerk and the journalist that she
addressed herself to Uncle Spencer. But she soon came to like his
company for its own sake; she began to take an interest in what he
said, she listened seriously to my Uncle Spencer’s invariably serious
conversation--for he never talked except on profitable and intellectual
themes, having no fund of ordinary small talk.
During the first days Emmy treated him with the respectful courtesy
which, she felt, was due to a man of his age, position, and character.
But later, when he began to follow her with his abject adoration,
she became more familiar. Inevitably; for one cannot expect to be
treated as old and important by some one at whom one looks with the
appealing eyes of a dog. She called him Uncle Spenny and ordered him
about, made him carry and fetch as though he were a trained animal.
My Uncle Spencer was only too delighted, of course, to obey her. He
was charmed by the familiarities she took with him. The period of her
pretty teasing familiarity (intermediate between her respectfulness and
her later cruelty) was the happiest, so far as my Uncle Spencer was
concerned, in their brief connection. He loved and felt himself, if not
loved in return, at least playfully tolerated.
Another man would have permitted himself to take liberties in return,
to be sportive, gallant, and importunate. But my Uncle Spencer remained
gravely and tenderly himself. His only reprisal for “Uncle Spenny”
and the rest was to call her by her Christian name instead of “Miss
Wendle,” as he had always solemnly done before. Yes, Emmy felt herself
safe with Uncle Spenny; almost too safe, perhaps.
My Uncle Spencer’s conversations were always, as I have said, of a very
serious cast. They were even more serious at this time than usual; for
the catastrophe, and now his passion, had brought on in his mind a very
severe fit of thinking. There was so much that, in the light of the
happenings of the last few weeks, needed reconsidering. From the German
professor’s theory to the problem of good and evil; from the idea of
progress (for, after all, was not this the twentieth century?) to the
austere theory and the strange new fact of love; from internationalism
to God--everything had to be considered afresh. And he considered them
out loud with Emmy Wendle. Goodness, for example, was that no more
than a relative thing, an affair of social conventions, gauged by
merely local and accidental standards? Or was there something absolute,
ultimate, and fundamental about the moral idea? And God--could God
be absolutely good? And was there such a vast difference between the
twentieth and other centuries? Could fact ever rhyme with ideal? All
these disturbing questions had to be asked and answered to his own
satisfaction once again.
It was characteristic of my Uncle Spencer that he answered them
all--even after taking into consideration everything that had
happened--on the hopeful side, just as he had done before the
catastrophe; and what was more, with a deeper conviction. Before, he
had accepted the cheerful idealistic view a little too easily. He had
inherited it from the century in which he was born, had sucked it in
from the respectable and ever-prospering elders among whom he had been
brought up. Circumstances were now making that facile cheerfulness
seem rather stupid. But it was precisely because he had to reconsider
the objections to optimism, the arguments against hopefulness, not
theoretically in the void, but practically and in the midst of personal
and universal calamity (the latter very bearable if one is comfortably
placed oneself, but real, but disturbing, if one is also suffering a
little), that he now became convinced, more hardly but more profoundly,
of the truth of what he had believed before, but lightly and, as he
now saw, almost accidentally. Events were shortly to disturb this
new-found conviction.
Emmy listened to him with rapture. The circumstances, the time, the
place, inclined her to the serious and reflective mood. My Uncle
Spencer’s discourses were just what she needed at this particular
moment. Naturally superstitious, she lived at all times under the
protection of a small gold lucky pig and a coral cross which had once
belonged to her mother. And when luck was bad, she went to church and
consulted crystal gazers. That time she broke her leg and had to cancel
that wonderful engagement to tour in Australia, she knew it was because
she had been neglecting God in all the prosperous months before; she
prayed and she promised amendment. When she got better, God sent her
an offer from Cohen’s Provincial Alhambras Ltd., in token that her
repentance was accepted and she was forgiven. And now, though she had
seemed to belong to the cheerful party in the attics of the Ministry
of the Interior, her thoughts had secretly been very grave. At night,
lying awake on her mattress, she wondered in the darkness what was the
reason of all this--the war, her bad luck in getting caught by the
Germans. Yes, what could the reason be? Why was God angry with her once
again?
But of course she knew why. It was all that dreadful, dreadful business
last June when she was working at Wimbledon. That young man who had
waited for her at the stage door; and would she do him the honour of
having supper with him? And she had said yes, though it was all against
her rules. Yes: because he had such a beautiful voice, so refined,
almost like a very high-class West End actor’s voice. “I came to see
the marionettes,” he told her. “Marionettes never seem to get farther
than the suburbs, do they? But I stayed for you.”
They drove in a taxi all the way from Wimbledon to Piccadilly. “Some
day,” she said, pointing to the Pavilion, “you’ll see my name there,
in big electric letters: EMMY WENDLE.” A hundred pounds a week and the
real West End. What a dream!
He had such beautiful manners and he looked so handsome when you saw
him in the light. They had champagne for supper.
In the darkness, Emmy blushed with retrospective shame. She buried
her face in the pillow as though she were trying to hide from some
searching glance. No wonder God was angry. In an agony she kissed
the coral cross. She pulled at the blue ribbon, at the end of which,
between her two small breasts, hung the golden pig; she held the mascot
in her hand, tightly, as though hoping to extract from it something of
that power for happiness stored mysteriously within it, as the power to
attract iron filings is stored within the magnet.
A few feet away the Russian countess heavily breathed. At the
stertorous sound Emmy shuddered, remembering the wickedness
that slumbered so near her. For if she herself had ceased to
be, technically, a good girl, she was--now that her luck had
turned--ashamed of it; she knew, from God’s anger, that she had done
wrong. But the countess, if sleep had not overtaken her, would have
gone on boasting all night about her lovers. To middle-class Emmy the
countess’s frankness, her freedom from the ordinary prejudices, her
aristocratic contempt for public opinion, and her assumption--the
assumption of almost all idle women and of such idle men as have
nothing better to do or think about--that the only end of life is to
make love, complicatedly, at leisure and with a great many people,
seemed profoundly shocking. It didn’t so much matter that she wasn’t a
good girl--or rather a good ripe widow. What seemed to Emmy so dreadful
was that she should talk about it as though not being good were
natural, to be taken for granted, and even positively meritorious. No
wonder God was angry.
To Emmy my Uncle Spencer--or shall I call him now her Uncle
Spenny?--came as a comforter and sustainer in her remorseful misery.
His wandering speculations were not, it was true, always particularly
relevant to her own trouble; nor did she always understand what he was
talking about. But there was a certain quality in all his discourses,
whatever the subject, which she found uplifting and sustaining. Thus
my Uncle Spencer quoting Swedenborg to prove that, in spite of all
present appearances to the contrary, things were probably all right,
was the greatest of comforts. There was something about him like a very
high-class clergyman--a West End clergyman, so to say. When he talked
she felt better and in some sort safer.
He inspired in her so much confidence that one day, while the
journalist was playing some noisy joke that kept all the rest of the
company occupied, she took him aside into the embrasure of one of the
windows and told him all, or nearly all, about the episode on account
of which God was now so angry. My Uncle Spencer assured her that God
didn’t see things in quite the way she imagined; and that if He had
decided that there must be a European War, it was not, in all human
probability, to provide an excuse for getting Emmy Wendle--however
guilty--locked up in the attics of the Ministry of the Interior at
Brussels. As for the sin itself, my Uncle Spencer tried to make her
believe that it was not quite so grave as she thought. He did not
know that she only thought it grave because she was in prison and,
naturally, depressed.
“No, no,” he said comfortingly, “you mustn’t take it to heart like
that.”
But the knowledge that this exquisite and innocent young creature
had once--and if once, why not twice, why not (my Uncle Spencer left
to his own midnight thoughts feverishly speculated), why not fifty
times?--fallen from virtue distressed him. He had imagined her, it was
true, surrounded by bad influences, like the journalist; but between
being taught to say “sarl coshaw” and an actual lapse from virtue,
there was a considerable difference. It had never occurred to my Uncle
Spencer that Emmy could have got beyond the “coshaw” stage. And now he
had it from her own lips that she had.
Celibate like a priest, my Uncle Spencer had not enjoyed the priest’s
vicarious experience in the confessional. He had not read those
astonishing handbooks of practical psychology, fruit of the accumulated
wisdom of centuries, from which the seminarist learns to understand
his penitents, to classify and gauge their sins, and, incidentally--so
crude, bald, and uncompromising are the descriptions of human vice
that they contain--to loathe the temptations which, when rosily and
delicately painted, can seem so damnably alluring. His ignorance of
human beings was enormous. In his refinement he had preferred not to
know; and circumstances, so far, had wonderfully conspired to spare him
knowledge.
Years afterwards, I remember, when we met again, he asked me after
a silence, and speaking with an effort, as though overcoming a
repugnance, what I really thought about women and all “that sort of
thing.” It was a subject about which at that time I happened to feel
with the bitterness and mirthful cynicism of one who has been only too
amply successful in love with the many in whom he took no interest, and
lamentably and persistently unsuccessful with the one being, in whose
case success would have been in the least worth while.
“You really think, then,” said my Uncle Spencer, when I paused for
breath, “that a lot of that sort of thing actually does go on?”