The evening was pearl-grey when they left the village; in their nostrils
was the smell of the leisurely death of the year, of leaves drying and
falling, of ripened fruit and bursting seed-pods.
"The fall's a maddening sort o' time for me," said Tom Randolph. "It
makes me itch to get up on ma hind legs an' do things, go places."
"I suppose it's that the earth has such a feel of accomplishment," said
Howe.
"You do feel as if Nature had pulled off her part of the job and was
restin'."
They stopped a second and looked about them, breathing deep. On one side
of the road were woods where in long alleys the mists deepened into
purple darkness.
"There's the moon."
"God! it looks like a pumpkin."
"I wish those guns'd shut up 'way off there to the north."
"They're sort of irrelevant, aren't they?"
They walked on, silent, listening to the guns throbbing far away, like
muffled drums beaten in nervous haste.
"Sounds almost like a barrage."
Martin for some reason was thinking of the last verses of Shelley's
_Hellas_. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them.
"_Faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks in a dissolving dream._"
The purple trunks of saplings passed slowly across the broad face of the
moon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was!
"Look, Tom." Martin put his arm about Randolph's shoulder and nodded
towards the moon. "It might be a ship with puffed-out pumpkin-coloured
sails, the way the trees make it look now."
"Wouldn't it be great to go to sea?" said Randolph, looking straight
into the moon, "an' get out of this slaughter-house. It's nice to see
the war, but I have no intention of taking up butchery as a
profession.... There is too much else to do in the world."
They walked slowly along the road talking of the sea, and Martin told
how when he was a little kid he'd had an uncle who used to tell him
about the Vikings and the Swan Path, and how one of the great moments of
his life had been when he and a friend had looked out of their window in
a little inn on Cape Cod one morning and seen the sea and the swaying
gold path of the sun on it, stretching away, beyond the horizon.
"Poor old life," he said. "I'd expected to do so much with you." And
they both laughed, a little bitterly.
They were strolling past a large farmhouse that stood like a hen among
chicks in a crowd of little outbuildings. A man in the road lit a
cigarette and Martin recognised him in the orange glare of the match.
"Monsieur Merrier!" He held out his hand. It was the aspirant he had
drunk beer with weeks ago at Brocourt.
"Hah! It's you!"
"So you are en repos here, too?"
"Yes, indeed. But you two come in and see us; we are dying of the
blues."
"We'd love to stop in for a second."
A fire smouldered in the big hearth of the farmhouse kitchen, sending a
little irregular fringe of red light out over the tiled floor. At the
end of the room towards the door three men were seated round a table,
smoking. A candle threw their huge and grotesque shadows on the floor
and on the whitewashed walls, and lit up the dark beams of that part of
the ceiling. The three men got up and everyone shook hands, filling the
room with swaying giant shadows. Champagne was brought and tin cups and
more candles, and the Americans were given the two most comfortable
chairs.
"It's such a find to have Americans who speak French," said a bearded
man with unusually large brilliant eyes. He had been introduced as André
Dubois, "a very terrible person," had added Merrier, laughing. The cork
popped out of the bottle he had been struggling with.
"You see, we never can find out what you think about things.... All we
can do is to be sympathetically inane, and _vive les braves alliés_ and
that sort of stuff."
"I doubt if we Americans do think," said Martin.
"Cigarettes, who wants some cigarettes?" cried Lully, a small man with a
very brown oval face to which long eyelashes and a little bit of silky
black moustache gave almost a winsomeness. When he laughed he showed
brilliant, very regular teeth. As he handed the cigarettes about he
looked searchingly at Martin with eyes disconcertingly intense. "Merrier
has told us about you," he said. "You seem to be the first American
we've met who agreed with us."
"What about?"
"About the war, of course."
"Yes," took up the fourth man, a blonde Norman with an impressive,
rather majestic face, "we were very interested. You see, we bore each
other, talking always among ourselves.... I hope you won't be offended
if I agree with you in saying that Americans never think. I've been in
Texas, you see."
"Really?"
"Yes, I went to a Jesuit College in Dallas. I was preparing to enter the
Society of Jesus."
"How long have you been in the war?" asked André Dubois, passing his
hand across his beard.
"We've both been in the same length of time--about six months."
"Do you like it?"
"I don't have a bad time.... But the people in Boccaccio managed to
enjoy themselves while the plague was at Florence. That seems to me the
only way to take the war."
"We have no villa to take refuge in, though," said Dubois, "and we have
forgotten all our amusing stories."
"And in America--they like the war?"
"They don't know what it is. They are like children. They believe
everything they are told, you see; they have had no experience in
international affairs, like you Europeans. To me our entrance into the
war is a tragedy."
"It's sort of goin' back on our only excuse for existing," put in
Randolph.
"In exchange for all the quiet and the civilisation and the beauty of
ordered lives that Europeans gave up in going to the new world we gave
them opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedom
from the past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europe
to-day with its infection of hate and greed of murder.
"America has turned traitor to all that, you see; that's the way we look
at it. Now we're a military nation, an organised pirate like France and
England and Germany."
"But American idealism? The speeches, the notes?" cried Lully, catching
the edge of the table with his two brown hands.
"Camouflage," said Martin.
"You mean it's insincere?"
"The best camouflage is always sincere." Dubois ran his hands through
his hair.
"Of course, why should there be any difference?" he said.
"Oh, we're all dupes, we're all dupes. Look, Lully, old man, fill up the
Americans' glasses."
"Thanks."
"And I used to believe in liberty," said Martin. He raised his tumbler
and looked at the candle through the pale yellow champagne. On the wall
behind him, his arm and hand and the tumbler were shadowed huge in dusky
lavender blue. He noticed that his was the only tumbler.
"I am honoured," he said; "mine is the only glass."
"And that's looted," said Merrier.
"It's funny ..." Martin suddenly felt himself filled with a desire to
talk. "All my life I've struggled for my own liberty in my small way.
Now I hardly know if the thing exists."
"Exists? Of course it does, or people wouldn't hate it so," cried Lully.
"I used to think," went on Martin, "that it was my family I must escape
from to be free; I mean all the conventional ties, the worship of
success and the respectabilities that is drummed into you when you're
young."
"I suppose everyone has thought that...."
"How stupid we were before the war, how we prated of small revolts, how
we sniggered over little jokes at religion and government. And all the
while, in the infinite greed, in the infinite stupidity of men, this was
being prepared." André Dubois was speaking, puffing nervously at a
cigarette between phrases, now and then pulling at his beard with a
long, sinewy hand.
"What terrifies me rather is their power to enslave our minds," Martin
went on, his voice growing louder and surer as his idea carried him
along. "I shall never forget the flags, the menacing, exultant flags
along all the streets before we went to war, the gradual unbaring of
teeth, gradual lulling to sleep of people's humanity and sense by the
phrases, the phrases.... America, as you know, is ruled by the press.
And the press is ruled by whom? Who shall ever know what dark forces
bought and bought until we should be ready to go blinded and gagged to
war?... People seem to so love to be fooled. Intellect used to mean
freedom, a light struggling against darkness. Now the darkness is using
the light for its own purposes.... We are slaves of bought intellect,
willing slaves."
"But, Howe, the minute you see that and laugh at it, you're not a slave.
Laugh and be individually as decent as you can, and don't worry your
head about the rest of the world; and have a good time in spite of the
God-damned scoundrels," broke out Randolph in English. "No use worrying
yourself into the grave over a thing you can't help."
"There is one solution and one only, my friends," said the blonde
Norman; "the Church...." He sat up straight in his chair, speaking
slowly with expressionless face. "People are too weak and too kindly to
shift for themselves. Government of some sort there must be. Lay
Government has proved through all the tragic years of history to be
merely a ruse of the strong to oppress the weak, of the wicked to fool
the confiding. There remains only religion. In the organisation of
religion lies the natural and suitable arrangement for the happiness of
man. The Church will govern not through physical force but through
spiritual force."
"The force of fear." Lully jumped to his feet impatiently, making the
bottles sway on the table.
"The force of love.... I once thought as you do, my friend," said the
Norman, pulling Lully back into his chair with a smile.
Lully drank a glass of champagne greedily and undid the buttons of his
blue jacket.
"Go on," he said; "it's madness."
"All the evil of the Church," went on the Norman's even voice, "comes
from her struggles to attain supremacy. Once assured of triumph,
established as the rule of the world, it becomes the natural channel
through which the wise rule and direct the stupid, not for their own
interest, not for ambition for worldly things, but for the love that is
in them. The freedom the Church offers is the only true freedom. It
denies the world, and the slaveries and rewards of it. It gives the love
of God as the only aim of life."
"But think of the Church to-day, the cardinals at Rome, the Church
turned everywhere to the worship of tribal gods...."
"Yes, but admit that that can be changed. The Church has been supreme in
the past; can it not again be supreme? All the evil comes from the
struggle, from the compromise. Picture to yourself for a moment a world
conquered by the Church, ruled through the soul and mind, where force
will not exist, where instead of all the multitudinous tyrannies man has
choked his life with in organising against other men, will exist the one
supreme thing, the Church of God. Instead of many hatreds, one love.
Instead of many slaveries, one freedom."
"A single tyranny, instead of a million. What's the choice?" cried
Lully.
"But you are both violent, my children." Merrier got to his feet and
smilingly filled the glasses all round. "You go at the matter too much
from the heroic point of view. All this sermonising does no good. We are
very simple people who want to live quietly and have plenty to eat and
have no one worry us or hurt us in the little span of sunlight before we
die. All we have now is the same war between the classes: those that
exploit and those that are exploited. The cunning, unscrupulous people
control the humane, kindly people. This war that has smashed our little
European world in which order was so painfully taking the place of
chaos, seems to me merely a gigantic battle fought over the plunder of
the world by the pirates who have grown fat to the point of madness on
the work of their own people, on the work of the millions in Africa, in
India, in America, who have come directly or indirectly under the yoke
of the insane greed of the white races. Well, our edifice is ruined.
Let's think no more of it. Ours is now the duty of rebuilding,
reorganising. I have not faith enough in human nature to be an
anarchist.... We are too like sheep; we must go in flocks, and a flock
to live must organise. There is plenty for everyone, even with the huge
growth in population all over the world. What we want is organisation
from the bottom, organisation by the ungreedy, by the humane, by the
uncunning, socialism of the masses that shall spring from the natural
need of men to help one another; not socialism from the top to the ends
of the governors, that they may clamp us tighter in their fetters. We
must stop the economic war, the war for existence of man against man.
That will be the first step in the long climb to civilisation. They must
co-operate, they must learn that it is saner and more advantageous to
help one another than to hinder one another in the great war against
nature. And the tyranny of the feudal money lords, the unspeakable
misery of this war is driving men closer together into fraternity,
co-operation. It is the lower classes, therefore, that the new world
must be founded on. The rich must be extinguished; with them wars
will die. First between rich and poor, between the exploiter and
the exploited...."
"They have one thing in common," interrupted the blonde Norman, smiling.
"What's that?"
"Humanity.... That is, feebleness, cowardice."
"No, indeed. All through the world's history there has been one law for
the lord and another for the slave, one humanity for the lord and
another humanity for the slave. What we must strive for is a true
universal humanity."
"True," cried Lully, "but why take the longest, the most difficult road?
You say that people are sheep; they must be driven. I say that you and I
and our American friends here are not sheep. We are capable of standing
alone, of judging all for ourselves, and we are just ordinary people
like anyone else."
"Oh, but look at us, Lully!" interrupted Merrier. "We are too weak and
too cowardly ..."
"An example," said Martin, excitedly leaning across the table. "We none
of us believe that war is right or useful or anything but a hideous
method of mutual suicide. Have we the courage of our own faith?"
"As I said," Merrier took up again, "I have too little faith to be an
anarchist, but I have too much to believe in religion." His tin cup
rapped sharply on the table as he set it down.
"No," Lully continued, after a pause, "it is better for man to worship
God, his image on the clouds, the creation of his fancy, than to worship
the vulgar apparatus of organised life, government. Better sacrifice his
children to Moloch than to that society for the propagation and
protection of commerce, the nation. Oh, think of the cost of government
in all the ages since men stopped living in marauding tribes! Think of
the great men martyred. Think of the thought trodden into the dust....
Give man a chance for once. Government should be purely utilitarian,
like the electric light wires in a house. It is a method for attaining
peace and comfort--a bad one, I think, at that; not a thing to be
worshipped as God. The one reason for it is the protection of property.
Why should we have property? That is the central evil of the world....
That is the cancer that has made life a hell of misery until now; the
inflated greed of it has spurred on our nations of the West to throw
themselves back, for ever, perhaps, into the depths of savagery.... Oh,
if people would only trust their own fundamental kindliness, the
fraternity, the love that is the strongest thing in life. Abolish
property, and the disease of the desire for it, the desire to grasp and
have, and you'll need no government to protect you. The vividness and
resiliency of the life of man is being fast crushed under organisation,
tabulation. Over-organisation is death. It is disorganisation, not
organisation, that is the aim of life."
"I grant that what all of you say is true, but why say it over and over
again?" André Dubois talked, striding back and forth beside the table,
his arms gesticulating. His compound shadow thrown by the candles on the
white wall followed him back and forth, mocking him with huge blurred
gestures. "The Greek philosophers said it and the Indian sages. Our
descendants thousands of years from now will say it and wring their
hands as we do. Has not someone on earth the courage to act?..." The men
at the table turned towards him, watching his tall figure move back and
forth.
"We are slaves. We are blind. We are deaf. Why should we argue, we who
have no experience of different things to go on? It has always been the
same: man the slave of property or religion, of his own shadow.... First
we must burst our bonds, open our eyes, clear our ears. Now we know
nothing but what we are told by the rulers. Oh, the lies, the lies, the
lies, the lies that life is smothered in! We must strike once more for
freedom, for the sake of the dignity of man. Hopelessly, cynically,
ruthlessly we must rise and show at least that we are not taken in; that
we are slaves but not willing slaves. Oh, they have deceived us so many
times. We have been such dupes, we have been such dupes!"
"You are right," said the blonde Norman sullenly; "we have all been
dupes."
A sudden self-consciousness chilled them all to silence for a while.
Without wanting to, they strained their ears to hear the guns. There
they were, throbbing loud, unceasing, towards the north, like hasty
muffled drum-beating.
_Cease; drain not to its dregs the wine,
Of bitter Prophecy.
The world is weary of its past.
Oh, might it die or rest at last._
All through the talk snatches from _Hellas_ had been running through
Howe's head.
After a long pause he turned to Merrier and asked him how he had fared
in the attack.
"Oh, not so badly. I brought my skin back," said Merrier, laughing. "It
was a dull business. After waiting eight hours under gas bombardment we
got orders to advance, and so over we went with the barrage way ahead of
us. There was no resistance where we were. We took a lot of prisoners
and blew up some dugouts and I had the good luck to find a lot of German
chocolate. It came in handy, I can tell you, as no ravitaillement came
for two days. We just had biscuits and I toasted the biscuits and
chocolate together and had quite good meals, though I nearly died of
thirst afterwards.... We lost heavily, though, when they started
counter-attacking."
"An' no one of you were touched?"
"Luck.... But we lost many dear friends. Oh, it's always like that."
"Look what I brought back--a German gun," said André Dubois, going to
the corner of the room.
"That's some souvenir," said Tom Randolph, sitting up suddenly, shaking
himself out of the reverie he had been sunk in all through the talk of
the evening.
"And I have three hundred rounds. They'll come in handy some day."
"When?"
"In the revolution--after the war."
"That's the stuff I like to hear," cried Randolph, getting to his feet.
"Why wait for the war to end?"
"Why? Because we have not the courage.... But it is impossible until
after the war."
"And then you think it is possible?"
"Yes."
"Will it accomplish anything?"
"God knows."
"One last bottle of champagne," cried Merrier.
They seated themselves round the table again. Martin took in at a glance
the eager sunburned faces, the eyes burning with hope, with
determination, and a sudden joy flared through him.
"Oh, there is hope," he said, drinking down his glass. "We are too
young, too needed to fail. We must find a way, find the first step of a
way to freedom, or life is a hollow mockery."
"To Revolution, to Anarchy, to the Socialist state," they all cried,
drinking down the last of the champagne. All the candles but one had
guttered out. Their shadows swayed and darted in long arms and changing,
grotesque limbs about the room.
"But first there must be peace," said the Norman, Jean Chenier, twisting
his mouth into a faintly bitter smile.
"Oh, indeed, there must be peace."
"Of all slaveries, the slavery of war, of armies, is the bitterest, the
most hopeless slavery." Lully was speaking, his smooth brown face in a
grimace of excitement and loathing. "War is our first enemy."
"But oh, my friend," said Merrier, "we will win in the end. All the
people in all the armies of the world believe as we do. In all the minds
the seed is sprouting."
"Before long the day will come. The tocsin will ring."
"Do you really believe that?" cried Martin. "Have we the courage, have
we the energy, have we the power? Are we the men our ancestors were?"
"No," said Dubois, crashing down on the table with his fist; "we are
merely intellectuals. We cling to a mummified world. But they have the
power and the nerve."
"Who?"
"The stupid average working-people."
"We only can combat the lies," said Lully; "they are so easily duped.
After the war that is what we must do."
"Oh, but we are all such dupes," cried Dubois. "First we must fight the
lies. It is the lies that choke us."
* * * * *
It was very late. Howe and Tom Randolph were walking home under a cold
white moon already well sunk in the west; northward was a little
flickering glare above the tops of the low hills and a sound of firing
as of muffled drums beaten hastily.
"With people like that we needn't despair of civilisation," said Howe.
"With people who are young and aren't scared you can do lots."
"We must come over and see those fellows again. It's such a relief to be
able to talk."
"And they give you the idea that something's really going on in the
world, don't they?"
"Oh, it's wonderful! Think that the awakening may come soon."
"We might wake up to-morrow and ..."
"It's too important to joke about; don't be an ass, Tom."
They rolled up in their blankets in the silent barn and listened to the
drum-fire in the distance. Martin saw again, as he lay on his side with
his eyes closed, the group of men in blue uniforms, men with eager brown
faces and eyes gleaming with hope, and saw their full red lips moving as
they talked.
The candle threw the shadows of their heads, huge, fantastic, and of
their gesticulating arms on the white walls of the kitchen. And it
seemed to Martin Howe that all his friends were gathered in that room.