[Cover Illustration]
[Illustration: _In the Tower Room._]
A
SERVANT OF REALITY
BY
PHYLLIS BOTTOME
Author of “The Dark Tower,” “The Second
Fiddle,” “Helen of Troy and Rose,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
NORMAN PRICE
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1919
Copyright, 1919, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, October, 1919_
TO
BETTY AND MAIDA
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. In the Tower Room
2. Daphne pushed him back into his chair and knelt beside
him
3. He did not know what was left of him or what was Kitty
4. There was no curtain left between Anthony and his pain
5. Like one of the June butterflies that haunt the down
country
CHAPTER I
Anthony Arden closed his eyes; he was trying to let the unutterable
misery of two years slip from him. It was over; it was all over, as over
as an extracted tooth, but he could not yet feel relief or exultation.
These feelings must come later, when he saw England. When he closed his
eyes he escaped seeing the very fat, red neck, passing without gradation
into the round-shaped head of his German guard.
In two hours he would be over the frontier into Holland and have no
guard. He kept saying to himself, “Free! free! free!” The word sounded
perfectly meaningless. Fears assailed him; he was quite used to fears,
ordinary fears about food, vermin, a bullying sergeant, or the collapse
of a fellow-prisoner. These were reasonable fears; the new kind were
not. They were too much like hopes; they were really terrible.
He had never been one of the men who collapsed; but he knew all about
collapses. He had fought them as St. Paul fought with the beasts at
Ephesus.
He knew their beginnings, the ominous vacillations of the will, when a
man could wait for a quarter of an hour before deciding which foot to
put his boot on. This would be the prelude to a fearful lethargy.
Anthony had watched the restlessness of the driven body before the mind
suddenly ceased to drive it; the rush and flutter of the helpless
thoughts till the interludes came; the blank spaces when the thoughts
subsided, and the thinker, exhausted, overwrought, and trembling, would
appeal to him for drugs. Bromide was useful if there was any tiding over
to be done, but too often it edged stupor with despair, and one could
seldom tide over the illimitable seas of prolonged imprisonment.
Anthony was a wonderful hand at keeping people up. Even the Germans
appreciated his power, and as they had by that time learned to prefer
sane prisoners to mad ones, they gave him all the drugs he asked for and
freedom to apply what other methods occurred to him.
Anthony had entered the war as one of the fighting forces; but in
another life, a strange, safe, horizonless, dignified world, where men
thought and acted without compulsion and knew next to nothing of fear,
he had been a rising young surgeon with an unshakable nerve. He was the
type of man who always rises; he could absorb himself in his aims and
control his desires and yet escape the tyranny of self.
The universe was his center; he was not the center of the universe. He
had no use for emotions and was not easily put out. He loved his home
and went there very seldom. He disagreed with his father whenever they
met, and wrote to his mother regularly once a week, on half-sheets of
paper, without telling her anything.
Daphne, his favorite sister, infuriated and delighted him; he
disapproved of everything she did, and generally found himself helping
her to do it. His eldest brother Tom, he never wrote to, seldom saw, and
loved ineradicably. Anthony would not have called it “love,” neither
would Tom; but neither would have hesitated an instant to die for the
other. Tom had been killed. There was a third brother, Henry, cleverer
than Tom, who fortunately had varicose veins. Owing to this he knew
nothing about the war except what he was told and what he had gathered
from the newspapers. He had a flat in London. Anthony was going there
now.
London! He didn’t really believe in it; that was why he shut his eyes to
see it better. While he was a prisoner he had never dared to make
pictures he could see; that was one of the ways in which men collapsed.
They got to seeing things; quite sensible things at first, things that
were there. Then they started seeing things that were not. It was always
better to keep one’s eyes fixed on little, every-day facts.
Anthony knew that London was safe. Zeppelins had done their best,
aëroplanes had touched London as a boy’s catapult drops pebbles into a
field. You had to hunt to find the pebbles; the field remained placidly
unshaken.
Daphne always slipped into her letters, “Funny old London is just the
same.” It was one of the faults he used to find with Daphne that she
overlooked the essential, but he had not known how realistic it made
letters. All his people had been wonderful about writing; they had
arranged it among themselves so that somebody, even if it was only an
aunt, wrote to him every day in the week. And they had thought of
everything in the way of parcels.
There had been six months’ hell first. Hell is a place where you are
forgotten by all you love and remembered by all you hate. Fortunately,
this was at the beginning, when Anthony had his self-control intact,
except for the first forty-eight hours. Anthony hadn’t been
self-controlled then, but he had not expected to have his broken leg
kicked. It had startled him very much. He had resented it, and they had
hurt him. They had hurt him so that when he remembered it he began to
tremble all over and to feel like ice. It wasn’t the actual physical
pain alone; it was the cruelty and the surprise. It was such a strange
feeling, to be quite powerless and hated, especially when one had lived
a particularly normal and kindly life and never known anything about
hate.
Hate is such a funny, medieval little word, like devil or hell; it means
nothing till one has tried it. When Anthony was a young man and knew
everything, and had learned nothing, he had laughed at these little
medieval words. He had called them, rather proudly, to his mother,
“theological nursery toys,” and she had said, “I wonder.” But he
wouldn’t have believed then that men could cry like children, or stop
crying and go to pieces—utterly to little pieces before other men’s
eyes. He hadn’t supposed, either, that other men could laugh at them or
have such cruel eyes.
It had shot through him once or twice, during those first six months,
that he had believed, actually believed, that people always behaved like
human beings. He might just as well have swallowed the old story of
Jonah and the whale. It was much better afterward. He himself had helped
to make it better; he hadn’t realized his own struggles. It just seemed
very gradually to have got bearable; and when it was bearable, he had
discovered that he was old.
All the top of his short, tight curls were gray, he could walk straight
with a very slight limp, and hold his head up; but his keen, gray eyes
were not as steady as they used to be, and if any one spoke loudly, he
jumped, or if they moved near him quickly, he flinched like a beaten
dog. Yes, he knew all about hate, and when the letters and the parcels
broke through, and he found the other world still existed and he was
remembered, passionately remembered and loved, just as if he were alive,
he learned something about love.
His mother ceased to be a not very clear-thinking, extremely
old-fashioned, middle-aged lady who had lived in the country all her
life, and who would keep asking him to go to church; she became instead
a steady hand to hold on to in a darkened room.
And as for Daphne, incapable, inconsequent, and most flirtatious Daphne,
who forgot everything and never answered any one, and was always doing
what she had much better not, and suggesting you should bear the
consequences of it because you were so sensible, he couldn’t have told
any one what Daphne meant to him. She never forgot a post, and knew
mysteriously the very moods in which he would meet her letters, and she
would go on being just what she always was, only regularly. Her very
voice reached him, like a lark singing under his window at dawn. It was
her letter he got first about Tom; he always saw it in her words, but as
if she had first put her own heart between him and the blow.
It was incredible to him that he could once have thought it a bore to go
down to Pannell for week-ends. The whole of his body and all his being
ached for home. Every night for a few minutes before he slept, if sleep
were possible, he had allowed himself to think of Pannell. First, the
railway station “Boscott,” with its blue lobelias picked out with white
chalk stones by Tuppins, the station-master. Then Daphne with her hair
half down her back, because she’d driven the pony in by herself and it
“hadn’t exactly” bolted; then, beyond Daphne’s hair and eyes, the line
of the downs, sometimes swathed in milky mists, and sometimes very firm
and velvety under a fleet of flying clouds. Boscott was a small village
with yellow barns dropped in a hollow.
Pannell Manor was in Pannell woods. There was an open space for it, and
the downs rose up in front of it. The church had been built at its gate,
on a lawn with flitting shadows of deer. The deer slipped delicately in
and out of patches of bracken. A wall separated them from the smooth
green terrace in front of the house, but you could always look over it
toward the downs, and watch the deer steal between the trees.
Pannell was an Elizabethan house, and the front of it was a mass of
tall, thin windows shining out of old gray and yellow stone. It had
suited Tom to perfection. It made Anthony sick to remember how it had
suited Tom. It would be Anthony’s now, and he wasn’t a landowning type;
he would simply have to do what he could with it in the intervals of his
profession. Unfortunately, Pannell wasn’t a place with which to do
things at intervals. It wanted the steady landlore of a practical,
unimaginative Sussex man. It wanted Tom. It had always belonged to
people like Tom; slow, patient, good-natured people who knew how to
leave things alone and never hurried anything except a fox. The land
would have to miss them for a generation now, because most of them were
dead.
* * * * *
They were at the frontier at last. Anthony got out on to the platform
with several other men. They all looked dazed and a little
uncomfortable, and tried to pretend that they knew how to move about on
platforms and get freely, without shouted directions, into trains.
Fortunately, the Dutch guards helped them.
They had very little to say to one another. They lit cigarettes with
shaking hands and grinned nervously when they met one another’s eyes. Of
course they were enjoying themselves awfully and weren’t afraid of an
accident on the train or the boat going down or suddenly finding they
were dying of some acute disease, and couldn’t get home first. It was
absurd to suppose that they could have such fears, for they were all
quite ordinary young Englishmen who had been in German prisons only a
few years. They were perfectly all right, really; they had made a point
of saying this in all their letters home.
Anthony knew exactly how they felt. He advised them to get a drink, but
they were all too afraid of missing their connection, which couldn’t
start for half an hour. Anthony forced himself to go into the
waiting-room and order a drink. He was very proud of still being able to
make himself do things, and a little self-conscious about it. He had
forgotten the time when he wasn’t self-conscious and never had to make
himself do perfectly obvious things.
They took the journey through Holland by moonlight. The country
stretched out in a sheet of silver; water and land melted together into
a delicate mist. The windmills moved across it like the black wings of
strange, inanimate birds. There were no walls and no barbed wire; just
wide-open spaces, with a low, broad sky above them.
They got on to the boat at midnight, and some one said it was England
already, for boats were always England. There were a few wives who had
not been able to wait for their husbands to reach England. They met them
shyly and without words; and afterward, Anthony noticed, even though
they were together, they still had a look of stubborn longing in their
eyes.
Anthony was not going to be met at all; he had arranged everything with
Henry. He would go to Henry’s rooms for a night and just hear how
everything was and be told about Tom; that would make things easier for
his mother. He would go down to Pannell next day; he had particularly
said he didn’t want Daphne to come up. He wanted to get into things
gradually.
There could be no possible danger of the boat sinking; he told several
fellows who asked him that all the accursed mines were swept away, the
seas were free. They were English and they were free. Of course he
didn’t say this, nor did the other men; they merely felt it moving
stubbornly in their hearts without words.
Anthony fully intended to go to sleep. He had wired for a berth, and the
other men were quiet as mice; but he was under the impression that none
of them slept; they were all quite ready to run up on deck if by any
chance one of the mines had been overlooked. His idea had been to get up
very early and watch the cliffs creep close across the sea. He
remembered a poem of Macaulay’s which he had learned as a boy—it was
called “The Jacobite’s Epitaph” and was a short reticent poem, with a
line in it which had always haunted him,—
By those white cliffs I never more may see—
Well, he wanted to see them; but when the boat arrived, England was lost
in a blur of rain. He saw nothing but a solid wall of grayness rising up
in front of him. The other men were on deck very early, too; apparently
the same idea had occurred to them, but none of them said anything about
Macaulay’s poetry.
It took an eternity to get alongside the wharf, and lots of accidents
might have happened. Nobody spoke except the youngest of them, who had
been in prison only a few months, and he remembered that it would be
jolly to get a good hot cup of tea, and wondered if they still made dear
old moldy buns.
There was no cheering to greet them, because they were not the first
boat-load of prisoners to reach England, and it was particularly early
in the morning. But there were two trains waiting, small, comfortable
English trains that ran on velvet lines through an endless expanse of
wet, green fields.
Two hours later the London Terminus closed on them like a large black
shell. Nobody took any notice of them; they weren’t, of course, any
different from anybody else, except that they weren’t quite so smart at
picking up a taxi as people who haven’t been in German prisons. They let
opportunities slip.
Anthony was one of the first to get one. He shook hands with several of
the fellows who hadn’t been specially met, and gave a lift to a
particularly bewildered looking boy who had forgotten where he lived for
the moment, but thought they’d remember it for him at the Oxford and
Cambridge Club. He was very proud because, although he had forgotten his
address, he could remember his own name perfectly.
Anthony wanted to explain to the boy that they had got back into a world
where people were in the habit of remembering their own names, and that
they must try to appear as much like ordinary people as possible. But
when Anthony began to explain, he was brought up short, because he
realized that he himself couldn’t quite remember how ordinary people
behaved.
Just as the quick, organized traffic in the streets was a dangerous blur
to his unaccustomed eyes, so were those old unconscious ways of normal
people a strange, a perilous blur to his insecure and unaccustomed
senses.
Fortunately, some one at the club did remember the boy’s address, but
there was no one who could fill in the curious unexpected gaps in
Anthony’s hidden mind.