It was long past midnight, and London was as still as a mountain pass.
The lights rose up hard and straight out of the empty streets; the vast,
dim spaces of the squares retreated from them as if they were the points
of weapons. Every now and then a furtive loiterer passed Anthony, a
creature as shadowy and unsubstantial as a dream. Sleepy and stolid
policemen stood phlegmatically under occasional lamp posts, with their
backs turned away from the mysterious secrecy of the dark. The tall
houses were overpoweringly still, blank citadels of ease and security
which forced a sense of outlawry upon the passer-by.
Anthony felt the sharp stir in him of a grudge against prosperity. It
suddenly seemed to him as if law and order held too many cards. All
humanity is at the mercy of certain casual blows, but how vast is the
difference between the people who can afford to place in front of
themselves the comfortable buffers of prosperity and those bleak
wanderers whom the blast strikes full without any protection!
Anthony had learned as few men in his position had learned the grim
habit of privation; he knew the difference between those who command
conveniences and those who are commanded by inconvenience. He had been
without comfort, he had forfeited privacy, and become inured to rest
without ease. He knew that privations undermine you and unfit you for
higher pleasures, and that the little jar and spite of painful living
prevent in you the release of thought. He knew also that behind
privation stands tyranny, the blind possessor who strikes against
courage and freedom.
Anthony held no theories about rich and poor, but his prison experience
had taught him that those without choice are captives.
If you cannot change a job, or correct a misfit, or gain a right without
the risk of an appeal which may push you into an abyss, you are a
captive.
Only men with margins can afford the courage of their convictions, and
unfortunately margins, while they produce courage, change convictions.
He remembered only by chance, because for the moment he had no money and
could not get a meal for Max, what it had been like to be without a
margin.
He remembered good Germans who were kind to prisoners. Their kindnesses
were not worse than their brutalities, because nothing is worse than
brutality; but they were harder to bear.
Anthony felt again the fierce shudder with which he used to meet their
victorious, satisfied eyes. He had found it harder than the others to
bear benevolence. Their captors had looked at the prisoners and pointed
out what was good for them; sometimes it was good for them, but the
prisoners had no choice. There is often a great deal to be said for the
safety of walls, but the weak go to them not because they like them, but
because the strong push them there.
The big, fine houses of the West End looked down on Anthony
contemplatively; they seemed to be pointing out to him the rights of
their solidity. Anthony changed Max from one arm to the other; he was
near Henry’s flat. It was a pity to disturb Henry, but Max was plainly
exhausted. He lay like a springless log in Anthony’s arms, and now and
then whimpered to express his sense of the unseemliness of perpetual
tramping through the night.
Anthony knew that he could find Henry’s flat—his mind had a bewildered
sense of the loss of other alternatives. He could not think of anywhere
else to go. But Henry’s flat stood out with a vivid, startling clearness
because he had come back to it out of prison—he knew that he could find
it in the dark.
Anthony was not conscious of his own fatigue. He had walked twenty-five
miles between five o’clock in the afternoon and two o’clock in the
morning, but his mind was fresh and his thoughts ran through it as fast
as a stream runs with the leap of a waterfall behind it.
Some of his thought ran backwards as the eddies of a stream run
backwards on to themselves.
Henry’s flat was behind Buckingham Gate. He could see a microscopic view
of the Green Park from it and the open drilling space of the Guards.
These were shadowed spaces now full of a held darkness. Henry had come
in late from an evening’s successful bridge, and he was preparing
himself for sleep by reading a pleasant, well-written story. He liked to
subside gradually from excitement to repose.
The maids always went to bed regularly at eleven. Henry listened with
incredulity to the sharp tang of the bell. He opened the door and gazed
with polite annoyance at the dusty figure of his brother.
“Really, Anthony,” he exclaimed, “what an extraordinary hour to call—in
flannels, too! And what have you in your arms? That Aberdeen?” Henry
invariably thought of dogs according to their species. “You know I
_never_ like dogs in my flat.”
“He has got to have a light meal and a drink,” explained Anthony. “I’ve
walked him unmercifully—in fact, I’ve walked him from Rochett.”
Henry said no more. He prided himself upon the way in which his mind
rose to face an emergency, especially by the manner in which, if
possible, he evaded finding out what the emergency was until it was
forced upon him.
He led Anthony into the dining-room, and said in a hushed voice:
“Above everything, we must not disturb the maids—that is the first
thing to be considered. I hardly know what there is to eat in the
house.”
“Well, look in the larder,” said Anthony, a trifle bluntly. “I suppose
you know where your larder is? I do. I had a flat like this once. It
ought to be on the north side of the kitchen. I don’t want anything to
eat myself; I want only scraps for the dog, and something to drink.
Don’t give him too much at once.”
“It is not easy to disinter food in the middle of the night,” objected
Henry, “even if I can find the larder. However, I’ll do what I can. Why
did you walk so far—in flannels? Has anything happened to any one?”
Henry meant, “Is any one dead?” but he never spoke of the dead except
collectively.
Anthony said that every one was perfectly all right, and Henry left him.
Anthony sank into a big arm-chair, and Max fell asleep instantly at his
feet on a soft lambswool rug. The room was full of light. It was just
what all the other big, inaccessible houses were like, so cruel outside,
so full of comfort and hospitality within. Anthony wondered what it
would look like smashed? Even this room, if you got up and broke
everything in it, might look uncomfortable. Anthony’s eyes took in all
the breakable things. He wasn’t going to touch anything, of course; but
he had an odd, excited desire in his mind to see the room in fragments,
broken down, and utterly in pieces, like some men’s lives, so that, no
matter what you did, you could not put them together again. It did not
seem quite fair to Anthony that outside things should remain safe and
whole.
Henry came back on tiptoe with a plate of scraps for Max and a tin dish
full of water. Max woke instantly, thanked Anthony for the food with a
wag of his short, bushy tail, and ungratefully ignored Henry.
Henry was a little surprised and annoyed with Anthony for drinking only
milk. He objected to his brother’s abstemiousness because, as he knew,
it did not come from principle. Henry felt that the only reason for
being moral was morality, and Anthony had no grasp whatever of morality.
Henry had received disquieting accounts recently of Anthony’s behavior
from a friend who lived at Rochett. He had written discreetly to Daphne,
asking for details; but Daphne, although she was a married woman and
could have replied with sufficient directness quite nicely, had not
replied at all.
Henry took a chair opposite Anthony and regarded him with tactful
vigilance.
“I rather wonder,” he said guardedly, “what made you walk twenty-five
miles on Sunday night when you could have got up by the eight-thirty
this morning.”
“I might have asked for a lift,” Anthony said consideringly, “earlier in
the night, perhaps, if I’d had any money; but I forgot to put change in
my pockets when I put on my tennis things, and then I started to walk.
Have you ever been without money, Henry?”
“I’ve sometimes run it very fine,” Henry observed thoughtfully, “after a
race meeting, and of course during the war I was perpetually short.”
“Short of everything?” Anthony strangely persisted.
“Hardly, my dear fellow,” said Henry, with an indulgent smile, “or I
shouldn’t be here now, should I? Everything is a tall order.”
“That’s what I keep wondering,” said Anthony in a low, uncertain voice.
“If one is short of everything, even hopes, what does one do? These
circumstances occur, you know, Henry. Have you ever thought what you
would do if everything failed, and there was no ground left to fight
on?”
Henry shook his head reassuringly.
“Those circumstances aren’t likely to come,” he answered. “Of course I
know what you mean. Men have bad times. I had an extremely unpleasant
one myself when you fellows went to France; it was no fun being kept out
of it, and people discussing why one didn’t go. I had hours of extreme
depression, but I pulled myself together and got over it. Depend upon
it, my dear fellow, making the best of things is a question of grit.”
“Yes, yes,” said Anthony, impatiently; “but you must have the things to
make the best of. What I mean is, what happens when you reach the point
where nothing is savable?
“I’ve been thinking as I came along about the down-and-outers, men who
are moneyless, without health, or without control, I don’t much mind
which—the people who have gone under. Death is so simple! You just go
out; but what happens when life goes on and everything else stops?”
“Do you mean when you have no income?” inquired Henry, anxiously. “Has
anything happened to Pannell?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Anthony, “nothing at all, has happened to anything.
I wasn’t thinking of us.”
He leaned forward, and Henry noticed with uneasiness that Anthony’s eyes
moved and shone unceasingly.
“Henry, I wish you’d tell me honestly—what do you believe?”
Henry turned his eyes instantly on the carpet. He saw in a flash what
had happened. Poor old Anthony had religious mania. That was why he
drank milk instead of whisky, walked twenty-five miles on Sunday night,
and wouldn’t carry money about with him. This was what came of never
going to church: the pendulum—or was it the boomerang?—swung back, and
Anthony had been hit by it. Henry’s mind acted with promptitude and
decision. He would soothe Anthony and, as soon as he could, make an
excuse to leave the room, and telephone for a doctor. Fortunately,
Hilton Laurence, one of Anthony’s best friends, lived quite near. He had
a disagreeable, curt manner, but he could probably give Anthony a
sleeping-draft and not mention it to any one else. Henry cleared his
throat.
“I am sure, my dear fellow,” he said with feeling, “that there is behind
the world a creative and guiding power making for righteousness.”
There was no sound in the room except Max’s snoring. Anthony kept so
still that he might have been made of stone. He seemed to be holding
himself down in his chair with both his hands. Henry gathered confidence
from Anthony’s fixed quiet.
“I don’t,” he continued gravely, “often probe into these questions—it
seems to me wiser for us to take things on trust—but I am confident
from my own experience—and I am sure, if you think it over, you will be
from yours—that we are guided and provided for all our lives.”
“Was Belgium guided and provided for,” asked Anthony, suddenly, “or
children maimed in air raids, or outraged women? If you’d seen some of
the people I’ve seen in hospital, my dear fellow, you’d back down on a
kindly Providence. We’ve got to look at things differently, and not rake
up old mufflers out of the easier ages. What I want to know is, have you
ever thought about it? Do comfortable people think?”
Anthony did not really care what Henry thought; he knew that Henry took
his ideas ready-made from leading articles out of conservative papers,
the opinions of other well-to-do people, and his momentary personal
convenience. Anthony doubted if Henry had ever had a naked thought
except once when he was nearly choked by a quinsy; but he wanted to
rouse Henry and also to talk himself. Thoughts ran through his brain as
fresh and fast as the swirl of water; he wanted to see them take form
and come out into the quiet room; he wanted to convince Henry of
tragedy.
“What about other people?” he repeated. “You know the Serbians have had
all their manhood rotted by typhoid and blotted out by guns? You know
that men have been frightened out of their wits, and it takes an awful
lot to frighten men out of their wits, and all the broken-hearted old
people with nothing left to love till death takes them. Do you believe
they were created for their good, robbed for their good by
righteousness? And yet if there is no righteousness, one wonders why one
minds. Why do we think about it at all, but not go on our own greedy way
snatching at anything we like regardless of the sufferings of others?
Horses don’t care about other horses. They would face any shelled place,
the trained ones—wonderful beggars!—without turning a hair—they’d see
other horses struck in front of them, done in before their eyes, and
never budge: but let a piece of shell scratch their flanks, and you
couldn’t get them near the lines again, no good at all after a personal
hit. Men aren’t like that. We mind other people’s hits; some of us try
to stop them at a risk to ourselves. That’s what I can’t make out, this
something in us. Is hitting what we need to put us on to it? Are we
meant to keep down the guns as well as to suffer by them? And is God
just the same only on a larger scale, more hit, more determined to stop
what’s hitting us? The story of Calvary, for instance. Is it a kind of
queer, double-edged truth to show us that we and God with us are caught
in a trap of pain, and must voluntarily stick it out, even when we could
escape, to help the rest from going under?”
“There is the love of God, of course,” said Henry, with one eye on the
door. “I quite appreciate that point.”
“Yes, we’ve got to care,” Anthony agreed slowly; “that’s what I never
used to see. If you don’t care, you can’t help. You’re not a safe person
even, except, of course, to yourself. We’ve got to care enough to be
broken to pieces; because that’s what it comes to; you can’t help people
unless you’re being broken with them, you’re too far away.”
“Self-control—” said Henry, going toward the fireplace and looking down
into it as if he had lost something. “A religion without self-control,
you know, wouldn’t _do_. That is the value of form in Christianity.”
“We’ve tried that,” replied Anthony, impatiently. “Christianity which
distinctly said ‘the letter killeth’ is too hard for us; so we set up
churches and got out of it. We put the gold into the fire because it was
so difficult to obey a spiritual God, and there came out a calf, an
awfully clever golden calf, very convenient to worship, made up of all
the ornaments of the people. But what ought to have gone into the fire
was _us_! God went into it.”
Henry shuddered. He disliked blasphemy.
“If you’ll excuse me a minute,” he said, “I’ll just see if the spare
room is ready. You must want to go to bed. I’ll be back directly.”
Henry came back humming cheerfully in the manner of those visitors to
the sick who wish to encourage the sufferer by the sight of their own
immunity.
Henry had remembered everything; he had told Hilton Laurence, who
sounded extremely snappy at the other end of the telephone, to bring a
sleeping-draft.
Anthony was sitting with his eyes shut. He did not speak until the
electric bell sounded; then he opened them with curious celerity and
remarked:
“That’s probably the doctor you sent for just now. It’s too early for
the milk.”
Henry jumped. He remembered the extreme cunning of madmen, and hurried
to the door.
It was Hilton Laurence, and he said:
“Well, where is he?” as if he didn’t want to hear Henry’s explanations.
However, he had to hear them while he was taking off his coat. Henry
explained in a hushed voice Anthony’s condition and his own inspired
tact. The last time he had left the room he had taken away the poker.
Hilton Laurence showed no tact at all; he walked into the dining-room
noisily, shook hands with Anthony, and said:
“Hullo, old chap! What’s the matter with you?”
Anthony began to laugh. He laughed so hard that both the other men
standing one on each side of him appeared preternaturally grave, and the
graver they became the more wildly Anthony laughed.
Hilton Laurence looked at Anthony from under heavy questioning eyebrows
and then looked away again, but he did nothing to stop him laughing.
After awhile Anthony stopped himself with a jerk.
“I’ve just discovered Henry thinks I’m mad,” he explained to Hilton
Laurence. “The funny part of it is, I’m not sure whether I am or not.”
Hilton Laurence sat down on Henry’s chair and said:
“You’d better go to bed, Mr. Arden, and leave your brother to me. He’ll
be all right. Let him sleep on in the morning.”
“The door on the left is his room,” Henry explained carefully; “mine is
on the right, if you should want me.”
Hilton Laurence nodded. When the two men were alone neither of them
spoke for a few moments, then Laurence said:
“What’s up with you, old chap?”
And Anthony, meeting his eyes, said quietly:
“I have been riding for a fall, and I’ve got it.”
“Some woman?” asked Laurence.
Anthony nodded.
Laurence said softly:
“Damn women!”
Anthony shook his head quickly.
“No,” he said, “that hasn’t answered. It’s been tried already, you
know.”
Hilton Laurence took out a small bottle.
“Here’s a sleeping-draft,” he explained. “It’ll put her out of your head
for twenty-four hours; then you’d better come and see me. I’ve got a
good hospital under my care—brain and spine cases, result of
wounds—and I want another man to help me. How rusty have you got?”
“The Germans let me look after our men and study some of their own
methods in hospital,” Anthony explained. “I’ve helped at some good
operations and I read a lot. I don’t think I did much less work than if
I’d been here; I’ll have to get used to the conditions, that’s all.”
“Good,” said Hilton Laurence. “I dare say you can give me some tips. I
have some very obscure cases.” He got up and glanced at Anthony again.
“Well,” he observed, “that’s all there is for you, you know—work.”
“I know,” Anthony agreed; “thanks awfully. I dare say I can work under
you. I couldn’t think how I should manage to get back into things. I had
what the Quakers call ‘a stop in my mind,’ quite literally a stop,
Hilton, and when you arrive at a stop you find a quantity of strange
impulses ready to get hold of you—vultures of the mind hovering about
on the off chance of a carcass, and there doesn’t seem anything handy to
keep them off. I was quite near going mad.”
Hilton Laurence nodded.
“Take a good long rest in bed,” he said, “and you’ll find your mind’s
all right. But you must keep away from the sore spot. That’s what work’s
for; work and—well, for some of us, you know, other women.”
Anthony shook his head. “I know,” he said. “I’ve thought of that, too,
but it won’t do. There are no other women for me. I’ve never cared about
women like that.”
“Ah, you’re romantic,” said Hilton Laurence, going to the door. “I can’t
cure romance.”