"UNBORN TO-MORROW"
"... the word
Was left upon your unmolested lips:
Your mouth unsealed, despite of eyes' eclipse,
Talked all brain's yearning into birth."
ROBERT BROWNING,
"Parleyings with Certain People: Gerard de Lairesse."
"Some day, George, when you can spare the time, I should like you to
write a little memoir ..." Violet paused as the car was brought to a
standstill by the tide of traffic at Hyde Park Corner. "For Sandy, when
he grows up," she went on.
We were in the last week of July. It was almost my cousin's first day
out of doors, and she looked frail and sadly young in her mourning. Two
days earlier the world had been informed that Captain the Marquess
Loring, previously reported missing, was now reported as killed. We were
returning to Curzon Street after the Requiem Mass at the Oratory.
"You knew Jim so much longer than I did," she resumed. "I want Sandy to
know what he was like at school and Oxford. And his friends. And how he
talked, and the sort of life people led when he was alive. Sandy's world
will be so different."
"And yet--it's hardly a year since the old world was blotted out," I
said.
"A year ago we were all at Chepstow," she murmured. "You remember the
news coming?... I think Jim was happy, but--we weren't long together,
were we?"
The car slowed down and came to a standstill before Loring House.
"May I stay with you till Amy and her mother come back?" I asked.
"Please do," she answered, as she stepped out of the car. Then, as we
walked upstairs to the drawing-room, "George, I never thought that death
would be like this. It's so--big. I couldn't have cried if I'd wanted
to. I don't feel I've lost Jim. I feel he's nearer me than ever before.
I shan't see him, but he'll be there--there. And I feel I must try to do
him credit: I mustn't fall out before the end. Sandy and I.... It'll be
hard for Sandy with only a mother to bring him up. We shall want you to
help us, George."
"In any way I can."
"I knew you would. That's why I asked you to write the memoir. It will
be something for Sandy to live up to. I want you to put in everything.
Jim was never mean, but any weaknesses you think he had--or
prejudices--or silly things he did--I want them all in.... George, I
wonder what kind of world Sandy's will be?"
"Of Jim's friends only Raney and I are left," I said.
"And poor Raney...." She left the sentence unfinished.
"Why pity him?" I asked.
"I can't help it, George."
"Isn't he rather--big to pity?" I suggested. "Pity him by all means if
we get no new inspiration out of this war. If there's to be nothing but
a wrangle over frontiers, the discussion of an indemnity, a free fight
for stray colonies, a fifty years' peace, even--it wasn't worth
sacrificing a single life for that. We've reached the twentieth century
without finding a faith to inspire it. Some one has still to preach a
modern doctrine of humanity."
The following night I went down to Melton for the week's holiday that
the Admiralty was giving me. It was the eve of Speech Day, and my train
was filled with unmistakable parents. Sonia met me at the station and we
drove up to the school together. Perfect contentment shone in her brown
eyes.
"I was sorry I couldn't get to the wedding," I said, "but nowadays one
is hardly master of one's own time. Burgess married you, didn't he?"
She nodded. "In Chapel. And Mr. Morris was best man. He got ninety-six
hours' leave for it. George, I'm jealous of him and I know he hates me,
but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters now. We did the whole thing as
furtively as we could--only ourselves and mother and the witnesses. It
was supposed to be a deadly secret, but when we came out the Corps was
forming a guard of honour down to the Cloisters, and old Lord
Pebbleridge turned out the hounds in Little End. It was all that little
cousin of yours--including the presentation.... George, they simply
worship David here."
"Do you wonder?" I asked.
"I call that a silly question," she answered.
There was little room to spare in the Junior Bachelor suite by the time
the Junior Bachelor had fitted a wife and a guest into the mediaeval,
lancet-windowed rooms in the Cloisters. I was made welcome and
comfortable, however, and was struck by the revolutionary changes
effected by Sonia in the fortnight she had lived there.
Speech Day passed off uneventfully, with its time-honoured ritual
unchanged. Once more the retiring monitors, standing face to face with
Burgess at the birch table, received, reversed and yielded up the long
school birch; once more the new monitors were handed their symbol of
office. Then the roll was called, a diminutive malefactor publicly
birched across the back of his hand, and we returned to Chapel. The
breaking-up service had already taken place, but honour had yet to be
paid to the dead. In a voice that twice quavered and broke, Burgess--for
thirty-eight years head master of Melton--read the roll of those who had
fallen in the war, every one a former pupil of his own, and
seven-tenths the brothers, uncles or fathers of boys now in the school.
My stall was next to O'Rane's and his hand shot out and gripped mine
when Loring's name was read out last on the list. With a twisted face
Burgess pulled off his big horn spectacles and wiped them, while the
organ crashed into the Dead March.
From that evening we had all Melton to ourselves. The housemasters
stayed on for a couple of days to dispose of their reports, then
collected their wives and children and hastened away to the sea. By the
4th of August, my last night there, only Burgess, O'Rane and Sonia were
left. I remember proposing that my host and hostess should dine with me
at the "Raven" by way of a change, but O'Rane told me it was impossible,
as Burgess had been invited to take pot-luck with us in the Cloisters.
"There aren't enough arm-chairs or anything of that kind," he said, "but
you can perch on the music-stool and I'll sit on the floor. And I doubt
if we've enough knives or plates, but nothing matters as long as we
hurry dinner through and let the old man get back to his pipe. He never
knows what he's eating and never complains."
At eight o'clock the slam of a door echoed through the desolation of
Great Court. With one hand smoothing his long white beard and the other
thrust into the bosom of his cassock, Burgess strode across to the
Cloisters, hardly pausing to glance at the opal sky or the creeper-clad
houses around him, their crumbling stone white and warm from the long
afternoon's sunshine.
During dinner he spoke of the Germany he had known before the Danish
war, when Bismarck was a young member of the Frankfurt Diet, and the
callow, revolutionary Wagner lived exiled from the kingdom of Saxony. He
discussed the war from many points of view--racially as the effort of a
growing nation to secure adequate land and food for its members,
economically as a new Punic struggle for markets and politically as the
last throw of a bankrupt landed class to win back the power it had
gradually lost to the encroaching democracy.
We talked of the war's duration and the probable form of its end, of
the redistribution of Europe and the guarantees of a lasting peace. Then
O'Rane handed round cigars and offered Burgess the better of the
arm-chairs.
"I have been asked to write a sketch of the last twenty years," I said,
"for a boy who's been born into the new world. Already I find it
difficult to recollect the old. The future--the 'unborn
to-morrow'--what's it going to be, sir?"
"We shall be dazed and bruised before an end is made, laddie, staggering
like drunken men. Peradventure, if ye speak of the Promised Land, men
will arise and stone you with stones, crying, 'Would to God we had died
by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the
fleshpots and when we did eat bread to the full.' I am an old man,
laddie, and old men and weary men, broken with the cares of this life,
are fain to go back to the things they know."
O'Rane had seated himself on the floor, with his hands clasped in
characteristic fashion round his knees, and his head thrown back and
resting on Sonia's knees. Burgess turned to him.
"David O'Rane holds his peace," he said.
Raney shook his head despondently. "Sometimes I see it like that, sir,"
he said. "The country slipping back into its old ways--all the more
eagerly for its moment of asceticism. I see the old politics and the old
sport and the old butterfly society of London, and the waste and the
cruelty. I see the factions going back to their interrupted
quarrel--capital spending its thousand on a ball and engineering a
lock-out so as to sell off its bad stocks at famine prices; labour not
content with money to burn on league championships and picture palaces,
striking because it hasn't had a share in the last advance of profits.
Two-and-seventy jarring sects preaching to us from their two-and-seventy
pulpits, and still men rotten with disease, still children without
enough to eat, still women walking up and down the London streets. And
then I wonder if it's worth winning the war."
He jumped up suddenly, walked to his writing-table and began rummaging
in one of the drawers.
"Is it anything I can do?" Sonia asked.
"I've found it, thanks." He handed me a bundle of manuscript and resumed
his place at Sonia's feet.
"It's fairly legible," he said. "I typed it, but of course I can't check
my typing. D'you remember my telling you in April that I was coming down
here to think? I've been thinking on paper, and you have the result
there. It may interest you if you have time to spare on it."
"Is it for an old man's eye also, laddie?" Burgess asked.
"Of course, sir. I'm afraid you won't find anything very new or
profound. I've shirked the hard parts and quietly assumed anything I
couldn't prove. I assume we're going to win, I assume our Statesmen can
exact material peace guarantees that can't be broken when anyone
chooses. I assume we shall move gradually towards greater international
spirit and become more peaceful as political power spreads downwards. We
were getting there, you know,--George, you know it better than
anyone,--approaching the time when the stevedores of Hamburg would see
no profit in bayoneting the stevedores of Liverpool. My first chapter is
a tissue of assumptions."
"It's going to be a book, then?"
"Perhaps. The second chapter deals minutely with England before the
war--an England moving rapidly towards social revolution, as I always
maintained--sectionized, undisciplined, unco-ordinated, indifferent,
soulless. I've tried to point out the dangers. Are we going back to an
Irish question, and a Suffrage question, and a General Strike? I've
tried to solve a good many problems--old ones and new, wages and the
relations of women and labour since the war; birthrate and marriage. We
shall have them before us in the House, and I want to be ready. That's
all the difficult part of the work--the part other people find so easy.
Then we get to the really easy part, the thing we can easily do, the
moral revolution, the attempt to make the world worth living in. George
knows my criterion."
"Can you get it accepted?" I asked.
He sprang to his feet and faced us with arms outstretched.
"With a war like this searing each man's brain and desolating each
man's house? A generation has gone to war, and two-thirds of its manhood
will never return. A third may come back, and when peace dawns it will
light up an England of old men, women and boys. The returning troops who
have looked death in the eyes and been spared--were they spared for
nothing? Destiny, Providence, God, Luck--even ... You may choose your
name. If they come back when others as good or better are blown or
tortured to death, do you suppose their escape hasn't bred in them a
soul? For a day and a night they have lived the Grand Life; will they
slip back? If they'll die for their country, won't they live for it?
Can't you dream of a New Birth ...?"
His hands dropped to his sides, and a spasm of pain was reflected in his
eyes like a wave of light.
"And those who remained behind," he went on, "the sick, the women, the
old men, the boys. It has cost heroic blood to keep them alive. They can
no longer map out existence for their amusement, they are in debt for
their lives. And the payment of that debt ..."
He covered his eyes and stood silent for a while, swaying. "I can still
see visions, thank God," he murmured. "This war's been going on for a
year--a year to-day, and a year ago I said it would demand of each one
of us whatever we held most dear. Then I looked on it all as a struggle
for bodily existence, but now--unless Death seen so near and by such
young eyes is going to destroy all regard for the sanctity of life--now
we seem to have a chance of winning our souls back.... When I was a
child in Prague my father took me to see a picture of Rome in the second
century--a street scene with patricians in their bordered togas swinging
along in litters, and slaves running on ahead, and priests and eunuchs
elbowing each other out of the way, and a popular gladiator being
recognized and cheered. There's a blaze of sunlight, and you can almost
hear the thunder of victorious material prosperity. Noise of jostling
humanity and the polyglot shouts of an Empire's citizens in the capital
of the world. And at a street-corner stands an elderly man, poorly
dressed, speaking, I suppose, not the purest Latin to a half-circle of
loafers. There is nothing noteworthy about him, save perhaps his eyes
and, I imagine, the sincerity of his voice as he tells his tale for the
thousandth time, 'Sirs, I saw him with these eyes--my Master, whom I had
denied; and they judged Him ... and nailed Him to a cross ... and He
died...."
There was a deep silence as O'Rane paused. "I--all of us who were out
there--have seen it. We can't forget. The courage, the cold,
heart-breaking courage ... and the smile on a dying man's face.... We
must never let it be forgotten; we've earned the right. As long as a
drunkard kicks his wife, or a child goes hungry, or a woman is driven
through shame to disease and death.... Is it a great thing to ask? To
demand of England to remember that the criminals and loafers and
prostitutes are somebody's children, mothers and sisters? And that we've
all been saved by a miracle of suffering? Is that too great a strain on
our chivalry? I'll go out if need be, but--but _must_ we stand at
street-corners to tell what we have seen? To ask the bystanders--and
ourselves--whether we went to war to preserve the right of inflicting
pain?"
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Sonia Between two Worlds, by Stephen McKenna