At last, thank goodness, he had found sufficient energy to break away
from this deadlock, to end this weary game of pretence! He had thought
that with Antoinette he could escape definitely from his abnormality;
escape from his loneliness; from the ever-present terror of himself;
from the nightmare of his own music; and his thoughts of Alan.... From
all these things he had sought refuge in Antoinette’s arms; she would
make him forget that they existed. And besides, Antoinette was of those
who understood; he had not the slightest intention of deceiving her;
some day they would talk everything out openly together.
But Antoinette had failed him; failed him in her moments of recoil, as
she had failed him in her moments of insincere passion. He knew all
along that her passion was insincere, and it frightened him. Was he,
then, in truth so abnormal, so different from other men, that he was
incapable of rousing real passion in a woman, real love? She did not
love him; yet she would not let him go, even when he begged her to make
her decision.
“We must go on, dear—or go back.”
“I can’t go on yet, and ... and I don’t want to go back. It’ll leave
such a big hole in my world if you’re not there, Dennis.” ... Always
appearing to give herself with one hand, and to withhold herself with
the other.
He began more and more to doubt the possibility of her understanding,
and to revise his previous judgment of her—judgment based upon some
flimsy illusion created that night at Amberhurst. She was after all just
an ordinary normal girl, who would turn from him in shuddering aversion,
if she knew.... And she was rather immoral, he thought, in her
simulation of passion that she did not feel; and endowed too, with the
ordinary woman’s vanity, that could not bear to lose an admirer, and
must keep him dangling, even though he meant nothing to her.
But it became more and more difficult to break as time went on; he knew
that there would have to be scenes and explanations. And he dreaded the
idea of explanations now.... Of mental kinship between them, there was
no longer any trace; neither of the warm tenderness which he had felt
for her at first. He shut his inner self away from her, and, when they
met, since they could not talk—he kissed her. It was evidently what she
wanted, now that she had overcome her first distaste, and what he—well,
not what he wanted, but what for the moment, could in some small measure
content him.
He was rapidly sinking back into the nightmare out of which he had hoped
to rise; nightmare of loneliness and strangeness and being different....
And the old hunting-mood had him again, when for hours together he paced
the streets, courting danger and the thrill of danger from a flung
glance or smile or whispered word ... and with burning cheeks and
beating heart, fleeing danger ... and courting it again.
And all Antoinette’s kisses could not content him now, even though she
gave them so lavishly in response to the passion that was not for her,
but only venting itself on her. That last day at Wargrave—surely some
instinct must have told her? Was she so dense or so insatiable that she
had really perceived nothing? She must have perceived nothing, or she
could not for an instant have endured his kisses. More than time for
them to break—so at last he had broken with her; and his letter would
eliminate all possibility of a further compromise—of further drifting.
He was not hurting her, at the most her vanity; and that did not matter.
She would console herself easily enough; find some other man to fill his
place.
And now he was free—for what, though? Free to take anybody, anything
that could reach him through his charmed circle of isolation. For in
this isolation of a soul terrified of itself, and doomed to eternal
misunderstanding and misjudgment, lay the greatest temptation of all:
the temptation to stretch out a hand to others like himself, and to own
himself frankly to be one of them. It would be so much easier.... But
his abhorrence of himself, and his honest desire to be as other men;
above all, the æsthete in him insisted on a perpetual wearying struggle
between his principles and instincts for the existence of which he was
no more responsible than for the colour of his eyes. He had done his
best to fight them down, only sometimes he was very tired, tired of
having to keep this ceaseless watch over himself, tired of having to
suppress and thwart desires that were natural to him, but would be
classified as vicious and perverted by the world of ordinary people,
lacking understanding of his peculiar temperament. Yet, even while he
craved for understanding, he dreaded it: for this reason he had not been
near Barnaby for weeks. He guessed that Barnaby’s attitude would not be
one of conventional intolerance, and therefore deliberately avoided him.
Once he allowed himself the luxury of confiding in someone, he could not
tell what effect this greater freedom might have upon him. Fear, mingled
with some strain of asceticism, made him deny himself that luxury, even
as in his schooldays, it had prevented him from accepting Eric
Rubenstein’s sympathy and friendship.
But London was too dangerous to him in his present condition. He almost
welcomed a letter from his mother, asking him to come down to Eastwold.
Hugh Clavering was expected home on leave, and his engagement to Doreen
was to be made public. Dennis went; but Hugh’s leave was several times
postponed, so that he did not actually arrive till after Christmas.
Dennis soon realised that the ladies of Eastwold were experiencing
considerable difficulty in the matter of how to treat his mother. Of
course if Mrs. Blackwood had only been _his_ mother, one could quite
simply have cut her; but as she was also Clive’s mother and Hugh’s
future mother-in-law, it complicated things. Clive was in the trenches
and had been mentioned in dispatches.... But there was Dennis who
steadily refused even to attest under the Derby scheme, and who thought
that all war was wrong (which was ridiculous, at least as far as the
British were concerned) and said so on every possible occasion.
Some of the ladies argued that one should condole with Mrs. Blackwood on
the subject of Dennis, rather than reproach her; some thought that his
disgraceful views more than outweighed Clive’s deeds of valour, so that
they felt justified in cold-shouldering Mrs. Blackwood. But the majority
contented themselves when they met her, with enquiring enthusiastically
after each individual member of her family, and leaving a frigid gap in
the conversation to mark the place where Dennis would have been enquired
after, had he been worthy of such enquiries....
Lily Hallard, very military indeed in her V.A.D. uniform, openly
confessed that she didn’t like the prospect of having a shirker for a
brother-in-law; and in her loud-voiced aggressive manner tried to
convert Dennis to a proper frame of mind.
“How you can bear to sit at home, while other men—while your own brother
is in the trenches!”
“They’re doing what they think is right—or rather, they don’t think at
all.”
“And you think it’s right to let others go out and be killed for you?”
“Killed for me.... Good Lord, do you think I _want_ them to go out into
that infernal mess and muddle? I’d hold every one of them back with my
own hands, if it were in my power!”
“You make me sick,” said Lily. “That’s not a man’s way of talking. Look
at Tom Sanderson—he’s exchanged into an infantry regiment, because he
says there’s nothing doing in the cavalry, and he’s so eager to get to
the Front. That’s the proper spirit.”
“Not unless you can believe, with all your intellect and soul, that
you’re doing some good by taking part in that wholesale butchery.”
“A fat lot most of our boys think of ‘intellect and soul.’ They just go
and do their bit, and don’t talk about it.”
“If they did—if people talked and thought about it more, there might be
some hope of ending the war altogether.”
“We don’t want the war ended that way!”
“No, you want it to be ended by fighting, rather than by thinking.... To
hear you, one would positively imagine that you enjoyed the idea of the
war going on and on.”
“It must go on till we win. Oh, if only I were a man! I’d give anything
to lead a fine cavalry charge....”
Dennis did not doubt that she was quite competent to do so.
Altogether, he suffered no lack of attempts to convert him.
There was Griggs—Lance-corporal Griggs—who had not been out yet, but was
dying to go, and expecting to do so next week, as he had been expecting
every week since the outbreak of war.
“What—not yet in khaki, Dennis, old man? What’s all this about pacifism?
Come, come, come, that’s nonsense—artistic temperament, that’s all.
You’ll make as good a soldier as anyone, just the same. We’re all in
this—don’t let anyone stand out. What I say is, rope ’em all in—rope ’em
all in.”
Dennis was reminded of the day at Amberhurst, when Griggs with just as
much fervour, had sought to induce him to play the piano during the
theatricals. “Rope ’em all in—everybody’s got to do something....”
No one must stand out. No one must be an exception. Not even if they had
no leanings towards the particular form of entertainment advocated by
Griggs.
Even Doreen, gentlest of sisters, did her best with Dennis.
“Don’t you think you ought to go, Denny dear, now that everybody else
has gone?”
“Do you imagine, Doreen darling, that I should have waited till
now—waited till everybody else had gone—if I had intended to go at all?”
A letter from Ottilie had come through _via_ Switzerland, saying that
“she herself with a hotly-beloved Bavarian officer on the West Front
engaged had;” also that she hoped to see her dear friend Doreen again
“as soon as the dreadful war over was.”
Dennis went on: “Surely you’d rather that your Hugh and Ottilie’s
soldier-man didn’t have the chance of shooting each other to bits?”
“But the Army’s so big, Denny: they’re not likely to meet.”
“In all probability they won’t. But there are thousands of others in the
same respective positions, facing each other in battle. Don’t you wish
they weren’t?”
“Y-yes, of course I do, but ... everybody’s going, Denny.”
And then the Ryan girls.... Millie cut him dead when she met him in the
town, but Amy, not prompt enough to achieve the cut direct, had begun to
smile before she realised what she was doing ... tried to retrieve the
smile, blushed, and finally stopped to say: “We all think it’th thuch a
pity about you, Dennith. All really nithe men go and fight, don’t they?”
Then, having said so much, she could not resist the temptation to
continue: “I’m keeping up a Correthpondeth with _three_ Lonely
Tholdierth—jutht ordinary Tommieth, of courthe, but being in khaki
maketh all the differenth, doethn’t it? Ethpethially if you never thee
them ...” with which somewhat ambiguous statement, she vanished.
The only one who made no assaults upon Dennis’s convictions, was young
Hugh himself, very tanned and handsome, very much the hero of his native
village, and the same unspoilt and charming boy he had always been.
“Doesn’t want to kill the Huns? Well, neither do we—part of the time.
Some of them are awful decent little chaps, quite pally with our men.
Still, I suppose it’s our job to do ’em in, if we can.”
The biggest discussion took place at the Blackwoods’ Sunday lunch party,
the occasion on which the engagement was officially announced. Lily and
her mother came, and Hugh and his parents, and Griggs, and the
Ryans—poor Millie had to exchange a few civil words with Dennis after
all, thus marring the effect of the previous cut.
The ladies had retired from the dinner-table; Hugh had vanished in
Doreen’s wake; and Griggs, as a non-smoker, had been accorded the
freedom of the drawing-room. Dennis was alone with his father, Mr. Ryan
and Dr. Clavering. Griggs, on his exit, gazing after Hugh and Doreen,
provided the old gentlemen with the necessary cue.
“There they go—the gallant and the fair! Doesn’t it make your heart
envious to see them, Dennis? It’s the uniform that does it, my lad, the
uniform....” He slapped his narrow chest, and went off, beaming.
“Yes, we believe you right enough,” grumbled Mr. Blackwood, “if I were a
young man, I’d be ashamed to be seen about in anything but khaki.”
“They say conscription’s coming in,” Mr. Ryan wheezed hopefully.
“That’ll be the end of all our slackers and shirkers, and a good job
too. What’ll you do then, my son?”
“Precisely what I’m doing now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Refuse to fight.”
“But you can’t,” cried Mr. Blackwood, “they’ll put you in prison, or
shoot you as a deserter.”
“Let them.”
“You mean to tell me,” expostulated Mr. Ryan, “that you’re afraid to go
out to the Front and die like a gentleman, and yet you’ve no objection
to staying at home and being shot like a dog? It’s monstrous, sir,
monstrous.”
“My objection to going to the Front isn’t entirely fear for my own skin,
Mr. Ryan, though I know you’re convinced that that is my sole reason for
staying behind. I don’t suppose I’m any more or less afraid of death
than the average man of my age.”
“Prove it,” muttered his father, “prove it....”
“I daresay I shall prove it, when conscription comes in. I would rather
be shot, as Mr. Ryan says, ‘like a dog,’ than submit to a law that
orders me to murder men with whom I’ve no personal quarrel. And if I did
have a quarrel with a man, I shouldn’t murder him.”
“There would be some cases in which it would be your duty to do so: what
would you do if a German attacked your mother?”
Dennis smiled as Mr. Ryan put the inevitable question. “I could defend
my mother by incapacitating him for the moment, without resorting to the
extreme measure of taking his life.”
“Tommy-rot!” snorted Mr. Blackwood, “when a man’s blood is up, he
kills.”
“Perhaps in the case of a personal quarrel. But you can’t say it’s his
duty to kill when he has no quarrel at all.”
“It’s his duty to his country——” began Mr. Blackwood, and Mr. Ryan’s
breathless voice broke in: “His country’s quarrel should be good enough
for him.”
“But it’s not the quarrel of the whole of this country, any more than
it’s the quarrel of the whole of Germany. Why not try and restrict the
quarrel to those who made it, without dragging in millions of innocent
people on either side ... people, some of whom don’t even know what the
quarrel is about, and what they’re fighting for? German peasant boys
taken straight from the plough—English lads raked out of remote sleepy
villages: how much do you think they know?”
“There can be no doubt that every Englishman knows what he’s fighting
for,” declared Mr. Blackwood.
“Yes, he’s told that he’s fighting for honour and glory and freedom, and
to defend his home and country from a dastardly enemy. And the German
boy is told exactly the same. And they both believe it, bless them. When
they’re both out there, dying a foul death side by side, perhaps they
may wonder if it was true, and if it was worth while, and why they let
themselves be driven out to kill and kill and be killed by each other.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Ryan testily, “we all know that war is very
dreadful——”
“Yet you won’t even attempt to stop it!” cried Dennis. “You encourage it
to go on. It’s like a fire that instead of confining to the smallest
area possible, you’re fanning and fanning till it spreads from one end
of the country to the other, and flinging on more material every day to
feed it. Why in heaven’s name won’t you try to stamp out the blaze?”
“Yes, it’s all very well to talk like that,” said Mr. Blackwood, “but
there always have been wars, and there always will be. Nations that have
had no wars have become degenerate, and gone to the wall.”
“Oh, I can’t stick all this humbug about war being necessary, and war
being good for us! How can people talk such stuff, if they have the
slightest conception of what war really implies?”
“Well, you won’t alter human nature,” answered Mr. Blackwood, “man is a
fighting animal, and for my part I should be very sorry to see the
fighting instinct knocked out of him.”
“That’s setting yourself deliberately against all idea of progress,
Father: because certain evils have existed up to the present, is that a
reason to declare categorically that they are bound to exist in the
future? Why not root them out? What is there to be proud of in the
instinct that leads one man to kill another? Why deny all possibility of
conquering an instinct that can only make for misery?”
He looked from one to the other of the two red-faced elderly gentlemen;
his father angrily fingering the stem of his wine-glass; Mr. Ryan
glowering at him through the heavy wreaths of his cigar-smoke. Only the
doctor, on the opposite side of the table, gave the impression of an
impartial spectator.
“I’ve no patience with all this rot!” cried Mr. Blackwood, “if a man’s
got no fight in him, he’s unnatural, that’s what I say, unnatural.”
“You’ll allow a man to conquer nature with his ships and his
railways—you’ll allow him to widen as much as possible the gulf that
separates him from the beast; but when it comes to rooting out the
war-instinct—_No!_ He can’t overcome that. Why should he? It’s always
been there, always will be. In fact, you’re rather proud of it: it’s
part of a gentleman’s equipment. You want progress and the conquest of
natural difficulties in every possible direction, and yet you won’t
admit that a man can conquer _himself_. You’re shouted down as
‘unnatural,’ if you as much as speak of overcoming an instinct that is
nothing but a hindrance to civilisation and progress.”
“Oh, you and your artist friends, I daresay you talk a lot of twaddle,
but you won’t convince _me_.” Mr. Blackwood drained his glass of port,
and rose from the table. Mr. Ryan followed him. Dr. Clavering remained
where he was.
Dennis smiled at him across the table. “Well, Doctor, you’ve been very
silent all through this.”
“I was umpiring.”
“They were two to one.”
“Oh, you were quite capable of holding your own. But you’ll never
convince them, Dennis, my boy.”
“And you, Doctor?”
“I don’t say that you’ve convinced me, but I can understand why, as an
artist, you take that point of view.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to have excuses made for me on that ground,”
cried Dennis, “nor am I pretending for a moment that Clive and Hugh and
others like them, can go out and kill, because they’re more brutalised
than I am. It’s their belief that I’m up against—their belief that
they’re doing right.”
“Dennis, Dennis, you’re fighting a losing battle! It’s too late for
pacifism now. The war’s started and the only thing for us to do is to
make every effort in our power to end the unfortunate business; and that
can only be done by fighting to a finish.”
“And what then? Doctor, it’s no use pretending that ‘this is a war to
end war.’ I don’t believe it. Do you believe that the British are
fighting for disarmament, for democracy, for world-peace, any more than
the Germans are? The governments of the big nations—not the
mass-peoples, because they weren’t asked—but the governments of all big
nations organise warfare with the same ends in view—extension of power;
consolidation of empire; commercial and political advantages. If we go
on fighting till Germany has to cry ‘Pax’ from exhaustion, it simply
means that the balance of military power will be shifted, and that _we_,
instead of the Germans, will be the war-lords of Europe. Do you call
that a goal worth the sacrifice of one man’s life-blood—let alone of
millions?”
“But that’s only a hypothesis, Dennis: you can’t be certain what will
happen after the war. We must end it first and then see. And surely, on
the strength of a mere hypothesis, you wouldn’t wish to see the Germans
win?”
“Of course not. It’d be a tragedy for any one of the great powers to
attain the complete military victory they’re each striving for.”
“But, my dear boy,” the doctor protested with some heat, “now that
we—now that all the nations—have sacrificed so much, we can’t go back.
Think of the utter futility of the whole thing ending in a draw!”
“I still maintain that that’s better than fighting till one side
(whichever it is) is beaten to its knees, and the other in the position
to dictate terms of bondage; and free to go on, through the years,
preparing for wars more terrible even than this one.”
“Well: and if it’s a draw?”
“If the so-called fruits of victory are withheld from them all alike,
there’s some chance that the people of each nation, seeing the true
nature of the war-machine by which they’ve been driven, will clamour to
have it broken up; will protest against the maintenance of great armies
and navies for their mutual destruction. There’ll be some chance of an
era of real peace—not the sham peace of the lull before the storm, which
will exist if the powers can be definitely divided into conquerors and
conquered, with the conquered merely biding their time to reverse those
titles, and the conquerors ever on the watch to see that they shan’t do
so. A lasting peace can never be achieved by war, because war only
breeds war.”
Dr. Clavering smiled. “You’re a Utopian dreamer, Dennis, but I sincerely
respect you, just as I respect my own boy, and all the other boys who do
their bit in their particular way.” He added after a moment: “And I
doubt if you’ll find your way easier than theirs....”
* * * * *
Later that afternoon, Dennis wandered out for a walk in the hills
surrounding Eastwold, thus cheating Mrs. Ryan of the opportunity to draw
him into a renewed discussion on militarism versus pacifism.
The first breath of Spring lay upon the land; just a breath, and no
more. The woods were not even faintly misted over with the green of
budding foliage, but stood out as massed shadows of purple and bronze
against the pale sky. Except for the deeper colouring of the woods, it
was entirely a day of half-tints; light fawn of the ploughed fields;
light green of the pastures where the cattle grazed; tenderest blue of
the sky. The hedges that separated the fields were lines of brown,
curving rhythmically about the undulations of the hills. Scattered farms
nestled in the hollows, and from them went up a medley of animal sounds;
lowing of cattle; barking of dogs; bleating of lambs; sounds that were
blended with the rapturous outpourings of larks, and the drowsy distant
peal of church bells, rippling eight notes down the scale.
Dennis lay at full length on a ridge above a chalk-pit, and looked out
at the hazy blue view, while the soft wind blew in his face, and flung
up the good strong scent of freshly-ploughed earth and young grass.
Railway-tracks gleamed in the sun; chalk-white roads wound their crazy
way up and down the hilly country; and across fields to meet them, just
as the brooks and rivulets, born of the winter’s heavy rains, meandered
along to join the placid shining river that followed its leisurely
course to the sea.
And Dennis thought of all the roads and railways that had been made
throughout Europe to connect one country with another; of how these same
roads and railways had been torn up or blocked and barred to form
frontiers and sever the connection between one country and another. And
he thought of the rivers that flowed through one country and another;
rivers, some of which ran red now with the mingled blood of nations
locked in this death-grapple of hatred and lust and vengeance—nations
each and all inspired by the thought that they were fighting in
self-defence for justice, for glory, for their honour, for their
fatherland, for their God ... each and all fighting blindly against each
other for the same abstract principles.
And the rivers flowed on, imperturbable; calm; oblivious of all
artificial frontiers; oblivious if it was French or German or British or
Austrian blood that reddened them.
If there remained enough sane people in this world gone hideously mad,
could they not put an end to it all? Could they not open the eyes of
those blindly fighting—of those in government who organised and were
responsible for the fighting? Surely it must be the aim of every
rational human being to stop the war: not to secure the victory of this
nation or that, but to lay the foundations of a lasting peace for all
humanity? But people holding such views were looked upon as cowards,
shirkers, traitors. And if they stood rigidly by their views, allowing
themselves to be deviated neither by scorn nor insults; allowing
themselves to be persuaded into no weak compromise or half-measures,
they would in all probability be shot or put in prison.
It must come to that for him too. For months, the Harmsworth press had
been agitating for conscription; the Bill would be passed that _ordered_
every man to go out and shed the blood of his fellow-men. And then....
If only sufficient people had the courage to fight against the war, then
might the other countries of Europe lie as peacefully as this spread,
misty landscape at his feet. The roads and the railways might link them
together again; the barriers of racial hatred and racial envy be swept
away; art and civilisation arise once more in place of murder and
barbarity.
Already, as was usual with him, thought was translating itself into
sound, into music that was no longer morbid as a nightmare, but strong,
triumphant, a pæan of peace—the peace of all nations. Into it would be
blended the characteristics of each; the steadfastness of the English
and the indomitable fire of the French; the depth and the innate
good-heartedness of the German people; and the easy tears and laughter
of the Austrians; the Italians’ hot-blooded rhetorical love of their
country, and the incurable melancholy of the Irish, the Russians and the
Poles.
The voice of each he would transfuse into his music. He would make
himself the medium through which their individuality, their thoughts,
their dreams, their yearnings should be expressed. His brain teemed with
the new bold harmonies into which they would be orchestrated. This
symphony of his should be as international as art itself; as
international as the heart of the man who, seeing beyond hedges and
frontiers and class-distinctions, claims the whole world as his
“country,” and claims kinship with all people who walk upon the face of
it.
He got up and wandered back into the straggling little town. A new
recruiting-poster on one of the hoardings caught his eye: a pink-kneed
Highlander with arm outflung against a highly-coloured patchwork of
field and hedge, demanding: “Isn’t this worth fighting for?”
Dennis smiled as he answered the question: “It’s worth more than that;
it’s worth—_not_ fighting for!”