adored elder brother with the manners of a sporting baronet, who had
slowly shrivelled down to the figure of a drunken thief! Everything
had shrivelled for her,--poor soul! In our streets in those old days
men were permitted to sell brightly coloured distended bladders to
children, the most apt instruments for acute disappointment you can
imagine; and the life God had given my mother was very like one of
these bladders. It had burst and shrivelled down to a limp and empty
residue that nothing could ever restore. She had faced her declining
days, prematurely wrinkled, weary, laborious and unloved except by
one dutiful son....
"Yes, the thought of Ernest was a consolation to me. Surely his
loyalty had meant happiness for her."
Sarnac paused. "I find it impossible," he said, "to disentangle my
thoughts as I stood by my mother's death-bed from a thousand things
that have come to me since about her. I have had to tell of her as
an antagonist, as a hard, uncharitable soul. That was her rôle in my
story. But she was indeed just the creature and victim of that
disordered age which had turned her natural tenacity to a blind
intolerance and wasted her moral passion upon ugly and barren ends.
If Fanny and Ernest and I had shown any stoutness against the
disadvantages of our start in life, if we had won for ourselves any
knowledge or respect, we inherited that much steadfastness from her;
such honesty as we had was hers. If her moral harshness had
overshadowed and embittered our adolescence, her passionate mothering
had sheltered our childhood. Our father would have loved us,
wondered at us and left us about. But early in her life, that fear,
that terror-stricken hatred of sex that overshadowed the Christian
centuries, that frantic resort to the suppressions, subjugations and
disciplines of a stereotyped marriage in its harshest form, a
marriage as easy to step into and as hard to leave as a steel trap
with its teeth hidden by the most elaborate secrecies and
misrepresentations, had set its pitiless grip upon my mother's
imagination and blackened all the happier impulses in life for her.
She was ready, if necessary, to pass all her children through the
fires of that Moloch, if by so doing their souls might be saved. She
did it the more bitterly because she was doing it against the deeper
undeveloped things in her own nature.
"Such things, more dimly appreciated perhaps, passed through the mind
of Harry Mortimer Smith, my former self, as he stood beside his dead
mother. He was torn--I was torn--by a sense of irrational separation
and by the haunting persuasion of lost opportunities. There were
things I felt that I might have said, propitious moments I might have
seized to make things better between us. I had differed from her so
harshly; I might have been so much kinder to her and still have held
my way. She lay there a feeble, little, old woman, thin, worn and
prematurely aged. How often had I struck at her with all my rebel
strength, blind to the fact that I could wound her as only a child
can wound the mother who bore it. She had been darkened and I also
had been darkened, and now--now it was all too late. The door had
closed between us. And was closed for ever. For ever...."
§ 12
"The year and a half that intervened between my mother's death and
the beginning of the First World War--the War that came before the
Poison Gas War and the Great Desolation--were years of rapid growth
for me, mental and physical alike. I remained with Matilda Good
because I had come to love that clumsy, wise, friendly creature
almost as if she was my second mother, but now I was prosperous
enough to occupy the whole of the second floor and to have a
sitting-room separate from my bedroom. I still came down to the
underground breakfast-room for breakfast or supper or high tea
because I liked talking with Matilda. Prue had married Mr. Pettigrew
by that time, and in her stead two grey and sedulous women came
in--they were sisters, one a spinster and the other the wife of a
broken-down prize-fighter--to do the drudgeries Prue and my mother
had done.
"My chief companion in those days was my sister Fanny. Our
childhood's alliance was renewed and strengthened. We had a need for
each other; we were able to help each other as no one else could help
us. I found out very soon that Fanny's life was divided into two
very unequal parts; that she had hours and sometimes days of
excitement and happiness with Newberry, who loved her greatly and
gave her all the time he could steal away for her and introduced her
to such friends as he could trust to respect her and keep their
secret, and also she had long stretches of uneventful solitude in
which she was terribly left to herself. My sister Fanny was plucky
and loyal and devoted, but before we two got together again I think
she found those grey intervals of suspended animation dreary and
dangerous and sometimes almost intolerable. Often she had nothing to
live for at all, nothing bright and vital, but the almost daily note,
a hasty word or so he scribbled to her. And the better he was, the
worse it was for her. The fact that he was pleasant and delightful
and deeply in love with her, the very brightness of being with him,
made those great intervals seem darker and duller."
"Hadn't she work?" asked Sunray.
"And fellow workers, and other women?" asked Firefly.
"Not in her position. Not as an unmarried woman--of lowly
origins--with a lover."
"But there were others in the same position? Surely there were many!"
"A scattered class, a class made to be ashamed of itself. Newberry
and Fanny were lovers, such lovers as we are to-day; they got through
with it and at last, I believe, they married according to the custom
of the time. But they were the exceptional ones, they knew what they
wanted and had stout hearts. Most of these irregular unions
succumbed to the boredom in between and to the temptations of
separation. Forgetfulness and jealousy played havoc with these
insecure couples. The girls in their phases of loneliness picked up
with other men and the first lover suspected their infidelities and
strayed away. I have a lot to tell you yet about jealousy in the old
world; it was not regarded as an ugly thing but as a rather
high-spirited thing. People let it go and were proud of it. And the
majority of these irregular unions were not even love unions in the
first place, they were vice unions, dishonest on either side. Drugs
and drink crept very easily into lives divided between
over-excitement and tedium and darkened by a general disapproval.
The defiant pose was the easiest pose. The unmarried lover was made
a social outcast and driven towards other sorts of social outcasts,
more evil and unhappy.... You see perhaps now why my sister Fanny
was rather alone and aloof, for all that she belonged to a numerous
class.
"I suppose," said Sarnac, "that the object of that rigid legal
marriage of the old world was to keep lovers together. In countless
cases it kept the wrong people together and lovers apart. But then
you must remember that in those days children were supposed to be
providential accidents; they were indeed accidents of cohabitation
and that altered all the conditions of the question. There were no
proper schools for children, no sort of refuge if the parents parted
and tore the home asunder. We are so secure; it is hard to imagine
now the chancy insecurity of the ancient days. It is hard to imagine
the dangers that hung about an unprotected child. In our world
nowadays we all seem to get paired; sooner or later each finds a mate
and marriage is a natural and necessary relationship instead of a
compulsory device. All the priests of all the religions that have
ever been in the world could not bind me to Sunray more firmly than I
am bound to-day. Does one get a book and an altar to marry the axe
to its handle? ...
"None of which does in the least degree affect the fact that my
sister Fanny suffered dreadfully from loneliness before she
rediscovered me.
"She was full of curiosities and enterprise, and she took possession
of my leisure to explore all sorts of shows and resorts in and about
old London, museums, picture-galleries, parks, gardens and heaths,
that I should otherwise never have visited. Indeed she might not
have visited them either if I had not been available as her escort,
because in that world of crazy suppressions, most of these places
were haunted by furtive love-hunters and feeble-minded folk who might
have been irritating and tiresome to a solitary girl so pretty as
Fanny. They would have followed her about and accosted her when they
got her alone, and thrust their disagreeable cravings between her and
the beauty and sunshine.
"But together we went gaily to all sorts of interesting things. This
old London I am describing to you had a large share of parks and
gardens; there was a pleasing quaintness about all of them and much
unpremeditated loveliness. There was a certain Richmond Park, to
which we often resorted, with many fine old trees and grassy spaces
and wildernesses of bracken, that got very yellow and gay in autumn,
and a quantity of deer. You might have been transported from this
age to Richmond Park two thousand years ago, and still fancied
yourself in the northland parks of to-day. The great trees, like
nearly all trees in those days, were, it is true, infested with
fungus and partly decayed, but Fanny and I never noticed that. They
seemed great healthy trees to us. And there was a view from a
hill-crest of the winding Thames, a very delightful view. And then
there were the oddest old gardens and flower spaces at Kew. I
remember a quite good rock-garden and glass-houses of flowers; the
brightest flowers the old world imagined possible. And there were
paths through a jungle of rhododendra, primitive small rhododendra,
but bright coloured and a great delight to Fanny and me. There was a
place where we had tea at little tables in the open air. In that
frowsty old germ-saturated world with its dread of draughts and colds
and coughs it gave one a bright sense of adventure to eat food in the
open air.
"We went to museums and picture-galleries and talked about what the
pictures meant and we talked of a thousand things together. There
comes back to me one conversation we had at a place called Hampton
Court, a queer, old, red-brick palace with a great grape-vine under
glass and an ancient garden beside the Thames. There were
flower-beds full of half-wild herbaceous flowers, and we walked
beside them under trees until we came to a low wall that looked upon
the river, and we sat down on a seat and there, after a silence,
suddenly Fanny, like one who has been pent up beyond endurance, began
talking of love.
"She began by asking questions about the girls I had met and the
girls at Thunderstone House. I described one or two of them to her.
My chief friend among them was Milly Kimpton from the counting-house;
we had got to the pitch of taking teas together and such-like
friendly acts. 'That's not love,' said Fanny the wise, 'lending each
other books. You don't begin to know what love is yet, Harry.
"'But you will, Harry--you will.
"'Don't you be too late about it, Harry. There's nothing in life
like loving someone, Harry. People don't talk to you about it and
lots of people don't know what they are missing. It's all the
difference between being nothing or something. It's all the
difference between being dead or alive. When you are really loving
someone you're all right and nothing can harm you. And when you
aren't, nothing is right, everything is wrong. But love is a queer
thing, Harry, and about as dreadful as it is dear. It gets wrong.
Sometimes it all goes wrong and it's awful; it slips from you
somehow; it goes and you're left mean and little--ever so mean!--and
you can't get back and it seems you hardly want to get back. You're
dead and you're damned and done for, and then again it all comes back
again like the sunrise--like being born afresh.'
"And then with a desperate shamelessness she began to talk of
Newberry and how much she loved him. She told little irrelevant
things about his 'ways.' 'He comes to me whenever he can,' she said,
and repeated this presently. 'He's all my life,' she said. 'You
don't know what he is to me....'
"Then her constant dread of a separation crept up to the surface of
her thoughts.
"'Perhaps,' she said, 'it will always go on like this.... I don't
care if it does, I don't care if I never marry him. I wouldn't
care--not if at last I'm thrown aside. I'd go through it all again
and count myself lucky even if I knew for certain I was to be dropped
and cast aside.'
"Queer Fanny! Her face was flushed and her eyes shining with tears.
I asked myself what had been happening.
"'He'll never throw me aside, Harry. He'll never throw me aside. He
can't. He can't. He's half as old again as I am and yet he comes to
me in his trouble. Once---- Once he cried to me. Men, all of you,
are so strong and yet so helpless....
"'You've got to have a woman to come to....
"'Just a little while ago---- Well---- He was ill. He was very
ill. He has pain in his eyes and sometimes he's afraid about them.
This time, suddenly, he had frightful pains. And he thought he
couldn't see. He came straight to me, Harry. He called a cab and
came to me, and he came feeling his way upstairs to me and fumbling
at the door; and I nursed him in my darkened room until the pain had
gone. He didn't go home, Harry, where there were servants and nurses
to be got and attendants and everything; he came to me. It was me he
came to. Me! He's my man. He knows I'd give my life for him. I
would, Harry. I'd cut my body to pieces bit by bit, if it would make
him happy.
"'It wasn't so much the pain he had, Harry, as the fear. He's not
the one to mind a bit of pain or be afraid of many things. But he
was afraid and scared. He'd never been afraid before, but he was
afraid of going blind--he was too afraid to go to the specialist. It
was like a little child, Harry, and him so big and strong--afraid of
the dark. He thought they'd get hold of him so that perhaps he'd not
be able to come to me. He thought he wouldn't be able to see his
beloved magazines and papers any more. And the pain just turned the
screw on him. He clung to me.
"'It was me made him go. I took him there. He wouldn't have gone if
it hadn't been for me. He'd have just let things drift on and not a
soul in the world, for all his money and power, to mother him. And
then he might really have gone blind if it hadn't been taken in time.
I pretended to be his secretary and I took him and waited in the
waiting-room for him. I dreaded they'd hurt him. I was listening
for something to happen all the time. I had to look at their old
_Graphics_ as if I didn't care a rap what they were doing to him.
And then he came out smiling with a green shade on and I had to stand
up stiff and cool and wait to hear what he had to say. I was scared
by that shade, Harry. Scared! I held my breath. I thought it had
come. "It isn't so bad as we fancied, Miss Smith," he says--offhand
like. "You kept the taxi? You'll have to take my arm I'm afraid."
"Certainly sir," I said, mimpsy-like. I was careful to be kind of
awkward taking his arm. There were people there in the waiting-room
and you never know. Acted respectful. Me!--that has had him in my
arms a thousand times.
"'But when we were in the taxi and safe he pushed up the shade and
took me into his arms and he hugged me and he cried--he cried wet
tears. And held me. Because he'd got me still and his sight still
and the work he loves to do. Things would have to be done to his
eyes but he'd keep his sight--and he has. There's been no trouble
now. Not for months.'
"She sat looking away from me over the shining river.
"'How could he ever leave me?' she said. 'After a time like that?'
"Stoutly she spoke, but even to my youthful eyes she seemed little
and lonely, sitting there on the old red wall.
"I thought of the busy bustling man with the big tortoise-shell
glasses away from her, and of one or two things I had heard whispered
about him. It seemed to me then that no men were good enough for the
women in the world.
"'When he's tired or in trouble,' said Fanny, sure and still, 'he'll
always come back to me.'"
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
MARRIAGE IN WAR TIME
§ 1
"And now," said Sarnac, "comes a change of costume. You have been
thinking of me, I suppose, as a gawky youth of seventeen or eighteen,
dressed in those ill-fitting wholesale clothes we used to call
'ready-mades.' That youth wore a white collar round his neck and a
black jacket and dark grey trousers of a confused furtive patterning
and his hat was a black hemisphere with a little brim, called a
Bowler. Now he changes into another sort of 'ready-mades,' even more
ill-fitting,--the khaki uniform of a young British soldier in the
Great World War against Germany. In 1914 Anno Domini, a magic wand,
the wand of political catastrophe, waved to and fro over Europe, and
the aspect of that world changed, accumulation gave place to
destruction and all the generation of young men I have described as
being put together from such shops as those one saw in Cheapside,
presently went into khaki and fell into ranks and tramped off to the
lines of ditches and desolation that had extended themselves across
Europe. It was a war of holes and barbed wire and bombs and big guns
like no war that had ever happened before. It was a change of phase
in the world muddle. It was like some liquid which has been growing
hotter and hotter, suddenly beginning to boil and very swiftly
boiling over. Or it was like a toboggan track in the mountains, when
after a long easy, almost level run, one comes to a swift drop and a
wild zig-zag of downward curves. It was the same old downward run at
a dramatic point.
"Change of costume there was and change of atmosphere. I can still
recall the scared excitements of the August days when the war began
and how incredulous we English were when we heard that our own little
army was being driven back before the German hosts like a spluttering
kitten pushed by a broom, and that the French lines were collapsing.
Then came the rally of September. At the beginning we British
youngsters had been excited spectators, but as the tale of our army's
efforts and losses came home to us we crowded to the recruiting
offices, by thousands and scores of thousands, until at last our
volunteers could be counted by the million. I went with the crowd.
"It may seem a curious thing to you that I lived through all the
Great World War against Germany, that I was a soldier in it and
fought and was wounded and went back and took part in the final
offensive, that my brother Ernest became a sergeant and won a medal
for gallantry and was killed within a few weeks of the concluding
Armistice, that all the circumstances of my life were revolutionised
by the war and that nevertheless it does not come into the story of
my life as a thing of importance in itself to that story. As I think
of it now, I think of the Great World War as a sort of geographical
or atmospheric fact, like living ten miles from your working place or
being married in an April shower. One would have to travel the ten
miles every day or put up an umbrella as one came out of church, but
it wouldn't touch what one was intimately or alter in any essential
the living substance of one's life. Of course the World War killed
and tortured millions of us, impoverished us all and dislocated the
whole world. But that only meant that so many millions went out of
life and that there was a fractional increase in everyone's anxiety
and disorder; it didn't change the nature and passions, the
ignorances and bad habits of thought of the millions who remained.
The World War arose out of these ignorances and misconceptions and it
did nothing to alter them. After it was all over the world was a
good deal rattled and much shabbier than before, but it was still the
same old mean and haphazard world, acquisitive, divided, cantingly
patriotic, idiotically prolific, dirty, diseased, spiteful and
conceited. It has taken two-score centuries of research and
teaching, training, thought and work to make any great alteration in
that.
"I admit the outbreak of the World War had a really tremendous air of
being an end and a beginning. There were great days in it at first,
and for us British as much as for any people. We apprehended the
thing in splendid terms. We thought quite honestly--I speak of the
common people--that the Imperialisms of Central Europe were wholly
wrong and that we were wholly right; hundreds of thousands of us gave
ourselves gladly in the sincere belief that a new world was to be won
by victory. That spirit was not confined to Britain, nor to either
side in this war. I am convinced that the years 1914, 1915 and 1916
saw finer crops of brave and generous deeds and noble sacrifices, of
heroic toil and heroic patience, than any years that ever came before
in the whole history of mankind or than any of the years that
followed for many centuries. The young people were wonderful; death
and honour reaped gloriously among them. And then the inherent
unsoundness of the issue began to wear through and that false dawn
faded out of men's hearts. By the end of 1917 the whole world was a
disillusioned world, with but one hope left, the idealism of the
United States of America and the still untested greatness of
President Wilson. But of that and what it came to, you read about in
the history books and I will not talk about it now. A God in that
man's position might have unified the world in the twentieth century
and saved it centuries of tragic struggle. President Wilson was not
a God....
"And I do not think I need tell you very much of the war itself as I
saw it. It was a strange phase in human experience and it was
described and painted and photographed and put on record very
completely. Most of us have read quite a lot about it--except of
course Firefly. You know how human life concentrated for four whole
years upon the trenches that stretched across Europe on either front
of Germany. You know how thousands of miles of land were turned into
wildernesses of mud-holes and wire. Nowadays of course nobody reads
the books of the generals and admirals and politicians of that time,
and all the official war histories sleep the eternal sleep in the
vaults of the great libraries, but probably you have all read one or
two such human books as Enid Bagnold's _Diary without Dates_ or
Cogswell's _Ermytage and the Curate_ or Barbusse's _Le Feu_ or Arthur
Green's _Story of a Prisoner of War_ or that curious anthology, _The
War Stories of Private Thomas Atkins_, and probably you have seen
photographs and films and also pictures painted by such men as
Nevinson and Orpen and Muirhead Bone and Will Rothenstein. All of
them, I can certify now, are very true books and pictures. They tell
of desolation passing like the shadow of an eclipse across the human
scene.
"But the mind has the power of reducing and effacing every sort of
impression that drags pain with it. I spent great parts out of two
years in that noxious, gun-pocked land of haste and hiding, and that
time now seems less than many days of my peace-time life. I killed
two men with the bayonet in a trench, and it remains as though it was
done by someone else and had no significance for me at all. I
remember much more clearly that I felt very sick when afterwards I
found my sleeve saturated with blood and blood on my hand, and how I
tried to get it off by rubbing my arm in the sand because there was
no water to be got. In the trenches life was hideously uncomfortable
and tedious and while it lasted I was, I know, interminably bored by
the drag of the hours, but all those hours are concentrated now into
a record of the fact. I remember the shock of the first shell that
burst near me and how slowly the smoke and dust unfolded, and how
there was a redness in the smoke and how for a time it blotted out
the light. That shell burst in a field of yellow-flowering weeds and
stubble against the sun, but I do not recall what preceded it nor
what followed it; shell-bursts rattled me more and more as the war
went on, but they left weaker and weaker pictures.