War.
Our world of artificiality lay like a cracked eggshell. As drowning
men, we clutched at everything that seemed stable ... to find nothing
that was not made of perishable stuff. Our pens that had criticized so
long mocked us as we gazed at the pages which seemed to reject our
thoughts before we gave them life. A few of us turned into special war
writers and comforted the nation with statistics. We showed that
Germany was beaten--it was a mathematical truth that could be proved.
While we demonstrated our immense superiority to the enemy in figures,
a little British Army was fighting against odds of six to one.
And the Fates stood by with poised shears, ready to cut the thread of
Britain's destiny.
It is not pleasant to recall the arraignment of the year 1914. The Boer
War had shown our weakness to every nation but ourselves; our educated
men had graduated into the world using their abilities as
obstructionists. We had discouraged everything that had the very odor
of progress.
Yet--we muddled through. Men still use that word as if it were
something creditable instead of hideous. We won, because, behind the
Britain that muddled and obstructed, there was the Britain of noble
mothers and noble sons.
And into the first winter our orgy of statistics went on, like an
endless Babylonian feast ... while the British fleet--which we should
never need--strained and plunged in the icy gales of the North Sea,
grimly, silently, saving the world for Civilization.
Great days. Fateful days. Terrible days.
One Friday night early in December I received a note from Norman,
asking me to meet him for dinner at "Arcadia." I had not seen him for
six months, but his debonair charm was as potent as ever, and we
chatted of the past like friends who had not met for years. As if by
mutual consent, we avoided the present until I noticed that the
orchestra was different.
"Where is Klotz?" I asked suddenly.
"Gone."
"Where?"
"To the war. He was a German reservist and got away."
"And his wife?"
"She is confined to her bed all the time, but fortunately there is an
excellent woman looking after her and young Siegfried. By the way, what
a conductor he'll make some day!"
By the subterfuge I knew who was paying for the woman, though his
income was always slender. Stimulated by a British-born orchestra that
played with a respectability beyond question, we pursued bubbles of
conversation for half-an-hour, saying many clever things and arriving
at no conclusions; but both of us knew that, behind the badinage, there
was the consciousness of war gripping our brains like a fever.
"What do you think," I said at last, "of the question of enlisting?" It
would have been a mockery to deny the fever any longer.
"Why should I enlist?" His smile was so disarming that I regretted my
move at once.
"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "You are not needed, and you
never will be. Besides----" My voice trailed off into the insincere
platitudes that always come to the lips when conscience is to be
drugged.
He lit a cigarette. "Pest," he said, "most men are participants in
life; a few, like myself, are onlookers. It was my choice when I was a
mere youngster--wisely or not, I do not know--but the pose has become
reality now. I am a jester at the court of the world, a wordy fellow
with a touch of melancholy in his humor, watching and commenting on the
real things of life. Before there was a war I blew bubbles, and now I
am fit for nothing else. Have a cigarette?"
"Thanks."
He passed his hand across his brow with the same weariness I had
noticed before.
"To gaze on life," he went on after a pause, "and not to live it,
spares one many sorrows. Even love, which comes to most men as an
overwhelming passion, stole into my life like a perfume of Cashmere.
When I was twelve years of age and living on the south coast, I used to
pass a little dream-girl of seven years or so. The purity of her face
stayed with me like a melody a mother sings to her child. Then she was
ill, and for three weeks I never saw her. Finally she came one day in a
chair, and her beauty was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. It
made me think that the God who gave us this beautiful world sometimes
cherishes a soul as sweet as hers and keeps it in a body that is frail,
so that through life He can watch it like a flower, tenderly,
lovingly;... and when He wants it back again He has but to whisper,
and, like a violet bending to a summer breeze, it hears and obeys.... I
have sometimes thought that even tears shed for such a one have in them
the quality of dew, and serve to keep the memory green and pleasant.
"The next day I brought her a rose. Though we had never spoken, she
took it, and gave me her face to kiss.... I lost my mother when I was
very young, but this dream-girl's kiss supplied that inspiration for
the ideal that a child takes from its mother. I could not have been
impure after that--I could not have been unkind. The next day she was
gone, and I never saw her again until I went to Surrey to visit young
Oxley. She was his sister."
"And you found?"
"That the dream-child had become a woman--the charm of Spring had
softened to the witchery of Summer."
He shrugged his shoulders and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.
"That, my dear Pest, is how love came to me."
I frowned in an endeavor to pierce his apparently superficial dismissal
of the subject.
"Don't you intend to marry her?" I said.
"Marry her?" He laughed, but there was little mirth in the sound. "Does
a jester marry?" His eyes hardened, and there was a new ring to his
voice. "Who am I to take a wife? A _poseur_, a _flâneur_, in a world of
men, I stand discredited beside the poorest workman whose toil brings
in a pittance for his wife and kiddies. England is calling for men--for
men, I say." He brought his fist with a crash on the table. "What can I
offer her--my parlor accomplishments? My minstrel's mummery that
shudders at the sight of a sword? Can I blow bubbles in a world where
hearts are breaking?"
There were tears in his voice, but his eyes were flashing furiously.
"Hexcuse me." A man had stepped up to us, wearing the armlet of a
recruit. His face was oddly familiar, but I could not recall it until a
light was switched on just behind him, and I recognized the
pumpkin-faced man of Christmas Eve.
"I just thought of 'ow I'd like for to tell you as I've been took for
the Army O.K."
We shook his hand and wished him the best of luck.
"Funny thing, sir, as 'ow the 'ole bloomin' time I was planning to sign
hup I was a-thinkin' of you and that there fiddle. 'You wouldn't like
to meet 'im,' I kind o' sez to myself, 'and you not in the harmy, you
wouldn't,' I sez."
"Instead of which," smiled Norman, all trace of his intensity gone, "I
am the one who is the slacker."
"But didn't I see you in the line the day we was going for to join
hup?"
Norman laughed. "I was probably a hundred miles away," he said. "Pest,
have I a double?"
The recruit scratched his head. "I could 'a sworn hit was you," he
said, and launched into a graphic description of drill and the
absurdities thereof, a recital which appeared to have no prospect of an
ending until we were interrupted by the restaurant proprietor, who took
Norman to one side for a consultation concerning the medieval cook.
I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see our friend of the pumpkin
face making secret and terrifying signs for me to lend him my ear.
"'E's a-'iding something," he whispered hoarsely. "I ain't been a
chandlery merchant hall my life, wot does most o' 'is business hon
tick, without hit learning me to remember faces. Hit _were_ 'im.
'E was turned down for a bad 'eart!"
Whereupon he made a semi-mystic sign with his thumb and forefinger to
indicate that the whole affair was a secret between gentlemen.
That night, in bed, the sensitive, delicate features of Basil Norman
remained in my memory. I had surprised his secret which he would admit
to no one; not to the girl he loved; not to himself. It was the same
spirit that had made him defy the whole of Westminster. We had called
him Puck and the Blower of Bubbles, and he himself had said he was
lighter than air.... But Basil Norman's life had been one endless
battle with an indomitable soul that refused to yield to the body.