1965
It was fifty years later.
Michael's wife, Serena, was waiting for her husband. The gallery in
which she sat was full of memorials of the past. The walls were covered
with portraits of Damers. Michael's grandfather in a blue frock coat and
light grey trousers. Michael's father, John Damer, ruddy and determined
in tweeds, with a favourite dog. Michael himself, not so ruddy, nor so
determined, in white smock and blue stockings. Michael's mother,
beautiful and austere in her robe of office.
Presently an aeroplane droned overhead, which she knew meant the
departure of the great Indian doctor, and a moment later Michael came
slowly down the landing steps in the garden, and entered the gallery.
"The operation has been entirely successful," he said.
They looked gravely at each other.
"It seems incredible," she said.
"He said it was a simple case, that all through those years while Father
was unconscious the skull had been slowly drawing together and mending
itself, that he only released a slight lesion in the brain. He has gone
back to Lucknow for an urgent case, but he says he will look in again in
a couple of days time if I let him know there is an adverse symptom. He
said he felt sure all would go well, but that we must guard him from
sudden shocks, and break to him very gradually that it is fifty years
since he was hit at Ypres."
"He'll wake up in his own room where he has lain so long," said Serena.
"Has the nurse changed yet?"
"Yes. We made up the uniform from the old illustrated papers. Blue gown,
white cap and a red cross on the arm."
"We had better get into our things, too," said Michael nervously.
"The blue serge suit is on your bed, and a collar and a tie. I found
them in the oak chest. They must have been forgotten."
"And you?"
"I will wear your Mother's gown which she wore at your christening. She
kept it all her life."
A few minutes later Michael, uneasy in a serge suit which was too tight
for him, and his wife in a short grey gown entered the sick room and sat
down one on each side of the bed. The nurse, excited and self-conscious
in her unfamiliar attire, withdrew to the window.
The old, old man on the bed stirred uneasily, and his white beard
quivered. His wide eyes looked vacantly at his son, as they had looked
at him all Michael's life. Serena, with a hand that trembled a little,
poured a few drops into a spoon, and put them into the half-open lips.
Then they held their breath and watched.
John Damer frowned. A bewildered look came into his vacant eyes, and he
closed them. And he, who had spoken no word for fifty years, said in a
thin quavering voice:
"The guns have ceased."
He opened his eyes suddenly. They wandered to the light, and fell upon
the nurse near the window.
"I am in hospital," he said.
"No. You are in your own home," said Michael, laying his hand on the
ancient wrinkled hand.
The dim sunken eyes turned slowly in the direction of the voice.
"Father," said the old man looking full at Michael. "Father! well, you
do look blooming."
The colour rushed to Michael's face. He had expected complications, and
had prepared numberless phrases in his mind to meet imaginary dilemmas.
But he had never thought of this.
"Not Father," said Serena intervening. "You are forgetting. Father died
before you married, and you put up that beautiful monument to him in the
Church."
"So I did," said the old man, testily. "So I did, but he is exactly like
him all the same, only Father never wore his clothes too tight for him
and a made up tie--never."
Michael, the best dressed man of his day, was bereft of speech.
"You're a little confused still," said Serena. "You were wounded in the
head at Ypres. You have been ill a long time."
There was a silence.
"I remember," said John Damer at last. "Have they taken the Ridge?"
"Yes, long ago."
"Long ago? Oh! can it be--is it possible? Have we?"--the old man reared
himself suddenly in bed, and raised two thin gnarled arms. "Have we--won
the war?"
"Yes," said Michael, as Serena put her arms round his father, and laid
him back on his pillow. "We have won the war."
John Damer lay back panting, trembling from head to foot.
"Thank God," he said, and in his sunken lashless eyes two tears
gathered, and ran down the grey furrows of his cheeks, and lost
themselves in his long white beard.
They gave him the sedative which the doctor had left ready for him, and
when he had sunk back into unconsciousness, they stole out of the room.
They went back to the picture gallery looking on the gardens, and
Michael gazed long at the portrait of his grandfather in the blue frock
coat.
"Am I so like him?" he said with a sort of sob.
"Very like."
He sat down and hid his face in his hands.
"Poor soul," he said. "Poor soul. He's up against it. Do you know I had
almost forgotten we had 'won the war' as he called it. There have been
so many worse conflicts since that act of supreme German folly and
wickedness."
"Not what he would call wars," said Serena. "He only means battles with
soldiers in uniforms, and trenches and guns."
"How on earth are we to break to him that his wife is dead, and that I
am his son, and that he is eighty years of age, and that Jack is his
grandson."
"It must come to him gradually."
"In the meanwhile I shall take off these vile clothes and get back into
my own. Serena, what can a made-up tie be, and why is it wrong?"
Michael tore off his tie and looked resentfully at it at arm's length.
"It is just like the pictures, it seems correct, and it fastens all
right with a hook and eye."
"It is the first time your taste in dress has been questioned, and
naturally it pricks," said Serena smiling at her husband. "It is lucky
Jack did not hear it."
"I don't know who Jack inherits his slovenliness and his clumsiness
from," said Michael. "Why on earth can't he sit on his smock without
crumpling it. I can. He may be a great intellect, I think he is; he
takes after my mother, there is no doubt, but he can't fold his cloak on
his shoulder, he can't help a woman into her aeroplane, and he is so
careless that he can't alight in London on a roof without coming down
either on the sky doorway, or the sky-light. He has broken so many
sky-lights and jammed so many roof doors that nowadays he actually goes
to ground and sneaks up in the lift."
Serena was accustomed to these outbursts of irritation. They meant that
her nervous, highly strung Michael was perturbed about something else.
In this case the something else was not far to seek. He recurred to it
at once.
"Will Father ever understand about Jack and Catherine? Will he ever in
his extreme old age understand about anything?"
"His mind is still thirty," said Serena. "The Iceland brain specialist
said that as well as Ali Khan, and all the other doctors. That is where
they say the danger lies, and where the tragedy lies."
"But how are we to meet it," said Michael walking up and down. Presently
he stopped in front of his wife and said as one who has solved a
problem!
"I think on the whole I had better leave the matter of breaking things
to Father entirely in your hands. It will come better from you than from
me."
And the pictures of the various wives of the various ancestors heard
once more the familiar phrase, to which their wifely ears had been so
well accustomed in their day from the lips of their lords, when anything
uncomfortable had to be done.
* * * * *
So Michael left it to Serena, and in the weeks which followed she guided
her father-in-law, with the endless tenderness of a mother teaching a
child to walk, round some very sharp corners, which nearly cost him his
life, which, so deeply was her heart wrung for him, she almost hoped
would cost him his life.
With a courage that never failed him, and which awed her, he learned
slowly that he was eighty years of age, that his wife had died ten years
ago, at sixty, that Michael was his son, and that he had a very clever
grandson called John after him, one of the ablest delegates of the
National Congress, and a grand-daughter called Catherine. She tried to
tell him how they had lost a few months earlier their eldest son,
Jasper, one of the pioneers of a new movement which was costing as many
lives as flight had cost England fifty years earlier.
"He failed to materialise at the appointed spot," said Serena, "I
sometimes wonder whether his Indian instructor kept back something
essential. The Indians have known for generations how to disintegrate
and materialise again in another place, but it does not come easy to our
Western blood. Jasper went away, but he never came back."
John Damer looked incredulously at Serena, and she saw that he had not
understood. She never spoke of it again.
* * * * *
As the days passed John, fearful always of some new pang, nevertheless
asked many questions of Serena when he was alone with her.
"Tell me about my wife. She was just twenty when I left her."
"She grieved for you with her whole heart."
"Did she--marry again? I would rather know if she did. She would have
been right to do so in order to have someone to help her to bring up
Michael."
"She never married again. How could she when you were alive, and in the
house."
"I forgot."
"She hoped to the last you would be completely restored. All the
greatest doctors in the world were called in, and they assured her it
was only a question of time. Wonderful discoveries had been made in the
Great War as to wounds in the head. But they only gradually learnt to
apply them. And the years passed and passed."
"It would have been kinder to let me die."
"Did doctors let people die when you were young?"
John shook his head.
"They are the same now," she said.
"And I suppose Catherine spent her life here, caring for her child, and
me, and the poor. She loved the poor."
"She cared for you and Michael, and she worked ceaselessly for the cause
of the oppressed. She battled for it. She went into Parliament as it was
called in those days, as soon as the age for women members was lowered
from thirty to twenty-one. She strove for the restriction of the White
Slave Traffic, and for safeguarding children from the great disease.
Some terrible evils were abated by her determined advocacy. But she
always said she did not meet the same opposition the first women doctors
did a hundred years ago, or as Florence Nightingale had to conquer when
she set out to improve the condition of the soldier in hospital and in
barracks, and to reduce the barbarities of the workhouses."
"I should have thought she would have been better employed in her own
home, that she would have been wiser to leave these difficult subjects,
especially the White Slave Traffic--to men."
"They had been left to men for a long time," said Serena.
* * * * *
The day came when he was wheeled out into the garden in the old mahogany
wheel chair which his father had used in the last years of his life.
Serena was sitting beside him. When was she not beside him! Michael, at
a little distance, was talking to two of the gardeners.
"Why do Michael and the gardeners wear smock frocks and blue stockings?"
"It is so comfortable for one thing, and for another it is the old
national peasant dress. We naturally all wish to be dressed alike
nowadays, at any rate when we are in the country, just as the Scotch
have always done."
"I remember," said John, "when I was a small child a splendid old man
of ninety, Richard Hallmark, who used to come to church in a smock frock
and blue worsted stockings and a tall black hat. His grown-up grandsons
in bowler hats and ill-made coats and trousers looked contemptible
beside him, but I believe they were ashamed of him."
His dim eyes scanned the familiar lawns and terraces of the gardens that
had once been his, and the wide pasture lands beyond.
It was all as it had been in his day. Nevertheless he seemed to miss
something.
"The rooks," he said at last. "I don't hear them. What has become of the
rookery in the elms?"
"They've gone," she said. "Ten years ago. Michael felt it dreadfully.
Even now he can hardly speak of it. I hope, Father, you will never
reproach him about it."
"Did he shoot them?" asked the old man in a hollow voice.
"No, no. He loved them, just as you did, but when he installed the Power
Station he put it behind the elm wood to screen it from the house, and
he did not remember, no one remembered, the rookery. You see rooks build
higher than any other birds, and that was not taken into account in the
radiation. At first everything seemed all right. The old birds did not
appear to notice it. Even the smallest birds could pass through the
current it was so slight. But when the spring came it proved too much
for the fledgelings. They died as they were hatched out in the nest.
Then the old birds made the most fearful outcry, and left the place."
"There has always been a rookery at Marcham," said John, his voice
shaking with anger. "I suppose I shall hear of Michael shooting the
foxes next."
Serena did not answer. She looked blankly at him.
* * * * *
Presently John asked that his chair might be wheeled up the steep path
through the wood to the little clearing at the top. Michael eagerly
offered to draw the chair himself, but John refused. He had been distant
towards his son since he had heard about the rookery.
Serena, with the help of a gardener, conveyed him gently to the heathery
knoll, just breaking into purple.
John looked out once more with deep emotion at the familiar spot in the
golden stillness of the September afternoon.
"I sat here with my wife the last afternoon before I went to the front,"
he said in his reedy old man's voice. "The heather was out as it is
now."
His eyes turned to the peaceful landscape, the wooded uplands, the
river, the clustered villages, and far away the city and the tall
chimneys of his factories. As he looked he gave a gasp, and his jaw
fell.
"The factories aren't working," he said.
"Yes, dear, indeed they are."
"They're _not_. Not a sign of smoke. It used to hang like a curtain over
the city."
"Or like a shroud," said Serena looking fixedly at him. "It hung over
the grimy overworked mothers, and the poor grimy fledglings of children
in the little huddled houses. The factories consume their own smoke
now."
"There was a law to that effect in my time," said John, "but nobody
obeyed it."
"No one," she agreed. "No one."
As he looked it seemed as if a cloud of dust rose from the factories,
and eddied in the air. As it drew near it resembled a swarm of bees.
"What on earth is that?" he asked.
"It is the work people going home to the garden city behind the hill. It
would not do for them to live near the factories, would it? The ground
is marshy. There are five or six streams there. And the gas from the
factories has killed all the trees. What was not good for trees could
not be good for children."
"They all lived there in my time. It was handy for work. There was
always a great demand for houses. I know I had to build more."
Serena's eyes fell.
The flight of aeroplanes passed almost overhead followed by two enormous
airships waddling along like monstrous sausages.
"Are those Zeppelins?"
"They are aero busses built on the German models. They superseded the
ground electrics a few years ago. Those two are to carry back the
workers who are more or less deficient, and can't be trusted to fly an
aeroplane; the kind of people who used to be shut up in asylums.
They can do sufficient work under supervision to pay for their own
maintenance. We group with them the hysterical and the melancholy, and
people who can't take the initiative, and those who suffer from inertia
and tend to become blood suckers and to live on the energies of others.
Their numbers grow fewer every year."
* * * * *
Serena and Michael talked long about his father that night.
"But surely he must have seen it was a crime to house his factory hands
like that."
"He didn't seem to. You see he compared well with many employers. He
doesn't know--how could he, that his generation let us in. We paid their
bill. All the wickedness and the suffering of the great black winter had
their root in the blindness and self-seeking of his generation and the
one before him."
"He's never been the same to me since he found I killed the rookery.
What's a rookery to a thousand children reared in a smoky swamp. What
will he think of me when he hears that I stalked and shot the last fox
in the county?"
"He must not hear it. We must guard him," said Serena, "and I pray that
his life may not be long. It can't be, I think, and we have been warned
that any sudden shock will kill him. I wish he could have a joyful shock
and die of it, but there aren't any joyful shocks left for him in this
world I am afraid."
"Have you explained to him that his grandchildren are coming home
to-morrow from the Rocky Mountains?"
"I have told him that they are coming, but not that they have been in
the Rockies. He might think it rather far to go for a fortnight's
fishing."
"Serena, what on earth will Father make of Jack. Jack is so dreadfully
well-informed. I hardly dare open my mouth in his presence. Jack says he
is looking forward to meeting his grandfather, and realising what he
calls his feudal point of view."
"Jack only means by that expounding to his grandfather his own point of
view. I don't think your Father will take to him, but he will love
Catherine; she is so like your Mother, and _she_ never wants to realise
any point of view."
* * * * *
Jack arrived first with his servant and a large hamper of fish. The air
lorry followed with the tents and the fishing tackle and the mastiffs.
"But where is Catherine," asked Michael, as Jack came in pulling off his
leather helmet and goggles.
Jack grinned and said with a spice of malice:
"Catherine fell into the sea."
"She didn't!" said Serena. "That's the second time. How tiresome. She
always has a cold on her chest if she gets wet."
"Where did you leave her?" asked Michael.
"In mid-Atlantic. We kept to the highway. It was her own fault. I warned
her not to loop the loop with that old barge of hers, but she would try
and do it. She was fastened in all right. I saw to that, but her stuff
was loose, and you should have seen all her fish and kettles and the
electric cooker shooting out one after another into the deep. It was in
trying to grab something that she lost control, and fell, barge and all
after her crockery into the sea. I circled round--that is why I am a
quarter-of-an-hour late--till I sighted one of the patrol toddling up,
old Granny Queen Elizabeth it was. Catherine wirelessed to me that she
was all right, and would start again as soon as she was dry and had had
a cigarette, so I came on."
Catherine arrived an hour later, full of apologies about the lost
crockery, and the electric cooker, and was at once put into a hot bath
by her mother and sent to bed.
* * * * *
After the arrival of his grandchildren John spent more and more of his
time in the clearing in the wood. He shrank instinctively from the
sense of movement and life in the house, and his sole prop, Serena,
seemed unable to be so constantly with him as before.
He was never tired of gazing at the gracious lines of the landscape.
Perhaps he loved that particular place because he had sat there with his
wife on their last afternoon together, perhaps also because, in a world
where all seemed changed, that alone, save for the cloud on the horizon,
was unchanged. He was at home there.
Jack took a deep and inquisitive interest in his grandfather which made
him often stroll up the hill to smoke a pipe on the bench near him.
Sometimes John pretended to be asleep when he heard his grandson's
whistle on the path below him. He was bewildered by this handsome,
quick-witted, cocksure, bearded young man who it seemed was already at
twenty-three a promising Fatigue Eliminator, and might presently become
a Simplyfier. His grand-daughter, Catherine, he had not yet seen, as she
was in quarantine owing to a cold, and the Catarrh Inspector had only
to-day pronounced her free from infection.
"You sleep a great deal, Grandfather," said Jack, coming so suddenly
into view that John had not time to close his eyes. "Don't you find so
much sleep tends to retard cerebral activity?"
"I don't happen to possess cerebral, or any other form of activity,"
said John, coldly.
"Do you mean you wish er--to resume the reins? Father and I were talking
of it last night. Everything he has is yours, you know, by law."
John shook his head, and looked at his powerless hands.
"Reins are not for me," he said.
"Well, in my opinion, grandfather," said Jack, with approval, not wholly
devoid of patronage, "you're right. A great deal of water has passed
under the bridge since your day."
"This clearing in the wood is the same," John said. "That is why I like
it, and my old home looks just the same--from here."
There was a moment's silence while Jack lit his pipe.
John suddenly said, "I put in the electric light. My father never would
hear of it, but I did it."
He thought it was just as well that his magnificent grandson should know
that he had done something when he held the reins.
"That is one of the many things I have been wishing to discuss with you,
grandfather. You installed electric light in the house and stables and
garage, but there was power enough to light a town. While you were doing
it, why didn't you light the church and the village as well?"
"I never thought of it."
"But it must have made you very uncomfortable to feel you had not shared
the benefit of it with the community. The village lies at your very
gates. You must have hated the feeling that you had lit yourself up, and
left them in the dark. It was essential, absolutely essential for your
workers' well-being that they should have light. Even in your day the
more intelligent among the agricultural labourers were beginning to
migrate to the towns. We only got them back by better conditions in
lighting and housing, and facilities for movement and amusement."
"Electric light in cottages was unheard of in my time," said John. "It
never entered my head."
"Just so," said Jack. "That seems so odd, so incomprehensible to us
unless we can seize the feudal point of view. You confirm the classics
on the subject. I have questioned numbers of very old men who were in
their prime before the war like you, grandfather, but I have not found
their opinions as definite as yours, because they have insensibly got
all their edges worn off so to speak by lifelong contact with the two
younger generations. Your unique experience is most interesting. Never
entered your head. There you have the feudal system in a nutshell. No
sense of communal life at all. I'll make a note of it--I'm compiling a
treatise on the subject. You were against female suffrage, too, I
remember. I've been reading up your record. You voted several times
against it."
"I did. I consider woman's sphere is in the home."
"Just so. That was the point of view, and there is a lot to say for it
considering the hash women made of power when first they got it, though
not so enormous a hash as the Labour Party. You know, I suppose, we've
had three Labour Governments since the great war?"
"I always prophesied a Labour Government would come, and I feared it. I
knew they had not sufficient education to rule. No conception of foreign
policy."
"Not an atom. I agree with you. Not a scrap. Thirty years ago most of
our rulers hadn't an idea where India was, or why we must complete the
trans-African railway in case we lost control of the Suez Canal. They
actually opposed it. They nearly piloted the Ship of State on to the
rocks."
John frowned.
"Now what I want to know is," said Jack, extending two long blue
stockinged legs, and enjoying himself immensely, "why instead of
opposing female suffrage you did not combine to place the franchise on
an educational basis, irrespective of sex; the grant of the vote to be
dependant on passing certain examinations, mainly in history and
geography. Or, if you were resolved to delay as much as possible the
entrance of women into politics, why didn't you give better national
education. You did neither. You let loose a horde of entirely ignorant
and irresponsible men and women out of your national schools. You say
you foresaw that a Labour Government was inevitable, but you don't seem
to have made any preparation, or taken any precaution to insure its
efficiency when it did come."
John was silent.
"They were also hostile men and women," continued the young man. "That
was the worst of it. Were you at Lille when you were fighting in
France?"
"No."
"Well, the East Lancashires were. They were all miners, and the thing
that interested them most was the devastated mines, ruined by the
Germans in their retreat. And they saw the remains of the bath houses at
the pit heads. Those baths had been there before the war. Every miner
could go back clean to his own home, instead of having to wash in his
own kitchen. Grandfather, you owned coal-mines. Why didn't you and the
other coal-owners put up baths at the pit heads? You would have liked it
if _you_ had been a miner. And just think what it would have saved your
wife. The English miners got them by threats after they had seen the
wrecks of them in France. But why didn't the English coal-owners copy
French methods, if they hadn't the imagination to think them out for
themselves? Why did they only concede when they could not help it?
Reforms were wrung out of the governing class in your day by threats and
strikes. That is what, for nearly thirty years, ruined our class with
Labour when it came into power. Why didn't your generation foresee
that?"
"We didn't see the danger," said John, "as you see it. Everyone can be
wise after the event."
"Just so. But if you couldn't foresee the danger, why didn't you see at
the time the _justice_ of their claims, men like you, grandfather, who
fought for justice for the smaller nations? It seems to me, the national
characteristic of the upper classes fifty years ago must have been
opposition to all change, a tendency to ignore symptoms which really
were danger signals, and an undeveloped sense of justice ..., which only
acted in certain grooves. The result was the uneducated came into power,
embittered, without a shred of confidence in the disinterestedness of
the educated. The Commonwealth--"
"The what?"
"The Commonwealth--you used to call it the Empire--nearly went upon the
rocks."
Jack's young face became awed and stern and aged, as John had seen
men's faces become when they charged through the mud in the dawn.
"I was in Liverpool," Jack said, "all through the Black Winter. It
needn't have been. It never, never need have been if there had been
justice and sympathy in England for Labour forty years before. But there
was not. So they paid us back in our own coin. We had no justice from
them. My God! I can't blame them."
Serena, coming quietly up the path, saw the two men looking fixedly at
each other, both pallid in the soft sunshine. The same shadow of
suffering seemed to have fallen on the beautiful young face, and on the
old one.
"You must not talk any more," she said to John, casting a reproachful
glance at her son. "You are over-tired."
Jack took the hint, kissed his mother's hand, and walked slowly away. He
was deeply moved.
John shivered. A deathlike coldness was creeping over him, was laying an
icy hand upon his heart. He turned to his sole comforter, Serena,
watching him with limpid grieved eyes.
"Your grand-daughter, Catherine, is coming up to see you in a few
minutes," she said, trying as always to guard him against surprise. "How
cold your hands are, Father. I could not let her see you till she had
been disinfected after her chill for fear she might give it to you."
He was not listening.
"Serena," he said feebly. "The world is not my world any longer. I am a
stranger and a sojourner in it. All my landmarks are swept away. I wish
I could be swept away, too."
Serena took his cold hands in hers, and held them to her breast.
"Father," she said, "unless you and countless others, all the best men
of your time had given your lives for your country, we should have no
country to-day. You bled for us, you kept it for us, for your son, and
your son's son: and we all honour and thank you for what you have done
for us."
John Damer's eyes looked full at her in a great humility.
"I see now," he said, in his thin quavering voice, "that I only died for
my country. I did not live for her. I took things more or less as I
found them. I was blind, blind, blind."
She would fain have lied to him, but her voice failed her.
He looked piercingly at her.
"Did the others--all those who never fought--there were so many who did
not fight--and those who fought and came back--did they live for her,
did they try to make a different England, to make her free and
happy--after the war?"
"Some did," said Serena, "but only a minority."
She saw his eyes fix suddenly. His face became transfigured.
"She's coming up the path," he said, in an awed whisper. "Catherine is
coming."
Serena followed his rapt gaze and saw her daughter coming towards them
in a white gown, her hat hanging by a ribbon in her hand, the sunshine
upon her amber hair.
"Catherine," said the old man, "Catherine, you have come to me at last.
You said we should sit here together when I was old. You've come at
last."
And he, who for fifty years had not walked a step, without help, raised
himself to his full height, and went to meet her with outstretched arms.
They caught him before he fell, and one on each side of him supported
him back to the bench.
He sank down upon it, blue to the lips. Serena laid the trembling white
head upon her daughter's breast. The bewildered young girl put her arms
gently round him in silence.
John Damer sighed once in supreme content, and then--breathed no more.