express. Started a bitter rush of packing. Somers, so sick of things,
had a great fire of all his old manuscripts. They decided to leave the
house as it was, the books on the shelves, to take only their personal
belongings. For Somers was determined to come back. Until he had made up
his mind to this, he felt paralysed. He loved the place so much. Ever
since the conscription suspense began he had said to himself, when he
walked up the wild, little road from his cottage to the moor: shall I
see the foxgloves come out? If only I can stay till the foxgloves come.
And he had seen the foxgloves come. Then it was the heather--would he
see the heather? And then the primroses in the hollow down to the sea:
the tufts and tufts of primroses, where the fox stood and looked at him.
Lately, however, he had begun to feel secure, as if he had sunk some of
himself into the earth there, and were rooted for ever. His very soul
seemed to have sunk into that Cornwall, that wild place under the moors.
And now he must tear himself out. He was quite paralysed, could scarcely
move. And at the farm they all looked at him with blank faces. He went
back to the cottage to burn more manuscripts and pack up.
And then, like a revelation, he decided he would come back. He would use
all his strength, put himself against all the authorities, and in a
month or two he would come back. Before the snow-drops came in the farm
garden.
“I shall be back in a month or two--three months,” he said to everybody,
and they looked at him.
But John Thomas said to him:
“You remember you said you would never drive to town again. Eh?” And in
the black, bright eyes Somers saw that it was so. Yet he persisted.
“It only meant not yet awhile.”
On the Monday morning he went down to say good-bye at the farm. It was a
bitter moment, he was so much attached to them. And they to him. He
could not bear to go. Only one was not there--the Uncle James. Many a
time Somers wondered why Uncle James had gone down the fields, so as not
to say good-bye.
John Thomas was driving them down in the trap--Arthur had taken the big
luggage in the cart. The family at the farm did everything they could.
Somers never forgot that while he and Harriet were slaving, on the
Sunday, to get things packed, John Thomas came up with their dinners,
from the farm Sunday dinner.
It was a lovely, lovely morning as they drove across the hill-slopes
above the sea: Harriet and Somers and John Thomas. In spite of
themselves they felt cheerful. It seemed like an adventure.
“I don’t know,” said John Thomas, “but I feel in myself as if it was all
going to turn out for the best.” And he smiled in his bright, wondering
way.
“So do I,” cried Harriet. “As if we were going to be more free.”
“As if we were setting out on a long adventure,” said Somers.
They drove through the town, where, of course, they were marked people.
But it was curious how little they cared, how indifferent they felt to
everybody.
At the station Somers bade good-bye to John Thomas, with whom he had
been such friends.
“Well, I wonder when we shall see each other again,” said the young
farmer.
“Soon. We will _make_ it soon,” said Somers. “We will _make_ it soon.
And you can come to London to see us.”
“Well--if I can manage it--there’s nothing would please me better,”
replied the other. But even as he said it, Somers was thinking of the
evening in town, when he and Ann had been kept waiting so long. And he
knew he would not see John Thomas again soon.
During the long journey up to London Somers sat facing Harriet, quite
still. The train was full: soldiers and sailors from Plymouth. One naval
man talked to Harriet: bitter like all the rest. As soon as a man began
to talk seriously, it was in bitterness. But many were beginning to make
a mock of their own feelings even. Songs like “Good-byeeee” had taken
the pace of “Bluebells,” and marked the change.
But Somers sat there feeling he had been killed: perfectly still, and
pale, in a kind of after death, feeling he had been killed. He had
always _believed_ so in everything--society, love, friends. This was one
of his serious deaths in belief. So he sat with his immobile face of a
crucified Christ who makes no complaint, only broods silently and alone,
remote. This face distressed Harriet horribly. It made her feel lost and
shipwrecked, as if her heart was destined to break also. And she was in
rather good spirits really. Her horror had been that she would be
interned in one of the horrible camps, away from Somers. She had far
less belief than he in the goodness of mankind. And she was rather
relieved to get out of Cornwall. She had felt herself under a pressure
there, long suffering. That very pressure he had loved so much. And so,
while his still, fixed, crucified face distressed her horribly, at the
same time it made her angry. What did he want to look like that for? Why
didn’t he show fight?
They came to London, and he tried taxi after taxi before he could get
one to take them up to Hampstead. He had written to a staunch friend,
and asked her to wire if she would receive them for a day or two. She
wired that she would. So they went to her house. She was a little
delicate lady who reminded Somers of his mother, though she was younger
than his mother would have been. She and her husband had been friends of
William Morris in those busy days of incipient Fabianism. Now her
husband was sick, and she lived with him and a nurse and her grown-up
daughter in a little old house in Hampstead.
Mrs Redburn was frightened, receiving the tainted Somers. But she had
pluck. Everybody in London was frightened at this time, everybody who
was not a rabid and disgusting so-called patriot. It was a reign of
terror. Mrs Redburn was a staunch little soul, but she was bewildered:
and she was frightened. They did such horrible things to you, the
authorities. Poor tiny Hattie, with her cameo face, like a wise child,
and her grey, bobbed hair. Such a frail little thing to have gone
sailing these seas of ideas, and to suffer the awful breakdown of her
husband. A tiny little woman with grey, bobbed hair, and wide,
unyielding eyes. She had three great children. It all seemed a joke and
a tragedy mixed, to her. And now the war. She was just bewildered, and
would not live long. Poor, frail, tiny Hattie, receiving the Somers into
her still, tiny old house. Both Richard and Harriet loved her. He had
pledged himself, in some queer way, to keep a place in his heart for her
forever, even when she was dead. Which he did.
But he suffered from London. It was cold, heavy, foggy weather, and he
pined for his cottage, the granite strewn, gorse-grown slope from the
moors to the sea. He could not bear Hampstead Heath now. In his eyes he
saw the farm below--grey, naked, stony, with the big, pale-roofed new
barn--and the network of dark green fields with the pale-grey walls--and
the gorse and the sea. Torture of nostalgia. He craved to be back, his
soul was there. He wrote passionately to John Thomas.
Richard and Harriet went to a police-station for the first time in their
lives. They went and reported themselves. The police at the station knew
nothing about them and said they needn’t have come. But next day a great
policeman thumping at Hattie’s door, and were some people called Somers
staying there? It was explained to the policeman that they had already
reported--but he knew nothing of it.
Somers wanted as quickly as possible to find rooms, to take the burden
from Hattie. The American wife of an English friend, a poet serving in
the army, offered her rooms in Mecklenburgh Square, and the third day
after their arrival in London Somers and Harriet moved there: very
grateful indeed to the American girl. They had no money. But the young
woman tossed the rooms to them, and food and fuel, with a wild free
hand. She was beautiful, reckless, one of the poetesses whose poetry
Richard feared and wondered over.
Started a new life: anguish of nostalgia for Cornwall, from Somers.
Wandering in the King’s Cross Road or Theobald’s Road, seeing his
cottage and the road going up to the moors. He wrote twice to the
headquarters at Salisbury insisting on being allowed to return. Came a
reply, this could not be permitted. Then one day a man called and left a
book and the little bundle of papers--a handful only--which the
detectives had confiscated. A poor little show. Even the scrap of paper
with _Ver mi hiu_. Again Somers wrote--but to no effect. Came a letter
from John Thomas describing events in the west--the last Somers ever had
from his friend.
Then Sharpe came up to London: it was too lonely down there. And they
had some gay evenings. Many people came to see Somers. But Sharpe said
to him:
“They’re watching you still. There were two policemen near the door
watching who came in.”
There was an atmosphere of terror all through London, as under the Czar
when no man dared open his mouth. Only this time it was the lowest
orders of mankind spying on the upper orders, to drag them down.
One evening there was a gorgeous commotion in Somers’ rooms: four poets
and three non-poets, all fighting out poetry: a splendid time. Somers
ran down the stairs in the black dark--no lights in the hall--to open
the door. He opened quickly--three policemen in the porch. They slipped
out before they could be spoken to.
Harriet and Somers had reported at Bow Street--wonderful how little heed
the police took of them. Somers could tell how the civil police loathed
being under the military orders.
But watched and followed he knew he was. After two months the American
friend needed her rooms. The Somers transferred to Kensington, to a flat
belonging to Sharpe’s mother. Again many friends came. One evening
Sharpe was called out from the drawing-room: detectives in the hall
enquiring about Somers, where he got his money from, etc., etc., such
clowns, louts, mongrels of detectives. Even Sharpe laughed in their
faces: such _canaille_. At the same time detectives inquiring for them
at the old address: though they had reported the change. Such a
confusion in the official mind!
It was becoming impossible. Somers wrote bitterly to friends who had
been all-influential till lately, but whom the _canaille_ were now
trying to taint also. And then he and Harriet moved to a little cottage
he rented from his dear Hattie, in Oxfordshire. Once more they reported
to the police in the market-town: once more the police sympathetic.
“I will report no more,” said Somers.
But still he knew he was being watched all the time. Strange men
questioning the cottage woman next door, as to all his doings. He began
to _feel_ a criminal. A sense of guilt, of self-horror began to grow up
in him. He saw himself set apart from mankind, a Cain, or worse. Though
of course he had committed no murder. But what might he not have done? A
leper, a criminal! The foul, dense, carrion-eating mob were trying to
set their teeth in him. Which meant mortification and death.
It was Christmas--winter--very cold. He and Harriet were very poor. Then
he became ill. He lay in the tiny bedroom looking at the wintry sky and
the deep, thatched roof of the cottage beyond. Sick. But then his soul
revived. “No,” he said to himself. “No. Whatever I do or have done, I am
not wrong. Even if I commit what they call a crime, why should I accept
_their_ condemnation or verdict. Whatever I do, I do of my own
responsible self. I refuse their imputations. I despise them. They are
_canaille_, carrion-eating, filthy-mouthed _canaille_, like
dead-men-devouring jackals. I wish to God I could kill them. I wish I
had power to blight them, to slay them with a blight, slay them in
thousands and thousands. I wish to God I could kill them off, the masses
of _canaille_. Would they make me feel in the wrong? Would they? They
shall not. Never. I will watch that they never set their unclean teeth
in me, for a bite is blood-poisoning. But fear them! Feel in the wrong
because of them? Never. Not if I were Cain several times over, and had
killed several brothers and sisters as well. Not if I had committed all
the crimes in their calendar. I will not be put in the wrong by them,
God knows I will not. And I will report myself no more at their
police-stations.”
So, whenever the feeling of terror came over him, the feeling of being
marked-out, branded, a criminal marked out by society, marked out for
annihilation, he pulled himself together, saying to himself:
“I am letting them make me feel in the wrong. I am degrading myself by
feeling guilty, marked-out, and I have convulsions of fear. But I am
_not_ wrong. I have done no wrong, whatever I have done. That is, no
wrong that society has to do with. Whatever wrongs I have done are my
own, and private between myself and the other person. One may be wrong,
yes, one is often wrong. But not for _them_ to judge. For my own soul
only to judge. Let me know them for human filth, all these pullers-down,
and let me watch them, as I would watch a reeking hyæna, but never fear
them. Let me watch them, to keep them at bay. But let me never admit for
one single moment that _they_ may be _my_ judges. That, never. I have
judged them: they are _canaille_. I am a man, and I abide by my own
soul. Never shall they have a chance of judging me.”
So he discovered the great secret: to stand alone as his own judge of
himself, absolutely. He took his stand absolutely on his own judgment of
himself. Then, the mongrel-mouthed world would say and do what it liked.
This is the greatest secret of behaviour: to stand alone, and judge
oneself from the deeps of one’s own soul. And then, to know, to hear
what the others say and think: to refer their judgment to the touchstone
of one’s own soul-judgment. To fear one’s own inward soul, and never to
fear the outside world, nay, not even one single person, nor even fifty
million persons.
To learn to be afraid of nothing but one’s own deepest soul: but to keep
a sharp eye on the millions of the others. Somers would say to himself:
“There are fifty million people in Great Britain, and they would nearly
all be against me. Let them.”
So a period of quiet followed. Somers got no answers to his letters to
John Thomas: it was like the evening when he had been kept waiting. The
man was scared. It was an end.
And the authorities still would allow of no return to Cornwall. So let
that be an end too. He wrote for his books and household linen to be
sent up, the rest could be sold.
Bitter, in Oxfordshire, to unpack the things he had loved so dearly in
Cornwall. Life would never be quite the same again. Then let it be
otherwise. He hardened his heart and his soul.
It was a lovely spring: and here, in the heart of England--Shakespeare’s
England--there was a sweetness and a humanness that he had never known
before. The people were friendly and unsuspicious, though they knew all
about the trouble. The police too were delicate and kindly. It was a
human world once more, human and lovely: though the gangs of wood-men
were cutting down the trees, baring the beautiful spring woods, making
logs for trench-props.
And there was always the suspense of being once more called up for
military service. “But surely,” thought Somers, “if I am so vile they
will be glad to leave me alone.”
Spring passed on. Somers’ sisters were alone, their husbands at the war.
His younger sister took a cottage for him in their own bleak Derbyshire.
And so he returned, after six years, to his own country. A bitter
stranger too, he felt. It was northern, and the industrial spirit was
permeated through everything: the alien spirit of coal and iron. People
living for coal and iron, nothing else. What good was it all?
This time he would not go to the police-station to report. So one day a
police-inspector called. But he was a kindly man, and a little bitter
too. Strange that among the civil police, everyone that Somers met was
kindly and understanding. But the so-called, brand-new military, they
were insolent jackanapes, especially the stay-at-home military who had
all the authority in England.
In September, on his birthday, came the third summons: On His Majesty’s
Service. His Majesty’s Service, God help us! Somers was bidden present
himself at Derby on a certain date, to join the colours. He replied: “If
I am turned out of my home, and forbidden to enter the area of Cornwall:
if I am forced to report myself to the police wherever I go, and am
treated like a criminal, you surely cannot wish me to present myself to
join the colours.”
There was an interval: much correspondence with Bodmin, where they
seemed to have forgotten him again. Then he received a notice that he
was to present himself as ordered.
What else was there to do? But he was growing devilish inside himself.
However, he went: and Harriet accompanied him to the town. The
recruiting place was a sort of big Sunday School--you went down a little
flight of steps from the road. In a smallish ante-room like a basement
he sat on a form and waited while all his papers were filed. Beside him
sat a big collier, about as old as himself. And the man’s face was a
study of anger and devilishness growing under humiliation. After an
hour’s waiting Somers was called. He stripped as usual, but this time
was told to put on his jacket over his complete nakedness.
And so--he was shown into a high, long schoolroom, with various sections
down one side--bits of screens where various doctor-fellows were
performing--and opposite, a long writing table where clerks and old
military buffers in uniform sat in power: the clerks dutifully
scribbling, glad to be in a safe job, no doubt, the old military buffers
staring about. Near this Judgment-Day table a fire was burning, and
there was a bench where two naked men sat ignominiously waiting, trying
to cover their nakedness a little with their jackets, but too much upset
to care really.
“Good God!” thought Somers. “Naked civilised men in their Sunday jackets
and nothing else make the most heaven-forsaken sight I have ever seen.”
The big stark-naked collier was being measured: a big, gaunt, naked
figure, with a gruesome sort of nudity. “Oh God, oh God,” thought
Somers, “why do the animals none of them look like this? It doesn’t look
like life, like a living creature’s figure. It is gruesome, with no
life-meaning.”
In another section a youth of about twenty-five, stark naked too, was
throwing out his chest while a chit of a doctor-fellow felt him between
the legs. This naked young fellow evidently thought himself an athlete,
and that he must make a good impression, so he threw his head up in a
would-be noble attitude, and coughed bravely when the doctor-buffoon
said cough! Like a piece of furniture waiting to be sat on, the athletic
young man looked.
Across the room the military buffers looked on at the operette;
occasionally a joke, incomprehensible, at the expense of the naked, was
called across from the military papas to the fellows who may have been
doctors. The place was full of an indescribable tone of jeering, gibing
shamelessness. Somers stood in his street jacket and thin legs and
beard--a sight enough for any gods--and waited his turn. Then he took
off the jacket and was cleanly naked, and stood to be measured and
weighed--being moved about like a block of meat, in the atmosphere of
corrosive derision.
Then he was sent to the next section for eye-tests, and jokes were
called across the room. Then after a time to the next section, where he
was made to hop on one foot--then on the other foot--bend over--and so
on: apparently to see if he had any physical deformity.
In due course to the next section where a fool of a little fellow,
surely no doctor, eyed him up and down and said:
“Anything to complain of?”
“Yes,” said Somers. “I’ve had pneumonia three times and been threatened
with consumption.”
“Oh. Go over there then.”
So in his stalky, ignominious nakedness he was sent over to another
section, where an elderly fool turned his back on him for ten minutes,
before looking round and saying:
“Yes. What have you to say?”
Somers repeated.
“When did you have pneumonia?”
Somers answered--he could hardly speak, he was in such a fury of rage
and humiliation.
“What doctor said you were threatened with consumption? Give his name.”
This in a tone of sneering scepticism.
The whole room was watching and listening. Somers knew his appearance
had been anticipated, and they wanted to count him out. But he kept his
head. The elderly fellow then proceeded to listen to his heart and lungs
with a stethoscope, jabbing the end of the instrument against the flesh
as if he wished to make a pattern on it. Somers kept a set face. He knew
what he was out against, and he just hated and despised them all.
The fellow at length threw the stethoscope aside as if he were throwing
Somers aside, and went to write. Somers stood still, with a set face,
and waited.
Then he was sent to the next section, and the stethoscoping doctor
strolled over to the great judgment table. In the final section was a
young puppy, like a chemist’s assistant, who made most of the jokes.
Jokes were all the time passing across the room--but Somers had the
faculty of becoming quite deaf to anything that might disturb his
equanimity.
The chemist-assistant puppy looked him up and down with a small grin as
if to say, “Law-lummy, what a sight of a human scare-crow!” Somers
looked him back again, under lowered lids, and the puppy left off joking
for the moment. He told Somers to take up other attitudes. Then he came
forward close to him, right till their bodies almost touched, the one in
a navy blue serge, holding back a little as if from the contagion of the
naked one. He put his hand between Somers’ legs, and pressed it upwards,
under the genitals. Somers felt his eyes going black.
“Cough,” said the puppy. He coughed.
“Again,” said the puppy. He made a noise in his throat, then turned
aside in disgust.
“Turn round,” said the puppy. “Face the other way.”
Somers turned and faced the shameful monkey-faces at the long table. So,
he had his back to the tall window: and the puppy stood plumb behind
him.
“Put your feet apart.”
He put his feet apart.
“Bend forward--further--further--”
Somers bent forward, lower, and realised that the puppy was standing
aloof behind him to look into his anus. And that this was the source of
the wonderful jesting that went on all the time.
“That will do. Get your jacket and go over there.”
Somers put on his jacket and went and sat on the form that was placed
endwise at the side of the fire, facing the side of the judgment table.
The big, gaunt collier was still being fooled. He apparently was not
very intelligent, and didn’t know what they meant when they told him to
bend forward. Instead of bending with stiff knees--not knowing at all
what they wanted--he crouched down, squatting on his heels as colliers
do. And the doctor puppy, amid the hugest amusement, had to start him
over again. So the game went on, and Somers watched them all.
The collier was terrible to him. He had a sort of Irish face with a
short nose and a thin black head. This snub-nose face had gone quite
blank with a ghastly voidness, void of intelligence, bewildered and
blind. It was as if the big, ugly, powerful body could not _obey_ words
any more. Oh God, such an ugly body--not as if it belonged to a living
creature.
Somers kept himself hard and in command, face set, eyes watchful. He
felt his cup had been filled now. He watched these buffoons in this
great room, as he sat there naked save for his jacket, and he felt that
from his heart, from his spine went out vibrations that should
annihilate them--blot them out, the _canaille_, stamp them into the mud
they belonged to.
He was called at length to the table.
“What is your name?” asked one of the old parties. Somers looked at him.
“Somers,” he said, in a very low tone.
“Somers--Richard Lovat?” with an indescribable sneer.
Richard Lovat realised that they had got their knife into him. So! He
had his knife in them, and it would strike deeper at last.
“You describe yourself as a writer.”
He did not answer.
“A writer of what?”--with a perfect sneer.
“Books--essays.”