affairs, but in his own so simple as to be almost a baby. And gentle! And extraordinarily unselfish. He didn’t betray one thought of self-interest… not one!
He was saying:
“But now, with this crowd of boodlers!… Supposing one’s asked to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to, say, Salonika — when they and you and common sense and everyone and everything else, know it’s disastrous?… And from that to monkeying with our own forces…. Starving particular units for political…” He was talking to himself, not to her. And indeed he said:
“I can’t, you see, talk really before you. For all I know your sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations.”
She said passionately:
“They’re not! They’re not! How dare you say such a thing?”
He answered:
“It doesn’t matter… No! I’m sure you’re not…. But, anyhow, these things are official. One can’t, if one’s scrupulous, even talk about them… And then… You see it means such infinite deaths of men, such an infinite prolongation… all this interference for side-ends!… I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over their heads…. And then… I’m to carry out their orders because they’re my superiors…. But helping them means unnumbered deaths….”
He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile:
“You see!” he said, “we’re perhaps not so very far apart! You mustn’t think you’re the only one that sees all the deaths and all the sufferings. All, you see. I, too, am a conscientious objector. My conscience won’t let me continue any longer with these fellows….”
She said:
“But isn’t there any other…”
He interrupted:
“No! There’s no other course. One is either a body or a brain in these affairs. I suppose I’m more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I’m not. But my conscience won’t let me use my brain in this service. So I’ve a great, hulking body! I’ll admit I’m probably not much good. But I’ve nothing to live for: what I stand for isn’t any more in this world. What I want, as you know, I can’t have. So…”
She exclaimed bitterly:
“Oh, say it! Say it! Say that your large hulking body will stop two bullets in front of two small anaemic fellows…. And how can you say you’ll have nothing to live for? you’ll come back. you’ll do your good work again. You know you did good work…”
He said:
“Yes! I believe I did. I used to despise it. but I’ve come to believe I did…. But no! They’ll never let me back. They’ve got me out, with all sorts of bad marks against me. They’ll pursue me, systematically…. You see in such a world as this, an idealist — or perhaps it’s only a sentimentalist — must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf…. No, they’ll get me, one way or the other. And some fellow — Macmaster here — will do my jobs. He won’t do them so well, but he’ll do them more dishonestly. Or no. I oughtn’t to say dishonestly. He’ll do them with enthusiasm and righteousness. He’ll fulfil the order of his superiors with an immense docility and unction. He’ll fake figures against our allies with the black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when
“Oh!” Valentine Wannop said, “how can you so hate your country?”
He said with great earnestness:
“Don’t say it! Don’t believe it! Don’t even for a moment think it! I love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey, mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a grosser name… and all the rest of the rubbish — you remember the field between the Duchemins and your mother’s — and we have always been boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so we’ve built up the great tradition that we love…. But, for the moment, it’s painful. Our present crowd is not more corrupt than Walpole’s. But one’s too near them. One sees of Walpole that he consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt; one doesn’t see his methods…. My son, or his son, will only see the glory of the boodle we make out of this show. Or rather out of the next. He won’t know about the methods. They’ll teach him at school that across the counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew…. Though that was another discreditable affair….”
“But you!” Valentine Wannop exclaimed. “
“I!” he said rather bewilderedly. “I!… Oh, I shall go into the old furniture business. I’ve been offered a job….”
She didn’t believe he was serious. He hadn’t, she knew, ever thought about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage sale. She cried out:
“Why don’t you do it at once? Why don’t you take the job at once?” for in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.
He said:
“Oh, no! Not at this time! Besides the old furniture trade’s probably not itself for the minute….” He was obviously thinking of something else.
“I’ve probably been a low cad,” he said, “wringing your heart with my doubts. But I wanted to see where our similarities come in. We’ve always been — or we’ve seemed always to me — so alike in our thoughts. I daresay I wanted you to respect me….”
“Oh, I respect you! I respect you!” she said. “You’re as innocent as a child.”
He went on:
“And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn’t been often of late that one has had a quiet room and a fire and… you! To think in front of. You
She said:
“No! What am I to see? I remember…”
He said:
“That I’m certainly not an English country gentleman now; picking up the gossip of the horse markets and saying: let the country go to hell, for me!”
She said:
“Did I say that?… Yes, I said that!”
The deep waves of emotion, came over her: she trembled. She stretched out her arms…. She thought she stretched out her arms. He was hardly visible in the firelight. But she could see nothing, she was blind for tears. She could hardly be stretching out her arms, for she had both hands to her handkerchief on her eyes. He said something: it was no word of love or she would have held it; it began with: “Well, I must be…” He was silent for a long time: she imagined herself to feel great waves coming from him to her. But he wasn’t in the room….
The rest, till that moment at the War Office, had been pure agony, and unrelenting. Her mother’s paper cut down her money, no orders for serials came in; her mother, obviously, was failing. The eternal diatribes of her brother were like lashes upon her skin. He seemed to be praying Tietjens to death. Of Tietjens she saw and heard nothing. At the Macmasters she heard, once, that he had just gone out. It added to her desire to scream when she saw a newspaper. Poverty invaded them. The police raided the house in search of her brother and his friends. Then her brother went to prison, somewhere in the Midlands. The friendliness of their former neighbours turned to surly suspicion. They could get no milk. Food became almost unprocurable without going to long distances. For three days Mrs. Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she grew better and began to write a new book. It promised to be rather good. But there was no publisher. Edward came out of prison, full of good-humour and boisterousness. They seemed to have had a great deal to drink in prison. But, hearing that his mother had gone mad over that disgrace, after a terrible scene with Valentine, in which he accused her of being the mistress of Tietjens and
