Now, God be Thanked

by John Masters

  The three grey-haired men conferred, nodding, listening. The roof rang to the crash of boots, cries, oaths, laughter, and yells. Dust fell from the ceiling cloth in a shower. The mess sergeant, seeing that no one was looking at him, permitted a smile to crease his leathery face.

  Roger Mortimer Christian Durand-Beaulieu, 9th Earl of Swanwick, leaned back in his chair in the small room off his library – perhaps originally used by a librarian – where he often discussed family problems with his wife, the countess, or his children. ‘It’s no good,’ he said gloomily, pouring himself another glass of port from the decanter set on the table, ‘some people are going to make money out of the war, but we’re not. We’ll be taxed more heavily than ever. That swine Lloyd George will see to that. The hunt’s going to cost more – if we can find huntsmen to look after the hounds. Every day Vickers tells me of something that’s going to cost more – or bring in less. This damned barrack will cost more, and it needs a new roof now.’

  ‘We can’t possibly afford that,’ Lady Swanwick said firmly.

  ‘But Vickers says it’s leaking in the servants’ quarters. He’s obtained an estimate … two thousand six hundred pounds.’

  ‘Out of the question!’

  The earl nodded. ‘Obviously. Why can’t we marry Cantley off to some Yankee heiress?’

  ‘Because such people are not so common in England as they used to be, and they’ll vanish altogether now that war is declared. And I don’t think he will allow us to pick him a wife, however rich. Besides, I think he likes being a bachelor.’

  ‘Working for those bloody Jews,’ the earl muttered, ‘and spending all his money on … daubs! I can’t make head or tail of that stuff. Picasso, Matisse, Braque, all dago and frog trash.’

  ‘It was you who suggested he join Toledano’s bank,’ she said patiently, ‘so that he could make enough money to save the family fortunes.’

  The earl grunted angrily, and said, ‘Helen should …’

  The countess interrupted him. ‘Now don’t start on Helen and Barbara, Roger. They’ve been through a London season, and no one wanted to marry them, and that’s that. I won’t have them sent out husband hunting. They’re nice girls and they have a right to live at home as long as they want to.’

  ‘As long as they have a home, you mean,’ he growled.

  Neither said anything for a while, then the countess said hesitantly, ‘Do you think they’ll volunteer?’

  ‘Who?’ the earl said; but she knew by his manner that he had had the same thought as herself. ‘Cantley and Arthur,’ she said.

  The earl said, ‘Arthur won’t … can’t … it would be idiotic for him to go into the army when he has a safe seat, and he’s only a step away from a cabinet post. And he’s a married man. Cantley could, I suppose, though he hates soldiers. Artists and writer johnnies and long-haired poets are more his line. But he knows he’s got to make money.’

  ‘Remind him, dear,’ his wife said, ‘otherwise he might think it’s his duty to go. Noblesse oblige.’

  ‘So it does, I suppose,’ the earl said. ‘Wish I could go back. Those five years in the Coldstream were the happiest in my life.’

  ‘You were a bachelor then,’ the countess reminded him, ‘and very rich, when London society really was rather splendid.’

  ‘Don’t think I have not been happy with you, Flora,’ the earl said hastily, ‘but just recently everything seems to have been going wrong with the money. We’ve accepted Amersham’s invitation for the twelfth this year, but I’m damned if we’ll be able to afford to go next year.’

  ‘If Lord Amersham’s grouse – and gamekeepers – haven’t gone to war by then.’

  ‘Ours, too, perhaps. My father was a hunting man, as you know, and you might say he preserved foxes. I’d prefer to preserve pheasants and get rid of the hunt, but I can’t. I’m the earl.’

  ‘You moved the kennels away from the Park, at least.’

  ‘The truth is that you can’t really hunt and shoot pheasants over the same ground … You’re right, though. I’ll see that Cantley thoroughly appreciates that unless he gets rich — very rich – we’re all sunk.’ He drank some port and seemed to cheer up a little. After a while he said, ‘Well, we’ve got that devil Gorse in gaol, anyway.’

  ‘He’ll be out again soon,’ she said.

  ‘And I’ll see that he gets put right back in again. An earl still has some power in this country, thank God!’

  The Honourable Arthur Durand-Beaulieu walked down a corridor of Chelsea Barracks, escorted by a khaki-uniformed guardsman. His frock coat was impeccable, his top hat shiny and set at precisely the right angle on his head, an ivory topped cane swinging in his hand. He followed the guardsman through a door marked ADJUTANT. The guardsman came to a halt with a tremendous stamping of boots.

  ‘Mr Arthur Durand-Beaulieu, sir!’

  The officer behind the desk said, ‘Thank you. That will be all.’

  ‘Sir!’ The guardsman saluted, turned about, and stamped out. The adjutant of the 3rd Battalion the Coldstream Guards waved a hand at his cluttered desk, ‘Do make it short, please, Arthur. This frightful mobilization, you know … And I thought you were in Italy.’

  ‘I was. Came back just in time. George, will you take me into the regiment?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so. I’ll tell the Regimental Adjutant, and he’ll ask the Regimental Lieutenant-Colonel. I should imagine he’ll be happy to accept you, unless he knows of some secret vice of yours which no one else does. But won’t the government collapse without you?’

  Arthur laughed. ‘Not the government. My dear father might. Give me a tinkle, then? Mayfair 4569. By the way, who’s your tailor?’

  The adjutant scribbled on a piece of paper and said, ‘Johnson, Pegg, 2 Clifford Street … Dorothy in good health, I trust?’

  ‘All right, considering. Had a miscarriage last week. No son and heir to the overdraft this time round. She’ll go back to nursing as soon as I go overseas.’

  ‘Sorry about the miscarriage. Find your own way out, Arthur, there’s a good fellow. I must deal with these confounded papers. By the time I get through them the war will be over.’

  Christopher Hengist Cate, squire of Walstone, master of Walstone Manor, walked slowly in the water meadows by the Scarrow, above his village. His son Laurence and daughter Stella walked beside him in the heat of the afternoon. The Scarrow was low, he noted. It had been a long hot summer, and the heat showed no sign of abating.

  ‘How long do you think the war will last?’ his son asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Christopher said, thinking, surely it cannot go on long enough to catch Laurence in its clutches.

  ‘Oh, it’s so exciting!’ Stella said. ‘If millions of men volunteer, where will they all go?’

  ‘They’ll set up tented camps as they did in the Boer War,’ he said.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘Soldiers in Walstone!’ she said, and her father heard the thrill in her voice. She was eighteen, and very susceptible. He recognized it, but what was a father to do or say to her? It was her mother’s job, and duty; and Margaret had gone to Ireland. He couldn’t say he missed her as a wife. Blyth and Mrs Abell ran the house just as well in her absence as when she was present; and of course there’d been no sexual intercourse for years; but he and the children missed her as a mother.

  A young woman came towards them through the fields, dressed in a bright green cotton dress many times patched, auburn hair flying. ‘Hullo, Mr Cate,’ she called. ‘Isn’t it exciting, about the war? All the lads of the village are going to join the army, they say.’

  ‘Then who’ll milk the cows and help with the ploughing?’ he said, smiling at her.

  ‘Oh, Fletcher and I’ll come any time you want us. Good afternoon, Miss Stella, that’s a lovely dress … Good afternoon, Master Laurence. I saw a strange bird in the Upper Bohun wood yesterday. It was on a tree, pecking and twisting its head all ways.’

  ‘Quite small?
’ Laurence said excitedly.

  ‘Yes. Brown and grey … very pretty marked, it was.’

  ‘A wryneck!’ Laurence cried. ‘They’re rare! Thank you, Florinda, I’ll look for it tomorrow, first thing.’

  Florinda’s mobile face sobered. She said, ‘What do you really think about the war, squire? It’ll change things, won’t it?’

  Christopher said, ‘It will … Florinda, I’ve never been to war, but I’ve thought about it a bit. I see war as a being of its own … not created by man, only released by man as from a cave. Men think they direct it, but really it grows, and feeds, and guides itself, for its own purposes.’

  The girl’s face was intent, her lips a little parted. Watching her, Christopher thought with a now familiar pang at his loins that she was beautiful, aware, and charged with sexuality. He said, ‘Well, goodbye, Florinda.’ He tipped his straw hat with its silk band in the Winchester colours. Florinda did a half curtsey, and ran on.

  Stella said, ‘She’s awfully pretty, isn’t she, Daddy? Don’t you think so, Laurence?’

  Laurence said shortly, ‘I wasn’t thinking about her, only of what a swizz it will be if the war’s over before I’m old enough.’ But as he spoke the surly words his heart was tight, and there was a construction at his thoat. At eleven last night, all the family and servants sitting up in the Manor waiting for peace to die, fear had gripped him that he would have to go.

  His sister’s emotions were exactly opposite. The unknown had always drawn her, and she felt now that she was living at a higher level than ever before. What would there be for women to do in this war? Would she be called upon to fire guns, drive cars cook for hundreds of men, nurse the wounded and dying … women did other things, for men, she knew … bad women, it was said: but if the men were sent off in hundreds of thousands, who would look after them? What would they do, deprived of ali women? Perhaps she …

  She felt herself flushing, and stooped, pretending to fasten her shoe lace, while her father and brother waited for her, talking quietly.

  Margaret Cate sat in a back room of a house in a respectable residential neighbourhood of Dublin. Round the dining-room table, now bare of white cloth and silver, but littered with newspapers and ashtrays, sat six men and one other woman.

  One of the men said, ‘Redmond’s going to go with the English, for the war.’

  ‘What about implementing the Home Rule bill?’ another asked.

  ‘They won’t do it, not a chance. They’ll suspend the bill till the end of the war. and then they’ll declare it null and void and start all over again.’

  Margaret cut in. ‘But then there’ll be the war behind them, and us – a hundred thousand Irish will have fought for them, and heaven knows how many died.’

  ‘Not if we can help it,’ a man muttered in a brogue deeper and softer than the others.

  ‘We can’t,’ Margaret said with determination. ‘Our people are going to join the British regments and fight, whether we like it or not, even if it’s only for the money to pay the rent and keep the children from starving … but afterwards we’ll be able to say, we did our part, now we have deserved independence.’

  The man who had spoken first, and who seemed to be the leader, laughed shortly and said, ‘It will make no difference, Maggie. And Sinn Fein cannot afford to sit back and let the English keep the initiative. We will attack as soon as the Home Rule bill is suspended. We will declare war – against Redmond and his lackeys, and against the English, simultaneously.’

  They were all silent in the face of the speaker’s obviously suppressed rage. He continued – ‘We shall look for help from our own friends, in America, or wherever we can find them. And from England’s enemies – Germany, Austria. And we shall strike not only in Ireland, but in England. Several score of our members live and work in England, and we have their names and addresses. I want someone to go over and organize them, work out a plan to commit acts of sabotage in England, to make the English people realize we are still here, and fighting.’

  ‘Like the suffragists,’ a man said.

  ‘Not like them. They’ve given up the fight for the duration; we’re just beginning … Who’ll go to England for us, at once? Someone not well known here, and not known at all in England?’

  The man next to Margaret said, ‘I will.’ He was tall, with dark hair and pale blue eyes, and the classic Irish long upper lip beloved of cartoonists.

  The leader said, ‘Very well, Dermot. I was hoping you’d speak up, because you’re the best man for it. Maggie, will you give him what help you can – but don’t get caught. We may need you, too.’

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  Archie Campbell stood back from his easel and looked at the painting set on it, brush in hand, palette balanced on the other arm. It was a harbour scene, a steamer being pulled by tugs out of a narrow dock, a full-rigged ship spreading its sails in the estuary beyond – the water black and filmed with oil and iridescent coal dust, chimney stacks, a grey sky, patches of orange undercoat all over the tramp’s hull – an industrial seascape, the sort he’d grown up near, in Glasgow, and lived in during his years at sea. Staring at the painting, which was nearly done, he wondered suddenly how that Spaniard, Picasso, would have dealt with the same subject. Some of his fellow painters dismissed Picasso as a charlatan, but he was far from that. His line, in the drawings Archie had seen, was incredible … but he must have double vision, or at least a gift of sight that was different from other people’s, for he saw objects from two or three aspects at the same time, and synthesized what he saw into something that, while difficult to understand at first, was obviously and clearly what it was, distortions or no. That painting Nude Descending a Staircase was another example of the same sort of experimentation, only this time the aspect was the same, but time advanced – like a section of cinema film, with motion frozen. It was extremely interesting, but … not for him.

  He stepped forward and applied a broad brush stroke to the water. There, that was nearly it … and now what? Take a couple of days off, and play golf down at Sandwich? Start the portrait of Malcolm Campbell, the racing motorist, which Campbell had commissioned from him, on the strength of their sharing the same clan name? But Campbell, being what he was, had probably joined the Argylls by now, or the Flying Corps … the country had gone collectively mad, as he had prophesied to Fiona: but, by God, this madness was dangerously infectious. He had felt a stirring himself, knowing all the time it was lunacy, when a detachment of the London Scottish had marched past him one day in the street, hodden grey kilts swinging, piper skirling ahead.

  The telephone rang in his living-room, next door to the studio. He put down palette and brush, went through and took the receiver off its hook. A tinny voice, which he nevertheless at once recognized, said, ‘Archie? I’m in town.’

  He pursed his lips and sighed quietly, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing … I was worried about you, in case you were joining up.’

  ‘I told you I wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure, woman.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Painting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A nekked woman. The model’s lying on the couch. She has a bonnie ginger bush.’

  Pause: and then, ‘Don’t tease me, Archie. I love you so much.’

  More gently he said, ‘But I do paint nekked women, Fiona. Often. And will continue to do so.’

  ‘Can I come and spend the night? I feel frightened … because of the war. I’ve seen dreadful things in dreams, Archie … earth torn to shreds, white faces staring up, like a carpet of dead daisies on it. And Quentin, all bloody.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll stop your nightmares for the night – but you must go home tomorrow. Aren’t Guy and Virginia at home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ll maybe need you more than you need me.’

  In 23 Greeley Crescent, Hedlington, all was quiet. Mrs Rowland ha
d telephoned from London that she could not come back till the following day and was spending the night with a friend. Ivy the maid had asked for permission to go out for the evening, and Guy had given it. Mrs Orr had reported all cleared up, and everything ready for breakfast, and had gone home. Guy and Virginia were in the drawing-room, both drinking ginger beer. The windows were open, the night full of stars, a light wind in the plane trees along the crescent, the occasional sound of horses’ hooves, once the racket of a car engine.

  ‘Where do you think Mummy’s staying?’ Virginia asked. She was lying sprawled on the floor, looking up at her brother. She was fifteen years old, still with her hair in pigtails, and looked very much like a female version of her father Quentin, except for the pale eyes, and the breasts shaping out her white blouse.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Guy said briefly. Virginia didn’t like their mother, and Guy did not want to get into an argument with her. Mother probably had problems on her mind that they could not understand. His sister was looking downcast at the rebuff; he softened it quickly, for Virginia had worshipped him since she was three. He said, ‘She’d tell us if it mattered, sis. She doesn’t seem to be happy, and I don’t know how we can help unless she talks to us.’

  ‘She won’t,’ Virginia said. Then, after a pause – ‘What are you going to do, Guy?’

  The blue eye and the brown moved to meet hers, but apparently independently, like guns in the turret of a battleship. He said, smiling, ‘About what?’

  ‘The war, silly! Lord Kitchener is calling for volunteers. Your King and Country need you!’ She pointed a finger at him, trying to set her plump young face into a stern expression. ‘Are you going to run away and join up?’