Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  “Tell us about the front, John.”

  For this was the great preoccupation and wistful longing of all young civilians at that time: to know what actually went on in that mysterious front line. When a raid took place, a battle, a barrage, a retreat, an advance, what did men actually do? How did one climb out of a deep trench? What did terms like enfilade actually imply?

  “Oh—you wouldn’t understand,” said John impatiently.

  “Some men in the Forces write interesting letters home that are printed in the papers,” my father reproved him.

  “Chris is the family letter-writer,” said John.

  This was a double stroke; a reproach because I was not in the trenches, and a sneer at the weekly letters which I most carefully and conscientiously wrote to him at that time. I felt vexed, for these letters, in my very scanty leisure, were often a wearisome chore. Accordingly I was silent.

  “Still, you might tell us a bit of something,” said my father, aggrieved.

  “Where’s Netta tonight, then?” asked John, disregarding him.

  “She’s on night duty at the canteen—or else out dancing somewhere, I never know which,” grumbled my father. “Really, these young girls nowadays!”

  “The war has at least achieved the emancipation of women,” said I.

  “Oh, Chris! What a dictionary you are!” said John in a tone between pity and disgust.

  “Everyone doesn’t think so,” said my father, unexpectedly staunch in my defence.

  Fortunately at this moment Edie and my mother returned. But even Edie’s honest heartiness could not keep John’s temper pleasant; he seemed to resent everything said and continually threw out bitter, sometimes almost savage, comments on all civilian topics, while falling into a moody silence over military matters. I perceived that all we had heard of the awful strain of prolonged sojourn in the front-line trenches was entirely true and exemplified in my brother.

  We did not see much of John in the next few days—after all he had his wife’s relatives and his own friends to visit—and I was surprised when, some three nights later, as I sat in the Ashroyd dining-room eating a belated meal, John suddenly came in. Netta was out, and my parents occupied their armchairs on each side of the hearth, as usual. John looked tired and dirty but also reckless and bright-eyed. My mother at once rose up and kissed him, and he squeezed her waist affectionately.

  “Well—I’ve just called in to say good-bye,” said John. “I’m off early to-morrow.”

  “Off? I thought you had seven days,” said my father, sitting up and putting on his pince-nez.

  “I got a telegram recalling me this afternoon.”

  “That’s very disappointing,” said my father severely, as if the vagaries of the War Office were the fault of his son.

  “Very,” agreed John.

  He grinned, and picking up the ball of khaki wool from which my mother was knitting, began to tease her by exaggerated stories of the unwearability of the home-knitted socks the soldiers in his company often received. At first believing him and expressing shocked alarm, my mother presently tumbled to the joke, and began to laugh, her dark eyes beaming. John laughed too and told more stories, unwinding the wool as she required it, in his strong broad hands. Mother and son thus made an agreeable picture, which my father and I enjoyed. But soon John rose to go.

  “Well, I must be off. Good-bye. Give my love to Netta. I’m sorry 1 haven’t seen her.”

  He kissed my mother, crossed the hearth and to my astonishment stooped and kissed my father as well. Then colouring, embarrassed, he sniffed and strode out of the room. I followed and opened the front door.

  “Well, good-bye, Chris,” said John.

  He offered me his hand. I was again astonished, but of course I shook it warmly.

  “Does your recall—mean anything?” I said, for all this open affection seemed to strike an ominous note.

  “I reckon it does. No need to tell mother and the old man, but things look bad. All leave’s cancelled. I hear there’s been a break-through round St. Quentin. The line’s weak just there. And since Russia dropped out the Germans have plenty of divisions to spare, you know.”

  “I wish I could go instead of you!” I exclaimed.

  “You wouldn’t last an hour, my boy,” said John, laughing. “Well, good-bye. If I don’t come back, do your best for Edie and the girls.”

  “I will. I’ll walk down with you now, John!” I started forward, for I was moved and wished to show him respect and affection.

  “No—don’t. You’re tired.”

  “No matter; I’ll come.”

  “No—I don’t want it, Chris!”

  He spoke with angry vehemence; his eyes were bright and he had a look of nervous tension.

  “Just as you like, of course,” I said, rebuffed.

  I waited till, through the wartime darkness, I could hear the clang of our gate as he passed through, then shut the door. I had scarcely returned to my meal when I thought I heard the front-door bell. John has forgotten something, or perhaps wishes me to accompany him after all, I thought. Pleased by this idea I hurried out, but when I opened the door nobody was standing there.

  I slept ill that night and hurried to the newspapers next morning. The headlines announced that the long-promised enemy offensive had begun over a fifty-mile area of the Western front. A great battle was in progress. But: German Divisions Smashed, British Mow Down Massed Infantry, Enemy Tries in Vain to Break Through, the subsidiary headlines informed me. I read them with a rush of relief, not only for my country but for John. After all, I thought, it was not likely that an infantry captain should know accurately the dispositions of generals; John’s informant had been misinformed. A claim by the Germans (in much smaller print) to have taken sixteen thousand prisoners, and a hint in the leading article that we may have to give ground here and there, showed me the foundations of the mistaken rumour of an enemy breakthrough.

  It was therefore with more than the disappointment and dismay natural to a defeat that I received the news of the next few days—the most anxious week since the war began, as our local newspaper truly called it. As Cambrai, Bapaume, Ham, Noyau and Roye successively were overrun, the fall of Amiens began to appear likely and still the Germans were not definitely held, I perceived that John’s informant had been only too correct, and that the first press reports of the battle had been so wide of the mark as to be practically lies. This was a profound shock to me. Indeed it was the beginning, the sowing of the seed, of the cynicism which afflicted so many of my generation after the war. Hitherto I had believed everything that authority said to me: all the slogans and catchwords of the day found their snuggery and breeding-ground in my simple, ingenuous, well-meaning, warmly affectionate and patriotic heart. The Germans used gas and lying propaganda, the English did not, I thought; it was as simple as that. To find that the supporters of my own cause were not as perfectly pure as I had imagined them, was a severe and sudden disillusionment.

  Scarcely had the March offensive died down when the enemy struck again, in April, and almost rolled up the whole British line; Haig issued his famous order about fighting it out with our backs to the wall. Barely was this attack stemmed when the enemy struck yet again, in May; the Allied line reeled back to the Marne, Paris was again in danger. The Allied casualties were enormous, and eighty thousand prisoners were taken by the Germans. In England the conscription age-limit was raised to fifty, a savage comb-out took place in industry, all holidays were cancelled and munition factories worked solidly twenty-four hours of every day of the week.

  This last fact caused me to be absent from home at the moment when Edie, her cheerful florid face pinched and grey, rushed in bearing the dreaded telegram expressing regret that Captain John Jarmayne was missing, believed killed. When I returned to Ashroyd late that night Netta, weeping, met me in the hall and broke the news. In the sitting-room I found my mother in quiet tears, my father sitting silent, his newspaper laid aside, a look of childlike anger and incredu
lity on his face. As I came in he turned his eyes on me, and I shall never forget the assessment of myself as his only remaining son which I read there. Shame and anger mingled in my heart with a very real grief. John had been so actively, robustly, vigorously alive that it was unnatural as well as sad to think of him unliving.

  It appeared, however, that my mother did not believe him dead.

  “He’s only missing. He’s probably a prisoner. John’s very sensible, you know. He’s not likely to get himself killed. If it were Chris, now, that would be different,” drawled my mother. “Chris would get killed. But John won’t.”

  “The telegram says missing believed killed” exclaimed my father irritably.

  “I know, Edward. But they make mistakes sometimes, you know.”

  She persisted in this attitude, which received some support from a letter presently received by Edie from John’s adjutant, saying that John had not been heard of since March 24th. On that day the battalion had to hurriedly retire and a number of men were taken prisoners.

  “What did I tell you?” said my mother, beaming.

  My father in his suspense and grief fairly shouted at her— one might have thought he really wished his eldest son to be dead. Edie on the other hand remained the practical Yorkshire housewife she had always been; she showed her hope by refusing to buy mourning, but dealt with the financial affairs John’s possible loss imposed on her with an alert shrewdness she had no doubt inherited from Uncle Alfred. It was a lesson to me in human behaviour; sorrow does not necessarily ennoble, I perceived, or at least not beyond the limit of capacity of the person concerned; the ruling passion remains strong not only in death but m grief. All the Jarmaynes grieved for John; but my father remained vehement and cross-grained, my mother dreamy and remote; Edie’s pastry was still light, my own reactions were still complex, generalized, theoretical. Only Netta seemed to me to show in her simple sweetness a true sensitivity, her nature answering to demands upon it with unswerving precision, like a magnet to the pole.

  A good many young men found Netta’s simplicity soothing, the more so as the strain of battle grew more intense. Now nineteen years old, Netta was not pretty in the accepted sense of the word, but her extreme fairness—she was what we should now call a chromium blonde—her silky hair, her milk-white complexion, her charming uptilted nose and large surprised grey eyes, made a pleasing whole. She was affectionate, unselfish, incapable of any calculation—indeed her intellectual activity altogether was of the simplest kind. She admired where she loved, and her light musical chatter, conveying always only agreeable impressions, called out all that was playful and tender in her listeners. Accordingly young men in uniform of various kinds had incurred my father’s wrath by keeping her out later than he thought proper, and presently one referred to as Geoff seemed to have ousted the others and taken first place in Netta’s esteem. I myself spent so few hours in Ashroyd now that I had gathered this fact only indirectly, from Edie’s kindly teasing, my mother’s slow smile and my father’s diatribes. So I was only half-prepared for the news which Netta gave me one night on my return from work. Running out into the hall to meet me, throwing her arms round my neck and putting a storm of swift light kisses on my cheek, she exclaimed all in a breath:

  “Oh Chris isn’t it wonderful, isn’t it lovely, Geoff and I are engaged! I was so surprised, no I wasn’t really, well in a way I was, isn’t it lovely, Chris? Geoff wants us to be married before his next medical board but father doesn’t, but you must persuade him, Chris. You will, won’t you? You will! You’ll help us!”

  I put my arm round her waist and gave her a brotherly hug, kissed her soft warm cheek and assured her I would do everything in my power to help her. She laughed delightedly and drew me with quick dancing steps into the sitting-room, so that before I had time to discover what I felt about her engagement in general, I was confronted with a tall lean man of about my own age, in the double-breasted khaki at that time worn by the Royal Flying Corps. His thin, haggard, handsome face and sea-blue eyes seemed somehow familiar. He smiled at me and offered his hand. I took it clumsily, conscious of my work-worn civilian clothes as contrasted with his smart (obviously best) uniform, and embarrassed because I did not know his name.

  “But don’t you remember Geoff, Chris? You were at school together! It’s Geoffrey Graham!”

  Involuntarily I exclaimed a loud: “No!”

  My father and mother gazed at me in astonishment; Graham too fixed his handsome eyes on me, with an uneasy and discomfited expression. It was a moment of piercing anguish for me. To lose my little sister to any man would not be easy; to lose her to a man who had successfully despised and persecuted me was intolerable. It seemed the ultimate defeat; it seemed as if I were leaving a highly sensitive part of my own body in Graham’s cruel hands, to be tormented at will. I looked at Netta; she had put her arm through Graham’s and was gazing up at him adoringly.

  “Yes, it is, Chris,” she said. “It’s Geoffrey Graham, truly it is.”

  Her light voice spilled over into a peal of delighted laughter; her eyes glowed with happiness. I could destroy that happiness with a word. If I told Netta that her beloved Geoffrey had made her beloved Chris supremely wretched, that her lover had set her brother into a pattern of fear and misery which would last till my life’s end, her simple mind would be torn between us, she would fall distracted between two conflicting loyalties. I saw her pale, weeping, harrowed; and knew that I could not speak the destroying word. It was no part of my philosophy, I reflected, to force my will on others as my father did; what Netta wanted, I must help her to have. All this passed in a second of time. I managed an embarrassed laugh, stammered some banalities about the disguising effect of uniform, and took Graham’s hand. It was a finely shaped hand, lean, warm and pulsating; I could more easily, I felt, have touched the brilliant patterned coils of a snake.

  In the next few weeks my determination unselfishly to forward Netta’s happiness was taxed to the utmost. Graham, who had been severely burned about the body in a forced landing after his aircraft had been damaged by machine-gun fire, wished—naturally enough, I thought, considering the low expectation of life of a pilot in 1918—to marry before he was recalled to service. My father demurred, from no reason that I could discern except his usual cross-grained perversity; all around us such marriages took place every day, but he as always took no notice of the general custom. He found it shocking, inconsistent with Victorian ideas of decency and order, that a young man who would probably be killed in the next few months should marry a young girl and leave her a widow.

  “Let them wait till the war is over,” said my father.

  “That may be too late, Edward,” drawled my mother.

  “They are far too young in any case,” grumbled my father.

  “Father, it’s cruel to Netta to keep them apart,” I blurted.

  “I wish you wouldn’t use such exaggerated expressions, Chris,” said my father. “Cruel indeed! What nonsense!”

  The persuasive pressure exerted by my mother and myself upon him would doubtless in the long run have been successful, but meanwhile the sands of Graham’s leave were running out. Suddenly, however, Netta’s cause received unexpected assistance. Geoffrey’s parents, Canon and Mrs. Graham, who had several times been invited to our house but found themselves unable to accept, at length appeared there, and it became at once evident that they were quite as reluctant as my father about the marriage. That his adored and brilliant son should marry a girl of slightly lower social status and (as he thought) no money was not agreeable to the Canon, a tall dark lean predatory man to whom we all took an instant dislike. His wife, however, a fair faded gentlewoman whose character had much quiet strength, had allowed herself to be mollified by Netta’s sweetness.

  “She’s a good girl, Mrs. Jarmayne,” she said to my mother, who beamed with happiness at this tribute.

  The Grahams were south-country people, with the appropriate accents, manners and contempt for the industrial north.
In these circumstances I could not but be glad for Netta’s sake that John was not on the scene, for John and Canon Graham would have come to fierce warfare. Henry on the other hand—I had not thought of Henry for years—would have been a great asset. In his absence it fell to me to uphold the prestige of the family against Canon Graham’s attacks. I found my reading my most useful weapon. It seemed that Geoffrey Graham—it was almost out of my power to call him Geoffrey alone—who had been pursuing the study of the law at Oxford before the outbreak of the war, had not shown the eager scholarship and pertinacious assiduity (the Canon’s words) which his father had desired. The Canon was a good classical scholar and in history a well-read man; we were able to use the same language in talking to each other, and perhaps he found the absence of any claim to learning on my part a point in my favour, for he could amiably patronise a man without a degree. But the main part played by the Canon in Netta’s marriage consisted of the antagonism he aroused in my father, who after a very short experience of his condescending suggestions about postponing the wedding, became violently convinced that the young people ought to marry at once, and said so with his customary vehemence. Accordingly Geoffrey and Netta had their wish, and were married by special licence on a bright June day.