Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  But her very insistence on the oddity of my ways and the probable disapproval of my elder brother militated against her argument, for Beatrice took pains to make me feel that my mode of life was superior to the general, my work interesting, my intellect remarkable; I was a man, not a mere younger brother, her delicate and tactful flattery continually insisted; she resented on my behalf any idea that we should defer our marriage till we heard what John said—such a suggestion was, she said, both insulting and ridiculous. Accordingly we married before the month was out at the Hudley Registrar’s office—I had scruples against submitting to a religious service, to which Beatrice most charmingly and unprotestingly deferred.

  It is difficult to describe my state of mind during the months that followed, though I can feel it, experience it, vividly as I write. A profound uneasiness, a feeling that all that was best and most characteristic of myself sobbed alone in a dark cave, alternated with a greater ease and comfort on the surface than I had ever previously enjoyed. I was no longer lonely; my wife hastened to meet me when I returned and was with me whenever I wished through all my leisure time. Beatrice was always pleasant, always affable, always ready to listen— nobody had ever listened to me as she listened, and though she knew little of the subjects that especially interested me, she had a lively natural intelligence and had lived with an intelligent father, so she was able to make responses far superior to those hitherto offered by my own family. It was agreeable to hear the opinions of a contemporary, a member of my own generation. She managed Ashroyd—for in my mother’s absence it seemed the best arrangement for the time for us to live there—with taste and skill; my father and I enjoyed better meals and greater comfort than ever before. She also managed my father, who admired and was a little afraid of her, with taste and skill, deferring outwardly to him but taking care that I received the dishes and arrangements I preferred. (For example, she did not grudge or interrupt the hours I spent in reading, but would devote these to pleasing my father, in talk or walk.) In our intimate relations no wife could have been kinder or more understanding; she received my clumsy and ignorant attempts at lovemaking with such infinite pity and gentleness that I was encouraged to believe (falsely) that I was not too unsatisfactory as a husband. She showed more knowledge in these matters than I did, but, accustomed as I was to being belated and inadequate in all the relations of life, this did not surprise me, and I was able to take pride in achieving the status of manhood.

  And yet I was wretched. Reading did not give me the same pleasure as of old, because the glorious delights of love which all creative literature exalted were, I now felt, placed forever out of my reach. My work now stifled and bored me, I did it conscientiously only for my country’s sake. In a word, my life had been stripped of hope. So that when presently Beatrice informed me that she was with child, I was almost torn apart by two contradictory emotions. On the one hand I felt that a child, whether son or daughter, would bring new hope, new interest, into my life and I should, of course, cherish and love it very tenderly. On the other hand, the birth of this new generation seemed to press me back into the past, to make me old and fatherly, to transfer my hopes from myself to my child as I had seen happen with earlier generations; my young-manhood was over before it had begun; a lifetime of captivity lay before me.

  Meanwhile July and August had come and gone, with their French and British tank victories, their “black day” for the German army, and September had brought the brilliant American operation round St. Michel. In October the news was all of Allied advances—no doubt they “stuck” sometimes and the newspapers told us the “penetration” was disappointing; but of retreats or adverse break-throughs there was no further mention. The tide of war had turned and now flowed irresistibly in our favour. Ludendorff fell; the Germans asked for an Armistice; the cease-fire, as everyone knows, took place at eleven o’clock on the eleventh of November, Monday morning. After a moment of overpowering joy when the buzzers and the church bells gave the news, I suddenly felt unutterably tired, cross and flat. Our workers were pouring out of the factories; the machines stood still for the first time in years. I asked my superiors if my services were required for the reconstruction meeting which was immediately to be held, and in a rather odd tone was told that they were not; I could go home. I threw myself into a train and found myself in Hudley, and presently at Ashroyd shortly after noon.

  For the first time in our married life, Beatrice did not seem pleased to see me. She came downstairs slowly to my call and set about preparing a meal with a slow step and a weary look; her face was pale and drawn and shadows lay heavily under her eyes. Thinking with concern of her condition, I began to help her, carrying trays and so on. In the middle of this my father burst into the house, as excited as a child. The town was all agog, said he; a special edition of the Hudley News carrying the good news had now been published, the streets were crowded, the Parish Church bells were ringing, flags and banners and bunting were everywhere displayed. We must at once find air old Union Jack he was sure we still possessed, which dated from the Coronation of Edward VII at the beginning of the century, and display it somehow at the front of the house; then walk down to town to see what was going on. I went to the attic in search of this flag while Beatrice completed the luncheon preparations, and with a good deal of instruction and interference from my father I eventually managed to drape it from a front window. Beatrice looked deathly pale when we at last came downstairs, and the dishes she placed on the table seemed almost ready to fall from her nerveless fingers. As we cleared away the meal together—our daily help having been swept away by the tide of national excitement—Beatrice once or twice clung to the table and seemed to experience a painful moment before she could proceed. I urged her privately to remain at home and rest while I went out with my father, but she seemed suddenly better and insisted on accompanying us.

  As my father had told us, the streets of the town were crowded; parties of workers linked arms and moved forward with dancing steps, singing the wartime songs which now suddenly belonged to the past and became unbearably poignant. People wept, laughed, slapped each other on the back, fell on each other’s necks, kissed each other; trams and cars could make no headway; policemen were swallowed up so that only their helmets and sometimes a beaming eye were visible, crowds surged towards the Town Hall to see a decoration of flags on its façade which had been hastily improvised there, then surged back again in search of something more exciting. The crowds were not in any sense riotous or out of control, but one received a good deal of good-humoured jostling in the continual movement to and fro. Beatrice took my arm and clung to me with what seemed an increasing weight and limpness; my father several times was swept away from us, but always turned up again, vehemently accusing some piece of ill manners on somebody else’s part which had effected the separation.

  On one such occasion the protruding elbow of a man carrying a child on his shoulder knocked off my father’s pince-nez. He exclaimed in a tone of furious anguish :

  “My glasses! You’ve knocked off my glasses! ”

  “Eh, I’m right sorry,” said the man, turning to my father. “It’s little lad, you see; I have to carry him. Stand back a bit, please!” he shouted. “Here’s someone lost their glasses!”

  The crowd nearby, pleased to show kindness on this great day, with a good deal of officious shouting and backing and the eventual aid of a policeman managed to clear a small space about us, in the middle of which sure enough lay on the pavement my father’s pince-nez, shattered as to glass but with their gold rims intact. Greatly embarrassed by all this public attention I stooped to pick them up, slipping my arm from my wife’s to do so. To my horror, Beatrice fell on her knees beside me, uttering a heavy groan.

  The crowd about us at once fell silent.

  “Beatrice!” I exclaimed, trying to raise her from the ground.

  It was beyond my strength to do so. The policeman came to my rescue, and raised her in his arms. But she lay back against him with her eyes
shut, and again a loud groan came from her open lips, which looked pale and swollen. Her hat fell back, her hair drooped over his arm.

  “She’s in her time—you didn’t ought to have brought her out in a crowd, mester,” shrilled a woman in my ear.

  “No, no!” I exclaimed. “It’s not that. It’s too soon. . . .” My voice tailed away in shame as I found I had involuntarily given out this revelation of my private affairs.

  “She’s having a miss, then,” said the woman shrewdly.

  A young woman in her twenties pushing her way through to the front of the ring now enquired loudly:

  “What’s wrong, eh? What’s going on?”

  “It’s a woman having a miscarriage,” replied the woman who had first spoken to me.

  The crowd about us at once became immensely sympathetic: Beatrice was carried to a nearby doorstep—the shops had all closed and this was the only shelter we could find. The policeman telephoned for an ambulance. I sat on the step and took Beatrice’s body as far as possible across my lap; her face was ashen and she was racked by groans. A few elderly men amongst the passers-by stood in front of us to guard us from the passing footsteps. The ambulance arrived; Beatrice was placed on a stretcher; I accompanied her to the hospital. My father, white and horror-stricken, tried to ascend the ambulance steps after me, but I cried out with savage vehemence that he was not to do so, and the policeman after a glance at my face held him with gentle strength at a distance.

  Beatrice gave birth to a living child, a son, and died the same evening. I had a few minutes alone with her before she became unconscious. Simple, foolish and ignorant as I was at that time, I was not so utterly devoid of sense as to imagine that the perfectly formed and healthy infant which the nurse showed me could possibly be a five-months child, nor was I unaware of the reserve in the manner, of the doctor and the nurses when dates and expectations were mentioned. (They, of course, imagined that Beatrice and I had had intercourse before marriage.) It was all quite clear to me; John’s solitary departure, the peal of the bell which came from Ashleigh, the shock which killed Dr. Darrell, Beatrice’s sudden determination to marry me; all was clear.

  All her beauty, all her elegance, had ebbed from her when I saw her; even the hand which lay on the coverlet had lost its fine clear outline; she was just a piece of suffering flesh. Perhaps that made it easier for me. At any rate I felt closer to her than I had ever done before. As I sat down beside her bed she opened her eyes—those fine bright speaking hazel eyes, now full of anguish—and murmured my name.

  “Chris.”

  I took her hand. She regarded me steadily.

  “You know,” she said.

  “Yes. Why didn’t you tell me, Beatrice? Why didn’t you trust me? I should have done just the same, you know, if you’d told me. I should have married you. It hurts me that you didn’t trust me.”

  “I was afraid,” murmured Beatrice, closing her eyes.

  “Afraid of me? Now come, Beatrice!” I said in a gently teasing tone. “You know that’s nonsense.”

  Beatrice sighed. After a pause she seemed to make an effort, and opened her eyes.

  “Shall you tell?” she whispered.

  This was the moment of decision which I had tried to postpone by joking kindness. I considered. If Beatrice lived, and I separated myself from her, I saw her wandering away through life, alone; if, as the doctors hinted, she died, there was the child, stigmatized by illegitimacy. Their fate lay in my hands and I simply could not condemn them to such misery. There was Edie, too. There was my father. There was, suddenly rushing up out of the past, my brother Henry. The prospect before me if Beatrice lived and I kept silence was hideously black, unutterably bitter. All the same I could not betray Beatrice; it was against my nature, against my cherished view of life, to do so.

  “No,” I said.

  Beatrice sighed again.

  “You’re a good boy, Chris,” she said.

  This wounded me very deeply. A good boy, that is all I am to everyone who knows me, I thought in angry resentment; John is a man, a soldier, attractive to women; I am just a good boy. I remembered with profound humiliation some of the less successful occasions on which I had made love to my wife. My silence was noticed by Beatrice, and she glanced at me.

  “I should like the boy to be called Robert, after my father,” she said.

  “Very well,” said I in a somewhat dry tone.

  Immediately I had spoken thus, I was ashamed.

  “Don’t worry about anything, Beatrice,” I said warmly, bending over her: “Everything will be all right. Trust me. You can trust me.”

  She gave me an infinitely wry and ironic smile—“after all,” I reflected, “she has not had much reason to trust the Jarmayne brothers”—and slipped away to coma and death.

  6

  As I turn over old newspapers to refresh my memories of the period of World War I, I am filled with an immense sadness. From the yellowing newsprint of 1914-1918 the names and staring, naïve, innocent photographs of Yorkshire young men start up, with captions praising their swift recruitment or promotion. A few months (or weeks) later “sad news has been received” by Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So of the same address; the lad 4s dead, or “has had the misfortune to lose the sight of both his eyes,” or, as happened to Geoffrey Graham two days before the Armistice, “was shot down in flames.” In regimental histories such as the one John proudly gave to us, page upon page, set densely in small type with casualty lists, show how many lads were wrenched out of life, how much homely likeable humanity was lost to the West Riding.

  Nor is it only the dead and the maimed who suffer from war, nor those who, like Netta, suffer direct bereavement. The whole fabric of life is torn by the violence of the emotions roused by the prospect of early death. I had not to endure the long agony of trench warfare, and shall always carry a feeling of inferiority—itself an evil—on that account; but yet I was deceived, betrayed, most cruelly, in my deepest and tenderest feelings, by passions which were heightened beyond control by the threat of final parting, I suppose John felt—and I shall not blame him—that to die without having once possessed Beatrice was not to be endured.

  As for my own part in this obscure and perhaps commonplace but none the less painful little tragedy of Beatrice and her child: I admit frankly that my acceptance of my brother’s child as my own was a piece of youthful idealism I should not be capable of nowadays. Though no doubt some fear and inertia had a part in my decision too, and above all an agonizing unwillingness to let my father know of my betrayal.

  I do not yet quite know whether I finally regret this acceptance, but at times I have certainly done so. But for what reasons? I know enough of human nature now to distrust my surface motives—I am amused, for example, to reflect that I thought I refrained from suicide when rejected for military service, on my family’s account, or because of Henry, when in reality I was merely rationalizing a sudden strong upward surge of desire for life. So when I remember telling myself at times that falsehood is incompatible with my chosen ethics, that John and Robert ought to have known themselves from the first as father and son, that Edie (who brought up Robert and loved him dearly) would have got over the shock before John returned from Germany and that I myself was not the best person to sustain the paternal relation towards Robert, I smile wryly and probe below. Those motives are genuine enough, but others lie beneath, more personal and more powerful.

  I find that I have disliked the instability of the falsehood, which a single careless word could topple, and the necessity it imposed for incessant watchfulness. I disliked appearing as a fool before John. I should have been glad to be honourably quit of the responsibility of Robert, who is not the sort of lad with whom I have much affinity, though he has my half-humorous affection.

  I think again, and certainly do not regret my shielding of Beatrice, to whom on the contrary I feel a certain gratitude, since it was she who taught me to be a man. Moreover, the contents of my adolescent daydreams reveal that I had in
part a desire for just such a woman as Beatrice: a lonely princess, older, nobler, more experienced than the egregious Etherington, who yet trusted in no-one but him. I suppose I constructed this princess partly out of Beatrice, and my marriage to Beatrice partly out of my need of this princess. But between the daydream and the action there is a great gulf fixed, and these fantasies would not have come to fruition, I imagine, if they had not been favoured by the hot unnatural climate of war.

  Thus the impact of World War I on the Jarmayne family, though we prospered materially, was undoubtedly severe. Of how many other thousands, millions of families this can be said, I know only too well.

  6

  Post-War

  1

  It is hardly possible to convey to the present generation the passion, the violence, of the revolt of my contemporaries against the Victorian tradition of our fathers, during the first post-war period. The very word Victorian became a term of abuse, while to deride the Victorians and their ideas was the pastime of all classes of society, from intellectuals like Lytton Strachey to popular song-writers. This revolt was shared by the two main, widely different, sections of the youth of the day, of which my brother John and I were typical specimens.

  John returned from the rigours of a German prison-camp early in 1919, looking thinner and wearing a derisive smile. He soon recovered his weight and squarely solid appearance, thanks to Edie’s cooking, but the smile of contempt remained, though it gradually took on a more cheerful tone. Familiarized by active service with the idiocies of generals and the contrast between the reality of war and the sentimental view of it promulgated in the newspapers, he had come to distrust all authorities and to despise all restrictions, especially parental restrictions, as inventions of the old to keep the young from enjoying themselves. (No doubt, to find Beatrice dead added to his rebellion against the scheme of things, but he said nothing to me of this matter, nor I to him.) Since every soldier, sailor and airman returning from active service needed a civilian suit, and the markets of the world had been starved of West Riding cloth for four years, there was a boom in the textile trade and money was plentiful; this money John proceeded to spend in cheerful profusion which appalled my father. Dancing was the rage, and John and Edie danced—as my father angrily remarked, “morning, noon and night.” Sophistication was the fashion, and the simple homely entertainments formerly favoured in Lonsdale Road gave place to cocktail parties; high tea was replaced by dinner, fur coats and silken underwear became essentials, and in every way the manners and customs of a higher class were imitated. The three children —indeed I may as well say four, for from the first Robert lived with them—were allowed to exhibit a hearty selfishness which was only limited by John’s temper and Edie’s basic common sense.