After the Dance

by Alan Warner

  ‘I remember,’ he used to tell them, ‘we came to this house once. It was among a lot of trees, you understand. I don’t know their names so don’t ask me. Well, the house was rotten with Boche and we’d fired at it all day. And the buggers fired back. Towards evening – it might have been 1800 hours – they stopped firing and it got so quiet you could hear yourself breathing. One of our blokes – a small madman from Wales, I think it was – dashed across and threw a grenade or two in the door and the window. And there wasn’t a sound from inside the house, ’part from the explosion of course, so he kept shouting, “The Boche are off, lads,” in that sing-song Welsh of his. So we all rushed the place and true enough they’d mostly gone. Run out of ammunition, I suppose. We went over it for mines but there wasn’t none. So we stood in the hall, I suppose you’d call it, all of us with our dirty great boots and our rifles and bayonets and there was these stairs going up, very wide. The windows were shot to hell and there was glass all over the place. And suddenly – this is God’s truth – an old woman come down the stairs. Dressed in white she was, a lovely dress like you’d see in a picture. And her lips all painted red. You’d think she was dressed for a ball. Her eyes were queer, they seemed to go right through you as if you wasn’t there. She came down the last steps and our officer stepped forward to help her. And do you know what she did? She put her arms around him and she started to waltz. He was so surprised he didn’t know what to do – the fat bugger. And all the time there was this music. Well, in the end he got away from her and some people took her away. Well, we could still hear this music, see? So we goes upstairs – there was a dead Boche on the landing, he’d been shot in the mouth – and we goes into this room. There was a bed there with a pink what-do-you-call-it over it. And beside the bed there was this big dead Boche. And do you know what – there was a dagger with jewels in it stuck in his breastbone. And beside him on the floor there was this phonograph playing a French tune, one of the officers said. He said it was a dance tune. Someone said it was bloody lucky the little fat fellow wasn’t wearing a grey uniform.’

  ‘All present and correct, sir,’ said Sergeant Smith.

  ‘All right, let’s go then,’ said Lieutenant Mackinnon.

  Down the trench they went, teeth and eyes grinning, clattering over the duckboards with their Mills bombs and their bayonets and their guns. ‘What am I doing here?’ thought Robert, and ‘Who the hell is making that noise?’ and ‘Is the damned wire cut or not?’ and ‘We are like a bunch of actors,’ and ‘I’m leading these men, I’m an officer.’

  And he thought again, ‘I hope the guns have cut that barbed wire.’

  Then he and they inched across No Man’s Land following the line of lime which had been laid to guide them. Up above were the stars and the air was cool on their faces. But there were only a few stars, the night was mostly dark, and clouds covered the moon. Momentarily he had an idea of a huge mind breeding thought after thought, star after star, a mind which hid in daylight in modesty or hauteur but which at night worked out staggering problems, pouring its undifferentiated power over the earth.

  On hands and knees he squirmed forward, the others behind him. This was his first raid and he thought, ‘I am frightened.’ But it was different from being out in the open on a battlefield. It was an older fear, the fear of being buried in the earth, the fear of wandering through eternal passageways and meeting grey figures like weasels and fighting with them in the darkness. He tested the wire. Thank God it had been cut. And then he thought, ‘Will we need the ladders?’ The sides of the trenches were so deep sometimes that ladders were necessary to get out again. And as he crawled towards the German trenches he had a vision of Germans crawling beneath British trenches undermining them. A transparent imagined web hung below him in the darkness quivering with grey spiders.

  He looked at his illuminated watch. The time was right. Then they were in the German trenches. The rest was a series of thrustings and flashes. Once he thought he saw or imagined he saw from outside a dugout a man sitting inside reading a book. It was like looking through a train window into a house before the house disappears. There were Mills bombs, hackings of bayonets, scurryings and breathings as of rats. A white face towered above him, his pistol exploded and the face disappeared. There was a terrible stink all around him, and the flowing of blood. Then there was a long silence. Back. They must get back. He passed the order along. And then they wriggled back again avoiding the craters which lay around them, created by shells, and which were full of slimy water. If they fell into one of these they would be drowned. As he looked, shells began to fall into them sending up huge spouts of water. Over the parapet. They were over the parapet. Crouched they had run and scrambled and were over. Two of them were carrying a third. They stumbled down the trench. There were more wounded than he had thought. Wright . . . one arm seemed to have been shot off. Sergeant Smith was bending over him. ‘You’ll get sent home all right,’ he was saying. Some of the men were tugging at their equipment and talking feverishly. Young Ellis was lying down, blood pouring from his mouth. Harris said, ‘Morrison’s in the crater.’

  He and Sergeant Smith looked at each other. They were both thinking the same: there is no point, he’s had it. They could see each other’s eyes glaring whitely through the black, but could not tell the expression on the faces. The shells were still falling, drumming and shaking the earth. All these craters out there, these dead moons.

  ‘Do you know which one?’ said Robert.

  ‘I think so, sir, I . . . Are you going to get him?’

  ‘Sergeant Smith, we’ll need our rifles. He can hang on to that if he’s there. Harris, come with us.’ They were all looking at him with sombre black faces, Wright divided between joy and pain.

  ‘Sir.’

  Then they were at the parapet again, shells exploding all around them.

  ‘Which one is it?’ And the stars were now clearer. Slowly they edged towards the rim. How had he managed to break away from the white lime?

  They listened like doctors to a heartbeat.

  ‘Are you there, Fred?’ Harris whispered fiercely, as if he were in church. ‘Are you there?’ Lights illuminated their faces. There was no sound.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right one?’ Robert asked fiercely.

  ‘I thought it was. I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Sergeant Smith.

  ‘We’d better get back then,’ said Robert.

  ‘Are you going to leave him, sir?’ said Harris.

  ‘We can’t do anything till morning. He may be in one of the shallower ones.’ His cry of ‘Morrison, are you there?’ was drowned by the shriek of a shell.

  ‘Back to the trench again,’ he said, and again they squirmed along. But at that moment as they approached the parapet he seemed to hear it, a cry coming from deep in the earth around him, or within him, a cry of such despair as he had never heard in his life before. And it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from all the craters, their slimy green rings, from one direction, then from another. The other two had stopped as well to listen.

  Once more he heard it. It sounded like someone crying ‘Help’.

  He stopped. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’re going for him. Come on.’

  And he stood up. There was no reason for crawling any more. The night was clear. And they would have to hurry. And the other two stood up as well when they saw him doing so. He couldn’t leave a man to die in the pit of green slime. ‘We’ll run,’ he said. And they ran to the first one and listened. They cried fiercely, ‘Are you there?’ But there was no answer. Then they seemed to hear it from the next one and they were at that one soon too, peering down into the green slime, illuminated by moonlight. But there was no answer. There was one left and they made for that one. They screamed again, in the sound of the shells, and they seemed to hear an answer. They heard what seemed to be a bubbling. ‘Are you there?’ said Robert, bending down and listening. ‘Can you get over here?’ They could hear splashing an
d deep below them breathing, frantic breathing as if someone was frightened to death. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘if you come over here, I’ll send my rifle down. You two hang on to me,’ he said to the others. He was terrified. That depth, that green depth. Was it Morrison down there, after all? He hadn’t spoken. The splashings came closer. The voice was like an animal’s repeating endlessly a mixture of curses and prayers. Robert hung over the edge of the crater. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t let me go,’ he said to the other two. It wasn’t right that a man should die in green slime. He hung over the rim holding his rifle down. He felt it being caught, as if there was a great fish at the end of a line. He felt it moving. And the others hung at his heels, like a chain. The moon shone suddenly out between two clouds and in that moment he saw it, a body covered with greenish slime, an obscene mermaid, hanging on to his rifle while the two eyes, white in the green face, shone upward and the mouth, gritted, tried not to let the blood through. It was a monster of the deep, it was a sight so terrible that he nearly fell. He was about to say, ‘It’s no good, he’s dying,’ but something prevented him from saying it, if he said it then he would never forget it. He knew that. The hands clung to the rifle below in the slime. The others pulled behind him. ‘For Christ’s sake hang on to the rifle,’ he said to the monster below. ‘Don’t let go.’ And it seemed to be emerging from the deep, setting its feet against the side of the crater, all green, all mottled, like a disease. It climbed as if up a mountainside in the stench. It hung there against the wall. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’ His whole body was concentrated. This man must not fall down again into that lake. The death would be too terrible. The face was coming over the side of the crater, the teeth gritted, blood at the mouth. It hung there for a long moment and then the three of them had got him over the side. He felt like cheering, standing up in the light of No Man’s Land and cheering. Sergeant Smith was kneeling down beside the body, his ear to the heart. It was like a body which might have come from space, green and illuminated and slimy. And over it poured the merciless moonlight.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to the other two. And at that moment Sergeant Smith said, ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ There was a long pause. ‘Well, take him in anyway. We’re not leaving him here. We’ll take him in. At least he didn’t die in that bloody lake.’ They lifted him up between them and they walked to the trench. ‘I’m bloody well not crawling,’ said Robert. ‘We’ll walk. And to hell with the lot of them.’ He couldn’t prevent himself swearing and at the same time despising himself for swearing. What would Sergeant Smith think of him? It was like bringing a huge green fish back to the lines. ‘To hell with them,’ he shouted. ‘This time we’ll bloody well walk. I don’t care how light it is.’ And they did so and managed to get him back into the dugout. They laid him down on the floor and glared around them at the silent men.

  ‘Just like Piccadilly it was,’ said Harris, who couldn’t stop talking. ‘As bright as day.’

  ‘Shut up, you lot,’ said Sergeant Smith, ‘and get some sleep.’

  Robert was thinking of the man he had seen reading a book in a flash of light before they had gone in with their bayonets. He couldn’t see properly whether it had been a novel or a comic. Perhaps it was a German comic. Did Germans have comics? Like that green body emerging out of the slime, that fish. He began to shiver and said, ‘Give the men whisky if there is any.’ But he fell asleep before he could get any himself, seeing page after page of comics set before him, like red windows, and in one there was a greenish monster and in another a woman dancing with a fat officer. Overhead the shells still exploded, and the water bounced now and again from the craters.

  ‘The bloody idiot,’ said Sergeant Smith looking down at him. ‘He could have got us all killed.’ Still, it had been like Piccadilly right enough. Full of light. It hadn’t been so bad. Nothing was as bad as you feared.

  The House

  In Oban in Scotland there is an unfinished circular many-windowed tower which dominates the town. It was built by a local banking family in order to give employment to the townspeople at a time when there was not much work to be had. Modelled on the Colosseum, statues of the bankers were to be placed in the windows and possibly, for all one knows, illuminated at night. But in fact for some reason – it may be that there was not enough money or it may be that death intervened – the tower was never completed and remains to this day, an object of curiosity to the many tourists who come from all over the world. It is very high up and the walk there is long but pleasant. When one arrives inside the empty structure one can walk across the circular grassy floor and hear, if it is a day in spring or summer, the birds trilling close at hand, or one can perch on the sill of one of the windows and look down at the sea which glitters in the distance. It is said that a certain lady was once looking for the Colosseum in Italy and tried to find out where it was by describing it as that building which is modelled on McCaig’s Tower in Oban.

  But in fact in our own village when I was growing up there was a house which had been unfinished for a long time though of course it was not so large as this tower. It was being built by the family of the Macraes over many years and no one remembers when it was begun though there are legends about it. The first Macrae, it is said, spent his entire life gathering huge boulders from wherever he could find them and hammering away at them like a sculptor to prepare them for the house. He was, it is also said, a very large strong fellow who killed a man who made mock of his dream house, not a stone of which had actually been laid. The two men, the Macrae and the other, fought, so it is said, for a whole day till eventually Macrae got his opponent on the ground and banged away at his head with a large stone which he was actually going to use in the building of the house. After that, no one made fun of his project. He died of a stroke with the hammer in his hand.

  The next Macrae was a dreamier type of person. He himself didn’t attempt any of the actual building but employed some workers to do it. The trouble was that he had so many ideas and plans, some appearing in his head simultaneously, that they had to pull down what they had built almost as soon as they had built it.

  Also they drank and smoked when they should have been working and continually asked for higher wages which he refused to give them. At one time he would want the house to merge into the landscape, at another he would want it to stand out from it since he was subject to varying moods of submission and domination. They say that he would walk around dressed in very bright colours shouting at his workmen in fragments of Italian which he had picked up from a guidebook. The workers naturally thought that he was mad.

  One of the inhabitants of the village – actually the schoolmaster – called him Penelope partly because of his dainty effeminate air, but also because he was pulling down each morning what had been erected the night before. But this Macrae, whose name was Norman, didn’t care. He went his way, carried a whip, and liked nothing better than to order his workers about though they paid little attention to him. There seemed, otherwise, little purpose in his life. He didn’t believe in God or the Bible and said once that things existed to be changed every day in order to prevent boredom. In fact he would have nothing to do with the detailed plans which his massive father had drafted out and wouldn’t even look at them. He would sometimes say that he wasn’t necessarily his father’s son, a comment which caused some gossip in the village as in fact his father had been a man who liked women and was a bit of a Lothario.

  When Norman died all that had been accomplished was that half the gable had been built. Norman had wanted to have an engraving set in the stone which would show a horse with an eagle’s head but had died before this could be started. The only reason he could give for creating such an engraving was that he liked eagles and horses, though in fact he had only seen an eagle once in his whole lifetime, and that was in a painting. The villagers didn’t like him as much as they had liked his father, though he had harmed them less, and had not, like his father, fornicated with many of their plia
nt daughters. They didn’t understand his statements for he could say that truth can be revealed as much in a green door as a red one, and that men’s shoes are being worn out each day. However when there was a sickness in the village he had helped them out with corn and fish though he openly despised all of them and called most of them superfluous.

  The next Macrae – Donald – was different again from Norman. He was a gloomy man who always wore dark clothes and spent most of his time reading his grandfather’s plans in a small room of his house. He also hired workers but kept them at it. The trouble was that he could never find the exact kind of stone that he wanted for the house, and all the stone that he did find locally was, according to him, soft and inferior. He spent much money on importing stone and because it was so expensive he became poorer and poorer but succeeded at last in adding another wall in which a long narrow lugubrious window was set. Sometimes he would sit with his elongated head and body at this window gazing across the village or brooding or reading a theological book. He would tell the villagers that they must prepare for their deaths and that they were merely like the lilies of the field. It did not escape their notice however that he got as much money from them as he could. He said that the house he was building was like a temple which would last forever and that it would glorify them all, poor as they were. Did they not wish to see some solid building erected among their poor thatched houses? They would gaze down at the ground, their caps in their hands, but say nothing since they couldn’t understand a word he was saying. What with his theological books and his stones he spent practically all his money and the family’s money and he died at fifty years old, a religious recluse who would suddenly emerge from his house and shout at the workmen that they weren’t worthy of their hire. Then he would mutter to himself and go back into his gloomy room where he would read till the early hours of the morning. No one had a good word to say for him for he would say things like, ‘You have no sense of excellence’ to their faces. At one time he even started a school in competition with the one already there, but after a while no one would attend it for he would never allow any of the pupils out during school hours in contrast to the teacher in the other school who used to take the children out to pick flowers and berries.