The Moment of Truth

by Storm Jameson

  Without meaning to, Breuner said aloud,

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “You’re not English, are you?” said Lackland.

  “No. I came from Europe.” He smiled without a trace of bitterness. “You shouldn’t despise Europe. It can still, I think, teach you a little it has learned by suffering it.”

  In his normally sharp confident voice, the colonel said,

  “Oh, quite.”

  Thorburn interrupted him.

  “I take it you weren’t going to talk about this, were you?”

  “No, sir, I wasn’t. I had no orders to keep back anyone here. In the circumstances—it bears directly on the problem of the aeroplane—I’ll take the responsibility.” He hesitated very briefly, sent a detached alert glance round them, and went on, “Certain of us must go. If you don’t mind my saying so, you, sir, and Brigadier Clarke, are too old for the maquis. Professor Breuner is, I believe, absolutely essential. That’s three passengers. It leaves two places. Obviously the child must go—and the child’s mother. If the boy is not counted as a passenger, one other person can go as well.” He looked at the girl. “You, Miss—er—”

  Cordelia looked back at him with a sullen dislike.

  “I’m not going,” she said.

  The colonel’s glance flickered over Marriot’s useless arm and hand. A lively mocking smile came on the young man’s face, but before he could jump into an imprudence Kent said hurriedly,

  “My orders are to send away essential people and V.I.P.’s. Jock—I mean Flying-Officer Henderson, the pilot—will decide whether the child counts as one passenger. Probably not.”

  There was a brief pause. From the back of the room, Hutton said, in his quiet dragging voice, awkward and decisive,

  “I s’d like to go along with you, sir.”

  He had moved a little forward, and the light showed that he was blushing, right over his face and neck to the roots of his hair—hair the lightest colour of flax, and eyebrows and eyelashes still lighter, no colour in them at all. He had small blue eyes, now starting out of his head with embarrassment, but he knew what he was saying.

  “Right,” Lackland said. “I expect young men to stay.” Rather less curtly, he went on, “Older men won’t be able to adapt themselves to a life which isn’t merely hard—but may be, yes, ugly.”

  Used by this man, the word startled Breuner.

  “What did you say?” he exclaimed.

  “I was present once,” Lackland said slowly, “during the war—I mean the last war—when four young Frenchmen decided to shoot a fifth. They had known each other since they were children—they were from the same village. If I may say so, it was unpleasant. It could happen here—I’ve no doubt it will.”

  “Yes,” murmured Breuner, “yes, it is ugly.”

  A silence. With barely repressed annoyance, Heron said,

  “It’s possible for even a farce to be ugly.”

  Lackland eyed him with a sudden mischievous gaiety.

  “You feel it would be undignified to take part in it? Well, well, we can’t all play Hamlet.”

  “Why Hamlet? You’d prefer, I suppose, a showier and more imposing role for yourself.”

  “Ah, but I’m not a genius,” retorted Lackland merrily—delighted. “I don’t have to carry myself about carefully for fear I spill over.”

  “I agree—too much intelligence would be a nuisance to you,” drawled Heron. “But you’ll need more than I believe you have if you’re not to kill thousands of unfortunate young men clumsily and very stupidly.”

  “That’s enough,” Thorburn said sternly. “The most sensible thing we can do now is to go to bed. Elizabeth—be off with you.”

  “Sleep on it, eh?” Clarke yawned and groaned.

  “Certainly. We can’t get away to-night.”

  “Perhaps the aeroplane will not come,” Breuner said in his slow quiet voice: he was speaking to himself.

  Mrs. Heron gave a cry of horror, startling them. They looked at her, Kent with annoyance and disapproval. She controlled herself at once.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she murmured.

  “It will be all right,” said Kent, vexed. “Jock has never let anyone down yet.” He glared at her. “Never. … Excuse me, sir,” he added, looking angrily at Thorburn. He turned and walked out. Glancing at each other, Marriot and the girl slipped after him.

  Shambling across to the door open on to the airfield, the general stood there, turning his back on the others. He had had enough of them. He heard them leaving, but did not move: his uncouth body, hands clasped loosely behind his back, head sunk, filled the doorway. A breath of wind touched his scalp through the matted hair: after a moment he made out the edge of the cliff, a ragged line drawn on the darkness of the sea; the sky was less dark, there were clouds on it waiting their time to thicken into a dazzling whiteness. For a moment he smelled bog myrtle; it vanished, then came again. His eyes and ears were still those of a child born and nurtured in a village: he heard the thin sound made by the reeds scraping the wall of the house; a small bird or a frog jumped twice, close to him, then all was still; the under-murmur of the sea below the cliff, the weak rustling of tiny insects in the roots of the grass, came and went like a gentle breath. Familiar sounds as they were, they kept a respectful distance from him, held back by a grief he could share with no one—would not dream of trying to share. Between him and the past, cutting off all memories with the same severity—so that last summer and the first he remembered were both now part of a legend—stood the fact of defeat. He could neither blink it away nor accept it. Merely to have known, along with a number of people, that in certain quite probable conditions, the island could not be held, was no help. And worst of all—so much worse that he felt: If it were only defeat—the withdrawal. … Call it what you like, he thought bitterly, it is no different from deserting, no better. A few thousands, perhaps, had been taken off, rulers, administrators, mechanics, fighting men, the strongest, the youngest, the most able, and the rest, millions of them, left. The desertion and abandonment of the English people—of the country itself, with its fields, its shores, its buried footsteps and voices. … He recalled an evening, at the end of a week’s infantry exercises on the Plain, when he had taken an American observer to stay the night with him in his own house in Stockbridge. They reached the village just before dark, the downs folding in softly behind it, the one only street empty, and the river, the Test, looking greener and clearer than he had said it was—he had never seen it look so well. … Why, it could be New Hampshire or Connecticut, his guest said. … Do you mean to tell me, he had answered—and only now felt the arrogance of his words—that you have anything like this in your country? … He did not believe it. And if it were true, if he were taken and shown it, what good? Not being English, it would be no more to him than the next stream.

  Before he could save himself, he saw his village, the wide street, the Test, waiting, as at this moment they waited. … He turned sharply round.

  He was not, as he had thought, alone. Clarke was still there, and met the frown he got with a look of astonishing simplicity.

  “What the devil d’you think you’re doing?” demanded Thorburn.

  “What d’you think you’re doing?”

  Before Thorburn answered, there was the sound, a great way off, of aeroplanes—not very many. He listened to it.

  “Hear them?”

  “Yes. They’ll be ours,” Clarke murmured.

  “Leaving.”

  To-day, to-morrow, in a day or two, it would really be the last planes: looking down, the airman would see fields, the coast, the rocks and sand below the edge of the sea, then a shadow, then nothing.

  “It’s only dark for about an hour up here, isn’t it?” said Clarke.

  Chapter Three

  The next day, between four in the afternoon and five, Elizabeth Heron came into the room. She had been looking for her husband, but he was not here, no one was here, and she stood, turning over the stained and torn
pages of magazines, unable to make up her mind to seek him outside. The heat was too great; the sun, burning behind a fine drifting mist, drew the strength out of her; she felt tired and oppressed. Nicholas, who could stand any sun, was out of doors with Hutton: she could hear his clear voice and Hutton’s answering murmur.

  Cordelia came in, hesitated. She admired the older woman sincerely, less the charming gaiety with which she moved even her hands, than another trick she had—was it a trick?—of seeming to enjoy the company of people and of things so simply and easily that the dullest must be happy with her. With so many human beings, the things round them are not at their ease; they feel unwelcome and out of place. Mrs. Heron had only to walk across a room for it to enjoy a modest confidence. Even this room.

  She looked round, smiled at Cordelia, and held out a page in one of the papers.

  “Do look at this. Cherry-trees in Kent, only two months ago—sunlight, white petals—children. What a warm early spring we had! Shall we ever be so happy?”

  The girl had no answer ready.

  “I don’t know.” Can I ask her? she thought—shall I?—“We’ve had no rain here for weeks—and usually it rains a lot.”

  “I can’t remember, can you, a better year for them? Our trees were white from head to foot. Nick stared his eyes out—it’s the first spring he’s noticed.”

  “Yes—it seems all wrong.”

  No one would have asked himself whether Mrs. Heron were beautiful or not. In fact she was plain, and charming and delightful—and would be when she was ninety.

  “Do you think so? Haven’t you ever noticed—it’s always when a country is at its best that things happen to it? Weeks of perfect weather, sun, cloudless skies, lilac, cherry-trees, no one is ill, even old people wake up feeling lighter than usual, there are more boys born than girls, the days are the clearest anyone ever saw, the nights warm and quiet—and then, nearly without any interval, war.”

  Cordelia felt without envy that the older woman was much too intelligent for her. How ignorant I am, she thought, and how dull. It was of no importance, and she had other things on her mind.

  “I expect you’re right,” she murmured.

  “Isn’t it rather unusual you’ve heard nothing of the plane? I thought—wireless and all that?”

  She caught the thread of anxiety in Mrs. Heron’s careless tone; it made her feel less inadequate.

  “Oh, no,” she reassured her, “he has to keep quiet; you couldn’t have him chattering about where he is, telling everybody. They’re not interested in a single unimportant plane, but still. … Of course he’ll come.”

  Elizabeth did not speak for a moment, then said,

  “You’re a pilot yourself, aren’t you? Do you like it?”

  “No. I hate flying.”

  “Really. Then why?”

  She tried hurriedly to think why she had chosen to train as a pilot. Because it was unusual and rather dashing?—when her mother said: Cordelia is going off to-morrow to begin training as a pilot, people who had always known her glanced at her with surprised interest. But it was not so unusual as all that, two of her own school friends … Because she wanted to reassure herself that she could do it? Because it was, after all, the most exciting, the best thing that offered? No, it must be much simpler than that. She had never asked herself why she was doing it—there are so many questions one must ask before it is necessary to fall back on questioning oneself. Certainly this was not the time: she said politely,

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you hate it, didn’t that make it more difficult to learn?”

  “Oh no.” The warmth in Mrs. Heron’s voice made her curiosity tolerable, even kind. “If you expect to like it very much, you’re less—less respectful, and that usually ends badly.” Hesitating a little, she said, “I don’t hate it—that was very silly. It’s a job, like any other.”

  “You’re very brave,” said Mrs. Heron, smiling, “I should never have the courage to fly.”

  Cordelia did not answer. Either I speak to her now, or it will be too late, she thought; I mayn’t get another chance. She was trembling, and she remembered at this moment that she had dreamed something like this the night before the first of her parachute jumps when she was training—a nightmare, not a dream.

  “I wanted to talk to you about the aeroplane.” She paused, and went on, “Nicholas is very light, I’m sure

  he won’t count as a passenger, but he does weigh something. That leaves—with you and the three old men—one possible place. That will be for Major Heron—if he’s going.”

  Elizabeth raised her eyebrows.

  “But, Miss Hugh-Brown, surely there’ll be room for you? You’re very light, too.”

  “An aeroplane isn’t a lorry,” she said drily.

  “Of course not—stupid of me—I thought it was.”

  She felt herself blushing.

  “Forgive me, I’m sorry.”

  “What’s the matter, my child?”

  She noticed that Mrs. Heron had avoided saying anything about her husband—whether he were going or not. With a resolute calm, she said,

  “It’s not easy to tell you—to tell anyone. I should like—I have a particular reason—I should like to go.”

  “Explain to me,” said Mrs. Heron, gently.

  “In six months—yes, it will be six months—my—my son will be born.”

  “You’re sure, are you, child, that it will be a son?”

  “Of course. You said yourself—” she broke off—realising, just in time, that she was being led along a diversion she had started herself. “I’m being very silly,” she muttered. She waited. Mrs. Heron did not speak. She had to go on. “That has nothing to do with it. The point is—since Jock was able to come back for us—and pilots were ordered to go, they’ll be needed—it seemed perfectly all right.”

  After a minute, Elizabeth said,

  “Forgive me—are you married?”

  Cordelia looked at her without speaking. She was not vexed: an impulse not her own kept her silent—it came perhaps from that slow-thinking obstinate man, her father, master in his ship and his home.

  “I ought not to ask. It’s Mr. Kent, isn’t it? You’re both terribly young—it’s impossible, and besides I haven’t a shadow of right, to blame either of you.”

  No, you have no right, thought Cordelia. She said slowly,

  “If we married I should have had to leave the Station. We didn’t want to be separated. And the last few weeks, of course, have been impossible; we’ve been hard at it sending scientists and their equipment away from Garra House, and fetching their families to a few of them—and all that.”

  “You meant to get married over there?”

  She hesitated a long time, ashamed and angry, then said,

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Heron lifted both her hands, palms upward.

  “It needs courage to bring a child into the world now.”

  “Yes. We were wrong.”

  “I didn’t say that, child,” answered Elizabeth swiftly.

  “No, you didn’t say it.” She was, she knew it, being uncouth and graceless. The older woman’s kindness, and her seductive voice and manner, were a sword in the hands of a skilled fencer. She could do nothing against it, except behave like a sullen schoolgirl in front of a charming and very clever headmistress.

  “What do you want me to do?” Mrs. Heron asked.

  Hesitating again,

  “Couldn’t you persuade one of the old gentlemen not to go?”

  Mrs. Heron smiled.

  “Didn’t you, when you came in, mean to ask me whether my husband was going? He’s not a soldier, you know, Miss Hugh-Brown. You’d hardly call Intelligence soldiering—or would you? He’s a writer.”

  Cordelia looked at her, waiting.

  “He’s one of the people they would kill as soon as they caught him.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere, she thought. She no longer felt baffled, and said coolly,

 
“Why should either of the old generals go? They can’t possibly be needed. There are hundreds of generals.”

  “My poor child,” Mrs. Heron said, “there are thousands of young women in this country, waiting for sons to be born to them.”

  Anger flamed in her, behind her eyes; her knees shook.

  “Any one of them is more important than two distinguished old men!”

  “You want both of them to stay behind?”

  Controlling herself, she said,

  “What use is it for me to go to America alone? After all … we shouldn’t be living safe lives, the war will go on, and I shall be the wife of a fighter pilot. Do you think—”

  Elizabeth interrupted her in a light voice, with the same air of simplicity and kindness,

  “How stupid I’ve been. Forgive me. I forgot—oh, but surely, wouldn’t it be the simplest thing in the world for you to call yourself Mrs. Kent? Who would doubt it? And you know—surely you know?—I’d help you to make it seem all right, and in any way.”

  The girl was silent. She did not feel embarrassed or afraid, although she was forced now to make a humiliating confession. It seemed to her that in a few minutes she had aged by as many years. She was not even nervous.

  “I was lying,” she said distinctly. “Andrew and I were married a month ago, in Garra village—by the Presbyterian minister.”

  A scarcely noticeable pause.

  “How wise. But—my dear child—I don’t understand why you—misled me.”

  Cordelia looked at her steadily.

  “Oh, I’m sure you do, Mrs. Heron. You know very well that I wanted you to think it was important for Andrew to go with me—if I go. If I’d told you the truth—that I can’t live without him—that means nothing.”

  “No, no, it means everything,” Elizabeth said warmly.

  Now, she thought.

  “Then help me.”

  Without knowing it, she had moved nearer Mrs. Heron. She realised it suddenly, finding herself looking closely at the other woman’s face, so plain and flawed, the skin almost coarse, and so charming. She stepped back.

  A strange calm smile crossed Mrs. Heron’s face.

  “Do I seem to you old?”