“He didn’t wake me, I’ve been awake some time,” Thorburn said with a little malice.
In silence Kent looked at Marriot. There was now nothing he could say to him. Marriot shook his head slowly: his eyes, astonishingly bright and loving, advised his friend to keep quiet.
“Do you expect me to stand about and see you decently murdered?” said Kent.
Still watching him, with the same gentleness, Marriot said,
“I’m perfectly all right. I give you my word, there’s absolutely nothing you need remember.”
Kent turned back to Thorburn. A painful sense of contraction in his throat made speaking difficult; he waited a minute and said coolly,
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve done us in once, by coming here. Need you add this bloody farce to it?”
Thorburn stood up, supporting himself with the back of the chair. An extraordinary air of arrogance, gaiety, almost slyness, made him look fresher.
“You’re quite right. I’m not up to dealing out maquis justice.” He glanced with careless irony at Marriot. “Nor your sort of political justice, either—my naive out-of-date principles don’t let me sentence a chap for crimes he may be going to commit some time—in fact because he doesn’t agree with me. … I don’t think I have any illusions—we shall certainly come to that, this country is going to be split from top to bottom, as others have been, and poison rubbed in its wounds … unless poisons don’t take on us. … You—” he made an amiable gesture towards the other young man—“you mustn’t delude yourself. I’m sparing you one ugly memory. No one’s likely to do that for you next time you run up against the need to kill one of our own people. … And if anyone says it’s not more disgusting and ugly to kill one of your own people than a foreigner, he’s a damned fool. No sensibility. An ass. If compassion is worth anything at all it’s narrow. … I’m warning you, my boy—you won’t get through this war without doing some abominable things. If you don’t mind my saying so—without guilt. Only thing that will save you from going bad is to know you’re guilty. Yes, know it. If you try to comfort yourself, you’re lost. …”
He shambled a few steps about the room, buttoning his jacket, and considered Marriot again, sadly, without much kindness.
“As for you—you young fool. You’ll comfort yourself all right. You’ll forget the lesson you’ve just had; you’ll tie a bandage round what used to be your wits, and when you begin agreeing to kill poor innocent devils for not having the sort of sentiments you think they ought to have, you’ll absolve yourself in the holy name of the people or the revolution or something equally exalted and nebulous. … God help you.”
He turned, and roared at Hutton.
“Come away from that door.”
The soldier stepped neatly aside. Marriot had not moved.
“Well?” Thorburn said rather brutally.
Marriot moved his head.
“I’m to go?”
“Yes. Get out.”
“It’s very good of you—” Marriot began.
Thorburn interrupted him.
“Thank my feebly liberal idea of justice. Or my stomach.”
“Thank you all the same,” Marriot said with difficulty.
“You might just remember—if it won’t sadly inconvenience you—that there used to be a time, and a world, which knew the difference between guilt and innocence. Now get out.”
“Oh, sweet Christ,” Kent said, “don’t hang about. Hop it.”
Marriot took a few steps towards the door. He turned and said to Kent,
“Look after yourself.”
“I might drop in on you one of these days.”
“No,” Marriot said. “Don’t.”
Kent smiled very briefly.
“See who catches who, eh?”
They looked at each other for a minute. Then Marriot went out: he hesitated in the doorway, but without looking back. The greyness outside, mist or the vaporous light before dawn, turned him into a shadow moving through it before it swallowed him.
Kent turned and faced Thorburn. He began a phrase, and was obliged to cough before he could finish it, stuttering. He was nervous: his face jerked, the lines below his eyes had deepened.
“I’m very grateful, sir. If you hadn’t helped us, it would have been a poor do,” he said. And stopped.
“I’m an old bastard.”
“Sorry, sir,” Kent said. He was only slightly disconcerted.
“No, you’re right. I’m old enough to do out of conviction—out of disgust as well—something you would have done because you’re an ignorant young fool. And out of love. Don’t look sour. I don’t give a damn what you feel or think.”
He lumbered as far as the door, filling it with his wrinkled back, and stared out. From the windless half-light a thought came to him: he remembered another war, in another age, and helmeted young men waiting beside him in the same stillness and grey light. As now, the minute had been all, without future. Yet this, now, here, was its future, he thought. To what future is this agony the past? … A shudder in the sea disturbed him, reminding him where he was.
Turning, he looked at Kent and Hutton. Their faces were alike in being closed to him. It was for himself he said, throwing it at them,
“That fellow Breuner is right. We go on living with what we did—we’re not cut off.”
Chapter Five
An hour later the light was strong enough to suck their colour from the lamps still burning in the room.
Lackland had listened to the general without comment. As he talked, Thorburn rambled about the room, speaking casually, as if he were bored, and scratching himself: his body was irritable with sleeplessness. As soon as he ceased,
“You can go,” Lackland told Kent.
The young man stepped just outside the door. He stood there, with his back to them. In the strict light, the yellow of the gorse was dimmed as by water. When you cannot see the sky, the night, the limitless night, is small. An immense sky now opened into space, pencil lines and feathers of white cloud floated off into the blue. He listened with half an ear to the dialogue behind him, in the room.
Thorburn said very roughly,
“You should add a line to your report to make it clear that the man was released by me, on my responsibility.”
“Very good, sir.”
With a touch of contempt,
“No doubt it hasn’t struck you that he knows nothing more than will very soon be known to everybody, including the enemy. The truth is, we hypnotised ourselves with our good reasons and excellent logic into thinking it necessary to do an abominable thing. As people do much too often.”
“You know my opinion, sir.”
“I find I can bear your opinion of me very lightly. … Come to that, I’m too old, too set in my feeble ways, to live in the future you are preparing.”
“I didn’t prepare it.”
Coldly,
“No. But you’ll adapt yourself very nicely. Your feeling about civil war and that young imbecile’s are much the same coin. So for that matter are your notions of justice.”
“With the slight difference,” Lackland said, “in the ways he and I take to meet an invader.”
A pause.
“Yes. You are right. But—I’m a selfish old man, I’m thankful to know I shall be dead before killing each other becomes an English habit. Manners of that sort may go down well in a barbarous society; here they’re against the grain—enough, at any rate, to humiliate people. And a humiliated people soon dies out”—In a less overbearing voice, “None of us can avoid guilt. This particular guilt happens to be one I won’t take. Not on your life.”
“Quite,” Lackland said, in a tone of cold meditative deference. “Your own, since you’ll be out of the country, is not involved.”
Thorburn said indifferently,
“I haven’t the slightest intention of going to America. Never had.”
Startled, Kent turned round to look at him. The general had seated himself again, in a
chair just high enough for the padded back to support his neck; he stared at the ceiling, placid, bored.
Very little taken aback, Lackland said,
“May I ask, sir, what you are going to do?”
“No.”
“If I might advise—”
Genially,
“You mayn’t.”
“Very good, sir.”
“But I’ll give you a spot of advice. At a time when every sort of problem, all of them disagreeable or difficult, hits you day after day, death very soon begins to seem not only the easiest solution of them, but the cleanest. When you reach that point, look out. To get the better of a man by killing him is the second most pleasurable act in the world. Some people, I’m told, find it the first. It’s sensible not to give it too much run.”
Behind a cool stare, Lackland reflected,
“There are so many ways of killing. The least honest is to persuade people to throw away their arms.”
Thorburn smiled tranquilly.
“I daresay. But as one whose business has been killing, I feel that we should kill as seldom as possible.” He stopped, and considered Lackland with a cold penetrating shrewdness. “D’you know what—I shouldn’t be surprised if one reason you were so anxious to shoot that daft fellow was annoyance with yourself for talking about your plans without knowing the chaps you were talking to.”
After a moment, Lackland said,
“Do you need me, sir?”
“No,” said Thorburn kindly, “you can go back to bed.” As the door closed, he murmured, “A fine fellow. Too fine by half. Much too fine for me.”
He slewed round in his chair, caught the pilot staring at him from the doorway, and said testily,
“Why the hell don’t you produce this aeroplane of yours?”
Kent had no answer ready. He watched Thorburn drag himself up and walk heavily out of the room, slamming the door. Kent hesitated. As if a hand were holding it up to the light, the horizon sent a splinter of colour into his eyes. His mind felt amazingly clear; even his body was relaxed, cool, sure of itself and its purpose. To yawn and stretch his arms was like walking into the sea on a hot afternoon. She’ll be asleep now, he thought, and if I go in quietly. … He heard the door open inside the room. Cordelia came in. She had thrown her overcoat round her shoulders, over her pyjamas. He hurried to her and they came together without speaking; she seemed at this moment so slight and yielding that the thought of separation was ridiculous. Never, he said to himself, never. In its inmost recess, his mind was turning over other words, but he said nothing, only held her and looked down, in the solitude and pain of love, at the deep lightly-closed eyelids, and the marks below them of anxiety and weariness.
Chapter Six
The sun at ten o’clock in the morning had a vigour that diminished everything below it: the far hills, the yellow wave of gorse, the runways, the aircraft—no beauty—settled there.
Only to Nicholas did it look formidable enough to carry several persons to the other side of the world. Taking Hutton with him, he examined it for the best part of an hour, too absorbed to say anything, with a stern face. His gravity broke up all at once, into a radiant excitement and joy. He turned a somersault, butted the soldier in the stomach, and rolled himself in the burnt grass. Smith cocked an eye at him and said, “You’ll be crying before eleven.”
“I shan’t,” he said excitedly. “Why?”
“Laugh before seven, cry before eleven,” answered Smith.
The child turned to Hutton.
“Was I laughing before seven?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there.”
“Yes, you were, you devil, you were there, you’re always there, when I’m asleep you’re there. You never go away.”
“Don’t you let your mother hear you use words,” Smith warned him.
“Why?”
“She’ll warm you.”
“Come on now, love, we’ll take a bit of a walk,” the young soldier said softly, “we’ll find something, maybe a gull’s egg.”
They were walking off, when Hutton glanced at the building and saw the child’s mother beckoning from an upstairs window. He sighed.
“Nay, you must come in now,” he said.
Nick looked at him with an astonished frown.
“No.”
“Your mother wants you.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does that,” said Hutton. “We must go.”
The child’s sudden docilities were as unaccountable as his fits of rage. He let Hutton take his hand and they walked slowly together along the runway to the house. As they stepped inside, his father and mother came into the room through the other door. Hutton let go of his hand, and stood, silent and awkward. Seized by a fear that the aeroplane had vanished as soon as he left it, the child ran back to the door; he did not go out, but watched from there, to see that nothing wrong happened. Without knowing why, he had suddenly become uneasy.
Speaking in a low voice to Hutton, Mrs. Heron said,
“I shall never forget your kindness during these days, and how you helped me with Nick.”
“Yes, very good of you,” said Major Heron kindly. “Hope you’ll be all right now.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Hutton.
“Anything I can do for you?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ve no doubt you’ll settle down here better than you would in America. Life’s very different over there.”
“Yes, sir.”
With a warm smile, Mrs. Heron said,
“Things won’t be easy here. But, Hutton—you won’t forget Nicholas, and I shan’t let him forget you.”
Looking down, Hutton muttered,
“He’ll forget soon enough.”
“I’ll see that he doesn’t.”
“Nay, he’d best,” Hutton said inaudibly.
“What?” demanded Heron. “What did you say?”
Hutton said nothing, and at this moment Thorburn came in, with Clarke, who was walking easily, without even a limp. The general himself was neater than he had been for days: Hutton had managed to get his uniform from him long enough to brush it, had polished his boots, and laid in front of him a hair-brush Thorburn picked up absently and used. Elizabeth Heron looked at him with love. She was a little afraid of him. He had shown her only affection and kindness; the fear, such as it was, sprang in herself. Deeply, it was a fear of being judged by him—and found not straightforward, not honest, and without the charity he had abundantly: he was generous, arbitrary, overbearing; she respected him and, half without knowing it, hoped he did not “see through me.”
“Well, my dear?” he said to her.
“I believe we go very soon,” she said, with a smile. “Are you ready.”
“Oh, I’m not going,” he said carelessly.
“What?”
“I mean I’m not going in the plane. I have m’own plans.”
Very disturbed, she said,
“But, Harry, I don’t understand you. You must. This is frightful.”
“Frightful? Nonsense,” he said brusquely. “You’ll be all right, you and George”—he glanced stealthily at Heron, who said nothing—“I’m only sorry I can’t give you anything, any money. No use to me here, and no use to you over there. Pity.”
Without looking at her husband, Elizabeth asked in a low voice—a voice as seductive as always, and now curiously uncertain,
“Why aren’t you coming? Why have you changed your mind?”
Thorburn gave her a shamefaced grin.
“I told that fellow Lackland I never meant to go. It’s not true. If the aeroplane had been here waiting I should probably have got into it. Thank God it wasn’t—I’ve had time to reflect on the absurdity of an old fellow like me scampering across the Atlantic to become a charge on—really, I hardly know on what.”
“You’re not older than many people who have gone. And you had orders.”
Thorburn laughed.
“Orders! You
mean, I benefited by the order that staff officers, wherever possible, were to go by air. Far too many generals blowing about over there already. Not that I despise generals. By God, I don’t despise even brigadiers. All I know is—either Europe, and this country with it, is dead, tired of itself and its graveyards, or it still has the will to begin again—and the curiosity. … At my age, Elizabeth, one hasn’t enough curiosity to make the trouble of carting us into a new world worth it.”
He noticed that she did not appeal to her husband: she turned to Clarke.
“You agree with me,” she said eagerly, “you think he should come—tell him not to be stubborn.”
“But I’m stopping here with him,” said Clarke. He sniggered and rolled his eyes. “What d’you think? The boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but he had fled, Ti-tum-ti-tum-titumpty-tum, we’ll take the rest as read.… What?”
“But you’re both impossible,” she said, with a gesture of astonishment. Looking for the first time at her husband, she said softly, “George.”
He started violently. A look of confused annoyance came on his pale face. Before he could speak, Lackland came in from the airfield, walked directly to him, and asked,
“Well, are you leaving?”
“Of course,” drawled Heron.
“Very well, you should be ready now. And the pilot wants to see what you have—in the way of luggage. You can’t take much.”
There was a brief silence. Elizabeth said quietly,
“We have very little, and none of it matters. I’ll bring it down.”
She moved towards the door. With awkward haste, Hutton followed her; the child ran to join him, catching up with him in the doorway. After a barely noticeable pause, Heron sauntered after them. Lackland watched him go, and said lightly,
“Just as well he’s cutting off. He’s one sort of human being—not the only sort—this country will have no use for in future.”
Thorburn stared over his head.
“Oh,” he said dispassionately, “the future may not be so poverty-stricken as you think.”
“Who knows anything?” muttered Clarke. “Let it roll. … It’s a fine day. Is that fellow Breuner going over, or isn’t he? I don’t pretend to fathom the minds of foreigners. He’s been walking about all night in the next room. Every time I turned over in bed I heard him. If he goes, that’ll be three and a half passengers. Seats for another two. I don’t know what you call it, old boy, I call it very satisfactory.”
The Moment of Truth Page 14
