And so this morning the voice struck into his consciousness. ‘It is the end of England.’ So he walked along blindly, up the valley and on the moors. He loved the country intensely. It seemed to answer him. But his consciousness was all confused. In his mind, he did not at all see why it should be the end of England. Mr Asquith was called Old Wait-and-See. And truly, English Liberalism had proved a slobbery affair, all sad sympathy with everybody, and no iron backbone, these years. Repulsively humble, too, on its own account. It was no time for Christian humility. And yet, it was true to its great creed.
Whereas Lloyd George! Somers knew nothing about Lloyd George. A little Welsh lawyer, not an Englishman at all. He had no real significance in Richard Lovat’s soul. Only Somers gradually came to believe that all Jews, and all Celts, even whilst they espoused the cause of England, subtly lived to bring about the last humiliation of the great old England. They could never do so if England would not be humiliated. But with an England fairly offering herself to ignominy, where was the help? Let the Celts work out their subtlety. If England wanted to be betrayed, in the deeper issues. Perhaps Jesus wanted to be betrayed. He did. He chose Judas.
Well, the story could have no other ending.
The war-wave had broken right over England, now: right over Cornwall. Probably throughout the ages Cornwall had not been finally swept, submerged by any English spirit. Now it happened—the accursed later war spirit. Now the tales began to go round full-tilt against Somers. A chimney of his house was tarred to keep out the damp: that was a signal to the Germans. He and his wife carried food to supply German submarines. They had secret stores of petrol in the cliff. They were watched and listened to, spied on, by men lying behind the low stone fences. It is a job the Cornish loved. They didn’t even mind being caught at it: lying behind a fence with field-glasses, watching through a hole in the drystone wall a man with a lass, on the edge of the moors. Perhaps they were proud of it. If a man wanted to hear what was said about him—or anything—he lay behind a wall at the field-corners, where the youths talked before they parted and went indoors, late of a Saturday night. A whole intense life of spying going on all the time.
Harriet could not hang out a towel on a bush, or carry out the slops, in the empty landscape of moors and sea, without her every movement being followed by invisible eyes. And at evening, when the doors were shut, valiant men lay under the windows to listen to the conversation in the cosy little room. And bitter enough were the things they said: and damnatory, the two Somers. Richard did not hold himself in. And he talked too with the men on the farm: openly. For they had exactly the same anti-military feeling as himself, and they simply loathed the thought of being compelled to serve. Most men in the west, Somers thought, would have committed murder to escape, if murder would have helped them. It wouldn’t. He loved the people at the farm, and the men kindled their rage together. And again Somers’ farmer friend warned him, how he was being watched. But Somers would not heed. ‘What can they do to me!’ he said. ‘I am not a spy in any way whatsoever. There is nothing they can do to me. I make no public appearance at all. I am just by myself. What can they do to me? Let them go to hell.’
He refused to be watchful, guarded, furtive, like the people around, saying double things as occasion arose, and hiding their secret thoughts and secret malignancy. He still believed in the freedom of the individual.—Yes, freedom of the individual!
He was aware of the mass of secret feeling against him. Yet the people he came into daily contact with liked him—almost loved him. So he kept on defying the rest, and went along blithe and open as ever, saying what he really felt, or holding his tongue. Enemies! How could he have any personal enemies? He had never done harm to any of these people, had never even felt any harm. He did not believe in personal enemies. It was just the military.
Enemies he had, however, people he didn’t know and hadn’t even spoken to. Enemies who hated him like poison. They hated him because he was free, because of his different, unafraid face. They hated him because he wasn’t cowed, as they were all cowed. They hated him for his intimacy at the farm, in the hamlet. For each farm was bitter jealous of each other.
Yet he never believed he had any personal enemies. And he had all the west hating him like poison. He realised once, when two men came down the moorland byroad—officers in khaki—on a motor-bicycle, and went trying the door of the next cottage, which was shut up. Somers went to the door, in all simplicity.
‘Did you want me?’ he asked.
‘No, we didn’t want you,’ replied one of the fellows, in a genteel voice and a tone like a slap in the face. Somers spoken to as if he were the lowest of the low. He shut his cottage door. Was it so? Had they wilfully spoken to him like that? He would not believe it.
But inwardly, he knew it was so. That was what they intended to convey to him: that he was the lowest of the low. He began even to feel guilty, under this mass of poisonous condemnation. And he realised that they had come, on their own, to get into the other cottage and see if there were some wireless installation or something else criminal. But it was fastened tight, and apparently they gave up their design of breaking in, for they turned the motorcycle and went away.
Day followed day in this tension of suspense. Submarines were off the coast; Harriet saw a ship sunk, away to sea. Horrible excitement, and the postman asking sly questions to try to catch Somers out. Increased rigour of coast watching, and no light must be shown. Yet along the highroad on the hillside above, plainer than any house-light, danced the lights of a cart, moving, or slowly sped the light of a bicycle, on the blackness. Then a Spanish coal-vessel, three thousand tons, ran on the rocks in a fog, straight under the cottage. She was completely wrecked. Somers watched the waves break over her. Her coal washed ashore, and the farmers carried it up the cliffs in sacks.
There was to be a calling-up now and a re-examination of every man—Somers felt the crisis approaching. The ordeal was to go through, once more. The first rejection meant nothing. There were certain reservations. He had himself examined again by a doctor. The strain told on his heart as well as his breathing. He sent in this note to the authorities. A reply: ‘You must present yourself for examination, as ordered.’
He knew that if he was really ever summoned to any service, and finally violated, he would be broken, and die. But patience. In the meanwhile he went to see his people: the long journey up the west, changing at Plymouth and Bristol and Birmingham, up to Derby. Glamorous west of England: if a man were free. He sat through the whole day, very still, looking at the world. Very still, gone very far inside himself, travelling through this England in spring. He loved it so much. But it was in the grip of something monstrous, not English, and he was almost gripped too. As it was, by making himself far away inside himself, he contained himself, and was still.
He arrived late in Derby: Saturday night, and no train for the next ten miles. But luckily, there was a motor-bus going out to the outlying villages. Derby was very dark, like a savage town, a feeling of savagery. And at last the bus was ready: full of young miners, more or less intoxicated. The bus was crammed, a solid jam of men, sitting on each other’s knees, standing blocked and wedged. There was no outside accommodation. And inside were jammed eighteen more men than was allowed. It was like being pressed into one block of corned beef.
The bus ran six miles without stopping, through an absolutely dark country, zeppelin-black, and having one feeble light of its own. The roads were unmended, and very bad. But the bus charged on, madly, at full speed, like a dim consciousness madly charging through the night. And the mass of colliers swayed with the bus, intoxicated into a living block, and with high, loud, wailing voices they sang:
There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams—
Where the nightingales are singing and the—
This ghastly trailing song, like death itself. The colliers seemed to tear it out of their bowels, in a long, wild chant. They, too, all loathed the w
ar: loathed it. And this awful song! They subsided, and somebody started ‘Tipperary’.
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go—
But Tipperary was already felt as something of a Jonah: a bad-luck song, so it did not last long. The miserable songs—with their long, long ways that ended in sheer lugubriousness: real death-wails! These for battle songs. The wail of a dying humanity.
Somebody started:
Good-bye—eeee
Don’t cry—eee
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye—eee—
For it’s hard to part I know.
I’ll—be—tickled-to-death to go, Good-bye—eeee
Don’t cry—eee—
But the others didn’t know this ragtime, and they weren’t yet in the mood. They drifted drunkenly back to the ineffable howl of
There’s a long, long trail—
A black, wild Saturday night. These were the collier youths Somers had been to school with—approximately. As they tore their bowels with their singing, they tore his. But as he sat squashed far back among all that coated flesh, in the dimmest glim of a light, that only made darkness more substantial, he felt like some strange isolated cell in some tensely packed organism that was hurtling through chaos into oblivion. The colliers. He was more at one with them. But they were blind, ventral. Once they broke loose heaven knows what it would be.
The Midlands—the theatre in Nottingham—the pretence of amusement, and the feeling of murder in the dark, dreadful city. In the daytime these songs—this horrible long trail, and ‘Goodbyeeee’ and ‘Way down in Tennessee.’ They tried to keep up their spirits with this ragtime Tennessee. But there was murder in the air in the Midlands, among the colliers. In the theatre particularly, a shut-in, awful feeling of souls fit for murder.
London—mid-war London, nothing but war, war. Lovely sunny weather, and bombs at midday in the Strand. Summery weather. Berkshire—aeroplanes—springtime. He was as if blind; he must hurry the long journey back to Harriet and Cornwall.
Yes—he had his papers—he must present himself again at Bodmin barracks. He was just simply summoned as if he were already conscripted. But he knew he must be medically examined. He went—left home at seven in the morning to catch the train. Harriet watched him go across the field. She was left alone, in a strange country.
‘I shall be back tonight,’ he said.
It was a still morning, as if one were not in the world. On the hill down to the station he lingered. ‘Shall I not go! Shall I not go!’ he said to himself. He wanted to break away. But what good? He would only be arrested and lost. Yet he had dawdled his time, he had to run hard to catch the train in the end.
This time things went much more quickly. He was only two hours in the barracks. He was examined. He could tell they knew about him and disliked him. He was put in class C 3—unfit for military service, but conscripted for light non-military duties. There were no rejections now. Still, it was good enough. There were thousands of C men, men who wanted to have jobs as C men, so they were not very likely to fetch him up. He would only be a nuisance anyhow. That was clear all round.
Through the little window at the back of their ancient granite cottage, Harriet, peeping wistfully out to sea—poor Harriet, she was always frightened now—saw Richard coming across the fields, home, walking fast, and with that intent look about him that she half feared. She ran out in a sort of fear, then waited. She would wait.
He saw her face very bright with fear and joy at seeing him back: very beautiful in his eyes. The only real thing, perhaps, left in his world.
‘Here you are! So early!’ she cried. ‘I didn’t expect you. The dinner isn’t ready yet. Well?’
‘C 3,’ he replied. ‘It’s all right.’
‘I knew it would be,’ she cried, seizing his arm and hugging it to her. They went in to the cottage to finish cooking the evening meal. And immediately one of the farm girls came running up to see what it was.
‘Oh, C 3—so you’re all right, Mr Somers. Glad, I’m glad.’
Harriet never forgot the straight, intent beeline for home which he was making when she peeped out of that little window unaware.
So, another respite. They were not going to touch him. They knew he would be a firebrand in their army, a dangerous man to put with any group of men. They would leave him alone. C 3.
He had almost entirely left off writing now, and spent most of his days working on the farm. Again the neighbours were jealous.
‘Buryan gets his labour cheap. He’d never have got his hay in but for Mr Somers,’ they said. And that was another reason for wishing to remove Richard Lovat. Work went like steam when he was on Trendrinnan farm, and he was too thick with the Buryans. Much too thick. And John Thomas Buryan rather bragged of Mr Somers at market, and how he, Richard Lovat, wasn’t afraid of any of them, etc., etc.—that he wasn’t going to serve anybody, etc.—and that nobody could make him—etc., etc.
But Richard drifted away this summer, on to the land, into the weather, into Cornwall. He worked out of doors all the time—he ceased to care inwardly—he began to drift away from himself. He was very thick with John Thomas, and nearly always at the farm. Harriet was a great deal alone. And he seemed to be drifting away, drifting back to the common people, becoming a working man, of the lower classes. It had its charm for Harriet, this aspect of him—careless, rather reckless, in old clothes and an old battered hat. He kept his sharp wits, but his spirit became careless, lost its concentration.
‘I declare!’ said John Thomas, as Somers appeared in the cornfield, ‘you look more like one of us every day.’ And he looked with a bright Cornish eye at Somers’ careless, belted figure and old jacket. The speech struck Richard: it sounded half triumphant, half mocking. ‘He thinks I’m coming down in the world—it is half a rebuke,’ thought Somers to himself. But he was half pleased: and half he was rebuked.
Corn harvest lasted long, and was a happy time for them all. It went well, well. Also from London occasionally a young man came down and stayed at the inn in the church town, some young friend of Somers who hated the army and the Government and was generally discontented, and so fitfully came as an adherent to Richard Lovat. One of these was James Sharpe, a young Edinburgh man with a moderate income of his own, interested in music. Sharpe was hardly more than a lad—but he was the type of lowland Scotsman who is half an artist, not more, and so can never get on in the ordinary respectable life, rebels against it all the time, and yet can never get away from it or free himself from its dictates.
Sharpe had taken a house further along the coast, brought his piano down from London and sufficient furniture and a housekeeper, and insisted, like a morose bird, that he wanted to be alone. But he wasn’t really morose, and he didn’t want really to be alone. His old house, rather ramshackle, stood back a little way from the cliffs, where the moor came down savagely to the sea, past a deserted tin mine. It was lonely, wild, and in a savage way, poetic enough. Here Sharpe installed himself for the moment: to be alone with his music and his general discontent.
Of course he excited the wildest comments. He had window curtains of different colours, so of course, here was plain signalling to the German submarines. Spies, the lot of them. When still another young man of the same set came and took a bungalow on the moors, West Cornwall decided that it was being delivered straight into German hands. Not that West Cornwall would really have minded that so terribly. No; it wasn’t that it feared the Germans. It was that it hated the sight of these recalcitrant young men. And Somers the instigator, the arch-spy, the responsible little swine with his beard.
Somers, meanwhile, began to chuckle a bit to himself. After all he was getting the better of the military canaille. Canaille! Canaglia! Schweinerie! He loathed them in all the languages he could lay his tongue to.
So Somers and Harriet went to stay a weekend with Sharpe at Trevenna, as the house was called. Sharpe was a C 2 man, on perpetual tenterhooks. He had decided th
at if ever he were summoned to serve, he would just disappear. The Somers drove over, only three or four miles, on the Saturday afternoon, and the three wandered on the moor and down the cliff. No one was in sight. But how many pairs of eyes were watching, who knows? Sharpe lighting a cigarette for Harriet was an indication of untold immorality.
Evening came, the lamps were lit, and the incriminating curtains carefully drawn. The three sat before the fire in the long music room, and tried to be cosy and jolly. But there was something wrong with the mood. After dinner it was even worse. Harriet curled herself up on the sofa with a cigarette. Sharpe spread himself in profound melancholy in his big chair, Somers sat back, nearer the window. They talked in occasional snatches, in mockery of the enemy that surrounded them. Then Somers sang to himself, in an irritating way, one German folksong after another, not in a songful, but in a defiant way.
‘Annchen von Tharau’—‘Schatz, mein Schatz, reite nicht so weit von mir.’ ‘Zu Strasburg auf der Schanz, da fiel mein Unglück ein.’ This went on till Sharpe asked him to stop.
And in the silence, the tense and irritable silence that followed, came a loud bang. All got up in alarm, and followed Sharpe through the dining room to the small entrance room, where a dim light was burning. A lieutenant and three sordid men in the dark behind him, one with a lantern.
‘Mr Sharpe?’—the authoritative and absolutely-in-the-right voice of the puppy lieutenant.
Sharpe took his pipe from his mouth and said laconically, ‘Yes.’
‘You’ve a light burning in your window facing the sea.’
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