Ted spoke to their minds. He’d spent a lifetime reading and talking, and thinking, traveling, writing, and trying to align his actions with his conscience. The bourgeois culture he was born into condemned him. To conform to its values would have meant a life of self-hatred. Instead he’d developed a unique, expansive vision of justice, wherein the rights of women and workers and same-sex lovers were coequal causes in a world in need of reform. Some younger thinkers had come to regard him as a relic in their new age of progress. But in fact, as Risley (also a fan and frequent guest) liked to point out, they forgot that it was Ted who’d initiated the progress that now made them regard him as quaint.
The lovers had come for their stay at Millthorpe at a fortuitous time. About a week after their arrival, Ted traveled to London to attend the inaugural meeting of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, where he was to be honored for his efforts to free same-sex love from bigotry, ignorance, and that particular kind of hatred that liked to call itself biblical. He framed the issue with questions of science and law; he did so by the authority of his education, his talent, and his humanity.
He returned from the city happy, “but completely talked out,” he said. “Hoarse, stupefied! Writers, professors, lawyers, you can’t shut them up. If I could just bring them here to see Alec and Maurice together, there’d be no need to say another word.”
To the lovers, Ted was a figure to be cherished, mild, grandfatherly, yet youthful. He’d seen India; he’d traveled to the States—choosing steerage class once, living below deck with the emigrants. He’d visited Walt Whitman in Camden and promoted the poet’s work in England.
Sometimes, though, his socialism rankled Maurice. “This life that he lives,” he had said to Alec quietly once in their room, “his education, this house, it’s all from the money his family left him.”
“He’s earned some for himself.”
“Yes, but inherited more…”
“Like anybody else we know?”
“But I’m thankful—for my advantages, I mean. He wants to turn all England upside down.”
“What’s it now, right side up? England wants you in prison, me too, and Teddy himself and George and all our like. And what about our poor footballers at the settlement house in the city? Skinny as sticks, stunted from lack of decent food, while there’s plenty to eat all round them. A disgrace to the crown, as Aderyn Prothero might say, and a crime against Christ’s very cross! We’ve no need for Marx here in Britain. We’ve got the slums of Sheffield.”
“I only meant … Oh, I don’t know what I meant.”
Alec caressed him. “One thing for you to put down your pride and take tea with the Butcher and Wife of Osmington…”
“They’re all right, your folks—”
“Chocolate-box villagers, eh, ‘picturesque’?”
“Alec—”
“But quite somethin’ else, now, with these others we’re gettin’ to know, in town and out here—fruitcakes and frumps and bluestockings. Poets. Fuckin’ philosophers! Even when they’re well-off an’ well-bred as yourself, you’re not truly comfy amongst them.”
“Conventional, am I?”
“More of a snob, I’d say…”
“Fair enough.”
“Though, to be fair, much less now than before,” Alec said.
“All right, so maybe I’d rather play tennis—”
“With Archie London?”
“With anybody. Even with you.”
Alec pounced and caught him in a hammerlock. Maurice struggled: “That’s right—I’d rather play tennis—even with you!—than listen to Dame Risley—your great admirer!—rhapsodize about—take your pick—”
“Algernon Charles Swinburne.” Alec tightened the hold.
“Aaaack! Worse!”
“Eleonora Duse!” he said, triumphantly trilling the r.
Maurice jabbed with both elbows at once, broke the hold, pinned Alec onto their bed, and declaimed in stage-Russian, “Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov!”
Alec narrowed his eyes and hissed at him, Risley-like: “Sigismondo Malatesta.”
“Now you’ve slain me…” Maurice rolled over and died. Then he opened his eyes and asked sweetly, “And how about you? How comfy is Alec with all this?”
“Oh, I get a kick out of our oddballs, bein’ one such myself. I’m queerer by far than any of them.”
“Surely not queerer than George.”
“Just give me time, darlin’ boy.”
“All right … but meanwhile, may I suck your extremely lovely cock…?”
“Kiss first.”
Maurice obliged.
“More.”
Maurice obliged again—throat, chest, mouth. When his lover moaned, he commenced on his original mission.
A warm breeze stirred the curtains. Alec said, “Was there ever a summer so balmy?”
* * *
One afternoon late in July, after sawing back an overgrown yew, Alec carted the larger branches and trunks to chop for firewood. He found Maurice splitting logs by the shed, attired appropriately for work at Millthorpe (as was Alec), in a pair of Ted’s homemade sandals and nothing else. Alec had grown accustomed to Maurice’s beauty, but now, at a distance, it struck him anew. His lover’s skin had browned during their weeks in the sun, making his eyes seem greener. When he raised the ax, the muscles of his torso, shoulders, arms, and legs tensed; when he brought it down, he released the strength of his whole body to split the wood, and his glossy hair fell forward over his brow. To anyone, he would have appeared heroic; to Alec, he was the paragon of young manhood. “Practicin’ to build us our place in the woods?”
They unloaded the logs from the wheelbarrow. Maurice spread an old blanket on the ground among the fragrant wood chips. Their desire for each other had increased during their time together, as their lovemaking had grown more skillful. They’d learned to come together, or if one should come first, they might be so lost in each other at the moment that neither could quite tell who. Today, before that moment arrived, Maurice murmured, “I want you to enter me.”
Alec knew the longing Maurice now gave voice to, a desire at once sensual and mystical and at last impossible: to incorporate the other into himself. Despite their passion, they’d not yet tried penetration, held back by a fear of giving pain. “Won’t it hurt?” he said.
“I don’t care. George told me how. He gave me an ointment.” Maurice applied the salve and guided Alec from behind. At first he winced. “Wait!” Alec stopped. Then Maurice relaxed and said, “Yes, all right, now, go ahead, easy.” Alec slid inside and held still in the perfection of this intense new pleasure. Maurice turned his head to offer his mouth to kiss. Alec imitated with his tongue the thrust of his prick. Hardly moving, Alec came. When the spasms ebbed, then ceased, he withdrew. They held each other. Tears, not from sadness or pain, mixed with their sweat.
Alec said, “Now you inside me, just the same.”
“We don’t have to.”
“Please, Maurice, yeah, I want to.”
IV
THE PLAINS OF ILIUM
16
In London, on that night in August 1914, crowds gathered along the Mall by the palace. At 11:00 (midnight in Berlin), the ultimatum expired without a satisfactory response from Germany concerning the neutrality of Belgium.
No one could say whether the tolling of Big Ben cued the throngs to sing “God Save the King” or the singing started first and the bell seemed to join in. But the scale of the sound, and its might and solemnity, anticipated the events to follow.
Twenty minutes later the War Telegram was dispatched across the empire: WAR, GERMANY, ACT.
* * *
Their hosts at Millthorpe tried to talk them out of enlisting. George argued from practicality: “You’ve just found your parcel of woodland—you could sign for it next week. Somebody will snatch it up while you’re gone.”
Teddy, ever altruistic, preached the pacifism of Gandhi and Bertrand Russell. He’d quoted, fervently, f
rom The Kingdom of God Is Within You. He excoriated the Established Church for its hypocrisy—no, heresy!—in condoning, even promoting, this immoral war.
The baroness and Risley traveled to Millthorpe to join the cause of dissuasion. “For God’s sake, don’t!” she urged. “What you possess is too precious to risk. Listen to me: I’ve seen it before, and how often? It’s useless, all of it, except to the damned gunmakers.”
Morgan also visited, but he seemed resigned to his young friends’ enlisting, as he was to the war. (He was already planning to volunteer with the Red Cross.) When the others got loud, he stayed quiet. When the others groaned as the boys disclosed their scheme to stay together by joining the Welsh Fusiliers, Morgan’s silence grew even deeper.
For the lovers, volunteering had hardly been a matter of discussion, much less of dispute. Neither could bear that the other might think him a coward. (At Mr. Abrahams’s school, fifteen-year-old Maurice had received his only student prize for composing a short theme in Greek on the virtue of bravery in battle.) Since other men of their age and good health were volunteering, they must too. To be sure, though, the declaration of war, when it actually came, surprised them. Not because they were unaware of the crises playing out on the Continent, but because it all seemed so far from Millthorpe, where their summer was passing in a paradise of working outdoors and reading and making love.
* * *
“Together?” the examining doctor asked them at the recruiting station in Cardiff.
“Yes sir,” they both answered at once. They stood naked in line with scores of others. Maurice, ever protective of Alec, kept as close as he dared. But this was not Millthorpe: their nakedness was clinical, not glorious. Like the others they shivered even though it was August, more from jitters than the breeze. The medic seemed weary. Poor fellow, Alec thought, thumping ribs, being coughed on and who knew what else all day. When he leaned his head against Alec’s chest to listen, the recruit was sure he felt something wet. The doctor turned on his swivel stool to mark the clipboard on the table behind him. When he turned back to Alec, he saw tears in the man’s eyes. “Perfectly sound,” he said. Alec started to step away to be weighed. The doctor stopped him: “You may wait for your friend.”
The two of them had called on the Scudders in Osmington to say goodbye. They made their case to Aderyn for the Welsh tradition of valor. (In truth, enlisting in Wales was more about their getting away from South East England than honoring Alec’s maternal forebears. Maurice knew too many people around London who might ask why the two were so close. Anonymous in Wales, they imagined they could stay together.) But the mother cared nothing for valor, only for her son: “Now I wish you’d gone on that ship with your brother,” she said to him.
Maurice tried to reassure her: “We’ll look out for each other, ma’am.”
“He’d be safe overseas but for you, Mr. Hall,” she answered tartly, “and your enterprise.”
Maurice visited his family alone. The ladies of the Hall-Grace household took it as a matter of course that their scion would enlist, noblesse oblige. When he told them he’d picked the Welsh Fusiliers for their fine reputation, Mrs. Hall did not question her son’s choice: men knew about such things. She protested that she faltered in her words and sniffled only because he’d made her so proud with his courage. Ada and Aunt Ida betrayed a less tender emotion. For months the two had been planning a September wedding. They had persuaded the groom to defer enlisting till October, but would Maurice be able to get leave so soon after signing on? If not, who would escort the bride? Kitty, embarrassed by their pettiness, said she intended to volunteer as a nurse and boycott their loathsome social event.
But the lovers’ scheme of serving together was undone within days of enlisting: Maurice received orders to report to London for officers’ training. It was unthinkable, his superiors informed him, that a man of his class should serve with the other ranks. What could he and Alec do? They’d signed on for the duration. Received opinion claimed that it would be a matter of months, involving “some cavalry charges, followed by infantry skirmishes,” and so they hoped. Alec remained in Wales; Maurice left for the city.
17
The Fusiliers seemed the right fit for Alec. Fusiliers are riflemen, and the gamekeeper knew how to shoot. He was issued a Lee-Enfield Mark III (nicknamed Smellie), at heart a hunting rifle, an excellent gun, accurate despite having its barrel shortened to make it easier to carry, fitted with a magazine that held two rounds of five bullets each. The men were assured this would be a great advantage over their foes, whose best rifles held only one round of five and so would need reloading twice as often. A well-trained British infantryman could fire fifteen shots a minute. (Their instructor fired thirty-eight.) With practice, Alec was soon averaging about twenty.
Marksmanship, however, played a small part in his soldier’s life. Most of the time was spent learning rules, or marching for hours under the weight of his gear. He wondered how they’d have any strength left for battle once they got to the front. And the bayonet practice! Lunge, thrust, rip, pull it out, finish him off, and then step over the body, cursing your foe the whole time. The instructors always yelled, because in battle there would be no polite conversations. “Scream at him! Cut his balls off! He’d do it to you, fucking Jerry would!”
* * *
After six months of training in Wales, in February 1915 Private D. Alexander Scudder was deployed to France. Disembarking from the troop transport, he slipped on a bit of ice on the gangplank. The plank’s skewed angle plus the weight of his gear brought him down. Then the hefty Scot next behind, tumbling over and crushing him, added calamity to what might have otherwise been a slapstick pratfall. His left thighbone snapped under his comrade’s bulk. Fuck almighty, the pain! Yet the medics told him he was lucky. The skin was untorn, so the break was simple. They could take care of it on the base in France, no need to ship him home. They pulled the bone straight to set it. Then splints and plaster to keep it rigid. Because they were saving the morphine for battle casualties, they let him drink whatever was on hand, cheap beer, cider, and brandy so rough it turned his face red. For the next three weeks on his back he was never quite fully sober, a good thing, since whenever they slid the bedpan under him, he felt like they were breaking his thighbone anew. Then more weeks of limping around on crutches. But he was young, so when they finally removed the cast, they found the break had indeed mended neatly.
During the time Alec was unfit for battle, the British Expeditionary Force had found him other work: canine duty. In light of his gamekeeper’s experience, he was put in charge of the base’s kennels, maintaining the war dogs at ready. Not a bad job as army jobs go, except for the daily shoveling of buckets of dog shit—which he found less distasteful than scrubbing the human latrines, as his Jewish brothers-in-arms were made to do on Sundays while the Christians attended C of E services or were marched off to Catholic mass.
Blanche Richardson and her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Richardson, had made a science of training dogs for war. They’d begun in Scotland with collies and shepherds, but settled on Airedales as the ideal breed for service because of their size, speed, and stamina. Then they expanded the program to all sorts of dogs, finding suitable work for each. To Alec, the results were nearly miraculous. Beautiful animals, many of them, so patient they even let him fit their canine gas masks over their snouts, a sight at once bizarre, comic, and heartrending.
There were no ranks among the dogs, but very clear divisions of labor. The sentries had to be cloistered because of their upside-down schedules. They were fed in the morning and rested all day, their kennels quiet and darkened, to keep them alert for the night, when they’d be on patrol on the front. They also had to be kept apart from the men, since too much human contact would dull their sharp sense of the Stranger. The messenger-dogs were more ragtag, recruited from Battersea Dogs Home, from strays sent by police stations around the kingdom, even from pets volunteered by their families—mutts and show dogs togethe
r. They too were trained, fed, exercised. Alec knew that his leg was fully healed when he could jog along the roads with the pack on their daily workout.
One day some ratters arrived from England—three terriers and a dachshund. The dachshund grew crazy-excited as Alec approached the transport cages. When he knelt down to spring the door, the little guy’s tail was wagging so hard that it shook his long body with it. Once released, the dog stuffed his nose into Alec’s crotch and would not relent in his whimpering.
“Affectionate, aren’t they, those little hounds?” said a woman in uniform with a black mourning armband, who had traveled with the new dogs across the Channel. “Or perhaps it’s the burrowing instinct.” Alec stood at attention. “Affectionate and madly brave,” she continued. “The French take them boar hunting. Imagine—small as they are. This one’s from Wiltshire. A gamekeeper sent it with a note saying the villagers were pelting it with stones, because he’s a ‘German.’ He’ll make a good mascot, won’t he, and pity the rodent that crosses that schnozzle.” The dachshund, on his hind legs, was now scratching at Alec’s trousers and whining for notice. “Bruno, sit!” she commanded. Bruno sat. Alec’s eyes widened.
“Ma’am, odd as it seems, I believe I’m acquainted with this very scamp from Wiltshire.”
“Indeed!”
“But I can’t say if I’m more astonished to be seein’ him here in the army or seein’ him do as he’s told. You’d never sit still for me back at Penge, would you, now, Bruno?” When Alec spoke his name, the dog rolled over and pawed at the air.
Alec Page 14
