by Hugh Ealpole
I have now, I think, brought together all the incidents that can throw any kind of light upon the final scene.
In the middle of 1919 he retired from the Army, and it was from this time to his death that I saw something of him. He went back to his old rooms at Hortons in Duke Street, and as I was living at that time in Marlborough Chambers in Jermyn Street, we were within easy reach of one another. The early part of 1920 was a ‘queer time.’ People had become, I imagine, pretty well accustomed to realising that those two wonderful hours of Armistice Day had not ushered in the millennium, any more than those first marvellous moments of the Russian revolution produced it.
Everyone has always hoped for the millennium, but the trouble since the days of Adam and Eve has always been that people have such different ideas as to what exactly that millennium shall be. The plain facts of the matter simply were that during 1919 and 1920 the world changed from a war of nations to a war of classes, that inevitable change that history has always shown follows on great wars.
As no one ever reads history, it was natural enough that there should be a great deal of disappointment, and a great deal of astonishment. Wilbraham, being a sentimentalist and an idealist, suffered more from this general disappointment than most people. He had had wonderful relations with the men under him throughout the war. He was never tired of recounting how marvellously they had behaved, what heroes they were, and that it was they who would pull the country together.
At the same time he had a naïve horror of Bolshevism and anything unconstitutional, and he watched the transformation of his ‘brave lads’ into discontented and idle workmen with dismay and deep distress. He used sometimes to come round to my rooms and talk to me; he had the bewildered air of a man walking in his sleep.
During these months I came to love the man. The attraction that I had felt for him from the very first deeply underlay all my relations to him, but as I saw more of him, I found many very positive reasons for my liking. He was the simplest, bravest, purest, most loyal and most unselfish soul alive. He seemed to me to have no faults at all, unless it were a certain softness towards the wishes of those whom he loved. He could not bear to hurt anybody, but he never hesitated if some principle in which he believed was called in question.
He was the best human being I have ever known, or am ever likely to know.
Well, the crisis arrived with astonishing suddenness. About August 2nd or 3rd I went down to stay with some friends at the little fishing village of Rafiel in Glebeshire.
I saw him just before I left London, and he told me that he was going to stay in town for the first half of August; that he liked London in August, even though his club would be closed and Hortons delivered over to the painters.
I heard nothing about him for a fortnight, and then I received a most extraordinary letter from Box Hamilton, a fellow clubman of mine and of Wilbraham’s. Had I heard, he said, that poor old Wilbraham had gone right off his ‘knocker’? Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but suddenly one day at lunch-time Wilbraham had turned up at Grey’s—the club to which our own club was a visitor during its cleaning—had harangued everyone about religion in the most extraordinary way, had burst out from there and started shouting in Piccadilly; had, after collecting a crowd, disappeared and not been seen until the next morning, when he had been found nearly killed after a hand-to-hand fight with the market men in Covent Garden.
It may be imagined how deeply this disturbed me, especially as I felt I was myself to blame. I had noticed that Wilbraham was ill when I had seen him in London, and I should either have persuaded him to come with me to Glebeshire, or stayed with him in London. I was just about to pack up and go to town when I received a letter from a doctor in a nursing-home in South Audley Street, saying that a certain Major Wilbraham was in the home, dying, and asking persistently for myself. I took a motor to Drymouth, and was in London by five o’clock.
I found the South Audley Street nursing-home, and was at once surrounded with the hush, the shaded rooms, the scents of medicine and flowers, and some undefinable cleanliness that belongs to those places.
I waited in a little room, the walls decorated with sporting prints, the green baize centre table laden with volumes of Punch and the Tatler. Wilbraham’s doctor came in to see me, a dapper, smart little man, efficient and impersonal. He told me that Wilbraham had at most only twenty-four hours to live, that his brain was quite clear, and that he was suffering very little pain, that he had been brutally kicked in the stomach by some man in the Covent Garden crowd, and had there received the internal injuries from which he was now dying.
‘His brain is quite clear,’ the doctor said. ‘Let him talk. It can do him no harm. Nothing can save him. His head is full of queer fancies; he wants everyone to listen to him. He’s worrying because there’s some message he wants to send—he wants to give it to you.’
When I saw Wilbraham he was so little changed that I felt no shock. Indeed, the most striking change in him was the almost exultant happiness in his voice and eyes.
It is true that after talking to him a little I knew that he was dying. He had that strange peace and tranquillity of mind that one saw so often with dying men in the war.
I will try to give an exact account of Wilbraham’s narrative; nothing else is of importance in this little story but that narrative. I can make no comment. I have no wish to do so. I only want to pass it on as he begged me to do.
‘If you don’t believe me,’ he said, ‘give other people the chance of doing so. I know that I am dying. I want as many men and women to have a chance of judging this as is humanly possible. I swear to you that I am telling the truth, and the exact truth in every detail.’
I began my account by saying that I was not convinced.
How could I be convinced?
At the same time I have none of those explanations with which people are so generously forthcoming on these occasions. I can only say that I do not think Wilbraham was insane, nor drunk, nor asleep. Nor do I believe that someone played a practical joke.
Whether Wilbraham was insane between the hours when his visitor left him and his entrance into the nursing-home I must leave to my readers. I myself think he was not.
After all, everything depends upon the relative importance that we place upon ambitions, possessions, emotions—ideas.
Something then suddenly became of so desperate an importance to Wilbraham that nothing else at all mattered. He wanted everyone else to see the importance of it as he did. That is all.
It had been a hot and oppressive day; London had seemed torrid and uncomfortable. The mere fact that Oxford Street was ‘up’ annoyed him. After a slight meal in his flat he went to the promenade concert at Queen’s Hall. It was the second night of the season—Monday night—Wagner night.
He had heard no Wagner since August 1914, and was anxious to discover the effect that hearing it again would have upon him. The effect was disappointing.
The ‘Meistersinger’ had always been a great opera for him. The third act music that the orchestra gave to him didn’t touch him anywhere. He also discovered that six years’ abstinence had not enraptured him any more deeply with the rushing fiddles in the ‘Tannhäuser’ overture, nor with the spinning music in the ‘Flying Dutchman’. Then came suddenly the prelude to the third act of ‘Tristan’. That caught him, the peace and tranquillity that he needed lapped him round, he was fully satisfied and could have listened for another hour—a little strange, he told me, because the first half of the third act had always bored him with Tristan’s eternal dying. He got up and went away, not caring to stay and listen to the efforts of an inadequate contralto to over-scream the orchestra in the last agonies of ‘Götterdämmerung’.
He walked home down Regent Street, the quiet melancholy of the pipe music accompanying him, pleasing him, and tranquillising him. As he reached his flat ten o’clock struck from St James’s Church. He asked the porter whether anyone had wanted him during his absence—whether anyone was waiting f
or him now. (Some friend had told him that he might come up and use his spare room one night that week.) No, no one had been. There was no one there waiting.
Great was his surprise, therefore, when opening the door of his flat he found someone standing there, one hand resting on the table. His face turned towards the open door. Stronger, however, than Wilbraham’s surprise was his immediate convict-ion that he knew his visitor well, and this was curious, because the face was undoubtedly strange to him.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Wilbraham said, hesitating.
‘I wanted to see you,’ the stranger said, smiling.
When Wilbraham was telling me this part of his story he seemed to be enveloped—‘enveloped’ is the word that best conveys my own experience of him—by some quite radiant happiness; he smiled at me confidentially as though he were telling me something that I had experienced with him, and that must give me the same happiness that it gave him.
‘Ought I to have expected—ought I to have known?’ he stammered.
‘No, you couldn’t have known,’ the stranger answered. ‘You’re not late. I knew when you would come.’
Wilbraham told me that during these moments he was surrendering himself to an emotion of intimacy and companion-ship that was the most wonderful thing that he had ever known. It was that intimacy and companionship, he told me, for which all his days he had been searching. It was the one thing that life never seemed to give; even in the greatest love, the deepest friendship, there was that seed of loneliness hidden. He had never found it in man or woman.
Now it was so wonderful that the first thing that he said was:
‘And now you’re going to stay, aren’t you? You won’t go away at once?’
‘Of course I’ll stay,’ he answered, ‘if you want me.’
His guest was dressed in some dark suit; there was nothing about him in any way odd or unusual. His face thin and pale. His smile kindly.
His English was without accent. His voice was soft and very melodious.
But Wilbraham could notice nothing but his eyes; they were the most beautiful, tender, gentle eyes that he had ever seen in any human being.
They sat down. Wilbraham’s overwhelming fear was lest his guest should leave him. They began to talk, and Wilbraham took it at once as accepted that his friend knew all about him— everything.
He found himself eagerly plunging into details of scenes, episodes that he had long put behind him—put behind him for shame, perhaps, or for regret or for sorrow. He knew at once that there was nothing that he need veil nor hide—nothing. He had no sense that he must consider susceptibilities or avoid self-confession that was humiliating.
But he did find, as he talked on, a sense of shame from another side creep towards him and begin to enclose him. Shame at the smallness, meanness, emptiness of the things that he declared.
He had had always behind his mistakes and sins a sense that he was a rather unusual, interesting person; if only his friends knew everything about him they would be surprised at the remarkable man that he really was. Now it was exactly the opposite sense that came over him. In the gold-rimmed mirror that was over his mantelpiece he saw himself diminishing, diminishing, diminishing. First himself, large, red-faced, smiling, rotund, lying back in his chair: then the face shrivelling, the limbs shortening, then the face small and peaked, the hands and legs little and mean, then the chair enormous about and around the little trembling animal cowering against the cushion.
He sprang up.
‘No, no! I can’t tell you any more—and you’ve known it all so long. I am mean, small, nothing. I have not even great ambition—nothing.’
His guest stood up and put his hand on his shoulder. They talked, standing side by side, and he said some things that belonged to Wilbraham alone, that he would not tell me.
Wilbraham asked him why he had come—and to him.
‘I will come now to a few of my friends,’ he said. ‘First one and then another. Many people have forgotten me behind my words. They have built up such a mountain over me with the doctrines they have attributed to me, the things that they say that I did. I am not really,’ he said, laughing, his hand on Wilbraham’s shoulder, ‘so dull and gloomy and melancholy as they have made me. I loved life; I loved men; I loved laughter and games and the open air. All things that they have forgotten. So from now I shall come back to one or two. I am lonely when they see me so solemnly.’
Another thing he said: ‘They are making life complicated now. To lead a good life, to be happy, to manage the world, only the simplest things are needed—love, unselfishness, tolerance.’
‘Can I go with you and be with you always?’ Wilbraham asked.
‘Do you really want that?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Wilbraham, bowing his head.
‘Then you shall come and never leave me again. In three days from now.’
Then he kissed Wilbraham on the forehead and went away.
I think that Wilbraham himself became conscious as he told me this part of his story of the difference between the seen and remembered figure and the foolish, inadequate reported words. Even now, as I repeat a little of what Wilbraham said, I feel the virtue and power slipping away. But on that day when I sat beside Wilbraham’s bed the conviction in his voice and eyes held me so that, although my reason kept me back, my heart told me that he had been in contact with some power that was a stronger force than anything that I myself had ever known.
But I have determined to make no personal comment on this story. I am here simply as a narrator of fact.
Wilbraham told me that after his guest left him he sat there for some time in a dream. Then he sat up, startled as though some voice, calling, had wakened him, with an impulse that was like a fire suddenly blazing up and lighting the dark places of his brain. I imagine that all Wilbraham’s impulses in the past, chivalrous, idealistic, foolish, had been of that kind—sudden, of an almost ferocious energy and determination, blind to all consequences. He must go out at once and tell everyone of what had happened to him.
I once read a story somewhere about some town that was expecting a great visitor. Everything was ready, the banners hanging, the music prepared, the crowds waiting in the street.
A man who had once been for some years at the court of the expected visitor, saw him enter the city, sombrely clad, on foot. Meanwhile, his chamberlain entered the town in full panoply with the trumpets blowing and many riders in attendance. The man who knew the real king ran to everyone telling the truth, but they laughed at him and refused to listen. And the real king departed quietly as he had come.
It was, I suppose, an influence of this kind that drove Wilbraham now.
What followed might, I think, have been to some extent averted, had his appearance been different. London is a home of madmen, and casually permits any lunacy, so that public peace is not endangered. Had poor Wilbraham looked a fanatic, with pale face, long hair, ragged clothes, much would have been forgiven him, but for a staid, middle-aged gentleman, well-dressed, well-groomed, what could be supposed but insanity, and insanity of a very ludicrous kind?
He put on his coat and went out. From this moment his account was confused. His mind, as he spoke to me, kept returning to that visitor. What happened after his guest’s departure was vague and uncertain to him, largely because it was unimportant. He does not know what time it was when he went out, but I gather it must have been about midnight. There were still people in Piccadilly.
Somewhere near the Berkeley Hotel he stopped a gentleman and a lady. He spoke, I am sure, so politely that the man he addressed must have supposed that he was asking for a match, or an address, or something of the kind. Wilbraham told me that very quietly he asked the gentleman whether he might speak to him for a moment, that he had something very important to say; that he would not, as a rule, dream of interfering in any man’s private affairs, but that the importance of his communication outweighed all ordinary conventions; that he expected that the gentleman had hitherto, as ha
d been his own case, felt much doubt about religious questions, but that now all doubt was once and for ever over, that—
I expect that at that fatal word ‘religious’ the gentleman started as though he had been stung by a snake, felt that this mild-looking man was a dangerous lunatic and tried to move away. It was the lady with him, so far as I can discover, who cried out, ‘Oh, poor man, he’s ill!’ and wanted at once to do something for him.
By this time a crowd was beginning to collect, and as the crowd closed around the central figures more people gathered upon the outskirts and, peering through, wondered what had happened, whether there was an accident, whether it was a ‘drunk’, whether there had been a quarrel, and so on.
Wilbraham, I fancy, began to address them all, telling them his great news, begging them with a desperate urgency to believe him. Some laughed, some stared in wide-eyed wonder, the crowd was increasing, and then, of course, the inevitable policeman, with his ‘move on, please,’ appeared.
How deeply I regret that Wilbraham was not there and then arrested. He would be alive and with us now if that had been done. But the policeman hesitated, I suppose, to arrest anyone as obviously a gentleman as Wilbraham, a man, too, as he soon perceived, who was perfectly sober, even though he was not in his right mind.
Wilbraham was surprised at the policeman’s interference. He said that the last thing that he wished to do was to create any disturbance, but that he could not bear to let all these people go to their beds without giving them a chance of realising first that everything was now altered, that he had had the most wonderful news.
The crowd was dispersed, and Wilbraham found himself walking alone with the policeman beside the Green Park.
He must have been a very nice policeman, because, before Wilbraham’s death, he called at the nursing-home and was very anxious to know how the poor gentleman was getting on.
He allowed Wilbraham to talk to him, and then did all he could to persuade him to walk home and go to bed. He offered to get him a taxi. Wilbraham thanked him, said he would do so himself, and bade him good night, and the policeman, seeing that Wilbraham was perfectly composed and sober, left him.
