Mrs Macfarlane was an elderly gentlewoman who had ‘seen better days’ but had never, in Guy’s conversations with her, made use of the phrase or betrayed any interest in the fact. She had been a widow for some years, living on very slender resources, unable to afford a full-time domestic servant. The chief personal interest in her life was her son Charlie, who was now entering his twenty-third year. They were made, both of them, of heroic stuff; they enjoyed a singular incapacity for self-pity, and each, without either displaying or seeming to demand affection, habitually put the other first. This much was visible even to Guy, who from his own restricted point of view had nothing to gain by observing them closely. The son was a stalwart, quietly cheerful young man who contrived, without effort, to be as Scottish in appearance as one parent and as English in speech as the other; and the mother tall, grey-haired, austere-looking, with high-arched brows, high cheekbones, and a complexion which, though parchment in texture and scored with time and troubles, retained a warm reminiscence of its earlier bloom. In her clear glance, and in the fine contours of her autumnal face, the story of a spirited girlhood was still legible. From the first she had treated Guy rather as guest than lodger, though ‘paying guest’ was another of the euphemisms she privately considered vulgar. Charlie was doing well in the Civil Service, plodding with perpetual industry from one examination to another in an endeavour to rise higher in his division. His secret bent was for science, but, seeing no chance of pursuing that, he had set himself, without visible repining, to do what had to be done.
The two young men liked each other well enough. Their ways did not throw them much together, but when they did meet they were conscious of a pleasant unintimate friendliness. Guy’s regard was not quite unmixed with envy of young Charlie’s serenity of bearing, at once modest and assured; he sometimes felt a need to impress him with the larger knowledge and superior wisdom of a man of affairs; and Charlie, ingenuously ready to learn, no matter from whom, could not but think well of one who thought so well, as Guy manifestly did, of his mother. Guy was perhaps more charmed by Mrs Macfarlane than he knew; and where he was charmed he could be charming. She had three claims on his notice: she was his hostess, she was a woman of breeding, and she represented something indefinable which, not quite consciously, and not at all willingly, he surmised to be of a rarer quality, a higher price, than the kind of success he was resolved on achieving for himself. Implicit in his attitude was the fond assumption that if he got the one, the other would be mysteriously added unto him. Let me have everything I want and I’ll be the nicest fellow in the world and not ask for a thing more: this or something like it was his unspoken, unformulated promise to himself.
For the Macfarlanes the outbreak of war was an event of immediate and drastic significance, not something to be merely wondered at and pushed into the back of the mind. For Charlie was a Territorial, and had been for some years: not as a matter of patriotic duty but because, half against his sober convictions, he enjoyed the weekly drills and the annual camp. Before the day of decision came he was already encamped with his regiment, the London Scottish. Within three months he was in France. Quick work that: it made Guy think a bit. Letters and cards came trickling home. Charlie, said Charlie, was having a good time; plenty to do; a good crowd of fellows; he’d always wanted to see France, and here he was; it reminded him a bit of Hertfordshire. Don’t believe everything you see in the papers, mother. It’s not half so bad. He wrote, surprisingly, to Guy. Dear Guy, he began: he had never called him that before, and the sudden intimacy gave Guy a curious pang. It was the usual letter, half-a-dozen straightforward uncommunicative sentences in neat Civil Service calligraphy, followed, after the signature, by a postscript containing perhaps the point of it all: I’d be grateful for a line or two about my mother, when you have time.
In mid-November there came a somewhat different kind of letter. Guy came downstairs and found Mrs Macfarlane standing at the breakfast-table, staring in a perplexed way at what her son had written.
‘Good morning, Mr Elderbrook.’
‘Good morning, Mrs Macfarlane.’ Her stillness made him look at her again. ‘Any news?’
She handed him the letter. He read it with some difficulty. Darling Mother, I have had the bad luck to be shot by a German sportsman, but don’t worry, they are looking after me beautifully. In case you would like to come over and see me Nurse is writing to tell you how. It will be very nice if you can. Your loving son Charlie.
Guy looked up from his reading.
‘It’s not a bit like Charlie’s writing,’ said Mrs Macfarlane.
The comment startled him, just though it was. Those large scrawling words had not been easily achieved.
‘Difficult, you know, writing in bed,’ Guy said.
‘Charlie’s always so neat.’ She seemed unwilling to leave the point.
‘Yes, I know. But he sounds—cheerful.’
‘He would, that,’ said Charlie’s mother.
‘Have you the other letter, from the nurse?’
‘So good of her. Yes. It came in the same envelope.’
‘Well, how about having breakfast? And then—perhaps you’ll let me see you to the station, Mrs Macfarlane?’
‘How will you manage about your meals?’
He gave her a half-smile. ‘I shall eat them, as usual. Now … please don’t talk nonsense.’
‘How kind of you!’ she said.
Breakfast was a silent meal; and very soon afterwards, for it took her only twenty minutes to pack her few things, he escorted Mrs Macfarlane to the boat-train at Victoria. It was the least he could do, he thought ruefully, and on the heels of that thought came the question: what more, what was the most? There was no clear conflict in his mind, no choice between simple alternatives, and his mind refused to define the question more precisely. War was a matter for professional soldiers, and for any others who had a taste for it. And this particular war would be over in six months, if not earlier. That Territorials as well as Regulars were being sent to France surprised not only Guy; and that Charlie Macfarlane had happened to be still a Territorial was a piece of sheer bad luck, because, as his mother explained, during the summer of this very year he had come near to leaving the Force in obedience to a sanguine anti-war sentiment which he shared with other thoughtful spirits of his day and generation. He had stayed for his own pleasure, because he ‘liked the work’, as he put it; and in the latter days of peace he had stayed because it looked as though there might soon be more serious work to do. Home service was all he was committed to, legally or morally, when the war came; but his mother was not surprised when he told her, apologetically, that he had volunteered to go abroad. It would be such fun seeing France, he said: the opportunity was too good to miss.
Mrs Macfarlane confided these things to Guy on their way to Victoria. He put her into the train and waved her goodbye. He said he was sure everything would be all right, and she agreed with him, smiling gratefully.
She came home ten days later. A letter had preceded her, telling him that Charlie, shot in the back by a sniper, had died in her presence after two days of watching and waiting. We had some nice talks, she said. He was glad to have me with him.
She arrived in the evening. Guy, hearing her latchkey in the street door, wondered how he could face her. He heard her come upstairs and pass his room on the way to her own. After waiting a while, undecided what to do, he slipped downstairs and put a match to the fire in her sitting-room. To make sure of it he added paraffin, which he fetched from the kitchen. And finally he fetched a kettle of water and the teapot.
When he rose from his knees, after nursing the fire, there she was, standing in the doorway: a straight, unbowed figure, calm and grave.
‘Are you——? Did you have a good crossing? I didn’t know which day to expect you,’ said Guy, in a rush of words.
‘What a nice fire!’ she answered. ‘Yes, quite a good crossing.’
So far he had avoided looking straight at her, but now, as their eyes
met, he knew that the thing he was trying to escape must be brought into the open.
‘I had your letter,’ he said. ‘It came on Friday.’
‘My letter? Yes, I wrote it on the Tuesday. It was on Monday that Charlie died.’
‘I see,’ said Guy. ‘Monday. I hope …’
He wanted to ask if Charlie had suffered much pain. But he was afraid of the words. And above all he was embarrassed by the awkwardness, almost the indecency, of being alive and whole when Charlie was dead.
As if reading his apologetic thoughts, Mrs Macfarlane faced him squarely.
‘Well, there it is. I’ve something left still. He was a good boy,’ she said simply, ‘and he died a brave one.’
§ 10
Except for the few who will it, and hope to profit by it, war is the great negation of personal life. In the larger perspective of history it may seem to belong to a pattern, to take its place as the effect of certain causes and the cause of certain effects; but to the lives it destroys or disrupts it comes as an inane irrelevance. Personal life consists — or it is nothing — in exercising free choice, or at least in the illusion of so doing; and in war, modern war, the play of choice is reduced for some millions of men to a point where nothing is left but the last freedom of all, the indestructible freedom of the spirit: indestructible because, though a man’s mind may be manipulated by another, may be dominated by suggestion or corrupted by fear, the compulsion on his spirit is not, except he consent to it, absolute.
The British soldier, in the first instalment of Germany’s assault on civilization, had his own way of affirming this ultimate personal integrity. The Recruits Depots of that time were staffed largely by ‘disciplinarians’ of the Regular Army, who, inspired by a contempt for civilians as such, spared no effort to make themselves more hateful than the enemy who was ravaging France. Felix, at first uncertain where his duty lay, did his best to believe, for sanity’s sake, that the stories of German frightfulness were overdone. But the weight of evidence finally overwhelmed him, and it was this, rather than the ubiquitous Kitchener poster (‘Kitchener wants YOU!’), that resolved his indecision. By then, however, the campaign of voluntary recruitment had assumed, in its bitter urgency, almost the character of a persecution; there was crowding, hustle, improvisation, and a shortage of everything except energy and zeal; and drill-sergeants who had never been under fire, and never would be, flung themselves with tigerish enthusiasm into the task of knocking the newcomers into military shape. Felix did not much enjoy his first ten days in barracks. He enjoyed them even less than he had supposed he would. But he did enjoy, on the whole, the conversation of the two men whose beds were ranged one east one west of his own in the long hut that served for dormitory.
‘You don’t want to worry, chum. Look at me. They can’t kill you.’
‘Don’t talk wet,’ said his western neighbour. ‘They can do anything to you in the Army.’
‘Except put you in the family way,’ said East.
‘They can put you in the family way all right,’ West retorted. ‘But what they can’t do, they can’t make you love the child.’
On the basis of this working compromise the war went on and on, as wars will.
§ 11
It went on until even Guy felt constrained to vary his occupation. The end of 1915 found him snugly entrenched in a government department affectionately known as ‘the Ministry’, its full title, The Ministry of National Co-ordination, being too much of a mouthful for everyday use. From time to time the Minister himself, Lord Vogue, would gather his key-men together and revive their flagging spirits with the kind of sales-talk to which, as well as to his genius for spotting the main chance, he owed his present eminence. ‘Co-ordination, gentlemen, is not only the watchword and the keynote of this department. It is also the goal, the aim, the reward, of all our endeavours. Co-ordination wholesale and retail, if I may borrow a phrase from the world of commerce. It is our privilege to be the great clearing-house or nerve-centre of a multifarious national war-effort. Not, I hear you say, a very heroic function. And that is true. But nevertheless a very necessary one. Our duty to King and Country, here at home, is to do the thing that’s nearest, though it’s dull at whiles. We do not march to battle with beating drums and flying flags,’ said Lord Vogue, his eyes wistfully bright with a vision of the gay pageantry of the western front. ‘Our part, our humbler but essential part, is to make it possible for others to do so. We, so to speak, are the carpenters, the scene shifters, the anonymous designers of the great drama. We are the unseen collaborators. The armed forces depend on us to pull our weight. The factories depend on us. The social services depend on us. And so long as the war goes on—yes, and beyond the end, into the difficult period of peace and reconstruction which must follow victory—our typewriters will clatter, our telephones ring, our memoranda circulate.’ The prospect was infinitely heartening.
Only a politician could talk like that and believe it, as Guy knew. Yet he himself was more than half persuaded that he was usefully as well as comfortably employed. Of the comfort of his position there could be no question; it had numerous advantages over the military life, and the convenience of being in touch with Trumpet Court was not the least of them; scarcely a day passed without his telephoning or visiting Talavera, always to their joint profit. He could not but know that he had exceptional talents, which would be largely wasted, he believed, in the Army or the Navy or the Royal Flying Corps. Since the enemy was unlikely to be charmed or wheedled into surrender there was an element of truth in his view. But, with all this, he did not trouble to disguise from himself that he was resolved to survive the war if he could, and ready, in pursuance of that resolve, to match his wits against the world. Already the pack was in full cry. Elderly men, sipping their port after dinner, only wished they were young again; leader-writers exhorted and cajoled; venomous young women took to distributing (sometimes to wounded soldiers in mufti) the white feather, traditional badge of cowardice. To outwit these zealots was worth while for its own sake. To disinfect oneself against the epidemic of cant was a simple sanitary precaution. Cowardice? It was not so simple as that. It was not his life as such, but his life-programme, to which Guy was so obdurately attached. Taking part in a world war had never figured in that programme; therefore the war must be delicately by-passed. If the enemy had been able to invade us, then indeed there would have been something to fight for; there would have been the soil of England to defend, our homes, our personal freedom. But, that being to his mind an utterly fantastic hypothesis in view of our naval supremacy, Guy remained unconvinced that what was happening in France was really any business of his. Being as innocent of history as the rest of his generation, and less credulous, he was inclined to think that the disaster might have been averted, or that Britain could have kept out of it, and that now, at any rate, since the conflict had reached a state of deadlock, the sensible thing to do was to call it off and negotiate a peace. These are not the kind of thoughts that inspire a man to set aside cherished schemes and throw himself into battle.
Instead, Guy threw himself into his official work. In a new department such as this there was abundant scope for intelligent interference. After a discreet beginning, a week or two of minding his own business and establishing blithe personal relations with his colleagues and superiors, he ventured upon a few half-humorous criticisms of the office routine, murmured into the ear of no less a person than Lord Vogue himself. The Minister was at once startled by the impudence and disarmed by the genial self-assurance of this personable young man. Before the conversation had proceeded far he found himself positively grateful to Guy for taking notice of him, since he evidently owned the place; and Guy for his part presently found himself entrusted with the agreeable task of co-ordinating the co-ordination. This involved much study of files, much turning over of documents, much pacing of the floor, much carefully controlled impatience at interruptions, as well as the engagement of an extra secretary and an immense output of internal memora
nda. Guy worked zealously, unremittingly, far into the night, tying the organization into knots, making himself indispensable to it, substituting for the existing small confusions a vastly complicated ritual of petty procedure which only its deviser could hope to understand. While this contribution to victory was in the making he would sometimes sleep at the office, on a simple camp bed like any soldier, and rise in the morning to greet his incoming colleagues with a brave smile, modestly denying that he was overworked. His energy was impressive, his good humour infectious. Even those who grumbled to each other that the supply of Elderbrook was in excess of the demand could not deny that he was a coming man. Wherever he went he distributed fun and flattery in nicely calculated doses; charmed away dislike and drew the sting of suspicion. Nor was office routine the only thing he transformed. If he introduced a certain stiffness there, and set the junior staff murmuring against him, no one could accuse him of promoting stiffness in personal relationships. Within three months of his arrival he was on Christian-name terms with everyone under fifty: except the inferior clerks and the female secretaries, for whom the excitement of the innovation would have been too much.
The Elderbrook Brothers Page 21
