The punishment inflicted by men of honour upon an equal is subtle and spiritual, and not to be judged by crude physical standards. It is cumulative, progressive, psychical, and considers the future even more than the present. The Court might have doomed Hammersly to be shot or sent to prison, but they inflicted on him a far more delicate yet poignant punishment. They set him free. They sent him back to his own people to explain away his shame.
So Hammersly found himself in Alexandria, wearing a cheap suit of ready-made mufti, and living at a little French hotel. He knew nobody, wanted to know nobody, for he was very much at war with the world. The Englishmen who had stripped him of his uniform and relieved him of his commission had quite failed to break his spirit, or to persuade him that he had every right to feel humiliated. He carried his head a little higher, and cultivated an attitude of intense and cool defiance. His egotism had not yet received its death blow. It is rather pleasing at times to play the part of one man against the world, and Alexandria is big and cosmopolitan, and Hammersly’s Byronism was in no danger of being challenged.
He had plenty of money, for the bank cashed his cheques, after lengthy and somewhat discomfiting interviews in which he had to produce evidence of his identity, and explain and prove the nature of his position. That last half-hour in the cool bigness of that bank might have shaken any ordinary man’s self-confidence, but Hammersly went through it with a sang-froid that was insolent. He ignored the curious glances of the swarthy French-Egyptian gentleman who attended to him. Several foreign fellows consulted behind the brass rails, and looked at him as though he were some sort of strange beast in a cage.
Hammersly walked out of the bank with a hundred odd pounds in his pocket. He went to a shipping office, arranged for a passage on the next P. and O. boat calling at Port Said, and returned to the little French hotel where no one knew him. The place pleased him; it was so undisciplined, so casual.
Hammersly spent four days in Alexandria, and he enjoyed every hour of those four days. He had managed to dissociate himself from all orthodox sentiments; he had denationalised himself, or thought he had, and he wandered about like a superior and cosmopolitan spirit, relishing life with all the audacity of the rebel. He liked the blue sky, the sunlight, the white houses, the French atmosphere of the new town, the multi-coloured, oriental vivacity of the older quarters. The poet and the artist in him reawoke. He had always admired Landor, and the serene arrogance of that brilliant egoist recurred to him with personal suggestiveness. Had he not refused to be one of the fools, repeating catch cries, rushing through the obvious gap in the hedge? His individualism had as much right to deny nationalism, as nationalism had to attempt the crushing of individualism. It was quality against quantity! He could stand alone.
His arrogance and his cheerfulness were quite pathetic. He enjoyed the French wine at his hotel, he enjoyed his bed, he enjoyed the shops, the scented narrow streets, the mystery, the colours. Even the men in khaki amused him; those brown, common men who were slaves. He was quite absurdly soul-blind for the time being. The social part of him seemed asleep. His individualism was drunk with the wine of defiance. He recognised no authority save that of his own free will.
And yet he longed with pathetic inconsistency for home; for that green island. He longed for the woman he loved. His egoism still blinded him. He talked all sorts of imperious nonsense to himself about “telling England the truth”; “shocking British complacency.” He was free, he could speak, he would make his voice heard, he would write a book, a terrible book that would convulse the country. England was decadent. He was particularly fond of that phrase, not having dug deep enough into the ultimate truth to know that when a man accuses his own country of decadence there may be something seriously wrong with his own courage or his common sense. The vulgar man disposes of such querulous critics with expressive bluntness—“No innards.” War demands humility and a stout, courageous stomach.
* * *
Janet read that letter of his on a grey November morning, with the wind buffeting the pine woods and spattering the rain against the windows. Heather Cottage had not been built for rough weather; it had been a summer speculation; the carpenter had worked in a cheerful, go as you please mood when he had fitted the windows, and they leaked and bubbled and produced pools upon the floor. Some tiles had been blown off the roof in the night, and one of the bedroom ceilings was dripping steadily.
Janet had sent a note of appeal by the milk-boy to Porteous Hammersly.
“The weather is getting the better of us. Can you find somebody to repair our roof?”
Half an hour later the postman had brought her that letter—that letter asking her to tell Orchards the truth.
She sat and stared at the fire, as though the news of his death had reached her.
He was on his way home, a disgraced man, as he put it, and proud to be disgraced. He wrote with a burning sense of wrong, mocking at the bitter things that had happened to him, daring anyone to make him feel ashamed. She realised that he had broken himself in a mood of mad revolt, for he was full of defiance and ready to flourish his defiance in the eyes of the world. “I shall take care to let the people at home know the truth. If the Machine has broken me I may yet do some damage to the Machine. I no longer call myself an Englishman, and I pray most devoutly that this country of shams and hypocrisies and political cowardices may be humiliated in the dust.”
He ended by asking her to break the news to the people at Orchards.
“I expect they will be rather upset. Tell them not to worry.”
She sat there with dry eyes, shocked by his immense egoism, and yet loving him because of her compassion, and because she foresaw the bitter humiliations he would have to bear. He seemed like a man blinded by his own hot blood, striking out wildly, beating with foolish, naked hands against a wall of iron.
“Hallo—hallo!”
She started up, the letter in her hand, and saw Porteous’s face at the window. He had driven up to see what he could do for her, and she had been so absorbed in her own thoughts that she had not heard the noise of the car.
She went to the door to meet him, still with that letter in her hand.
“How good of you——”
He glanced at the sheet of paper, and then raised his eyes almost furtively to her face.
“News, Janet?”
“Yes.”
“Not very good?”
“I’ll tell you. Come in, dear.”
She felt a sudden great pity for him, and more sorry for him than she was for his son.
“Not killed, Janet?”
His eyes were afraid.
“No, nor wounded. Besides, you would have heard. Sit down there by the fire.”
She closed the door, and Porteous Hammersly stood watching her.
“Janet—I think—I know.”
Her eyes lifted to his; she was very pale.
“You know?”
“I can guess. Pierce has done what Gerard did.”
She sat down in an armchair and clasped her face between her hands, the crumpled letter between one palm and her cheek.
“This letter came this morning. He has asked me to tell you. He has been court-martialled and cashiered.”
“Good God! For——?”
“Cowardice—and refusing to obey orders. He says that someone was a beast to him—and he went mad. He is on his way home.”
Porteous Hammersly stood swaying slightly, and there was no sound save the sound of the wind in the chimney.
“Show me the letter, Janet.”
“I think it is better that you should not read it. He wanted me to tell you.”
Old Hammersly faced about and leant his elbows on the mantelshelf. His figure seemed to shrink, and his cheeks to fall in.
“I had a premonition. I have been waiting——”
“For this?”
“Yes.”
She saw his shoulders jerking. He seemed to swallow something to master himself; he began to speak in
a slow, toneless voice.
“You see—Pierce was always restive, impatient. He is just what Gerard was; you can’t drive such men—they flare up and burn. Perhaps we spoilt him.”
He lapsed into momentary silence, and there was a wet gleam in Janet’s eyes.
“I don’t think I doubted his courage, but I did doubt his temper. I’ll admit that; I was afraid. And in a way I feel responsible. And in a place like Scarshott! I must stand by the boy.”
He appeared to be speaking to himself, but Janet rose and laid her hands on his shoulder.
“How fine of you. And I’ll fight too. They shall know that I really cared; that I’m not an adventuress.”
“My dear——”
All his plump and debonair sententiousness had left him, and he was just a plain man suffering acutely, and longing to be comforted. He turned, took Janet’s face between his hands and kissed her forehead.
“Pierce did well for himself, dear, when he persuaded you to love him. I can’t quite place things—at present. I don’t think life will be possible for him here.”
“Pierce has so much to learn,” she said softly. “No—I’m not speaking like a prig; this war does not ask for individualists.”
“No—anything does—to block a trench.”
He walked to the window to recover his composure, and watched the yellow birch leaves falling in the wind and rain and dappling the wet grass.
“I had better tell my wife, Janet. She will have to know, and she has made it rather difficult for all of us.”
“Tell her soon.”
He left her, knowing that he had an ordeal before him, and that he would get but little comfort and comradeship from Mrs. Sophia. And so it proved. She stubbornly refused to accept the news at first, and when she accepted it, it was with scorn and indignation. Her complacent soul refused to be wounded through the wounding of her son.
“My dear Porteous, don’t be so foolish. Pierce must have been the victim of some gross injustice. If he disobeyed orders he must have had a sound reason for disobeying them. They have made him a scapegoat——”
And then she declaimed stridently.
“Everyone knows that our Staff is rotten. I don’t believe that there is a competent General in the Army. They have been sacrificing the men, throwing their lives away. I am not surprised that Pierce rebelled. This scandal will have to be made public. You must insist on Sir Joseph bringing the matter up in the House.”
Porteous Hammersly looked like a man nipped with the cold.
“My dear, it was for cowardice,” he said.
“Cowardice! Impossible! Deserting your own son! What poltroonery!”
But when he had left her she was staring with stupid, wide-eyed indignation at the Dresden figures on the white marble mantelpiece.
CHAPTER XXII
Pierce Hammersly arrived in London, like an Athanasius against the world. He put up at the Milan because it was supposed to possess a foreign and un-English atmosphere. His first visits were to his tailor and his hatter, for a man who is out to defy society ought to go naked or be faultlessly dressed.
He proposed staying in London for several days, and he did not write immediately to Janet or his father. London had to be attacked before he defied Scarshott, and he found it necessary to cultivate a detached yet aggressive pose, to carry his head a little higher, and to compel himself to look the world straight in the eyes.
For England—and London in particular—shocked the rebel and the anarchist in Hammersly, and shocked them very considerably. He found himself in old familiar places, and watching familiar things; he had to remind himself that he had quarrelled with London and all that London stood for; the man who drove him in a taxi was an enemy; the little milliner girl who looked at him interestedly in Oxford Street was also an enemy. He sensed a potential antagonism everywhere, even in the most innocent individuals who sold him cigars or sat at the next table in a restaurant.
Hammersly had not lost his sensitiveness, and perhaps his sensitiveness was appalled at the prospect before it. He was defying the solidarity of a people; challenging a whole nation, from the paper-boy to the diplomat. His imagination had warned him of all this, but there is nothing like the restless realism of a great city for compelling an egoist to take his bath in cold water. He may be a cypher in an anonymous crowd, but a man like Hammersly never feels anonymous. There are sensibilities, impulses, cravings that cannot be crushed. A man cannot stand on a chair in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and coolly declare that he stands two feet superior to the fools who carry on the social game around him. The police intervene, or he gets his coat torn. Society has a rough-and-ready way with its own children; you cannot escape out of the great family, even by trying to sulk in a corner.
And London frightened Hammersly. All these floating faces were the faces of strangers, and he began to think of Scarshott as a London in miniature, where the faces would not be strange. And in frightening him London did two things to Hammersly—it exasperated the rebel in him, and it made him feel most damnably lonely. His pose prevented him from talking to people; he was always on his guard, waiting restively for that first occasion when the inevitable coincidence should jostle him against someone whom he knew. But no amount of lofty aloofness could heal the heart-hunger that troubled him. There were times when he wanted to rush at England as though England were lover, father, mother, friend, but his self-imposed hostility nullified such impulses. He wanted Janet most desperately; he wanted her as he had never wanted anything else in the world.
“Hallo, Hammersly!”
That test case had arrived at last. Pierce was walking fast down St. James’s Street—he always walked fast now—when a man in khaki limped across his path. It was Heriot of Trinity, a man he had known well a little less than a year ago.
For one moment he hesitated, looking into the brown face and the blue eyes of his friend. The man within him held out a hand; the revolting self plucked it back.
“Thought you were out at Gallipoli.”
Heriot dropped his hand, and looked puzzled.
“So I was. But I am out of the Machine.”
“Sick? I’m sorry——”
“No.”
The intense discomfort that he was suffering made Hammersly out-Herod Herod. What the devil was he afraid of? He had got to outface these people; ride by on his pride.
“I had a difference of opinion with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. I told them I had no more use for the Army. Of course they retaliated by kicking me out.”
Heriot still looked puzzled.
“You mean——?”
“They court-martialled me. The Machine always wins at that sort of game.”
“They court-martialled you——?”
He seemed unable to grasp such a situation. Only the drunkards, and the rotters, and the wide-world toughs got themselves court-martialled. But English public-school and University men——!
Hammersly’s face looked pinched and cold.
“I refused to obey orders, and they accused me of cowardice. I’m not down about it; I’m proud. I am going to cut all England if necessary.”
“But, my dear chap——!”
He found himself addressing Hammersly’s back—a very square and uncompromising back that was receding up the street. Then it occurred to him that Hammersly was a “mental” case; he had been shell-shocked or something. A few days later Heriot saw the notice in the Gazette.
“Well I’m damned!” he reflected; “this war knocks everything!”
That chance meeting had a most unhappy effect on Hammersly. It had humiliated him bitterly, and he knew it; the feeling was like the burning of a raw wound hidden under a clean dressing. He decided that he was in an impossible position. He could not go about explaining his case to people, and advertising his impenitence by insulting them. Unfortunately, he had lost all sense of humour, and he was not quite sane when he thought of Scarshott. Damnation! He was not going to explain himself to every indivi
dual acquaintance in Scarshott. He would launch an official defiance at Scarshott and have done with it.
That was how Hammersly came to perpetrate the most egregious outrage on his own dignity. He was too angry to remember that some things are unexplainable to a crowd; that one should never argue with a crowd; that it is better to be silent when you are being pelted than to scream like a furious old woman. He lost himself utterly in that last childish and paltry bit of furiousness. He was nearer being contemptible than he had ever been before.
Three days later the editor of the Scarshott Weekly Advertiser received a very original letter that had been sent him for publication. He happened to be a rather mean little man; moreover, he owed the house of Hammersly a grudge. Instead of burning that letter as the evidence of a young man’s fierce and tortured perversity, he toddled round and showed it to his lawyer, satisfied himself as to his own safety, and published it in the Saturday edition of his paper.
Pierce Hammersly’s letter gave Scarshott one of its sensations of the century, and two days later someone saw the corroborating evidence in the Gazette. Pierce had never been particularly popular in the town. His temperamental cleverness had puzzled people, and mediocrity does not like to be puzzled.
Moreover, even the educated part of Scarshott was still very ignorant of war psychology. The average mind is quite unsubtle; it sees only crude colours, obvious movements. It separates qualities and pushes them to extremes. It concludes that there are no intermediate states between being brave and being afraid; between goodness and badness; between cheerfulness and gloom. There are many people who still do not realise that ninety men out of a hundred are physical cowards, and that only gross excitement, some high stimulus, or a grim sense of duty, make them masters of their natural fear. Many a comfortable critic has never tried to imagine what men have had to bear in this war. “Oh, we have only to go on long enough, and we shall beat them.” Well and good, but only those who do the “going on” have the right to judge their fellows.
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