Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 12

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Luke Christy answered the rap of a little brass knocker on a door up three flights of stairs.

“Hullo, Major! I had an idea you’d come. You can’t keep away from my sinister influence.”

He saluted in an ungainly fashion, like a drunken Tommy, and then gripped Bertram’s hand in his long, bony fingers. He was a tall, thin, loosely-built man, with a clean-shaven face singularly ugly because of its long, lean jaw and bulging forehead. “An ugly mug,” as Bertram had often insulted it, but with a bright light within, shining out of dark, humorous, brooding eyes.

He was in his shirt sleeves, unpacking some hand-bags amidst a litter of dirty shirts, collars, socks, pyjamas, newspapers, and paper-backed books, and other salvage from a long journey.

“Just come back from Poland,” he said, “by way of Berlin. Put on a pipe and tell me all about life and London, while I stow this wreckage away. How’s Lady Joyce and the British aristocracy?”

He looked up at Bertram with the whimsical smile which always twisted his face when he chaffed Bertram about his close relationship with “bloated aristocrats.” His own family kept a little shop in a Warwickshire village.

“Joyce is pretty well,” said Bertram. “She had a baby … but it died.”

Luke Christy’s twisted smile left his face, and his eyes shone with sympathy.

“Oh, Lord! That’s tragic. I’m sorry.”

Bertram sat watching him “tidy up,” a process which seemed to consist in heaving his dirty linen into a cupboard, and flinging the paper-backed books on to a shelf already crowded with papers.

The whole room was framed in books, badly assorted in size, and mostly of tattered bindings. Above them were some rather good etchings and caricatures torn out of foreign newspapers, fastened to the walls with drawing pins. On the mantelpiece were photographs of several young soldiers, one of Bertram himself, and a “homely” elderly woman with grey hair, exactly like Luke Christy—who, as Bertram knew—was Christy’s mother.

A door opened into an inner room into which Christy plunged now and then with pairs of trousers, boots, and other bits of clothing. It was from this inner room that he began a monologue to which Bertram listened through the open door.

“Hard for a girl to bring a life into the world, and then see it flicker out. I’m sorry to hear that, Pollard. It’s the saddest thing for you and that exquisite little lady of yours. Good God, yes! But for myself, I couldn’t risk it, anyhow. I haven’t the pluck. I should be filled with dreadful forebodings.”

“About what?” asked Bertram.

He could not see Christy, but heard him moving about the inner room.

“Why, to bring a new life into the world. Was it a boy?”

“Yes,” said Bertram, “it was going to have my name.”

“A boy, eh? Oh, Lord, no! I couldn’t bring a boy into a world like this. It wouldn’t be fair. Not yet awhile, until we see how things are going to shape out. Major”—he still kept to Bertram’s old rank—“I’m afraid I’m becoming a coward.”

He came to the half open door, and leant against the frame of it, looking in at Bertram, who sat in a low leather chair with his back to a long casement window through which the dusk of a grey day crept from the darkening Thames below. So Christy had often stood in the entrance of a dug-out when he and Bertram lived in the earth not far from an enemy’s line.

“What are you afraid about?” asked Bertram, with a curious thrill, like the sensation he had had as a boy when his nurse told him ghost stories.

“I’m afraid of this civilisation of ours, and of all sorts of forces creeping up to destroy it.”

For an hour or more he talked of the things he had seen.

He had been to Eastern Europe, from which civilisation was passing. Poland was poverty-stricken, disease-stricken, and utterly demoralised.

Austria was no more than the corpse of a nation which had once been a mighty Empire, and now was a bulbous-headed thing without a body.

Vienna was its bulbous head, a great capital of over two million people without the means of life. He described the dance of death there, the starvation of women and children, the misery of the mean streets, the ruin of the intellectuals and the professional classes. In the hotels and restaurants and café concerts, foreigners were gathering like vampires to feed on the mortality of that old centre of civilisation. Austrian Jews and international gamblers, making paper fortunes out of the fluctuations of paper money, guzzled and gorged in an orgy of vice with girls who sold their smiles for the sake of a meal or an evening’s warmth.

The old palaces of Vienna still stood, the great mansions and cathedrals and churches and art galleries and museums remained as the heritage of a splendid past, but the life that made them had gone. When they began to crumble there would be no money to repair them. No man or woman could follow the pursuit of beauty and truth, painting or music or science, as in the old days. They must either get back to the land, and grub a sparse life out of the soil, or starve to death. So it was with other countries, the little new nations of the Baltic, the great Empire of Russia.

He’d not been into Russia—it pulled him tremendously, he must get there somehow—yet out on the frontier he’d met the refugees, and heard their tale of misery. In Russia civilisation was passing, had almost passed.

He would have to go to Russia before long to see the truth of things. There was a famine coming which would destroy millions of people. Disease was already rife, amounting to pestilence. Again, there, the only people who could live at all were those who stayed close to the soil, and were desperate in defence of their own produce.

Was Europe, a large part of it, going to return to the Peasant State? That might happen. That would be something to cling to, though not civilisation as it had been built up through centuries of struggle. But worse than that might happen.

He’d been to Berlin and other German towns. What was happening there? An immense industry of a people over-strained by war, crushingly defeated, beaten to the earth in pride, but desperate to regain their place in the world and defend their national existence. They were working with an astounding energy, adapting their immense genius to the necessities of this peace and its penalties. Krupps’ which had made great guns, were now turning out sewing-machines, reapers and binders, cash registers, razors, anything of metal for the markets of the world. But the indemnities put upon them by the victors made all their energy fruitless. The mark was dropping in value week by week. Every time they paid their indemnities it dropped lower with a rush. The printing presses poured out new marks. That enabled them to undercut their rivals in every market of the world, but at the same time they were bleeding themselves to death.

Meanwhile France was putting on the screw, goading the Germans to hatred again, making them vow vengeance, some time, some day, in the future, however far ahead. France was ready to ruin the whole world rather than let Germany get up again, and the whole world, and England first, would be ruined, if Germany were to go the way of Austria and plunge over the precipice into national bankruptcy.

There were evil forces at work everywhere, forces of cruelty, and greed, and stupidity, and hatred. The men of the Old Order were keeping a grip on the machinery of Government, arranging new balances of power, making new alliances for an “inevitable” war. Hostile to them, were those out to destroy all civilisation, at any cost, the revolutionaries for revolution’s sake, the fanatics allied with the murderers and the cave-men of life.

In between those two extremes, poor patient people, desiring peace, were bewildered by the non-fulfilment of all their hopes after so much sacrifice, and in their ignorance turning this way and that, to false gods, to those who appealed to their lower passions, to those who doped them with the greatest falsehoods. There was no truth-teller to whom the masses would listen. No high and noble leadership, but only corrupt and unclean men, holding on to power, or little men, honest in a little way, clinging to their jobs.

Other forces were at work, biological, evolutionary, and mysterious forces, which no man could understand or govern. There was a new restlessness in the soul of humanity. Some great change was happening, or about to happen. The old checks and balances had become unhinged, in the minds of men, in the spirit of peoples, in great races. The coloured peoples of the world were stirring. Some yeast in them was rising. Some passion of desire. India, Egypt, Africa, Mesopotamia, were seething with the spirit of revolt. He had been in the East. He had seen something of it. The white races would have to take care. There were other races waiting for their place. Japan and China were changing in “the unchanging East.”

What of the British Empire? Little old England, dependent on overseas trade, on world markets which had failed, on a mercantile marine which could not get its cargoes, would be hardest pressed of all. … And the spirit of revolution among men embittered by war, disillusioned by false promises, beaten back to a low standard of life, had touched even England, at last.

“Major,” said Luke Christy, “I wouldn’t care to bring a son into the world.”

Bertram rose, and did not answer for a while. He went to the window and stared out into the darkness creeping over the Thames. From Christy’s windows he could see the curve of the river, and the lights of the great old city gleaming through the purple dusk, and the red fire from the engine of a train passing over Charing Cross bridge, and the head-lights of motors and taxi-cabs streaming along the Embankment—all the glamorous life of London in the hour between dusk and darkness of an evening in May. A scene in modern civilisation as he knew and loved it.

He turned round to Christy and said: “You old ghoul! You make me shiver. It’s not as bad as all that!”

Christy laughed, and switched on the electric light, breaking the spell of darkness.

“It’s my morbid temperament! P’raps I’m all wrong. But I’m just watching, and trying to find out the drift of things.”

He’d found one curious thing wherever he went, in whatever country; he found men and women talking anxiously, analysing civilisation, uncertain of its endurance. Was that a good or a bad sign? The intellectuals of Greece and Rome used to talk like that before the “decline and fall.”

“Let’s drop the international situation and get down to home politics. What are you doing with yourself, Major?”

“Looking for a job,” said Bertram.

Luke Christy advised him to get a soft job, in one of the Government offices, with good pay out of the rate-payers’ pockets and no more work than an office boy could do without knowing it.

“I want to be an honest man,” said Bertram.

Christy seemed to find that uncommonly amusing.

“My dear Major! The only honest men in the world are those who are dying of starvation. All who have more than that are rogues. I’m one of the worst of hypocrites, for while I bleed at the heart for suffering humanity, I get a good price for the articles in which I describe its torture and disease.”

Bertram suddenly flushed a little, and spoke in a nervous way.

“Christy, I believe I could write, if I tried. In the old days at St. Paul’s, I had a notion—anyhow, I feel I might do something if I had a shot at it. What do you think?”

“You?” said Christy.

That word and its emphasis of surprise were not encouraging, and Bertram found it hard to confess to his friend that he had been writing a book, and believed that at last he had found his object in life, and the impulse he’d been seeking.

“What kind of book?” asked Christy.

“A book on the War.”

Christy groaned, and cried “Kamerad!” with raised hands.