Читать книгу The Middle of the Road - Philip Gibbs - Страница 9

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A man came up in the dusk that was creeping into the streets of London, and walked alongside Bertram. He said something about no work, a sick wife, children, the war.

Bertram had heard it all a hundred times from other men, and tried to remember whether he had any money in his pocket. Then something in the man’s voice stirred an old memory. He halted and stared into the man’s face, and saw that it was one of his old company, Bill Huggett, the Cockney fellow from Camberwell.

He spoke his name, and the man was startled, and then shamefaced.

“Good Lord, Huggett! Have you come to this?”

Bertram was distressed. This man had been with him in the dirtiest places, on mornings of great battle, in the dreary old routine. He had always “groused,” but had never failed in pluck, and always cheered his comrades by his grim humour when things were bad, and death neighbourly.

“Well, what else?” asked the man, in a hostile voice. He wanted to know what a bloke could do on twenty-five shillings a week, out of work pay, and food prices rising every day, and a family of brats to keep. After saving the blasted country!

Bertram suggested that other men had helped to save the country, and were in the same trouble.

“Not you, anyhow,” said the man, with an ugly rasp in his voice.

“Me too,” said Bertram. “Let’s go and get a drink and talk things out. …”

They went through the swing door of a dirty public house somewhere behind Baker Street station, and Bertram sat opposite his former corporal at a table wet with beer dregs. At the bar a number of seedy men, some of them in khaki trousers under old overcoats, were drinking beer in a gloomy way, without much conversation.

Huggett asked for a glass of stout, which he said was food as well as drink. He was a thin-faced fellow, with a battered bowler hat and an old trench coat still stained with the mud of Flanders and the Somme, and the later grease of low class eating houses in London. By trade, as Bertram remembered, he was a French polisher, but according to his tale, there was “nothing doing” in French polishing.

It was at the end of a second glass of stout that he became talkative, and Bertram did not like his kind of talk. He liked it less because it expressed crudely and violently some of the ideas that had been creeping into his own mind—the rough deal that was being given to the men who had fought and come back, the inequality of reward for service done, so that while the front line men were unemployed, the slackers, the stay-at-homes, the artful dodgers, had captured all the jobs.

“Look at all the Generals in Whitehall,” said Huggett. “Still strutting around as though the war was on, with flower gardens blooming on their breasts. Did they ever stand in the mud up to their knee-caps, serving a blarsted machine-gun under a German barrage? Not on your life!”

“They did their job as well as they knew how,” said Bertram. “It had to be done. Somebody had to do it.”

Huggett did not see why his job had to be done. The war had not been to make life easier or better for ordinary folk. It had made it harder. He was pleased to admit, as he wiped his lips with the back of his hand, that if Fritz had won he would have mopped up everything and skinned England alive. He had to be beat. But after the war? What about all the promises about homes for heroes? A land for heroes to live in? He was one of the little heroes, well, he’d done his bit!—but his unemployed pay was not enough to keep a dog decent.

He lowered his voice, and spoke of the bitterness of men like himself. They were getting savage. He wasn’t one to believe in revolution, but there were others who did. They wanted to tear down everything, drag down everybody, smash up the whole show, and then all start level. There were foreign chaps about, round the factory gates, in the pubs, putting those ideas into the heads of young chaps who were ready for them. There were a lot of little leaflets going about—very hot stuff—pushed through letter boxes, and into the hands of factory girls. All Huggett wanted, and steady fellows who didn’t hold with wild stuff, was decent wages for decent work, but there were numbers who weren’t out for work at all. They were out for Red Revolution—bloody red—said Bill Huggett. “And can you wonder, sir, when there’s nothing like a fair deal for honest working men. It’s just asking for trouble.”

Bertram listened gloomily. He seemed to hear in the words of Bill Huggett, this thin-faced Cockney, the voice of the underworld, not heard in Parliament or in the Press, the murmur of masses of men, discontented, bitter, restless, out of work, wondering, as he had asked himself, whether all the sacrifice had been worth while.

He switched the conversation on to another line, less worrying to his troubled mind.

“How’s your wife, Huggett?” He remembered the man had kept his wife’s photograph in his tunic during his time with the machine-gun company, and had shown it to him once with pride—the photograph of a plain-faced girl, in a cheap blouse and hat with “fevvers.” Huggett took it out of his pocket now, and dropped it in the beer-dregs on the table.

“She ain’t like that now. You remember I showed it to you one day at Mally Mally, down on the Somme? It was after that she went clean off her dot. After an air raid. They took her away, and I’m alone with the kids. Christ!”

The man’s voice broke, and he drew his hand over his eyes.

Bertram said something in sympathy. What was the use? Presently he paid for the beer, and then took off his wrist watch and pushed it over to Bill Huggett.

“You might get something on that. It might help a bit. I’ve no money to give you.”

Huggett stared at the wrist watch. It had been synchronised for zero hour in many mornings of battle. The young Major had worn it day and night, was always shooting his cuff to look at it. Huggett pushed it back.

“I wouldn’t take it, not if I was starved to death.”

“All right,” said Bertram. He slipped the watch into his waistcoat pocket and then rose from the table to go.

“Come and see me, now and then, Huggett. We ought to keep in touch, as ‘Comrades of the Great War,’ eh?”

As he passed out of the public house, Huggett stood up stiffly and saluted with his hand to his battered bowler hat.