Читать книгу The Interpreter - Philip Gibbs - Страница 11

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Barton decided, of course, to accept the request from Washington. There was no other decision possible. Too much pressure was brought to bear upon him by his family and friends and by his own inner consciousness that here lay his way of service to England which he had learned to admire so much, and of which he now felt himself a part because of Anne. It was a big wrench from which he flinched. It seemed to him that in going to America again he would be going away still farther from Anne. Her spirit would never visit him there, he thought. In England, though she was dead, he still seemed near to her, though not near enough. The English scenery, the London streets, the house in St. Leonard’s Terrace, all belonged to her. There were times when he thought he might meet her round the corner—or almost felt that in a kind of daydream. He could never feel that in Chicago, New York, or Detroit, or Omaha, he might meet Anne round the corner.

Her father and mother were among those who urged him to go, and indeed took it for granted that he would go. Their old house in the country, where he had once stayed with Anne long before his marriage, had been given up for a convalescent hospital, and they were now living in Sloane Gardens, where he went to see them now and then, but not often, as he resented his mother-in-law’s stoic acceptance of Anne’s death—as though she had only done her duty in dying—and regarded his distinguished father-in-law as one of the old caste with whom he had nothing in common, except a little pity such as he might have given to the last of a dying race.

To be fair to his father-in-law, Lord Stanfield, he had to admit that His Lordship had no illusions on the subject himself.

“I’m just a hanger-on from the dead past,” he said one night, standing with his back to the fireplace in the drawing room of the house in Sloane Gardens. “I and my crowd of poverty-stricken peers are as much out of date as King John’s barons. I can’t think why the Government asks the King to create new peers. We shall all be swept away as soon as the war ends, when State Socialism will take over the former system. We’re already taxed out of existence.”

“Do you resent the idea?” asked John, who was moderately on the Left, although under Anne’s influence he had modified some of his political opinions, and did not believe, with his former faith, that all virtue and intelligence resided in the Labour party.

Lord Stanfield, that tall, heavily made Saxon-looking man, whom once John had mistaken for a gamekeeper, laughed with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

“What’s the good? The mammoths and the Megatheriums did not resent the floods and cataclysms which swept them away. It’s the natural process of historical evolution. We’ve had our day. Perhaps it lasted too long. I daresay it will be a better world without us, though sometimes I have my doubts. In our time we stood for something. If you take us at our best, and not at our worst—God knows, we’ve produced a multitude of blackguards!—we’ve helped to serve England, and sometimes to save her. We and the common people together, peers and peasants bred on the soil. I’ve never had much use for the lawyer fellows and the professional politicians, nor for the little Jacks in office.”

He broke away from this discussion by referring to John’s coming visit to America.

“You’ll be seeing David,” he said. “He seems to be doing well at Washington.”

David was his youngest son, whom John had met first in the British Embassy in Rome—a delicately made fellow, unlike his sturdily built father.

He asked an abrupt question.

“Do you think Roosevelt will bring America to our side in this war? I mean with its man power as well as with munitions?”

“It’s going to be difficult,” said John Barton. “American mothers do not want their sons killed.”

Lord Stanfield nodded.

“I don’t blame them,” he said. “If I were an American I’d be an isolationist. I’d try to keep my country out of this carnage.”

John disagreed with that point of view. It was precisely the opposite of his deepest convictions.

“If we keep out of it,” he answered, “we shall let down the civilized world. If we keep out of it we shall be shamed forever as cowards and charlatans, mouthing ideals but refusing to fight for them, calling ourselves a democracy but not caring a damn if the dictators trample roughshod over all liberties. It would be an eternal disgrace and I should be ashamed to call myself an American.”

Lord Stanfield laughed good-naturedly.

“I’m afraid I’ve put my foot in it with you. Sorry, John. But I suppose I’m not an idealist. I wish Anne could have heard you say all that—she would have loved it.”

He gave a deep sigh at the mention of his daughter’s name. They had been good friends. They had understood each other.

“Anne was very high-spirited,” he said. “I miss her enormously.”

John was silent. Always the mention of Anne’s name seemed to reopen his wound.

It was during this silence that the door opened and a young girl came in. She was in some kind of uniform with a khaki shirt and jacket smartly cut. It was Lady Marjorie Ede, Anne’s sister, who had been rather wild as a long-legged thing, but now looked gallant and gay.

“Seeing ghosts?” she asked, coming up to kiss her father.

He ignored the question. He and John had been seeing one ghost whose beauty they had known.

“What sort of a time have you been having?” he asked. “How many love affairs are you having?”

“A perfectly wonderful time,” said Marjorie. “I’m driving staff officers from Whitehall to other places of delay and defeatism. They all flirt with me very nicely, but I’m walking out with a sergeant of the Grenadiers. He’s a perfect darling, Daddy, and he ought to be made commander in chief.”

“Why not?” asked her father with a short laugh. “I daresay we shouldn’t lose the war any faster.”

“We should win it,” said Marjorie. “He’s a highly intelligent young man, and very impatient of delay. He wants me to marry him on Monday next.”

“Are you going to?”

“ ’Fraid not,” said Marjorie. “I have my job to do. Marriage and babies will have to wait until after the war.”

She turned to John and put her small hand into his.

“Going strong?” she asked. “I heard your broadcast the other night. Good. That’s the stuff to give them.”

“High praise,” said John. “Thanks.”

For a moment he saw in this girl’s face a startling likeness to Anne. She was dark and Anne was fair. But there was something in the set of the eyes and the modeling of the cheek line.

“I envy you going to the U.S.A.,” she said. “I’d give my last shirt for that trip on the Clipper.”

She sent her love to her brother David and urged John to smite the isolationists hip and thigh—especially that reptile Val D. Turner.