Читать книгу The Interpreter - Philip Gibbs - Страница 3

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There was a pretty picture of life and some pleasing sounds in the Surrey village of Spurfold on a July day in the year 1941. The date is worth mentioning because pretty pictures of life were in sharp contrast to the headlines of the morning papers just delivered round the village by a boy on a bicycle, unperturbed by the daily tale of death and human agony in his bundle of newsprint.

That morning German armies were smashing their way nearer to Moscow. The stench of dead bodies—until three weeks before the living youth of Germany and Russia—wafted over the ruins to Smolensk, but did not reach as far as Surrey, which was still fragrant with flowers. Fifty more Frenchmen who had been seized as hostages had been executed for the murder of a German officer by unknown men. Famine and pestilence raged in Poland, where thousands of civilian prisoners were dying behind the barbed wire of concentration camps. The R.A.F. had bombed Hamburg again....

In the village of Spurfold the morning sun was streaming through the leaded windows of an old cottage with tall chimneys, making a diamond-shaped pattern of light on the opposite wall. On the breakfast table, which had just been laid by a stout woman who moved heavily about the room, was a bowl of roses not yet fully blown, and exquisite in form and colour. It was a low-ceilinged room with a black beam across it, and a fireplace of red brick and blackened hearthstones, where centuries ago the rustics here had warmed their bones and baked their bread by wood fires. The room was daintily furnished with signs of the modern spirit, showing that no rustics lived here now. On one of the walls, for instance, was a portrait, very modern in style and technique, of a young woman with merry eyes which laughed out of the canvas. On the polished boards there was a Persian rug, too precious for the muddy feet of rustic folk. Through the leaded windowpanes was a view of a small garden where hollyhocks were growing taller than the King of Prussia’s grenadiers, and where there was a scent of sweet William and lavender.

So much for the pretty picture of life in time of war. Pleasing sounds came from a bedroom upstairs. A small child was cooing and crowing at the advent of a new day in life, and a young mother was doing some backchat while she finished her morning toilet in an old-fashioned wash-basin. All these sounds could be heard very clearly in the breakfast room below, which had now been entered by a tall, thin, youngish man in a blue dressing gown, who stood reading the headlines of the morning paper with a look of intense concentration and anxious gravity. Only once did he seem to hear the noises going on upstairs, and for a moment a smile touched his lips. It was when his sister Judy abused her infant son in a high, laughing voice.

“You little bag of mischief! I’ll be after you. Trying to climb out of your cot, are you? No, my lad! No attempts at suicide allowed in this cottage.”

The child seemed to think this remark highly amusing. It gave out a prolonged note of crowing ecstasy.

“My goodness, what a noise!” cried the mother. “People will think it’s an air-raid siren.”

She went on talking nonsense to a small lump of humanity born in a world war which had no mercy on women and children.

“Judy is happy with her baby,” said the man in the blue dressing gown.

He made this remark to an elderly woman with white hair, who came into the room and kissed him.

“That poppet is a great joy to her,” she answered. “It makes up for the loss of Robin—though I found her crying last night because those Germans don’t let him write as often as he wants. I wish Anne had left you a child, John, my poor dear!”

“For God’s sake, Mother!” said the man in the blue dressing gown. A look of anguish came into his eyes. He turned away and strode to the window and stared through its diamond-shaped panes seeing nothing, though the morning sun was shining on the low-lying hills with the massed foliage, and on the spire of a little old church, and the tiled roofs of cottages and barns in the village below.

“I’m sorry, John,” said the white-haired lady. “But I don’t think you ought to shrink from talking about Anne now and then. It might help you a little. You know she is still with you, my dear. She has only gone into another room. She is very close to us, and would like us to talk about her.”

“No,” said the man; “I can’t bear it, Mother—please.”

The man in the blue dressing gown was John Barton, the American correspondent, well known to millions of us now because of his broadcast talks during three years of war, to say nothing of his newspaper articles. He turned back from the window and sat down heavily at the breakfast table. Presently he opened some letters which had been put by the side of his plate. One of them seemed to hold his interest. He read it twice, and then pushed it away with a harsh, dry laugh.

“Any news?” asked his mother, who had been reading some of her own letters.

“Nothing good,” he answered.

Then he greeted his sister Judy, who came down with her small son, born two months after Dunkirk, and too late to be seen by his father, now a prisoner of war.

“Morning, Judy. No need to ask after the health of the infant Hercules.”

“Oh, he’s fine,” said Judy. “I hope he didn’t wake you up at dawn?”

She looked searchingly at the letters on the table. There were none by her own plate, and she gave a deep audible sigh. “Nothing from Robin.”

“Well, he’s safe,” said her mother cheerfully. “That’s the great thing. And on the whole he’s well treated, he says.”

“I hope it’s true,” said Judy grimly.

“Have a look at that,” said John, flicking over the letter which he had read twice.

Before looking at it, Judy dumped her small boy into his high chair within reach of a silver spoon which he banged on the table with great satisfaction to himself.

“Something important?” she asked.

“It wouldn’t help to win the war,” said John, with dark irony. But the letter seemed to excite his sister.

“Why, John, it’s a splendid offer! And isn’t it a great honour? I mean the great man in Washington doesn’t write letters like that every day. ‘The best interpreter of England to the United States.’ That’s a nice description of you, John. And because it’s true it doesn’t make it less handsome.”

“Well, I’m not going,” answered her brother. “Nothing will induce me to leave England now. Besides, I loathe lecturing; and anyhow, I’m up to my neck in work for the B.B.C.”

Judy rescued her son from instant death—he had nearly swallowed the spoon—and then she looked at her brother with steady eyes.

“John, you ought to go. You can’t turn it down.”

“Oh yes, I can,” he said, with a laugh.

“It comes at the right time,” said Judy. “You want a change—you want to get outside of yourself. And, John, think of it, you might bring the United States into the war. You might help to save England and liberty everywhere.”

John Barton laughed at his sister’s excitement. For a moment he forgot his private grief.

“No chance of that,” he answered. “Our great democracy, the champion of liberty and noble sentiment, has decided to stand on the side lines and watch this struggle from afar. Bundles for Britain, but no expeditionary force. Munitions of war, but no fighting for their little lads. Those damned isolationists are in the ascendant.”

“You might convert them,” said Judy. “You might sweep the country and bring them in. Don’t turn it down, John. Anne would have wanted you to go.”

At the name of Anne, his wife, John Barton’s face paled. A look of pain came into his eyes again.

“I’ll think it over,” he said gruffly.

“What are you two talking about?” asked Mrs. Barton, looking up from a chatty letter which had come with the American postmark and the censorship label.

Judy answered her question.

“The great man wants John to go out as the best interpreter of England to the United States. He wants John to lecture all over the country to counteract the isolationists and that horrible windbag, Val D. Turner.”

“Why, that sounds fine,” said Mrs. Barton. “It’s a great honour for you, John. And it’s just the thing for you now. It will help you to forget.”

John Barton looked sombrely at his mother.

“I don’t want to forget,” he said, in a harsh voice.

He left the breakfast table abruptly and walked into the garden.

“Poor dear John!” said Mrs. Barton. “His wound won’t heal.”