Читать книгу The Interpreter - Philip Gibbs - Страница 5

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They had gone to St. Leonard’s Terrace, Chelsea, where Judy and her husband Robin—that humorist—were living with John’s mother: crowded quarters at first, though presently Robin went away to France as a staff officer, leaving his heart behind, and hating this new war.

As an American correspondent in England, John did not have much home life. His paper was insatiable for news and descriptive articles about English life in wartime, until they began to think it was a phoney war because there was no fighting in Flanders. Meanwhile Anne was equally irregular in her home-coming. In the evenings she attended first-aid classes and instruction on poison gas. In the daytime she served on a committee for evacuating mothers and children. It was annoying to John, when he came home at odd hours, sometimes very late, to find that Anne was out.

“I thought we were married?” he said to her more than once. “I never see you. When I’m in, you’re out. There’s no sense in it.”

“There’s a war on, John,” she answered carelessly. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed it?”

She looked very tired sometimes—utterly fagged out—but she ignored his pleadings with her to give up some of her work.

“Other women are not taking the war so seriously,” he argued.

It was a bad argument with Anne.

“That’s why I’m working,” she said. “If we don’t take it more seriously, we shall lose it. It’s a case of amateurs versus professionals. We have an army of Boy Scouts against the most terrific force in Europe. I know those Germans, I’ve seen them on the march.”

“But, Anne,” argued John, for purely selfish reasons, the selfishness of love, “I don’t see why you can’t cut out all that first-aid stuff. What are you going to do with it? Aren’t there any nurses? Hasn’t the Government organized all that? And, in any case, where are the casualties?”

“John,” said Anne, “you know perfectly well the smash will come one day. I’ve heard you say so when you are urging us to live in the country. When it comes the army nurses will be overwhelmed. They will want thousands of women to look after the civilian wounded.”

Even then a chill of fear had passed down John’s spine as he had a vision of Anne—so fine and delicate—standing under aerial bombardment, rescuing children out of the ruins, helping wounded women, careless of her own risk.

Yes. He knew the smash would come one day. When it came, after the fall of France—that incredible tragedy—and after the daylight Battle of Britain, Anne behaved as he had foreseen.

They had had a kind of quarrel about it one night: not really a quarrel, but a passionate discussion in which he pleaded emotionally for Anne’s consideration of her own safety, for the sake of his future happiness, and for any love which she might have for him.

He had come home from doing a broadcast at the B.B.C. It was on the day when part of that building had been hit by the previous night’s bombing. He had spoken to America over the microphone describing last night’s raid, and the courage of the ordinary London folk in that grim ordeal. He had seen that. He had spent the night going from one shelter to another, coming up into moonlit streets below a scarlet and throbbing sky. He had been frightened now and then, not only because of his own peril—he had heard the whine of shell splinters close to his head, and the crashing of heavy bombs not far away—but also because of the frightful scene of London under this attack from the air. The streets in which he walked were solitary. He seemed to be the only man alive above ground. They were gleaming under the moon, as though paved with silver. The London roofs were shining also, like quicksilver. But the sky above them was as red as blood; throbbing, boiling blood, because of the many fires started.

“This is like hell!” he said aloud. “It is hell. I am alone in this hell of war!”

Then he had thought of Anne, for the thousandth time that evening.... She was out in this somewhere. She had gone off with a mobile canteen to the East End where the fires would be hottest, and where there would be the most casualties among civilians.

“Jesus Christ!” he had cried aloud; not with irreverence, but with a kind of prayer from his soul.

Anne might be killed that night. His beautiful wife. His adorable Anne.

“Curse Hitler!” he had said aloud, as he stared up at the scarlet sky again. “Curse all these devils who make war against women and children!”

He was in a kind of rage, and a kind of terror, because Anne was out in all this somewhere.

And yet, so odd is life, he had laughed that night. Down in the shelters, the London cockneys, especially the old men and women, had made him laugh. Their spirit was undaunted, though when they emerged at dawn many of their slum houses might be just heaps of brick and rubble. Some of them down in the Piccadilly tube had started dancing the Lambeth Walk, and he had done a turn with them, laughing also, though in his mind there was that cold fear for Anne. In his broadcast message to the United States he had described all this, and had stressed the humour in the shelters rather than the horror of the streets. But he had left out Anne, who was in the centre of his thoughts.

She had come home at dawn an hour after his own home-coming, an hour of dreadful apprehension. Because of nerves and fears his greeting had been querulous.

“Good God, darling, what have you been doing in this hellish city?”

“Doing my bit,” she answered, with a tired laugh. “It wasn’t a picnic. They’ve made an awful mess in Limehouse. Lots of people killed. I helped to drag some women and children out of the ruins. It was pretty ghastly.”

John looked at his wife sombrely, and almost angrily. She was very pale, with white lips. Her blue uniform was covered with dust, and there was a rent in her skirt, badly torn by a twisted iron in the ruins of Limehouse. There was a smudge of soot on her face.

“I don’t like you doing this work,” he said. “It fills me with terror. Supposing you get killed?”

Anne looked at him with a tired smile.

“Lots of people are being killed,” she answered. “We’re all taking the same risks. That’s our privilege. We’re all in this fight for England—even the women and children. That’s fair. I don’t see why the boys should do all the dying. Make me a cup of tea, John, and tell me what you’ve been doing. After that, I’ll have a bath, gravely needed.”

He made her some tea with a kind of sulkiness, which was due to blue funk rather than ill-temper. His nerves were rattled. He was conscious of that when suddenly he put his arms round her and gave a sob.

“Anne,” he cried, “my beautiful wife, don’t be so brave! I don’t want you to die for England. I want you to live for me.”

She rubbed her smutty cheek against his, and laughed again.

“What an egoist you are, my John. And how very illogical you are. Haven’t you been out all night, cheek by jowl with death, all for the sake of an American newspaper and a B.B.C. broadcast? How do you think I shall feel if you get killed?”

“I’m a man,” he answered. “I’m not beautiful. Beauty must be saved in this hideous world.”

Anne was amused by the absurdity of those words.

“Beauty doesn’t matter a damn,” she told him; “though I’m glad you think I’m beautiful.”

She spoke gravely for a moment after taking his hand and putting it to her lips.

“John, my dearest dear, we have to face this thing. We can’t dodge it. It may be death for one of us, or both of us. We must all be fatalists. If our name is written, it is written—that’s how most people are taking it—those women in Limehouse tonight. I don’t want to die. Death is very unpleasant, as I saw tonight, but I hope to keep my little flag flying whatever happens, my little flag of pride. I have a tradition behind me, a family code—I should hate to let that down. Those women in Limehouse have nothing of that behind them, but they’re incredibly brave. They crawl out of their ruins and say: ‘Give me a nice cup of tea, dearie, and to ’ell with ’Itler!’ So it’s up to you and me, John. We can’t show the white feather when all these people are so high-spirited.”

She added some words which wounded him.

“Of course it’s harder for you, being an American. This isn’t your war, old dear. It isn’t your country.”

“You’re wrong,” he told her sharply. “It’s my war and it’s my country now. England is in my bones, and I have an English wife in my heart.”

“Well, I must say you’re behaving very nicely,” said Anne. “You’re telling the right things to the American people, only it doesn’t seem to convert your naughty isolationists. Oh! I’m so tired!”

She was so tired that she went to sleep in his arms with her face against his cheek.