Читать книгу The Interpreter - Philip Gibbs - Страница 8

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He passed a terrible night in that lonely house with broken windows. It was a wonder that the noise of his agony was not heard in the street outside. He groaned loudly like a wounded animal. He kept crying out: “God! ... God! ...” He wept convulsively, clasping his hands above his head and pressing his forehead against the wall of the drawing room, into which he had gone again. A thousand times he called Anne’s name, as though he could call her back. Once in the night he had the strange idea that she would come to him if he asked her. He said “Anne! Come back!” in an urgent voice. Surely to God, he thought, her spirit will come to meet me here in this little home of ours. If there is survival after death, she will hear this cry of mine. “Anne! Please—come to me!”

There was only one lamp burning, as when they had played chess together. He stared towards the door, as though she might come in. But it was no good—this cry in his heart. She did not come, or he could not see her.

“It’s all a lie,” he said bitterly. “We are utterly deluded. There is no life afterwards.”

He wept again, and it was not until dawn that he fell asleep, exhausted in soul and body. When he woke up three hours later he felt hungry and went down into the larder to find some food. There was half a tongue in a glass jar, and he took it into the kitchen with some bread. His thoughts were busy inside himself. Anne is dead, he said to himself. Last night somebody told me she had been killed, but here am I eating bread and meat like a filthy animal. I cried a lot last night, but it was all hypocrisy. I don’t care a damn because Anne is dead. I’m alive still. I must have my bit of bread and meat. I have no more emotion. I feel dry like a mummy. I feel empty of everything. I feel dead except for this physical appetite.

That mood lasted for a few minutes. Suddenly he found himself weeping again, and he was glad of his own tears because they were better than that cold deadness. He could taste the salt of his own tears.

Suddenly he felt a horror of being alone in this house. He felt an immense craving for human sympathy. He must tell somebody that Anne was dead. He couldn’t keep it to himself like this in a house with broken windows now bunged up with cardboard.

“I must keep a stiff upper lip,” he said to himself. “I’m in England. The English always keep stiff upper lips, as they say.

“They don’t like emotion. A man who weeps is disgusting to them. I haven’t seen any tears in those shelters.”

He walked out of the house unaware that his hair was tousled and that he was as white as death, and that his eyes looked wild.

It was eight o’clock in the morning. The postman was going his rounds and looked at him curiously as he passed, turning round to stare at him.

Two typist girls from farther down the terrace—the mean and ugly end of it—beyond the eighteenth-century houses—came by chatting brightly, but gave him a sideways glance.

“Cheer up,” said one of the girls impudently. “There’ll be better news soon.”

She giggled to her companion.

John Barton did not answer. He did not hear.

A woman was washing down the crazy pavement of a house two doors from his own and pushed her pail away to let him pass.

“Is Mrs. Langdon down yet?” he asked.

“Oh, yes sir.”

The woman gave him a sharp glance. She knew him well by sight and he had often said good morning to her. The American, she called him in her own mind. She thought he looked like a film star, one of the tough guys, as they said in the movies. Now there was something wrong with him, she thought. Perhaps he had been scared by the blitz.

He strode past her and walked into the hall. This house had been his second home. Katherine Langdon had given him great kindness and sympathy, and was always charming and lovely. Langdon himself, the well-known novelist, had been his best friend in England, although they had argued incessantly about world affairs. He was almost a complete pacifist, partly because of his son Paul, and all youth whom he wished to save from such a massacre as in the last war.

He could hear the tinkle of teacups in the dining room to the right of the hall, and he pushed open the door and went in. Katherine Langdon, in a flowered dressing gown, was there at the breakfast table. Langdon was standing at the window looking at The Times.

“I’m sorry,” said John.

They looked at him with astonishment, and then with alarm. They had never seen him looking like this before, so wild, so deadly white.

“John, what’s the matter?” asked Mrs. Langdon.

She rose from the breakfast table and went towards him.

Langdon put down his paper and said: “My dear fellow.”

“Anne has been killed,” said John. “She’s dead.”

He spoke quietly and without emotion.

Then suddenly he lurched forward to Katherine Langdon, whose hands went out to him, and he put his head down on her breast and gave a strangled sob and wept terribly.

“My poor John,” she said. “My poor John.”

Langdon stood there rigidly with a look of great pain in his eyes.

“This frightful war,” he said. “This murderous war. Oh God—if there is any God! Oh Christ—if Christ cares for us!”

John Barton drew away from Katherine and mastered himself after a moment’s struggle.

“I apologize,” he said. “Please excuse me. I’m making a fool of myself. It isn’t done, I know, in England. It isn’t done much in America. Thanks all the same. I suppose I crave for a bit of sympathy. I suppose I’m rather enjoying this sob stuff.”

He gave a bitter laugh.

“It’s my infernal egotism,” he said. “I’m thinking more of myself than of Anne. Quite soon I shall get hardened. I shall probably fall in love with somebody else. That’s how men behave, isn’t it, when they’ve lost their wives? They soon forget. I’ve already raided the larder and eaten heartily. All these tears mean nothing really, except slushy weakness.”

He yielded to that weakness again, though he had condemned it. “Oh God!” he cried. “Anne has been killed. She was blown to bits when I was laughing in a tube shelter. I shall never see her again.”

“My poor John,” said Katherine Langdon again.

She poured him out some coffee and handed it to him as he sat down heavily at the table.

“Drink this,” she said.

He gulped down some of the hot coffee, and it seemed to strengthen him. He spoke less wildly.

“I shan’t even be able to go to her funeral,” he said.

Katherine Langdon took his hand across the table and bent down to kiss it.

“I want to ask you two people a question,” said John. “It’s a straight question. Give me a straight answer. You are the most truthful people I know in the world, and one doesn’t lie in the presence of death, even for kindness’ sake. Do you mind?”

“What is it, my dear fellow?” asked Langdon, who had sat down at the table still with that look of pain in his eyes.

“Do you believe in survival after death, or is it just nursery talk for the poor ignorant babes?”

There was a moment’s silence broken by Katherine Langdon. “There’s not much sense in life unless one believes that,” she answered. “And I believe it. I couldn’t carry on unless I believed it. If Paul is killed I shall have a little courage, because I cannot believe that death is the end of everything.”

“But what evidence is there?” asked John. “I can’t find any evidence. Perhaps it’s a wish dream and a fairy tale put over by priests for the comfort of men.”

“Christ reappeared to His disciples,” said Katherine.

John looked at her searchingly.

“Do you believe that, or is it a legend? How can we tell?”

“His disciples died because they believed it,” said Katherine.

“Lately,” said Langdon, “I’ve been thinking of this a lot. One can’t get exact evidence, but one has psychological experiences, and science itself leaves the door open wide for some possibility of mind acting apart from matter. Lately I have seemed to get closer to a spiritual world. But it may be an illusion or a wish. We can’t produce proof. I am gravely uncertain about all that, and yet, sometimes in my own mind lately, with all this death going on around us, I have had a kind of certainty.”

“I’d like to know,” said John. “I want to meet Anne again.”

“You will,” said Katherine, “in another dream world.”

“I called to her last night,” said John. “She didn’t come. I called to her with a great cry of the soul. She didn’t come.”

His head drooped over the breakfast table. He raised it again a moment later.

“London can take it,” he said with a mirthless laugh. “I wrote those words. Coventry can take it. I wrote that too. They became a kind of slogan in America. It means taking the loss of one’s wife and children when they’ve been blown to bits, so that they don’t even get a funeral. It means taking a hell of a lot. It means that one’s crucified. And yet some of these people in the shelters and elsewhere seem to be able to pull themselves together. I suppose I shall have to pull myself together.”

He tried to do so then with these two friends who had been so kind to him.

“How’s Paul?” he asked.

“All right so far,” said Langdon. “Two nights ago he did his twentieth raid over Germany. I shudder when I know he’s going.”

“I must telephone to my mother and Judy. They don’t know yet.” He rose from the table and said: “Thanks, a thousand times.”

“Lie down upstairs for a bit,” said Katherine Langdon. “I’ll telephone to your mother and Judy.”

“No. That’s my job,” answered John. “I can’t shirk it. And there are others—Anne’s father and mother. And I must go up to Limehouse and get the full story of what happened. I know nothing except that Anne was killed.”

He spoke like a reporter talking about his morning assignment, except that his face was still pallid.

He shook hands with Katherine, but she drew him towards her and kissed his cheek. Perhaps she ought not to have done that, because he nearly broke down again.

“It’s kind of you,” he said in a broken voice. “You are always kind.”

Langdon grasped his left hand and gave it a hard grip, but said nothing.