Читать книгу The Interpreter - Philip Gibbs - Страница 9

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During the months that followed Anne’s death—he had obtained all details of that and had been very brave—John pulled himself together, at least in the face of the world, and carried on his job with his usual efficiency and energy as a reporter for the American press, and by his broadcast talks to the American people, as an interpreter of English life in wartime.

He was surprised sometimes by the reputation he was building up. He seemed to strike the right note with his broadcast stuff, and to tell his own folk what they wanted to know and in the way they liked. Cablegrams and letters reached him from all parts of the United States, mostly addressed to John Barton, American Commentator, London, England. Most of them were full of enthusiasm and praise.

Grand stuff, John. Keep at it.

You have made us fall in love with England. You’ve broken down the ancient grudge. You make us weep and you make us laugh. I’m sending all I can spare and a bit extra to Bundles for Britain.

You are number 1 world reporter, John Barton, sir. We thank you a lot over here. My wife and daughters hang on to the radio every time you speak, and I go about repeating your stories of those Londoners and the heroic folk in other English cities. Take care of yourself and don’t get killed. We can’t spare you.

All that was pretty gratifying to an American newspaperman. John Barton liked to read those messages which poured in from the United States, and felt guilty by being warmed by them so much.

“It’s just food for my vanity,” he told his sister Judy, who refused to agree with him. “Besides, there’s something disgusting about it. I’m making a national reputation out of the agony of England. And, in any case, what does it matter now that Anne has gone?”

“You’ve shared the agony, John,” answered Judy in her matter-of-fact way. “You’re taking the same risks. I wish you wouldn’t take so many. You’re the first to get to any place after it has been blitzed.”

“Afterwards makes a lot of difference,” said John. “It’s damned easy to stroll about the ruins when the bombs aren’t falling.”

“Don’t be absurd, John,” said Judy. “Haven’t you been in all the London raids? You deserve all that’s coming to you in fame and recognition.”

“It’s not worth a row of beans,” said John. “Besides, I get plenty of kicks in the pants.”

Letters and cables of another kind reached him now and then. They were, to say the least of it, unfriendly.

A woman wrote from San Francisco:

How much do the English pay you for all your propaganda?

If you think you are going to drag us into this war by your sickening praise of the English, you’re making a big mistake. We’re not going to be hoodwinked again by sending our boys to pull England’s chestnuts out of the fire. No sir! This war is not our war. You’re a paid creature of the President, who is trying to force us into a war in which we are not interested. He, of course, is in the hands of the international Jews.

There was another letter from a man in Omaha, Nebraska. It was not a beautiful specimen of literary style.

Say, Johnny Barton, who’s been leading you up the garden path? Why do you send over such slush about those lousy bastards, the English? You know as well as I do that the English leaders, including that bullfrog Churchill, are a bunch of crooks. You try to pull the wool over our eyes by your sob stuff about the cockneys and the slum dwellers. We’re not taking it, Johnny. The English are only good at running away. They make a habit of retreat and let the other fellow do the dying. I’m a hundred per cent isolationist in this war. So is every level-headed American.

A man from Lexington, Kentucky, wrote:

You’re a traitor to your own country.

You’re one of those depatriated Americans who fall victims to the English snobs. Isn’t your wife the daughter of an earl? Doesn’t that account for your cowardly and treacherous disloyalty to the only true democracy on earth? You’re a dirty rat, Barton, and it gives me great pleasure to tell you so.

If ever you show your face in these United States, it will be definitely changed in shape. We are not tolerant of traitors.

John passed over this letter to Judy when they were at breakfast together in the cottage at Spurfold.

She read it with anger.

“It’s shameful,” she said. “It’s horrible, John, to think that our country is crowded with people who think like that. It accounts for their refusal to come in and fight on the side of liberty. I’m ashamed of my own people. I never want to go back. I’m English in body and spirit.”

She was the mother of an English boy aged two, who was having a great time at the table with an empty jam jar from which he was pretending to feed a Teddy bear, a golliwogg, and a comic dog which he loved with passion.

John took back the letter and smiled.

“It comes from the Middle West,” he said carelessly. “That’s the stronghold of the isolationists—and not much of a stronghold at that, I should say. They’re losing ground, according to Charlie Seligmann, who wrote to me the other day.”

Charlie Seligmann was the news editor of John’s New York paper, and he kept John in touch with American opinion. He was a shrewd judge, but although he thought the isolationists were losing ground, he did not believe that the American people were ready for any active participation in the war. He wrote:

The President is having an uphill fight against our national apathy and the extreme reluctance of American women to send their sons overseas. Aid to Britain, but no fighting. That’s the present mood of the majority. Your last talk over the radio was the cat’s whiskers. It moved me to tears, and Charlie Seligmann ain’t much given to that kind of weakness, being one of the tough guys. Congratulations, Johnny. You’re doing grand. All the boys say so.

As the months passed with a wonderful respite in England from bombing raids now that Germany was desperately engaged in the Russian campaign, John Barton was able to hide his wound from most people, though he flinched when Anne’s name was mentioned by his mother or Judy. Sometimes, indeed, he forgot his wound, and then hated himself for that ease of mind. He found himself laughing with his friends again. He found himself telling funny stories in London teashops or club restaurants. His insatiable interest in English life and character had been regained, and in the company of other correspondents on visits to munition works, dockyards, airdromes, and army units, he talked a lot and laughed a lot, and was his old, keen, vital self, until in his bedroom in some provincial hotel on one of those journeys he was alone with his thoughts. Alone, horribly alone.

“I’m forgetting Anne,” he said in those lonely rooms, desperately cold and cheerless in an English winter. “I haven’t thought of her once all day. I made a monkey of myself telling funny stories to that bunch of pressmen. I’m like the rest of men—lousy, selfish egoists, disloyal to their wives. I’m disloyal to Anne. She is fading out of my heart. She’s becoming only a dream woman. She’s dead, but I go on laughing and eating and drinking and talking. Anne, my darling, forgive me. Life is worth nothing to me without your beauty and your love. I wish I were dead too. I wish I had been killed that night, and that you had been left alive. Speak to me, Anne, if you are anywhere about. Come to me in my dreams. Surely you can do that?”

Never once did she come to him in his dreams.

No ghost walked his way. Anne gave no sign from the spirit world.

Perhaps she went back to St. Leonard’s Terrace trying to find him? But he was reluctant now to go into that house again. It was so dark, so desolate. As often as possible he went down to the country cottage at Spurfold, and when he had to spend a night in London—and that was several times a week—he put up at his club in Pall Mall, where he could meet a few friends to discuss the war with them and get their minds and moods, which varied from unreasoning optimism, he thought, to unreasoning despair.