Читать книгу The Battle Within - Philip Gibbs - Страница 4

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Pearl Haddon had heard her father and mother go out at about half-past ten. That was just after she had gone to bed; but once in a while she didn’t feel like sleeping, though generally she was greedy for sleep after a hard day in town at St. James’ Palace and the journey back, first in an over-crowded train and then in an overcrowded bus with standing room only, and not much of that.

Mrs. Marlow had come in with her saint-like parson that evening and had made her go hot and angry over the usual argument about the German people. She had had it with Mrs. Marlow and many others a thousand times since the war began—even with her father, who was very decent about it, knowing how she felt, and why. It was absurd of her after all this time, especially as they had evidence every day about German atrocities and German cruelties. She had refused to believe them at first. Hadn’t there been a lot of fake atrocities in the last war? Her father had told her that, and he ought to know, having been in France and Flanders from first to last in field hospitals and casualty clearing-stations. But apart from what was in the newspapers—all that ghastly stuff about Poland—she had met many people who had first-hand evidence whom she was bound to believe. Young Quentin Fellowes, who had escaped from France after Dunkirk, had seen the refugees—old people and women and children—machine-gunned on the roads between Dieppe and Pontoise. She just had to believe him. Mrs. Halliday’s husband, a submarine commander, had seen the German dive-bombers deliberately attack and sink Red Cross ships in the Ægean Sea, and come down low to kill men struggling in the water after their ship had been torpedoed. She had to take his word for it. They had machine-gunned women and children at the English seaside, according to Mrs. Loftus, who had dragged her two little girls behind a breakwater. Myra Lehmann had made her sick with the things she told about German cruelties to the Jews in Austria and Poland. So it was absurd to get all hot and bothered again when Mrs. Marlow had denounced the whole German race and said that we ought to sterilize all German women after the war, and hoped that thousands of German soldiers would be bayoneted to death by our men in Tunisia.

“Why take prisoners?” asked Mrs. Marlow. “They are all murderers.”

Mr. Marlow had sat with his eyes down, looking distressed. His thin, ascetic face, like a saint by an Italian primitive, had a sad look, though now and then he tried to laugh off his wife’s violence of speech.

“I thought we were Christians,” he said once, with one of those uneasy laughs.

“It’s because I’m a Christian that I want to rid the world of Hitler and his devils,” answered Mrs. Marlow.

The conversation had gone that way because of Myra Lehmann’s attempt at suicide—if it was that—a few nights ago.

She had walked into the pond. Mr. Fellowes had seen her in the moonlight and had plunged in and dragged her out. She had lied to him and told him that she was sleep-walking. Of course it was a lie. She had told Pearl several times that she thought she could not bear life any more. Her mother and grandparents had been left alone all these years because of their age perhaps and because the people in their Austrian village had sheltered them. Now she had news that they had been dragged off and sent to Poland on one of those journeys in cattle-trucks which was a sentence of death. Her sister had killed herself in Vienna when the Nazis had forced her husband to divorce her.

“There are still people in this country who would let the Germans off after the war,” said Mrs. Marlow. “There are still people who think that some of the Germans are nice kind folk with ordinary decent human instincts.”

“I do,” said Pearl.

She could have bitten her tongue out for saying that. It was only asking for a lot of silly argument. Of course it happened. Mrs. Marlow turned on her with a flame in her eyes.

“I wonder you dare to say so, Pearl, when England is fighting this crusade against the spirit of evil and your own brother is in the R.A.F. If I didn’t love your father and mother so much I should say you ought to be locked up.”

Pearl’s mother had laughed and slapped Mrs. Marlow’s hand.

“Shut up, Peggy,” she said. “You always let your tongue run away with you. You’re a most violent specimen of the female species.”

“Thank God I’m an English woman and a patriot,” answered Mrs. Marlow.

Mr. Marlow had murmured something about patriotism is not enough, and then his wife had turned on him.

“You ought to have been a conscientious objector, Timothy. You’ve no right to stand in the pulpit and preach to a patriotic congregation. You’re worse than Dick Sheppard.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” answered Mr. Marlow with a faint laugh. “Perhaps I’m a dishonest fellow and a bad Christian. In fact I know I am.”

Pearl’s mother had tried to cheer him up in her usual way.

“Perhaps you’re the only Christian among us,” she told him. “Anyhow, I shall come to church if all the rest of your congregation forsakes you.”

Pearl had left her chair and gone sharply out of the room when Mrs. Marlow had advocated the sterilization of German women. She couldn’t stand that. Whatever they said she knew that there were still decent German people. She had been very happy in Munich, where she had first met Karl von Diercksen. They had all been kind to her. They couldn’t have turned into devils. Not all of them.

And yet the frightful cruelties went on and the German people seemed to acquiesce. There was the last story of Myra Lehmann and her family. It was sickening in its horror. Myra could not stand life any more because of it. She had tried to drown herself in a Surrey pond.

It was odd that after that row with Mrs. Marlow she should have torn up Karl’s letters and photographs. She had given Mrs. Marlow the chance of saying she was pro-German. Now she tore up the letters and photographs of her German lover. That was when her father and mother had gone over to Myra Lehmann’s cottage—or rather Dawn Davenant’s cottage—where Myra had a room.

She took out the bundle of letters from a tin box which she kept locked in her wardrobe. There were about thirty of them and several photographs of Karl. The one she had liked best was in Austrian peasant dress in a white shirt and shorts with tasselled stockings. He was terribly good-looking. There was another in an English lounge suit, like the one he wore at the R.A.C. one afternoon just before the war when he had been in London. It hadn’t been an amusing tea-party. The loud-speaker had been turned on in the big lounge and there was a lot of stuff about the evacuation of school children. Karl turned quite pale and wiped a little sweat off his forehead as though he were going to faint.

“I don’t think I can stand this,” he said. “I think I ought to go.”

Peter had laughed at him.

“Sorry it makes you feel uneasy, Karl. A guilty conscience perhaps?”

She remembered that now. She remembered all her love episodes with Karl von Diercksen: the climb up the Zugspitze, a picnic at Garmisch—that was when he had first kissed her—tea and conversation with him on many afternoons at the Vierjahreszeiten, and then his London visit when she went with him to the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection—he was keen on pictures—and many theatres and concerts.

He believed that Hitler stood for peace and persuaded her to believe it too. He was all for Chamberlain and his umbrella. He refused to believe that war would come, even when there was only one more week of peace.

Then he said good-bye to her at Liverpool Street station on his way back to Germany by way of the Hook of Holland.

He was almost speechless at the end. He kept on saying: “I love you. I love my English Pearl. Damn all warmongers who spoil life.”

“Stay here, Karl,” she pleaded with him several times.

It made him irresolute. He was almost tempted to stay, even if it meant prison. But not quite....

“I’m a German,” he said. “I shall have to go back. One has to stand by one’s own folk, right or wrong. Isn’t that the English way?”

“I shall always think of you,” he told her at the last moment by the open door of the railway carriage. “Whatever happens in this war, if it comes, will make no difference to my love. Will it be the same with you, Pearl?”

“It will be the same with me,” she told him.

Now, after more than three years, she tore up his letters and his photographs. She tore them into very small pieces and went down into the kitchen and thrust them into the fire. Myra Lehmann’s story, added to all the others, had made her do that.

She couldn’t defend these Germans or any German after all the frightful things they had done. Karl belonged to the German army. Perhaps he was fighting against the Eighth Army in Tunisia and putting booby traps under dead bodies like his comrades. The wireless, the newspapers, the atrocity stories told by her friends had broken her down at last. Mrs. Marlow and others had called her pro-German because she had believed that some Germans were decent. One girl—Margaret Shillington—had cut her because she had been engaged to Karl. They had a quarrel in the bus. “They ought to put you in Holloway,” said Margaret, whose father and mother had been killed in an air-raid. Now she had torn up Karl’s photographs and his letters. That was that. She had finished with Karl and he was dead in her heart. Stone dead.

She had been perfectly calm about all this until suddenly she wept convulsively for a moment or two.

“Silly ass,” she said aloud after that convulsion. “Blasted fool.”

She put the kettle to boil on the gas-ring in the kitchen. Her father always liked a cup of cocoa when he came back from a night call.