Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 15

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Though I charged O’Rane at the time with disturbing the repose of our retreat, I can see now that, even before I invited him to Cannes, I was resigned to moving at least one stage nearer to the heart of politics. It is true that my uncle Bertrand’s appeal for help in his election was answered with a lame reference to Barbara’s health; simultaneously I told Frank Jellaby, without a trace of lameness or indecision, that I was too little in sympathy with the liberal party to fight a seat on my own account; all the time, however, I was conscious of a chilling remoteness. I did not want to go back; I was thankful that Barbara seemed content to vegetate; but, if I was right in thinking that the fruits of the war remained to be gathered, I was right in thinking that they could not be gathered in Cannes.

I hoped that O’Rane, with his knowledge of other countries, would tell me whether my derided ‘will to peace’ was practicable or even necessary. If he shared my misgivings, I wanted his help in planning a campaign that would be bounded only by the confines of the inhabited earth and would engage our energies for the rest of our lives. A train of reasoning is sometimes so persuasive in its premises and overwhelming in its conclusion that human intelligence rejects it without argument; and a train of this kind was presented to me on the eve of the armistice, when Hornbeck declared in succeeding breaths that another war would be synonymous with the end of the world and that nothing could prevent another war. His first premise was substantiated by all the evidence of the late war; his second was at least supported by every soldier and statesman whose memoirs I had been reading for the last month. The syllogism could only be refuted by a general strike against war. This was my revelation and mission; and I had suffered too long from the revelations and missions of others to trust my own until I had been put to the question.

The O’Ranes arrived, with my sister and her husband, a week before Christmas. It was characteristic of the times that I should first set eyes on my brother-in-law two years after his marriage. Beryl wrote in 1916 to say that she was engaged to a certain Gervaise Maxwell, whom she had nursed at the Lorings’ hospital in Scotland. They parted after a week’s honeymoon: Beryl went back to House of Steynes, Gervaise rejoined his battalion in Mesopotamia; and they met for the second time four days after the armistice.

Now they were coming to exploit my influence in finding work for Gervaise; and I, knowing the slender proportions of that influence and recollecting the claims already advanced by Sam Dainton and my cousin Laurence, wondered helplessly whether the government did wisely in releasing men from the army before they had found civil employment. For a week before leaving London my telephone had been agitated by the voices of anxious friends who assured me that they could be demobilized at once if I would invent some urgent private business for them. “Good pay, light work and decent holidays,” they all said. I suppose the army let them go because the army could not retain them. At Wilminster and Yareham the troops demobilized themselves and walked home; at Enstaple and Durncliffe they threatened to mutiny if they were ordered back to France. It was one thing, however, to kick a uniform into a cupboard; and something quite different to find civilian clothes that would fit. Gervaise, I decided, must wait until I had discussed with O’Rane my own plans. It might be that, within a few months, I should want all the men I could get; or it might be that I should be cultivating my garden in Ireland. I must wait, too, until I had heard O’Rane’s proposals. Eighteen months had passed since I hunted him out to America, nominally to lecture on the war and really to make a fresh start with Sonia after her disaster with Vincent Grayle. In that time I had purposely not enquired how they were getting on, as a fresh start might well be the fresh start only to more trouble. The woman who jilts two men, marries a third, runs away with a fourth and returns with his child, all before the age of thirty-three, has either too much emotion in her nature or else too little.

I must confess to a feeling of embarrassment as the train drew in. The feeling passed as Sonia waved ecstatically from her window and announced breathlessly that no one would believe what a success she had had in Paris, that she was insolvent, that this no longer mattered, that she had the most wonderful news for me, that she was going to have an unprecedented success in London, that it was heavenly to see me again and that she was really going to enjoy herself in Cannes.

A woman who lived only for the moment was not likely to be disturbed by regrets or fears; and, as Sonia swung down from the train into my arms, her eyes were as limpid and innocent, her lips were as moistly red and provocative, as when I took her to supper at her first parties fifteen years before. Then and now, she was of those who make the world take them at their own valuation. Then she had babbled of her earliest ball-room triumphs; now she described the men who had thrown themselves at her feet from San Francisco to Paris.

“Then you enjoyed yourself?,” I asked, when she paused for breath.

“They enjoyed me,” she answered complacently. “I don’t think they’d ever seen anything quite like me before. Oh, George! Has David told you our news? We met Mr. Stornaway in London; and he wants us to come and work with him! Say, kid, can you beat it? I asked him what the work was; and he said it was just helping him to spend money. If there’s one thing I do know about ... We’re going to be the new big noise in London. Collect David; and we’ll tell you all about it!”

If my embarrassment returned as I went forward to give her husband a hand, it vanished as he took up the interrupted tale. In voice and manner there was nothing to hint that he had ever been estranged from his radiant wife; and I decided that, in a sense, he too lived only for the moment. When we first met, a small boy without a friend in the world had decided that he must put himself to school. His father had been killed, fighting for Greece against Turkey; and David made his way to England, with enough money for one term, by working his passage round the world. When he had sucked in all that Melton and Oxford could give him, he banished them into the past, as he had already banished his wanderings, and concentrated all his energies on making money; when the money was made, he turned his back for ever on the oil-fields of Mexico and devoted himself to English politics until the war imposed on him a more urgent duty. On the day that he was discharged from hospital, blinded and maimed, he called to tell me that he had already secured new work. When Sonia left him, he set himself to get her back; and, when she returned, I am sure that he set himself with equal singleness of purpose to forget that they had ever been parted.

Now he could think of nothing but Raymond Stornaway’s proposal.

“That’s where I want your advice,” he explained gravely, as though in all his thirty-five tempestuous years of life he had ever taken advice from anybody.

“And I want yours,” I told him. “I’m sorry to find Raymond butting in: I expect to need your help much more.”

That evening after dinner, when the others had gone away to gamble, we talked of the war and of that other evening, when we stood on the dividing ridge between two worlds. Of the men who dined at Loring Castle on the last night of peace, he and I alone had survived. We talked of the war that was over as then we had talked of the war that was coming. I quoted him the words in which he had described his vision of what the world might be after the war; and I challenged him to say whether he still believed in the perfectibility of man.

“I’ve acquired a lot of patience in the last four years,” he answered.

Then I tested him with Hornbeck’s prediction that wars would be fought so long as the human race survived to fight them.

“I want you to help me organize a general strike against war,” I said, as I began to blow out the candles. Then I paused to frame a question which I had kept unasked since our last evening of peace: “D’you remember blowing out the candles that night?” He nodded. “You left two. Why?”

As he hesitated, I saw that he was frowning. I saw also that, like the rest of us, he had aged in the last five years, though the thin face had its old passionate vitality and the fine black hair its old gay disorder. Slight as ever, boyish as ever, he was none the less lined with the mental and physical tortures of the war. His very hesitation was a subtle mark of decline, as though for the first time in his life he doubted himself.

“I knew in my bones that only two of us would come through,” he muttered. “I should be one; I couldn’t make a guess at the other.”

“There aren’t more than half-a-dozen left out of all our generation,” I told him. “The old club-groups at Oxford.... I can’t look at them.”

“And I couldn’t see ’em if I did look. Not that I need to be reminded of them.” ... The unseeing eyes flashed in sudden exaltation. “What death takes away, George, is very little by comparison with what he leaves! The men I’ve loved best in the world have been my father and your uncle and old Burgess and you and Jim. Three of you, thank God!, are alive: I stayed with Burgess for his last night before he retired from Melton; but you’re no more alive than my father and Jim. Nothing can take away the time I spent with them.... I shan’t see again in this world, but nothing can take away all that I’ve seen in the past. I still see the men I recruited, the men who trained with me, though I helped to bury more than a few.”

“Some of them were here to-night,” I said.

“Yes! And what death has done is just to put their bodies out of action .... That means there are fewer hands and more work.” ...

As I led him to the door, O’Rane’s fingers ran lightly down my arm.

“It’s about twenty years since you first came to stay with us,” I reminded him.

“I suppose it must be. Good, full years.”

“I was feeling middle-aged till you came. Middle-aged and depressed.”

He laughed and gripped my hand:

“We’ve no time to grow middle-aged. It’s the next twenty years that will count. We must pull together. In a sense we are the last two.”

As I blew out the remaining candles, the room once more seemed to fill with our friends of other days. We were indeed almost the only survivors; and I could not tell these ghosts that they had given their lives, I could not tell O’Rane that he had given his sight, to no purpose.

“Think over what we’ve been saying,” I suggested. “Tell me if you can see any reason why just such another war shouldn’t break out with just as little reason.”

“If it does, then this war wasn’t worth while.... And it’s our business to make it worth while,” he answered.