Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 5

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Barbara was asleep, with a light burning by her side and an open book face-downwards on the bed. At last, I told myself, I could see something of my wife. I should be able to read the new poets and novelists who overflowed her cases. At last we could entertain our friends again. At last, after eight months, we could have our honeymoon. Barbara looked dangerously fragile. As I watched her, one hand was drawn slowly up the sheet; and the fingers were almost transparent. Her head turned restlessly from side to side; and I knew that she was dreaming. There was a whispered sigh; and I felt that her dreams were unhappy.

“George! Oh, it’s you!,” she exclaimed with a throb of relief; and, as she brushed the cloudy hair back from her face, I saw that her big, deep-set eyes were black and anguished.

“Who else should it be?,” I asked, as I draped a shawl over her thin shoulders and kissed her flushed cheeks. “They’ve signed, Babs. It’s all over.”

“It’s ... all ... over?,” she repeated dreamily.

“Yes. I telephoned to your mother from the Admiralty. They’re safe: Neave and Charlie.”

Silence fell between us until Barbara covered her face and murmured: “Thank God!” Then she sat up and stared round the shadowy room:

“What ... what are we going to do now?”

Within an hour I felt that most people would be asking themselves that question:

“I don’t know. For this morning Phil Hornbeck suggested that I should invite a few friends to my room in case there’s anything to see. Afterwards ...”

“Afterwards you must take me away!,” she cried. “You’re quite sure there’s been no mistake?”

“Quite sure!,” I answered, as I sat down by the telephone and tried to remember which of our friends we should both care to have with us at the moment when peace dawned.

A change had overtaken London by the time that I set out to collect my party. As on August bank-holiday four years earlier, when I drove about Gloucestershire, with Loring and O’Rane, waiting for news, the city had an air of suspended animation. Of the twenty strangers who interrogated me on my way across the park, not one had more doubt that the terms would be accepted than that the sun would rise on the morrow. And yet, so nicely balanced were hope and fear, I should have been surprised if any one had laid me long odds on peace. Like Barbara, they were grown used to the war. As I spread the news from house to house, every one said: ‘What time is it now?’; and it seemed as if the eleventh hour of the eleventh day would never come. There was a muddle-headed point of honour, too, that no one should betray even impatience.

“Oh, yes, I’ll look in, if I have nothing better to do. You might have called here instead of bringing me to this infernal contraption,” growled my uncle Bertrand, who always visited his hatred of the telephone on the heads of those who addressed him by it. “That all you have to say? Filson! Filson!,” I heard him calling to his man. “They’ve signed!”

Lady Dainton, whom I invited for the sake of old associations, murmured: “Thank you so much. I know Roger will be interested,” as though I had announced a minor change in the cabinet. Raymond Stornaway said: “I trust this doesn’t mean a general holiday: I’ve the very devil of a day’s work ahead of me.” My sister Beryl hoped that I had not gone to the expense of buying that new uniform.

I had already warned old Lady Loring by telephone; and, when I reached Curzon Street, I found my cousin Violet dressed to go out and playing in the hall with her boy.

“I’m waiting to be told what to do next,” was her greeting.

Though she had worn her deep mourning for more than three years, her little white face looked pathetically young and helpless. I wondered what kind of life she could expect from the armistice.

“We’re all in the same boat,” I answered. “I called to suggest that you should bring Sandy to the Admiralty. My father could just remember the Famine; my mother remembers the crowds in the streets when Sebastopol fell. Sandy may carry away something to fix this, eighty years hence, as the day when the Great War ended.”

“I wonder if people will talk about it then as ‘the Great War’?,” Violet mused.

As she buttoned her boy into his coat, I felt that she was thinking only of the day when her husband of a month, with all that health, fortune, rank and riches could give him, drifted whimsically to France, in the meshes of a machine which he ridiculed, there to die in defence of one country, which he faintly despised, against another, which he mildly disliked. Violet had been left with a son to bring up and a vast estate to administer. She would never, I knew, marry again; and, now that the war was over, she saw herself fading into the twilight of life to dwell with ghosts and memories and dreams.

“The Great Waste,” I suggested, as we set out. “If any one could have foreseen, four years ago, how this would end, I wonder if there’d have been a war? I tremble to think what the world will look like when we have time to take stock.”

In our passage from Loring House to the Admiralty, I found that the news had spread before us; and young Lucien de Grammont, speeding towards the French Embassy, stopped long enough to vent on us his disappointment that the allies had not insisted on unconditional surrender.

“Those accursed Americans!,” he cried. “But for them, peace would have been signed in Berlin! Now in fifty years’ time ... Well, let us hope we shan’t be alive to see it.”

As he flung off in furious disappointment, I ventured the opinion that, but for the Americans, a German peace might have been dictated in Paris. Then we pressed through the crowd in the Processional Avenue and took up our positions to see at least the greatest war in history ending. My secretary had cleared the table of its trays; and we sat in a row, looking through the mist of Horse Guards’ Parade and trying to guess what was going to happen. The Crawleighs had arrived before us and were talking to Raymond Stornaway; Sir Roger and Lady Dainton followed on our heels; and our last inch of space was filled when my uncle Bertrand, puffing and growling at the stairs, lumbered in with heavy tread and demanded in the loud voice of incipient deafness why it was necessary to collect this nest of magpies.

“Disreputable old wrecks we are!,” he muttered with a glance of sour and comprehensive disfavour from Lord Crawleigh to Sir Roger Dainton and from Sir Roger Dainton to Raymond Stornaway. The grey November light, shining on a row of bent backs and haggard faces, made us older than our years. “We’ve had our chance,” he continued; “I believe the only way of stopping war is to have conscription for all men and women over fifty and to call up the oldest classes first.”

“So that you could hear men of thirty boasting that they’d ‘given’ two grandfathers to the army?,” asked Raymond.

“They’d still be of an age to be kicked, if they tried that kind of cant.... No, but I’m sufficiently sick of everything to feel it’s indecent for me to be alive when mere children are wearing black for men who might have been my grandsons. Eighty-four.... Most of my friends will tell you I’ve lived twenty years too long; and, on my soul, I believe they’re right.”

“You said something of the kind on the day war broke out,” I reminded him. “Now that it’s all over ...?”

Bertrand gathered himself for attack, towering over me with his hands on his hips till the silence of the room daunted him. Then he shrugged his shoulders and turned, with a savage tug at his black walrus-moustache, to shake hands with his neighbours:

“I don’t detect any great reason for optimism. Um, Crawleigh. You English have seen a million or two of your best men killed or wounded.... Whose child is that? ... You’ve seen new debt piled up to the tune of thousands of millions.... How do, Lady Crawleigh? ... I’m an Irishman.... Violet, my dear! ... And a liberal. I’ve seen liberalism stamped out of existence and the Irish party broken.... Lady Dainton, your humble servant. Find me a seat, George, there’s a good boy.”

Most of us knew my uncle well enough to imagine his violent anger if any one else had dared to be so despondent. My father-in-law, however, felt obliged to pick up the gage.

“You mean that we should be no worse off,” he suggested, “if the Germans had drawn up the terms and we had accepted them?”

“Not quite,” Bertrand conceded, “not quite.... I beg your pardon, Barbara my dear, I didn’t see you! ... If you know your Bible, my dear Crawleigh, you’ll recollect that a Jew called Samson tried to get level with the Philistines by pulling a heavy roof down on their heads. He got level; but he paid for it with his life. Some one pulled away the pillars that had been holding up our civilization for Heaven knows how many centuries. Credit, commerce, law and order, faith and morals, production, exchange, distribution: they’ve all toppled; and they’ve toppled on the heads of all of us. You’ll see as soon as peace really sets in. No! No, Crawleigh! This war should have ended two years ago, while there were still a few tiles left on the roof!”

I recalled my uncle’s warning, on the day war broke out, that freedom of speech was dead; on the day it ended, he asserted his right to it with a truculence that had been shouted down when he pleaded for “a patched-up peace” at the end of 1916, before the United States came in, and again in 1917 when the Lansdowne letter was published.

“Lucien de Grammont wants to go on to Berlin,” I said.

Bertrand clasped his hands over the crook of his stick and nodded scornfully at a headstrong world that refused to take his advice. His expression and attitude reminded me of Dr. Johnson, in the celebrated picture, awaiting an audience with Lord Chesterfield.

“He forgets, perhaps, that we at least went into this war to uphold the neutrality of Belgium. We stayed in to make the Germans pay for the damage they’d done there. Later ... Later, we were told that the French must have Alsace-Lorraine, Russia must have Constantinople, Italy must have an infernal place called the Trentino. And any stray islands or continents where a German or the ally of a German has ever set foot must be taken away and given to somebody else. It may be all very right and proper; but that wasn’t our aim in 1914.”

More was coming; but his audience began to shew signs of hostility; and Violet intervened by setting her boy on the old man’s knee and whispering:

“You mustn’t quarrel on a day like this. Help me to shew him the different nationalities, Uncle Bertrand. Sandy! Sandy! You see the little man down there by the tree. D’you know what he is? He’s a Jap. Japanese.”

“Jap-an-ese,” Sandy repeated slowly.

“Those are Americans,” she continued, with her finger pointing to three grave, lean-faced young officers. “Amer-i-cans.”

“Call ’em ‘Yanks’, most noble marquess,” grunted Bertrand, who—with much else that was Johnsonian—exhibited the doctor’s unreasoning antipathy to the new world.

“Merry-cans,” Sandy repeated.

“There’s a Frenchman! There’s a Canadian! See, Sandy? Uncle Bertrand, find me an Italian,” Violet pleaded. “I don’t know how much this mite will remember, but it is rather marvellous to see them all together. That’s a South African, isn’t it? Oh, and a poor soul with only one leg. There’ll still be plenty of them for him to see when he’s grown up. I wish I could find an Italian!”

The open space under my window had filled so rapidly that it was hardly possible for any one to move. Typists from the government offices, in short skirts and transparent blouses, were standing on tiptoe, bare-headed in the biting cold, staring bright-eyed over the shoulders of those in front. There were soldiers, in uniform and in their hospital undress; sailors; nurses; government messengers with battered red boxes; a park-keeper; two clergymen; some errand-boys; and a thousand nondescripts. At one moment they were very silent; at another, they broke into feverish conversation with unknown neighbours, occasionally shaking hands and cheering a foreign uniform.

“Five minutes to eleven,” muttered a voice which I could not identify.