Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 8

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At Barbara’s thoughts I could make no guess. Before the war, she had been more mercilessly pursued by publicity than any one of her generation. When our engagement was announced, I slunk like a criminal past the contents-bills that proclaimed a “Famous Society Beauty Engaged”; and, on the day of the wedding, when the traffic was held up for three hours and the auxiliary police were numbered by hundreds, the London crowd was certainly far more concerned to catch a glimpse of Lady Barbara Neave than to hear that the Channel ports were safe. Since our marriage, she had hardly appeared in public; but, as she crouched over the fire without speaking, I wondered what picture she was composing for her life in the unknown, new peace.

When her maid came to dress her, I went to my own room. Night had fallen silently; and, when I looked towards the corner of Park Lane, the streets were more empty than on the night of an air-raid. Once or twice I heard the echo of subdued revelry; but, in ten minutes, I counted only four men and two women walking rapidly westward, closely buttoned against the biting air. Any vision of what this day would be had nothing in common with the patchwork I had seen. Dawdling luxuriously—for the first time in four years—over my dressing, I could recall scraps of altercation with Bertrand, flashes of speculation with Hornbeck, confidences with Crawleigh. Jerkiness, incompleteness, artificial reserve, an overwhelming perplexity and a relief too great to be expressed were what I carried away from the armistice; and I should think that most people in England experienced the same confused emotions and lay down that night with the same confused recollections.

There was none of the vulgar debauchery that had disgraced the capital of a great empire on Mafeking night: in nineteen years our pride was more chastened and our thankfulness more heartfelt, even if we did not know how to give it words.

“I thought you promised to arrange a survivors’ dinner,” said Barbara, as we went up to bed.

“Only about six of us survived,” I answered. “And we’re all scattered. We’re tired, too. The war went on too long.” Though I was almost too exhausted to think, I remembered a far-away debate at Melton on the first anniversary of the war, when the greatest headmaster and the wisest man that I have met warned me that a long war would be followed by an even longer moral reaction: a bruised world, said old Burgess, would go back to the ways it knew and to the fleshpots it loved. “We shall be useless for years,” I said.

“I wonder if it was worth it,” Barbara mused.

“That depends on what you expected or wanted. We’ve secured our terms. And, if it’s not too rhetorical, I believe that every man who voluntarily offered his life, at a time when we thought we were degenerating, has to a great extent saved his soul. This country has been spared invasion.”

Barbara parted the curtains in her room and looked down on the silent street.

“The first night of peace since Jim’s last party at Loring Castle,” she murmured. “We ... Well, I suppose we go on from that?”

“If we want to.”

“Well, don’t you? For the last four years we haven’t been able to call our souls our own.”

“I wonder whether we ever shall again,” I said, as I filled my final pipe. That last night of peace lingered more vividly in my memory than any since. War was certain. We had read Grey’s speech; and I walked with O’Rane up and down the valley-terrace, trying to decide what we were fighting to preserve. “We want something more than the status quo,” I told Barbara. “That night ... There was no question, then, of a general levy: the war must be over in a few months, and only the regular army would fight. Well, we’d seen Jack Summertown and a car-load of officers driving off the night before: they were a small minority who were quite clearly going to risk their skins for the rest of us. Were we worth it? I told Raney that I’d like to shew something that was better worth fighting for.”

“And haven’t we? When you think how every one has worked and fought ...”

“But now that it’s all over?,” I persisted. “Raney said that people couldn’t come back from the war to take up the old futility; you couldn’t set up social barriers between men who had undertaken the same charge. It was unthinkable to save a country from invasion in order to perpetuate things like sweated labour. I wonder.” ...

“What a long time ago it all seems!”

There was no cynicism in Barbara’s voice; but, if anybody spoke nowadays of a new world, his words were dismissed as Fleet Street rhetoric or Downing Street claptrap; and, though not one man of all the thousands who would be returning in the next few days was likely to say that he had risked his life to perpetuate sweated labour, I could not imagine that many would exert themselves to abolish it.

Exertion! I was too tired to undress! The world might be bankrupt and yet survive; the world might be decimated and yet make good its wastage; first and foremost, the world was weary to the marrow of its bones.