Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 21

Table of Contents

No one handed Karl a white feather.

Like many a sensitive lad he may have seen the white symbol floating in the air like swansdown.

He did not want to go to the war. He had no illusions about the war. The make-believe of waving flags and blaring brass had passed. A resigned and dogged realism had replaced rhetoric; the whole business was as drab as khaki. Only the press, a few politicians and some old ladies of both sexes continued to talk heroic tosh. Karl had spoken with the men who had come back.

He saw the war as a filthy business, a vast and savage scuffle in a foul ditch. You became a slave, or one of a herd of cattle, hardly deserving to be distinguished by a number, driven here and driven there. You were voiceless. Your consent was not asked when you were sent up to be slaughtered. How could man be fooled by so monstrous an illusion? A war to end war! He supposed that some sort of text was necessary. And the great comradeship? O, no; he was a rather separative creature, and he shrank from that anonymous herding, sharing your soul with some primitive and your shirt with the lice. Sensitive? But that was just it. There was a generous impulse urging his shrinking self towards action. One might have to decide in dreadful silence that something compelled you to rush into all that dreadful noise. Karl did not say—

“I owe it to my self-regard.” That might have sounded priggish, as priggish as the saying—“I am too fine and fastidious for this monkey show.” He was somehow conscious of being part of a body of anguish and fear and horror and courage, of a torn and bewildered humanity that suffered and endured. Could any man will himself out of that community of pain into a little sneering, careful clique, and say “I’m not such a poor fool”? The inevitableness of the thing was that you had to be a fool and share in the tragedy of this world folly. Civilization’s agony in the desert? Generous natures rushed in and accepted the folly, and Karl was realizing that he would have to join the multitude of sacrificial fools. He could not stand aside with the little, superior, clever people.

He had spoken to old Vidler.

“I’ve got to go, Tom.”

“Well, my lad, all the blood and guts of the country are out there.”

At the moment Karl was writing a play, a romantic fantasia into which he had sought to escape. That play would never be finished. The plays he was to write after the war were to be of different stuff.

His mother did not ask him whether he had finished or would finish that play. She knew.

She saw her son’s face as the face of a dear stranger. Her beloved was alone with things. She saw his manuscript each morning lying closed in its brown paper cover. She would open it, and read the same words that broke abruptly into space.

“Mary. But why do we do the things we do?—Even when they are against ourselves, even when they hurt?”

Then, the blank half page. There was no answer given to that question. The answer was hidden somewhere in her son’s silence.

His room was over hers, and sometimes she heard him walking about at night, and more than once she crept heavily up the stairs in her slippers, and stood—a large, dim, yearning figure outside his door. She was sure—now.

O, what a world! His mother was grotesquely conscious of herself as a fat old Jewess in a pink flannel bed-jacket, standing helpless outside the door of youth. Shop,—shop!—She had fat hands, and a wedding ring embedded on one finger, and slippers down at the heels. Beyond the drawn blind was the Essex Road and the grey greasiness of an English winter. She had been a seller of old clothes, with a text of “Wardrobes Purchased.” But the Rebecca of the dark landing was just a figure of symbolism, ugly and beautiful and anguished, and crying in her shabby slippers—“O, my beloved, my beloved!”