Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 17

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There were a few leaves left to fall, though the grass of that French orchard was stippled with them. But no wind moved. A faint mist hung in the air, and the sky was of an unbroken greyness, while in the ditches dead leaves floated in brown water. There was a great stillness over everything.

Scarsdale had wanted to be alone and in this little, deserted orchard he had found solitude, a silence that covered the horizon like the canopy of cloud. He was off duty; he had walked out of the shabby little French town that had emerged from four years of tyranny and terror, and had taken the road between the poplars, but its very straightness had depressed him. He had a yearning for secret things and places, some corner where he could be alone, and by a Calvary he had come upon a lane looping its way between hedges towards groups of trees. After standing a moment at the foot of the Calvary and looking at the desolate face of the Christ, Scarsdale had followed the lane and found this orchard.

November 11, 1918.

It was the afternoon of that most strange day, strangest of all days to the men who lived through it, a mere date in the calendar to the younger generations.

Scarsdale wandered about the orchard. A few yellow leaves drifted down, and seen through the dark fretwork of branches the grey horizon had a smoky blueness. He was alone and he was restless; it was as though a little shiver of freedom stirred in those silent trees, like the shiver of spring divined even in the restfulness of winter. He stood and stared. It seemed to him that the whole world stood and stared, and with an incredulous, still face, listened for the sounds that had ceased. Peace. No more guns, no more agonies in the mud, no more fragments of humanity laid upon bloody stretchers.

Yet the solemnity and the significance of this sudden silence affected him personally. As a little centre of consciousness under that grey sky, he was aware of himself and of man as man, millions of human particles congregated into a crowd, a vastness and yet a unity. The war had stripped him, and in this orchard he felt stripped a second time, raw, and naked and new born, and somehow yearning for the comfortable old clothes of his pre-war self. Like thousands upon thousands of other men he wanted to be back in the old days, dressed in the old habits, immersed in the old job.

He watched a leaf fall. It floated, seemed to hesitate, touched the grass, and lay still. Was there anything symbolical in the fall of a leaf? Was that his idea of the future, to touch the soft grass and lie still? What of the spring, the surging of the sap?

And suddenly he felt himself troubled by a strange unrest. He had come out here to be alone, to escape from the crowd, and this solitude had become a clamour. Questions! Such obvious questions, and yet so baffling and disturbing. Going back after the war! Was there ever a going back? What would happen? These millions of men returning in a tawny crowd to a civilization which had been subtly brutalized, tarnished, cheaply gilded. Could so crude a thing as organized murder go on for years, and the world remain none the worse for it?

He was aware of a feeling of chilliness, something like fear. Or was it that he was fey, a sensitive, a little more wide-eyed than other men? What was there to fear?

Why not be like other men? He had heard some of them shouting, and seen them throwing up their caps.

“By God, the blasted old war’s over.”

Half a dozen of them had come blundering into his billet.

“What-o, Bossy. Cleaning your buttons! What!”

“I’ll not clean another blasted button. Not me.”

Someone had shouted.

“We’re going to get drunk to-night if we have to break into the blasted stores.”

Was that the idea, the reaction? Getting drunk and ceasing to clean buttons? Would the new world be something like that? But no. He had seen other men going about with looks of silence, and with eyes that were like his own, surprised, sobered, perplexed. There was that other cry deep in the hearts of decent humility. “We want to get home.” Yes, home.

He remembered suddenly that he had no home. He had lived in a couple of rooms in Canonbury Square; he had been a scribbler, a reviewer of other men’s books, a sort of mild and kindly parasite. He was shocked. A parasite, a hack? O, no, not that, but a man of letters, an essayist, a reviewer. A cultured person.

And then it came upon him suddenly that he had missed things, women, adventure, the larger human happenings, the fine swagger of life. He had no one to go home to, no one who cared whether he returned.

Rather extraordinary!

And what would they be doing in England on this day, especially the women of England? Going into churches, sitting staring silently into the fire? Surely it was a solemn and a sacred day for the women?

Or would they be—?

What would Marwood’s daughter be doing?

A quickened restlessness possessed him. He walked out of the orchard and down the lane till he came to the Calvary. He looked up at the face of Christ. It had a darkness, almost the bitterness of disillusionment.

He thought—“Has someone or something—a faith or an ideal—always to be crucified?”

He hurried on. The face of the figure had disturbed him. Was it that men and their dreams died and did not rise again?