Something crystallised in Winifred’s soul. She alienated herself from him. She would go on alone with her family, doing everything, not counting her negative husband.
This was the state of affairs for almost a year. The family continued chiefly in London; the child was still being massaged, in the hope of getting some use back into the leg. But she was a cripple; it was horrible to see her swing and fling herself along, a young, swift, flame-like child working her shoulders like a deformed thing. Yet the mother could bear it. The child would have other compensation. She was alive and strong; she would have her own life. Her mind and soul should be fulfilled. That which was lost to the body should be replaced in the soul. And the mother watched over, endlessly and relentlessly brought up the child when she used the side of her foot, or when she hopped, things which the doctor had forbidden. But the father could not bear it; he was nullified in the midst of life. The beautiful physical life was all life to him. When he looked at his distorted child, the crippledness seemed malignant, a triumph of evil and of nothingness. Henceforward he was a cipher. Yet he lived. A curious corrosive smile came on his face.
II.
It was at this point in their history that the war broke out. A shiver went over his soul. He had been living for weeks fixed without the slightest sentience. For weeks he had held himself fixed, so that he was impervious. His wife was set fast against him. She treated him with ignoring contempt; she ignored his existence. She would not mend his clothes, so that he went about with his shirt-shoulders slit into rags. She would not order his meals. He went to the kitchen and got his own. There was a state of intense hard hatred between them. The children were tentative and uncertain, or else defiant and ugly. The house was hard and sterile with negation. Only the mother gave herself up in a passion of ethical submission to her duty, and to a religion of physical self-sacrifice: which even yet she hardly believed in.
Yet the husband and wife were in love with each other. Or, rather, each held all the other’s love dammed up.
The family was down at the cottage when war was declared. He took the news in his indifferent, neutral way. “What difference does it make to me?” seemed to be his attitude. Yet it soaked in to him. It absorbed the tension of his own life, this tension of a state of war. A flicker had come into his voice, a thin, corrosive flame, almost like a thin triumph. As he worked in the garden he felt the seethe of the war was with him. His consciousness had now a field of activity. The reaction in his soul could cease from being neutral; it had a positive form to take. There, in the absolute peace of his sloping garden, hidden deep in trees between the rolling of the heath, he was aware of the positive activity of destruction, the seethe of friction, the waves of destruction seething to meet, the armies moving forward to fight. And this carried his soul along with it.
The next time he went indoors he said to his wife, with the same thin flame in his voice:
“I’d better join, hadn’t I?”
“Yes, you had,” she replied; “that’s just the very thing. You’re just the man they want. You can ride and shoot, and you’re so healthy and strong, and nothing to keep you at home.”
She spoke loudly and confidently in her strong, pathetic, slightly deprecating voice, as if she knew she was doing what was right, however much it might mean to her.
The thin smile narrowed his eyes; he seemed to be smiling to himself, in a thin, corrosive manner. She had to assume all her impersonal righteousness to bear it.
“All right——” he said in his thin, jarring voice.
“We’ll see what father says,” she replied.
It should be left to the paternal authority to decide. The thin smile fixed on the young man’s face.
The father-in-law approved heartily; an admirable thing for Evelyn to do, he thought; it was just such men as the country wanted. So it was the father-in-law who finally overcame the young man’s inertia and despatched him to the war.
Evelyn Daughtry enlisted in a regiment which was stationed at Chichester, and almost at once he was drafted into the artillery. He hated very much the subordination, the being ordered about, and the having no choice over quite simple and unimportant things. He hated it strongly, the contemptible position he occupied as a private. And yet, because of a basic satisfaction he had in participating in the great destructive motion, he was a good soldier. His spirit acquiesced, however he despised the whole process of becoming a soldier.
Now his wife altered towards him and gave him a husband’s dignity; she was almost afraid of him; she almost humbled herself before him. When he came home, an uncouth figure in the rough khaki, he who was always so slender and clean-limbed and beautiful in motion, she felt he was a stranger. She was servant to his new arrogance and callousness as a soldier. He was now a quantity in life; he meant something. Also he had passed beyond her reach. She loved him; she wanted his recognition. Perhaps she had a thrill when he came to her as a soldier. Perhaps she too was fulfilled by him, now he had become an agent of destruction, now he stood on the side of the Slayer.
He received her love and homage as tribute due. And he despised himself even for this. Yet he received her love as tribute due, and he enjoyed it. He was her lover for twenty-four hours. There was even a moment of the beautiful tenderness of their first love. But it was gone again. When he was satisfied he turned away from her again. The hardness against her was there just the same. At the bottom of his soul he only hated her for loving him now he was a soldier. He despised himself as a soldier, ultimately. And she, when he had been at home longer than a day, began to find that the soldier was a man just the same, the same man, only become callous and outside her ethical reach, positive now in his destructive capacity.
Still they had their days of passion and of love together when he had leave from the army. Somewhere at the back was the death he was going to meet. In face of it they were oblivious of all but their own desire and passion for each other. But they must not see each other too often, or it was too great a strain to keep up, the closeness of love and the memory of death.
He was really a soldier. His soul had accepted the significance. He was a potential destructive force, ready to be destroyed. As a potential destructive force he now had his being. What had he to do with love and the creative side of life? He had a right to his own satisfaction. He was a destructive spirit entering into destruction. Everything, then, was his to take and enjoy, whilst it lasted; he had the right to enjoy before he destroyed or was destroyed. It was pure logic. If a thing is only to be thrown away, let anybody do with it what he will.
She tried to tell him he was one of the saviours of mankind. He listened to these things; they were very gratifying to his self-esteem. But he knew it was all cant. He was out to kill and destroy; he did not even want to be an angel of salvation. Some chaps might feel that way. He couldn’t; that was all. All he could feel was that at best it was a case of kill or be killed. As for the saviour of mankind: well, a German was as much mankind as an Englishman. What are the odds? We’re all out to kill, so don’t let us call it anything else.
So he took leave of his family and went to France. The leave-taking irritated him, with its call upon his loving constructive self, he who was now a purely destructive principle. He knew he might not see them again, his wife and children. But what was the good of crying about it even then. He hated his wife for her little fit of passion at the last. She had wanted it, this condition of affairs; she had brought it about; why, then, was she breaking up at the last? Let her keep a straight face and carry it on as she had begun!
There followed the great disorder of the first days in France, such a misery of chaos that one just put up with it. Then he was really engaged. He hated it, and yet he was fulfilling himself. He hated it violently, and yet it gave him the only real satisfaction he could have in life now. Deeply and satisfactorily it fulfilled him, this warring on men. This work of destruction alone satisfied his deepest desire.
He had been twice slightly wounded in the two
months. Now he was again in a dangerous position. There had been another retreat to be made, and he remained with three machine-guns covering the rear. The guns were stationed on a little bushy hillock just outside a village. Only occasionally—one could scarcely tell from what direction—came the sharp crackle of rifle fire, though the far-off thud of cannon hardly disturbed the unity of the winter afternoon.
Evelyn was working at the guns. Above him, in the sky, the lieutenant stood on the little iron platform at the top of the ladders, taking the sights and giving the aim, calling in a high, tense voice to the gunners below. Out of the sky came the sharp cry of the directions, then the warning numbers, then “Fire!” The shot went, the piston of the gun sprang back, there was a sharp explosion, and a very faint film of smoke in the air. Then the other two guns were fired, and there was a lull. The officer on the stand was uncertain of the enemy’s position. Only in the far distance the sound of heavy firing continued, so far off as to give a sense of peace.
The gorse bushes on either hand were wintry and dark, but there was still the flicker of a few flowers. Kissing was never out of favour. Evelyn, waiting suspended before the guns, mused on the abstract truth. Things were all abstract and keen. He did not think about himself or about his wife, but the abstract fact of kissing being always in favour interested and elated him. He conceived of kissing as an abstraction. Isolated and suspended, he was with the guns and the other men. There was the physical relationship between them all, but no spiritual contact. His reality was in his own perfect isolation and abstraction. The comradeship, which seemed so close and real, never implicated his individual soul. He seemed to have one physical body with the other men; but when his mind or soul woke, it was supremely and perfectly isolated.
Before him was the road running between the high banks of grass and gorse. Looking down, he saw the whitish, muddy tracks, the deep ruts and scores and hoof-marks on the wintry road, where the English army had gone by. Now all was very still. The sounds that came, came from the outside. They could not touch the chill, serene, perfect isolation of the place where he stood.
Again the sharp cry from the officer overhead, the lightning, perfectly mechanical response from himself as he worked at the guns. It was exhilarating, this working in pure abstraction. It was a supreme exhilaration, the finest liberty. He was transported in the keen isolation of his own abstraction, the physical activity at the guns keen as a consummation.
All was so intensely, intolerably peaceful that he seemed to be immortalised. The utter suspension of the moment made it eternal. At the corner of the high-road, where a little country road joined on, there was a wayside crucifix knocked slanting. So it slanted in all eternity. Looking out across the wintry fields and dark woods, he felt that everything was thus for ever; this was finality. There appeared a tiny group of cavalry, three horsemen, far off, very small, on the crest of a field. They were our own men. So it is for ever. The little group disappeared. The air was always the same—a keen frost immovable for ever.
Of the Germans nothing was to be seen. The officer on the platform above waited and waited. Then suddenly came the sharp orders to train the guns, and the firing went on rapidly, the gunners grew hot at the guns.
Even so, even amid the activity, there was a new sound. A new, deep “Papp!” of a cannon seemed to fall on his palpitating tissue. Himself he was calm and unchanged and inviolable. But the deep “Papp!” of the cannon fell upon the vulnerable tissue of him. Still the unrelenting activity was kept up at his small guns.
Then, over the static inviolability of the nucleus, came a menace, the awful, faint whistling of a shell, which grew into the piercing, tearing shriek that would tear up the whole membrane of the soul. It tore all the living tissue in a blast of motion. And yet the cold, silent nerves were not affected. They were beyond, in the frozen isolation that was out of all range. The shell swung by behind, he heard the thud of its fall and the hoarseness of its explosion. He heard the cry of the soldier to the horses. And yet he did not turn round to see. He had not time. And he was cold of all interest, intact in his isolation. He saw a twig of holly with red berries fall like a gift on to the road below and remain lying there.
The Germans had got the aim with a big gun. Was it time to move? His superficial consciousness alone asked the question. The real he did not take any interest. He was abstract and absolute.
The faint whistling of another shell dawned, and his blood became still to receive it. It drew nearer, the full blast was upon him, his blood perished. Yet his nerves held cold and untouched, in inviolable abstraction. He saw the heavy shell swoop down to earth, crashing into the rocky bushes away to the right, and earth and stones poured up into the sky. Then these fell to the ground again; there was the same peace, the same inviolable, frozen eternality.
Would they move now? There was a space of silence, followed by the sudden explosive shouts of the officer on the platform, and the swift training of the guns, and the warning and the shout to “Fire!” In the eternal dream of this activity a shell passed unnoticed. And then, into the eternal silence and white immobility of this activity, suddenly crashed a noise and a darkness and a moment’s flaring agony and horror. There was an instantaneous conflagration of life and eternity, then a profound weight of darkness.
When faintly something began to struggle in the darkness, a consciousness of pain and sick life, he was at home in the cottage troubling about something, hopelessly and sickeningly troubling, but hopelessly. And he tried to make it out, what it was. It was something inert and heavy and hopeless. Yet there was the effort to know.
There was a resounding of pain, but that was not the reality. There was a resounding of pain. Gradually his attention turned to the noise. What was it? As he listened, the noise grew to a great clanging resonance which almost dazed him. What was it, then?
He realised that he was out at the front. He remembered the retreat, the hill. He knew he was wounded. Still he did not open his eyes; his sight, at least, was not free. A very large, resounding pain in his head rang out the rest of his consciousness. It was all he could do to lie and bear it. He lay quite still to bear it. And it resounded largely. Then again there returned the consciousness of the pain. It was a little less. The resonance had subsided a little. What, then, was the pain? He took courage to think of it. It was his head. He lay still to get used to the fact. It was his head. With new energy he thought again. Perhaps he could also feel a void, a bruise, over his brow. He wanted to locate this. Perhaps he could feel the soreness. He was hit, then, on the left brow. And, lying quite still and sightless, he concentrated on the thought. He was wounded on the left brow, and his face was wet with stiffening blood. Perhaps there was the feel of hot blood flowing; he was not sure. So he lay still and waited. The tremendous sickening, resounding ache clanged again, clanged and clanged like a madness, almost bursting the membrane of his brain.
And again, as he lay still, there came the knowledge of his wife and children, somewhere in a remote, heavy despair. This was the second, and deeper, reality. But it was very remote.
How deep was the hurt to his head? He listened again. The pain rang now with a deep boom, and he was aware of a profound feeling of nausea. He felt very sick. But how deep was the wound in his head? He felt very sick, and very peaceful at the same time. He felt extraordinarily still. Soon he would have no pain, he felt so finely diffused and rare.
He opened his eyes on the day, and his consciousness seemed to grow more faint and dilute. Lying twisted, he could make out only jumbled light. He waited, and his eyes closed again. Then he waked all of a sudden, in terror lest he were able to see nothing but the jumbled light. The terror lest he should be confronted with nothing but chaos roused him to an effort of will. He made a powerful effort to see.
And vision came to him. He saw grass and earth; then he made out a piece of high-road with its tufts of wintry grass; he was lying not far from it, just above. After a while, after he had been all the while unrelaxed in his will
to see, he opened his eyes again and saw the same scene. In a supreme anguish of effort he gathered his bearings and once more strove for the stable world. He was lying on his side, and the high-road ran just beneath. The bank would be above. He had more or less made his bearings. He was in the world again. He lifted his head slightly. That was the high-road, and there was the body of the lieutenant, lying on its face, with a great pool of blood coming from the small of the back and running under the body. He saw it distinctly, as in a vision. He also saw the broken crucifix lying just near. It seemed very natural.
Amid all the pain his head had become clear and light. He seemed to have a second being, very clear and rare and thin. The earth was torn. He wanted to see it all.
In his frail, clear being he raised himself a little to look, and found himself looking at his own body. He was lying with a great mass of bloody earth thrown over his thighs. He looked at it vaguely, and thought it must be heavy over him. He was anxious, with a very heavy anxiety, like a load on his life. Why was the earth on his thighs so soaked with blood? As he sat faintly looking, he saw that his leg beyond the mound was all on one side. He went sick, and his life went away from him. He remained neutral and dead. Then, relentlessly, he had to come back, to face the fact of himself. With fine, delicate fingers he pushed the earth from the sound leg, then from the wounded one. But the soil was wet with blood. The leg lay diverted. He tried to move a little. The leg did not move. There seemed a great gap in his being. He knew that part of his thigh was blown away. He could not think of the great bloody mess. It seemed to be himself, a wet, smashed, red mass. Very faintly the thin being of his consciousness hovered near. A frail, fine being seemed to be distilled out of the gaping red horror. As he sat he was detached from his wounds and his body.
Selected Stories Page 21