The fine pleasurable image of Lise in his mind faded. In the corner of his eye he saw Cohen take an envelope from his pocket and scribble a short sentence. Instantly his mistrust of the man started awake. How far could you trust a Jew who was also a Radical? He had found the Daily Post useful 5 he had used it. His policy was thus : so long as there is a free press, people allowed to read what they like, even silly subversive rubbish, so long he must need an ear in every camp. He did not like Cohen better for owning an offensive newspaper which he sometimes used.
Cohen put the envelope back in his pocket and looked up. His glance travelled from Ling’s pitiable face to the face of another director, a Jew. Something passed between them, an assurance not translated into words. Cohen sat upright, pressing his thighs together, and looked at Harben. His eyes, so full, so brown, that they seemed fleshier than other people’s, were now alert.
‘There is a suggestion I have to make here,’ Harben said. ‘I have discussed it privately in certain quarters, and it has been welcomed.’ He leaned with his arms over the table. ‘What I have in mind is the formation of a council, a league, call it anything you like, formed I say to counter the revolutionary doctrines of economic communism. After a war, slump, unemployment, demobilised youths, is especially favourable for the spread of notions. You have psychological unrest, you have a sentimental socialism based on ignorance or denial of economic laws; you have communism itself. I needn’t add, you have the fate of Russia. Russia has become a fat breeding ground of economic diseases. Well, gentlemen, I am not inclined to leave the failure and defeat of these forces to chance. Once a Socialist rot sets in, nothing is safe enough, no institution. Not even the banks. If you knew that certain men were mining your factory would you be willing merely to go on running your machines in the hope that the mines would fail to go up?’ He opened and shut his hands. He had noticeable hands, firm, large, brutal. ‘I have in mind an organisation charged to collect news of subversive movements and persons; to put forward—in the press, throughout the whole country at meetings, through all reputable existing bodies—the sound economic doctrines of private enterpise; to uphold our great mercantile tradition; to discourage state interference; to combat the menace of organised Labour; to oppose dangerous and sentimental notions of pacifism; to-’
A faintly puzzled voice repeated : ‘Pacifism?’
‘The most complete proof you could want!’ Harben said smoothly. ‘Here you have a key industry—steel—armaments—chemicals—directly menaced by a bosh of sentiment, false assertion, and pure bolshevism. Our national security itself is involved. Pacifism, gentlemen, is not a joke, it is a threat. In my personal knowledge there are men in important positions who are infected with it. It seems not to have occurred to these influential fools that the spread of their sentiments would bring us to a condition in which we should look back at the War as a time of happiness and security.’
The director who was interested in humane slaughter of animals and worked for it devotedly, spoke. He never said anything more than Perfectly quite quite, but since he was uninterested in everything except humanely slaughtered animals—he had photographs and diagrams of them in all stages—no one noticed him, saving the secretary, whose business was to hear everything, and Thomas Harben. Harben could not endure this man’s voice.
‘Who’s going to pay for it all?’ George Ling said. ‘Eh?’ His chin trembled.
‘Members will pay an agreed subscription.’
‘Members? You said?’
‘The several industrial and financial interests approached are the first members. You can expect a sharply growing membership when the aims of the—I should like it called an Economic Council—are known.’
‘How known?’ Cohen interrupted. ‘I don’t imagine you’ll seek publicity.’
‘Not in the columns of the Daily Post,’ Harben said.
‘But all this ought to be done by the Government,’ Ling exclaimed. ‘A strong Government would make this—these expensive schemes unnecessary. I support it but I don’t like it. The shareholders will want to know why and how their money is being spent.’
‘Shareholders are only interested in their profits,’ Cohen said gently. ‘You have sums which have been transferred to special reserve before striking profits. Why bring out at all the item of a subscription to the Economic Council?’
‘A memorandum is being prepared for private circulation,’ Harben said. ‘As for the Government—I may add now that it will be right to attach the Council at various points to the permanent structure. The Home Office. The Foreign Office. The police. Certain organisations working already in other countries.’ He yawned suddenly and involuntarily. ‘Every vital interest is concerned,’ he said.
At this moment the secretary to the Board looked up quickly. An electric bell rang in the corridor. The footsteps in the room over their heads suddenly ceased. Harben rose to his feet. All rose, and stood in their places at the table. One fiddled with his hands. A heavy tear ran across the side of Ling’s nose and dropped on to the blotting-paper. Cohen stared before him at the window. A tender expectant feeling rose in him. He did not know what he expected but he leaned forward, pressing his body against the table, to be ready for it when it came. At the other side of the table Harben had closed his eyes in a spasm of discomfort.
4. Frank sometimes thinks about the War
Leaving Sally to serve the morning customers, Frank walked over to look at the new road. It was well begun, men working at both sides of the cutting, trucks, cement mixers and what not. He stood for a time looking at the work, then spoke to a man.
‘How much longer? Oh, next spring maybe or summer, who cares?’
‘I do,’ Frank said. ‘I been running a sandwich place on the old road.’
The other looked at him. ‘Better move it here, chum.’
‘No bon. They wouldn’t have it. I been and asked. Not good enough, see.’
The other saw. It might have been himself he saw. Frank moved away and walked the length of the cutting to the northern end. From here he could see three villages wrapped in their fields and bare trees. A stream joined two of them. There were no shadows on the distant fields, the sunlight too pale and the winter hedges low. The scene reminded him of Northern France, not of any place he remembered but a feeling of all that country he came into behind the line, seeing unspoiled villages and fields and hearing voices not English but country voices, and for a short time something he had had in the past closed round him. But it was changed. So now the familiar English fields were changed by that country known to him as ‘rest.’ They folded into each other in his mind, and sometimes when he fell asleep he was living with other men in a village of which he had forgotten the name and country, but all its colours were stronger and clearer, the woods like flames, the streams a deep colour like the sky, the hills bold as brass, than any in life. He was glad and pleased to find himself living in such a place. When he woke he knew that he had been dreaming; there were no such colours anywhere in the world. He had never seen such woods, streams, or hills in any part. He did not know that neither was there any colour in the world like the one at which he supposed himself to be looking. It was not green, not grey, not yellow, not English, not French. Part of his mind had fallen asleep in France, in ‘rest,’ and was dreaming as it looked. He turned and walked back to The Dug-out.
From this side he had to pass through the village. He heard the church clock strike: it was like a broken rusty key turning slowly, round and round, in the lock. There was a long wide street, which was empty. Two cars drawn up at the side, the drivers still at the wheel, caught his eye. After he had passed them, a man he knew came grinning to the door of the Spread Eagle and called out: ‘Hurrying? You walked slap through the silence, my lad. I saw you afar off, as it says.’
‘What silence?’
The man laughed and went in. Frank was left standing. He had remembered just as he said it; and the thought of himself standing stock still in the middle of an empty stree
t made him jump. Of all damned nonsense, he said angrily. He hurried on. Now he walked in a straight line, keeping to the side of the road, his head down. He was the inner man of the rank, to the side and in front of him he saw other marching bodies and felt the pressure on his body of those coming behind. He felt easy and not tired and he marched without thinking. Someone spoke in the rear file and the words slipped through the ranks like leaves rubbing on leaves.
At the turn of the road he saw the corrugated iron hut—The Dug-out A Good Pull-in—and now he was alone.
An overmastering anger seized him. He had no words for it. Certain words that had been obscene had become old friends by going all through the War with him. In the face of this injustice they were useless. When I came here and when I built our two rooms and when I was putting up the notice and when I fitted the shelf, he thought, I was glad. In a confused way he felt that the higher authority that had taken away his gladness was mean at bottom. We weren’t doing anyone any harm, he thought. His shelves, the notice board, Sally’s things she was so pleased of, might be so much dirt. No one gave a thought to them. No one. No one in the whole of England.
He reached the Dug-out. The door into their living-room was shut and he stood for a moment in front of the big coffee urn. The shelf behind him was piled with cups and plates. He took a cup in his hand and flung it against the urn and followed it with another and another. ‘I’ll smash them first,’ he shouted.
He was breaking the eighth when the door opened behind him and his wife stood there. ‘Frank, what is it?’ she said, afraid. He looked at her for a moment, then he went awkwardly to her and put his arms round her and his face in her neck. She drew him into their room. She understood that something in him had been finished when he broke their cups. After a time they talked to each other in low voices, as though someone ought not to hear, and then she got up and went outside and swept up the broken bits.
5. Two minutes only
T.S. heard the warning for the two minutes’ silence. He was alone at his end of the laboratory and he could not even glance round. The liquid in the second retort had reached the stage he was watching for; he had to move instantly.
His movements seemed mechanical and were not. Although he knew the result, what he was doing was for the first time. His mind had something to do besides watch. At the same time it had the energy to finish off a thought that had been with him all morning. This thought was about his wife. From some feeling of pity for her, because he had noticed she was unhappy and anxious, he had gone to her room when he came home that evening, full of words he meant to say. He opened the door, and closed it again quietly at once.
The silence in the factory, in his laboratory, penetrated to his mind. He moved an arm. The very slight noise he made, of glass against zinc, sounded like a knife dropping. He tilted the retort, waited, judged. The image of his wife in William Ridley’s embrace stayed on one level of his mind, like a print tacked to a wall. He felt thoroughly vexed by her stupidity. She should have fastened her door, he said. The contempt he had been feeling for her since was due to that and nothing else. She can have as much of anything as she likes, it relieves me of my responsibility, he thought; but she should have been careful. It might have been any one, one of the servants who came in and saw them. His hand made a swift neat movement. The sun in this corner is in the way, he thought. His eyelids rose and fell quickly. See to it. But she must lock her door. Very distinctly he remembered walking along the High Street after school with his mother, there were boys coming behind them, when he saw that her petticoat was coming down under her dress. She never cared how she looked. When he told her she only laughed, and turned round to look at it. In a low voice he said,‘Do hush, mother.’ There were inches of it showing at the back over her boots, it was almost on the ground, he felt very miserable with the disgrace of it. He would never be able to go back to school, never face them. A year afterwards when his mother died he had not forgotten that day, and before he missed her he thought quickly, She won’t be coming to meet me, I shall be safe. After that he had been alone until the War and his marriage. He married a woman twelve years older than himself.
He saw himself standing in front of her at their first meeting. He had to ask her name. He was awkward with women, tormented, wanting them to like him and despising them in self-defence. Perhaps he had bragged in talking to her. ‘Are you turned twenty-three?’ she asked. She looked at him with a mocking smile, but with something else in her look, with a warmth, with pleading. He turned round. His hand moved over towards the bunsen burner. Now I’m twenty-seven I look forty, he thought. I haven’t enough life left to cope with her.
He saw himself dressing to catch the early leave train. Their hotel was part of the station and through the night they had heard the trains. He dressed swiftly with his back to Evelyn. When he was ready he woke her and found that she had been crying. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. She gripped him with both arms, pressing him to her in a useless fear. He saw himself running down the long platform. Leaves aren’t worth it, I don’t want another yet. He was glad to be sitting in the train, to sit and be moved, not to move himself, to act, to think. Had I another leave? he wondered. The tiny flame of the bunsen burner vanished when he touched the tap. If the end had come before I was this tired she wouldn’t have changed.
A faint shadow wavered across his hand and up the wall, so faint that it was like a strand of hair loosed in an eddy of deep water. It was the reflection of smoke from a chimney below the windows. The works covered about eight acres of ground. There were no sounds from the yard. He listened, moved the retort over, and picked out a test tube from the rack of them at his elbow. Everything had gone as it should. He noted a figure under those he had written, and as he slipped the cap on his pen he heard the siren go off at the gas works. A truck started with an abrupt screech in the yard. The silence is over, he thought. It occurred to him at once that since his experiment had to do with the first stages in the production of a new highly poisonous war gas it would have been indecent and very silly for him to pause. In the same moment he came to the end of his feelings of spite and humiliation and felt sorry for Evelyn. But she didn’t change; it was I that changed, it was the last year, he said. No war ought to last four and a half years. It is too long.
6. His wife washes her hands
Evelyn Heywood waited in the window of her room. She was not dressed, she had overslept, and she reproached herself for her laziness. A restless anxiety to be at the office struggled in her against the tension that kept her here, doing nothing, not even opening her letters. Her secretary had already telephoned from the London Review to know when she was coming. She felt imprisoned. The door was open, she had only to bestir herself, to dress, to walk out. She felt her thoughts turning in her head and her heart jumping, but she stood motionless. She looked at the river.
There had been a light mist. Now the near buildings were dark, like ramparts, and the farther ones as dim and insubstantial as a vapour, a breath. She saw a barge move slowly at the head of a string of lighters. There was a woman on board, moving between the cabin of the barge and the side. She emptied a spout of water overboard, went away, and reappeared, moving smoothly and swiftly like a brightly coloured shuttle. Evelyn thought, If I could go away, if I could leave everything and lead that woman’s life I should be saved. She knew that she was incapable of living such a life, incapable in her over-trained mind and in her weak under-experienced body. There is something rotten in me, she thought 5 but what is it? She looked down at her hands and imagined that one of them had become soiled since her bath. I must have touched something. Looking down at her hand, as she walked turning it from palm to back, she hurried into the bathroom and there washed both her hands with great thoroughness. She let the water run the whole time and held the offending hand under it. The quick hissing noise of the water filled her ears. She dried her hands, pulled open the door sharply, and heard a bugle and on top of it drowning it the whistles of ships. The two minu
tes had come while she was in the bathroom and gone. She began to dress, opening cupboards and dropping her clothes over the floor in search of others. When she had finished she looked at the disordered room and rang her bell. ‘Clear this up,’ she said to the servant; ‘put everything away and then polish the paint and the glass. Make everything clean and sweet.’ She picked up gloves and paper. Her hands were now shaking. She looked : it was inconceivable that they had become dirty again, yet she saw it distinctly. Dropping everything she held she went back to cleanse them. She wiped and rubbed and plunged them into the hot water and at last she was satisfied.
7. William Ridley will be the voice of England
The silence caught Ridley in the street, outside the offices of the Daily Post. He was expecting it, yet when the traffic stilled suddenly about him and a man walking in front stopped and jerked off his hat, Ridley was taken by surprise. He stood still, hat in hand, and stared round him at the immobilised street. A horse’s bit jingled. A boy scraped his foot on the pavement. These tiny noises accentuated the silence.
As he waited a strange emotion sprang in him. He felt himself surrounded by friends, and though he saw no face or form and heard no voice, he knew that they were the men with whom he had lived in France. At another time, if anyone had said, of him and them, these men loved each other, he would have laughed incredulously, since he had forgotten even their names. And he would have been right to laugh, in so much as the end of the War ended that love, which sprang from it; but yet he was wrong, since what he then felt, though it died too quickly, was the quckening of a new promise, an assurance offered by one man to others, that since everything else has failed, since there is no help in princes, and none in God, nevertheless help is forthcoming. Help shall be given, ‘Nation shall not lift a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ And if this is a lie, if the seed quickens again and again only to die, then we are all lost and the generation to which Ridley, and Hervey Russell, and Philip, and David Renn, and T.S., and Frank of the Dug-out, and Jake, who was nearly too young for it, belong, will be the last nourished in the illusion of freedom.
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