A War Romance

by F. W. Harvey

  Dwelling in Eccleton – a queerly coloured orchid amidst thistles and lesser things – was a lady by name of Mrs. Violet Bransbury-Stuart, inhabiting a large and luxurious house with a bald-headed bullying J.P. called Bransbury-Stuart who owned coal mines. She was young – thirty to be exact – and wanton; yet more human than most of those who held her anathema.

  The Eccleton canal winds – a dirty thing – through slums, and past ‘Highfield’ the house inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. Violet Bransbury-Stuart on the outskirts of the town. There is a towpath skirting the canal. It was of use to Mrs. Bransbury-Stuart on occasions as a short and hidden way home, there being no lights upon it other than stars faintly reflected in the black water.

  Passing hastily that way one night in the last summer which preceded the Great War, she was startled by a splash as of some heavy thing being thrown into the water a short distance off.

  Pluck was not wanting to her equipment and she was on the spot in time to drag from the water and revive a dripping man whose hands were bound tightly with cord.

  It was but a few yards further to ‘Highfield’ and there she took him. The cords which had marked his wrists she threw away. And the gentleman who had accidentally fallen into the canal; and was then and there warmed with brandy, comforted with fire, and re-apparelled in dry though ill-fitting clothes belonging to her husband, was (so it turned out) a young solicitor of the town, by name of Harvey.

  CHAPTER III

  ‘No siren this – a woman

  Whose way was ever gay,

  Half honest, wholly human,

  She goes her sunlit way

  As in Boccacio’s day.

  In her all frailty

  Doth seem a pretty folly,

  Nor is she enemy

  To aught save melancholy:

  And to – mankind may-be.’

  Dainty china tinkled. Silver gleamed. Steaming water bubbled above a little blue and yellow flame which flickered in a fantastic blossom beneath it. clear amber liquid became cloudy with cream. Mrs. Bransbury-Stuart – a queen in her small kingdom – poured out tea.

  Six months had passed since that first unconventional meeting between herself and Willie – now the sole quest – and they had come to know one another ‘rather well’.

  Yet ‘rather well’ was not well enough to at least one of them; – possibly both. ‘Rather anything’ was a term unsuited to either temperament. They did not so constrain emotion. Life meant something more than ‘rather’ to each of them.

  But life means different things to different people. And these were very different people. Life had not hitherto satisfied Mrs. Bransbury-Stuart in this small matter. A queer reticence on Willie’s part had prevented it. It was a reticence which, though fascinating, she had determined to remove.

  During tea the talk was a good deal less significant than their thoughts, being occupied and exclusively with ‘commonplace,’ and conventional topics. Their minds if accessible must have exhibited matter at once more interesting and less edifying. (Here, one is tempted to ask, ‘What in the name of goodness would happen to society in general if everybody (being an author) could see clearly the thoughts of all around?’ It would dissolve like moisture in sunlight! It would break like a politician’s promise! It is fortunate that no such uncomfortable thing has happened, or is likely to happen – even to authors.)

  ‘And will the merman take more tea?’ This pet name always offended Willie, who did not like to be reminded of that evening. Violet was cruelly aware of the fact. Cruelty is one of the most effective of sexual traps, though it requires skilful setting. Hate is not only better to win than indifference, it is often as good as love. There is moreover great satisfaction in hurting the thing one desires.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘But he shall! That fascinating little scowl which he puts on, makes him’ (taking and filling his cup) ‘more like a merman than ever – A queer ugly babyish inhuman “old thing,” he is come up through his own dark wandering element to see the world. He blinks at is so funnily. He cannot understand it at all. Let me tell your fortune, merman!’ She reached across the table (flashing, as she knew how, the emeralds on her pretty fingers) to take his hand.

  ‘No, you must come closer. Move your chair up to me.’

  Willie obeyed. ‘But I’ve had my fortune told before. I am going to be poor always, and I am going to marry a foreigner.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter whom you marry!’ she replied significantly, looking back at him out of those queer slanting eyes which reminded him somehow of Clemmy’s. ‘Though as a matter of fact you shouldn’t marry,’ she added.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it isn’t worth while – for a man.’

  ‘It is for a woman?’

  ‘It is a protection and a screen to her. He does not need these.’

  ‘Screen against what?’ he asked.

  ‘The eyes of the world,’ was the reply.

  ‘But,’ began he – (This sort of talk had continued for three months – and seemed to her likely to do so for three more).

  ‘Oh, never mind – “but”! I’m waiting to tell your immediate fortune.’ Her knee slid by accident against his. If it exerted a slight pressure, which provoked in Willie a small but imperceptible shiver it was clearly without the knowledge of its owner. There are women who possess an uncanny power of unconsciousness regarding the movement of their limbs.

  But Willie had an appointment. He was sorry, but his time would not permit the telling of his fortune.

  Mrs. Bransbury-Stuart bit her lip as he arose. ‘Then perhaps you can hear it this evening. Come to dinner. My husband will, I fear, be away, but –’.

  Willie promised that he would be back at seven o’clock. Why? He did not himself know. Perhaps he wanted to. Perhaps he was lonely. Perhaps – Anyway he consented. To play with fire is a very human pastime, and Willie was human in spite of the description given of him as a merman.

  ‘She is very like Clemmy – in some ways,’ he thought as he departed. It was true. Those eyes, that bobbed hair, and the atmosphere which surrounded her, all combined to make convincing the subtle resemblance between two women whose superficial differences were evident. For Clemmy was dark, and she gloriously golden. Clemmy’s eyes were like sloes, but her’s the shifting colour of sea-water. the little, shabbily dressed, nursemaid had only one leg, but Violet Bransbury-Stuart (as the cut of her fashionable skirt amply proved) suffered from no such physical defect. She had two legs. And yet –

  ‘Tonight she’ll expect me to kiss her,’ he mused; ‘anyway I shall –’ (This anticipation was as it happened a modest estimate of reality).

  That lady, as she watched him depart, reassured herself with the memory of a shiver. Sensuality – she could play airs and variations upon the single string as well as any! It was the strings of his mind that she could not touch. That was always preoccupied with – Something. (Yes, even now Something was there, and speaking louder than any voices of Despair and Loneliness and Lust). She could not, she found, appropriate that, but his body was, she felt, already hers. Only the indirect method must go. By that sign – the shiver – she knew that her appeal must be to the passions alone, and also that any plain frontal attack would now succeed. It was of course to be taken for granted that the first victory would pay for all. There would be no difficulty after. She smiled prettily to herself in a mirror.

  Firelight made a halo of her golden curls as she sat that night at dinner with Willie opposite. Gold of a paler colour lay in the half emptied glass she fingered. Golden bubbles uprise in a tiny tree from the glass’s stem and spread upon the wine’s surface in foamy foliage of gold. But her white hands lay bare in the lamp light; fingers uncircleted by any gold. Even the third finger of her left hand was bare.

  They chatted lightly of this and that over the dessert. Then, rising, ‘I have a present to show you,’ she said. ‘It is from an old friend’ (‘lover’ thought Willie) ‘of mine. He went East last year,’ she add
ed. ‘And he had sent this,’ picking up a tiny packet from the Chesterfield. Ribbons were untied, and a gauzy web of something flung to float like sunny mist upon the air.

  ‘By Jove! – but what in the world is this beautiful thing?’ cried Willie.

  ‘A kimona.’

  The shining mist moved slowly down and hung suspended from her bare arm which gleamed through. It was as though some great artist had of merest air woven this magic veil overwrought with bright ghosts of all strange birds and flowers that in his imagination sang and blossomed.

  ‘But is – is this woven air to be worn?’ he stammered.

  ‘You shall see,’ she replied as with a joyous smile she disappeared.

  Her reappearance after a few moments was a reminder to Willie of the famous ‘Prima vere’ of Botticelli. With a scent of flowers Spring incarnate, Spring whose white body fought through and conquered its floating veil of breeze and bird-song; danced in, and stood before him. He sprang forward, and as he did so she flashed round and was gone, leaving him in an empty room. For an instant he faced the slammed door, hesitating. Then leaping forward as from a trance he followed through the darkness of the hall and sound of those retreating footsteps. At the end of the passage before a room flickering with fantastic firelight he paused since all guiding sounds had ceased. He entered the room. It was furnished cosily and luxuriously. A Bechstein piano reflected in its polished wood and face of fire whose fingers seemed stroking its keys. Skins of wild animals were under foot, and before him a large ottoman overhung with something scarlet. At his elbow the undraped figure of a statue stood black and erect outlined with a pencilling of orange light. He groped round for the electric switch, and as he did so, the statue bent down and kissed him.

  So, let the curtain descend amidst cries of shame from the audience which pays to witness such plays.

  CHAPTER IV

  ‘If Beauty were a mortal thing

  That died like laughter, grief, and lust

  The poet would not need to sing

  If beauty were a mortal thing

  It would not wound us with its sting.

  We should lie happy in the dust

  If beauty were a mortal thing

  That died like laughter, grief, and lust.’

  The heroes and heroines of modern novels sin, and sin frequently, but always from the highest possible motives. The same cannot be said of Willie. Unlike them, but like so many ordinary people who inhabit earth, he knew quite well that what he did was wrong. And he did it.

  Mrs. Bramsbury-Stuart was much more like a heroine. The thought never occurred to her.

  To search for reasons is not to find excuses. The reason (so far as Willie is considered) behind that behaviour and course of life which he adopted and continued for a time during the period previous to the breaking out of the Great War, is the reason which lies behind three quarters of all the sins which are committed upon earth – boredom.

  To be bored is to be idle. To do the wrong work is to leave unemployed that part of you which is most active. It is to be bored and idle – a state long accepted as one particularly suited to the designs of Satan.

  And the reason why boredom is at the back of almost every sin, and is in itself a sin of deepest dye, is that it is a closing of the eyes to God, and all the nobleness of life. Gratitude that sweet child of Huanity is necessarily outcast from it, and with her all the fortifying and heavenly graces. It houses instead a narrow selfishness, and feeds it on lies. Courage only remains, and he weak with a poisonous pride.

  Willie was thus fair game for His Majesty. At least four-fifths of his nature was unemployed – and the rest was of little consequence to himself or anyone else.

  Men are only good when they are working in their vocation – that is body and soul. All men who makes beautiful things are good – while they are making them. But we make nothing. The greatest manufacturing country in the world makes nothing. So it is unhappy, and no amount of payment seems to be (or is) a just reward for its labour.

  The men who built the cathedrals, the men of the guilds – ah, but now we touch politics! Let this only be said – When man is not a maker, he is a destroyer. It is a truth which the world will have to remember before this century is out …

  But there is no doubt that Mrs Bransbury-Stuart found her merman glorious, (as for certain mad hours, he, her). This unaccountable dark lover, whose appearance suggested a strayed gnome, whose humour flashed so gaily and bitterly, was a fascinating contrast to any of his sleek predecessors. So that she actually forgot to provide him with contemporaries!

  And to him, she was a sedative. Which of them loved least it would be hard to say; for it would not seem possible to give less love than did he; yet perhaps even then, she was the better off, – giving none.

  But love is a queer word which may mean almost anything. To take it at their own valuation – passion was to her an art, but to him only a pastime. Therefore she loved, if you like to put it so, with more of herself. Where he fell (easily enough) into sin, she executed a beautiful and deliberate dive. Women called her ‘a bad woman,’ men ‘a sport,’ but she was neither – Simply a highly-sexual and frankly pagan woman, endowed with many generous impulses. Children remembered her with gratitude during the miners’ strike – that is something.

  As for Willie – Man’s passion is possibly smaller than woman’s. Certainly it was he who first tired of the liaison. That may be partly accounted for by the fact that this sexual adventure was to him never more than – an adventure. He was hastening to forget life, while she was hastening to remember it. Here was the satisfaction of curiosity, pleasure, risk … little more. Yet in a certain way he loved her. She had been good to him in Hell…

  But slowly, inevitably, it was borne in upon him – through mind and body and spirit – that this life which he was living was Hell.

  That dark underground passage into which he had strayed at home shut him off no less effectually from Life than this. He felt the same gasping terror at his throat. He was not living. He was buried alive.

  ‘There is no happiness but the serving of something noble with your heart and strength’ – runs his diary at this time. ‘A “cause” is lacking to the happiness of millions of people. But where is it?’ (This was at the end of the year nineteen thirteen).

  And again – ‘The senses can divert, but never satisfy – except they are attached to some eternal thing.’

  And he concludes – ‘Nobleness mucst use us for its own purposes.’

  Then – ‘What am I doing?’ And again – ‘What am I doing?’.

  But it was not until the early summer of 1914 that he broke away. It happened in this way:–

  He had walked all night, soothed with bodily exercise, and that darkness which hid or ennobled the landscape – chimneys turning to star-crowned shadows; mean streets to winding silences; slums mercifully blotted out, and so into country where nothing was discernible but vague outlines of trees and hedges. Over all was the owner of heaven – strange clouds trailing with majesty over the moon, stars seeking their inevitable places.

  At morning he had returned to town full of these memories of beauty. Then, seeing life arise sordidly to its sordid tasks ‘What in the name of sense is living man doing here?’ he cried. ‘I will turn my back upon it for ever.’ So, meaning to give a month’s notice to his employer that morning, he had faced the good-humoured chaff of his landlady, and after breakfasting (and paying his week’s bill, since the day was a Saturday) had gone to office, weary but more content at heart than for many a month.

  ‘I must say goodbye to Violet, I suppose,’ he had ruminated on the way. And then, when he arrived there he heard that Violet was dead.

  It’s a bad business about Mrs. Bransbury-Stuart,’ said a clerk.

  ‘What?’ said Willie startled.

  ‘Haven’t you heard? she’s shot!’

  ‘Shot!’

  ‘Yes, the old man did it. He’d been drinking a lot, it seems, lately. And then l
ast night they had a quarrel. He accused her of siding with the men who had ruined his pit, and she told him outright that she did, and had used her money, and his, to help their children, and anybody that was starving among them. And he got queer and took a gun and killed her; blew her heard nearly off. Mad, I supp–’.

  ‘Good God!’ …

  ‘Hold up! Arn’t you well, Mr. Harvey?’ said the repentant man who had told the story callously in the light of certain rumours as to Willie’s relations with the dead woman (there are men like that!) and was now thoroughly alarmed at its effect. His victim’s face was chalky. His limbs could but just support him.

  Then, as he lurched from the room – ‘Why must people always pay for their virtues?’ Willie cried – and those were the last words they heard him speak. Then and there he left that place of accursed memories.

  CHAPTER V

  Eric had gone to Oxford to work. He was no longer at a time of life when he could afford to let Time drift by an idly and deliciously as the green-tunneled waters of ‘Char’ (Charnall) under that dreaming Youth which throngs it each summer day. Had he gone up from school that leisure (and it is not to be despised) might have been his, but now.

  Yet Oxford is a sweet mother alike to those who ‘fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden age,’ seeking, consciously or not, the noon of pleasant memories, and to those whose preoccupation with graver problems causes them to meet her smile with looks less joyfully insouciant. Her whie lovely towers, sunlit or moonlit, and lovely and vital youth which thronged beneath in 1913 – in 1913! Wherefore Eric always looked upon that year immediately prior to war as one of the happiest of his life; a thing which could be remembered in trenches with longing and with gratitude.

  But Willie even in trenches cursed its memory, and would at no time have budged a foot to step back into that same year, if magically the chance had ever been his – as it was not. For death in certain company is better than life in another, and, the soul being sick, there is a terror of mere living which – but this is to digress.