by Alec Waugh
A little later he told Brownleigh that she was going to have a child. It was impossible to know if he was glad or not. ‘It’ll keep her quiet’; that was all he said. It was another bond holding him to Cologne. But I do not think he looked ahead. He probably felt as he had in the bank before the war. ‘This can’t go on forever. Something is bound to happen soon.’ He was tired, and he thought that when she had a child Eva would be easier to live with.
And then one morning he walked into the office of the British military police and said, ‘I wish to put myself under arrest. I have killed my wife.’
They had had another fierce quarrel the night before. It was after they had gone to bed; she had a bad cold; she had not been able to get the particular medicine that she wanted and she could not sleep. She had begun to abuse the English.
‘I hate the lot of you,’ she had said. ‘You’re killing Germany, you’re starving us, and you talk about internationalism, which means getting as much as you can for yourselves; and you, you’re just like the rest of your nation—what sort of a life do you think I am having?’
‘For God’s sake, shut up,’ Morrison had said.
‘I shan’t shut up; I’m tired of you, tired to death of you. I wish I’d never married you. I was happy before you came. I should have married one of my own people—I should—’
Morrison could stand it no longer; he took her by the shoulders and shook her, till she was quiet, then he turned round and went to sleep. In the morning he found her dead.
He was handed over to the German authorities; it was a civilian case. But the little official assured the British with great suavity that everything would be all right. ‘Crime passionnel,’ he said. ‘No jury would convict him. And besides—her state of health.’
The German police were anxious to keep on the right side of the British. There was a good deal of rowdyism in Cologne. Discharged soldiers had been causing trouble; without the British it would have been hard to maintain order. In the meantime, of course, Morrison would have to go to prison. He was sent to Düsseldorf.
The affair caused naturally a good deal of excitement in a society that depended on itself for entertainment. The general impression was that Morrison would be discharged and that it was, on the whole the best thing that could have happened to him.
‘After all,’ said the colonel, ‘what could it have led to? Think of the poor devil staying here when the armies went. There would have been no one for him to talk to. He’d have been an outcast. I doubt if his business would have paid. He could hardly have brought her back to England. She’d have hated the idea and here he’d have had to stick while his family increased, and his responsibilities along with them. It’s the best way out, really. What a life he’d have had!’
Brownleigh was tempted to point out that the colonel had not done much to make Morrison’s life in Cologne any easier, but it would have served no purpose and the colonel was an ordinary conventional man, who had lived by rule. It was not his fault, indeed it was no one’s fault. Things had turned out that way. It looked now as though the tide had begun to turn for Morrison.
The trial was awaited confidently. A strong case for the defence had been drawn up. Numberless instances of Eva’s exasperating habits were collected. A doctor was prepared to give evidence on the state of her health, and to affirm that her constitution had been weakened by the privations of war, and the lack of milk, butter and dripping. After all, ‘Crime passionnel’—that was an unfailing argument and the prosecution did not want a conviction which might be presented in the English Press as another case of German injustice.
Everything, indeed, was going along smoothly, when all these plans were overthrown by the revolution in Düsseldorf. For a few days the town was in the hands of the Spartacists. The gates of the prisons were flung open and Morrison was let free.
Brownleigh thought that he would make straight for Cologne, though some believed that he would try to cross the frontier.
‘After all, he can’t be certain that he won’t be convicted. Things go wrong. I wouldn’t run any chances if I were in his place.’
The German authorities were apathetic. ‘He has escaped with the rest,’ they said. ‘It is a little thing, that, at such a time.’
It was a fortnight before any news came through. Then the suave official appeared, bowing and scraping.
‘We have heard about your friend. It is very sad. He has been found dead in Düsseldorf.’
The statement was confirmed. Morrison’s body had been found in a cellar in a small side-street. The face was terribly disfigured with the jaw shot right away, but every article of clothing on the body belonged to Morrison and the pockets were full of his letters and papers; he had no money on him; from a tear on the inside of his finger, it would seem as though a signet ring had been torn off him by force.
‘There is nothing to be done,’ said the German. ‘We are very sorry, but after all—in times like these—’ He shrugged.
That was the story as Brownleigh told it me.
‘It was really rather amusing,’ he said, ‘to see the way in which those who had before been most against him, hastened to make excuses for him now. We heard a great deal about “the rough diamond”, and the colonel, who had been so affronted at the Opera, insisted on giving him a military funeral.’
He told it me in person when he was home on leave. I listened in silence. Morrison was the most dramatic character I had met. I remembered how he had triumphed over Carter, how he had made the Australian officer show him round the line. I thought of the evening in the mess when Brownleigh had tried to make a fuss about his girl. He was so very vital! And even afterwards, when he had been cut at the Opera, I’m not sure that he hadn’t scored. He had stuck to his self-respect. They must have been secretly ashamed of themselves, those others, as they hurried past him with eyes turned away. They must have felt uncomfortable for a long time afterwards, talking loudly to pass it off. He had been only angry. I could not realize that he was done with, finished, that his existence had been wiped out suddenly in a dark street by a chance bullet.
It was strange that I should have thought that, that I should have refused to believe that he was really dead. Perhaps mental telepathy warned me that the ending was not here. At any rate, I was not as surprised as I should have been when I heard in that jeweller’s shop in Hampstead, a familiar voice voluble and insistent.
‘I refuse to take no for an answer.’ It was saying: ‘Talk sense.
What does it matter to you how you make your profit, as long as there is a profit.’
Yes, it was Morrison all right. No one I knew had possessed to the same degree the magnetic power of making men do what he wanted.
I stood back in the shadow. I saw the old jeweller take out his magnifying glass and inspect the samples. I saw them arguing until, finally, the old man gave an order and Morrison marched out, jubilant and content, as always the master in a world of men.
I did not follow. I preferred not to find out exactly what happened in that dark side-street in a town possessed of terror. I preferred to let Morrison remain a man of mystery, to see him in my memory as I saw him first on that wet afternoon at Bullecourt, a stranger among us, standing against the sky, letting in the wind and the rain.
1920
An Unfinished Story
She paused in the doorway of the small Soho restaurant. A fur Russian-style cap fitted tightly to her head; a gloved hand, raised against her throat, kept in place the woollen scarf that was flung round her shoulders. She was barely twenty. She was not beautiful, but she had the prettiness of all young girls whose figures are slim and graceful, the charm of the green leaf and the bud.
A man rose to welcome her, very much the ex-officer, ex-Public Schoolboy type. He was tall, thin, on the edge of thirty; he had a small dark moustache and showed signs of baldness.
I could not hear how they greeted each other, but in the way in which he helped her off with her coat, I detected a slight uneasiness. ‘Th
ey do not know each other very well,’ I thought. I was dining alone and I foresaw that I was going to indulge my storyteller’s instinct to concoct imaginary plots about the people round me. I shifted my chair so that I could watch them without turning.
The suggestion of uneasiness was repeated as he leant across the table with the menu. ‘A little too eager,’ I decided, ‘anxious to make a success of it and overacting.’ He ordered a flask of red Chianti and drank his first glass quickly, in three gulps. Then he began to talk; amusingly, I gathered, for she smiled quite often. Once she burst out laughing; a fresh, clear laugh that, coming half-way through the meal, stressed what I had already noticed, that while he was fretted with self-consciousness, she was solely concerned with the natural enjoyment of a good dinner in pleasant company. This dinner was clearly a special occasion for him but not for her. I wondered why.
And why should he be nervous and she not? He had something on his mind.
There was no suggestion that they were lovers. They had not once looked into each other’s eyes. He might be in love with her, not she with him; not yet; but that was not a cause for shyness. Surely he could not be planning a premature proposal. It is disastrous to anticipate a climax. A man of thirty must know that. Yet perhaps he was contemplating this very folly. Why?
I began to frame a story. He has been ordered abroad unexpectedly. He had gone up to Oxford after the war hoping to pass into the Home Civil, but he had failed to make up for the years he had lost during the war and passed instead into the Indian Civil. In a few days he will be sailing, leaving behind this girl with whom he has fallen suddenly in love. He has asked her out this evening resolved to bring things to a head before he sails. But of all this she is unaware, having in her inexperience mistaken his love for comradeship.
It was a situation that might be developed into what the magazines describe as a ‘long-short’. It would have a topical appeal. The man’s failure to pass into the Home Civil would stress the plight of the ex-officer who is passed over in favour of some one who has not seen service. He had prepared for a long slow courtship. He feels he is not the type of man to sweep a young woman off her feet. But now he has to compress into a few days the campaign of several months.
The story shaped itself in scenes: the meeting at a tennis tournament; the news of his failure in the exam; this dinner in the restaurant. I could picture them in the taxi afterwards. She is chatting casually and cheerfully. Suddenly he interrupts, leans forward, grabs her hand. She draw back, startled. As he had overacted in the restaurant, so does he now, greedily clutching her in his arms, kissing her awkwardly, stammering ‘I love you’. It is a grisly failure. It might have been her first kiss and she would have her own romantic conception of what a first kiss should be. ‘You’ve spoilt it all,’ she cries, for at such moments it is the ridiculous that first occurs to us and she would speak out of her recollection of magazine heroines.
‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Can’t you see that you’ve spoilt everything?’
When they reached her home, she would jump out of the taxi and run straight up the steps without turning to say good-bye. And he would sit back, reflecting dismally that in three days he would sail for India; he would not see her for perhaps five years.
And then …?
But it should not be difficult to find an ending to this kind of story. While he was away he would write and ask forgiveness, protesting that he loved her, had always loved her, that he was sorry for his stupidity. When he came back, might he not hope? A trite enough letter, but if it were not trite he would be a writer of some talent, and that I did not propose to make him. No; he would write her an ordinary love-letter, and she, being an ordinary woman, would be moved by it. With the distance hiding her shyness, she would reply that she had been young and silly. He would find her more sensible when he returned. During the first year’s separation they would build up letter by letter an illusion of each other out of the enchantment of things remote. When at last they met she would be faced by a prosaic Empire-builder with thinning hair, while he would find that a girl had become a woman whose prettiness had shrivelled.
Would they marry?
Probably, from a lack of the courage that looks itself in the glass and says: ‘You have failed, my friend.’ It should be truer to make them marry, and perhaps she might be happy in her children, while he found pleasure in the society of another woman. But, either way, a dream would have passed and that would be the object of my story; to tell simply how everything changes, how all things are in flux; not a new philosophy and one that occurred to Heraclitus, but true nevertheless.
And looking across at the couple in the corner, I thought of their fate with sympathy. They were preparing to leave; the waiter had brought the bill neatly folded upon a plate; the girl had turned toward a large photograph of the Royal Family, and was endeavouring to arrange her hair in its blurred reflection.
She was smiling and happy, ignorant of the disaster that awaited her. Within five minutes she would have been embraced clumsily, would have assured her lover that ‘he had spoiled everything’, and the curtain would have descended on the first act of tragedy. Could nothing be done to save her? I was indulging my pet weakness to the top of its bent when suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was the witness of a dramatic incident.
When the girl turned to arrange her hair in the blurred reflection of the sheet of glass that protected the Royal Family from dust, and, to brush a little powder from her chin, she had taken her pocket-handkerchief from her bag. The bag lay open on the table, its mouth pointing to her companion; to my amazement, I saw him lean forward, glance round the room, then quickly take from the bag a couple of pound notes; these he placed on the plate under the bill, adding another of his own.
I suppose I should have risen from my seat and called the girl’s attention to the theft, but it is hard for one who has chosen for himself the role of onlooker to decide on violent and sudden action. Besides, I have learnt that interference is invariably unwise; I cannot expect others to mind their own business unless I mind mine. At any rate, whatever was the right thing to do, I did what it was natural for me to do under the circumstances; I sat where I was.
The reason for the man’s embarrassment was now clear; all the evening he had been waiting an opportunity to steal his companion’s money. And to think that for half an hour I had been concocting an absurd story after the manner of Turgenev, about an Indian Civil Servant and ‘the girl he left behind him’! Impatiently I called for my bill, and walked out into Dean Street.
The cool air restored my confidence. It was a mistake, I told myself, that anyone might have made. We do not expect to meet thieves in actual life. And it was quite a good story that I had invented—a debt to Turgenev perhaps, but then every short story that is written today owes something to Turgenev or Maupassant or Chekov. And I had, besides, the material for another story. The young girl prattling away and the man getting more and more worried. ‘Will she never powder her nose?’ he asks himself, and tries to hide his anxiousness beneath a series of amusing anecdotes.
I could make them discuss the modern girl, she will say that she hates the girl who powders and paints; he will have to agree with her, seeing that her complexion is her own, although he is, for the first time in his life, hating the fresh bloom of her cheeks, wishing that she were another sort of girl. And then, at last, when all seems lost, I could make her lean forward and smell the flowers on the table, and a speck of yellow pollen would attach itself to her chin. He would, in relief, call her attention to it.
‘Really?’ and opening her bag she would take out her handkerchief, turn to the photograph beside them, giving him his chance.
Up to that point it would be straightforward narrative. But beyond it a lot of thought would be required. So good a motive must not be flung away, and all the way down the Charing Cross Road I turned the incident over in my mind.
Fifteen years ago I could have made him an agent in the White Slave Traff
ic. It was a popular theme then; every girl who came up to London looked round at Paddington Station apprehensively for the kindly old lady who would ask her if she was new to these parts. But during the last fifteen years, Villiers Street has been placarded with shilling descriptions of ‘why girls go wrong’, and the Bishop of London has preached a great many sermons. The White Slave Traffic had become vieux jeu. But even so might there not be something in the seduction motif.
Another story started to take shape.
Her brother has motored her up from Brighton. She plans to return by train. She has been invited to dinner by a friend of long standing who knew her as a child. She thinks of him as she always has, as a kind of uncle. But his feelings now that she is grown up have changed.
I pictured them at the station booking office. She fumbles in her bag, searching every pocket. She turns to him in alarm.
‘I’ve lost my money.’
‘You can’t have. Look again.’
Another long, careful search, in vain.
‘What am I to do?’
In her tone of voice, is the implied suggestion that he should lend her the few shillings that she needs. He shakes his head. Alas, he has not enough. But if she will come back to his flat? ‘Into a taxi, quick.’ But when they arrive at the flat, which would be at the top of four flights of stairs, with the flat below unoccupied, he would discover that he had no money either, that the porter had gone, and that there was no one from whom he could borrow; she would sink down on the sofa, her hands clapsed before her knees, while he stood behind her wondering at what exact point …