And Somers relinquished his broom to a bigger man.
They were kindly, and, in the essential sense, gentlemen, the little terrier of a sergeant too. Englishmen, his own people.
When it came to Somer’s turn to be examined, and he took off his clothes and sat in his shirt in the cold lobby: the fat fellow pointed to his thin, delicate legs with a jeer. But Somers looked at him, and he was quiet again. The queer, soft, pale-bodied fellow, against Somers’ thin delicate whiteness. The little sergeant kept saying:
“Don’t you catch cold, you chaps.”
In the warm room behind a screen, Richard took off his shirt and was examined. The doctor asked him where he lived — where was his home — asked as a gentleman asks, treated him with that gentle consideration Somers usually met with, save from business people or official people.
“We shall reject you, leave you free,” said the doctor, after consulting with the more elderly, officious little man, “but we leave it to you to do what you can for your country.”
“Thank you,” said Richard, looking at him.
“Every man must do what he can,” put in the other doctor, who was elderly and officious, but a gentleman. “The country needs the help of every man, and though we leave you free, we expect you to apply yourself to SOME service.”
“Yes,” said Somers, looking at him, and speaking in an absolutely neutral voice. Things said like that to him were never real to him: more like the noise of a cart passing, just a noise.
The two doctors looked from his face down his thin nakedness again.
“Put your shirt on,” said the younger one.
And Somers could hear the mental comment, “Rum sort of a fellow,” as he did so.
There was still a wait for the card. It was one of those cards: A — Called up for military service. B — Called up for service at the front, but not in the lines. C — Called up for non-military service. R — Rejected. A, B, and C were ruled out in red ink, leaving the Rejected. He still had to go to another office for his pay — two shillings and fourpence, or something like that. He signed for this and was free. Free — with two shillings and fourpence, and pass for a railway ticket — and God’s air. The moment he stepped out with his card, he realised that it was Saturday morning, that the sun was shining, filling the big stone yard of the barracks, from which he could look to the station and the hill with its grass, beyond. That hill beyond — he had seemed to look at it through darkened glass, before. Till now, the morning had been a timeless greyness. Indeed, it had rained at seven o’clock, as they stood lounging miserably about in the barracks yard with its high wall, cold and bitter. And the tall man had talked to him bitterly.
But now the sun shone, the dark-green, Cornish hill, hard-looking, was just a near hill. He walked through the great gates. Ah God, he was out, he was free. The road with trees went downhill to the town. He hastened down, a free human being, on Saturday morning, the grey glaze gone from his eyes.
He telegraphed the ignominious word Rejected, and the time of his arrival, to Harriet. Then he went and had dinner. Some of the other men came in. They were reserved now — there was a distance between him and them — he was not of their social class.
“What are you?” they asked him.
“Rejected,” he said.
And they looked at him grudgingly, thinking it was because he was not a working man he had got special favour. He knew what they thought, and he tried not to look so glad. But glad he was, and in some mysterious way, triumphant.
It was a wonderful journey on the Saturday afternoon home — sunny, busy, lovely. He changed at Truro and went into town. On the road he met some of the other fellows, who were called up, but not summoned for service immediately. They had some weeks, or months, of torment and suspense before them. They looked at Somers, and grinned rather jeeringly at him. They envied him — no wonder. And already he was a stranger, in another walk of life.
Rejected as unfit. One of the unfit. What did he care? The Cornish are always horrified of any ailment or physical disablement. “What’s amiss then?” they would ask. They would SAY that you might as well be shot outright as labelled unfit. But most of them tried hard to find constitutional weaknesses in themselves, that would get them rejected also, notwithstanding. And at the same time they felt they must be horribly ashamed of their physical ignominy if they were LABELLED unfit.
Somers did not care. Let them label me unfit, he said to himself. I know my own body is fragile, in its way, but also it is very strong, and it’s the only body that would carry my particular self. Let the fools peer at it and put me down undeveloped chest and what they like, so long as they leave me to my own way.
Then the kindly doctor’s exhortation that he should find some way for himself for serving his country. He thought about that many times. But always, as he came near to the fact of committing himself, he knew that he simply could not commit himself to any service whatsoever. In no shape or form could he serve the war, either indirectly or directly. Yet it would have been so easy. He had quite enough influential friends in London to put him into some job, even some quite congenial, literary job, with a sufficient salary. They would be only too glad to do it, for there in his remoteness, writing occasionally an essay that only bothered them, he was a thorn in their flesh. And men and women with sons, brothers, husbands away fighting, it was small pleasure for them to read Mr. Somers and his denunciation. “This trench and machine warfare is a blasphemy against life itself, a blasphemy which we are all committing.” All very well, they said, but we are in for a war, and what are we to do? We hate it as much as he does. But we can’t all sit safely in Cornwall.
That was true too, and he knew it, and he felt the most a dreary misery, knowing how many brave, generous men were being put through this slaughter-machine of human devilishness. They were doing their best, and there was nothing else to do. But even that was no reason why he should go and do likewise.
If men had kept their souls firm and integral through the years, the war would never have come on. If, in the beginning, there had been enough strong, proud souls in England to concentrate the English feeling into stern, fierce, honourable fighting,, the war would never have gone as it went. But England slopped and wobbled, and the tide of horror accumulated.
And now, if circumstances had roped nearly all men into the horror, and it was a case of adding horror to horror, or dying well, on the other hand, the irremediable circumstance of his own separate soul made Richard Lovat’s inevitable standing out. If there is outward, circumstantial unreason and fatality, there is inward unreason and inward fate. He would have to dare to follow his inward fate. He must remain alone, outside of everything, everything, conscious of what was going on, conscious of what he was doing and not doing. Conscious he must be, and consciously he must stick to it. To be forced into nothing.
For, above all things, man is a land animal and a thought-adventurer. Once the human consciousness really sinks and is swamped under the tide of events — as the best English consciousness was swamped, pacifist and patriotic alike — then the adventure is doomed. The English soul went under in the war, and, as a conscious, proud, adventurous, self-responsible soul, it was lost. We all lost the war: perhaps Germany least. Lost all the lot. The adventure is always lost when the human conscious soul gives way under the stress, fails to keep control, and is submerged. Then out swarm the rats and the Bottomleys and crew, and the ship of human adventure is a horrible piratic affair, a dirty sort of freebooting.
Richard Lovat had nothing to hang on to but his own soul. So he hung on to it, and tried to keep his wits. If no man was with him, he was hardly aware of it, he had to grip on so desperately, like a man on a plank in a shipwreck. The plank was his own individual self.
Followed that period of suspense which changed his life for ever. If the postman was coming plunging downhill through the bushes over the moor, the first thought was: What is he bringing now? The postman was over military age, and had a chuckle of plea
sure in handing out those accursed On His Majesty’s Service envelopes which meant that a man was summoned for torture. The postman was a great Wesleyan and a chapel preacher, and the thought of hell for other men was sweet in him: he had a religious zest added to his natural Cornish zest in other people’s disasters.
Again, if there was the glint of a bicycle on the moor road, and if it turned down the bypath towards the cottage, then Somers strained his eyes to see if the rider were fat and blue, or tall and blue. Was it the police sergeant, or the police constable, coming for more identification proofs.
“We want your birth certificate,” said the sergeant. “They’ve written from Bodmin asking you to produce your birth certificate.”
“Then tell them to get it. No, I haven’t got it. You’ve had my marriage certificate. You know who I am and where I was born and all the rest. Now let them get the birth certificate themselves.”
Richard Lovat was at the end of all patience. They persisted he was a foreigner — poor Somers, just because he had a beard. One of the most intensely English little men England ever produced, with a passion for his country, even if it were often a passion of hatred. But no, they persisted he was a foreigner. Pah!
He and Harriet did all their own work, their own shopping. One wintry afternoon they were coming home with a knapsack, along the field path above the sea, when two khaki individuals, officers of some sort, strode after them.
“Excuse me,” said one, in a damnatory officious voice. “What have you got in that sack?”
“A few groceries,” said Lovat.
“I would like to look.”
Somers put the sack down on the path. The tall and lofty officer stooped and groped nobly among a pound of rice and a piece of soap and a dozen candles.
“Ha!” he cried, exultant. “What’s this? A camera!”
Richard peeped in the bag at the groping red military hands. For a moment he almost believed that a camera had spirited itself in among his few goods, the implication of his guilt was so powerful. He saw a block in brown paper.
“A penn’orth of salt,” he said quietly, though pale to the lips with anger and insult.
But the gentlemanly officer — a Captain — tore open the paper. Yes, a common block of salt. He pushed the bag aside.
“We have to be careful,” said the other, lesser man.
“Of course,” said Richard, tying up his bag.
“Good afternoon!” said Harriet.
The fellows half saluted, and turned hastening away. Richard and Harriet had the advantage of sauntering behind them and looking at their noble backs. Oh, they were gentlemen, true English gentlemen: perhaps Cornish.
Harriet gave a pouf of laughter.
“The poor innocent salt!” she exclaimed.
And no doubt that also was chalked up against her.
It was Christmas time, and two friends came down to stay at the cottage with the Somers. Those were the days before America joined the Allies. The man friend arrived with a whole parcel of American dainties, buckwheat meal and sweet potatoes and maple sugar: the woman friend brought a good basket of fruit. They were to have a Christmas in the lonely cottage in spite of everything.
It was Christmas Eve, and a pouring black wet night outside. Nowhere can it be so black as on the edge of a Cornish moor, above the western sea, near the rocks where the ancient worshippers used to sacrifice. The darkness of menhirs. The American woman friend was crouching at the fire making fudge, the man was away in his room, when a thundering knock at the door. Ah Lord!
The burly police-sergeant, and his bicycle.
“Sorry to trouble you sir, but is an American, a Mr. Monsell, stopping here with you? He is. Can I have a word with him?”
“Yes. Won’t you come in?”
Into the cosy cottage room, with the American girl at the fire, her face flushed with the fudge-making, entered the big, burly police-sergeant, his black mackintosh-cape streaming wet.
“We give you a terrible lot of trouble, I’m sorry to say,” said Harriet ironically. “What an awful night for you to have to come all these miles. I’m sure it isn’t OUR doing.”
“No, ma’m, I know that. It’s the doing of people who like to meddle. These military orders, they take some keeping pace with.”
“I’m sure they do.”
Harriet was all sympathy. So he, too, was goaded by these military canaille.
Somers fetched the American friend, and he was asked to produce papers, and give information. He gave it, being an honourable citizen and a well-bred American, with complete sang froid. At that moment Somers would have given a lot to be American too, and not English. But wait — those were early days, when America was still being jeered at for standing out and filling her pockets. She was not yet the intensely loved Ally. The police-sergeant was pleasant as ever. He apologised again, and went out into the black and pouring night. So much for Christmas Eve.
“But that’s not the end of the horrid affair,” as the song says. When Monsell got back to London he was arrested, and conveyed to Scotland Yard: there examined, stripped naked, his clothes taken away. Then he was kept for a night in a cell — next evening liberated and advised to return to America.
Poor Monsell, and he was so very anti-German, so very pro-British. It was a blow for him. He did not leave off being anti-German, but he was much less pro-British. And after all, it was war-time, when these things must happen, we are told. Such a war-time that let loose the foulest feelings of a mob, particularly of ‘gentlemen’, to torture any single, independent man as a mob always tortures the isolated and independent.
In despair, Somers thought he would go to America. He had passports, he was Rejected. They had no use for him, and he had no use for them. So he posted his passports to the Foreign Office, for the military permit to depart.
It was January, and there was a thin film of half-melted snow, like silver, on the fields and the path. A white, static, arrested morning, away there in the west of Cornwall, with the moors looking primeval, and the huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences. So easy to realise men worshipping stones. It is not the stone. It is the mystery of the powerful, pre-human earth, showing its might. And all, this morning, static, arrested in a cold, milky whiteness, like death, the west lost in the sea.
A man culminates in intense moments. This was one of Somers’ white, deathlike moments, as he walked home from the tiny post-office in the hamlet, on the wintry morning, after he had posted his passports asking for visas to go to New York. It was like walking in death: a strange, arrested land of death. Never had he known that feeling before: as if he were a ghost in the after-death, walking a strange, pale, static, cold world. It almost frightened him. “Have I done wrong?” he asked himself. “Am I wrong, to leave my country and go to America?”
It was then as if he HAD left his country: and that was like death, a still, static, corporate death. America was the death of his own country in him, he realised that.
But he need not have bothered. The Foreign Office kept his passports, and did not so much as answer him. He waited in vain.
Spring came — and one morning the news that Asquith was out of the government, that Lloyd George was in. And this was another of Somers’ crises. He felt he must go away from the house, away from everywhere. And as he walked, clear as a voice out of the moors, came a voice saying: “It is the end of England. It is the end of the old England. It is finished. England will never be England any more.”
Cornwall is a country that makes a man psychic. The longer he stayed, the more intensely it had that effect on Somers. It was as if he were developing second sight, and second hearing. He would go out into the blackness of night and listen to the blackness, and call, call softly, for the spirits, the presences he felt coming downhill from the moors in the night. “Tuatha De Danaan!” he would call softly. “Tuatha De Danaan! Be with me. Be with me.” And it was as if he felt them come.
And so this morning the voice struck into his
consciousness. “It is the end of England.” So he walked along blindly, up the valley and on the moors. He loved the country intensely. It seemed to answer him. But his consciousness was all confused. In his mind, he did not at all see why it should be the end of England. Mr. Asquith was called Old Wait-and-See. And truly, English Liberalism had proved a slobbery affair, all sad sympathy with everybody, and no iron backbone, these years. Repulsively humble, too, on its own account. It was no time for Christian humility. And yet, it was true to its great creed.
Whereas Lloyd George! Somers knew nothing about Lloyd George. A little Welsh lawyer, not an Englishman at all. He had no real significance in Richard Lovat’s soul. Only, Somers gradually came to believe that all Jews, and all Celts, even whilst they espoused the cause of England, subtly lived to bring about the last humiliation of the great old England. They could never do so if England WOULD NOT BE humiliated. But with an England fairly offering herself to ignominy, where was the help? Let the Celts work out their subtlety. If England WANTED to be betrayed, in the deeper issues. Perhaps Jesus wanted to be betrayed. He did. He chose Judas.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 366