by None
‘He looked around as if the very chart-room fittings were strange to him. The Commanding Officer asked him whether he had not seen any unusual objects floating about while he was at sea.
‘“Objects! What objects? We were groping blind in the fog for days.”
‘“We had a few clear intervals,” said the Commanding Officer. “And I’ll tell you what we have seen and the conclusion I’ve come to about it.”
‘He told him in a few words. He heard the sound of a sharp breath indrawn through closed teeth. The Northman with his hand on the table stood absolutely motionless and dumb. He stood as if thunderstruck. Then he produced a fatuous smile.
‘Or at least so it appeared to the Commanding Officer. Was this significant, or of no meaning whatever? He didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. All the truth had departed out of the world as if drawn in, absorbed in this monstrous villainy this man was – or was not – guilty of.
‘“Shooting’s too good for people that conceive neutrality in this pretty way,” remarked the Commanding Officer, after a silence.
‘“Yes, yes, yes,” the Northman assented, hurriedly – then added an unexpected and dreamy-voiced “Perhaps.”
‘Was he pretending to be drunk, or only trying to appear sober? His glance was straight, but it was somewhat glazed. His lips outlined themselves firmly under his yellow moustache. But they twitched. Did they twitch? And why was he drooping like this in his attitude?
‘“There’s no perhaps about it,” pronounced the Commanding Officer sternly.
‘The Northman had straightened himself. And unexpectedly he looked stern, too.
‘“No. But what about the tempters? Better kill that lot off. There’s about four, five, six million of them,” he said, grimly; but in a moment changed into a whining key. “But I had better hold my tongue. You have some suspicions.”
‘“No, I’ve no suspicions,” declared the Commanding Officer.
‘He never faltered. At that moment he had the certitude. The air of the chart-room was thick with guilt and falsehood braving the discovery, defying simple right, common decency, all humanity of feeling, every scruple of conduct.
‘The Northman drew a long breath. “Well, we know that you English are gentlemen. But let us speak the truth. Why should we love you so very much? You haven’t done anything to be loved. We don’t love the other people, of course. They haven’t done anything for that either. A fellow comes along with a bag of gold… I haven’t been in Rotterdam my last voyage for nothing.”
‘“You may be able to tell something interesting, then, to our people when you come into port,” interjected the officer.
‘“I might. But you keep some people in your pay at Rotterdam. Let them report. I am a neutral – am I not?… Have you ever seen a poor man on one side and a bag of gold on the other? Of course, I couldn’t be tempted. I haven’t the nerve for it. Really I haven’t. It’s nothing to me. I am just talking openly for once.’
‘“Yes. And I am listening to you,” said the Commanding Officer, quietly.
‘The Northman leaned forward over the table. “Now that I know you have no suspicions, I talk. You don’t know what a poor man is. I do. I am poor myself. This old ship, she isn’t much, and she is mortgaged, too. Bare living, no more. Of course, I wouldn’t have the nerve. But a man who has nerve! See. The stuff he takes aboard looks like any other cargo – packages, barrels, tins, copper tubes – what not. He doesn’t see it work. It isn’t real to him. But he sees the gold. That’s real. Of course, nothing could induce me. I suffer from an internal disease. I would either go crazy from anxiety – or – or – take to drink or something. The risk is too great. Why – ruin!”
‘“It should be death.” The Commanding Officer got up, after this curt declaration, which the other received with a hard stare oddly combined with an uncertain smile. The officer’s gorge rose at the atmosphere of murderous complicity which surrounded him, denser, more impenetrable, more acrid than the fog outside.
‘“It’s nothing to me,” murmured the Northman, swaying visibly.
‘“Of course not,” assented the Commanding Officer, with a great effort to keep his voice calm and low. The certitude was strong within him. “But I am going to clear all you fellows off this coast at once. And I will begin with you. You must leave in half an hour.”
‘By that time the officer was walking along the deck with the Northman at his elbow.
‘“What! In this fog?” the latter cried out, huskily.
‘“Yes, you will have to go in this fog.”
‘“But I don’t know where I am. I really don’t.”
‘The Commanding Officer turned round. A sort of fury possessed him. The eyes of the two men met. Those of the Northman expressed a profound amazement.
‘“Oh, you don’t know how to get out.” The Commanding Officer spoke with composure, but his heart was beating with anger and dread. “I will give you your course. Steer south-by-east-half-east for about four miles and then you will be clear to haul to the eastward for your port. The weather will clear up before very long.”
‘“Must I? What could induce me? I haven’t the nerve.”
‘“And yet you must go. Unless you want to –”
‘“I don’t want to,” panted the Northman. “I’ve enough of it.”
‘The Commanding Officer got over the side. The Northman remained still as if rooted to the deck. Before his boat reached his ship the Commanding Officer heard the steamer beginning to pick up her anchor. Then, shadowy in the fog, she steamed out on the given course.
‘“Yes,” he said to his officers, “I let him go.”’
The narrator bent forward towards the couch, where no movement betrayed the presence of a living person.
‘Listen,’ he said, forcibly. ‘That course would lead the Northman straight on a deadly ledge of rock. And the Commanding Officer gave it to him. He steamed out – ran on it – and went down. So he had spoken the truth. He did not know where he was. But it proves nothing. Nothing either way. It may have been the only truth in all his story. And yet… He seems to have been driven out by a menacing stare – nothing more.’
He abandoned all pretence.
‘Yes, I gave that course to him. It seemed to me a supreme test. I believe – no, I don’t believe. I don’t know. At the time I was certain. They all went down; and I don’t know whether I have done stern retribution – or murder; whether I have added to the corpses that litter the bed of the unreadable sea the bodies of men completely innocent or basely guilty. I don’t know. I shall never know.’
He rose. The woman on the couch got up and threw her arms round his neck. Her eyes put two gleams in the deep shadow of the room. She knew his passion for truth, his horror of deceit, his humanity.
‘Oh, my poor, poor –’
‘I shall never know,’ he repeated, sternly, disengaged himself, pressed her hands to his lips, and went out.
A. W. WELLS
‘CHANSON TRISTE’
I have sometimes thought that if I put it all down on paper, precisely and exactly as it occurred, my mind might become easier. Certainly nothing has given me relief up to now. One, two, three, seven years ago it must be since it happened, and at a spot four or five thousand miles away, to which I am never likely to return; and yet there still come days, nights, sometimes even weeks, when the whole thing will break out in my brain again as though everything took place only yesterday. Curious – the odd, queerly inconsequent sort of causes to which I trace these outbreaks. Always, for instance, I seem to find myself worst when the grapes are in season (especially the small ‘black’ variety), or when the plovers are crying on bright moonlight nights; while there is one place which I have learned to shun as I might shun a plague. If I can possibly avoid it, nothing will ever induce me to climb the hill that stretches along the Surrey suburb in which I live, and look across the twenty-miles-wide valley to where the next range of hills loom, across the horizon.
But perhaps the most
weird result of all is that I can never stay in a room for long where Tschaikovsky is being played – particularly his ‘Chanson Triste’.1 I like Tschaikovsky; yet when the orchestra played ‘Chanson Triste’ to-night I simply had to come out. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Joan, I could see, was as nearly furious with me as she has ever been since our marriage. She’s forgiven me now, for I have told her all about it, shown her the photograph and kept not a single detail back from her… but I could see quite plainly that she did not understand. And I want somebody to understand. Most of all, of course, I want Dimitri to understand. I’d give ten, twenty years of my life, I believe, if I could only make Dimitri understand.
No, Dimitri was not a woman: a soldier, just a common Bulgar soldier,2 but with this one supreme and startling difference – that of the men who died in the Great War Dimitri died the worst death of all. And although it was no weapon of mine – either held, directed, or commanded by me – that killed him, I am afraid I was responsible for that death. Of one thing, at least, I am certain: Dimitri thinks I was responsible. The whole tragedy lies in that.
It would be the most foolish, in some ways the most tragic, mistake in the world to suppose that this is just an ordinary war story that I have to relate. I wish it were. If I could only trace one experience similar to mine (as, indeed, I have spent hours and hours browsing over bookstalls trying to find it) I should feel comforted; but nowhere have I been able to discover the vaguest hint of a resemblance. It all happened not far from a town called Dorrain,3 which is situated at the far end of the valley where the river Struma runs between Bulgaria and Macedonia; but I would rather you immediately forgot those names, and pictured to yourself only the town and the valley – the town a poor, war-battered heap of buildings, and the valley a twenty-miles stretch of country, lying between ranges of hills so high and formidable that the military experts had long since given them up as impregnable. And I would have you imagine that while in the town war is being carried on in the best modern manner – two opposing swarms of rats gradually nibbling into one another’s territory – all the warfare that exists in the valley is conducted by small groups of men who creep down from their respective hills in the night-time, wander vaguely about the valley until dawn comes, and then creep weariedly back again. All night long the shriek of the shrapnel and the glare of the Very lights may be hovering over the town; but in the twenty-miles-wide valley the darkness may pass without the sound or the flash of a single rifle shot. And the valley is so strewn with ravines and little clumps of trees, and men are so very scarce there, that a group of men from one range of hills may pass a group of men from the other, barely a hundred yards away, and never be aware of it.
So I think you may very fairly visualize the scene in which the experience I have to relate to you occurred; and yet I find myself altogether at a loss to convey the feeling of a man suddenly withdrawn from his little rat-hole in the town, and sent roaming about the valley wherever the fancy moved him – the groping, childlike fright of it all, those first few nights, and then, as time wore on, the sweet, civilian scent of liberty that suddenly seemed to breathe over everything. I wish I could convey to you, for instance, only a fraction of the divine joy there was to be had in those secret little pilgrimages to the pomegranate orchard, near the five tall poplar trees; the breathless, perspiring excitement that was to be felt in stealing into those ruined, deserted little villages – deserted, that is, except perhaps by the fellows from the opposite hills. But most of all, I wish I could convey to you something of the sudden sense of awe that fell on me one night, when, entirely alone, and trying to locate a certain fig-tree, I came across a small straw-thatched hut, tucked away in a little ravine I never remembered having seen before.
Softly I crept up to the doorway, waited for a moment to make sure that no sound came from within, and then entered. Marking first that there were no cracks through which the moonlight was piercing, I struck a match and looked anxiously round the room. A small, rickety-looking table, and an equally rickety-looking chair drawn up to it – that was all. Then I noticed that on the table was a small piece of candle, and lying only a foot away from this, a thin, black-bound book – a copy of Rupert Brooke4 with the leaves turned down at the page:
… And I shall find some girl, perhaps,
A better girl than you,
With eyes as wise, but kindlier,
And lips as soft, but true.
And I dare say she will do.5
Oh God, this was rich! Who, in the name of all that was wonderful, was the lovesick buffoon in the battalion who stole away into this lonely little straw-thatched hut at nights so that he might the more reflectively read Rupert Brooke? Then I turned to the fly-leaf and read the name:
NICOLAS DIMITRI.
Several moments, I think, must have elapsed before I realized the tremendous significance of my discovery – that the book in my hand belonged to a man from the opposite hills, who, even as I stood there, might enter to claim it. Quivering with excitement I thrust the book hurriedly into my pocket, blew out the light, and went outside.
Do not ask me to explain why it was that the next time I visited the straw-thatched hut in the ravine I should leave on the rickety little table the only book of poetry I ever carried during the war – a small, leather-bound edition of Omar Khayyám.6 All that I know is that it seemed to me the only and natural thing to do; and I can still recall very vividly the excitement I felt when, a night or two later, I crept away from my patrol to see if the exchange had been accepted. Yes, the table was quite empty – quite empty except for the same innocent stump of candle. And then I suddenly noticed a certain peculiarity about that candle. Instead of standing erect, as I first saw it, it was now lying on its side, and trailing away from the wick was a long line of grease spots, stretching not only across the table, but half-way across the floor to where lay a large, flat boulder. In a flash the thought came to me that I was intended to lift that boulder; and two minutes later, hands quivering with excitement and heart throbbing against my ribs, I was eagerly deciphering, as a raw youth might read his first love-letter, the curiously stilted, Latin-looking hand of a man who told me that, although born a Bulgar, and now fighting as a Bulgar, he had spent the greater part of his life in America, where he had learned to understand and appreciate English art and literature beyond all other.
That letter still lies before me – one of the dozen, tattered, carefully hoarded pages I have just revealed to Joan; but little purpose could be served, I am afraid, by quoting it in full. He makes great fun, I see, because, above all poets, I should choose as my grand consoler in the war an old Persian who died eight hundred years ago. ‘I think you must be very, very English,’ he writes. ‘I do not wonder that the Rubáiyát so appeals to you. You English like to think yourselves stolid, unshakeable and imperturbable; but how much of this, I sometimes wonder, is due to some curious kink of Oriental fatalism about you?’ And then there is the letter in which he reflects on the mutually futile, bloody butchery that went on all round us in those sublime spring evenings of that mournful year of 1917. Bitter, searing things he writes, as only a man can write who has recently returned from ghastly, naked realities. But I will not trouble you with these. Poor Dimitri! To quote them now would be to mock him.
I leave it entirely to the psychologists to explain the strange compelling attraction, the almost romantic glamour, that somehow pervaded this friendship of ours, right from the very beginning. Times there must have been, of course, when both of us must have reflected that what we were doing was utterly wrong and deceitful: that we were committing a crime for which, had they discovered it, the countries whose uniforms we wore would immediately have had us shot, and buried like so much loathsome carrion; and yet, speaking for myself, I can only say that always uppermost in my mind was a feeling of stupendous glamour about our association – heightened a hundredfold, I suppose, because only two people in the world knew of it. And the very fact that it was illicit, I think, only grew i
n time to be a still further attraction. I began to understand, I am afraid, something of the irresistible lure that men have felt in illicit dealing and illicit love, ever since the world began. I am persuaded to think, indeed, that there were many ways in which this association between Dimitri and myself resembled very much an illicit love affair. All that I seemed to live for, at that time, was the weekly letters, hidden under the large, flat boulder in the little straw-thatched hut; and at all sorts of odd moments during the day I would find myself staring across that twenty-miles-wide valley picturing, somewhere on those opposite hills, the writer of them – wondering what he was doing and whether he ever similarly wondered about me.
And then, as time went on, it seemed that letters would no longer suffice; we began to make gifts to one another. I started by directing attention to a small box of cigarettes and a packet of chocolate that might be found hidden in the hollow of a certain fig-tree a dozen yards farther down the ravine; he responded by leaving me a bunch of grapes, of a small black variety I have never known surpassed for sweetness. Then the gifts no longer sufficed: Dimitri began to talk of photographs – ‘civilian preferred’, as he expressed it. For a long time I hesitated about that. Either of us, I pointed out, might at any time be killed, and to be found with enemy photographs in our possession might lead to an infamy which certainly neither of us deserved. But in the end I yielded; and even now, as I write, there stares mutely, half-defiantly up at me from the midst of the tattered letters the picture of a tall, rather lanky sort of youth, with that peculiarly elusive kind of face we are inclined to call ‘temperamental’, and with a mass of jet black hair brushed abruptly back from his forehead.
Only one thing remained for us now, of course, and that was to meet; but both of us, I think, shrank from mentioning this. For here, it seemed, we reached the one great forbidden sin: the pitch, once touched, that must inevitably defile. The wonder was, I often thought, that we did not meet by accident, and one night, I remember, we nearly did meet by accident. For some reason or other Dimitri seems to have been unusually indiscreet. When within twenty yards of the hut I could see the tiniest glimmer of light piercing through the door, which had evidently been closed with insufficient care. Then the light suddenly went out, and a minute later I heard footsteps moving towards the opposite end of the ravine, and a soft musical whistle mournfully mingling with the melancholy croaking of the frogs. The tune was Tschaikovsky’s ‘Chanson Triste’. For fully a quarter of an hour I must have remained there and listened, a cold sweat breaking over me lest on his return journey he should run into my patrol, whose duty (as, indeed, it was mine) would be either to take him prisoner or to kill him. But nothing happened.