The Black Laurel

by Storm Jameson

  “Really? And what were you? Fighter pilot?”

  “Bomber,” the young man said briefly.

  Irritated now by his coolness, real or pretended, the general said stiffly,

  “You didn’t want to stay in the service?”

  “I don’t think many of us will be kept on, sir,” Coster said in the same low voice. He was rigid, a muscle in his face twitched.

  “Why not?”

  Before the young man could reply, Gary interrupted.

  “I took care he had no chance,” he said easily. “I’ve had an eye on him for some time. Since he flew me back from a — a little mission I undertook, in 1940. Singularly unpleasant trip it was.”

  A delicate affection came into his voice.

  “Remember it, Arnold?”

  Suddenly thinking of his sons, the general felt a prick of jealousy. He glanced again at the pilot. Yes, he thought, that young man has fallen on his feet all right.

  Chapter Four

  Towards ten o’clock, Gary excused himself to his guests. Lise’s father sent her to bed, and young Coster had disappeared, stepping through a window into the darkness when he thought no one would notice. As Gary left the room he saw the two soldiers draw together, an almost imperceptible gesture. Closing ranks, he thought, amused.

  He told a servant to find Coster and send him to him in the library.

  It was a long comfortable low room, full of the books he had been gathering all his life, including some he bought when he was at school. Many of them were shabby, and there were debauched paper-backed vagabonds from France and Spain. Nothing could be less like the library of his house in London, a museum of finely-bound books and collector’s editions — yet he had chosen those too. As he came into the room he saw that a writing-desk he had told a servant to look for in the attics had been brought and placed in the middle of the floor. A small bureau of yellowed walnut and ivory, it had been his mother’s, and for years after she died and ceased tormenting him with her tongue, he used it. One day for no reason he knew of he sent it away. To-day, again for no reason he had pardoned it, and it stood there, not even blaming him. He pressed his hand on it. It was delicate, but he had no feeling that it would break under his weight.

  He began idly to pull out the narrow drawers. Caught behind one, a sheet of notepaper fell down and fluttered into his hand. It was the beginning, hardly even that, of a letter: the date — of twenty-five years since — and the words My dearest Georgina. . . Nothing more. He let it lie on his hand. His dearest Georgina had died six years ago, taking with her below the earth the girl for whom the letter had been meant. The girl remained obstinately hidden in his memory of a woman over forty, careless how she looked, her skin rough and flawed, sensual lines cut in it deeply from nostrils to chin. He could not see her — nor did he wish to. If, he told his mother, this is one of your unkind tricks, you have overreached yourself. He did not dislike being reminded of his youth: simply, his memories of it had no meaning for him. At a precise moment of the other war, in October 1918, they became mute, an absence. Silence about one’s memories can be, often is, a never-ending gossip with oneself; or a cave of echoes; or shameful and voluptuous. For Gary it was only a suicide. In his wilful exile he had become stone-deaf to the dialect of a half of his life. A word spoken in it did not reach him. Without bothering to tear the letter he dropped it in the wastepaper-basket, and walked over to the bell.

  He took his hand away at once, without ringing. He had been going to say: Take this desk out. Get rid of it. At that moment he caught sight of it again from the corner of his eye, looking so inoffensive and nothing that it was only ridiculous to think it had tried to make signs to him. He pushed it against the wall. Let it stay.

  The door opened and his pilot came in. He’s had too much sun to-day, and a little too much to drink, Gary thought, with amused liking. Flushed and half-smiling, he was very attractive. For less than an instant, Gary felt anxious, as though he were in some way responsible for the young man.

  “Well, how d’you like it here?”

  The pilot smiled at him — he had a delightful smile, quick and deceptively intimate.

  “Very much, sir.”

  He won’t say more, Gary thought. What had drawn him to the young man was not his courage, great, and in a pilot unremarkable and common. He had been interested because Arnold protected himself so firmly and coolly against any attack on his emotions. It could be the war, but it seemed older. Gary remembered a priest, from the days when he still practised his religion, saying to him: To-day it is very easy for a child of God, even an infant, to die and become a solitary individual, with nothing better to do than to play with his young energy. Arnold, he knew, had come out of the Air Force with a contempt for the civilian mob, sharpened by the respect for authority he had got first by obeying, and then as the skipper of an æroplane, with that absolute responsibility. Yet he was malleable still. Gary felt a strangely sharp pleasure in moulding him. Why not? One must have some human warmth. Even, he thought cynically, be admired. And Arnold admired him. Before he came to Gary, he must still have believed that no one was more powerful than Air Marshals and Secretaries of State. He had seen these great men deferring to Gary humbly, and Gary had told him stories, not known to anyone else, about their quarrels, jealousies, back-biting. The very men the country thought of as its saviours.

  “Sit down, Arnold. Tell me — what d’you think of General Lowerby?”

  A brief hesitation:

  “He must have been an excellent head prefect, sir. That’s not so easy.”

  He had a habit, when he was trying to be clear, of moving his thin long fingers as though he were getting rid of sand on them.

  Gary did not smile. Good, he said to himself. He had begun to expect the moments when Arnold was seized by an older and dispassionate self, able to judge men: when these happened he felt almost the foolish pride of a parent.

  “Yes, you’re nearly right,” he said lightly. “He’s an excellent fellow, clever as a monkey, very pious, morally fearless as well as adroit. If he were a priest I think he’d be a Jesuit. He knows what he wants, and he doesn’t spare himself. It surprises me he didn’t do better than Major-General. He must have enemies. If I were the Army Council I should have used him. I could use him now, if he were out of the army.”

  “So long as you don’t turn me over to him,” Arnold mumbled. When he was speaking for himself he became indistinct.

  “I shan’t do that.” Gary laughed. “Have a cigarette — help yourself. . . Colonel Brett, now, is out of another cellar, almost another century. Much more direct, and a soldier to his least bone. I can’t think how he spared the devotion to marry. If he didn’t enjoy himself so much, he would be one of Vigny’s officers — poor and a failure. You’ve never read Vigny. You should.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I do, my child. You’ll find him on the third shelf, behind you.”

  The pilot did not move.

  “Is he going to Berlin?”

  “Who? Colonel Brett? They’re both going. Advance Control Commission. Lowerby is in charge of the Political Investigation Division: Brett goes with him on his staff. By the way, we may go ourselves — next month.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Without intending to Gary said,

  “D’you like your job?”

  Arnold looked at him with a warm smile.

  “Very much. Better than anything I can think of. I’m very lucky.”

  To stifle his pleasure, Gary thought cynically: Yes, you’re lucky. Not one man in a thousand has a living relation to his job. For the others it’s a life sentence. He watched the young man turn, without enthusiasm, and look along the shelf until he found the battered copy, take it out and hold it unopened. If I had had a son he would be the same age, he thought. A thought that, if he were foolish enough to hold it, would burn his hand. He dropped it.

  “And when you’re too old for flying?”

  Arnold’s face became bla
nk, as when the general had probed him.

  “I’ve always thought you should start another life at forty. And another at eighty. In fact, I don’t know why people die.”

  “Ah,” Gary said. A disturbance began in him, so deeply that he could ignore it. “If you feel like that —”

  He checked himself, and smiled indulgently.

  “I’ll find you work at forty. More than you expect. An intelligent young man — you are intelligent — should be able to learn quickly what I was ten years, more, finding out for myself. I’ll tell you something. The very humble people — who expect nothing — can be happy, so can the powerful. It’s the mass who suffer, the millions, poor or well-off, who daren’t ask themselves why they were born — because the only truthful answer terrifies them. They’ll clap anybody — a politician, a successful general, Hitler — who palms off on them a comfortable answer. The pity is that none of the answers work, the lies are too clumsy, and the poor deluded millions find themselves starving, or waiting for bombs, or dropping them. And they call that living.”

  Arnold had watched him intently, so intently that for once he had an unguarded look, young.

  “Do you know the answer, sir?”

  “If I couldn’t think of a better one than the atom bomb, I’d shoot myself,” Gary smiled. “But in a properly-run world why should anyone ask uncomfortable questions? They only do it because they’re bored. I’d use everyone to his limit — jolly little animals or scientists, the machine or the inside of the atom or Betelgueuse. The courageous and intelligent would enjoy each minute as if it were the last; for the others, I’d provide charming little screens to hold up, so that they died happy. What d’you think?”

  Arnold moved his fingers. He relaxed, slipping down in his chair, and smiled slightly.

  “I hope you’ll use me to my limit,” he said indistinctly.

  He was struggling against sleep, swallowing yawns in his throat.

  “Go to bed,” Gary said gently. “Be off.”

  He saw, when the young man had gone, that he had left the copy of Vigny at the side of his chair. No, he never meant to take it, he thought, smiling. He put it back on the shelf, took another book for himself, and went to bed. Turning the pages, he stopped at familiar lines —

  Comme on voit sur la branche au mois de mai la rose En sa belle jeunesse, en sa première fleur. . .

  Arnold did not trouble to draw curtains or turn the light on. He undressed quickly and carelessly, dropping his clothes about the room. His head was spinning. He made an effort to think about Gary’s properly-run world — no use — he put it aside for to-morrow, when he would be flying to London and back. My brain works best at four thousand feet, he thought lightly. Instead he thought about Gary, with a sudden warmth. He had respected him from the first day, and this evening he felt something better than respect. I can trust him, he thought. He was not sure what he meant — unless it were that, without admitting it, he had wanted to believe in something, or someone. If he could believe without feeling disgraced. . . One of the things that pleased him about Gary, apart from his kindness, charm, was the distance between them. To be able to admire, respect, and like, yes, like — without reserves — what a piece of luck. And what luck if I can help him, he thought.

  He stood for a moment at the window, wide open on the July night. The darkness was scarcely dark; it was translucent and seemed to reflect the lawn, trees, the stream. He felt the other fatigue coming up under the fatigue of his walk — the suspense and fever. An excitement stirred in him by Gary’s words struggled against it, but as soon as he realised his excitement he turned sharply on himself. What have you to be so pleased about? he thought, vexed. He moved away from the window and jumped into bed.

  At once — it happened when he was tired — he felt the jerking sickness of a moment when he knew he was going to crash. He forced himself awake and lay rigid, gripping the sides of the bed. After a moment he trusted himself to close his eyes again. This time it was all right.

  Chapter Five

  “My dear old boy, my first night in Berlin, I slept in a wood. On the ground. There were mines, rats, and dead bodies. It was pitch dark when we arrived. The bodies announced themselves at once, but we didn’t discover the mines until my servant trod on one, poor devil. After that we didn’t move until it was light. I bored myself there for a week, then, mercifully, the old man came out and took over a house for us in Grunewald. Berlin is fantastically crowded. And what people!”

  Edward West spoke with a distaste half ironical, half real. He was feeling very happy, delighted that the first day of his London leave was also Arnold’s one evening there on his way to Germany — but he could not help talking as he would have talked to a man he hoped to amuse and impress. He knew he was doing it; he knew that its effect on his friend would be just the opposite: Arnold would not be impressed and would take pains to seem cooler than usual. Yet he could not at once drop the manner he had begun practising at school — it had served him, there and since, well. His friendship with Arnold was older than their schooldays: it began in the nursery, and having outlived every change in their lives it had become a habit of mind. More than that — for them both it was security and ease. In the very moment when he realised that he was using it on Arnold, his sophistication had broken down — it was almost that, the falling to pieces of a second face and voice he preferred to those he had been born with.

  During the last six years he had seen Arnold only twice. They were not fighting the same war — his own was a professional soldier’s war. He had done well enough. A light head wound in 1940, at the end of a week which for all it was a nightmare of disasters he enjoyed — he had not needed to impress anyone — and during which he had earned his D. S. O. A staff appointment. North Africa. An inopportune illness — after missing a better job he became General Lowerby’s Personal Assistant; but he was not dissatisfied. At worst, he was off on the right foot.

  He looked at Arnold, who had put his feet up on his bed. Abruptly, he wanted to laugh; everything was ridiculous, and nothing mattered. He had taken off his belt and was holding it. He threw it across the room, into a chair.

  “What are you grinning about?” demanded Arnold.

  “Nothing. I’m glad you didn’t get yourself kaput. And I’m frightfully pleased you’re coming to Berlin. Haven’t felt so pleased about anything for years.”

  Arnold stretched himself, arms folded behind his head.

  “It sounds just what I’ve been looking for,” he said easily, “a quiet friendly place to spend the rest of my life.”

  “It might be better than spending it here.” Edward looked round the room with displeasure.

  They were in Arnold’s club in Curzon Street: it was new; its founders had taken over a handsome eighteenth-century house which might have been pulled down and now survived as a shell, scarcely noticed by the dentists, stockbrokers, young officers, and the company directors and their wives who found its rather sordid luxury reassuring. During the war the luxury had become shabby without looking any better for it.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Arnold yawned. “Andrew and I joined it in 1940, to have somewhere to sleep.”

  “Andrew? What became of him?”

  Arnold did not answer. After a second, Edward went on in the voice he had used to criticise anything Arnold told him about Eton — he had not been sent there, and their first day together during the vacations was always spent by him in subtly deriding what he imagined it to be like: derision which left Arnold unmoved.

  “It isn’t a club, you won’t meet anyone of the least interest — or of any use. And it’s pretentious, it pretends to be fashionable. Why didn’t you tell me, you ass? — I’d have put you up for the Savile.”

  “I don’t want to meet people,” Arnold said lazily. “All I need is a bed. I don’t talk to anyone, y’know. When my mother opens her house again, I shall chuck it.”

  “Oh, is she coming back to London?”

  “Of course.”
>
  A pity, thought Edward. She’s a monster of vanity and self-pity, a devoted bad mother. Poor woman, though — she’ll try to bully him again with her sorrows and find she can’t, he’s grown a shell.

  “Berlin is a mad-house.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with it?”

  “Oh, the normal after-war scramble for jobs. Senior officers whose departments are closing down, and they’ll have to revert to their substantive ranks. Naturally they don’t want to; they butt their way into other jobs, then work like beavers to swell them out. A department that used to be run, easily, by a major, a captain and a couple of subalterns, manages to get itself fitted out with colonel, two lieutenant-colonels, four majors, eight captains, and a whole raft of subalterns. They all have to live somewhere — hence the mob. It’s fantastic.”

  “Nothing to do with me, thank God.”

  “No. You’re lucky. I’m glad — damned glad. You’re made, my dear Arnold, for life.”

  But is he? He glanced again at his friend’s long indolent body and fine smile. He has no idea of looking after himself, he thought affectionately: I’ll keep an eye on him, though. I’ll see to it he doesn’t miss any of his chances. . . He stood up.

  “We must do something. Would you like to go and see Mary Brett?”

  “Brett? Who is she?”

  “Oh, come now, you’ve heard of her,” Edward said, impatient and lightly annoyed. “I mean the diseuse. She’s good, too. A bit limited — too English, too well brought up.”

  He considered for an instant telling Arnold that she was his mistress, had been for more than three years — but held his tongue. It was old news; the moment when he could not have helped telling Arnold was long past. He thought gravely: In a few months it mayn’t be true any longer — you can’t tell. This coolness about a triumph — it had been that — charmed him.

  “And then, she has social ambitions.” He smiled candidly. “I have myself, but I’m a soldier, not any sort of an artist, I can afford them without ruining myself.”