The Black Laurel

by Storm Jameson

  The doctor paused outside the next room, turned to the guard, and said in her low voice,

  “I shall shut the door of these rooms, and you will stay outside. None of these women can run away, and it’s not suitable.”

  The guard looked at her with a strange expression of embarrassment and irony. He allowed her to have her way.

  The excitement Renn was trying to repress tightened the nerves of his chest: his heart began to beat with a painful quickness. It was not the thought of seeing Marie; some other feeling was coming obscurely to life in him. It might only, he thought mockingly, be a new baseness. When he was told by the French police that she had left the country, with a German, a shady individual they had meant to pick up that same evening, he had felt horror and remorse. I forced her to it, he thought. A curiously disagreeable thing — there was scarcely any difference between his remorse and the grief he had felt as a child when a tame rabbit he had neglected until it was weak with hunger was handed over by his father to the village butcher: for nights he cried scalding tears over the picture he conjured up of its end — and all the time he had known quite well that if it came back he would be bored by it again. It was perhaps the first creature he had failed. After that, he thought, with a defensive irony, it became a habit. For an instant, he was seized by the certainty that the reason he was trying to find Marie had to do with himself, only with himself. His excitement became a tension of his whole body. He had an impulse to shout or laugh, and pressed his lips tightly.

  They went into a room no larger than a cupboard. In the bed was lying a girl with a few days’ old baby. She looked like a peasant; she was remarkably handsome, too tall for the camp bed — she lay in it curled up, her baby in the fold of her arm. Moving her head, she looked at Renn with a sudden eagerness: she had grey eyes, as clear, without self-consciousness, as a child’s. The doctor bent over her.

  “Yes, now is your chance,” she whispered.

  With a swift movement, the girl thrust her free hand under the pillow and drew out an envelope addressed, in pencil, in an unformed sprawling hand: it was a letter she had written her husband to tell him of the birth of their child. The only address she had was a village in Bavaria where he had been stationed with his company when she last heard eight months ago: he was a German, in the German army.

  “Read it,” the doctor said to Renn, “and if you find it all right, post it to him when you go back to Germany. Will you?”

  Renn nodded. He could not have refused. The face of the young woman in the bed became radiant; a smile of ecstasy crossed her full colourless lips. Outside the room, the doctor murmured,

  “Of course he’s not there, probably she’ll never see him again, but you’ve made her happy, and happiness of any sort, even false, is rare here.”

  Nodding towards another door, she smiled, and said,

  “I won’t take you in: the women in there had their babies only a few hours ago. For a week or two they’ll be almost content. After that. . . You understand, their milk will dry up — since they have the same food as everyone else; the babies will begin crying with hunger, the few spoonfuls of milk we’re allowed to give them are nothing.”

  She walked quickly to the next door, paused, fingers on the handle, and said quietly,

  “Marie Pieck is in here.”

  The room held three beds. She took him directly to the one nearest the small window. He looked down at a young woman who was not Marie, yet so like her that any description of her would describe Marie equally well. She was very young, as young as the other Marie when he had seen her last six years ago, in the room in Paris. She had the same large dark eyes, the arched eyebrows, almost joined, the rounded forehead. He realised that in listening to the Czech priest’s account of the girl lying here, he had made no allowance for the years during which Marie had been living a life which must have changed her, beyond recognition, perhaps. If I’d thought about it for less than a moment I should have known, he reflected. This girl, too, had a directness in her glance quite unlike the other Marie’s fixed dreamy gaze, which only altered when she was frightened or chattering about her life as a child in a shabby forgotten port.

  He felt an overwhelming thankfulness and relief. It appalled him. What sort of a selfish brute am I? he asked himself.

  “Is she the one you’re looking for?”

  “No.”

  During these moments the girl in the bed had been looking at him with a slight friendly smile, as if hiding an embarrassment she felt in lying here under the scrutiny of a stranger, a man. The doctor touched her hair gently, lifting it away from the damp forehead.

  “You’re stronger again today, my child. In a few weeks, in no time, we’ll have you up walking.” Turning to Renn, she added, “She has been in here and other camps since May. She ran away, with her family, from the Russians; the others were killed, she’s quite alone . . . But you’re not afraid now, are you? . . . ” She smiled at the girl with a detached serene tenderness.

  In a low voice, very pleasant, the girl said,

  “No — but if only I knew what they were going to do with me. One can’t get used to being nothing.”

  She glanced at Renn as she said it. He was silent. Why tell her that the only thing he was certain of in her future was the clearing-house near the Lehrter Station in Berlin, the stinking rags of her fellow-travellers, the coldness, the scorn, of the German nurses when they had to touch her? He moved, without waiting for the doctor, towards the door. From another bed, a voice, young, weak, rough, said,

  “One doesn’t get used to being hungry, either.”

  “Yes, look,” the doctor said quietly.

  Lifting up the arm laid on the blanket, she showed Renn that it was bones covered by a grey skin. He glanced away from it at once. There was nothing he could do. . . He was not to be let go away without seeing the last circle. A narrow room, badly lit by one bulb, with half a dozen cots. The room of the sick babies. Two of the cots were empty. From one of the others a weak crying rose, so thin, so nearly not a sound at all, yet it went on and on. Two of the other three babies were lying quietly, their tiny livid faces barely visible on the rough pillow.

  “They’re nearly gone, thank God,” the doctor said calmly. “There was nothing the matter — a teething-rash — but babies born here have no strength to resist anything, they die of a scratch. The other one may live — I don’t know yet.”

  The other — the fourth — was propped up in his cot. He was older than the rest, perhaps a year old. He had four playing-cards he was looking at listessly: one of them dropped from his hand and lay face downward on the blanket; he left it there.

  Renn bent again over one of the cots: the child’s face scemed to dissolve, and for less than a breath he saw through its soft skull the guillotine in Pancrac, the walls of the little bathroom, the terror of children in the instant before they were killed, the decent bodies of women heaped as naked as maggots in their common grave — the spume of agony flowing back and forth across Europe.

  Then he saw only the dying baby.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  When, in one of his emphatic gestures, he moved his hand, Mr Scorel’s wedding-ring shone formidably in the sun. Twice the thickness of any ordinary ring, it symbolised fidelity, respect for the female principle, heaven knows what.

  He was sitting opposite Gary at the general’s table — and talking. During the past months he had visited several countries, and in each of them, sitting in the lounge of his hotel, or at breakfast in the public dining-room, or in his own room — all these rooms, whatever the country, were identical, since logically and for convenience he chose a hotel on the international level, where not only the staff but the beds, chairs, tables, and the cooking, speak the same reassuring language — he received and talked to suppliants. With benevolence, energy, firmness, severity, kindness — according to their needs and for their good.

  Looking at Gary,

  “I’ll tell you, sir, what I told all of them. I told t
hem: you’ve smashed all your poor old houses and burned down all your trees and barns, and you’re all over the place, and your poor tired faces make me want to cry when I look at them and think of all you’ve been through — you’re a lot of tired and exasperating and terribly exasperated children, and you ought to go to bed for a month, all of you. But you can’t — no — you’ve got to work, you’ve got to learn to live together again, you need more of everything than anyone could give you — even if it would be right to give you everything — it wouldn’t — you’ve got to gird up your poor tired bodies for another fifty years’ hard work. But in the meantime, what have I got on me that you ought to have? You tell me — that’s what I’m here for. And afterwards, my friends, you can listen to me for a minute.”

  Gary smiled without malice.

  “And do they listen?”

  Scorel laughed, gently and ironically.

  “If they need something from me — and they usually do — they listen. And when they get outside, where I can’t hear them, they say: That old s. o. b. of an American, what’s he over here for, offering us butter with one hand and advice with the other? Why doesn’t he stay home and mail us the butter?”

  Looking at him with affection, Gary said,

  “Do you want to know what I say about you behind your back?. . . Scorel? Oh, a splendid fellow, intelligent, sound, good, but he doesn’t know he’s born.”

  “And at that you’re right,” Scorel said calmly. “No American knows he’s born. Now and then it does just cross our minds that we’re not dead. Not by a century or two.”

  General Lowerby considered his three guests with a gaiety which had nothing to do with them. It came from himself. From Ricky’s letter this morning, full of a lighthearted egoism and affection: the child was only interested in himself, not ashamed to talk about it, and he loved his father. And from the friendliness of Gary’s manner when he arrived, ten minutes before the other two — “to have the chance to talk to you”. What had they talked about? In fact, nothing — but he had drawn from these minutes so clear a feeling of intimacy that he felt sure he could ask Gary’s help for himself

  — that is, for Ricky and the other two — without the fear of being snubbed. Almost sure.

  Glancing across the table, he was sorry that Brett looked gloomy and under the weather. What can I do to please him?. . . He spoke to one of the servants. The man went away and came back with a bottle he showed carefully.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Lowerby said.

  He spoke to Brett.

  “Humphrey, I’ve had them fetch out a Richebourg of ’23. For you.”

  Brett looked at him and nodded, with an almost hostile smile.

  The Richebourg was served with the tournedos. Of the two bottles that had been opened, Brett drank one and a third, at least. He had nothing to say. Scorel turned to him, and said,

  “Colonel, there’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  No answer.

  With a tolerant smile, Scorel murmured,

  “I guess the colonel has troubles. I always say about colonels they have the hardest life of any officer. Below them, no one cares, and above them it begins to be all liberation. Precisely.”

  “Humphrey,” Lowerby said gently.

  Brett looked up, amused; but his amusement was aggressive.

  “What?”

  Scorel threw his head back; his nose, blunt and inquisitive, twitched.

  “I’ve been hearing about a very interesting trial you put on when I was away — a refugee, an educated man, who came back here to do a job of work, and started in to loot and murder like any Nazi. Now that’s very strange. It suggests to me —”

  Brett interrupted him.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Only what my Germans have been telling me,” said Scorel. “They were full of it, like gossipy old women. I always say. . .”

  Watching his friend, the general knew that he was going to be violently indiscreet. He had an impulse to check him — swept away at once by a feeling of curiosity and malice.

  Brett said,

  “You probably say and hear a lot of damned nonsense. The trial you’re talking about is a joke. A thoroughly rotten joke. Anyone but a lawyer — lawyers being to normally sensible men what eunuchs are to you and me — would have known that the poor devil was neither a murderer nor a blackguard.”

  Gary frowned. In a dry voice,

  “You have a poor opinion of the court’s good sense, haven’t you?”

  Not only his nose, every feature of Scorel’s neat blunt face quivered with his passion for being told things.

  “But as I got the story, colonel,” he gabbled, “the man was caught in the act, you couldn’t have acquitted him, but my Germans feel that the sentence was harder than it should have been. They say if it hadn’t been that he was defended by a German, he’d have gotten off lighter, and while I know that’s nonsense I thought I smelled something in the room. Just precisely what, I’m not sure. Maybe you can tell me.”

  Brett gave him an insolently hard glance.

  “A less sensitive nose, my dear boy, would —”

  The general cut him short. Not roughly — he was in too good a humour. Why be annoyed with the silly fellow? He felt a cool pleasure in the contrast of his own good sense with Brett’s violence.

  “Not only your Germans, Scorel — what sorts do you collect? — but far too many Germans are talking about the case. I know why. . . The point is we’ve had too much of this looting, the country is full of unpleasant numbers, not all of them German. The Boche himself is stunned — at the moment — but Boches are Boches, and it would be lunacy to show weakness. Do you want to see our own people ambushed and shot up in bed? I’ve dealt with rebels before. Nowadays they call them partisans — they smell equally rank.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Scorel briskly, “I see it’s important to be very very firm.”

  “You’re a lot of scoundrels,” Brett said contemptuously. “You’re talking about expediency. . . all right. . . but why the hell call it justice? That’s what shocks me.”

  “My dear Humphrey,” Lowerby said — with the same delicate feeling of pleasure — “your opinion of the fellow — what’s his name? — Kalb, is interesting. It’s an opinion. And in any case — in any case — his merely conceivable innocence is scarcely important. It’s not, in this place and time, the real point.”

  He saw — and could not help smiling — that Brett had lost control of his temper. In an urbane voice, Gary said,

  “It’s regrettable, of course — but in a harsh situation, harsh measures. . .”

  The general caught in his voice an inflection of anger.

  “Kalb made a bad impression on the court,” he said. Scorel’s nose twitched and pointed.

  “Now precisely what kind of a fellow would he be, this Kalb?”

  “Nobody,” Brett shouted, “a chap with no friends. That was his mistake. If he’d been a big blackguard, a friend of yours, my dear Gary, and had ratted in good time. . . poor friendless little beast. . .”

  The general felt only a deep joy that his friend was making an indiscreet fool of himself. Under his joy, against his will, he envied him bitterly. That he dare do it. He held himself in a tense pose, his fingers gripping the table, and listened.

  “Now, now,” Scorel laughed, “you’re not going to tell me that a big blackguard would have gotten softer treatment.”

  Brett looked at him with smiling mockery.

  “I don’t dare tell you anything. You have a conscience, that pure uncorrupted American conscience we poor devils respect so humbly.”

  “I gather that your friend, when he was in England during the war, was a German agent,” Gary said drily. “No doubt he was frightened. A refugee. . . one definition of refugee is bad citizen”

  Scorel went off with the inhuman vivacity of a machinegun.

  “A refugee may be just a misfit, it’s very very difficult to blame a man who isn’t comfortable i
n his own country for running away, it’s just as difficult, and very very unjust to blame another fellow for choosing to stick it out at home and show loyalty even to a wicked government — until he has the opportunity to do better. No, no, my friends, it’s not so simple. We ought to respect the sufferings of a man faced with the choice.”

  “By God I do,” said Brett, “I respect all opportunists who are also honourable gentlemen.”

  “Like Scorel’s, your conscience is touchingly pure,” Gary mocked.

  “I value your opinion — on a matter of which you know less than I do.”

  With a barely suppressed rage, Gary answered,

  “You must instruct me.”

  The general shifted his chair a little, and caught sight of himself in the mirror. His face wore a sharp fine smile, of contempt, pleasure, envy. Shocked, he pulled himself together — to put an end to the argument.

  “Military Government is responsible for order, and therefore the judge of how much harshness is needed,” he said, coldly.

  The silence he expected followed.

  Gary glanced at him — a quick intimate smile.

  “I’d say you know your job,” Scorel said, in a good-humoured voice. “I’m saying nothing against our people, but I’d say you have a lighter hand for Occupations. . .”

  The general leaned back. He felt no pity for his friend. If ever a man insisted on ruining himself, he thought drily.

  Gary and the general were alone.

  “Humphrey’s nerves are in a bad state,” Gary said gently, “he’s let this place get on top of him.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’m sorry about it. I must say — let’s hope he’ll be moved away before he has a serious breakdown.”

  Lowerby did not answer. He reflected rapidly that of Brett’s two majors, it would be better to promote the temporary officer. In a year or two this officer would retire to civil life. The other, the regular, was a pushing fellow, who had got quite far enough. Walking with Gary to his car, he felt extremely alert and well.