Why not be like other men? He had heard some of them shouting, and seen them throwing up their caps.
“By God, the blasted old war’s over.”
Half a dozen of them had come blundering into his billet.
“What-o, Bossy. Cleaning your buttons! What!”
“I’ll not clean another blasted button. Not me.”
Someone had shouted.
“We’re going to get drunk to-night if we have to break into the blasted stores.”
Was that the idea, the reaction? Getting drunk and ceasing to clean buttons? Would the new world be something like that? But no. He had seen other men going about with looks of silence, and with eyes that were like his own, surprised, sobered, perplexed. There was that other cry deep in the hearts of decent humility. “We want to get home.” Yes, home.
He remembered suddenly that he had no home. He had lived in a couple of rooms in Canonbury Square; he had been a scribbler, a reviewer of other men’s books, a sort of mild and kindly parasite. He was shocked. A parasite, a hack? O, no, not that, but a man of letters, an essayist, a reviewer. A cultured person.
And then it came upon him suddenly that he had missed things, women, adventure, the larger human happenings, the fine swagger of life. He had no one to go home to, no one who cared whether he returned.
Rather extraordinary!
And what would they be doing in England on this day, especially the women of England? Going into churches, sitting staring silently into the fire? Surely it was a solemn and a sacred day for the women?
Or would they be—?
What would Marwood’s daughter be doing?
A quickened restlessness possessed him. He walked out of the orchard and down the lane till he came to the Calvary. He looked up at the face of Christ. It had a darkness, almost the bitterness of disillusionment.
He thought—“Has someone or something—a faith or an ideal—always to be crucified?”
He hurried on. The face of the figure had disturbed him. Was it that men and their dreams died and did not rise again?
2
At No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace, Marwood’s daughter sat in front of the fire. It was only a little fire, and she had lit it because the war was over, and because she had just emerged from a most devastating row with her mother. She had felt cold and a little sick after she had fought her battle and won it.
She was alone. She had been pelted with words, and some of them still stuck like gobbets of cold wet mud. Her mother had lost all self-control; she had screamed obscenities. “Your father was always a mean, dirty little dog—and you—you’re just his daughter.” Yes, she was alone and glad to be alone after sitting stolidly in a chair, and letting her mother tear the last tempest to pieces. She—Julia—had not spoken more than two dozen words.
“The house and the furniture are mine. I am going to run this house as I please.”
“You want me out of it. I’ll get out of it.”
Her mother had banged doors. She had been like a furious, large noise in the house, an overheated human presence, pushing furniture about, opening and shutting drawers. Something overhead had gone over with a crash, and the glass globes in the chandelier had rattled. Then, her mother had come down the stairs quite silently, and had gone out of the house, leaving a stillness behind her. No. 53 seemed to hold its breath.
Julia nursed her knees. She was alone, for both her brothers were out on this epic November night when a great fear died and other fears were born. She did not want to go out, but warmed herself at the fire, and felt torn, and sombre and triumphant. O, but it had hurt, as most shameful things can hurt, and yet as she hugged her knees and brooded she knew that she would not relent. She could not relent. She too had brought her war to an end. The little house seemed to draw deep breaths.
Like Spencer Scarsdale in his orchard she too confronted the future, sitting squarely over against it as she sat in front of this fire, with her eyes at gaze and her chin pushed forward. Someone had once said to her—“O, you young things never know what you want,” but Julia knew what she wanted, and knew that she knew it. No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace had compelled her to recognize certain realities and to choose between them. She had chosen. She wanted her mother and Master Robert out of the house, so that No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace could be herself and Harry.
That was her first objective, and beyond it, stretched other objectives that were less definite, though her attitude to life was practical. She had ambitions, however limited they might appear. The centre point of her human purposefulness was Harry, for it was Harry who evoked in her rather hard young soul a maternal glow, a saving tenderness. She wanted Harry out of that blue jacket with its silver buttons. She wanted Mr. Paul Jimson to admit her value and to raise her salary to four pounds a week. She had more than a suspicion that she coveted a share in Mr. Paul Jimson’s business, and that she could develop that business. She wanted authority, independence, results, hard cash.
For Julia Marwood had been educated in no dame-school. She had grown up in No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace, in an atmosphere of wranglings, and shabbiness, and physical clashes. She had been up against the physical most of her life, and in contact with crude appetites. She had been afraid, and had learnt that other people could be more afraid. She had had to fight, and very realistically so with young Bob whose animal arrogance had used fists and feet. She had fought him with a cold, white fury, and with a strength and a courage that had driven him down steps and into corners; she had fought him until he had flinched and covered up; she had fought him for herself and for Harry. Now he was afraid of her. She had impressed her dominance upon him.
She had fought her mother, but otherwise. Their war, until the last clash, had been more of a siege or a blockade, silent, watchful. And she had suffered. She had suffered in the most impressionable part of her young self, in all those softnesses and flushings of sex, in the bloom of her young womanhood. Her mother had disgusted her with sex, left her with a maggot in the bud of her rose, and somehow the flower had not unfolded as it should. Bob’s hands had bruised her bosom and torn her hair, but Florence Marwood’s excursions into the physical had left other bruises.
So, she sat before the fire and stared at it. She did not see in it the pictures which so many girls see, but coal and flame, a blackness and a redness. She looked through the windows of No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace and the windows of Messrs. Jimson & Stent. She saw beds to be made, and Harry in his buttons, shops, and the prices of things, food, clothing, some advantage to be seized, some person or situation to be confronted. Life was reality, shillings and pence, No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace, shoe-leather, a ninepenny seat in a cinema, bus fares, bargains at shops, necessities, the urgent greeds of other people. She confronted it all; she was strong; she was ten years older than her twenty-one.
Her attitude was significant, though she did not realize its significance. Almost it symbolized the pose of the new generation towards the phase that was unfolding. She had not been to any place of worship since the age of ten. Her ethics were herself, the product of her own individual make-up, and of her parentage and her environment. She had known nothing of beauty, save her father’s rather inarticulate and commonplace affection for her, and the bright and eager face of her small brother. She had had to push sturdily and stubbornly against edges and obstructions in a world that was too full of people who were hard up and in a hurry.
She had learnt to grip. She had learnt to look at the price of every article. She had meant to watch the face of Mr. Jimson, and of her mother, and to keep a sophisticated scrutiny upon a blackguard brother. Life had for her few soft edges, or purple patches. Her own face, firm and white and enigmatic, was a confrontation of reality, of circumstance.
And the war was over. She was sick of the war. It had had no glamour for her. Her practical young soul wanted it swept up and tumbled away into some hole in the ground. It had been a stupid, and abominable mess. She had no sentimental feelings about it, and she did not want to sentimentaliz
e about its products, or about the men who would come back from it.
She wanted to get on with her own particular job.
About nine o’clock Julia heard the front-door knocker; three light taps and one final and emphatic thud. That would be Harry. She got up quickly and let him in.
“O, Ju, what a beano! Everyone’s gone jolly well mad.”
She closed and locked the door.
“Celebrating, are they?”
“I should think so! I went as far as Piccadilly. Such a squash. And the row! An old woman kissed me.”
“Did she.”
“Funny, wasn’t it? She was blubbing.”
“Well, I don’t know. Had any supper, old lad?”
“No.”
“I left some out for you.”
He was flushed and excited, and she had to sit in the kitchen and listen to his description of the crowd and the crowd’s exultation. He had thought it all a huge joke. “Women holding their skirts up high and dancing, Ju. Kicking their legs up. And officers. And lots of ’em squiffy. And the row! I saw one girl rolling in the gutter.” She listened with an air of dark-eyed thoughtfulness, watching him and over him; he was so innocent. Life was a great joke.
When he had gone to bed, she sat down again on the foot-stool in front of the sitting-room fire which had dwindled to a meagre redness. She poked it and sat holding the poker; she listened; her figure had an expectant rigidity.
She was wondering whether her mother would come back and try that locked door.
But her mother never came back.
3
The eyes of Florence Marwood also saw a new world in its moment of frenzy, though it was but part of a world, and neither new nor old. Some of London celebrated. It had a silly, drunken, howling countenance. It surged and shouted and screamed, and laughed. Lights, lights, let there be lights! And there were lights and there were shadows, a hustling humanity, and overhead a canopy of darkness, and no angels from Mons. The London crowd called for reality in the flesh; the war had shot angelic pinions to pieces.
Up aloft that aerie figure in bronze, poised above this pageant of a new paganism, seemed to be preparing for flight. So had the old gods looked upon Rome and fled. Who were these new barbarians, these new English? Democracy drinking to itself, and to a world fit for heroes?
Julia’s mother laughed. She laughed perpetually, and waggled her hips. She was but a part of this hot, surging mass, this blur of bodies. She was wearing the Australian’s hat, and the soldier had hers crammed on the back of his head. They sidled and oozed through the crowd with their arms round each other, pushing and being pushed, rejoicing in the proud flesh of victory.
Her prophetic mouth screamed strange verities. She did not speak; she screamed.
“This is a bust up of all the blasted old humbug. Where are all the b—— y padres?”
The Australian kissed her brutally.
“Yes, this old war has let in air. We know what’s what. Gosh, you smell nice.”
There was a sudden surging of the crowd, and they were carried with it toward a vortex where the new world was letting itself go. There were screams, laughter, confusion. People pushed and peered and asked questions. “What’s on. What’s the rag?” The Australian forced his way through, like a strong animal in a cattle pen, and with Marwood’s widow attached to him. His face smiled a cruel, icy smile.
“Gosh!”
“What’s on?”
He heaved his way further, roughly, scornfully. He had a glimpse of a half-naked woman, and of other women.
“What’s on?”
“Go it, girls. Leave nothing on.”
“What’s happening?”
“The totties are scragging one of the women police.”
Marwood’s wife let out a scream of laughter. Her face was exultant.
“That’s lovely. Pity it’s not my —— of a daughter. She’s a sort of she-bobby. We’re teaching the world something, Cobber. Where are the dear padres?”
4
When Scarsdale heard how a part of London had given thanks to God on Armistice night he looked pained.
He and the man who had been on leave and who had shared in that solemn occasion, were sitting warming their hands at a Canadian stove in a hut somewhere in France. The hut was in darkness save for the stove, which, emitting a sombre glow, lit up the faces and the spread hands of the two men. Scarsdale’s nose looked huge. His gentle eyes stared. Almost they were frightened eyes, while the man behind them was refusing to be afraid.
He said—“But that’s not England. It can’t be.”
The other man lit a cigarette. He was red and good-natured and well-fleshed.
“A jolly big crowd of it, anyway, Bossy.”
“Well, natural enough, perhaps. People must let off steam. It’s the reaction,—after all these years.”
The other man seemed to give the stove a knowing smirk. He had enjoyed that particular show.
And Scarsdale sat and stared. His soft, brown eyes seemed to grow more prominent. He had thought of England as a country on its knees, silent and still and sacred. He had thought of women with tear-stained faces, women praying, women sitting in half darkness with their memories.
Piccadilly Circus!
No, England was not like that. He picked up a piece of wood and dropped it into the stove. He sacrificed to his own faith in humanity, and not to Baal.
Chapter Five
Late in the month of March Spenser Scarsdale was packed into a goods-wagon with some twenty other men and transported to a demobilization camp at Dunkirk. This train carried eight hundred men and a dozen officers, and the whole process suggested to Scarsdale the entraining and detraining of a herd of cattle. This brown crowd of men, gathered from various branches of the service, had lost its compactness but not its cohesion. The brown blobs cohered, and tried to arrange themselves in order when shouted at by an hectoring and somewhat scornful young major. It was a docile crowd; it was going home; but already it was ceasing to be a military formation and displaying the characteristics of a mob.
The major shouted.
“Don’t crowd, don’t crowd. Form up, by the right. Two deep. Damn you, I said two deep. You’re not a lot of sheep.”
The brown mass slowly sorted itself.
“Number. As you were. I said number.”
Scarsdale, crowded in the front rank, and watching the major’s face, saw it express impatience and scorn.
“Just like cattle!”
But at last the uneasy, jostling mass was formed into fours, and marched off to the camp. Scarsdale had a little, peaky-faced R.A.M.C. private on his right, and obviously the man was feeling bitter.
“I’ve ’ad enough of being shouted at by bloomin’ toffs. What price Lenin?”
The camp was a comprehensive affair, hutments and marquees in a big flat field that had been a meadow. The organization was admirable. Mass-man in the making was paraded and distributed, housed and fed. Hot meals were ready. The huts were scrupulously clean. Scarsdale, correctly documented, and feeling most strangely like a bale of cloth that was being handled for export, wondered how the souls of his fellow-men reacted to the process. Here was bureaucracy in action, efficient, impersonal, clean, and yet somehow damnable.
In an immense hut a variety show was provided, and it was by no means a paltry show. An infantry lance-corporal with the face of a girl, sang the old songs, and sang them to the soul of the home-going crowd.
“I’m in love—I’m in love.”
Scarsdale was strangely moved. He slipped out and wandered up and down between two dark and empty huts, with a clear, cold sky overhead stippled with stars. The night air had the tang of the sea and the spring, and he was conscious of a strange unrest, a yearning for—what? “I’m in love,—I’m in love.” Like these other and younger men he was in love with life, and with the vision of the new world that was to be, England in the spring of the year, the freedom to do this and that, youth, woman. He was going back to work, an
d to the earning of a living, but almost these verities were old, forgotten things grown dusty. He felt strangely and poignantly young that night, and his youth went out towards the youth of the new world.
He found himself thinking of Marwood’s daughter. A dark, handsome, and rather inscrutable creature! Her face had remained with him.
But the morrow brought other realities, and the significance of them worked in Scarsdale’s mind like leaven. He and other men were paraded, and marched, carrying their kits, to a group of huts in which the Goddess Hygeia presided over the initiation at the gate of the new freedom. Kits were handed in over a counter. The men stripped, and their clothes were taken to be baked. Naked they passed to the baths. They washed. They waited in nakedness for the final judgment.
“Next,” said a voice.
The orderly in charge gave Scarsdale a nudge, and Scarsdale, as nature had made him, passed through a canvas doorway, and found himself in the presence of a medical officer seated on a kitchen chair. He was scrutinized, and the scrutiny was keen, efficient, impartial. He was told to stretch out his hands and spread his fingers. He was examined for any sign of venereal disease. The doctor’s blue eyes were bright and hard, and when they met Scarsdale’s eyes there was no friendliness in them.
“Right. Next.”
Scarsdale was shepherded away to another compartment where clean clothes and a disinfected uniform was ready for him. He felt chilly, both within and without. He had been passed in nakedness to the new world. The cold and observant eyes of the doctor had stabbed into him a consciousness of himself as an insignificant and anonymous body, mere flesh, a carcase. The war had stripped him of spiritual garments, and peace had insisted upon seeing him stripped again before admitting him to its world for heroes. It was all very sensible and sound, but somehow the secret soul of him felt humiliated. Possibly his pride was hurt. He found himself wondering what would have happened to him had the examiner found him unclean.
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