Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

by Edith Olivier

  Another lodger was a bad sleeper, and he groaned piteously in the night, waking with really terrifying cries of anguish which lasted till he could bear it no more. Then he got up, and, to my relief, I heard the kindly pop of a bottle of beer. This, and a meat lozenge, had a very soothing effect, and both he and I generally had quiet nights after this treatment. When I spoke of this to another of my lodgers he at once recited what he called a “ Potted Biography”. It was this:

  “Mr. Alfred Beit

  Screamed suddenly in the night.

  When they asked him why,

  He made no reply.”

  I never heard these lines before, though the lodger said they were a well-known classic. I cannot say that they contain much beauty, though I don’t deny that they were appropriate. I admit that they prove that the suffering lodger was following in the footsteps of other famous men, but the cause of his groans is made no clearer. The whole episode confirmed my conviction that, as a race, Men are Mysteries.

  A very congenial lodger was the one who sat up till the small hours of the morning, deciphering old family records for a book he meant to write. At first I found it quite impossible to go to bed when he was here, but sat listening to letter after letter, dating from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. And from such enchanting people too. Five or six separate books could be written from those papers, and I wish I were clever enough to write one of them myself. Such reading aloud is the kind of night noise to which I was already more or less accustomed; and I enjoy it more than anything, even though it means sitting up later than is my custom. It completely satisfies the soul.

  With this cultivated young man I had an amusing adventure, late one night, when our literary labours were over. Staying in the house at the time, was a well-known literary critic who enjoyed, as much as we did, the delving into ancient history which gave our evenings so much glamour. An hour or two after we had gone to bed, cries for help came from the young historian. The household assembled in his room in an indescribable mixture of night attire—myself, the critic, and my two maids, for this was before young women had been called up to join the services. A tap had broken, and streams of water were pouring from the fixed basin into the bedroom. We all turned out to be completely helpless. Nobody knew where to find the main water control of the house. This, I may remark, is one of the pieces of “General Knowledge” which Hitler has since forced us all to learn; but in those early days, none of us had traced our water supply back to its source. We clustered round the overflowing basin, armed with all the futile tools we could discover. And here I must confess that, in pre-war days, I had never tried to play the part of the female “ Carpenter Brother”. I was, and am, no mechanic. Nor were any of the others. We tried to tighten up the tap: it retaliated by ejecting a succession of sharp bursts of water into our faces. We tried a more soothing method, swathing the tap in piles of towels, but they were quickly saturated, and the water dribbled through them on to the floor. At last, in despair, we surrounded the danger spot with baths, into which the water rattled with a continuous clatter. Then we all bolted, taking with us the bed and bedding, with the awakened sleeper. All were transferred to an empty room, and thus we awaited the morning.

  One of my lodgers made his first appearance in the house some time after midnight. His luggage had already arrived, with a message saying he would come “after dinner’’; but when ten-thirty had come and gone, and there was no sign of his appearance, I declared that I didn’t mind whether or not he had lost his way and fallen into the water. I refused to drag the river at that hour in the night. However, some time after I had gone to bed, I heard a brisk step approach the house, followed by some uncertain movements within it. I knew that the lights were out, and I guessed that the lodger was groping for the switch. I pulled myself together, and went downstairs to receive, with my most conventional smile, a young man whose beauty made me dizzy. He was exactly like a Guardsman in a “Ouida” novel. With courtesy and some diffidence, he explained that he had been kept late at the office, and had lost his way in the wood. With equal courtesy, and a certain modesty, I showed him his way about the house, and then went to bed, to hear his voice, in the room below, keeping up a continuous flow till morning. At first I thought he was saying his prayers. Then I decided that he must be reading poetry aloud. Though either sound was a little disturbing, I rejoiced to know that a young gentleman of so much physical beauty also possessed these elevated tastes. The next morning, he hoped that he had not disturbed me by “using the telephone”.

  The explanation was that, as a Staff Officer, my new lodger had a private telephone installed near his bed, by which he nightly passed the secrets of His Majesty’s army.

  This officer was an ardent soldier, and he soon decided that the work he was temporarily doing in the office would not keep him in condition for active service. He therefore made up his mind to sleep out of doors, and as he could not be parted from his telephone, every night he put his bed within reach of it in the colonnade under my window. Here, instead of interrupting the quiet of my night, he helped to preserve it. It was a very wet season, and nightly, the rain thundered down upon the pavement below me, so that sleep was really often impossible. But this young man was one of those healthy youths, whose slumbers nothing can break. He lay, like a quieting carpet between the stone paving and the water-spout, which kept crashing from the sky; and as he did this, he broke for me the din of the downpour. On one particular night, I had to warn him, before he went to bed, that the rain was too much for him to face; and I ordered him to sleep indoors. He disobeyed. At five in the morning I heard a scrambling sound outside. I looked, and behold, there was my lodger suddenly springing awake, and rushing indoors like a gigantic piece of animated and saturated sponge. Water streamed from every yard of him. Next morning, the house looked as if Niagara had flowed through it in the night. I censured the lodger for this childish escapade, and sentenced him to a school-boy’s punishment. He had to write out a hundred lines:

  Miss Emma Nightingale is always right.

  I now had a very tall lodger. He looked about seven feet high, and, probably because of this, he seemed to be rather ill and sad. His one consolation was music, and I believe it was the reputation of my piano which brought him to the house. He played upon it till one o’clock every morning, but this did not keep us awake, as he was far away from any of our bedrooms. When at one time, he could not use the music-room, he migrated elsewhere, and another lodger, not knowing that he had changed his room, thought she heard him extemporising an opera in the dining-room. This did not surprise her, as she believed that no form of music was beyond him; but next morning she found that, failing the piano, he was consoling himself with the wireless.

  He also telephoned a good deal during that part of the twenty-four hours which, before the dawn of the Electric Age, could truthfully be called “ the stilly night”. This epithet is now everywhere out of date.

  My latest lodger was rather a disappointment, as he moved about the house as quietly as a mouse, making no sounds by which he could be identified. One evening I thought I had caught him out. He had gone to bed early with a cold, and some time later on, a sudden succession of metallic crashes resounded through the house. A lady lodger hastened to my room saying in agitated tones.

  “Did you hear that noise; I believe the Major has fainted. Oughtn’t we to go downstairs and see what we can do?”

  My housekeeper was passing the door at the moment. She looked in and said:

  “It was only the casserole fell off the frigidaire. That’s all.”

  Casserole and frigidaire represent extremes of heat and cold, so their clash would doubtless create most unusual results; but I had not guessed that the sound of a Major fainting was so equally extraordinary, that it could be mistaken for a casserole falling off a frigidaire.

  However, the Major could clear himself. He was, after all, innocent of any connection with this sudden sound in the night.

&nb
sp; Chapter V

  UNIFORM OR UNIFORMED

  It is perhaps natural to treat these two words as having an almost identical meaning, but, none the less, it would be to-day a natural mistake. Hitherto, I have lived very little among soldiers, but now I am surrounded by khaki; and the appearance of all these men, going hither and thither on their unfathomable business—their faces drilled to the same expression, and their figures adapted to the same uniform, at first creates the impression that this uniformity must extend to the mind.

  Before the war, all the soldiers we met were what we now call “regular soldiers’’, and in those days, I believe our impression would not have been far from the truth. Soldiers were as apart from the world as monks and nuns, though they would never have admitted it. Their minds, their speech, and their lives were drilled into a pattern. Unconventionality was “bad form’’, and only a man of outstanding character could save himself from adopting a rather dull conformity with the majority of those around him. If life were to be looked upon as a gigantic game of General Post, a young officer joining a line regiment in peace-time, might be pardoned if he concluded that his own call to play would inevitably come when the Postmaster announced: “The post goes from Sandhurst to Cheltenham”. For was it not towards Cheltenham that most retired Colonels and Majors gravitated, there to spend their declining years? More than a touch of genius was required to throw off the weight of routine which culminated in this predestined goal; and only that same touch of genius could lead a man to the top of his profession.

  I am an old country woman with no right to possess, or to express, any opinion about the army, especially as I knew so little about it till the war had changed its character. But looking at it from outside, it seems to me that, pleasant as the regimental system must be for men actually in regiments, who find it as cosy and friendly as a good club, yet it must tend to narrow the outlook. It is a hard test of mental independence, to be doomed to spend the whole of one’s life, from twenty years old onward, with the same group of about thirty men, especially as, to begin with, they are all one’s superior officers. Sailors are different. They serve in ship after ship. Their allegiance is to the Navy as a whole. Their experience includes service in all manner of crafts, and with all manner of men. Nearly every man in the Navy seems, at one time or another, to have been “ shipmates” with nearly every other man in the Navy.

  But the army of to-day is different from the army of yesterday. The “ regular soldiers” are greatly outnumbered; but though the newcomers, do their best to look as uniform as possible, yet, sooner or later, one finds, under the khaki, the old friend unchanged and unspoilt. This is very admirable. Here is a generation of men, belonging by race and environment to the most individualistic nation under Heaven, and who, from the day they left school, have lived in a world of complete Go-as-you-please. Now, of their own free will, they are merging their separate personalities into membership of a profession with ancient and inviolable traditions. The point is that they have merged themselves. They have not been submerged. The verb is active, not passive.

  So when my house became a point of halt for a succession of army lodgers (“ billets” they call them), I found that the new army might indeed be uniformed, as it was, but it was certainly far from Uniform. These are no uniform men. They are uniformed Barristers, Stockbrokers, Artists, Journalists, Schoolmasters, Business Men, Country Gentlemen, Agriculturalists, Professors, or Literary Men, It is indeed true to say of the British Army which is fighting Hitler, that it is a cross section of the nation as a whole.

  I think of one officer who came here and whom I had known previously as an outstanding man of science. At first I could not find him when I went to meet him at the station.

  There seemed to be no scientists about. Brisk and businesslike, a martial stream of men issued from the platform, their faces sternly set on the quickest route for the only two station taxis. From their speed, an onlooker might have supposed that they had been shot out of guns. Then suddenly I recognised my man. He too seemed imbued with Purpose. He had lost all appearance of the scholar, and, instead “a Trainband Captain eke was he”.

  And even when I thought I had recognised him, I still had to make the acquaintance of this soldierly fellow. So completely had he adjusted the outer man to the new career, that I felt we should have to begin all over again. But I soon learnt that the Doctor had never thought of doffing the Scientist before donning the Captains uniform. He had carried into the Army the scientific knowledge of a lifetime; and his army experiences had been absorbed, not by the mentality of a junior officer, but by the critical and constructive mind of a trained man of science. He was now uniformed: that was how he came to march so swiftly towards the taxi rank. He was still the original thinker: that was why he was going to be of special value to the Army.

  When the Russo-Finnish war was drawing to its close, this Doctor had been sent on a mission to Finland, to investigate health conditions in the country. Finland is very sparsely populated. What we should call a hamlet, they call a village; and their towns, are the size of our villages. The Finnish Army was then in the act of retreating before the Russians, and the Doctor knew that it would bring with it a large number of wounded, who must be cared for in these tiny villages. He told the people that a Field Hospital must somehow be extemporised, but this was something quite outside their experience. They made him tell them exactly what its purpose would be; and then he learnt the practical and self-reliant character of this primitive people. They had no central organisation to fall back upon. They had no guidance except from an ex-army sergeant. But within two days, with seemingly no materials at all, they turned a disused old factory building into a hospital, which actually did receive over a thousand cases. They pressed into service anything which they found under their hands. The wood from old sleighs, and broken farm implements made an operating theatre, operating tables, stretchers, surgical splints, and stands for operating lamps; while the lamps themselves were made from old electric bulbs rejuvenated. The whole thing was a miracle of improvisation.

  The Doctor then watched the evacuation of the Karelian Peninsula. This began as a unorganised movement of a whole population; before the advance of enemy troops, and later on all the world saw in France, what a disaster such a thing could be. Here, the refugees never became a rabble. As they arrived, each village received and retained that proportion of the passing stream of people which it could absorb in suitable and necessary employment. The others went on to be received elsewhere in the same way.

  “How could this possibly be carried out by untrained peoples?” I asked. “ Here, with no enemy in the country, we had to use several Government departments to tackle that job. And even they made some mistakes,” I concluded, thinking ruefully of our lost blind people.

  He shrugged his shoulders, as if he had no explanation to offer, but what he said was something like this:

  “They were like a colony of white ants. The communal mind seems to act when each individual has his own special job set before him, and realises the purpose of that. And, too, there must be enough self-reliance to act without waiting for instructions. When a high individual development and a high degree of communal spirit coincide, then an entire people moves. That national genius constantly came to the surface in Finland, whether it was in manual work, in civilian administration, or in such a case as that of the solitary soldier on guard, who scared a whole Russian detachment into retreat by pretending to be a ghost on skis.”

  The Doctor found in our own country an equal efficiency in small groups, like members of Fire Services, Home Guards, or isolated platoons. He was specially struck by a Fire Service in a port where he was acting as Medical Officer early in the war. They responded to every demand, as if they had been for many years a trained brigade, and then he was surprised to find that they had only been training for a few months. They created their own organisation to meet their own needs. The Doctor said he had found that such is the way in which human beings will behave, if
their individual, their professional, and their community lives are so regulated as to depend upon the responsibility of the individual. He was so strongly convinced of this that when he was invalided a few months later, he planned and founded an industrial and farming community in the form of a training college, which was attached to a well-known aircraft factory. I have seen this at work, and it seems likely to become the pattern for a society which would fulfil every human capacity—spiritual, intellectual, and practical. And this was my first experience of the difference between uniform and uniformed in the Army of to-day.

  Another officer who came to my house had been for many years in the Middle East, and he seemed to know it, not as one “knows the palm of one’s hand’’, but as a child knows a sand castle which he has built up from its foundations on the sea-shore. He was a quiet, unobtrusive man, and it was a real surprise to find that he had, for many years, been on easy terms with Noah, Abraham, and Melchizedek—not to mention Arabs of every rank and occupation in Egypt and Mesopotamia during the past twenty years. As the child knows the sand castle, so he knew that part of the world, for he was a famous archaeologist, and his knowledge of the past was gained by digging into its foundations in the company of hundreds of Arabs of the present day. He knew their dialects perfectly, and therefore he knew a great deal about the men who spoke them; for a dialect is, of all speech, the nearest to the thought of the speaker. Dialect and slang. Those who converse in either of these open their thoughts in a way which no trained speaker can ever do. His verbal currency has passed through too many minds.

  This man had actually dug into Noah’s Flood, and what did he find there to-day? Eleven feet of seemingly undisturbed earth, lying between layers of ruined cities, each of which represented one of the successive civilisations which the world has forgotten. In those primitive lands where many races have come and gone, the digger generally finds the ruins of many cities one above the other, each one mingling with that immediately before or after it. But here, in the heart of Mesopotamia, when one particular city had been excavated, the excavators came upon those feet of apparently virgin soil. A less experienced digger would have thought he had come to the end of what the site would yield. Not so this one. He dug on, seeking another world hidden below that anonymous stratum and then he found that he had come to the remains of the antediluvian world where, “in the days of Noe, they did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the Flood came, and destroyed them all”.