Brackenhurst High Street in the March dusk. Allgoods’s, the grocers, is just the same; Mullins’s window is full of tools and ironmongery, guns and cartridges. I meet familiar faces and stop and shake hands. “Glad to see you back, doctor.” My reply is to everybody, “I’m glad to be back.” I enter the surgery by the yard door, pass through the waiting-room with its little crowd of club patients, and find Randall dressing a whitlow in the surgery. He looks at me, drops the bandage, and his face lights up. He is wearing spectacles, and they make him look much older.
“Stephen!”
He grips my hand, and clasps my arm with the other hand.
“Well, this is good.”
“More than good.”
I stoop and recover the bandage and re-roll it. Both of us remember the patient, an old grizzled farm labourer with a face that is all blue eyes and hair.
“What have you been doing, Spray?”
“Pricked he on a bit of barbed wire, ssir. My boy he do write that he be messin’ ’bout with t’same mucky stuff out there in France.”
I take over Spray’s case and leave Randall free to deal with one of the others.
When the surgery is empty he drags me off into his den, produces whisky and a syphon and glasses, and we drink. It is very rarely that Randall touches whisky.
“War habit, Stephen. Find I need it sometimes. You look fatter.”
“Lazy life. I expect you have been having rather a devil of a time.”
“Not too bad, Stephen. Old Merriman of St. Helen’s has come back into harness, and has been helping me.”
“Pretty good at his age.”
“Sixty-five. But I have had to do all the night work.”
“And the hospitals?”
“Oh, the St. Helen’s men do most of that, Murchison and Viner. Well, here’s luck again. You see I have taken to gig-lamps.”
“They suit you.”
“They make me look like an owl.”
* * *
I suppose this first week back in harness has been one of the happiest weeks of my life. We have had a March blizzard; two elms are down in the churchyard, and one of the rectory cedars has lost two huge branches. The wind was extraordinarily fierce, and in Hammer Pool Lane there was a snow-drift five-feet deep. I shall have cause to remember it, because I had a midwifery case at one in the morning at the Old Forge; a moon was shining and the surface of the snow was so deceptive that I drove my car into the drift, and had to leave her there all night. I got back home at about five in the morning, with the church elms like huge besoms trying to sweep the stars out of the sky.
But it was a very beautiful world, Sussex under snow, and I am well content with it and its people. I seem to be spending most of my time among working folk, and I feel like a shepherd in the lambing season.
My Old Forge mother says to me, “Doctor, I’m praying that my boy will never be taken for a soldier,” and I can echo that prayer.
These working folk do not seem to want to talk about the war, and my whole desire is to forget it, and to submerge myself in the doing of simple, useful things, but the people of my own class are different, especially the few who, though brought up on Waterloo, Balaclava and Kipling, have a suspicion that all is not well. Even the rector corners me and tries to pump me. What is the truth about the Gallipoli affair?
I tell him one or two truths, and he looks shocked. I realize that these people do not want the truth; they ask to be reassured, and be made to feel comfortable by the promising of comfortable things.
“I’m afraid you must be rather a pessimist, Brent. I don’t think one ought to let oneself appear a defeatist.”
I am reproved.
“Quite so, sir, but you asked me——”
“Yes, yes,” and he looks at me over the tops of his pince-nez, “of course I understand that mistakes are made in every war.”
I realize that he and all the others understand nothing of the war, and that if one is wise one will not attempt to unsettle their illusions. The men are splendid, everything is splendid, everyone courts wounds and death, everyone is supremely unselfish, all wounded men are thirsting to be back in the blood-bath. One or two old ladies still believe in the Angel of Mons. No one understands the horror and the slavery, the petty intrigue, the callous necessity that treats men like cattle. There is splendour, yes, but there is a dumb anguish in this human splendour.
Randall is one of the few people who is not Waterloo-minded. He questions me tentatively.
“What’s the spirit, really, Stephen?”
“Do you want me to be quite honest?”
“My dear chap!”
“Well, I’m afraid most men discover that they have a horrid objection to being maimed or killed, even for the sake of their country.”
“All, Stephen?”
“Most, if they are honest. The glory idea is mischievous and ruddy rubbish. I suppose a doctor sees the negative side of it. No blood lust and fury for us.”
“You mean, men have to be driven?”
“Yes, but also by something inside them. This modern war business is all against nature. It’s organized murder at a distance. My feeling about it is that the crowd, when it has got away from the Brass Bands and the Press, is rather like a sullen and bewildered drove of beasts who somehow dread the shambles but know there is no escape.”
“Unless——?”
“You wangle, or can work a wangle.”
He looks at me sadly.
“Yes, I suppose it’s rather like a dissecting-room. No one can know what a dissecting-room is like save those who have fished their own bit of salted human meat out of the spirit-locker.”
April comes suddenly and sweetly, and as I drive on my rounds I seem to see this Sussex world anew. It is rolling country under great skies mountainous with white clouds. My awareness of things is like a mirror in which little pictures are brilliantly reflected. I see old and shaggy orchards like ancient men putting on spring garlands. Coldbank Mill seems always visible like a great white pharos against the very blue sky. The banks are pied with primroses and violets. The larch plantation in the Great Wood is like a goblin city of a thousand crowded green spires. Windflowers are blinking in the coppices. I have to drive every day to Burntshaw and the great beech woods sheltering the park move me to strange emotion. Soon every odd corner will be green and feathery with chervil. I have a case at the Abbey Mill, and here, above the old stew ponds the woods will soon be a sheet of bluebells. I see lambs playing, and on the high meadows the gorse is still ablaze. From Coldbank Hill one can see the blue curve of Rye Bay, and in the north-west beyond the pines of Town Toy the faint outline of Blueborough.
But there are little specks of dust upon the surface of this mirror.
I run up against Rob Guthrie. I don’t know why I have not met him before. He is full of patriotic self-importance and that strange complacency that crowns like a halo some of these elderly gentlemen who are so busy at home. He seems to have become a sort of public censor.
“What, Brent, back again? How did they manage to let you out of the army?”
Guthrie appears to have a secret grievance against me, but why? Is it that these older men feel themselves to be brave dogs when all the younger men are in exile, and that they resent our return? I explain that doctors can enlist on a yearly contract.
“Very peculiar. I was unaware that any citizen was allowed to barter his services for a year and a day.”
“Well, it is so.”
“So they must think old ladies’ tongues more important than our wounded.”
He is an offensive fool, and pottering about on platforms seems to have made him even more of a gasbag. Perhaps my year in the army has caused me to be a little more fierce and frank, but I let fly at Guthrie.
“How’s the flatus?”
“What do you mean?”
“Wind. A little gentian and soda seems indicated.”
His mouth hangs open for a moment under that huge and untidy moustache.
“Are you trying to be offensive, Brent?”
“I was merely giving you a dose of your own medicine, Guthrie. May I tell you that we people who have seen the real thing haven’t much use for the windy guff they talk at home.”
He is furiously offended. He glares at me, nibbles like a rabbit, and passes on.
There are some new people at Lingwood. I have to drive over there every other day. One morning in the sunken road beyond Burntshaw I am confronted by a pony trap with two girls in it. I slow up, for there is not much room, and smile, though they are strangers to me. One of them, a pert young blonde, makes a mouth at me and says, “Go to the war.”
Little fool! But I have a feeling that this sort of thing should not be allowed to pass. I pull up, get out, and hail their trap.
“Excuse me a moment.”
They stop, and I walk along the lane, and raise my hat. Both their faces are solemn and smug.
“Did I hear you say ‘Go to the War’?”
The blonde nods at me.
“May I suggest that this sort of thing makes you look silly. You see, I happen to be back from the war.”
Her face confronts me dumbly like a little pale, sour bun. She does not say she is sorry. What she does say is, “How do I know that you aren’t bluffing?”
That makes me laugh.
“I am sorry that you can pin neither the lie nor the white feather on me, but please don’t do this sort of thing again. It only makes you look silly. Good morning.”
I raise my hat and leave them both looking sullen and dumb-saucy, and as I turn and walk away I hear the bun-faced one say, “I don’t believe he’s ever been in khaki. He doesn’t look like it.”
So the last word rests with them.
* * *
Why should these petty incidents possess any significance for me? And why should the skin of my soul be so hypersensitive? Is it that I am trying to repress that secret sense of failure that still rankles in me? I know that I am not proud of my soldier’s year, and that in my heart of hearts I am ashamed of it. It provoked in me the mean and bitter revolt of my egotism. Why should I suffer?
Even the beauty of this spring comes to have a wounding poignancy. I am trying to drink it in like an opiate and to convince myself that it is the one reality, that and my daily work, but I cannot escape from the feeling of universal tragedy. I ask for permanence, peace, security, and the face of this beautiful world is whimsical and sad. There is no permanency even in nature. Things pass, the apple blossom falls, the bluebells become grey ghosts, all the exquisite shades of green begin to merge into the heavier foliage of summer. Even when I open the friendly white door of my house and go in I have a sense of sneaking into some funk-hole.
I catch Randall looking at me questioningly in the surgery. Is it that he thinks me moody and irritable? Perhaps I am. This secret dissatisfaction with one’s self is like some chronic pain in one’s stomach, or rather, qualms and a perpetual uneasiness.
* * *
Mary is so very full of her hospital. It seems to be the new nucleus of Brackenhurst’s life, and I have no share in it. It is a Murchison-Viner show, and I rather resent the intrusion of these two men. And from Mary I get the impression, though I know she is innocent of any ulterior purpose, that their work is the real work, while I, as Guthrie had said, am looking at old people’s tongues.
I am hearing so much about Murchison. No doubt he is an able surgeon and doing good work, but need Mary always come back and tell me about Murchison’s operations?
He is a rather superior person, tall, dark and debonair, with a supremely confident manner. Gossip has whispered that his lady patients always fall in love with Murchison.
Surely I am not jealous of the fellow?
* * *
I come into lunch tired and depressed. Mary is absent. She hurries in late with a kind of grave, Madonna face.
“I’m so sorry, Stephen, we’ve had a terrible case.”
“Oh?”
“An abdomen that had gone wrong. They had to operate.”
“Murchison?”
“Yes.”
“What result?”
“Oh, I think they have saved the boy. Randall gave the anæsthetic.”
I feel huffed. Why hadn’t they asked me to give the anæsthetic?
But Mary’s enthusiasm is in full flower.
“It is really rather wonderful to be able to do things like that. It’s so real and good.”
“You mean, being able to cut in and patch up?”
She looks at me quickly as though I had dropped a plate on the floor.
“Yes.”
“It’s all in the day’s work.”
“But what work.”
Yes, I am jealous of Murchison, not of the man and his looks and his sex appeal, but of the work he is doing and the position he holds. He is skilful and complacent and secure, while I seem to be a poor, disgruntled fumbler, unable to possess my soul in peace. Murchison is immune from criticism. He is the right man in the right place; moreover he is not of military age. This bloody business cannot affect him; it only endows him with more kudos.
Damn Murchison! Why am I not in his place? Because I have neither the skill nor the confidence. But I regard him bitterly as an interloper, and despise my mean little soul for feeling in this way.
* * *
My gardener has had to join up. I get out the mowing machine in the evening and cut grass. I try to lose my bitterness and discontent in my garden, but somehow the work irks me. Pottering about among weeds while another man is performing major operations, and other men—— I can remember one evening behaving like an angry child. I had been nailing up a board in the fence, and I hit my thumb with the hammer. Sudden blind rage! I threw the hammer into the middle of the raspberry canes.
Afterwards, I had to go and recover it.
* * *
Mary brings me a message. Could I find time to go round the wards three times a week, and do some of the more serious dressings?
“For Murchison?”
“Yes, dear; he is so terribly rushed.”
I flare.
“I’m damned if I am going to be Murchison’s bottle-washer.”
She looks at me with sudden, shocked intentness. Almost, I divine compassion and some secret comprehension in that look, and it exasperates me.
“It’s only the work, Stephen, I was thinking of. But if you are feeling like that——”
“I’ve quite enough to do as it is.”
She is silent.
* * *
The instinct for self-preservation. It seems to me that it is the strongest of all the elemental urges, stronger than sex and than hunger, and that I have been and am the slave of my natural self. Nature wills us either to be cowards or to fight, and to run away from or towards one’s enemy are both legitimate and natural actions. It depends upon how big one’s enemy bulks, and how shrewd and right one’s fear is.
But society, even in its most elementary phases, sets itself to condemn and to coerce the natural urges of the individual, if the urge is anti-social. We must fight for our clan or our country, and no high metaphysical argument will save us from being damned and scorned as cowards if we dare to value the one self more than the stark need of the many. Societies must protect themselves. But they will help us to dress up our own cowardice in shining and noble armour, and call it by high-sounding names, patriotism, sacrifice, the pride of a manly self-regard.
I have no illusions now. I am not of the blood of martyrs. The crowd man is right when one of these crowd catastrophies ravages the earth. Your merely clever person is better silent and under the bed, unless he can strip himself of his ingenious excuses and cease from being superior.
I am not feeling superior.
I am feeling a wretched failure, and my self-regard is like a moping hen.
I realize that my first surrender was a surrender to my neighbours, to a convention, to social pressure. I wanted to be alone, my one self in the wo
rld, and as the world is constituted at present that is impossible, unless one has immense vanity and courage. Perhaps vanity is needed more than courage. But what if my self-regard is a reality, and sacrifices one of the spiritual essentials in this mysterious pageant of death and of life? Must a man renounce everything and go forth to embrace his particular cross? And for what? That there may be peace in the world?
Will there ever be peace?
But can I hide behind scepticism? Is not the very voice of my embittered vanity the one voice to which I should listen? Let me put ideals aside for the moment. However bloody silly this war may seem, my country and my friends are trapped in it. It may be a dirty ditch, but can I stand on the edge of it and pretend to be superior while my country is struggling in the mud?
I both value myself too highly, and I value myself not at all.
* * *
I wish I could talk to Mary about it, but somehow I cannot. These secret agonies, like an ache in one’s belly, are resolvable only by the tissues of one’s own soul. I don’t suppose my wife has any suspicion of the secret shames and urges that are contending in me. Besides, why should she suffer? It would be even greater cowardice to involve her in the scufflings of my conscience.
But what does all this mean? That I, who only a few weeks ago escaped from a life that I loathed, and who put off the livery of war with joy and exultation, am being driven by something in myself to return to the life that I hate!
How extraordinary!
How strange that it should happen to me like this! Stranger still, I am realizing that a part of me, my pride, wants to go back. There is nothing heroic about it. I am still a cowardly person, but it is not any fear of society that coerces me. I know that as things are ordered at present I have presented my sop to Cerberus, and that I can remain here without public shame. There may be thousands of shirkers, but I shall not be accounted one of them. If I cared to I could adopt an air of patronage to men like Murchison and Viner, and parade my services by telling stories. “When I was in Gallipoli——” Yes, it would be so easy, and seemingly legitimate, but my urge does not lie that way.
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