by John Masters
‘Another D.S.O.,’ she said. ‘How wonderful for you. And we’re all so proud of you. You don’t look very well, though.’ ‘Whisky?’ he asked abruptly. She nodded.
In the old days a lady would never have drunk whisky in public, and seldom in private, but this was 1915. The old days had gone, crept between the pages of The Times and hidden there for ever under the casualty lists. Also, Peggy was drinking. She had been for a good many years; not too heavily, but it was beginning to show in her face.
‘I saw Uncle George this evening,’ she said at last. ‘Just after you’d left the house.’
He said: ‘Then you knew that Emily had gone. Why did you pretend to be surprised she wasn’t with me?’
She took up her whisky and drank deeply. ‘I knew she’d left the house,’ she said. ‘I thought she might have quarrelled with Uncle George--wanted to be alone. I didn’t know what had happened.’
He said: ‘For God’s sake, Peggy, tell me where she is.’
‘Harry’s in hospital in Brighton,’ she said suddenly. ‘A flesh wound, in the leg--shrapnel. Nothing serious, he says. Only he didn’t get a medal. He hasn’t got any medals yet, though he’s been wounded twice and has been out since before Neuve Chapelle.’
‘Where has Emily gone?’ he cut in harshly. He didn’t have to pretend so much now, for he was becoming truly desperate.
Peggy said: ‘Emily? Poor Emily. She missed you so much--before you came back in June, I mean. Gerry tried to comfort her while he was in London, but then you came back and took him away. Emily was so afraid for both of you--really for Gerry more than you, I think sometimes. Because she knew you’d come out all right. I knew that. Everyone knew that. Even Gerry knew, at the end, didn’t he?’ She drank again, and he signalled to the waiter to refill her glass. This would be her third, and her tight control was going.
He said: ‘You know what Gerry meant to me.’
‘Oh yes, yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes it all so awful, for everyone.’
‘Where’s Emily?’
‘Lonely,’ Peggy said. ‘I’m sure she’s lonely, whatever she said. Did she tell you she didn’t want to see you ever again?’
‘Where is she?’
‘And that it was no use your trying to find her? It isn’t, either, even if you use the police, because those Welsh people are so devoted, and they wouldn’t give her away to the police or anyone else if she asked them not to.’
He kept silent until, from waiting for him to renew his pleading, she realized that he wasn’t going to. Her eyes came slowly round, and he held them. He got them tight and leaned forward, as he had a hundred times before in the old days when he was going to do something and wanted to let them all know that nothing would stop him.
He said: ‘Peggy, if you don’t tell me where Emily is I am going to walk out of this hotel, now, and report to the War Office. By tomorrow night I’ll be out of the country. You won’t ever see me again. There’ll be no more gloating, because I won’t make any other attempt to find Emily. It will all be over. You don’t want that.’
He didn’t mean what he said, but this was perhaps the first time in Peggy’s experience that that had been so. She believed him. Simultaneously, her concentration dispersed by the whisky, she realized what had happened to her, that his last statement should be true. She didn’t want his and Emily’s unhappiness to be resolved, because her hatred of them meant more to her than any love. This she realized, and of this she realized the bitter ugliness. Her puffy face dissolved, and she stood up suddenly. ‘Did Gerry die quickly?’
He stood up with her, facing her across the glass-cluttered table. ‘Instantly,’ he said.
‘Was he happy? He should have been. “Dulce et decorum est---” And Gerry was a gentleman, you know.’
He said: ‘No. He wasn’t happy.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
She lowered her veil and said: ‘Perhaps he had learned he had an incurable disease. Perhaps Emily found she was going to get it--or the children--if she didn’t run away. Peter Savageitis.’ He said: ‘Good-bye, Peggy.’
She said: ‘Wait. She’s at Gaerwen cottage. It’s in Merionethshire, at the head of Cwm Bychan’--she pulled on her gloves--‘but I’m sure you’d do better to go to the War Office.’
Chapter 26
In the train he had studied the map and found the lane marked on it. There were two ways to it: up from Llanbedr or Harlech, on a country road which would take wheeled traffic as far as the farm below Cwm Bychan; or by a footpath from Trawsfynydd, over the mountains to the east, and then down on the cottage by the old Roman Steps. He had decided to come this latter way, fearing that word would be sent ahead of him if he came through Llanbedr.
The journey from London to Trawsfynydd was long and slow, but once he got out of the train and could stretch his legs some of his morbid anticipation fell away. The Welsh hills rolled higher around him, and on the eastern slope it was a fresh October day. On the tops ahead the rain-clouds hung low, and only a shepherd and his sheep were there, huddled together under a wall. Peter climbed steadily up the old footpath, treading in the footsteps of Druids and Roman soldiers and English bowmen.
At the top the path entered a defile, so sharp that it appeared to be man-made between the rocks, and then swung down the hill among bracken and heather and the twisted roots of small trees and slabs of stone lying every way on the hill-side. Here there were paving stones set on the mountain, some broken, some still dovetailed as closely together as when the Druids had put them there, the outer edges now worn smooth and the centres hollowed and shallow with rain.
After three hours he came to the valley floor of Cwm Bychan, passed the old farmhouse at the head, and swung down the road. Now it was close. The road ran between a low rise of rock and a black lake. The map showed that the cottage lay behind the rise, and a short lane led to it from this narrow road, a hundred yards farther on. A mist from the sea swirled in irregular patches about the valley and over the lake, and suddenly he came upon her--walking towards him, a basket over her arm.
She stopped and stepped back. He went forward slowly, his hands out. She clasped her hands behind her back, and he felt his face hardening and determination welling up. He would take her back--but that was the voice of the Peter Savage she was running away from.
He said: ‘Emily.’
‘Why do you have to be so dramatic?’ she cried. ‘Striding out of the mountains with mist all over your clothes, looking like the devil?’
‘I thought you would be told if I came from Llanbedr,’ he said. ‘I came from Trawsfynydd.’
‘That’s a long way. Who told you I was here? Daddy? Your grandfather? No, he wouldn’t.’
‘Peggy.’
She said: ‘Yes. She would. You are as clever as you used to be. Now go back the way you came.’
‘I’m not going back till I know what’s happened,’ he said.
‘What has happened?’ she said slowly. ‘Nothing’s happened. I just found out that you’re a murderer, a real cold murderer. I’ve always known you would lead men to their deaths for something you thought worth while. I didn’t like it, but it was a part of you. I was fool enough to think I could have the excitement and hold that in check, that we’d perhaps find some way of life together that would replace it, or turn it to good use.
But--a murderer---‘
The water of the lake hung suspended, like a wavering curtain of slate and ebony, on his left hand. The little hill rose steeply in broken rock and tufted grass on his right. The soft Welsh wind blew the mist about them so that they were in a private place, there in the middle of the road.
He said: ‘I--I didn’t mean to harm Gerry.’
She said: ‘A liar, too? Did you tell him before you shot him? Or did you shoot him in the back? You kept him waiting till the very last possible moment, though, didn’t you? Wouldn’t it have been more efficient, more typical, to have pushed him off the Channel steamer the night you
left England? Weren’t you afraid, at all, that he might shoot you! I suppose he must have carried a loaded pistol all the time--but you would be sure he wouldn’t do that. You hadn’t done anything a gentleman must expect to be punished for.’
He sat down slowly on a rock, because his legs were weak. This was the avalanche that had presaged its coming as soon as Harvey opened the front door of 27 Minden Square to him two days ago.
For a moment Emily’s terrible certainty, the sheer loathing in her face, made him believe that he had actually shot Gerry. It must have been Gerry’s chest that he had centred in the sights of the carbine that dawn on Monte Michele. He had been so exhausted, his eyes so blurred, that it was possible.
With a tremendous effort he forced that picture out of his mind. It was the Austrian corporal he had shot. He said: ‘I didn’t kill Gerry, Emily. I didn’t shoot him,’ he added, because he knew that in another sense he had broken and then killed Gerry. This, he realized, was the cause of his desperate need to find Emily. He had to ask her to shrive him, so that they could start again--this time he following her, to find the place of peace that she had often tried to tell him about.
She was looking into his face with a new anxiety, for he had never lied to her. She said suddenly: ‘Tell me.’
He told her, only of those last seconds on Monte Michele. When he had finished, and after she had held her hand to her eyes for a little while, she said: ‘I had made sure you had shot Gerry. I knew it.’ She spoke wearily, and quietly, as though to herself.
‘Why should you think so?’ he burst out passionately. ‘By God, what have I done to you that you should jump to that conclusion?’
She looked at him carefully. ‘I suppose I wanted to,’ she said at last. ‘It was nothing that you had done. But it doesn’t matter now. I believe you, but I don’t need to think you’re a common murderer to get the strength to tell you to go. Now go, go, for God’s sake go, Peter!’
‘Why should you not believe me?’ he cried. ‘Why should you believe, without even asking me, without waiting to speak to me, that I would kill my best friend deliberately, by shooting him in the back?’
She grabbed his arm. ‘You know, damn you! Do you think I’m going to believe Peggy didn’t tell you?’
He said: ‘Emily, I don’t know what you are talking about.’ She looked at him again, that look of careful study. But still it was true--he had never lied to her. She unfastened the cloak that had been billowing and flapping about her, and he saw that she was newly pregnant. She said: ‘Gerry’s.’
He held his breath. This was the full force of the avalanche. He was under it, and also above it, watching himself go down and round and over and over inside the snow, now coming up to catch air, now being struck by the rocks and trees embedded in the falling snow. He thought: Any man must feel some jealousy when he learns that his wife has lain with another man. Any man must suffer a wound to his pride. He felt the jealousy and the wound, but they were smothered in the enormity of realizing, feeling in himself, what pressure must have made Gerry and Emily do it. As soon as the opened cloak revealed the swelling of her belly and she said ‘Gerry’s,’ he knew why she had done it.
Emily said: ‘So I killed him, really, didn’t I? Trying to save him.’
Peter shook his head. ‘Will you take me back?’ he asked her humbly.
She hesitated a fraction of a second before answering: ‘No. I’m afraid of you now, Peter. Because of you I did this. Do you think I don’t feel soiled and ashamed all the time? What might you make me do next? Will I find myself one night, at midnight, bending over Rodney’s bed to kill him because I have seen that he is going to be his father’s son?’
He stood looking into the lake. The mist was rolling back, and it was an October evening. His eyes were dim with tears for the first time he could remember. His wife stood before him, and he loved her. But the avalanche had at last come to rest, and there he lay, revealed for what he was. Whatever he loved, he must conquer. Whoever followed him, he destroyed. Grandfather’s warning came to him. Do you have to go?
No, he didn’t, but he had discovered it too late, when he had already succeeded, by unparalleled strength and daemonic courage, in shattering the only people who could have led him towards peace.
The ruins stretched as far as his eye could see in every direction. His children?--he dared not go near them for what he might influence them to become. Emily?--he had made her an adulteress and self-accused accomplice in murder. Rudwal? --every action he took there would lead to glory for him and bitter despair for others.
‘What are you going to do?’ Emily asked almost conversationally.
He thought as matter-of-factly of that problem. Suicide was no sort of answer to this. Even in death he’d fill the headlines, sadden Grandfather’s quiet dusk, leave a stain of rumour on his own children and the one yet to be born. By God, by the steely lake there he could at last smell what must have been stinking in their nostrils for years past, the odour of death that hung around him.
‘Let me see the children,’ he said.
They walked together down the road, turned up the lane, and came to the cottage. An angular middle-aged woman opened the door and stared grimly at him. He recognized her as Alice.
Rodney was playing on the floor, an oil lamp on the table above him--and outside the dusk falling fast across the tarn of Cwm Bychan. The boy recognized him and jumped up with a shout. ‘Daddy, Da-a-a-addy!’ Peter kissed him once and then put him down, for fear. Elizabeth came out of the tiny kitchen and ran to her mother, eyeing him with distrust. Rodney wanted to know where he had been, and how many men he had killed. Elizabeth came to him slowly, of her own accord, and he held her at his knee for a time and then got up.
It was time to go. He said: ‘Have you got any men’s clothes here that would fit me?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a suitcase of yours. I didn’t mean to bring it. It came by mistake. What are you going to do?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Only if anyone comes looking for me, don’t tell them about the clothes. Where’s the suitcase?’
‘Upstairs. I’ll show you.’ He followed her to the narrow bedroom at the head of the stairs. He opened the case and found, among other things, an old tweed suit he had worn a lot in Zermatt in ‘09. Emily went downstairs, and he changed quickly. Emily’s wounds were so deep that he wondered whether she would ever recover from them, even if she never thought of him again. All the quickness and warmth of her response to life had gone. He carried his uniform downstairs. She was sitting in an old kitchen chair by the fire. He began to throw the uniform on the fire, piece by piece. ‘Take the buttons and metal bits out and bury them tomorrow,’ he said.
She said she would.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked her when he was ready.
‘Stay here till the baby is born. After that--I don’t know.’
That was the cruellest moment. He knew that he could keep her. He could take her round the waist, and his arms were strong. He could say: ‘It’s all right. I love you. I loved Gerry and I’ll love his baby. We’ll start again.
But he was not David, but Cain.
He stood away, when he had got control of himself, and said: ‘I won’t tell you where I’m going, in case you change your mind. Good-bye, darling.’
He swung quickly out of the door before the need to throw himself into her arms overcame him. He ran for a mile down the Llanbedr road and then, his breath still coming easily, settled down to a driving, punishing walking pace that would leave him thoroughly exhausted by the time he reached the village and the railway.
He knew what he was going to do. He was going to join the New Armies as a private soldier of infantry. It was as deep, as anonymous a place as he could think of, and no one would think to look for him there. There, in the universal slime of the trenches, he would be made to feel kinship and renounce leadership. There he would be helpless in the power of others, as so many had been helpless in his. He would learn what Emily and
Gerry had learned, and suffer as they had suffered in learning it. Above all, he would never influence a soul again, for good or evil.
Chapter 27
There was a rat. It moved slowly through the deep shadows of the corner of the barn where he lay. They were used to the darkness in there now, after a day of waiting, no one knew why, so that the single strong bar of July sunlight pouring through a wall where a shell had torn a long, narrow hole hurt his eyes. The rat was not afraid of any of them. It seemed to know that they were in no mood to hurt it now, and if they tried it could easily escape through the missing lath or under the pile of sour straw. The guns were shouting and booming all the time, but the men hardly heard them.
On the other side, near the place where the door of the barn had been, a dozen men of the platoon lay in a circle and played cards. Their rifles and bulging packs were stacked in a rough row along the wall there--entrenching tools, water-bottles, grenades in festoons hanging on to the dust-soiled equipment, ammunition pouches bulging square and hard-edged with the fullness of the sharp-pointed brass cartridge cases and nickel-nosed bullets inside, rolled blankets, greatcoats. When they put all that on they lost resemblance to human beings. They would do that soon, and crawl east along the wide, empty road, past the rubbled houses and the inn sign where no inn stood. The eyes would flicker under the steel bowls of the helmets--eyes of automata, men with no reality and no difference between them, in spite of the identity discs round each neck; 10948475 Smith, W., C. of E., the one they had allotted him said.
It was July 1916, and he had been William Smith for eight months. It was a name, but he had prevented it from becoming clothed in any personality. The recruiting officer looked sharply at him when he reached the barracks with the rest of them picked up there in Birmingham, but he asked no questions. There was a war on.