“But you do KNOW?” woman-like, she persisted.
“No, I don’t even know,” he replied coldly.
Harriet broke into a few tears of fright, fear, and chagrin.
“Have we no rights at all?” she cried, furious.
“Be quiet,” said Richard to her.
“Yes. It is your duty to serve your country, if it is your country, by every means in your power. If you choose to put yourself under suspicion — .”
“Suspicion of what?”
“I tell you, I do not know, and could not tell you even if I did know.”
The foul, loutish detectives meanwhile were fumbling around, taking the books off the shelves and looking inside the clock. Somers watched them with a cold eye.
“Is this yours?” said one of the louts, producing a book with queer diagrams.
“Yes, it’s a botany notebook,” said Somers coldly.
The man secured it.
“He can learn the structure of moulds and parasites,” said Richard bitterly to Harriet.
“The house is all open, the men can search everything?” asked the officer coldly.
“You know it is,” said Somers. “You tried yesterday while we were out.” Then he asked: “Who is responsible for this? Whom can I write to?”
“You can write to Major Witham, Headquarters Southern Division, Salisbury, if it will do any good,” was the answer.
There was a pause. Somers wrote it down: not in his address book because that was gone.
“And one is treated like this, for nothing,” cried Harriet, again in tears. “For nothing, but just because I wasn’t born English. Yet one has married an Englishman, and they won’t let one live anywhere but in England.”
“It is more than that. It is more than the fact that you are not English born,” said the officer.
“Then what? What?” she cried.
He refused to answer this time. The police-sergeant looked on with troubled blue eyes.
“Nothing. It’s nothing but that, because it CAN’T be,” wept Harriet. “It can’t be anything else, because we’ve never done anything else. Just because one wasn’t born in England — as if one could help that. And to be persecuted like this, for nothing, for nothing else. And not even openly accused! Not even that.” She wiped her tears, half enjoying it now. The police-sergeant looked into the road. One of the louts clumped downstairs and began to look once more among the books.
“That’ll do here!” said the officer quietly, to the detective lout. But the detective lout wasn’t going to be ordered, and persisted.
“This your sketch-book, Mr. Somers?” said the lout.
“No, those are Lady Hermione Rogers’ sketches,” said Somers, with derision. And the lout stuffed the book back.
“And why don’t they let us go away?” cried Harriet. “Why don’t they let us go to America? We don’t WANT to be here if we are a nuisance. We want to go right away. Why won’t they even let us do that!” She was all tear-marked now.
“They must have their reasons,” said the young officer, who was getting more and more uncomfortable. He again tried to hurry up the detective lout. But they were enjoying nosing round among other people’s privacies.
“And what’ll happen to us if we don’t go, if we just stay?” said Harriet, being altogether a female.
“You’d better not try,” said the young man, grimly, so utterly confident in the absoluteness of the powers and the rightness he represented. And Somers would have liked to hit him across the mouth for that.
“Hold your tongue, Harriet,” he said, turning on her fiercely. “You’ve said enough now. Be still, and let them do what they like, since they’ve the power to do it.”
And Harriet was silent. And in the silence only the louts rummaging among the linen, and one looking into the bread-tin and into the tea caddy. Somers watched them with a cold eye, and that queer slight lifting of his nose, rather like a dog when it shows disgust. And the officer again tried to hurry the louts, in his low tone of command, which had so little effect.
“Where do you intend to go?” said the officer to Somers.
“Oh, just to London,” said Somers, who did not feel communicative.
“I suppose they will send the things back that they take?” he said, indicating the louts.
“I should think so — anything that is not evidence.”
The louts were drawing to an end: it was nearly over.
“Of course this has nothing to do with me: I have to obey orders, no matter what they are,” said the young officer, half apologising.
Somers just looked at him, but did not answer. His face was pale and still and distant, unconscious that the other people were real human beings. To him they were not: they were just THINGS, obeying orders. And his eyes showed that. The young officer wanted to get out.
At last it was over: the louts had collected a very few trifles. The officer saw them on to the road, bade them good-morning, and got out of the house as quick as he could.
“Good-morning, sir! Good-morning, mam!” said the police sergeant in tones of sympathy.
Yes, it was over. Harriet and Lovat looked at one another in silent consternation.
“Well, we must go,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” he replied.
And she studied the insolent notice to quit the area of Cornwall. In her heart of hearts she was not sorry to quit it. It had become too painful.
In a minute up came one of the farm girls to hear the news: then later Somers went down. Arthur, the boy, had heard the officer say to the police-sergeant as he went up the hill:
“Well, that’s a job I’d rather not have had to do.”
Harriet was alternately bitter and mocking: but badly shocked. Somers had had in his pocket the words of one of the Hebridean folk songs which Sharpe had brought down, and which they all thought so wonderful. On a bit of paper in his jacket-pocket, the words which have no meaning in any language apparently, but are just vocal, almost animal sounds: the Seal Woman’s Song — this they had taken.
Ver mi hiu — ravo na la vo — Ver mi hiu — ravo hovo i — Ver mi hiu — ravo na la vo — an catal — Traum — san jechar — .
What would the investigation make of this? What, oh, what? Harriet loved to think of it. Somers really expected to be examined under torture, to make him confess. The only obvious word — Traum — pure German.
The day was Friday: they must leave on Monday by the Great Western express. Started a bitter rush of packing. Somers, so sick of things, had a great fire of all his old manuscripts. They decided to leave the house as it was, the books on the shelves, to take only their personal belongings. For Somers was determined to come back. Until he had made up his mind to this, he felt paralysed. He loved the place so much. Ever since the conscription suspense began he had said to himself, when he walked up the wild, little road from his cottage to the moor: shall I see the foxgloves come out? If only I can stay till the foxgloves come. And he had seen the foxgloves come. Then it was the heather — would he see the heather? And then the primroses in the hollow down to the sea: the tufts and tufts of primroses, where the fox stood and looked at him.
Lately, however, he had begun to feel secure, as if he had sunk some of himself into the earth there, and were rooted for ever. His soul seemed to have sunk into that Cornwall, that wild place under the moors. And now he must tear himself out. He was quite paralysed, could scarcely move. And at the farm they all looked at him with blank faces. He went back to the cottage to burn more manuscripts and pack up.
And then, like a revelation, he decided he would come back. He would use all his strength, put himself against all the authorities, and in a month or two he would come back. Before the snow-drops came in the farm garden.
“I shall be back in a month or two — three months,” he said to everybody, and they looked at him.
But John Thomas said to him:
“You remember you said you would never drive to town again. Eh?” And in the
black, bright eyes Somers saw that it was so. Yet he persisted.
“It only meant not yet awhile.”
On the Monday morning he went down to say good-bye at the farm. It was a bitter moment, he was so much attached to them. And they to him. He could not bear to go. Only one was not there — the Uncle James. Many a time Somers wondered why Uncle James had gone down the fields, so as not to say good-bye.
John Thomas was driving them down in the trap — Arthur had taken the big luggage in the cart. The family at the farm did everything they could. Somers never forgot that while he and Harriet were slaving, on the Sunday, to get things packed, John Thomas came up with their dinners, from the farm Sunday dinner.
It was a lovely, lovely morning as they drove across the hill-slopes above the sea: Harriet and Somers and John Thomas. In spite of themselves they felt cheerful. It seemed like an adventure.
“I don’t know,” said John Thomas, “but I feel in myself as If it was all going to turn out for the best.” And he smiled in his bright, wondering way.
“So do I,” cried Harriet. “As if we were going to be more free.”
“As if we were setting out on a long adventure,” said Somers.
They drove through the town, where, of course, they were marked people. But it was curious how little they cared, how indifferent they felt to everybody.
At the station Somers bade good-bye to John Thomas, with whom he had been such friends.
“Well, I wonder when we shall see each other again,” said the young farmer.
“Soon. We will MAKE it soon,” said Somers. “We will MAKE it soon. And you can come to London to see us.”
“Well — if I can manage it — there’s nothing would please me better,” replied the other. But even as he said it, Somers was thinking of the evening in town, when he and Ann had been kept waiting so long. And he knew he would not see John Thomas again soon.
During the long journey up to London Somers sat facing Harriet, quite still. The train was full: soldiers and sailors from Plymouth. One naval man talked to Harriet: bitter like all the rest. As soon as a man began to talk seriously, it was in bitterness. But many were beginning to make a mock of their own feelings even. Songs like “Good-byeeee” had taken the place of “Bluebells,” and marked the change.
But Somers sat there feeling he had been killed: perfectly still, and pale, in a kind of after death, feeling he had been killed. He had always BELIEVED so in everything — society, love, friends. This was one of his serious deaths in belief. So he sat with his immobile face of a crucified Christ who makes no complaint, only broods silently and alone, remote. This face distressed Harriet horribly. It made her feel lost and shipwrecked, as if her heart was destined to break also. And she was in rather good spirits really. Her horror had been that she would be interned in one of the horrible camps, away from Somers. She had far less belief than he in the goodness of mankind. And she was rather relieved to get out of Cornwall. She had felt herself under a pressure there, long suffering. That very pressure he had loved so much. And so, while his still, fixed, crucified face distressed her horribly, at the same time it made her angry. What did he want to look like that for? Why didn’t he show fight?
They came to London, and he tried taxi after taxi before he could get one to take them up to Hampstead. He had written to a staunch friend, and asked her to wire if she would receive them for a day or two. She wired that she would. So they went to her house. She was a little delicate lady who reminded Somers of his mother, though she was younger than his mother would have been. She and her husband had been friends of William Morris in those busy days of incipient Fabianism. Now her husband was sick, and she lived with him and a nurse and her grown-up daughter in a little old house in Hampstead.
Mrs. Redburn was frightened, receiving the tainted Somers. But she had pluck. Everybody in London was frightened at this time, everybody who was not a rabid and disgusting so-called patriot. It was a reign of terror. Mrs. Redburn was a staunch little soul, but she was bewildered: and she was frightened. They did such horrible things to you, the authorities. Poor tiny Hattie, with her cameo face, like a wise child, and her grey, bobbed hair. Such a frail little thing to have gone sailing these seas of ideas, and to suffer the awful breakdown of her husband. A tiny little woman with grey, bobbed hair, and wild, unyielding eyes. She had three great children. It all seemed a joke and a tragedy mixed, to her. And now the war. She was just bewildered, and would not live long. Poor, frail, tiny Hattie, receiving the Somers into her still, tiny old house. Both Richard and Harriet loved her. He had pledged himself, in some queer way, to keep a place in his heart for her forever, even when she was dead. Which he did.
But he suffered from London. It was cold, heavy, foggy weather, and he pined for his cottage, the granite strewn, gorse-grown slope from the moors to the sea. He could not bear Hampstead Heath now. In his eyes he saw the farm below — grey, naked, stony, with the big, pale-roofed new barn — and the network of dark green fields with the pale-grey walls — and the gorse and the sea. Torture of nostalgia. He craved to be back, his soul was there. He wrote passionately to John Thomas.
Richard and Harriet went to a police-station for the first time in their lives. They went and reported themselves. The police at the station knew nothing about them and said they needn’t have come. But next day a great policeman thumping at Hattie’s door, and were some people called Somers staying there? It was explained to the policeman that they had already reported — but he knew nothing of it.
Somers wanted as quickly as possible to find rooms, to take the burden from Hattie. The American wife of an English friend, a poet serving in the army, offered her rooms in Mecklenburgh Square, and the third day after their arrival in London Somers and Harriet moved there: very grateful indeed to the American girl. They had no money. But the young woman tossed the rooms to them, and food and fuel, with a wild free hand. She was beautiful, reckless, one of the poetesses whose poetry Richard feared and wondered over.
Started a new life: anguish of nostalgia for Cornwall, from Somers. Wandering in the King’s Cross Road or Theobald’s Road, seeing his cottage and the road going up to the moors. He wrote twice to the headquarters at Salisbury insisting on being allowed to return. Came a reply, this could not be permitted. Then one day a man called and left a book and the little bundle of papers — a handful only — which the detectives had confiscated. A poor little show. Even the scrap of paper with Ver mi hiu. Again Somers wrote — but to no effect. Came a letter from John Thomas describing events in the west — the last Somers ever had from his friend.
Then Sharpe came up to London: it was too lonely down there. And they had some gay evenings. Many people came to see Somers. But Sharpe said to him:
“They’re watching you still. There were two policemen near the door watching who came in.”
There was an atmosphere of terror all through London, as under the Tsar when no man dared open his mouth. Only this time it was the lowest orders of mankind spying on the upper orders, to drag them down.
One evening there was a gorgeous commotion in Somers’ rooms: four poets and three non-poets, all fighting out poetry: a splendid time. Somers ran down the stairs in the black dark — no lights in the hall — to open the door. He opened quickly — three policemen in the porch. They slipped out before they could be spoken to.
Harriet and Somers had reported at Bow Street — wonderful how little heed the police took of them. Somers could tell how the civil police loathed being under the military orders.
But watched and followed he knew he was. After two months the American friend needed her rooms. The Somers transferred to Kensington, to a flat belonging to Sharpe’s mother. Again many friends came. One evening Sharpe was called out from the drawing-room: detectives in the hall enquiring about Somers, where he got his money from, etc., etc., such clowns, louts, mongrels of detectives. Even Sharpe laughed in their faces: such canaille. At the same time detectives enquiring for them at the old address: th
ough they reported the change. Such a confusion in the official mind!
It was becoming impossible. Somers wrote bitterly to friends who had been all-influential till lately, but whom the canaille were now trying to taint also. And then he and Harriet moved to a little cottage he rented from his dear Hattie, in Oxfordshire. Once more they reported to the police in the market-town: once more the police sympathetic.
“I will report no more,” said Somers.
But still he knew he was being watched all the time. Strange men questioning the cottage woman next door, as to all his doings. He began to FEEL a criminal. A sense of guilt, of self-horror began to grow up in him. He saw himself set apart from mankind, a Cain, or worse. Though of course he had committed no murder. But what might he not have done? A leper, a criminal! The foul, dense, carrion-eating mob were trying to set their teeth in him. Which meant mortification and death.
It was Christmas — winter — very cold. He and Harriet were very poor. Then he became ill. He lay in the tiny bedroom looking at the wintry sky and the deep, thatched roof of the cottage beyond. Sick. But then his soul revived. “No,” he said to himself. “No. Whatever I do or have done, I am not wrong. Even if I commit what they call a crime, why should I accept THEIR condemnation or verdict? Whatever I do, I do of my own responsible self. I refuse their imputations. I despise them. They are canaille, carrion-eating, filthy-mouthed canaille, like dead-man-devouring jackals. I wish to God I could kill them. I wish I had power to blight them, to slay them with a blight, slay them in thousands and thousands. I wish to God I could kill them off, the masses of canaille. Would they make me feel in the wrong? Would they? They shall not. Never. I will watch that they never set their unclean teeth in me, for a bite is blood-poisoning. But fear them! Feel in the wrong because of them? Never. Not if I were Cain several times over, and had killed several brothers and sisters as well. Not if I had committed all the crimes in their calendar. I will not be put in the wrong by them, God knows I will not. And I will report myself no more at their police-stations.”
So, whenever the feeling of terror came over him, the feeling of being marked-out, branded, a criminal marked out by society, marked out for annihilation, he pulled himself together, saying to himself:
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 369