Chapter 12
He had known such different deep fears. In Sicily, a sudden fear, in the night of some single murderer, some single thing hovering as it were out of the violent past, with the intent of murder. Out of the old Greek past, that had been so vivid, sometimes an unappeased spirit of murderous–hate against the usurping moderns. A sudden presence of murder in the air, because of something which the modern psyche had excluded, some old and vital thing which Christianity has cut out. An old spirit, waiting for vengeance. But in England, during the later years of the war, a true and deadly fear of the criminal LIVING spirit which arose in all the stay–at–home bullies who governed the country during those years. From 1916 to 1919 a wave of criminal lust rose and possessed England, there was a reign of terror, under a set of indecent bullies like Bottomley of John Bull and other bottom–dog members of the House of Commons. Then Somers had known what it was to live in a perpetual state of semi–fear: the fear of the criminal public and the criminal government. The torture was steadily applied, during those years after Asquith fell, to break the independent soul in any man who would not hunt with the criminal mob. A man must identify himself with the criminal mob, sink his sense of truth, of justice, and of human honour, and bay like some horrible unclean hound, bay with a loud sound, from slavering, unclean jaws.
This Richard Lovat Somers had steadily refused to do. The deepest part of a man is his sense of essential truth, essential honour, essential justice. This deepest self makes him abide by his own feelings, come what may. It is not sentimentalism. It is just the male human creature, the thought–adventurer, driven to earth. Will he give in or won't he?
Many men, carried on a wave of patriotism and true belief in democracy, entered the war. Many men were driven in out of belief that it was necessary to save their property. Vast numbers of men were just bullied into the army. A few remained. Of these, many became conscientious objectors.
Somers tiresomely belonged to no group. He would not enter the army, because his profoundest instinct was against it. Yet he had no conscientious objection to war. It was the whole spirit of the war, the vast mob–spirit, which he could never acquiesce in. The terrible, terrible war, made so fearful because in every country practically every man lost his head, and lost his own centrality, his own manly isolation in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real. Practically every man being caught away from himself, as in some horrible flood, and swept away with the ghastly masses of other men, utterly unable to speak, or feel for himself, or to stand on his own feet, delivered over and swirling in the current, suffocated for the time being. Some of them to die for ever. Most to come back home victorious in circumstance, but with their inner pride gone: inwardly lost. To come back home, many of them, to wives who had egged them on to this downfall in themselves: black bitterness. Others to return to a bewildered wife who had in vain tried to keep her man true to himself, tried and tried, only to see him at last swept away. And oh, when he was swept away, how she loved him. But when he came back, when he crawled out like a dog out of a dirty stream, a stream that had suddenly gone slack and turbid: when he came back covered with outward glory and inward shame, then there was the price to pay.
And there IS this bitter and sordid after–war price to pay because men lost their heads, and worse, lost their inward, individual integrity. And when a man loses his inward, isolated, manly integrity, it is a bad day for that man's true wife. A true man should not lose his head. The greater the crisis, the more intense should be his isolated reckoning with his own soul. And THEN let him act, of his own whole self. Not fling himself away: or much worse, let himself be DRAGGED away, bit by bit.
Awful years—'16, '17, '18, '19—the years when the damage was done. The years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage to face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death. But no courage in any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by its decision. Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!
Richard Lovat was one of those utterly unsatisfactory creatures who just would not. He had no conscientious objections. He knew that men MUST fight, some time in some way or other. He was no Quaker, to believe in perpetual peace. He had been in Germany times enough to know HOW much he detested the German military creatures: mechanical bullies they were. They had once threatened to arrest him as a spy, and had insulted him more than once. Oh, he would never forgive THEM, in his inward soul. But then the industrialism and commercialism of England, with which patriotism and democracy became identified: did not these insult a man and hit him pleasantly across the mouth? How much humiliation had Richard suffered, trying to earn his living! How had they tried, with their beastly industrial self–righteousness, to humiliate him as a separate, single man? They wanted to bring him to heel even more than the German militarist did. And if a man is to be brought to any heel, better a spurred heel than the heel of a Jewish financier. So Richard decided later, when the years let him think things over, and see where he was.
Therefore when the war came, his instinct was against it. When the Asquith government so softly foundered, he began to suffer agonies. But when the Asquith government went right under, and in its place came that John Bull government of '16, '17, '18, then agonies gave way to tortures. He was summoned to join the army: and went. Spent a night in barracks with forty other men, and not one of these other men but felt like a criminal condemned, bitter in dejection and humiliation. Was medically examined in the morning by two doctors, both gentlemen, who knew the sacredness of another naked man: and was rejected.
So, that was over. He went back home. And he made up his mind what he would do. He would never voluntarily make a martyr of himself. His feeling was private to himself, he didn't want to force it on any other man. He would just act alone. For the moment, he was rejected as medically unfit. If he was called up again, he would go again. But he would never serve.
"Once," he said to Harriet, "that they have really conscripted me, I will never obey another order, if they kill me."
Poor Harriet felt scared, and didn't know what else to say.
"If ever," he said, looking up from his own knees in their old grey flannel trousers, as he sat by the fire, "if ever I see my legs in khaki, I shall die. But they shall never put my legs into khaki."
That first time, at the barracks in the country town in the west, they had treated him with that instinctive regard and gentleness which he usually got from men who were not German militarist bullies, or worse, British commercial bullies. For instance, in the morning in that prison barracks room, these unexamined recruits were ordered to make their beds and sweep the room. In obedience, so far, Richard Lovat took one of the heavy brooms. He was pale, silent, isolated: a queer figure, a young man with a beard. The other soldiers—or must–be soldiers—had looked at him as a queer fish, but that he was used to.
"Say, Dad," said a fattish young fellow older than himself, the only blatherer, a loose fellow who had come from Canada to join up and was already cursing: he was a good deal older than Somers.
"Say, Dad," said this fellow, as they sat in the train coming up, "all that'll come off to–morrow—Qck, Qck!"—and he made two noises, and gave two long swipes with his finger round his chin, to intimate that Richard's beard would be cut off to–morrow.
"We'll see," said Richard, smiling with pale lips.
He said in his heart, the day his beard was shaven he was beaten, lost. He identified it with his isolate manhood. He never forgot that journey up to Bodmin, with the other men who were called up. They were all bitterly, desperately miserable, but still manly: mostly very quiet, yet neither sloppy nor frightened. Only the fat, loose fellow who had given up a damned good job in Canada to come and serve this bloody country, etc., etc., was a ranter and a bragger. Somers saw him afterwards naked: strange, fat, soft, like a woman. But in another carriage the men sang all the time, or howled like dogs in the night:
I'll be your sweetheart, if you will be mine, All my life I'll be you–o–o–ur Valentine. Bluebells I'll gather, take them and be true, When I'm a man, my plan will be to marry you.
Wailing down the lost corridors of hell, surely, those ghastly melancholy notes—
All my li–i–i–ife—I'll be you–u–r Valentine.
Somers could never recall it without writhing. It is not death that matters, but the loss of the integral soul. And these men howled as if they were going to their doom, helplessly, ghastly. It was not the death in front. It was the surrender of all their old beliefs, and all their sacred liberty.
Those bluebells! They were worse than the earlier songs. In 1915, autumn, Hampstead Heath, leaves burning in heaps, in the blue air, London still almost pre–war London: but by the pond on the Spaniards Road, blue soldiers, wounded soldiers in their bright hospital blue and red, always there: and earth–coloured recruits with pale faces drilling near Parliament Hill. The pre–war world still lingering, and some vivid strangeness, glamour thrown in. At night all the great beams of the searchlights, in great straight bars, feeling across the London sky, feeling the clouds, feeling the body of the dark overhead. And then Zeppelin raids: the awful noise and the excitement. Somers was never afraid then. One evening he and Harriet walked from Platts Lane to the Spaniards Road, across the Heath: and there, in the sky, like some god vision, a Zeppelin, and the searchlights catching it, so that it gleamed like a manifestation in the heavens, then losing it, so that only the strange drumming came down out of the sky where the searchlights tangled their feelers. There it was again, high, high, high, tiny, pale, as one might imagine the Holy Ghost, far, far above. And the crashes of guns, and the awful hoarseness of shells bursting in the city. Then gradually, quiet. And from Parliament Hill, a great red glare below, near St. Paul's. Something ablaze in the city. Harriet was horribly afraid. Yet as she looked up at the far–off Zeppelin she said to Somers:
"Think, some of the boys I played with when I was a child are probably in it."
And he looked up at the far, luminous thing, like a moon. Were there men in it? Just men, with two vulnerable legs and warm mouths. The imagination could not go so far.
Those days, that autumn…people carried about chrysanthemums, yellow and brown chrysanthemums: and the smell of burning leaves: and the wounded, bright blue soldiers with their red cotton neckties, sitting together like macaws on the seats, pale and different from other people. And the star Jupiter very bright at nights over the cup hollow of the Vale, on Hampstead Heath. And the war news coming, the war horror drifting in, drifting in, prices rising, excitement growing, people going mad about the Zeppelin raids. And always the one song:
Keep the home fires burning, Though your hearts be yearning.
It was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter 1915–1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.
No man who has really consciously lived through this can believe again absolutely in democracy. No man who has heard reiterated in thousands of tones from all the common people during the crucial years of the war: "I believe in John Bull. Give me John Bull," can ever believe that in any crisis a people can govern itself, or is ever fit to govern itself. During the crucial years of the war, the people chose, and chose Bottomleyism. Bottom enough.
The well–bred, really cultured classes were on the whole passive resisters. They shirked their duty. It is the business of people who really know better to fight tooth and nail to keep up a standard, to hold control of authority. Laiser–aller is as guilty as the actual, stinking mongrelism it gives place to.
It was in mid–winter 1915 that Somers and Harriet went down to Cornwall. The spirit of the war—the spirit of collapse and of human ignominy, had not travelled so far yet. It came in advancing waves.
We hear so much of the bravery and horrors at the front. Brave the men were, all honour to them. It was at home the world was lost. We hear too little of the collapse of the proud human spirit at home, the triumph of sordid, rampant, raging meanness. "The bite of a jackal is blood–poisoning and mortification." And at home stayed all the jackals, middle–aged, male and female jackals. And they bit us all. And blood–poisoning and mortification set in.
We should never have let the jackals loose, and patted them on the head. They were feeding on our death all the while.
Away in the west Richard and Harriet lived alone in their cottage by the savage Atlantic. He hardly wrote at all, and never any propaganda. But he hated the war, and said so to the few Cornish people around. He laughed at the palpable lies of the press, bitterly. And because of his isolation and his absolute separateness, he was marked out as a spy.
"I am not a spy," he said, "I leave it to dirtier people. I am myself, and I won't have popular lies."
So, there began the visits from the policeman. A large, blue, helmeted figure at the door.
"Excuse me, sir, I have just a few enquiries to make."
The police–sergeant always a decent, kindly fellow, driven by the military.
Somers and Harriet lived now with that suspense about them in the very air they breathed. They were suspects.
"Then let them suspect," said he. "I do nothing to them, so what can they do to me.
He still believed in the constitutional liberty of an Englishman.
"You know," said Harriet, "you DO say things to these Cornish people."
"I only say, when they tell me newspaper lies, that they ARE lies."
But now the two began to be hated, hated far more than they knew.
"You want to be careful," warned one of the Cornish friends. "I've heard that the coast–watchers have got orders to keep very strict watch on you."
"Let them, they'll see nothing."
But it was not till afterwards that he learned that the watchers had lain behind the stone fence, to hear what he and Harriet talked about.
So, he was called up the first time and went. He was summoned to Penzance, and drove over with Harriet, expecting to return for the time at least. But he was ordered to proceed the same afternoon to Bodmin, along with sixteen or seventeen other fellows, farm hands and working men. He said good–bye to Harriet, who was to be driven back alone across the moors, to their lonely cottage on the other side.
"I shall be back to–morrow," he said.
England was still England, and he was not finally afraid.
The train journey from Penzance to Bodmin with the other men: the fat, bragging other man: the tall man who felt as Somers did: the change at the roadside station, with the porters chaffing the men that the handcuffs were on them. Indeed, it was like being one of a gang of convicts. The great, prison–like barracks—the disgusting evening meal of which he could eat nothing—the little terrier–like sergeant of the regulars, who made them a little encouraging speech: not a bad chap. The lounging about that barracks yard, prisoners, till bed–time: the other men crowding to the canteen, himself mostly alone. The brief talks with men who were for a moment curious as to who and what he was. For a moment only. They were most of them miserable and bitter.
Gaol! It was like gaol. He thought of Oscar Wilde in prison. Night came, and the beds to be made.
"They're good beds, clean beds, you'll sleep quite comfortable in them," said the elderly little sergeant with a white moustache. Nine o'clock lights out. Somers had brought no night clothes, nothing. He slept in his woollen pants, and was ashamed because they had patches on the knees, for he and Harriet were very poor these years. In the next bed was a youth, a queer fellow, in a sloppy suit of black broadcloth, and down–at–heel boots. He had a degenerate sort of handsomeness too. He had never spoken a word. His face was long and rather fine, but like an Apache, his straight black hair came in a lock over his forehead. And there was an Apache sort of sheepishness, stupidity, in everything he did. He was a long time getting undressed. Then there he stood, and his white cotton day–shirt was long below his knees, like a woman's nightgown. A restless, bitter night, with one man cough, cough, coughing, a hysterical cough, and others talking, making noises in their sleep. Bugle at six, and a scramble to wash themselves at the zinc trough in the wash house. Somers could not crowd in, did not get in till towards the end. Then he had to borrow soap, and afterwards a piece of comb. The men were all quiet and entirely inoffensive, common, but gentle, by nature decent. A sickening breakfast, then wash–up and sweep the floors. Somers took one of the heavy brooms, as ordered, and began. He swept his own floors nearly every day. But this was heavier work. The sergeant stopped him. "Don't you do that. You go and help to wipe the pots, if you like. Here, you boy, YOU—take that sweeping brush."
And Somers relinquished his broom to a bigger man.
They were kindly, and, in the essential sense, gentlemen, the little terrier of a sergeant too. Englishmen, his own people.
When it came to Somer's turn to be examined, and he took off his clothes and sat in his shirt in the cold lobby: the fat fellow pointed to his thin, delicate legs with a jeer. But Somers looked at him, and he was quiet again. The queer, soft, pale–bodied fellow, against Somers' thin delicate whiteness. The little sergeant kept saying:
"Don't you catch cold, you chaps."
In the warm room behind a screen, Richard took off his shirt and was examined. The doctor asked him where he lived—where was his home—asked as a gentleman asks, treated him with that gentle consideration Somers usually met with, save from business people or official people.
"We shall reject you, leave you free," said the doctor, after consulting with the more elderly, officious little man, "but we leave it to you to do what you can for your country."
"Thank you," said Richard, looking at him.
"Every man must do what he can," put in the other doctor, who was elderly and officious, but a gentleman. "The country needs the help of every man, and though we leave you free, we expect you to apply yourself to SOME service."
"Yes," said Somers, looking at him, and speaking in an absolutely neutral voice. Things said like that to him were never real to him: more like the noise of a cart passing, just a noise.
The two doctors looked from his face down his thin nakedness again.
"Put your shirt on," said the younger one.
And Somers could hear the mental comment, "Rum sort of a fellow," as he did so.
There was still a wait for the card. It was one of those cards: A—Called up for military service. B—Called up for service at the front, but not in the lines. C—Called up for non–military service. R—Rejected. A, B, and C were ruled out in red ink, leaving the Rejected. He still had to go to another office for his pay—two shillings and fourpence, or something like that. He signed for this and was free. Free—with two shillings and fourpence, and pass for a railway ticket—and God's air. The moment he stepped out with his card, he realised that it was Saturday morning, that the sun was shining, filling the big stone yard of the barracks, from which he could look to the station and the hill with its grass, beyond. That hill beyond—he had seemed to look at it through darkened glass, before. Till now, the morning had been a timeless greyness. Indeed, it had rained at seven o'clock, as they stood lounging miserably about in the barracks yard with its high wall, cold and bitter. And the tall man had talked to him bitterly.
But now the sun shone, the dark–green, Cornish hill, hard–looking, was just a near hill. He walked through the great gates. Ah God, he was out, he was free. The road with trees went downhill to the town. He hastened down, a free human being, on Saturday morning, the grey glaze gone from his eyes.
He telegraphed the ignominious word Rejected, and the time of his arrival, to Harriet. Then he went and had dinner. Some of the other men came in. They were reserved now—there was a distance between him and them—he was not of their social class.
"What are you?" they asked him.
"Rejected," he said.
And they looked at him grudgingly, thinking it was because he was not a working man he had got special favour. He knew what they thought, and he tried not to look so glad. But glad he was, and in some mysterious way, triumphant.
It was a wonderful journey on the Saturday afternoon home—sunny, busy, lovely. He changed at Truro and went into town. On the road he met some of the other fellows, who were called up, but not summoned for service immediately. They had some weeks, or months, of torment and suspense before them. They looked at Somers, and grinned rather jeeringly at him. They envied him—no wonder. And already he was a stranger, in another walk of life.
Rejected as unfit. One of the unfit. What did he care? The Cornish are always horrified of any ailment or physical disablement. "What's amiss then?" they would ask. They would SAY that you might as well be shot outright as labelled unfit. But most of them tried hard to find constitutional weaknesses in themselves, that would get them rejected also, notwithstanding. And at the same time they felt they must be horribly ashamed of their physical ignominy if they were LABELLED unfit.
Somers did not care. Let them label me unfit, he said to himself. I know my own body is fragile, in its way, but also it is very strong, and it's the only body that would carry my particular self. Let the fools peer at it and put me down undeveloped chest and what they like, so long as they leave me to my own way.
Then the kindly doctor's exhortation that he should find some way for himself for serving his country. He thought about that many times. But always, as he came near to the fact of committing himself, he knew that he simply could not commit himself to any service whatsoever. In no shape or form could he serve the war, either indirectly or directly. Yet it would have been so easy. He had quite enough influential friends in London to put him into some job, even some quite congenial, literary job, with a sufficient salary. They would be only too glad to do it, for there in his remoteness, writing occasionally an essay that only bothered them, he was a thorn in their flesh. And men and women with sons, brothers, husbands away fighting, it was small pleasure for them to read Mr. Somers and his denunciation. "This trench and machine warfare is a blasphemy against life itself, a blasphemy which we are all committing." All very well, they said, but we are in for a war, and what are we to do? We hate it as much as he does. But we can't all sit safely in Cornwall.
That was true too, and he knew it, and he felt the most a dreary misery, knowing how many brave, generous men were being put through this slaughter–machine of human devilishness. They were doing their best, and there was nothing else to do. But even that was no reason why he should go and do likewise.
If men had kept their souls firm and integral through the years, the war would never have come on. If, in the beginning, there had been enough strong, proud souls in England to concentrate the English feeling into stern, fierce, honourable fighting,, the war would never have gone as it went. But England slopped and wobbled, and the tide of horror accumulated.
And now, if circumstances had roped nearly all men into the horror, and it was a case of adding horror to horror, or dying well, on the other hand, the irremediable circumstance of his own separate soul made Richard Lovat's inevitable standing out. If there is outward, circumstantial unreason and fatality, there is inward unreason and inward fate. He would have to dare to follow his inward fate. He must remain alone, outside of everything, everything, conscious of what was going on, conscious of what he was doing and not doing. Conscious he must be, and consciously he must stick to it. To be forced into nothing.
For, above all things, man is a land animal and a thought–adventurer. Once the human consciousness really sinks and is swamped under the tide of events—as the best English consciousness was swamped, pacifist and patriotic alike—then the adventure is doomed. The English soul went under in the war, and, as a conscious, proud, adventurous, self–responsible soul, it was lost. We all lost the war: perhaps Germany least. Lost all the lot. The adventure is always lost when the human conscious soul gives way under the stress, fails to keep control, and is submerged. Then out swarm the rats and the Bottomleys and crew, and the ship of human adventure is a horrible piratic affair, a dirty sort of freebooting.
Richard Lovat had nothing to hang on to but his own soul. So he hung on to it, and tried to keep his wits. If no man was with him, he was hardly aware of it, he had to grip on so desperately, like a man on a plank in a shipwreck. The plank was his own individual self.
Followed that period of suspense which changed his life for ever. If the postman was coming plunging downhill through the bushes over the moor, the first thought was: What is he bringing now? The postman was over military age, and had a chuckle of pleasure in handing out those accursed On His Majesty's Service envelopes which meant that a man was summoned for torture. The postman was a great Wesleyan and a chapel preacher, and the thought of hell for other men was sweet in him: he had a religious zest added to his natural Cornish zest in other people's disasters.
Again, if there was the glint of a bicycle on the moor road, and if it turned down the bypath towards the cottage, then Somers strained his eyes to see if the rider were fat and blue, or tall and blue. Was it the police sergeant, or the police constable, coming for more identification proofs.
"We want your birth certificate," said the sergeant. "They've written from Bodmin asking you to produce your birth certificate."
"Then tell them to get it. No, I haven't got it. You've had my marriage certificate. You know who I am and where I was born and all the rest. Now let them get the birth certificate themselves."
Richard Lovat was at the end of all patience. They persisted he was a foreigner—poor Somers, just because he had a beard. One of the most intensely English little men England ever produced, with a passion for his country, even if it were often a passion of hatred. But no, they persisted he was a foreigner. Pah!
He and Harriet did all their own work, their own shopping. One wintry afternoon they were coming home with a knapsack, along the field path above the sea, when two khaki individuals, officers of some sort, strode after them.
"Excuse me," said one, in a damnatory officious voice. "What have you got in that sack?"
"A few groceries," said Lovat.
"I would like to look."
Somers put the sack down on the path. The tall and lofty officer stooped and groped nobly among a pound of rice and a piece of soap and a dozen candles.
"Ha!" he cried, exultant. "What's this? A camera!"
Richard peeped in the bag at the groping red military hands. For a moment he almost believed that a camera had spirited itself in among his few goods, the implication of his guilt was so powerful. He saw a block in brown paper.
"A penn'orth of salt," he said quietly, though pale to the lips with anger and insult.
But the gentlemanly officer—a Captain—tore open the paper. Yes, a common block of salt. He pushed the bag aside.
"We have to be careful," said the other, lesser man.
"Of course," said Richard, tying up his bag.
"Good afternoon!" said Harriet.
The fellows half saluted, and turned hastening away. Richard and Harriet had the advantage of sauntering behind them and looking at their noble backs. Oh, they were gentlemen, true English gentlemen: perhaps Cornish.
Harriet gave a pouf of laughter.
"The poor innocent salt!" she exclaimed.
And no doubt that also was chalked up against her.
It was Christmas time, and two friends came down to stay at the cottage with the Somers. Those were the days before America joined the Allies. The man friend arrived with a whole parcel of American dainties, buckwheat meal and sweet potatoes and maple sugar: the woman friend brought a good basket of fruit. They were to have a Christmas in the lonely cottage in spite of everything.
It was Christmas Eve, and a pouring black wet night outside. Nowhere can it be so black as on the edge of a Cornish moor, above the western sea, near the rocks where the ancient worshippers used to sacrifice. The darkness of menhirs. The American woman friend was crouching at the fire making fudge, the man was away in his room, when a thundering knock at the door. Ah Lord!
The burly police–sergeant, and his bicycle.
"Sorry to trouble you sir, but is an American, a Mr. Monsell, stopping here with you? He is. Can I have a word with him?"
"Yes. Won't you come in?"
Into the cosy cottage room, with the American girl at the fire,