CHAPTER IV
“Captain Rothenburg—killed in action. Rothenburg—Rothenburg—that’s a German name. What was he doing in an English command, I’d like to know? Ought to have been interned.”
Richard sprang up, knuckles white with the clench of his hands on the rim of the breakfast-table, his brows a lowering black ridge of anger. He and Mr Gryce confronted one another across a space of half the dining-room. The other visitors sprinkled at the various tables looked up expectant, conscious of latent antagonism spurting at last into visibility. The old man’s eyes bulged like pale marbles over the top of his newspaper.... “Ought to have been interned,” he repeated ostentatiously to his neighbours.
“Sit down, Richard,” his father commanded quietly. And as though with a physical effort, the wrestling look was unlocked; the boy sat down, head turned away from the detestable civilian who had dared sneer away Con’s glory. As if Con wasn’t as thumpingly keen a soldier as any of the purest British descent! Con, the splendid sixth-form hero of Richard’s earliest Winborough days. And now ... to make out he had given his life to no effect because his name happened to be German....
Richard was still shaking from the harsh shock of the news, and from a sort of desperate hatred which almost approached fear. “Is it true?” he asked Ferdie, who was searching through “The Telegraph.”
“I’m afraid so. Ah, yes, here: On May 15th ... etc. I suppose his parents can only just have heard. Nearly a week, isn’t it? Poor Con, he was a nice fellow. Otto will be upset—his eldest boy.”
“But why do they print the name Rothenburg?” Stella questioned in a low voice, inaudible to Mr Gryce.
“I expect the young man had the good sense not to beashamed of his father’s birthplace,” rumbled Hermann Marcus, in an aggressive voice distinctly audible to Mr Gryce, who muttered: “Damned old Hun!” amid a murmur of surrounding sympathy.
Richard explained: “David told me Con held out when the rest of them changed their name; he was a Territorial ages before the war, and his men knew him as Rothenburg—good enough for them!” with a defiant scowl in the direction of Mr Gryce. The latter, sending out his plate for more bacon: “I’ve had nothing but fat and gristle!” remarked further to the young lady at the table beside him: “They’re not half strict enough over this alien business. I like a German tobea German; if they want to fight, can’t they stick to their own side?”
“Though I’m not surprised some of them are ashamed to,” he creaked on, pulling his tuft of beard irascibly.
“No more, thanks.” Richard escaped from the room. He very rarely finished a meal nowadays.... Aunt Stella followed him out, and waylaid him in the empty hall:
“Richard, you must take care what you say in the dining-room. You shouldn’t have jumped up like that. Everybody saw.”
“And Con died so that—so that he could have his second helping of bacon,” Richard exploded.
“Yes, but you know in our position we’ve got to be careful. You especially.”
“It’s so unfair. So beastly unfair. If I thought he only said it to get my back up—but he believes it. He oughtn’t to beletbelieve it. I want to hammer it into him that old Con wasn’t even conscripted—was ready at the very first shove-off. Oh, it’s mean to do him out of the credit. Not that he would have cared, but——”
Stella was surprised. Her nephew’s extreme taciturnity was one of her stock subjects for jest.
“You’ll have to go and condole with the Rothenburgs to-day.”
Richard immediately lapsed into surly schoolboyhood: “Lord! Must I?”
“David is your friend. And as he happens to be at home—— Your father and I will be going after lunch. Or you can call by yourself this morning if you prefer it.”
“Call!” he grumbled. “As if David wanted people mooching about and saying they were sorry.”
“Saying? Aren’t you sorry?”
... Funny, how aunts were apt to say silly platitudes in a silly, ready-made voice, just when one was paying them the compliment of treating them like humans. It showed how careful you ought to be, Richard reflected glumly, on his way to Hampstead.
How on earth did one “condole?” He knew right enough just how David had cared about Con, and what a swollen sensation attacked his own throat to think of anyone so cheery and keen on his job and altogether decent as his late school-captain, part of a heap of flung-together mixed-up limbs and mud and stained khaki, here and there twitching still....
But all this was well set apart from official condolence. All this led to silence, not to speech. Richard, deliberately taking the longest way round to Fairwarne Gardens, became ever more acutely uncomfortable over his mission. Besides——
“You ought to have had it out with Mr Gryce.”
The phrase spoke itself so clearly in his mind, and with such detached emphasis, that he started, and almost glanced over his shoulder for the speaker.
It was quite true; his father had made a mistake in hushing him: himself had made a mistake in surrender. Mr Gryce had had the best of the encounter; and probably never again would Richard be whipped to such a stinging fury of indignation. An ingredient of fear might well creep in ... fear such as had twanged deep down in his consciousness when Aunt Stella said: “You especially....” The owner of those light-blue bulging eyes would not hesitate to use the advantage of an adversary’s birthplace.
Richard perceived uneasily how fatal it would be to live enslaved by the notion that he had lost all right to resent. Undoubtedly he ought to have had it out with old Gryce there and then at the breakfast table. Too late now....
And here was the Redbury’s house with blinds all lowered. He rang the bell; and waiting on the doorstep, tried to break up his face every time it stiffened into a set shape appropriate to the business in hand.
“Is Mr David in?”
David, in second-lieutenant’s khaki sobered by a black mourning band on the sleeve, hardly looked up from his puttees at Richard’s entrance; and when the first apathetic “Hullo!” was over, there seemed nothing more to be said. The room wasin semi-darkness, and the very slant of sunshine through the chinks was furtive.
“What on earth have you come for?” David burst out at last irritably. “To express your sincere sympathy with me in my great bereavement? Then for the Lord’s sake, express it—if you can—and get it over, and be natural. You make me nervous, standing about as though you had changed into a black tie before coming out, which I wonder you haven’t!”
Richard in his turn got thoroughly bad-tempered. The walk had been hot and dusty, and there was the episode of Mr Gryce that morning, and—and Con was dead. And now David merely jeered at him.
“All right—I’m going; you needn’t worry. I didn’t come here for fun, they made me.”
David laughed uproariously. “That’s better; that’s more the little Richard we know and love!”
Richard grunted, and banged himself into a chair. He understood now.... David’s noisy laughter had shown him.
“When did you get your commission?”
“Only last week. Samson worked it for me—through his cousin, Sir Ephraim Phillips. Did you know Samson was back from the Front?—trench-feet. Pater’s still trying to rope him into the family, with Nell as a lasso; but I don’t believe he’s having any; still keen on Deb.”
“So you’ll be going to France, perhaps....”
“Yes, in about six months I shall be able to avenge Con by killing the Hun who killed him.”
“Does—would that—help?” Richard asked awkwardly. Then met David’s ironic eyes—
“It ought to be the attitude, oughtn’t it? Beatrice supplied me with it, and the family have taken up the chorus. It’s so natural and picturesque and primitive: the younger brother belting on his sword and going forth to slay for the sake of the slain. Old Grandmother Phillips, who approves of me because she thinks I take my religion seriously, even added the Old Testament touch: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth....
“No, Richard, it doesn’t help at all. If I could land home on the one actual and definite German who was responsible for Con, it would be different. I believe in fighting—for love of a cause. As Con did. Oh, Con never said much, but he was a patriot down to bedrock fundamental; he was a pre-warpatriot, which was pretty rare. And now that he’s dead, I can’t possibly stand out. Because of my people. It would explode all that he’s done for them. ‘My son who was killed in action’ would be see-sawed out of all usefulness by ‘My son who conscientiously objected.’ They wouldn’t be able to say the words ‘My son’ at all. I can’t play them or Con a shabby trick like that; after all, patriotism begins at home—loyalty to one’s family is a local form of patriotism, I suppose. If the Redburys were properly entrenched, but——”
“‘In our position.’...” Richard quoted softly.
And David added with very unboyish bitterness: “Pater’s awfully upset now—but I can already foresee what a magnificent asset Con’s death is going to be—‘in our position,’ as you say. Pater will run it for all he’s worth. Marcus, there’s a kink wrong in civilization when a father’s got to swank for safety on a son’s death.”
“Swank?”
“There are letters to show, from the Colonel, from brother-officers, from his men. It seems that long after he was wounded, he held that bit of trench with one machine-gun to cover a retreat. Oh, the stock tale of heroism!”
Richard was badly jarred by the last words. It struck him that David was carrying flippant detachment rather too far; one might well be glad of a brother who was guilty of the stock heroism. “Con jolly well deserves a medal for that,” he remarked on an aggressive note.
And David said: “He’s been recommended for the D.S.O.”—and suddenly he jerked up his head and went crimson.... Richard turned his eyes away from that surge of hot red pride. Funny, how one never knew, with David!
Trudchen Redbury popped in her head, as though in search of someone.
“Ach, Davidchen——” she nodded kindly to the two boys, but still did not appear to have found what—or who—she wanted. Her comfortable fat little face was rough and scrapy with long crying—the kind of crying that goes on and on, and stops for a bit, and smiles and talks and gives the orders in the kitchen, and then meanders on again....
Trudchen had none of the Spartan courage recommended to mothers nowadays.
“Hullo, Mums!”—David sprang up and laid his arm round her dumpy shoulders and gently put his lips to her cheek—(Yes,he was a dear fellow, her youngest boy, and so much more considerate than Con, who had always nearly knocked her down with his violent hugs.... “Mein Konrad!”)
“Na, Richard, how goes your Aunt Stella?”
“She’s coming this afternoon.” And Richard growled something in which the word “sorry” vaguely occurred.
“David, vot do you sink?—if I write to liebe Anna now, it vill gewiss reach her in the neighbourhood of the sixtieth birthday when there vill be rejoicings—what one can rejoice these days——” she shrugged resignedly. “Our Con more than you or Max your Aunt’s loveling ever was. Vot do you sink, David?”—for the second time; “shall I vait before I write to Berlin—a month perhaps? One does not wish to spoil a birthday.”
But beyond a queer look shot towards Richard, David made no comment. And presently Trudchen went on, with a sort of chirruppy perplexity:
“And you know how angry Papa is when I ask him at all about Anna and Karl, though he used to love and eat largely of her Pflaumentorte and vex me by naming it better than mine. And yet not even a letter from me for the sixtieth birthday—vot vill she think? And she and I wiz ever only a year between ... but how can one write and say nothing about our Con ... though it will surely remind her again of the armer seligen Fritz—since how little while is he too ... my eldest and her youngest——” she sighed. “Perhaps—no—I will not tell zem—now.” And yet again: “Vot do you sink, David?”
“There’s Max,” he reminded her. “We’ve written to Max—and if he sees Uncle Karl——”
“Ne, Schatz, not now they have moved him to that camp so far away.... And one does not know vot to believe or not; they say—Otto says the Chermans do such terrible sings to the English prisoners—and the Phillips tell me too—it is almost unthinkbar—to cut offboththe hands at the wrist——”
“Mums, Mums, when you’ve had letters through in Max’s own writing——”
“As if the dear boy would worry me by telling it in a letter....” sobbed Trudchen.
Richard emphatically felt the need of departure. And the Lord spared him an encounter with Otto in the hall.
He lunched, and then sauntered into the afternoon show at a music-hall, thinking to get rid of himself by plunging intoa mass of people and a rattle of sound. But the dress-circle was filled with an atmosphere unusually attentive to the performers on the stage; and when the lights were raised during the interval, he perceived that the seats were mainly occupied by a large detachment from St Dunstan’s: men who had been blinded in the war; men who had been chosen haphazard for the greatest sacrifice of all. Richard wondered whether a single one of them had anticipated such a calamity as this; and whether, knowing, they would still have willingly exposed themselves; he had heard so many soldiers bound for the Front, half-jokingly prophecy their own death, or a broken nose, or a wooden leg; but—no, he had never heard the possibility of blindness joked about. Was this the secret fear they all carried in their hearts when they volunteered?
“Not a bad show,” he remarked to his neighbour, who immediately turned on him one immense rolling eye and a tiny glass one, and became confidential. He was a comical little chap, small and square, with a wide mouth, a skyward nose, and a knowing air that was enhanced by the appearance of a fixed wink. He informed Richard that he was the third of a trio; that he was his mother’s favourite, and his father’s favourite and the favourite of his two brothers; that one of his brothers had married a shrew and the other a slattern, and he alone had the perfect wife; and that the less fortunate twain were wont to say to him: “Jock, wish I ’ad yer luck!”... Moreover, he was the secret favourite of both the slattern and the shrew, and he ought by rights to have won the waltzing competition up at St Dunstan’s on Monday night, but his partner had fouled his chances by treading three times on his toe, and it was bluggy well the last time he was going to lug her round the room!...
“You brick!” muttered Richard in his heart, over and over again. Not only to be jolly and normal, but actually keen about things still—prizes, and your brother’s wife! not, as one instinctively imagined these martyrs of the war, pensive and resigned and uncannily patient, with a sort of pale upliftedness....
The jovial rowdiness in that portion of the auditorium was hushed as the curtain went up on a troupe of acrobats and dancers kissing amorous hands to the audience, from various inverted positions on the trapeze.
“Wot’s that?” demanded Richard’s neighbour. Then:“‘R—I see, said the blind man!’ ackerbats—lot o’ use to us blindies, that. Funny idea o’ givin’ us pleasure some people ’ave: one old geezer, she came ter take me out fer the day in a kerridge an’ all. ‘Wot-o!’ sez I to myself. An’—are you listening’, you?”—with a nudge—“an’ she took methree times to Churchafore she brought me back in the evenin’!”
Richard ducked his head in a smother of laughter; the enormous eye rolled mournfully in his direction had been so pregnant of disgust.
“Three times to Church, an’ no lollies. An’ me ’elpless. Some people——” words failed him. He fumbled precariously with a cigarette and a lighted match, quite matter-of-fact over his handicap. “That all right?” shaking the match to and fro and dropping it still alight; Richard’s foot shot out, stealthily.... “’Ave one? they give us plenty. Yus, when she come again, I was in ’iding, betcherlife. Scout warned me. ‘That pore well-be’aved young man anywhere about?’ sez she to Sister; but Sister was a sport and didn’t let on. So she just took a look round at me pals: ‘Are they all quite blind?’ sez she; ‘Yus, but they ain’t deaf,’ sez Sister, quick as ’ell. ’R well, s’pose ’er idea of ’appiness ain’t mine; she did ’er best.”
“What does make you happy?”
The reply was brief and to the point: “Taxis an’ cuddlin’.”
... It was not until the last turn of all, a Chinese conjuror, that Richard found his companion’s attention sufficiently astray from the stage to permit him to put a question that had lately nagged for an answer from its source. “I say—what made you join up?”
“Looked as though ’Is Majesty wos invitin’ specially me to a private picnic. An’ I sez:Withpleasure!... Yus, an’ then I woke up, an’ found one of my eyes gone West, an’ t’other deaf-an’-dumb. Well, I’m not saying nuffing to that; wot’s done is done, an’ ’ad ter be done by someone, an’ Government’s paying me ’ansome for the rest o’ my life; but when it comes to putting me to ajob——” again a large disgusted eye appealed to Richard for sympathy. “Work? not ’alf! And the other chaps is that keen they makes an awkward president.”
“What?”
“President. Same as setting an example, only not quite. But you just see what me mother thinks abaht it.” He fumbledin his pockets, pulled out two or three crumpled letters, and thrust them into Richard’s hand. “Read ’em.”
The main point of the letters was clear: Harold’s old mother passionately advised Harold not to work—thank God there was plenty while she and father could live and work for him; plenty afterwards too—“I will see to that, son, so don’t you bother to learn a trade. Well, son, never mind about your sight, that don’t matter to us; at any rate your not one as had cold feet. There’ll always be plenty for you, so don’t you let them make you learn nothing you don’t want, darling——”
“Thank you,” said Richard gently, passing the letters back. Most of the last pages were filled up with pencil crosses; he wondered if Harold knew....
The music was holding its breath while Li Hung Wang surpassed himself in a last effort of magic; resulting in a terrific display of flags; and the curtains swaying together, back again, and once more together to the opening chords of “Land of Hope and Glory.”
Immediately the men of St Dunstan’s shuffled to their feet and stood at attention while they sang through the first verse of Elgar’s anthem, till the whole risen audience, enthusiastically joining in, swamped their voices in a volume of louder, fresher sound....
And Richard carried out into the Strand the blurred vision of uneven rows of weedy, shambling figures in their ill-fitting mufti, the ephemeral vanity of khaki shed now for good, ordinary men in ordinary casual clothes, heads tilted stiffly backwards:
“Land of Hope and GloryMother of the Free—”
“Land of Hope and GloryMother of the Free—”
“Land of Hope and GloryMother of the Free—”
“Land of Hope and Glory
Mother of the Free—”
And he knew that though the picture of Trudchen Redbury perplexed over the question whether tidings of Con’s death in the English trenches should be sent to spoil the birthday of her sister Anna in Berlin, might and did symbolize an international predicament—yet that other picture was indeed war and the splendour of war and beyond war; was patriotism itself, the urge and reason for patriotism, the ultimate answer to all niggling private issues; he knew that before war and after war, war may be averted; but during war ours is to shut both eyes and stand by the blind and follow the dead.
And then, in all the forgetful semi-hysterical jubilance ofthe pride of belonging, he was brought to a standstill as though by a pounding blow on the forehead, confronted with a placard of a weekly journal just out:
“Enemy Aliens. Intern them all.”
As surely a personal message for him, as a Salvationist’s shouted text goes straight home to the heart of a sinner.
“What’s the good? they don’t want me....”
He seemed to be repeating vaguely some childish experience of disappointment, when his eagerly proffered help was turned away with the same superciliousness of uncomprehending rebuff.
“They don’t want me. Well—I don’t want them either!” ... he was not so very much older now, after all.
“I don’t want to be English!”
No, Richard? Not even for the sake of those rows of eyes, bandaged and gutted and black-spectacled? Not even for the right to join in as those men stood at attention, and chanted in the queer flat strains peculiar to the blind:
“How can we extol theeWho are born of thee?”...
“How can we extol theeWho are born of thee?”...
“How can we extol theeWho are born of thee?”...
“How can we extol thee
Who are born of thee?”...
Not even to be one of them, Richard?
“Well, I wasn’t born in England, so what does it matter?”
But he was aware, in a positive flash of knowledge, that had he been permitted to go into the trenches and fight, it would have been bang there, between the eyes, that his bullet would have caught and shattered him ... there, where the insult of the placard seemed first to have struck. He had not been allowed the choice of which blow; so how could he ever prove to this coldly, carelessly exclusive England, how the choice would unquestioningly have swung?
Half-an-hour later, as he stormed through the hall of Montagu House, he was greeted by the menace of Mr Gryce’s voice, creaking, creaking....
“Naturalized or unnaturalized, it’s all the same—the leopard can’t change his spots!”
And the day was rounded to a perfect circle.
And after that, Mr Gryce’s voice mixed itself up with pretty well everything; but particularly with Richard’s three meals a day in the dining-room of Montagu Hall. He would like to have disappointed Mr Gryce by occasional absences from meals—taking it for granted that the Inquisitor does feel a certain disappointment at the absence of his victims from the rack; but, remembering David’s remarks on patriotism locally applied, he forced himself to be present for his father’s sake; forced his taciturnity to voluble talk, throwing up a screen between Ferdie and the enemy; or, if that failed, at least grandfather could sometimes be diverted from the muttered arrogance of patriotism—German patriotism—which might at any moment,viaMr Gryce’s hearing, provoke a public scene. Richard dreaded a scene now as much as he had sought it at the incident of Con Rothenburg’s death; it was as though his pugnacity had been wounded, and would not heal, and was raw-sensitive....
Especially raw-sensitive to Mr Gryce; his pores were all open to Mr Gryce, who from merely ignoring the Marcus family, was suddenly subjecting them to active nagging persecution. The recent loss of the “Hampshire,” with Lord Kitchener aboard, had resulted in another wave of anti-German feeling sweeping over the country. Richard hardly wondered at it; he was furiously resentful, furiously suspicious himself over the happening—but that did not prevent him from equal wrath when Mr Gryce considered himself patriotically entitled thereby to bang doors in Aunt Stella’s face.
The truth was that both Richard and Mr Gryce were both afflicted with the same obsession—the internment of enemy aliens; to each of them, the war centred entirely on this point, radiating thence on spokes of lesser interest. But Mr Gryce was on his own territory.
Three meals a day! They met in the hall; they met on the stairs and landings; in the streets round about the house ... but they passed with quickening step, averted eyes, and a twitching sense of the other’s nearness. But those three meals a day had to be stolidly endured. Breakfast was worst, for then Mr Gryce read aloud the papers to his neighbours, and delivered his opinions—allatthe Marcus table, for he never spoke to them directly. Richard tried being earlier thanMr Gryce at breakfast ... but then he had to see the pink head and the wisp of white beard travel down the room, sit down at the table, and with a certain unctuous deliberation, unfold the paper; watch him ... and then wait, with a cold sickness of anticipation, for the first rusty creak: “What do you think the Germans have been doing now?——” How many thousand times more would he have to hear Mr Gryce’s vicious inflexion of the word: Germans—(“He doesn’t mean the fighting Germans, the Germans out there; he means us; he means me....”)
Presently it seemed to Richard that the creak of the voice and the pinkness of the head was mixing itself in with the very food he swallowed, poisoning it....
For the boy had reached that state where he felt himself acutely and personally responsible for every atrocity committed by the Hun enemy; his nerves shrank and cowered from each newly-printed horror or treachery or brutality, as from a thong laid across his bare shoulders. And there was always something—hospital ships sunk—English prisoners tortured—liner passengers drowned—poison gas—Zepp raids on non-combatants—wanton violation again and again of the code of decent warfare. Richard, tired out from the long day-to-day strain, only wanted the Germans for pity’s sake to stop—if but for a little while, tostop.... All England had dwindled to Mr Gryce, and there was no one but Richard himself to stand forward and answer for all Germany’s accumulating reproach!
He put up a gallant enough struggle to retain his fairness of vision. And presently his imagination, up to all sorts of tricks in these days, was able to see himself and his personality on the nerves of Mr Gryce, in exact replica of Mr Gryce on the nerves of Richard Marcus ... saw the irritation in the curve of his own stolid ill-tempered shoulders—the antagonism aroused by his out-thrust underlip and the butting carriage of his head.... “Always that boy! and a loyal Englishman has no option but to live in the same house, breathing the same air, eat and sit in the same room, tread the same carpet—it’s a disgrace!” Richard was so detachedly aware of this point of view that at certain hysterical moments of encounter he was not sure if he were driven out of the smoking-room by sight of that inevitable pink head, or whether he were banging the door with the hand of Mr Gryce’s fury because those Marcusshoulders were discovered humping in the armchair by the window.
He mistrusted an imagination as flexible. But the more he denied it and resented it, the more uncannily it functioned. Marcus of Winborough two years ago would have cut the present Marcus dead, dubbing him a freak ... he saw that too.
He was far from desire to defend the Germans. He examined their conduct generally, their methods of warfare, with that new impartiality of his; gave them their due of victory, resource, consistency and stubborn devotion to their country; and nevertheless came to a conclusion that whereas a decent German might be almost as decent as a decent Briton, a rotten German is immeasurably rottener than the rottenest Briton. The sinking of hospital ships, for instance; wantonly to plunge into icy death the broken suffering bodies of men who had once already, perilously and with infinite care, been dragged back to life, and only asked now to be let rest with their own people again in their own land. Nothing could condone the sinking of hospital ships ... and Richard had to clench his teeth on the longing to join hotly in the chorus of condemnation; as he had also to grind down the impulse to join the shouting when the news was good and glorious—“What have either of these to do with you?”
By unspoken pact, the Marcuses remained silent on these subjects, when in public; they did not gain much by the attitude, for people commented in whispers: “Have you noticed that they never have anything to say on our victories, or about the atrocities? Bound to have sympathies with the other side; wonder what they say among themselves?” On the other hand, if they expressed their perfectly spontaneous pleasure over an English feat of arms, and their quite unaffected indignation over a Hun outrage, they were instantly accused of hypocrisy and over-acting, and Mr Gryce said: “I like a German at least tobea German!”
It was a difficult problem, but on the whole, perhaps, silence solved it best. And Ferdie tried to impart to his son some of that placid philosophy which formed a firm basis to his more surface characteristics.
“My dear boy, what do you expect?—that in times like these the English will cherish us for our German origin? On the whole, they are lenient and fair-minded——”
“Yes, but they promised you—promised without reservation, that you should be as good as an Englishman, equal to any Englishman. And because it was the English who promised, we—you—we all thought it was all right ...” his tone was heavy with reproach for the country which of all countries had a reputation for welcoming and sheltering those refugees from harsher lands and laws.
For Richard, in want of occupation, had begun to read lately; hoping to find in history the companionship of other children of No Man’s Land; common-sense told him that in every war must have been a few examples of betwixt and between, belonging to both sides and therefore outcast from either side. He was comforted, in an odd sort of way, by this hunt through old tomes and chronicles, for precedent to his own position. Precedent that he could quote authoritatively to Ferdie, less well-informed.
“Be patient,” said Ferdinand Marcus. “One day the war will be over, and all will be forgotten.”
“Not it. Never. No foreigner will ever feel safe in England again.”
“Why not? we suffer from inconvenience, not from tyranny.”
“But in their heart of hearts they’ve chucked us out for good.... Haven’t you heard old Gryce swear he’ll never shake hands with a German again?”
Ferdie weighed the question of old Gryce with solemn deliberation, and then summed up: “Yes, he has the mania to persecute. One can understand—but one wishes he would not insult your aunt. But perhaps he has lost a son.”
“Oh—is this Regent Street or Tuesday?” impatiently. “No forgivable link of cause and effect. Besides, he hasn’t lost a son. He’s not even married. It’s just that he has nothing better to do. You never hear a fellow who’s back from the Front, using himself up in anti-alien agitation. But old Gryce talks big about brave little Belgium—and then raises hell if the Belgians get served with the pudding before him at dinner. I’m not unreasonable, Dad; I can understand perfectly well that while the Germans are murdering our men and women it’s natural that the relations of our murdered men and women find it painful to meet us, even though we’re not the same Germans. That’s why the internment penalty is a just penalty, I suppose; at any rate, I don’t see how itcould be avoided. But petty nagging is different. There’d be some sense in the not-shaking-hands business if one could strike away a hand that was the concentrated essence of all that was foul in Germany——”
“I wonder,” said Ferdinand slowly, “if you have any idea of all thatisfoul in Germany?—of what drove a whole colony to England in 1848?—the Acht-und-vierzigers, as they call themselves, those few who are still alive and whose sons are now part and parcel of the British Empire, bleeding for it....”
“Eighteen-forty-eight?—that was a democratic revolt against the domination of Prussia over the smaller states, wasn’t it?”
“Yes; the only way we could protest; we could hardly enter into Civil War—we who wanted only peace. The early socialists. So we escaped to England, and we are glad we escaped. We—well, I was not born yet; my turn came later, and was more solitary. But there lies the root of our antagonism to the fatherland that bore us; and that is what the English find so hard to understand in us now. They argue by analogy: because no Englishman can ever feel anything but an Englishman, so no German—etc. But the English nature is different ... and besides, it has had no need for discontent; no need to exchange their own country for another. They think we still love Germany. But are we not herebecausewe hate Germany? I have no wish to make speeches or to give you a history-lesson, Richard; but I sometimes wish, when I see you angry with me for—how did you once put it?—shoving you in a position with your feelings in one pocket and your birth-certificate in the other, I sometimes wish you realized a little better how you would have rebelled against German education and drill system and forced Imperialism; rebelled, or—worse still—submitted. You have noticed your grandfather, even now that he is old and ill and in a strange land, how rudely he still speaks, how dogmatically he thinks, how arbitrary are his judgments, and how he considers nobody. That is all military Germany embodied. There is another side to Germany, certainly, but it is crushed during war-time. Perhaps it will flower softly again afterwards——”
“Afterwards? Oh, father, will there ever be an afterwards? Will it be over by next year, do you think?”
(Next Autumn he would be eighteen....)
The elder Marcus looked doubtful: “Who can tell? Haveyou seen in to-day’s paper?—there have been peace negotiations——”
“Anythingreal?”
And again: “Who can tell? You had better see for yourself. Here.”
But Richard only made a pretext of seeing for himself. He dreaded reading the papers; made any sort of excuse not to do so. The papers were always full of allusions, direct or indirect, to naturalized and unnaturalized Germans, to spies in our midst, reproaches to the Government for laxness, incitements to reprisals, leagues for the future exclusion of Germans or semi-Germans, root and branch, from all association with civilized countries. Even if one hunted through the whole paper with ever-growing relief at one day, one issue, free from barbed reproach ... at the last, a small paragraph would surely catch the eye and destroy the momentary security. So Richard read no papers. The posters were bad enough, blatant or mysterious from the kerbstone; you could not avoid those, except by never stirring from the house ... and in the house was Mr Gryce. Besides, there is no escape when the mind is spread like a net to catch all stray matter that has bearing on the one morbid obsession. Even when it is a question of going round the corner to have a pair of Aunt Stella’s boots soled and heeled....
In the little street were rival cobblers; one with the name: Marshall, obviously re-painted over a name possibly less pleasing to his customers; the other displaying a large placard in the window: “No German TaintHere!”
“Yes, but it’s rather mean to make an advertisement out of it!” and Richard, against express orders, carried Aunt Stella’s boots to Mr Marshall. The latter was a lank sad-faced individual with a slight cockney accent; he confided in Richard that he had unfortunately been born in Germany of a German father—— “but p’raps I oughtn’t to be tellin’ you this, sir?” “It’s all right,” gruffly. “Brought up over ’ere with me aunt and uncle who put me in the army—the reg’lar army, that is. Yes, oh yes, I wos a Tommy years before the war, an’ went through all the Gallipoli part of it. ’Ot stuff!—I wos shipped home nearly dead from an explodin’ shell. They discharged me out o’ hospital at last, an’ discharged me from the army; an’ I took over me late uncle’s job ’ere. No, I’m not partial to cobblin’; I tried most other things, butthey won’t ’ave me nowhere, being so to speak, a German, sir. They ask very particular, you see, nowadays. And this isn’t payin’, neither ... not by any manner of means. Customers remember the name. Fact is, sir, I’m afraid I shall ’ave to be quick with these ’ere boots—I’m wantin’ to oblige you, since you brought ’em ’ere, but I’m obliged to shut up shop next week.”
“What will you do?”
“Nothing for me to do but ask ’em to intern me, sir. A man can’t starve. Wot I’m fearin’ rather, is that them in the internment camp won’t make me over welcome neither, me havin’ fought against ’em, and bein’ mostly English in my ways.”
Richard whistled.... “What an old muddle it is! I’m in the same box,” he added, envying the man his Gallipoli experience, exploding shell and all.
“Yes, I know, sir; or I wouldn’t ’ave been so bold——”
“Know? How do you know?” God! there surely could not be anything German in his appearance ... horrible thought!
“It’s talked about among the folks in the neighbourhood, sir; there’s a gentleman at Montagu ’All as isn’t too friendly to you, I believe; an’ ’e seems to have told the policeman at the corner to keep a sharp eye——”
“I see. Thanks. Good-day.”
Mr Gryce. And the mythical policeman of Otto Rothenburg’s dread, materialized at last. Not that it mattered; there was nothing for him to find out. “May as well make up my mind to the fact that I’m a criminal,” muttered Richard with a grim smile. It was part of the nightmare that his absolute belief that the foundations of things were “all right,” solid ground upon which the foot might solidly tread, had now been shaken to this ... this ricketiness. “Ican’tbe a German—I don’tlikethe Germans!” his cry of a year ago, had been incredulous of a state of the world in which such things could happen. Now: “I haven’tdoneanything!”—but his tone was acceptance that such things did happen, and therefore anything could happen, and go on happening ... who or what was left to stand security?
“When will the boots be ready?” Aunt Stella enquired.
“Early next week.”
“As soon as that?”
Richard explained.
“I told you to take them to the other man,” displeased.
“Thought poor old Marshall needed encouragement.”
“Then leave encouragement to people in a different position. I’ve warned you before that we must be careful.”
Stella was certainly careful; the most careful of the family. She would have nothing to do with the lady who recently came to Montagu Hall and who gave Richard one moment of sardonic happiness by demanding of Mr Gryce, in innocent and guttural friendliness: “Haf you got a dable-dime, my Sir?”
Mr Gryce, more successful with her than with the Marcuses—perhaps her credentials were less unimpeachable—had her removed within a week; but not before she had thrice beamingly tried to attach herself to Stella, under the false impression that here at least she was bound to find kindly compatriotism and shelter, and thrice had suffered a chilling snub delivered without consideration for her possible feelings: “She’s ever so much more German than we are,” Stella explained to the other members of her family; “we really can’t risk it—in our position! Just as well that old Gryce is getting rid of her.”
Richard thought: “It’ll be us next....”
He did not say so. After his one outburst to Ferdie, he never mentioned Mr Gryce to him again ... could not, somehow, get the name past a thickness in his throat. The three Marcuses imagined that Richard did not notice Mr Gryce and his malignant attitude—(“Richard was never observant!”).... He was glad for them to believe it. Mr Gryce had taken it upon himself, of late, to warn every fresh arrival at Montagu Hall, of the deadly growth in their midst. Richard watched him do it once, from the other end of the long drawing-room; he could have strode out, certainly; but, for discipline of that unruly sense of fear, he forced himself deliberately to witness the give-away; one did not surrender to fear without a struggle. But ... Mr Gryce worked himself into his sleep, now, and made it hideous. He dreamt wildly of scenes with Mr Gryce, in which, instead of hurling at him all the wounding, tearing speeches repressed during the day—which might have been some relief—he was compelled instead to follow him about, pleading his case, over and over again: “Don’t you—can’tyou understand—it isn’t my fault? It’s nobody’s fault. You can’t stop yourself from hating us, but you couldn’t have stopped yourself from being born in Germany either—oh, dotryand see that....” It was perfectly damnable to have to plead with Mr Gryce, even in sleep, and to be helpless in preventing the subconscious self from these humiliating displays. “Can—I—help—for—it?”.... Why, that was what Gottlieb Schnabel had gasped.... Mixed up with his dreams, the old sick dream of a flour-smeared face cowering from his pursuers—from Richard—from Richard himself....
His punishment, these slow fear-bitten months; punishment for his previous denseness of imagination. Yes, yes, but it has gone on so long, and there seems no end to it, and I’m tired and frightened and beaten—beaten to my knees. You who send punishment and You who can stay it, let it be over now....
“Are you alone?”
“Richard!”
Deb shrank with a cold sense of shock at sight of his face, from which all fleshiness had contracted to a drawn covering of the bony structure; hollows in the cheeks; hard mouth; and eyes that had known persecution.... “Richard, what is it? I haven’t seen you for about six weeks. Have you been ill?”
“No. I say, are you alone?”
“Yes; La llorraine and Manon won’t be in for ages.”
“You—you—you’ve got to marry Samson Phillips.”
“I mean.... I want you to,” when he saw her choking bewilderment.
Deb perceived that he was in extremes. “I’ll do anything, Richard.” She just touched him with her hand. And he stumbled forward and put his head down in her lap and began to cry.
“Richard ... dear old boy ...” she was athrill with terror now. It was horrible to hear him, with the knowledge how his normal self, the self which for seventeen years had stood for all that was chunky and gruff and pugnacious, was abhorring, or would presently return to abhor, this sudden utter breakdown of all control. “Tell me—oh do tell me,” Deb pleaded to the hunched suffering curve of his shoulders.
“They won’t leave us alone ... the pink heads. Deb—rowsof pink heads everywhere—you can see them from the top—yes, sitting round tables ... all over England: ‘Intern the Alien Enemy.’ But it isn’t that so much; I’m getting used to the thought of it, for me; one year—not quite—and I shall be interned.... What’s the word make you feel?—cold iron and damp black earth. But it isn’t that——”
“What is it then, dear?”
“Deb, d’you know why England and Germany are fighting? Such a silly reason!—to find out if Goethe or Shakespeare was the greatest. Lothar said so.”
“We’re fighting to keep England a free country,” Deb spoke clearly and simply as to a child ... her young brother was even less than a child in his shaken hysterical outpourings.
“Are we? I’ve been thinking too much, thinking all the time, and all round.... I want to stop thinking, but I don’t know where to begin to stop, or why I ever started to think.... Something happened to Gottlieb Schnabel and he screamed—but it was quite right, Deb, he was a German; he shouldn’t have left Germany; perhaps his father brought him here and didn’t have him naturalized; if he’d stopped over there he might have fought for his country—tho’ he’d have been a rotten fighter. Anyway, the Germans wouldn’t have him now. They wouldn’t have me.”
“But even if—you’d never——?...Richard!”
He was silent, too tired to attempt to tell her of all the bludgeonings his spirit had received since that evening in the May of 1915. “But I’d still knock down the fellow who hinted that I cared a curse for any country except England ... England....”
But England had informed him fifty times a day, and by fifty different methods, subtle and brutal, that she had no need of him, no use for him, preferred to do without him, doubted and despised him.... Loyalty crept shivering into a corner at last ... loyalty was apathetic, numb——
“What’s the good? It just has to be like this. They’d persecute me in Germany for being English, worse than in England for being German. And the neutral countries are all getting sucked in one side or the other.... I thought once we could all go to America. What’s the good! everybody’s fighting for something they believe in! everybody’s got their back to the wall ... there’s not even a wall for us; only dropping spaces.... No Man’s Land.... I dream of itwhen I fall asleep—nowhere to go—and reeling pushes from all sides—you spin round and round, and your brain spins round and round—nowhere to go and nowhere to rest—for Thomas Spalding and me.... You hope it’s going to end, but it doesn’t, and they hate us worse every day ... they hate us worse than they hate the real Germans.... I don’t know why, I don’t know what we’vedone—except perhaps that we’re here and near at hand; it’s more fun to hate something that’s near, isn’t it? We hang on and try to prove that we’re loyal and all right ... the hate seems to be receding ... and then something happens—and naturally it all rolls up again. Deb, it’s a double treachery when one of our lot betrays England to Germany—they betray us to England at the same time ... and you can see the pink heads bobbing....”
“The war will be over one day.”
The boy lifted his face; showed her the eyes of a fighter crucified to inaction:
“And what sort of a world do you suppose it will be, after the war, for men who haven’t fought in the war? The others will talk and remember—and I’ll be shut outside their talk and memories. They’ll have suffered, and lost their pals, and helped their pals through with it—I shall have suffered nothing and lost nothing and helped no one. I—oh, I was kept safe ... in cold storage! God! the meanest little whelp of a Servian or Bulgarian, German, Turk, or Belgian—it doesn’t matter what side, when you’re in the scrum, heart and soul—he will have taken a risk denied to me. I’m funking life after the war, worse even than to-day and to-morrow and next week—and next Autumn. Didn’t know I was a funk, did you, Deb?”
She asked slowly: “Will it really do you any good, if I marry Samson Phillips?”
And Richard got up, frowning. “No. What makes you ask that?”
“You said—when you came in——”
“Did I?” he muttered. “I didn’t know—didn’t mean to. I’m all in bits; don’t take any notice.” He dug his hands into his pockets, and walked away to the window.
It was significant that he growled out no apologies for having cried. That he should be capable of such a thing was accepted, wearily, with the other horrors.
Queer how the very bend of his neck made his sister feel sore with tenderness ... shemusthelp him butt through his bad hour. And she reproached herself for neglecting him all this while—Richard, whom she loved better than any other.
“Is Samson in England again?”
“Yes. In hospital. Trench feet. David told me. Said that Uncle Otto still wants him for Nell. Somebody English in the family, to grab on to.”
“Oh—Uncle Otto!” Deb’s tone rang scornfully.
“Yes—I used to laugh at him, too. I don’t now. We—we come down to that, Deb, when we’re in a panic.”
“Was that what you meant, what you hoped, when you told me I must marry Samson? Somebody to grab on to?”
Richard nodded. “Yes. But never mind. You don’t care enough for him, do you?”
“How could he help you?”
“He’s solid English through and through; have you noticed how people imagine that every Jew must be a German—or every German a Jew—I forget which. But Phillips’ cousin is Sir Ephraim Phillips; David seemed to think he was going to be useful over Fürth, get a permit for Hedda to see him oftener—only David says Hedda doesn’t want to. If he were to vouch for me, perhaps—they listen to a man who has enlisted from the very beginning, and got the M.C.” A long pause ... and then Richard whispered under his breath, with the reverence of a pilgrim who speaks of his Mecca: “He might perhaps have got me into the trenches....”
Presently he jerked out, in his roughest manner: “Look here, Deb, old girl—forget all this. Perfect rot, really. Don’t suppose he could do anything—much. I was simply mooching about—and—and a poster or something got on my nerves and sent me pelting down here. I wouldn’t for worlds have you bother about Phillips when you’re not keen on him. Not fair on him, either.”
“I was wondering how you guessed, that’s all ...” Deb’s head was turned away from him; he stared incredulously at the wavy black mop of hair—what had she done to her hair?...
“Guessed?”
“That—I made such a fool of myself.... Oh, Richard! that I chucked away everything last year—just for a bit of fun.”
“When you put him off by—Deb, you—you’re not bluffing? you’ve cared all this while?”
“Yes.... And now you tell me he’s back, I wonder if I could put things right again—I do wonder....”
“But you told me at the time that you were laughing, pulling his leg....” Richard hardly dared believe in this secret of his sister’s which synchronized so marvellously with his own petition.
She stamped a petulant foot at him. “Iwaslaughing—because I was too ashamed to own up that I’d hurt myself by teasing him with that idiot lie of mine about Cliffe. I thought you would have guessed—I thought youhadguessed, when you first lugged in Samson’s name, and were only pretending that bit about Uncle Otto and yourself and influence, for—for cover; to cover me. I thought it was so nice of you. Richard”—she walked straight up to him, and put her arms round his neck, looking steadily at his eyes, those sombre, tortured eyes which were beginning already to lighten hopefully and lose some of their strain—“Richard, own up; it was that, wasn’t it?”
Play-acting. But she had done it so long and inconsequently and for no one’s sake at all, surely now she was justified in play-acting to the tip of her powers, at Richard, and for Richard’s sake....
“Wasn’t it?”
“No. No, Deb. It was sheer selfishness. But if you can ... if you honestly do love him....”