CHAPTER VI
Why had he not thought of suicide before this? Looked upon calmly and dispassionately, from a merely business aspect, it was the only course for him—lacking the vital sustenance which men drew nowadays from love of their own land. It annoyed Richard that even though he had reached the sea, the sea was nowhere in sight—lost behind wide flats of mud. He leant against the rail which divided the path beside the railway from a strip of coarse sand, sullenly determined not to plunge across all that marsh till he found deep enough water to drown him; even suicide, it seemed, was to be a difficulty and a favour;—well, the sea could come to him—he would wait for the returning tide.
He must have run more than five miles; that was all he knew of his whereabouts. For when he registered, it was made clear that for him the Essex coast was prohibited area. Leigh was evidently the name of this little estuary town he had struck haphazard. There would be half a column in the local paper: “Enemy alien drowns himself.”... Perhaps two lines in the London Press, amongst other minor items of news.
Richard stared horizon-wards where might be the dilatory tide of his desire. He was now peaceful, almost numb in mind and body, caring little for recent turmoil, where so soon blankness was to be. He wondered dispassionately as to the time? About six o’clock, to judge by the western pyramid of opaque storm-grey cloud, a pale yellow sun breaking its peak into fragments and spilling itself in shaft after shaft of dim light down the triangle and on to the illimitable green and brown and fawn, burnishing it to a glimmering fantasy like the hues of a mackerel. Patches of blue sky were reflected in purple pools. And areas of mud were almost invisible for ships, their keels deeply embedded, as though a whole lurchingfleet had suddenly flung themselves on their sides and were impotent ... ropes and nets and sails and tackle, old tubs and steamers and hulks. The scene was packed and spiked with masts. Behind the station, and its creak and flap of signals and gates and coal-trucks, a purple gasometer seemed to have entangled itself beyond redemption into the mournful landscape; and from an outjutting breakwater, the black finger of a donkey-engine pointed darkly, accusingly against the sky. The tide had turned, somewhere far out there; and in monotonous procession up a narrow flowing squiggle of silvery grey, the fishing-boats came in; their unclothed masts still gauntly upright; small dark figures of men hauling with ropes on either side, or gently paddling from the stern; small dark figures, penguin-height, standing patiently in rows on the mud, to receive the loads of fish. Round each dwindling bend another boat could be sighted; they might come in thus for ever, with nothing to break their soundless even progress. The sky was all grey now, and the grey and brown of the marshes hardly touched to pearliness. A throb in the air loudened, as a grey steel airship came pounding, slow and enormous, across the foreground. Dagon, god of fish ... god significant of grey steel wars....
From lethargic contemplation, Richard was being imperceptibly hypnotized by the subtle rhythmic excitement that pervades and hangs about an estuary; estuary which is not quite the sea; which leads to the sea; which opens out so wildly and generously from the mere width of a river. The fishing-hauls were in, and the men had vanished from the marsh; but to him it was still as though boat after boat were following the curve of the inflowing stream ... but dimly visible now ... the air was full of windless dusk, and a quiver shook the keels of the mud-locked fleet; soon they would begin to stir and lift....
The scream of a siren punctured the calm. Another one, from much nearer at hand, pressed down and swallowed the first long raucous shock of sound.
Richard knew the two blasts were signals of an air-raid impending. He had heard the Dunnes discussing the possibilityof several during this week of harvest moon. A few lingering footsteps pattered to sudden quickness and silence. In the little town at his back, and all along the coast, he was aware of no panic, but of every person on the defensive; sucked back behind walls and shutters and curtains; braced to sturdy sensible resistance of the chance-monster and its grim selection. In the morning the population would emerge and stand about and gossip clamorously, with frequent repetition of the phrase: “Well, I was just——” “Yes, and I was just——” But now, all activity withdrawn and waiting....
Richard waited too, a few moments. Then, impatient of immobility, strolled along the path on his right. He was impressed by the absence of fuss on the part of the civil population. All very well for him who had no more fastenings on life; but these ordinary people appeared to take it so for granted that they should be disturbed in the midst of their daily business, to an encounter with such grotesque apparition as bombs and shrapnel and aerial torpedoes.... Their behaviour roused him to the same queer beating tenderness as when the blind discharged soldiers at the music-hall had been “still keen on things.” Some people were rather fine.... English people ... but he had declared out loud that he hated the English ... and so he had to die.
He went past the gas-works, and along the sea-wall which meandered through the marshes. Open country all around him now, and no noise but the swish of rushes, far-off gurgle and squirt of water, occasional plop of some small animal into the spreading pools. Was there always this black gaping rent of silence between the signal and the first gun-mutterings? It was Richard’s unique experience of an air-raid outside London; and an air-raid in London he had considered was altogether a second-rate affair.
“First line of defence,” he remembered Greville had called the belt of fortresses—Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Canvey Island, Tilbury and Gravesend. He strained his eyes towards the angles of crouching coast-line opposite him, in vain effort to distinguish them. First line of defence, he repeated once or twice exultantly—before he pulled himself up as a fool. What did such trivialities concern him now?
Hallo—was that firing out there? No.
Yes.
Or a dog barking?
Richard told himself persistently it was only a dog barking, to smother the quality of vital contentment newborn in him and uprising with the nearer and yet nearer sound of the guns.
The darkness was lit with sinking star-shells; and through the thin white light which the rising half-moon spread over the estuary, the inland flight of little winged machines was clearly and delicately visible.
Richard stood stock-still, staring at these, till, in a surge of wild indignation, he found himself starkly confronted with the fact that they were the Gothas, and that they were over an English river, carrying death to an English city.
“Damn their insolence!” he shouted into the sky. “It’sourland——”
Ourland, fizzing in a nightmare of flame; drowned in great gun-thunders. And these small black figures busy with their evening’s haul of fish not an hour ago,ourfisherfolk—could we prevent them from being torn and hurt?
“Oh, Christ—that’s good!” as the barrage crashed from every side at once; and the giant gun on Canvey Island mouthed and reverberated above all the rest.Ourbarrage!... To Hell with these invaders....
Richard was all right. His at last, that blessed bias on the vision which he had forfeited, and so desperately sought. He was, thank God, incapable now of reason or justice or sanity—unconscious of himself and his position, oblivious of an enemy point of view. Just English for all he was worth. One man for one land. A patriot ... and—init!... He forgot that he was alone; the rending chaos all about him gave him the illusion of being a central participant; so his solitary figure jigged and capered on the flat sea-wall with incoherent vocal splutter of encouragement and fury and a very delirium of pleasure.
A shape of yellowish drab came scuttling along the wall, arms thrown up to shield the face.... “Hallo—look ahead!” Richard called warningly—then threw out his hand and clutched at the slipping figure. “You were nearly down then—I say, what’s the matter with you?” for the little soldier was clinging to him in a very frenzy of terror, with prayer and sob and blasphemy mingled....
“Oo—er—O Jesus, the blarsted noise again ... don’t let ’em—don’t lemme go—I ain’t a coward, sir, ’streuth I’mnot—bin two years in the trenches—but them guns fair do somefink to the inside of me ’ead.... Ow—er——” he fell writhing and vomiting to the ground beside Richard, as the barrage appeared to have enclosed a stray Gotha, and shook the four sides of the world with triumphant yelps and rumblings.
“Shell-shock,” muttered Richard. “Corporal by his stripes and—by Jove! Military Medal”—as a twist of khaki tunic into the moonlight revealed a strip of ribbon sewn on to the man’s meagre chest.
He was suddenly guilty and ashamed of his own arrogance of calm. This sort of wreck was what the war made of some of its heroes; “this is what the war ought to have made of me” ... he should have been blind with the St Dunstan’s men: broken like the little cockney soldier from France, cowering here beside him. His mind and body and five senses whole and immune, were dishonour.
Richard knelt and took firm grip of the twitching wrists. “It’s all right,” gruffly. “Listen—they’re getting away towards London; we shall have quiet for a bit.”
“Till they come back,” sobbed the man, but he trembled less violently, and presently drew himself up to a sitting posture.
“Discharged ‘fit’ from ’orspital larst week,” he whispered, lips trembling to a rueful smile. His peaked, freckled face was glistening with sweat, and his fingers still tore at the grass; but he was making an effort at control. “Doc told me I shouldn’t get another o’ these ’ere attacks, but—I dunno—it’s the s’noise wot did it. I was walkin’ over quiet-like from Benfleet—luvly evenin’ an’ all—when that bloomin’ siren went and gave me fits an’ I begun to run.” His voice conveyed apology, and Richard flushed crimson.
“It’s all right,” he repeated awkwardly; “where do you want to get?”
“H’under cover,” said the Corporal with distinct emphasis. “We’re nearer Leigh, I b’lieve, than Benfleet; might make a dash for ’ome sweet ’ome before.... Oh, Gawd!don’t, don’t,” as a fresh growling outbreak from the Sheerness guns signified the approach up the Thames of a second batch of raiders.
Cover? Richard looked round the landscape; it was entirely exposed; not even a tree; nothing humped from the flat marshes except a few old derelict boats reversed in themud; one of them at the foot of the slope where now they lay.
“Better than nothing!” It might at least be suggestive of shelter to his companion, even if of no actual protection from shrapnel. Richard leapt down from the wall, and plunged up to his knees in mud, tugged at the boat with all his welded strength of shoulder and muscle.
“’Ere—you’re not gawn?” he heard whimpered during a lull in the barrage. And “Rather not!” he shouted back, reassuringly; and succeeded in tilting the half-rotten boards so that the bows rested against the slope while the stern remained still embedded; thus the concave bottom of the boat roofed a small dark space—an amateur dug-out.
Meanwhile, the second raiders were not suffered to pursue their leaders to London; the barrage waxed fiercer, shutting them in, driving them from point to point; a few bombs were dropped, and exploded with a dull concussion of sound quite distinct from gun-fire; and all along the Kent and Essex coast the shrapnel flew screaming.
“Hot stuff!” laughed Richard, as a moaning hoot snicked past his ears; he sprang up the bank again, and found the Corporal crying in a quiet agony, too exhausted to budge. Without explanation he lifted him gently; placed him “under cover” as he had desired. Then he blocked the aperture at the tilt of the boat with his own square stocky build. “Shut your ears with your arms, you won’t know anything more about it till the morning,” he shouted through the din.
Presently his companion said: “I’ve just remembered me name—it’s Plunkett—Ted Plunkett.”
“Oh—yes?” Richard was rather surprised at the formality in the midst of shell-shock during air-raid.
A pause. Then: “Well—ain’t you goin’ to tell me your name now I’ve told you mine?” reproachfully.
“Richard Marcus.”
“R! Got some pluck, ’aven’t you, Sonny Richard Marcus?”
And amusement twinkled in Richard’s deep-set eyes, as he reflected on the quality of pluck needful under bomb-fire by a person out for the express purpose of drowning himself.
“Ever heard the comic story of the servant who had never seen the sea?” he replied with seeming irrelevance, but thinking how the tide had temporarily baulked his intentions. “She was so dead keen on seeing it that she stole her mistress’jewels to pay for the fare to Southend—and then they arrested her while she was waiting for the tide to come up.”
“Fair did ’er in!” commented Corporal Plunkett, laughing weakly. “Less row now, ain’t it?”
“Some of our chaps gone up, I should say. Yes—listen!” as a succession of quick staccato bangs were knocked out directly overhead, then echoed a little farther off.
The Corporal subsided, crouching his dazed tormented head deep into his arms. And Richard, with his hands clasped round his knees, waited through the ensuing drawn-out silence for the distant inland throb which would easily mean the return of the first batch of raiders from London. He longed with eagerness for the renewed sound of gun-firing; it definitely slaked a thirst in him that had craved for such satisfaction since three years. Well—he had not been able to go to the war, but a little bit of the war had come to him.... God was—not so bad, after all! He was happy, sitting there waiting.
“There they are!” And at the same moment he felt a warm trickle down his neck. “Cheerio! wounded in action!” that bit of shrapnel which had scraped so close to his ear, must have scraped closer than he had noticed at the time.
“Yes, there they are—with a vengeance!”
... In the subsequent transformation of earth, sky, air and water into sheer noise, he faintly heard his comrade ejaculating “Hell” between intervals of violent sickness. He thrust a stealthy hand into the aperture; it was grabbed and twisted by wet chilly fingers.
“It’s all right, y’know,” said Richard gruffly. “Quite all right....”
The last Gotha was chased from the mouth of the Thames out to sea. The last mutter of guns died away.
“I daresay it’s h’over now.” Plunkett emerged cautiously into the moonlight some ten minutes later. “May as well get ’ome,” and he staggered to his feet. “The Missus’ll be wondering.”
“You think itisall over?” Richard was reluctant to believe it. That one nerve in him was still twanging irritably for the relief of gun-fire.
The Corporal nodded. “It’ll be ’alf-an-’our or more afore they give the signal. Can’t wait for that. You comin’?”
“Where? Back to Leigh?—No, not for the moment. Can you get along by yourself? It isn’t far.”
“Fit as a fiddle,” the other declared. He held out his hand to Richard—“Thank yer, Sonny....”
The boy blurted out, at a reminding prick of the old goad: “I was born in Germany, you know....”
Corporal Plunkett, M.M., was astonished at the inconsequent confession ... some divine impulse prompted him to the speech that healed. “Lord, sir—thatdon’t matter. You’re one of us all right!”
... The obsession was lifted. Corporal Plunkett had done it. Corporal Plunkett had atoned for Mr Gryce. Never again would Richard turn hot and miserable at the mention of German frightfulness ... he had no connection with the things the Germans did. Born in Germany, yes, but—“You’re one of us all right,” the cockney soldier had said. The awful crazed obsession of responsibility was rolled away; and in utter thankfulness Richard lay on the sea-wall that first night of the September air-raids, half-dreaming, content to have heard the guns, content....
He was not going to drown himself. Suicide was surrender without a fighting chance. Richard’s sturdier business instinct rejected the proposition. Suicide was stupid—a refuge for weaklings and decadents—he could wrench out better terms for himself. Now that his spirit was fixed for one land and one people, the fact of continued official ostracism hardly counted. He would have to submit to that as to a fact and a nuisance, but in no way vital.... Internment? That also was only official—“I’ll just have to get through with it.” Richard scowled healthily at the annoying prospect.
But he was out of No Man’s Land at last ... it had been dreary fog-sodden territory, and he was glad, a thousand times glad to be quit of it. Not once again need he set foot there; his love of England was sanctuary. He would love England, not as before, in exacting casual certainty, but with the fierce beating love of a man for the woman who has no love for him, who will never return his love. He would love England in spite of herself, and with a love steadily cognizant of its own hopelessness. And he thought of fireside happiness where passionwas mutual and easy ... and rejoiced, in new-found defiance, that his body should stand outside, pressed against hard rains and hard storms and hard swerve of the hills.
“But I’ll make her take me somehow—in the end——”
A man must have a country to call his own. Toknowhis own. So much the war had taught him. Other lessons it might have held for others; but for him this special groping agony of nowhere belonging.
Internationalism ... brotherhood ... that was all very well; men had hailed it, and believed in it; had let the careful drawing of boundary be slurred; had forgotten to set stern limits to their sense of humanity ... had merged the significance of birthplace to freer, more casual interpretation: The world is my birthplace.... Men had wandered, drifted, flung themselves down in alien places. Why not? The subconscious trust in the brotherhood of nations had urged them to such courses.
And Internationalism had failed them. Each country was tightly puckered again to self-sufficiency. Internationalism had no country to give her devotees during a European war. No country but No Man’s Land ... desolate sodden track without end or beginning, neither land nor sea ... to Richard, almost asleep, came a vision of the estuary echoed somewhere in space and in deeper shadow ... greyer fog ... shapes stumbling about it, hunting for cover, some wailing loudly, some silent and bewildered.... He was himself a wraith, one of the betrayed ... and there were others vaguely familiar....
Voices calling, and receiving no answer, calling again and again ... red-cheeked waiters, vaguely seen in pre-war days, vaguely disappeared after 1914—they were all here, paler now.... And here the cobbler to whom Richard had given Aunt Stella’s shoes ... and Trudchen and her sister Anna, seeking each other, missing each other.... Otto Rothenburg squealing loudly that he was British.... And now Richard, in his travellings, bumped up against Gottlieb Schnabel, who shrank from him and shrank away into the murky gloom ... and turned into Captain Dreyfus—“I wonder why?” That legendary soldier who had killed his own brother on the opposite side—he was native of No Man’s Land; and his brother, the sticky brown gouts dripping from both his shot arms—And: “You here too?” said Thomas Spalding to Richard, and heldout a hand.... A cloud of fog seemed to roll between them.... Thomas Spalding was lost again.
Children of No Man’s Land—of Denmark and Norway and Sweden and Spain and Holland, entangled haphazard in one belligerent country or another, condemned haphazard as pro-German, pro-English.... Their bewildered avowals disbelieved and mocked.... “Who are the neutrals? there are no neutrals—the world is at war....” Born in one place, reared in another, married in a third—“which is your country?” No Man’s Land is their country ... we shall meet them in No Man’s Land.... “An artist has no country”—artists without number groping their way through No Man’s Land, thinking they are walking straight ahead and out of it, not knowing that in the darkness and the smiting din they are walking round and round in circles....
“I have no son!” voice sombre and deep from the shadows; a proud old man, this, naturalized English, hating Germany, eighteen-forty-eight refugee.... He sent his son to be killed at Gallipoli, and now they are interrogating his loyalty—“Have you a son at the Front?” “I have no son!” He will be accepted at his own word and valuation, or not at all. The dead boy is too dear to stand for mere pledge and security....
Little distracted figures plunging hither and thither, some of them frantically waving a sheet of paper—“Look—Look,” but there is no escape from No Man’s Land by naturalization ... in despair the papers are thrown away—flutter whitely in the gloom “like a paper-chase,” Richard thinks.
He is hunting for David, in frantic need of comradeship. “Is it you? Or you?” thrusting away each white distorted face as it looms towards him. But David is not here—David was once of No Man’s Land, but now no more.... Zion has him, wholly and completely. David is a Jew, and the Jews have been granted a cause and a kingdom.... Of no avail to seek for David in these grey spectral fogs. The noise is louder and louder—no definite sound, but an intensified cosmic thudding which can be heard when body and soul are alone and listening.... Richard is aware of loneliness drenching him like vast breakers—must he stay here for ever?
“Lord, sir—thatdon’t matter ... you’re one of us all right!” It is Corporal Plunkett’s voice which bursts thenightmare vision ... and drags him back to the sea-wall by the estuary....
One day men would dare to wander again, and dare to pitch their tents in strange places ... but not those who had once been victims; not Richard Marcus, nor his sons, nor his sons’ sons, he vowed grimly....
And with that came the idea to dig himself in. And with the idea, determination.
He would marry—Molly, perhaps.... A sort of quick ripple seemed to pass over the world when he thought of Molly and of his savage outburst with her in the orchard. He would marry her—as he had said then, whether she liked it or not—and their son should be born in England, brought up in England, owning land in England; he should be reared to no ideas that were not purely insular; and he in his turn should marry an English girl, and their son—would he be enough Englishman yet to be allowed to tolerate foreigners? Or must that safer, easier attitude wait for the son of his son’s son? How many generations did it take to plant a man securely, son of the soil?
Retrogressive, all this. The result of the war. Who could afford, after such drastic teaching, again to omit patriotism from fundamental need?
Richard began to muse on just how fundamental was the need; and how much slapped on from the surface, by suggestion? What was patriotism? He had first asked himself this on a certain evening of shock, three years ago; and had since only succeeded in discovering, very thoroughly, what was the lack of it.
Sense of property, to start with ... but that presupposed actual ownership; that a farmer, a landed proprietor, was more directly inspired to fight for England, than—oh, than cockney Corporal Plunkett, who was probably serving in a shop before the call came.
Birthplace, then?—But Richard himself could answer the question of how much that mattered to the soul.... The law was surely overstressing topography.... The law was polishing a hollow shell of sentimentality. David—David was nearer truth when he defined patriotism as the sense of family: son of our house; thence to local fanaticism: sons of our village—and sons of our country, which was patriotism ...but it must stop there.... Sons of our five continents ... it sounded chilly, expanded so far. Internationalism again—Richard, denying it, yet could not prevent thought from crashing up against it from time to time.... One day, yes—but the soul must first catch cold in the pursuit of it.
What was patriotism? unity of pride in the nation’s slow-born history and tradition? Impetus of divine fury which springs from sanctuary violated?... He remembered his rage as the Gothas headed their insolent course straight up the Thames—“MyThames” ... he looked down the estuary towards the sea ... loving it ... looked up the river past Benfleet ... good British name that, pungent with jolly naval tradition ... his inward sight followed the dwindling stream through London, a draped lady stepping delicately beneath crossed blades of silver, searchlights that protected her ... and still farther up lay the Thames valley, noontide of green and gold drowsing gardens, and the glory of ancient woods.... “My Thames!”
Suddenly Richard flung back his head and laughed, heartily and with no trace of bitterness, at the mere idea that he could love it less because his mother happened to be somewhere else than here at the hour of his birth. It was—so entirely ridiculous! Screaming little red-faced atom ... what possible difference could it make to him, sucking at his bottle, if Hun-land or home-land were beyond the windows?... A world constructed on the arbitrary basis that each person must be screwed down solemnly and with ritual, in residence and in feeling, to the consecrated spot in which he was born, was really not unlike a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.
Of course there was the old argument of “blood tells.”Didit? His sudden rushing worship of the river-god disproved the argument wholly. For if he were no individual person, but the compound of his ancestors’ emotions, the Thames would bore him, and the thought of the Rhine stir him to unutterable pæans.
Thus Richard—he not knowing how a little shy German boy had once crossed to England, and worn a blazer, and sculled in a queer ecstasy from Bray to Cookham. Richard’s love of the Thames was a heritage from Ferdie....
“I can’t get hold of it—quite——” the boy decided at last, abandoning his quest for patriotism defined. “But it’s there——” There, elusively, tormentingly woven into thefabric itself; distinct from patriotism exploited, talked about, and sung about, and worked up into posters and pictures ... till it tasted like wood in the mouth. “Can’t a man serve his land unquestioningly, without all this cant?” But no emotion could be left deep-hid and dimly private—not love of art, nor love of child, nor love of man for woman ... patriotism must be thumbed with the rest, till its name was Jingoism. “A patriot for lost causes, and a Jingo after victory—that’s the difference....” Had David said so? It sounded like David.... Richard had not quite realized as yet how awakened by circumstances was his own powerful, slow-moving brain.
The suck of water startlingly near.... He raised himself on one elbow, then sprang to his feet, and saw the tide was up, flowing in clear, luminous black over the marshes, oozing greedily into each hole and inlet, lapping at the very foot of the sea-wall. The bump of lifted boats was audible in the moonless night.
Richard reflected, not without humour, that the sea had emerged from obscurity rather too late to be of any practical value—to him.
He looked at his watch—ten minutes after midnight. Then—he was eighteen to-day! ... and the dreaded evening would see him in prison—“Rum sort of birthday!”—But horror had all been drained out of the coming ordeal, leaving it, well—a nuisance, nothing more odious nor festering. A confounded nuisance—but inevitable; neither the fault of those interned nor of those who interned them; just a happening out of greater happenings.
The last London train from Leigh would have gone by now; he might catch an early morning workmen’s train. He did not want to go back to the Dunnes—grimaced slightly at the mere idea of encounter, with his burst of madness so very recent in their minds. Why—he had come rushing out minus even his cap; they could pack his bag and send it up to Montague Hall ... not that he would need anything much for the next year or two ... or for however long this dreary war was going to last.
And after the war——?
“Let ’em go back to their own country—we don’t want ’em here.” But, “Thisismy country....” Richard stood on the sea-wall, an obstinate figure, black against the dim flatwash of water. He was smiling a little ironically at the thought of Mr Gryce ... voice creaking in the hall as he came in: “Intern ’em all!”—and how he would exult on hearing the next day that one more enemy alien had indeed been interned!...
Suddenly, and with an unexpected tearing at the heart, three long-drawn-out hoots of the siren shrieked across the swamp, a pause between each, as though the deliverer were holding his breath. Then, all along the English coast, the pent-up tension relaxed, and “We can go to bed,” said the English people. “That’s the All Clear!”
... The boy threw himself full length on the coarse grass; lay with bare head pillowed on his arm; the same faint smile still twisting his underlip:
“May as well get some sleep now,” said Richard. “That’s the All Clear.”