The Impregnable Women, page 10
‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you want.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘A couple of minutes ago you wanted me to tell you about the war.’
‘I know I did.’
‘I keep thinking of it anyway. It isn’t easy to forget it overnight.’
‘You’re not trying.’
‘Rose, my dear. Rose, I’m utterly in love with you. Utterly and starkly and for ever and ever.’
‘My sweet, my darling . . .’
Love was the sovereign lenitive of the stricken world, its refuge and unfailing bliss. Never had love more closely, universally been sought than now, when the dirt and squalor of the war made by contrast its luxury more dear, and dread of Sergeant Death, who was everyman’s own neighbour, drove him to the Cyprian for sweet forgetfulness. Love meant release of all that turbid and tumultuous feeling which the shouting of the patriots and fear and thought of vengeance had aroused; and was the remedy for coldness and despair. Ares had come back to overstride the ruined fields, but Aphrodite Pandemos ruled the air.
A few miles south of Edinburgh a battalion of English infantry was marching along a straight road between winter-stript black hedges. Their rifles were slung, they marched at ease, but soldierly. Their heads were high, their bearing gallant. Rank after rank, they trod the road in the precision and iron discipline of a Roman Legion, but their stride was the swagger of free men. In all the history of military service there was never a general from Hannibal to Charles the Great, from the Italian captains to Napoleon’s marshals, who would not have been proud and thankful to command them, and boasted they were wholly dedicate to war. But the road turned a corner and passed a little house whose garden broke the long line of the hedge, and running to the gate, waving their hands to the soldiers, came a woman and her daughters. Then the brave music of the band, the martial drums and high-pealing fifes, were shouted down by a sudden outcry, and all the soldiers as they swaggered by called loudly to the blushing woman and the laughing girls. They began to sing, no warlike tune but a common air of the people; a music-hall song:
If you feel rotten because you’re a woman,
Seek for a suitable spouse –
Say what you like, but admit you are human,
And better for having a man in the house!
Rose Armour’s vulgar song was acquiring an unexpected bitterness, however, as more and more women became lonely through no fault of their own, and girls when their lovers left them for the war saw loneliness haunting their middle years. The song was less popular than it had been, and many women who heard it saw in their imagination those haggard Birds, with women’s faces pale and hungry, who waited for the next to die. In the orchards and forests of Europe and the meadows of England they sat on the trees, the Harpies waiting for their meat, and fouling all they could not take.
There were, too, ghouls of another sort, many of whom were much esteemed by the uncritical world, and leaders of fashionable society. They consumed the dead with relish, and unexceptionable manners. Late in the afternoon – of this day when Rose Armour had been sad for half a minute, and the marching soldiers had sung her song – about thirty of them were gathered in a house in Heriot Row; of whom three or four were listening to a Mrs Losel and her story of a distinguished General.
‘He was so amusing about their last Conference,’ she said, speaking to Mrs Curie, Colonel Hotspur, and Mr Sanfoy, who with sherry glasses in their hands were crowded close to her by the surrounding throng. ‘He said that none of the politicians had the vaguest notion of the number of effectives in the Home Command, and all of them had utterly erroneous ideas not only about the reinforcements needed, but those we are actually sending to the front.’
‘I believe the wastage from all sources is about a hundred and twenty thousand a month,’ said Mr Sanfoy.
‘Yes, I think it is. And then Puffles said, “If you want to know the truth about the war, we’re not fighting the French at all, but the Home Office and the Treasury.”’
‘Poor Puffles is malvu with everyone except the soldiers now.’
‘They say the Prime Minister still believes in him.’
‘My dear, the Prime Minister believes in anyone who leaves him alone. He slept for fourteen hours after the last meeting of the Conference, and when he woke up he refused to see anyone till six o’clock, because he was reading Pride and Prejudice.’
‘How I envy him! The war gives me no time for reading, literally none.’
‘Didn’t I see you lunching with Lionel and Myra yesterday?’
‘Yes, we had a marvellous talk. Lionel is terribly bitter against the War Office. He says nobody has made any plans for the future, and even if they got the divisions they’re asking for, there isn’t maintenance for them, and no one would know what to do with them.’
‘It’s an absolute certainty, I believe, that poor Puffles will be dégomm.é
‘I suppose you’ve heard the marvellous story about von Schmerding?’
‘About his attempt to convert poor Sir Joseph to Wotanism?’
‘No, better than that. Our unfortunate allies, as you know, have had heavy losses in the Böhmer Wald... Lysistrata! I haven’t seen you for ages.’
‘I have been rather busy lately,’ said Lysistrata.
‘You mustn’t kill yourself, my dear. That won’t do anyone any good.’
Lysistrata had gone to Lady Oriole’s sherry party because of a suspicion that loneliness was making her morbid. For some weeks she had been living very quietly, seeing few people except those with whom she associated in her war-work, and because more solitude than she was used to had been making her think more profoundly than was her habit, she had begun to fear that her mind was getting unhealthy. She had gone to the party in the hope of finding it tonic and restorative, but it had only made her angry and more unhappy.
They were enjoying the war, these fortunate people. They had such fine material for gossip now, such hot expensive pies to dip their fingers in. The difficulties of all the world were translated for their pleasure... The Prime Minister, they said, knew nothing of the military arrangements between our several allies – the soldiers had muddled everything – the politicians were ignorant of strategy – the Generals had never heard of economics. They had had the most fascinating discussion with someone who knew all about Italy and Rumania – and the most marvellous Bridge – and the last time they saw him Sir Joseph had looked like a peacock in a thunderstorm, and screamed like one too. Their lives were rich with all the news they heard, and the agony of nations was their table-talk. Europe on its death-bed fought for another day or two of life, and they were all agog to be told its latest symptoms. Already, they said, the quality of recruits was deteriorating, and Puffles had called the new officers a parcel of tailors. The life of a subaltern was only six weeks, however, so perhaps it didn’t matter. – They would be short of men in another year. They needed twelve more divisions on the western front. The C.-in-C. had said he was no longer worrying about reserves, because he hadn’t got any. The politicians knew nothing about strategy, and the soldiers had muddled everything. – The heavens were falling, and such a harvest of gossip had never been reaped before.
Lysistrata was fond of her hostess, however, who was a busy, nervous, hospitable woman, with a habit of keeping too many irons in fires of her own igniting, and a husband, sometime in the Brigade but now commanding a Territorial battalion, who had gone to Germany, though ten years too old for the line, and was enjoying himself prodigiously there. Camilla Oriole hated the war, and was constantly endeavouring to hurry it to a satisfactory conclusion, either by fomenting intrigue against the Prime Minister and Sir Joseph Rumble – or against Sir Archibald Puffin-Lumkyn, who was in command of Home Defence – or by touring the United States with propaganda of her own devising – or by extravagantly subscribing to every charity she heard of. There was an abundance of virtue in Lady Oriole, and its unassociated surplus might have healed Lysistrata’s infirmity had Lady Oriole had time to talk to her; but she was too busy conversing with Colonel Siegfried Fleischhauer, a new military attaché, a person with such highly polished manners, magnificent appearance, and automatic supply of lubricant information that he resembled rather an expensive motor car than a human being.
‘We interrupted you,’ said Mrs Losel to Colonel Hotspur, ‘when you were sur le point de te gausser de von Schmerding’.
‘It is a sad story,’ said the Colonel complacently, ‘and von Schmerding was very upset about it. Our allies, with all the thoroughness of the Teuton, had prepared a splendid attack along the Regen. It was to be a lesson in the art of war, a model battle that would be quoted in the textbooks. Every detail had been planned, even to a review of the successful troops.’
‘And what prevented it?’
‘The impetuous Czechs. They launched their attack just twenty-four hours before the Germans were ready, with what results you know. But the joke was von Schmerding’s reaction. He was still tearful when I saw him, and he said – you know his manner – “It would have been such a beautiful battle! We had made every arrangement, we had many of our best troops there, and then everything was spoilt. It is heartbreaking to fight with an enemy who cannot be trusted!”’
‘They used to be so clever,’ said Mrs Curie with a sigh. ‘But I suppose they’ve had too much mass emotion and muscle-building and Wagner, poor things.’
‘My dear!’ exclaimed a tall marcid woman, very smartly dressed, with brilliant dark eyes and a thin scarlet mouth, who came shrill-voiced through the crowd, her bony braceleted hand held high. – ‘My dear! have you been to Madame Corvo? She’s the most marvellous fortune-teller I’ve ever known. I had her round to my house the other day, when all the Admirals were there after their conference about the Mediterranean – just as useful to confer about the moon, so I told them – and every one consulted her, and you should have seen their faces when they came out of the room! A smirk, you know, terribly happy but very decently controlled. Each one like the last, I give you my word. She’d told the whole lot of them they were going to be Commander-in-Chief, it was plain as a pikestaff, whatever that is. She’s really wonderful, and she says the war’s going to last another five years at least. You should go to see her... Lysistrata, darling, where have you been all this time? I thought you had died or taken vows of some sort, I haven’t seen you for so long.’
Mechanically, conscious how dull she was being, Lysistrata again said she had been very busy, and a minute or so later protested she must go.
‘Poor Lysistrata,’ said Mr Sanfoy. ‘She’s looking rather pulled-down, don’t you think?’
‘And no wonder,’ said the tall marcid woman vivaciously. ‘You’ve heard, of course, of the storm that’s brewing round the ears of her preux chevalier? You haven’t? Good heavens, you ought to cultivate a few Socialists, they’re the people to give you news. You get more information from a Socialist M.P. in an hour than you do from The Times in a week. It was my Mr Marchpane who told me about Tony Scrymgeour. He’s losing too many men. Very successful and all that, but far too expensive. My Mr Marchpane wrote an article about him, calling him a butcher or something of the sort, but the Censor wouldn’t pass it, so he’s going to ask a question in the House next week. I do think there’s this to be said for the war, that so many men have lost their reputation that a fallen woman feels quite respectable again. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, isn’t it?’
Chapter Three
Councils of Mutiny
I
Out of a silver-plumed swiftly moving sky and from the new-green lands beyond the Forth, the wind blew brisk and cold in the challenging way of a northern spring. The window had a far chill view. It rattled in its frame, and Eliot, half-turning in his bed, felt the humiliation that came from every movement as he shifted the diminished weight of his body. The bandaged stumps of his legs, not yet resigned to impotence, sought for resistance and could not find it. His mind was still conscious of knees and feet, but when he tried to reach the mattress with them, they were not there, and his mind grew ashamed and miserable.
The bold sky’s brightness taunted him. Not with soft fingers, with flowers at foot and plainsong in the hedge, does spring come to Scotland; but with a blow and a challenge. With the challenge, he thought, of cock-crow in the dark of a cold morning, or pipers loudly through the dawn-grey tents blowing reveillé. It shocks, not woos, the earth awake, and one day dazzling the feathered streams with the sun in splendour, the next will beat the shivering trees with a white storm of hail. But the leaves grow brighter green for their whipping, the rare sun colours the brooks that go leaping over granite boulders, and summer when it comes is lovelier under translucent tall skies than the lazy charm of the south. – April, icy-shod, hammers at the door, the reeds in the lake bend down and whip the pointed waves, the pale sun tossing through the clouds rolls like an Indiaman in stormy seas; and it’s time to be out and catch the tide of the year. Faith, the old hunter stretches his legs; Hope, his old bitch, strains at her leash; and against all modern likelihood, despite the bankrupt spirit and the shabby heart, belief renews in beauty and the bright shining beneath her cloak that may be reality. April, icy-fisted, the braggart pipers rousing the tents, the thought of summerlit mountains and long Atlantic beaches...
The renewal of life and the other year were flaunting their finery in the north. Eliot with a thrust of his arms shifted his stumps and turned away from the window. There was a knock at the door and Lysistrata came in.
‘Thank God!’ he said. ‘I’ve been feeling the renouveau in my legs, and as my legs no longer exist, it was damned uncomfortable. What’s the news? Talk scandal, rumour, gossip – tell me what’s agog in Edinburgh – anything to take my mind off that confounded sky and the time of the year. Por la saison, qui se change et remue, chacune, fors moi, s’esjoïst et revele’
Lysistrata stooped and kissed him. Her cheeks were cold. ‘Surely the weather isn’t so inviting as that,’ she said. ‘The wind’s like a knife.’
‘Not inviting, but compulsive,’ said Eliot. ‘That’s the note of Scotland. I think my legs must have been true Saxon, and now the blood of my Border grandmother has a preponderance in my curtailed body. I’ve been in the damnedest, silliest mood of romantic excitement, Lysistrata. I’ve been talking poetry to myself. Lush, high-falutin poetry that none of the words I know will fit, but look like a schoolboy’s jacket on a grown man. It’s my Scotch grandmother who’s done it, and being in Edinburgh. If I’d gone to Birmingham, I wouldn’t have felt anything at all.’
‘You mustn’t get excited, Eliot.’
‘Do you think it matters?’
But he lay back on the pillow, and his face was suddenly drained of the strength that had filled it while he was talking. The bone showed white and fragile through his skin, his hollow cheeks were bloodless, and his thick dark hair had the dead look of a hank of black cotton.
Lysistrata sat without speaking, his hand in hers. She had visited the hospital a dozen times since his coming there, and she still found it difficult to hide her distress when she saw him, and the flatness of his bed revealed the enormity of his mutilation. The uncontoured coverlet, tightdrawn over nothing, was horrible to look at.
‘You don’t feel it, do you?’ said Eliot suddenly.’ The spring, I mean. The challenge of that sky?’
‘Not as a challenge. As another wound, and a joke in the worst of taste, yes.’
‘The grass coming to life, and men going to their death. Yes, it’s a joke against home sapiens, who can think of so many clever things and make such ingenious toys, but has never been clever enough to grow up and give himself the chance to enjoy them. What do you live for, Lysistrata?’
‘For peace, and Tony coming back to me. That’s all, at the moment.’
‘You don’t care, now, who wins the war?’
‘Of course I do. But not so much as I care about Tony. They’re attacking him again, Eliot.’
‘The Labour people?’
‘And some of the newspapers. I know his losses have been heavy, but how can he help that? He has to do his duty like any subaltern, and no one can win a battle without casualties.’
‘That’s true, unfortunately. But it’s also true that some of Tony’s successes have been rather expensive. They say he has never lost a trench, but he’s lost more men than any other general in the war.’
‘So you hate him, too?’
‘No, that’s too crude a simplification. Tony is a good soldier, and a good soldier is like a good mole; wherever he goes, his progress is shown by little mounds of earth. But I hate the war, that sets good people to grave-making, because I believe with all that’s left of me in the goodness of life; or its potential goodness. I don’t like to think of young men – men with legs, my dear – being deprived of it without gain or purpose. I asked you a minute ago what you were living for; and you said Tony’s return. Well, why do you want him to return?’
‘So that I can be happy again.’
‘Precisely. And isn’t happiness what everybody wants? Isn’t happy living the very point and justification of living? Even the Scotch Presbyterians – my grandmother was one, and nobody ever accused her or them of frivolous thinking – agree that enjoyment is one-half of man’s aim in life. Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever. That’s what they say. Well, if God is anything at all, he’s the creator, and to enjoy him is to enjoy his creation, which is life and the world. To enjoy that for ever. But instead we go to war and get our legs shot off, or die face down in the mud, or cough our lungs out, rotten with gas. It’s not a joke, my dear, it’s sheer bloody farce. What does a man want? Happiness. And what does a nation need? Peace. So we go to war and blow each other’s guts out. A farce, by God! Do you realize that I lost my legs when I was trying to rescue a quarter of beef? That’s farce, isn’t it? Roaring, blood-boltered farce. The grass knows more than we do. It grows!’
