The Great Fog, page 11
Then, there was Simpkins at the farm. She remembered vividly how he had said to her, that day she’d given up hope and resolved to die, “I’m fifty, Miss, but good for another twenty years, and to think I’d have to live out my life under them! I’ve got to stick to the farm. It’s my skilled way of keeping them out. But, by George, if I see them in these fields with their dirty boots on my land, I’ll pitchfork the first couple like stooks, right over the hedge. I’m as strong as any lad of twenty-five.” And he was. Yet she had suddenly been called into the farmyard as she was going along the lane that led from the school buildings to her rooms.
There he lay. He had been pitching straw; the pitchfork was still stuck in a truss. He was down in the straw, his strong, worn left hand clawed against his chest. “Lord,” he panted, “Lord.” She saw at once that he mightn’t last till the Doctor came, and, naturally, she had no injections with her—only her precious bottle. It wasn’t much help. She knelt beside him.
“You’ve done your bit grandly,” she said. It was all she could think of.
His eyes rolled around to hers. “What,” he whispered.
“You’ve helped, as much as anyone, all of us, to resist.”
Then she thought she had better add something stronger to help him in his deafening pain.
“You’ve helped us to win.” He’d never be there to see, one way or the other.
“To win?” he whispered; puzzled, querulous. “God, is Doctor coming?”
“Yes,” she said, “yes, he’s just here.”
Suddenly the clawed hand opened. Simpkins spoke very faintly but without strain. “Whew, that was hell,” he said. “Lord, I’m comfortable … but weak, awfully weak.”
Then, with surprise all the more intense because it seemed to be conveyed from such an immense distance, as he spoke in the thinnest whisper, “What’s this? What’s this?” His mouth fell open with what seemed ultimate amazement. He was dead.
And he was her age, much stronger, of course, too. Last June, if anyone had said, “Which of those two would go first?” she surely would have been the choice. So time did go on. Men wore out and died, just as they did when there was no war. She found that she had come to think that you simply couldn’t die unless you were killed or you killed yourself. And here, right at her feet, was death at his work, taking his average yield. And his partner, pain, worked beside him just as efficiently without bayonet or bastinado, and just as though gas and bombs weren’t needed to make life intense and to make time count.
That noon, as she knelt before her bowl of “happy dispatch,” her mind wandered beyond her bicuspid cavity. These two things, her fate and the country’s defeat—the one entailing death for the other—no longer seemed to embrace everything between them. They really didn’t go down—as she had assumed—to the foundations of everything. Something else went on underneath, like an immense ocean current on which all the sea wrack, foam, and waves, churned and floated.
Still, for the time being, the war and its overarching breaker must be all, for all of them under its shadow. She must be ready to plunge at a moment’s notice. She could not and she would not withdraw her ultimatum. She could and would accept life only on her own terms: victory or death. Surely there could no longer be any doubt about that. That was the only possible Realism. Yes, in Simpkins’ death one saw that life was going on its own way and, of course, victory would and could mean only death deferred. “We all live under an indefinite reprieve.” Who had said that? Wasn’t it one of those comfortable Victorians whose security and firm expectation of living seemed almost fabulous now? Yet the daily news always reconfirmed her grim faith. She would quote Chesterton. “I bring you nought for your comfort: Yea, nought for your desire: Save that the sky grows darker yet: And the sea rises higher.” The storm must, it simply must, sooner or later blot out everything. About that there could be no doubt. And that was the issue, the only issue for practically everyone. Of course, some hundreds, thousands—if the suspense could really be sustained—might go as Simpkins had gone; slipping out in the pause before the blow. They must go by the law of averages, but they would only be those exceptions which prove nothing.
She thought rapidly of the national statistics she had read: some five hundred thousand people died “from natural causes” every year. That number would represent a big battle, even today. But, of course, they were nearly all old or very young. And what were the latest figures about fewer people in the island dying by accident because, in spite of the great number butchered by bombs, the check on the motor traffic had greatly reduced the road casualties? Somehow one had never thought of the civilian’s motor car as a monster destroying life. Yet there it had been, a worse Juggernaut than many a tank.
Simpkins’ last moment kept on coming back to her. She could hear his voice, passionate and strong last June, utterly involved in the one issue, victory or death; and then across that resolute tone she heard the thin whisper cutting through all that assurance. When he was actually dying, all he had said, about dying with brave good faith, meant just nothing. It all melted away in something far bigger that underflowed it.
Yet she wasn’t dead; wasn’t likely to be, soon. The one likelihood, the one pretty certainty (how odd to call such a degree of high risk by that vapid little word “pretty”), the one thing they must all still count on, was the invasion, and then, when it came off, then she must do her bit and call in death.
So the ritual was continued right into the spring, and outwardly it continued to be fully sanctioned. People came down regularly from Town, half stunned. The preliminary barrage for the invasion, one could see, was being kept on at full blast. Life surely was hell; and though one might “stick it out,” one could never think of lessening, even by a jot, one’s minimum terms. There they stood, starkly rational: victory, or defeat and death. If it was victory, then one would reconsider the terms on which one might take back the deceiver. But to think of victory was to let hope get its nose out of the bag and begin to breathe again.
The facts, the bare facts without a shred of wishful thinking, came just to this: Though a few irrelevant deaths—a sort of seepage—might go on, for practically everyone everything else had stopped or had ceased to matter. Time had stopped, for all private life had stopped, arrested until the Great Event on which it would be decided whether life again would ever be livable. Of course, some private affairs did go on. Now and then, people were married—just as now and then, the older ones died. But in its way marriage was simply—like any other rations—an aid to one’s war work. Relaxation, concerts, movies, dances, these were all part of mental and physical hygiene, and so was marriage. Of course, no one could.…
And then Adelaide, her only first cousin, whom she had treated as a younger sister, called suddenly, without notice. Adelaide, she remembered, as though in another life, had married during the “gray war,” the war of waiting. They hadn’t seen each other or heard of each other during this next life, the life of accepted death, death as an everyday possibility. Now, the moment Adelaide stepped into the room, Miss Potts knew that she had no need to be told. She made the easy calculation instantly.
“But,” she stammered, and couldn’t help herself, “but you must have done it that very month! How could you!”
Adelaide burst into tears and was actually out of the room before Miss Potts realized that, as “elder sister,” she had failed in an immemorial “actor-proof” part. She ran out and dragged the girl back.
“I’m so glad,” she managed to say.
She noticed her own flat tone and noticed, as clearly, that it had failed to register on the pregnant mother. Her cousin turned with a kind of animal satisfaction, brute, insensitive to all but its own race-enforced impression of life.
“I knew you’d be delighted. Jim and I are so pleased. We’re sure it’ll be a boy. We’ve made all the arrangements. The doctor says it’s as easy as appendicitis now. Anyhow, just think, when he’s born.… Oh, I’m so happy!”
Yes, Miss Potts remembered having read all about the endocrine glands and what they do during pregnancy. But now, at this crisis, at this culmination of crises, to bring into this world, into this beleaguered, bombed, invasion-threatened, crowded island, to bring another life, another mouth, to fill another hospital bed …!
And Adelaide had been so keen-minded, yes, even to being hard-boiled. She’d been the first to mock propaganda and blah. She was for the war, of course, but only because, as she used to say, if there was a fight, she liked the gloves off. “Call butchery butchery” she used to say coldly. “We’ve got to clean up the bloody mess. If we fail, we’ll be done, and we’ll deserve it. If we succeed, well, then we’ll get out the old virtues again and see if we can make something efficient out of them this time.” Yes, here was the body which a few months ago had uttered all that and much more good, telling, Progressive pitchforking. And now here she was, a cow, big, swollen, diffuse, drugged.
It was later than she thought. Adelaide stayed to tea. Jim, she said, had to be in the district and had left it to her to tell her “sister” the good news. He’d call back. Exercise was all the thing nowadays in pregnancy, right up to the date. And it was, literally, up to the date. Tea was hardly begun—they had hardly taken their first sip of that hay-and-hot-water that now passed for tea—when Adelaide said she felt a little queer.
Miss Potts’ anxiety was a good diagnostician. She ran to the telephone. Fortunately, Dr. Charles was at home. He did not come, however, until she had had her second treatment in detachment from the horned dilemma, Victory or Death. She saw Adelaide before her eyes, as she had seen Simpkins; torn out of the present setting, the crisis, rushed, in a moment, out of what had seemed to them all the world of basic realism and plunged into something vaster and deeper. But whereas Simpkins had been snatched by Death, had gone off into some vast unknown, Adelaide, infinitely more puzzling, was being snatched by Life, for something more instant and actual than any simply man-made activity like war.
Here at her knees, instead of her hard-boiled adequate, war-minded cousin, was simply an animal that writhed and bellowed in contest, not with a mortal enemy but with the remorseless drive of Life itself; Life that was so much more agonizing than Death and yet was what people always chose rather than Death: Life that rent and tore, mired and bestialized until, beside this exhibition of birth, a concentration camp seemed an austere, cleanly, monastic order. Even Adelaide’s face seemed to be smudged out, all personal expression and character gone, while her body seemed a shapeless bag within which some violent animal was kicking and pounding to break its way out.
And when Dr. Charles took over, the second act was not less surprising, not less incongruous with that attitude which she had built up and taken as Basic Realism. The child emerged, as all children have always emerged, with more outrageous assault on the decencies of every one of the five senses than a massacre could make. But that was not the final shock. That was psychological, not physical. That was Adelaide’s reaction. She lay gasping, sweating, swabbed. The billowing smell of chloroform gave a final wash of nausea to the rank farm odors that lay heavily about the room. And, sunken in all this, Adelaide, the neat, the repressed, lay sprawled. Her body might well be out of kilter after such an extraction. It was not the physical sprawl that hit Miss Potts. It was the idiotic, loose amiability on Adelaide’s face; it had become all unstitched, unupholstered.
Dr. Charles was tidying up. After sending Miss Potts to call for a nurse and hearing that none could be along for an hour or more, he said ritually, turning to the patient, “The little chap is doing fine and you’re all right, my girl.”
Adelaide, who had never seen the doctor before, nodded, smiled sheepishly, and goggled.
“Miss Potts,” he said, “give her the boy.”
She picked up the object wrapped in a piece of wool, looking, she thought, rather like a large bandaged thumb, and which, a few moments before, she had been ridding of the really quite terrible, natural traveling wrap in which it had arrived. The bath had uncovered an unutterably ancient and wrinkled little fellow: not young, but also not weak. He looked as tough as well-cured rubber and, heavens, he needed to be, considering what she had just seen him go through. He was cross, of course, cross as hell, but he gave a curious sense of vitality and of a settled determination to endure this outrageous experience.
She carried him over to his mother. Adelaide’s sagged and damp face—like an energetic washerwoman’s held too long over scalding suds—broke into subrational delight. She folded the stirring lump of terra-cotta flesh into her neck. In Miss Potts, only two emotions remained. One expressed itself in the words she whispered to herself, “So this is life, real life—it just doesn’t care a damn for meaning—it cares so much that it knows meaning doesn’t matter.” The other was too strong, too outrageous for words. She felt herself bent over the two creatures who at teatime had still been one; and now one of them would go on into a world she would never know, in which she’d be only the faintest of fading memories at best.
“Goo, goo,” she said, “goo, goo.”
It was several days before Miss Potts had the use of her sitting room, since Adelaide couldn’t be moved to the hospital earlier. Now, “mother and child were doing finely,” and, with that bulletin fixed, life and the crisis and the ritual reply-to-the-crisis must be resumed.
Sure enough, the crisis was still there. News continued to be bad; just steadily getting graver; another country had gone under. But, still, the denouement was postponed. It’s just like the Arabian Nights, thought Miss Potts. She stood by the window. She ought to be making a survey of the village street (part of the ritual). You could see it beautifully today. She noticed that the trees were in leaf again, as full as when “time officially stopped” last year.
A whole year … “a Thousand-and-One-Nights,” the famous title came into her mind. So Scheherazade had gained a thousand-and-one reprieves. Three years, she thought. And that started another old, mental echo: “Three years, or the duration of the war.” That was the old enlistment term of the last war. That had seemed to last forever, and no one seemed likely to survive it or, if they did, to find any life worth living at the end of it. But now all that was getting on for a quarter of a century ago. People thought about it mainly now, as her parents did about the Crimean war.… And in the end Scheherazade was reprieved “for good,” indefinitely, and married the monster and gave him a son.…
Her mind hopped over to Adelaide. The boy had a name now, Franklin … the scientist … the explorer … the president. He was a registered person. He was growing, too, every day. It was absurd but undeniable; and absurd and undeniable, it was far more interesting than the war news.
She had moved to her washstand and, by routine, had taken the soap dish, removed the soap from its strainer, put the dish on the floor, knelt, poured the water, and then felt in her pocket for the bottle. Of course, she remembered, while Dr. Charles was about, she had locked it up. She did not want his keen nose smelling out that telltale almond scent. She found the key and went to the drawer in her desk. Then she paused.
How long would she go on with this if nothing happened; or, rather, if the zero hour refused to strike though everything else struck and crashed? How long would she wait about, arrested, while Life and Death inexhaustibly dealt out fresh cards in their endless game? Her tongue went to that small bicuspid cavity. Yes, it was twice the size, and the tip of her tongue, like a finger on an electric bell, could start a trill of pain when she pressed in. Was she going to loose that tooth? Here was a small sharp question. She could decide that; she must; she alone would pay if she didn’t. After all, death by dental neglect would hardly be realism, and it would be very uncomfortable and slow.
Philosophers had endured prison, but Shakespeare said even they bowed to toothache. If only things would run on schedule. If only the invasion had been tried and failed—or had come off. But just as it was—with some people dying and others being born just as though the war was not the final thing, and the war always failing to go according to timetable.…
Could it be true that just facing things wasn’t enough? Might true wisdom be, even, to refuse to face things, to refuse all plans, all large provisions? How could you plan if you couldn’t really foresee?
She had thought the actual Gospels pretty soft stuff. They kept her from joining the Church, even when she saw that Christianity in its time, had picked up a lot of psychological knowledge useful enough to stranded individuals. But the Sermon on the Mount; all that sentiment about easygoing lilies and careless little birds …! What was the actual phrase in which all that poetry ended?
As a matter of fact, she remarked to herself as she recalled the passage, it doesn’t conclude that everything is sweet fun. The deduced proposition is “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” That would mean that one is meant to take life in the actual, swallowable, daily doses as they come.
What had all of them been going through? They had been trying to stop the present and to live in what they had concluded was a certain future. They had been “doing time,” as convicts say. But what time? “The indeterminate sentence.” She smiled wryly as that phrase, beloved of progressive penologists, came to her lips. But the meaning of the indeterminate sentence was to give back the initiative to the convict. He could rewin his liberty by doing something, even while doing time. Time, even in prison, waited on you, on your good conduct. No, they had not been going through a progressive, indeterminate sentence—quite the reverse. Something quite different from you and your terms, ultimata, and demands, “controlled the stretch,” played the music slow or fast.
Something she’d read in her old college days, when she’d met a Theosophist, floated into her mind. “Time is all,” it ran, “Pain and Pleasure, Sorrow and Happiness, Disaster and Prosperity: they are the same thing felt at a different Tempo.” Well, she’d heard the psychophysiologists say something of that sort about pain. Her tongue gingerly felt around the back of the bicuspid. You could make the pain go from half-pleasure to quite-pain.
