CHAPTER VII
I
He was presently walking back, returning to Tidborough.
He was trying very hard, all his life's training against sudden unbridling of his bridled passions, to grapple his mind back from its wild and passionate desires and from its amazed coursings upon the immense prairies, teeming with hazards, fears, enchantments, hopes, dismays, that broke before this hour as breaks upon the hunter's gaze, amazingly awarded from the hill, savannas boundless, new, unpathed,—from these to grapple back his mind to its schooled thought and ordered habit, to its well-trodden ways of duty, obligation, rectitude. He had not left them. But for that cry of her name wrung from him by sudden application of pain against whose shock he was not steeled, he had answered nothing to her lamentable disclosure. This which he now knew, these violent passions which now he felt, but lit for him more whitely the road his feet must take. If he had ever tried consciously to see his life and Mabel's from Mabel's point of view, now, when his mind threatened disloyalty to her, he must try. And would! The old habit, the old trick of seeing the other side, acted never so strongly upon him as when unkindness appeared to lie in his own attitude. Unkindness was unfairness and unfairness was above all qualities the quality he could not tolerate. And here was unfairness, open, monstrous, dishonourable.
Mabel should not feel it.
But he was aware, he was informed as by a voice in his ears, "You have struck your tents. You are upon the march."
II
He approached the town. The school lay in this quarter and his way ran through its playing fields and its buildings. Nature in her moods much fashioned his thoughts when he walked the countryside or rode his daily journey on his bicycle. He now carried his thoughts into her mood that stood about him.
Nature was to him in October, and not in spring, poignantly suggestive, deeply mysterious, in her intense and visible occupation. She was enormously busy; but she was serenely busy. She was stripping her house of its deckings, dismantling her habitation to the last and uttermost leaf; but she stripped, dismantled, extinguished, broke away, not in despair, defeat, but in ordered preparation and with exquisite certitude of glory anew. That, in October, was her voice to him, stirring tremendously that faculty of his of seeing more clearly, visioning life more poignantly, with his mind than with his eye. She spoke to him of preparation for winter, and beyond winter with ineffable assurance for spring, bring winter what it might. He saw her dismantling all her house solely to build her house again. She packed down. She did not pack up, which is confusion, flight, abandonment. She packed down, which is resolve, resistance, husbandry of power to build and burst again; and burst again,—in stout affairs of outposts in sheltered banks and secret nooks; in swift, amazing sallies of violet and daffodil and primrose; in multitudinous clamour of all her buds in May; and last in her resistless tide and flood and avalanche of beauty to triumph and possession.
That was October's voice to him; that he apprehended and tingled to it, as the essence of its strange, heavy odours; secret of its veiling mists; whisper of its moisture-laden airs; song of its swollen ditches, brooks and runnels. It was not "Take down. It is done." It was "Take down. It is beginning."
Mankind, frail parasite of doubt, seeks ever for a sign, conceives no certainty but the enormous certitude of uncertainty. A sign! In death: "Take down, then; but leave me this—and this—for memory. Perhaps—who knows?—it may be true.... But leave me this for memory." In promise: "So be it, then—but give me some pledge, some proof, some sign." Not thus October. October spoke to Sabre of Nature's sublime imperviousness to doubt; of her enormous certainty, old as creation, based in the sure foundations of the world. "Take down. It is beginning."
Sabre used to think, "It gets you—terrifically. It's stupendous. It's too big to bear." He had this thought out of October: "You can't, can't walk along lanes or in woods in October and see all this mysterious business going on without knowing perfectly well that this astounding certainty must apply equally to human life. I'd wish the death of any one I loved to be in early autumn. No one can possibly doubt in early autumn. In winter, perhaps; and in spring and in summer you can know, cynically, it will pass. But in October—no. Impossible then. And not only death, Life. Life as one lives it. You can't, can't feel in autumn that in the lowest depths there is lower yet. You only can feel, know, that the thing will break, that there's an uplift at the bottom of it all. There must be."
III
Take down: it is beginning. The spirit and the message of the season (as they communicated themselves to him) began, as opiate among enfevered senses, to steal about his thoughts. Had anything happened? His feeling was rather that he was at the beginning of something; or at the end of something, which was the same thing. The place whereon he stood entered into his thoughts. He had left the main road and was skirting through the school precincts. He was crossing The Strip, historic sward whereon were played the First XV football matches. Impossible to be upon The Strip without peopling it again with the tremendous battles that had been here, the giants of football who here had made their fame and the school's fame; the crowded, tumultuous touch lines; the silent, tremendous combat in between. Memories came to him of his own two seasons in the XV; his own name from a thousand throats upon the wintry air. His muscles tautened as again he fought some certain of those enormous moments when the whole of life was bound up solely in the unspeakable necessity to win. Astounding trick of thought from what beset him! He was alone upon The Strip, in an overcoat, on the way to forty, not a sound, not a soul, and with that brooding sense of being upon the edge and threshold of something vast, dark, threatening, unfathomable.
IV
Down the steep hill flanked by masters' houses. Twilight merging now into darkness. Boys passing in and out of the gateways. Past Telfer's which had been his own house. All this youth was preparing for life; all these houses eternally, generation after generation, pouring boys out into life as at Shotley iron foundry he had seen molten metal poured out of a cauldron. And every boy, poured out, imagined he was going to live his own life. O hapless delusion! Lo, as the same moulds awaited and confined the metal, so the same moulds awaited and confined the living stuff. Mysterious conventions, laws, labours; imperceptibly receiving; implacably binding and shaping. The last day he had come down the steps of Telfer's—jumped down—how distinctly he remembered it! It was his own life he was coming down, eagerly jumping down, into.—Well, here he was, passing those very steps, and whose life was he living? Mabel's? Old Fortune's? And to what end?
V
Whose life was Nona living?
He had asked her, "Tell me about you and Tybar."
With pitiable gentleness of voice she had approached that quantity which had been missing from her first statement of her position. And she had done tribute to her husband's parts with generosity, nay with pride. "Tony does everything better than any one else." She had said it on that occasion of their first reëncounter; its burthen had been the opening of her recital of what else she had for him.
"Marko, I think Tony's the most wonderful person that ever was. He does everything that men do and he does everything best. And everybody admires him and everybody likes him. You've no idea. You've no idea how he wins everybody he meets. People will do anything for him. They love him. Well, you've only got to look at him, haven't you? Or hear him talk? I think there's never been any one so utterly captivating as Tony is to look at and to hear."
Most engagingly, with such words, she had presented him: one that passed through life airily, exquisitely; much fairy-gifted at his cradle with gifts of beauty, charm, preëminence in all he touched; knowing no care, knowing no difficulty, knowing no obstacle, or danger, or fear, or illness, or fatigue, or anything in life but gay and singing things, which touching, he made more bright, more tuneful yet; meeting no one, of whatever age or degree, but his charm was to that age or degree exactly touched; captivating all, leading all, by all desired in leadership. Fortune's darling!
"And, Marko," she at last had come to. "And Marko—this is the word—graceless. Utterly, utterly graceless. Without heart, Marko, without conscience, without morals, without the smallest scrap of an approach to any moral principle. Marko, that's an awful, a wicked, an abominable thing for a wife to say of her husband. But he wouldn't mind a bit my telling you. Not a bit. He'd love it. He'd laugh. He'd utterly love to know he had stung me so much. And he'd utterly love to know he'd driven me to tell you. He'd think—he'd love like anything to drive me to do awful things. He's tried—especially these two years. He'd love to be able to point a finger at me and laugh and say, 'Ah! Ha-ha! Ah!' You know, he hasn't got any feelings at all—love or hate or anything else; and it simply amuses him beyond anything to arouse feeling in anybody else. There have been women all the time we've been married and he simply amuses himself with them until he's tired of them, and until the next one takes his fancy, and he does it quite openly before me, in my house, and tells me what I can't see before my own eyes just for the love of seeing the suffering it gives me. You saw that Mrs. Winfred. He's done with her now. And he's as shameless about me with them as he is about them with me. And what he loves above all is the way I take it; and I can take it in no other way. You see I won't, I simply will not, Marko, let these women of his see—or let any one in the world suspect—that I—that I suffer. So when we are together before people I keep up the gay way we always show together. He loves it; it's delicious to him, because it's a game played over the torture underneath. And I won't do any other way, Marko. I will keep my face to the world—I won't have any one pity me."
"I pity you," he had said.
"Ah, you...."
VI
And he was suddenly shot into an encounter of extraordinary incongruity with his thoughts and of extraordinary intensity. A voice accosted him. He was astounded, as if suddenly awakened out of heavy sleep, to see to where he had come. He was in the narrow old ways of Tidborough Old Town, approaching The Precincts, by the ancient Corn Exchange. A keen-looking young man, particularly well set up and wearing nice tweeds, was accosting him. Sabre recognised Otway, captain and adjutant of the depot, up at the barracks, of the county regiment, one of the crack regiments, famous as "The Pinks."
Otway said, "Hullo, Sabre. How goes it? Are you going to this show to-morrow?"
He was pointing with his stick to a poster displayed against the Corn Exchange. Sabre read it. It announced that Field Marshal Lord Roberts was speaking there, under the auspices of the National Service League, on Home Defence—a Citizen Army.
"I hadn't thought about going," Sabre said. He wanted to get away.
Otway was staring at the poster as though he had never seen it before; but he had been staring at it when Sabre came along the street. "You ought to," Otway said. "You ought to hear old Bobs. Of course the little chap's all wrong."
He seemed to be talking to himself, staring at the poster, more than to Sabre. Sabre, despite his preoccupation, was surprised. "All wrong? Good lord, I should have thought you of all people—" And immediately a torrent of Otway was let loose upon him, bursting into his thoughts like a stone chucked through a study window.
Otway spun around in his keen, quick way to face him. "All wrong in the way he's putting his case, I mean. All these National Service chaps are. Home defence they talk about, nothing but Home Defence. It's like chucking sawdust into a fire—the fire being all the bloody fools who are opposed to military training. Any fool can knock the bottom out of this Home Defence business. The Blue Water fools are champions at it. They say the only defence against invasion is the Navy and that half a million spent on the Navy is worth untold millions chucked away on this 'Nation in Arms' shout. And they're damn right."
"Well, then?" said Sabre. "What's the argument? What's the harm in knocking the bottom out of—this?" he nodded towards the poster.
Otway spoke with astonishing intensity. "Why, good God alive, man, don't you see, we do want a nation in arms; we want it like hell. But we don't want it for here, at home; we want it to fight on the Continent. That's where we've got to fight,—out there. And that's where we're going to fight before we're many years older."
In his intensity he had extended his left hand and was beating his points into it with the handle of his stick. "See that?"
Sabre was not in the mood to see anything. He only wanted to be away.
"No, I'm dashed if I do. What are we going to fight on the Continent for—supposing we ever do have to fight anywhere?"
The stick hammered away again. "Because we've got obligations there. We've got to defend Belgium, for one. And if we hadn't—if we hadn't any obligations we'd pretty soon, we'd damn soon find them as soon as ever Germany breaks loose. That's what these National Service Johnnies ought to tell the people, that's what Bobs ought to tell them, that's what these blasted politicians ought to tell them: you don't want National Service to defend your perishing homes. The Navy's going to do that. You want it like hell because you've got to defend your lives—out there." He waved his stick towards "out there." "My God!" he said. He was consumed with the intensity of his own emotions. "My God!"
Despite himself, Sabre was impressed. The man would have impressed anybody. His eyes were extraordinarily penetrating. There actually were tiny little points of perspiration about his nose.
"I never thought about that," Sabre said doubtfully. "I never thought there were any obligations. I doubt any member of the Government would admit there were any."
"I know damn well they wouldn't," Otway declared. "And they'd be helped to deny it, or to evade it, by the howl of laughter there'd be in the Commons if any one had the guts to get up and ask if we had any obligations. There's no joke goes down like that sort of joke. Well—" His manner changed. He tucked his stick under his arm and took out a silver cigarette case. "Cigarette? Well—they'll laugh the other side of their chuckle heads one of these days."
Sabre took a cigarette. "You're pretty sure there's going to be a war, aren't you?"
The extraordinary man, who had become smiling and airy, immediately became extraordinary again. He had struck a match, held it to Sabre's cigarette, and was applying it to his own. He extinguished it with violent jerks of his arm and dashed it on to the pavement. "Sure? My God, sure? I tell you, Sabre, you won't be five years, I don't believe you'll be two years, one year, older before you'll not only be sure—you'll know! I've just finished a course at the Staff College, you know. We finished up with a push over to Belgium to do the battlefields. We went into Germany, some of us. They fed us in some of their messes. Do you know, those chaps in those messes there talked about fighting us as naturally and as certainly as you talk with your opponents about a coming footer match. They talked about 'When we fight you'—not 'if we fight you'—'when', as if it was as fixed as Christmas. And they didn't talk any of this bilge about fighting us in England; they knew, as I know, and every soldier knows—every soldier who's keen—that it's going to be out there. In Europe." He had not taken two puffs at his cigarette before he wrenched it from his mouth and dashed it after the match. "Sabre, why the hell aren't people here told that? Why are they stuck up with this rot about defending their shores when they can see for themselves that only the Navy can defend their shores? What are they going to do when the war comes? Are they going to lynch these bloody politicians who haven't told them they've got to fight for their lives? Are they going to turn around and say they never knew it so they'll be damned if they'll fight for their lives? Are they going to follow any of these politicians who will have betrayed them? Do you suppose any man who's been party to this betrayal is going to be found big enough to run a war? I tell you that's another thing. Do you suppose a chap who's been a miserable vote-snatcher all his life is going to turn round suddenly and be a heaven-sent administrator in a war? You can take your oath Heaven doesn't send out geniuses on that ticket. What you've lived and done in fat times—that's what you're going to live and do in lean. Heaven's chucked stocking divine fire."
"I'm with you there," Sabre said. He did not believe half this intense man said, but he conceived a sudden and great admiration for his intensity. And he had had no idea that a soldier ever thought so far away from his own subject—which was sport and one chance in a million of fighting—as to produce aphorisms on habit and development. "But you know, Otway," he said, "it's jolly hard to believe all this inevitableness of war stuff that chaps like you put up. Do you read the articles in the reviews and the quarterlies? They all pretty well prove that, apart from anything else, a big European war is impossible by the—well, by the sheer bigness of the thing. They say these modern gigantic armies couldn't operate, couldn't provision themselves. And there's the finance. They prove you can't fight without money and that credit would go and the thing would stop before it had begun, pretty well. I don't know anything about that sort of thing, but the arguments strike me as absolutely sound."
Otway was waiting with fidgety impatience. "I've heard all that. I don't give a damn for it. Of course you don't know anything about it. No one does. Least of all those writing chaps. It's all theory. Every one thought that with modern this, that and the other you were as safe on the last word in liners as in your own bedroom. Then comes along that Titanic business in April, and where the hell are you with your modern conditions? Fifteen hundred people done in. I tell you it isn't that things that used to happen can't happen now; it's simply that they'll happen a million times worse. What's the good of theories when you've got facts? Look at the things there've been with Germany just this year alone. Old Haldane over in Germany in February for 'unofficial discussions', Churchill threatening two keels to one if the German Navy law is exceeded. That was March. In April the Germans whack up their Navy Law Amendment, twelve more big ships. That chap Bertrand Stewart getting three and a half years for espionage in Germany; and two German spies caught by us here,—that chap Grosse over at Winchester Assizes, three years, and friend Armgaard Graves up at Glasgow, eighteen months. An American cove at Leipzig taking four years' penal for messing around after plans of the Heligoland fortifications. Those five yachting chaps in July arrested for espionage at Eckernforde. War, too, skits of it. Turkey and Italy hardly done when all these Balkan chaps set to and slosh Turkey. Have you seen to-day's papers? I'll bet you they'll send Turkey to hell at Kirk Kilisse or thereabouts before the week's out."
He had been ticking these points off on his fingers, much astonishing Sabre by his marshalling of scattered incidents that had been merely rather pleasing newspaper sensations of a couple of days. He presented the ticked-off fingers bunched up together. "There, there's concrete facts for you, Sabre. Can you say things aren't tightening up? Why, if war—when war comes people will look back on this year, 1912, and wonder where in hell their eyes were that they didn't see it. What are they seeing?—" He threw his fingers apart. "None of these things. Not one. All this doctors and the Insurance Bill tripe, Marconi Inquiry, Titanic, Suffragettes smashing up the West End, burning down Lulu Harcourt's place, trying to roast old Asquith in the Dublin Theatre, Seddon murder, this triangular cricket show. Hell's own excitement because there's so much rain in August and people in Norwich have to go about in boats, and then hell's own hullaballoo because there's no rain for twenty-two days in September and people get so dry they can't spit or something." His keen face wrinkled up into laughter. "Eh, didn't you read that?" He laughed but was immediately intense again. "That's all that really interests the people. By God, they'll sit up and take notice of the real stuff one of these days. Pretty soon. Tightening up, I tell you. Well, I'm off, Sabre. When are you coming up to the Mess again? Friday? Well, guest night the week after. I'll drop you a line. So long." He was off, carrying his straight back alertly up the street.
VII
His going was somehow as sudden and startling as his appearance had been sudden and tumultuous. He had carried away Sabre's thoughts as a jet from a hosepipe will spin a man out of a crowd; smashed into his preoccupation as a stone smashing through a window upon one deep in study; galloped across his mind as a cavalcade thundering through a village street,—and the effect of it, and the incongruity of it as, getting his bicycle from the office, he rode homewards, kept returning to Sabre's mind, as an arresting dream will constantly break across daylight thoughts.
Nona had said that Tybar knew she thought often of him. "He knows I think of you." That was the way she had put it. It explained that mock in his eyes when they met that day on the road, and Mrs. Winfred's remark and her look, and Tybar's, that day outside the office. Extraordinary, Otway bursting in like that with all those ridiculous scares. Here he was riding along with all this reality pressing enormously about him, and with this strange and terrible feeling of being at the beginning of something or at the end of something, with this voice in his ears of, "You have struck your tents and are upon the march"; and there was Otway, up at the barracks, miles away from realities, but as obsessed with his impossible stuff as he himself with these most real and pressing dismays. What would he, with his apprehension of what might lie ahead, be saying to a chap like Otway in two or three years and what would Otway with his obsessions be saying to him? Ah, two or three years...!
But Nona loved him.... But his duty was here.... And he could have taken her beautiful body into his arms and held her beloved face to his.... But he had said not a word of love to her, only his cry of "Nona—Nona...." His duty was here.... But what would the years bring...? But what might have been! What might have been!
VIII
He finished his ride in darkness. The Green, as he passed along it on the free-wheel run, merged away through gloom into obscurity. Points of light from the houses showed here and there. The windows of his home had lamplight through their lattices. The drive was soft with leaves beneath his feet.
Lamplight, and the yielding undertread and all around walled about with obscurity. It was new. It had shown thus now for some nights on his return. But it was the first time he had apprehended it. New. Different. A commencement. An ending.
He left his bicycle in the roomy porch. He missed Low Jinks with her customary friendly greeting. It was very lonely, this. He opened the hall door and entered. Absolute silence. He had grown uncommonly accustomed to Low Jinks being here.... Absolute silence. It was like coming into an empty house. And he had got to go on coming into it, and living in it, and tremendously doing his duty in it.
Like an empty house. He stood perfectly still in the perfect stillness. Take down: it is beginning. You have struck your tents and are upon the march.