II
Little by little I learnt the details which linked the end of Malory’s story to the point where I was to take it up. Rawdon Westmacott, in spite of his wife’s entreaties to settle in another part of the country, had insisted on returning almost directly after their marriage to his farm, and there, ignored by her own family and by the whole horrified, scandalised countryside, Ruth had dwelt in a companionship more terrible than solitude. For Westmacott had followed unbridled his habitual paths of drunkenness and violence. How grim and disquieting must have been that situation: not two miles separated Pennistans’ from Westmacotts’, not two miles lay between the parents and the daughter, yet they were divided by league upon league of pride, across which their mutual longing quivered as heat-waves upon the surface of the desert. The mother, I think, would have gone, but Amos, with that Biblical austerity which Malory had noted in him, forbade any advance towards, any mention of, the prodigal. The ideal of decency, which is the main ideal of the country people, had been outraged, and this Amos, the heir of tradition, could not forgive. During the greater part of the first year, neither Ruth nor her mother can willingly have stirred far from their own garden door. The torment, the gnawing of that self-consciousness! The apprehension of that first Sunday, when Amos with set jaw forced his wife to church! with what tremulousness she must have entered the little nave, casting round her eyes in secret, dreading yet hoping, relieved yet disappointed. She bore traces of the strain, the buxom woman, in the covert glance of her eyes and the listening, searching expression of her face. I have seen her start at the sound of the door-latch, and look up expectantly as she must have looked in those days, afraid and longing to see the beloved figure in the door.
The tension came to an end at last, for Nancy, whose will might not be crossed, burst out with indignation at the treatment of her sister and set off angrily for Westmacotts’. She returned within an hour with the information that Rawdon was dead drunk in the kitchen and that Ruth’s child would surely be born before morning. Mrs. Pennistan had not known of the child; she leapt to her feet saying that she must go at once, and upbraided Amos for having withheld her so long from her own flesh and blood. Amos rose, and saying gloomily, “Do what you will, but don’t let me know of it,” he left the room.
I know nothing of the meeting between mother and daughter, but I imagine that the sheer urgency of the situation mercifully did much to smooth the difficulty of the moment. The crisis over, a new order of things replaced the old: relations were re-established, and Ruth henceforward came and went between her present and her former home. Only, the Pennistans’ door was barred to the son-in-law, as their lips were barred to his name. At the most, his phantasm hovered between them.
Now I have told all that I could reconstruct, and most of this I heard from Nancy, who was a frank, outspoken girl; common, I thought her, and ordinary, but good-hearted underneath her exuberance. She had lived at home since her husband had gone to fight. She was very different from her quiet sister, as different as a babbling brook from a wide, calm pool of water. I heard a great deal of abuse of Westmacott from her, even to tales of how he ill-treated his wife; and I also heard of her own happiness, confidences unrestrainedly poured out, for she was innocent of reserve. To this I preferred to listen, though, truthfully, she often bored and sometimes embarrassed me. I soon discovered that for all her fiery temper she was a woman of no moral stamina, and I didn’t like to dwell in my own mind upon her utter annihilation under the too probable blow of war.
The blow fell, and by the curse of Heaven I was there to see it; the reality of the danger had always seemed remote, even in the midst of its nearness, for such nightmares crawl closer and closer only to be flung back repeatedly by the force of human optimism. I had never before realised the depths of such optimism. Her first cry was “It cannot be true!” her first instinct the instinct of disbelief. In the same way she had always clung to an encouraging word, however futile, and had been cast down to an equal degree by an expression of pessimism. I suppose that when the strings of the human mind are drawn so taut, the slightest touch will call forth their pathetic music.... Poor Nancy! I had seen her husband on leave for ten days during which her eyes were radiant and her voice busy with song; he went; and was killed the day after his return to France.
Not very long afterwards I got a letter from Malory, forwarded and re-forwarded, which, coming out of the, so far as he was concerned, silence of years, reminded me forcibly of the day he had broken silence at Sampiero. It gave me a queer turn of the heart to see that the envelope I held in my hand had gone first of all to Sampiero, to our little lodging house, had been handled, no doubt, by the hunch-backed postman I had known so well. I could see him, going down the street, with his bag over his shoulder, and my letter in his bag. I could see my old landlady with the letter in her hand, turning it over and over, till light broke on her, and she remembered the Englishman, and hunted up his unfamiliar address, and wondered, perhaps, whether he, too, had fallen in the war.
I give Malory’s letter here.
“... I read his name in the official list, and can only suppose that it is my Daphnis, as I know he was in a Kentish regiment. Oh, these yeomen of England, of whom I always thought as indigenous to the soil, born there, living there, dying there, buried there, with no knowledge beyond their counted acres, but knowing those so well and thoroughly, tree by tree, crop by crop, path by path through the woodland! They have been uprooted and borne to foreign shores, but they are England, and it is for their own bit of England, weald, marsh, or fell, that they die.
“They have lived all their lives in security, and the security of centuries lies behind them, as the volume of ocean lies behind each wave that laps the shore. Now the mammoth of danger and unrest prowls round their homesteads, and a hand whose presence they did not suspect moves and removes them, pawns in the game. How can they understand? They do not. They only cling, for the sake of sanity, to what they know: their corner of England and their own individuality, rocks which have been with them since they were born, and which in the thunderstorm about their ears they can retain unaltered.
“I live amongst them now, and I know.
“I have been once in a great earthquake, and I know that the secret of its terror is that the earth, the steady immutable earth, betrays the confident footstep. So in this earthquake men cling to themselves and to their land, as they know it, as immutable things.
“I am living now in a great peace; I do not hear the din around me; I am as one in the centre of those tropical winds, where all that is in the path of the hurricane is destroyed, but in the still and silent centre birds sing and leaves do not stir. Or I am as a totally deaf man, the drums of whose ears are burst. I am happy.
“But the others, who are in the path of the wind, they are clouted and pushed and beaten, blinded and deafened by the cyclone. They are made to gyrate as the little mice were made to gyrate. What is it, oh God, that drives us, poor creatures?
“I am not one of those who, at this moment, hold that the war is supreme and all-eclipsing. The war is not eternal, and its proportions are relative; only life is eternal, and fate is eternal. Fate! Do you remember the Pennistans, and how fate, the freaky humorist, played her tricks upon them? There was no escape for them then, there is no escape for us now.
“If all mankind were resigned to fate, sorrow would take wing and fly from the world.
“I think of this present stirring of nations as the stirring of huge antediluvian beasts, kicked up out of their slumber by a giant’s foot, and fighting amongst themselves like the soldiers of Jason. No human eye can follow the drift of war, as no human mind can encircle the entirety of modern knowledge. We are as men in the valley, with mountains rising around, and, beyond each ridge that we climb, a farther ridge. It is for the geographers of the future to come with their maps and measure peak after peak to their correctness of altitude. And it is for us to remember that as the highest peak is as nothing upon the perfect roundness of the globe, so is our present calamity as nothing upon the perfect roundness of the scheme of destiny.”
Again that strange impulse to confide in me! in me the stranger whom he, if anything, disliked. I wondered whether our whole lives were to be punctuated by these spasmodic confidences, and whether the forging of a number of such links would finally weave together a chain of friendship? I reflected that he, the analyst, could probably explain the kink in men’s brains by which confidential expansion is not necessarily based on sympathy, but I admitted to myself that I was routed by the problem.
I liked his letter; it produced in me a sensation of peace and light, and of a great broadening. I envied him his balance and his sanity. I envy him still more now that peace has come, and that the rapid perspective of history already shows me the precision of his judgment.
I showed part of the letter to Ruth, curious to observe the impression which Malory’s reflections would produce on a primitive and uncultivated brain. I knew that that letter was not the outcome of a transitory or accidental frame of mind, but that, like a rock gathering speed as it bowls down the side of a hill, the swell and rush of his considered thought had borne him along until his fingers, galloping to the dictation of his mind, had covered the sheets I now held in my hand. Ruth frankly understood no word of his letter. She merely asked me in her direct way whether I thought Mr. Malory was sorry her brother-in-law had been killed. Privately I thought that some devilish cynicism in the man, some revolting sense of artistic fitness, would rejoice in a detached, inhuman fashion, at the pertinence of the tragedy.
He said in his next letter to me—a reply to a letter of mine:—
“... Destiny and nature are, after all, the only artists of any courage, of any humour. Do they take Rawdon Westmacott? for whose disappearance all concerned must pray; no, they take Daphnis, who, of the thirty or forty million fighting men, is in the minority that should be spared.
“From the beginning they have exercised their wit on these innocent country people. How can we escape from their humour, when it gambols around us in the unseen? we cannot escape it, we can only hope to cap it with the superlative humour of our indifference.
“Around how many homes must it be gambolling now! from the little centre in the Weald of Kent, which is known to both you and me, to the little unknown centres of human life in the heart of Asia, where anxiety dwells, and where no news will ever come, but where hope will flag and droop day by day, till at last it expires in hopeless certainty.
“If you do not hear of me again, you may conclude that the arch-joker has taken me also, but remember that I shall have had the laugh on him after all, for I shall not care. However, I shall probably be spared, for no man or woman would weep for me.
“One’s chief need, one’s principal craving, I find, is to get Death into his true proportion. We have always been accustomed to think of Death as a suitable and even dignified ending to life in old age, but to regard the overtaking of youth by Death in quite a different light, as an unspeakable calamity. Here, of course, such an overtaking is of everyday occurrence. This, you will say, is a truism. I answer, that there is no such thing as truism in war; there is only Truth.
“If I take all my reflections about Death, slender as is their worth, and pass them through a sieve of analysis, what do I get? I get, as a dominant factor, Pity. Pity, yes, pity that these young men should have missed the good things life would have given them; not horror so much that they should be in the blackness below the ground, as pity that they should not be above it in the light....”
An intense anger and irritation rose in me at his passive acceptance of what he termed fate. If man must struggle against his fellow-men in order to survive in the life-battle, then why not against fate also? He who does not resist must inevitably be crushed. It was at this stage that my great scheme began to formulate in my mind, by which I should defeat fate for the sake of Malory and Ruth; partly, largely, for the sake of their happiness, but partly also, I must admit, for the triumph of taking Malory by the hand and showing him how with the help of a little energy I had overcome the destiny he had been passively prepared to accept as inevitable. I would pit my philosophy against his philosophy, and incidentally bring two muddled lives to a satisfactory conclusion.
I hugged my scheme to myself in the succeeding months as a lunatic hugs an obsession.