III
... Strange that his brain should have shot right away from the main catastrophe on to this tangent question of reprisals! There, out in mid-ocean, a liner sunk; here, in a London slum, a baker’s shop raided. Where was the connection? A Gottlieb for an Ethel Ann.... “Yes, but is it quite fair—revenge by proxy? it wasn’t Schnabel who drowned Ethel Ann; it was another German; Schnabel was all the while harmlessly selling loaves. Why should he have to pay?” Were they thinking of that, the mad herd who had rushed up the street, brandishing their crowbars and axes and pokers? “Was I thinking of it? To relieve one’s feelings ... biting on the tooth—yes, but it’s got to be that especial nervous tooth—and you should want to hit the same German, not any old German, or the next-best German. If Ethel Ann’s mother could have got in on one of the torpedo crew ... I suppose one can’t expect a crowd to reason that way. But I might have saved him.... Damn it, why should I? he’s a German!”
And so am I—and so am I—knocked the meaningless hammer refrain from the walls and ceiling of his room, from every corner and cranny; in the wind that fitfully rattled the blind; in the creak of the chair; and from the rumble of traffic far below.... So am I—so am I—everywhere but inside his brain, where the mere statement might have been quickened to torturing realization—but it seemed unable to force an entrance, pushed out by a fantastic jumble of oddments he had never thought out before, never bothered to think out.
—Naturalized ... what exactly did that stand for? A paper which was given in payment of some small sum, stating that you were no more of one nationality, but of another.... But surely nationality was no surface matter, to be dealt with in this arbitrary fashion? it went deeper: your own country, your own soil. “‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead!’ how Fraser ranted that, last term when they were doing Scott. Beastly showing-off!... What will they say at Winborough when I tell them?—No, hang! that wasn’t it.... Nationality—the place where you were born——”
A dead halt in the onrush of thought. Richard stared blankly around him.... Then it began again, mental machinery that whirled ever faster, grinding, minutely grinding, at all that stray lumpy stuff....
“Nothing to do with where you were born. I can swear to that. That’s accidental. And your father’s nationality—accidental too, as far as you’re concerned; can’t be tacked on to it as a matter of course.
“What is it, then? The land that holds a meaning for you; it might be a question of habitation, or tradition, or convenience—herd instinct with the people you live among. Or—or imagination.
“No—it digs further down than that even.
“It ought to be the sum of where you were born, and where your father was born as well, and his father; where you have always lived, and always hope to live.”