Nor Many Waters Read online

  NOR MANY WATERS

  BY

  ALEC WAUGH

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  I

  We were standing, John Harraway, the editor of Contemporary Ideas, and myself, in the lobby of the Granville Club, when the tall, elegant, austere figure of James Merrick swung through the revolving doors.

  “The very man,” said Harraway. “Do you mind waiting for me half a second?”

  Their conversation took place within a couple of feet of me.

  “Such luck,” said Harraway. “I was just going to write to you. And now I’m saved the trouble. I was wondering whether you’ld care to do an article on divorce for me. Something about the history of it; what the ideas of the first reformers were: what kind of opposition they were up against, showing how the law’s changed. You know the kind of thing.”

  Merrick nodded his head. The subject of divorce was topical. A few days earlier the bill prohibiting the press report of divorce proceedings had been passed. And no man was better qualified to write such an article than Merrick. For twenty years he had been pleading the necessity for reform in articles and speeches to which his position as a solicitor had given an authority and weight, denied to the most distinguished and eloquent of laymen. His pale, thin cheeks flushed a little as he answered.

  “I shall be delighted,” he said, “and I am flattered that you should ask me. How soon would you require the article?”

  “As soon as you can manage it. The subject’s in the air.”

  “By Saturday.”

  “Splendid! And about two thousand words. I’m afraid I can’t offer you as much as I should like, as much as the article will be worth…”

  But Merrick had lifted a deprecatory hand.

  “My dear sir,” he said, “there are very few resolutions to which I can claim honestly to have been faithful. But to this I have: that I would never take a penny for such work as I have been able to do in the cause of easier divorce. Will you please send a cheque for whatever you think my article to be worth to the secretary of the Divorce Law Reform Union. I shall consider myself to be repaid amply by the pleasure and privilege of writing it.”

  It was in a way a pompous little speech, but spoken though it was in a dry, precise, carefully articulated voice, it was by no means without dignity. And it was with a perplexed but genuine admiration that Harraway watched the tall, sparse figure climb the stairway with long even strides.

  “An odd fellow,” was his comment. “But a rather fine one.”

  Which showed perspicacity on Harraway’s part. For it was the oddness rather than the fineness that one was inclined to notice first. In my own case I know very well it was. But then in my own case it was under considerably less conventional circumstances that we had met; under indeed the unlikeliest of conditions, in the spring of 1918 and in the Offizier Kriegs-gefangenen-lager Mainz.

  §

  We had been captured on the seventh day of the retreat within a few miles and a few hours of one another. We had reached Karlsruhe on the same day; and on the same day, a week later, we had been drafted to the citadel at Mainz. We did not, however, for six weeks get to know each other. There were six hundred other officers in the camp. He was a major, I was a lieutenant; and field officers, for the first few weeks at any rate, of captivity, stayed more or less among themselves. I was not, indeed, more than vaguely conscious of his existence till he outraged contemporary opinion by black-legging the camp wine-boycott.

  The details of the affair are these. In days when the mark was worth a shilling a particularly raw and sour wine was sold to us in the billiard-room above the kitchen at fifteen marks a bottle. There was no other form of alcohol to be obtained, and in our more cheerless moments we were grateful if not for the stuff’s taste, at least for the warmth it stirred in us. For a month or so we accepted it for what it was in a land overful of Ersatz.

  And then the sentry who was responsible for the custody of the cellar confided to a British orderly that the wine for which we paid fifteen marks at the citadel was bought for three marks in the town; which fact was communicated by the orderly to the officer-in-charge of the room for whose cleanliness he was responsible. The officer reported it to the senior colonel in his block and a committee sat upon the question. A profit of four hundred per cent was agreed to be excessive; some profit, it was conceded, was legitimate. But four hundred per cent!—no—that was too much! A deputation waited upon the German authorities. The wine, it was submitted, was beyond the restricted means of the members of the camp. The number of bottles consumed during the last week did not, the German authorities retorted, support this theory. These things were relative, the deputation answered. Perhaps if the wine cost less, there would be more drunk. The German authorities doubted if this were possible. Anyhow it was not worth the risk. They were doing, it was suggested, a good line of business. They preferred, they regretted they must prefer, to leave things as they were.

  The committee again sat. After two hours of deliberation the following resolution was approved. If the Germans were unprepared to accept a reasonable profit, they must be denied all profit. There should be no wine drunk. Wine should be boycotted till the price was lowered. The details of this resolution were announced privately to the members of each room. The camp went dry. For a fort-night it remained dry. Then there was a cold spell and the camp felt that dear wine was better than no wine at all. A, deputation waited upon the deputation. Was anything being done about the boycott? The senior deputation waited upon the Germans. Did not the authorities think that a lowering of the price of wine would be to the advantage of the authorities? There seemed to have been less wine drunk during the last fortnight. Had there, was the authorities’ bland retort. They had not noticed it. Again the deputation withdrew, and the camp was informed that their interests were not being overlooked. It was two days after the announcement of the deputation’s failure that James Merrick became a blackleg.

  I was in the billiard-room at the time, waiting for a game to finish. It was half-past one and there was no one else in the room beside the two players and the gunner subaltern who had been detailed to act as a piquet to protect the boycott. The cold spell had passed. The metallic heat of a German summer was beating down upon the parched and empty square. Most of the prisoners were in their rooms asleep. The German orderly was dozing against the stove. Some ducks were quacking in the courtyard below the window. I thought of Lord’s and the green peace of an English summer. Even the clicking of the billiard balls was muted.

  And then James Merrick strolled into the room; it was not the first time that I had seen him, but it was the first time that I had noticed him. He was tall and graceful, of his type good looking, and in a curious way he gave an impression of being exceedingly well dressed. His tunic, as were the majority of our tunics in those early days before parcels had begun to arrive from England, was frayed and ragged. His breeches were patched haphazardly about the knee. His puttees were scratched and stained and punctured. And yet he was well dressed in the same way that Cinderella always seems to be well dressed as she sits in her rags before the kitchen fire; far better dressed indeed than when she is a shimmering sheet of silver. It may be that when a coat is new our eyes are attracted from the fine points of tailoring by the glow and colour of the cloth, so that it is only when a coat is old that we can tell whether it is well or badly cut. At any rate James Merrick that day in his ragged and stained tunic appeared more strikingly well dressed than ever he has seemed since as I have watched him stroll negligently down Piccadilly, a graceful, supercilious figure, bending forward now and again to smile, and raise with
a stiff and courtly sweep the gleaming surface of his hat.

  Slowly he walked into the room towards the German orderly.

  “I am thirsty,” he announced. “I believe that you sell wine.”

  The bullet-shaped head was jerked forward into wakefulness.

  “Eh, vat?” he said. It was the first time that anyone had spoken to him for sixteen days.

  “I said,” repeated Merrick, “that I was thirsty. I am informed that you sell wine.”

  There was a dead silence. The billiard players had turned from their game. The wine piquet was leaning forward anxiously on his stool. The German was staring stupidly at Merrick.

  “Come, come,” said Merrick impatiently. “Do you or do you not sell wine? And if you do, what manners of wine have you?”

  “Only this, sir,” and the German dived quickly down into the wooden case beside him and produced a long slim-necked bottle.

  Merrick took the bottle from him, turned it over slowly in his hands, read the name on the label. “Liebfraumlich,” he said, sniffed, raised the bottle to the light, then handed it again to the German. “It may be;” he said, “how much?”

  “Fifteen marks, sir.”

  Merrick counted out fifteen marks, waited for the bottle to be uncorked, then went and sat down at a table by the window from which he could be seen by anyone passing the west side of the square. The wine piquet looked dubiously at me.

  “What shall I do?” he asked. He was a poor-looking creature. Had he been anything else, he would not, I imagine, have been there at all.

  “What are you supposed to do?” I said.

  “Stop people drinking. But that chap’s a Major.”

  “Then I should go and find someone who can stop him,” I suggested.

  A slow smile of gratitude and relief spread upwards about his face. “Of course,” he said, “of course. Thank you so much. I’ll go at once.”

  We waited, the remainder of us, in that atmosphere of half-pleasant, half-unpleasant anticipation in which as small urchins in a fourth form day-room we had awaited the arrival of the cane that had been ordered for the castigation of faults not ours.

  While James Merrick sipped slowly and with apparent appreciation at the dull yellow fluid, we strained our ears for the sound of feet on the stone-flagged stairway.

  At last they came. And one glance at the dumpy little figure with a bright red face, a curling moustache and a ludicrously tight-fitting tunic, who strutted forward like a Bateman caricature, told us that it was comedy and not drama that we were to witness. The Senior Officer whom the wine piquet had requisitioned was no doubt a highly effective instrument of justice in his own orderly room with the might of the Army Act behind him, but the present situation lay clearly beyond his tether.

  Merrick raised his head from the table and smiled pleasantly as his brother officer came up to him.

  “Good afternoon, Everard,” he said, “may I persuade you to take a glass of wine with me?”

  Major Everard shook his head. “No, no; thanks very much. It’s very kind of you, Merrick. I’m quite well though, thank you.”

  “Had I thought you to be anything else,” laughed Merrick, “I should not have been so tactless as to offer it you!”

  His inquisitor blushed, coughed and began to stammer. “I thought… I… I… I… imagined,” he said, “that you—you must be ill yourself or… or you would not have… would not have broken the… broken the confidence the camp had p-placed in you. I should not have thought unless you had been ill…”

  “Now you know, Everard,” said Merrick, “that you imagined nothing of the sort.”

  “Er… er…” the Major began to stammer.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Merrick smiled. “It was only that you desired to be tactful. A desire that I commend in you. The whole affair, is however, exactly what it appears to be. Being thirsty, I felt the need of wine. A need that I have come here to gratify. You consider that to be very wrong of me and you have come to tell me so. That is how it stands, surely?”

  Twenty-five years earlier, when he was a cadet at Sandhurst, youth and resilience might have supplied Major Everard with the requisite technique for such a moment. But he had lived too long in a world where things were so, or were not so, where a rifle was either clean or dirty, where the word ‘please’ was a command. He could not fence. He could only bluster.

  “It’s disgraceful,” he said; “you, a senior officer, to set such an example. To let down the camp like this—a disgrace, sir, a disgrace.”

  Merrick smiled sadly at him.

  “My good Everard,” he said, “this boycott was organized for the benefit of the camp, and it is not going to be affected by my breaking it alone and to the extent of a single bottle. Had I conducted some organized offensive, you might with justice have felt aggrieved. But that I have not done. I could drink a bottle of wine here every day and the Germans would still be running their cellars unprofitably. If more fellows follow my example, it will mean merely that they, in company with myself, prefer dear wine to no wine at all. And if in time the majority of the camp should come to agree with me, then, as the boycott was organized for the camp’s benefit, it will be better that the wine boycott should cease, for the camp will have ceased to consider such a thing to be in its interests. In the meantime the Germans will not lower the price of wine. You can be sure of that. They are obstinate creatures.”

  “Then we should be equally obstinate.”

  Merrick shook his head. “There is an old proverb, Everard, about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The pleasure that it would give me to annoy the Germans would be less than the discomfort my abstinence would cause me. Of two evils I must take the less. The rest of you may think differently. To me that is a consideration of minute importance. I rarely attempt to influence opinion: never unless it appears to me to be hindering personal liberty. If the camp wants wine, let it have it. If it does not want it, let it do without. Myself, however, I do need it. I trust,” he said, turning to me, “that you agree with me.”

  I murmured something that, had it been audible, would have been non-committal.

  Major Everard grunted angrily.

  “What this young man thinks or does not think,” he said, “is neither here nor there.”

  “Ah,” said Merrick; paused; then added thoughtfully:

  “You think that, do you? Well, perhaps you are right; in fact, I’m sure you are. It isn’t. It is neither here nor there. We are laws unto ourselves: or should be. Personal liberty, that is all that matters. Still, if that is your attitude, Everard, you should allow an equal freedom to the rest of us. Yes?”

  And he smiled cheerfully into the Major’s face.

  But the Major was defenceless, unarmed and weaponless. His face grew redder. The pouches beneath his eyelids twitched. He embarked on the first syllables of three sentences, each of which he abandoned with a grunt. “You will hear more of this,” he said, and strutted from the room. Heavily and at irregular intervals his feet thudded on the stone stairway.

  James Merrick sighed.

  “It is curious,” he said, “very curious how incapable the average person is of applying the laws of demand and supply to changed conditions. That dear old Major is convinced that because wine is sold at three marks in the town it should be sold for five marks here. But it should be obvious to him that the demand for wine in this camp is far greater than it is in Mainz. In Mainz there are a number of competing inducements to extravagance. In Mainz you may spend your money on dances, or theatres, or cinemas, or women. There is only a limited amount of money to be spent, and if the price of wine is unproportionately higher than the price of a stall, the money will go on stalls and not on wine. But here there is no competition. There is no dancing. There are no concerts. There are no theatres and, alas I suspect for Major Everard, no women. Food and wine are the only targets for extravagance. The demand is greater here and so the price is higher.

  “It is quite fair,” he conti
nued. “I do not grumble. And in a very short time the camp will realize that it must buy something with its money; that it must be entertained. The Germans know that, so they are waiting. Someone had to be the first to break this boycott, and I prefer to be the first rather than the fifth or seventh. The price of everything is fixed by supply and demand. For instance, I pay twice a week seventy-five marks to a German sentry for a loaf of bread.”

  I gasped at that. “Three pounds fifteen shillings for a loaf,” I said. “It’s robbery!”

  “Not at all,” he answered. “Money is no use to me when I can buy nothing with it. I spend, I suppose, in London, about a pound a day selfishly on my own amusements, which is just about what I am spending here on bread. You make the mistake that so many others make, that nearly every one, in fact, does make, of imagining that money has an absolute value. It has not. It is merely a medium of exchange. In London a pound is worth a lunch at the Savoy. In Paris a dinner at the Crillon. In Palm Beach it will purchase you an icecream sundae. Here, as you see, it is worth about a quarter of a loaf of bread. I am a practical man. I take what I want for what I possess. And I cannot allow my liberty to be fettered by unenlightened prejudice. I have the right to be swindled if I choose.”

  He smiled; and rather charmingly, with one of those smiles that express an attitude rather than a mood: that come seemingly from mellowed distances.

  “In the meantime,” he added, “wine is one of the things that cannot be enjoyed alone. You had better help me. It is foul stuff. I shall never be able to finish it alone.”

  He was right; it was foul stuff. But by four o’clock there were three empty bottles on the table. And the bottle has made as many friendships as it has broken.

  §

  A community so heterogeneous as a Prisoners of War Camp divides itself of necessity into groups. There was the escaping club group and the theatrical group and the educational group. There were the people who drank and the people who prayed and the people who played bridge. There were, and they were vastly in the majority, the people who did nothing. While lastly there were ourselves, some eight or nine of us, who met day after day in an annexe off the billiard-room which we called the ‘alcove,’ to talk and write and idle as the mood impelled us; some eight or nine of us united by a reluctance to be disturbed, an attitude to our environment that was best defined, I think, by Merrick.