Nor Many Waters Read online

  “Peace of mind, that’s all I ask,” he said. “The rest of them can organize escaping clubs to their hearts’ content. They never will escape. For four years now people have been trying to and no one has. If it amuses them to plan escapes, by all means let them. I am old and tired and an indifferent linguist. I have spent twenty-eight consecutive months between Nieuport and Peronne. My war is over. The Americans can carry on there now.”

  And so, while the rest of the camp busied itself elsewhere, we would sit through those long summer days, writing and chattering and drinking.

  It was an odd kind of workshop, that annexe off the billiard-room. On one side, through the open windows, came the cackle and the smell of ducks. And on the other, from the larger room, the murmur of conversation, and the click of billiard balls. While within the alcove itself it was never really quiet. The fact that one of us was at work upon a novel would not prevent the remaining six from discussing as loudly as they chose the psychology of Hamlet or the physiology of Queen Elizabeth.

  “What do you think,” someone would remark, “of this’ll as a rhyme for whistle?”

  To which would come the retort, “I’ve done eighteen hundred words since breakfast.”

  “I want a rhyme for porcelain,” the librettist would announce.

  There would be a pause. Then “Of course, Elaine,” would be suggested.

  Or else Merrick, who spent much of his time working out cross-country train journeys with the aid of a pre-war Bradshaw that had found its battered way into the camp library, would be wondering how long it would take to get across Bath in a taxi from the Great Western to the Midland Station.

  “Ten minutes. Admirable,” he would say. “Then it is just possible to lunch at Melksham and reach Shepton Mallet in time for tea.”

  A curious atmosphere. A curious time.

  We used to talk much in those days of all that we would do, or rather, not so much of what we would do, as of how marvellous life would be for us, when the war was over. For four years every minute that we had spent in London had been on leave, and every minute of it had been madly, deliriously happy. It was natural that we should conceive the return to civilian life as a glorified week-end leave. We did not see that return in terms of any specific pleasure. It was not that we should be able to enjoy this and dispense with that, but that we should be touching at every minute of the day that level of intense consciousness which we had during those last four years touched only on our leaves. For hours we would talk of it: that enchanted countryside of peace, and all of us in the same vaguely coloured anticipatory sense. All of us except Merrick. He was content enough with the present and unthrilled about the future. The days were passing: let them pass.

  His position of course was different from that of the rest of us. He was older, in the middle forties; and he was returning, as the rest of us were not, to assured and established habits. He was senior partner in one of the oldest and most respected firms of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn. The work he had abandoned would be awaiting him. He would convey property, investigate titles, pacify litigants, file petitions. He would identify himself again with the cause of simplified divorce; the work which had made his name familiar outside the grey precincts of the law; a work to which, indeed, in quite large part the changing attitude of the general public towards divorce was due. He was a bachelor, and the green shutters would be unbarred before the windows of that tranquil house in that tranquillest of little squares which is in Knightsbridge to the south of Charles Street.

  “It is a pleasant house,” he said. “You must come and dine there with me when we get home. I have some quite nice things. And I cannot say how relieved I was to be in the position when war came of not being forced to let it. I loathe the idea of other people being among my things. It will be pleasant to get back to it.”

  Pleasant. It was a word that was very often on James Merrick’s lips: a word that defined and expressed very accurately the modified excitement with which he looked out on life. It would be pleasant to be back in his own atmosphere, among his own things, and his own acquaintances. Pleasant, but no more than that. Peace would not mean for him the opening of high adventure, but the restoring of certain material amenities. Good food, good wine, warm fires, comfortable chairs, the agreeable interchange of views that comprises the sum of leisured conversation. It was these that he was missing. And there was something curiously typical of this attitude in the imaginary train journeys that he spent so large a portion of his time devising: typical, because of their obviously intrinsic uselessness; because to his absorption in them was added the corollary that they were no more worthless than anything else in a universe where it is idle to set high store on anything since the universe and all that it contains are incidents in a stream of change; typical, because of his insistence throughout those journeys of the importance of material comforts. The thrill of the unknown that is the chief charm of travel did not touch him. It was on the problem of meals that all his calculations turned. If one left Melksham after lunch, would one be able to reach Shepton Mallet in time for tea? Restaurant accommodation, he maintained, was the secret of successful transport. No man could be happy if he was hungry or was in danger of being hungry. Merrick had called himself a practical man. And if to be practical is to see life in terms of material pleasures and livelihood in terms of the satisfaction of those pleasures, then James Merrick was the most practical man that I have ever known.

  Only once did I see him make the least show of feeling, and that was in connection with the one subject that was personal to him, the subject of divorce. I forget how the conversation turned that way. Out of some modern novel, probably. All that I can recall of it is the picture of a languid figure leaning back against the window, and fluting in a languid, effeminate voice: “Must say that for myself I think it’s rather dangerous to marry in the same spirit that our grandfathers went to Brighton for a week-end, looking on it all as a rather entertaining diversion with no responsibilities attached to it. Strict divorce may mean a few hard cases, but for the general good and that, I’m all for it. Believe in people paying for their mistakes, myself.”

  It is a vivid picture. The languid, effeminate voice; the sudden flashing of Merrick’s face, the clenching of a fist, the sudden outburst, with the precise punctilious note gone utterly from a voice that anger had made real.

  “Nonsense! You might just as well say that a man who’s got venereal disease has no right to be cured of it: that he ought to be punished. That he ought to be made an object lesson!”

  A wild and angry outburst. Followed a second later by a suave apology.

  “You must pardon me,” Merrick was saying. “I should never be permitted to speak in private about divorce. I have spoken in public so often that I always imagine that I am answering a heckler. And for the average heckler, well, bad manners have to be parried by bad manners.”

  But it was not that. It had been no associated memory that had caused that outburst. James Merrick had definitely lost his temper. One thing at least could move him.

  It was the only thing that could, however. At all other times he was the detached materialist, the interested but unstirred spectator of the human comedy: making certain of the tangible things that were to be touched and seen. He was amusing and well informed; a sympathetic listener; as pleasant a companion as any exile has the right to wish for. But there were times when he depressed me. He was twenty-five years older than I was, twenty-five years further down the road that I was travelling. And I was afraid lest I too one day might see nothing left in life but the decoration as gracefully made as might be of the interval preceding one’s extinction. Once, after all, he must have felt as I was feeling, once must have asked of life something that was not material; had asked, and, having failed to find it, had fallen back on the things of which he could be sure, the things which had then seemed to him unimportant. And I did not care to think that one day I might come to hold the same views on life that Merrick held. For they were deep-ro
oted. Of that I was convinced. They were not merely the reaction against four years of discipline and discomfort. They were, I was very certain, more than that. Back somewhere in the past they had been built out of experience. And I would pause often in the intervals of my writing in the alcove to look curiously at him as he pored over the pages of his Bradshaw arranging imaginary week-ends, fantastic cross-country journeys from one end of England to the other, and always so arranging them that nowhere should a single meal be missed.

  §

  Odd days. So odd that it is difficult to believe that it is less than ten years ago that James Merrick and I were walking round the square at Mainz after dawdling the afternoons away in the alcove over sour hock; hard to believe that it is less than ten years ago that we were parading the town in the thrill of an unexpected freedom, sauntering into cinemas and cafés, and tipping waitresses amid protestations of astounded gratitude with penny packets of sunlight soap. So odd, so distant, that they belong, those days, seemingly to another century, another world. Which in a way they do.

  There is not much left of them. Of the loyalties and prejudices and ambitions that we cherished then, how much remains? The post-war world has proved to be a very different place from anything that we had expected. Which is not to say it is a worse place. It may not be the thing which our dreams took it for, but it is varied and vivid enough with plenty of scope for high adventure. We have no right, really, to complain of it. But it is different: so very different that it is hard to remember we ever existed in that brooding paradise. So different that the days when we believed in it are shadowy. As are the people and the interests that we shared them with. Little remains, and that which does remain is that which at the time seemed least essential. How surprised I should have been had I been told ten years ago that more than anything it would be my friendship with James Merrick that would serve to remind me that those days were real: that that, where so much else had gone, would stay.

  That it has done is not, however, in face of the facts, surprising. Most personal relationships are affairs of circumstance and habit. And whereas those other companions of the alcove with whom I had intrinsically more in common have drifted into other ways of life, to other towns and other countries, the associations of mutually held tastes and interests have year by year drawn Merrick and myself closer to one another.

  We are members of the same club. And once or twice a month we sit next each other at dinner, and afterwards over coffee and old brandy pass an hour or so of desultory talk in the exchange of personal gossip and information that is not conversation, but is friendlier than conversation, and I will listen in indolent disagreement while he arraigns with a complete indifference the manners of a generation that no longer leaves cards at the houses where it has dined, that smokes cigarettes and occasionally even pipes in Piccadilly, that has discarded the silk hat on Sundays and has been seen to dine in a black tie in public.

  He is my solicitor, and though I am not a profitable client, I acquired the habit during the weeks when I was negotiating for a bungalow in Sussex, and later when an injudicious essay brought me within danger of litigation, of dropping in to discuss the situation after lunch at the long bar counter of the First Avenue Hotel, where he has made a practice of lunching ever since he came as a young man to his offices in Lincoln’s Inn. It was a pleasant habit, and I found myself continuing those visits after the need of them had ceased. So that usually once or twice a month I will saunter down there and seat myself on a high stool beside him, and eat dressed crab, while he makes his invariable lunch of two dozen oysters and a pint of stout.

  And now and again he will invite me to his house; his small green-shuttered house in Trevor Square where each detail of ordered comfort is fastidiously set: where the temperature of every room and passage is guaged by a thermometer, where Merrick as he opens a door will never fail to cast a quick fussy look about the room to make sure that every vase is in its correct position, every picture at its right angle, every book dressed evenly along the white wood shelves.

  We share also, and perhaps this is our greatest bond, a passion for cricket. And often during the summer he will ring me up round about four o’clock to suggest that we should spend a couple of hours at Lord’s on the sun-drenched balcony of the pavilion.

  And all that, over eight years, means the knotting of a good many ties.

  There are times when I think of a man’s life as so many parallel railway tracks down which he sends parts of himself; or parts of his belongings, for who is to say what is and what is not oneself, in different trains at different paces, like packages, to await his arrival at some ultimate clearing house. There is the heavily loaded, labouredly moving train; the train of family and race and caste, that moves slowly, grunting along its track from birth to death. There is the train of ambition and career that one launches in the early twenties, and there are the swifter trains; the personal relationships in which one travels for one or ten or twenty years. And there are the expresses; the enthusiasms and loyalties and prejudices for certain causes and for certain creeds, in which one travels excitedly for a little space; and there is the train bleu of a love affair, that rattles over the points, crashes through stations, flinging up its curtain of sparks and smoke; overtaking the other trains, drowning the movement of the other trains with its noise and speed, to reach that ultimate clearing house in a tenth of the time that the slow and more heavily-cargoed carriages will take.

  And they are all carrying something of one: some part of one that there is no seat for in any other train; and whether they take a long or a little while over the journey does not seem to matter, provided they carry their baggage to the customs; provided that all of one gets there: that one does not leave anything of oneself behind. I do not know that it matters much in what order or at what times the various trains arrive. I do not know that in the end there’ll be found to have been very much more to it in having one’s life all of a piece, in having one’s trains running side by side, one’s friends and work, one’s liking and one’s loving. It may give an impression of harmony, but they’re different trains and different tracks and different packages. And anyhow it will all be a jumble at the other end.

  There could be worse analogies for my friendship with James Merrick than that of some lazy local train puffing its way under a gentle sun through gentle shires: the kind of train that nobody bothers over very much, that you would have to search hard for in a Bradshaw, but that runs steadily and runs to time.

  §

  A passion for cricket was, I said, the greatest bond between us. And certainly, had it not been for cricket, I should never have seen James Merrick as a figure in three dimensions. I should never have seen round him. He would have remained a flat figure; a caricature; a person whom I knew as one knows certain characters in Dickens by external idiosyncrasies: by little tricks and peculiarities. His fussiness about his home, his preoccupation about his comfort, his regard for the observances of a demoded social code, his punctiliousness in dress and conversation: and as a humanizing touch the King Charles’ head that is in all of us: that odd passion for divorce reform. All the essentials for caricature are there. And had it not been for our shared love of cricket there would never have arisen that occasion for confidence which showed him to me in relief; that marked the stages for me by which he had become the man he was.

  It came, that occasion, unexpectedly; without any of the usual machinery that precedes a confidence. It was in winter time; one of the winters when an English cricket side was touring not too gloriously in Australia, and from my high stool at the bar counter of the First Avenue Hotel I was lamenting our lack of reliable information as to what was really happening.

  “We get telegraphed reports,” I said, “but what do they amount to? What do they really tell us? No more than the facts. No more than communiqués did in the war. What wouldn’t one give for the sort of report that one gets in The Times of an average county match? I’ld give a lot,” I added, “to know what they
really think about our batting.”

  “Well, I can tell you that,” said Merrick. “They’re only afraid of Hobbs and Sutcliffe. And not very frightened of Sutcliffe after Hobbs is out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “From the Australian papers.”

  “You get them sent to you?”

  “I have friends who send me them.”

  “I envy you!”

  “They are there for you to borrow.”

  I took him at his word. After lunch I went back with him to his office: a pleasant room on the third floor looking out on to the grass and trees of Lincoln’s Inn. It was in Stone Buildings, and often when I had been in training with the Inns of Court during the early months of the war, I had looked up wistfully at the long low block whose grey stone and calm proportions symbolized a world of ease and leisure that had passed very possibly for ever; whose passage was symbolized by the yellow waste of mud into which the feet of drilling men had churned the ordered lawn past which generations of wigged barristers had hurried on their way to Court.

  “How little I thought then,” I said, “that I should ever stand in one of these windows looking down on a green lawn and a quiet square!”

  Merrick had no reply. He was standing at his desk, holding in his hand the large roll of a pink newspaper that must have come in by a midday mail to be delivered in his absence.

  “The new number of the Australasian,” he said; and his voice had gone curiously soft, losing its precise, affected note; and his eyes as they looked at the paper wrapper were vague and dreamy; and though he made no reply to my remark, it may have been that its evocation of the past had started a train of thought.