My Place in the Bazaar Read online

  ‘But we never worry about that. My sergeant’s been round the guns as often as I have. He knows all there is to know about them. I got shown round by a sergeant when I took over.’

  ‘I don’t care about that. I’ve got my orders. Come along. I can’t wait here all night.’

  ‘I’m damned if I come. The sergeant can take you.’

  ‘All right then. Just as you like. But I shan’t sign the relief paper till you do.’

  They stood looking at each other. Morrison had every card in his hand.

  ‘It’s just as you like,’ he said. ‘Either you show me round—’ For a moment I thought the Australian was going to hit him; but

  he turned and pulled on his steel helmet.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. All the way up the dug-out steps he coughed and choked.

  Morrison included among his peculiarities a type of perverse chivalry. He always backed the losing side; in the mess he stuck up for the Sinn Feiners and Bolshevists simply because we were against them. At the Café Royal he would have been equally violent as a militarist with overwhelming arguments in favour of the knock-out blow. This was not in itself unusual. We all like to be martyrs in the abstract. But it is unusual to find anyone who puts the minority theory into practice, and Morrison did.

  He was invariably courteous to German prisoners. Once we were brewing a dixie of tea, when a Prussian officer was brought along the trench. We offered him a cup, but before he had time to drink it a shell pitched on the back of the trench, scattering us with mud; the German’s tea was ruined. It was a frequent tragedy of the trenches and usually an occasion for mirth. Morrison, however, had been sheltered by a traverse; without a word he handed his cup over to the prisoner. He would not have done that for one of his own men under any conditions: ‘War is war,’ he would have said.

  On another occasion a party of prisoners were being marched through Albert and a large fat Frenchman stood in the doorway of his house shouting after them ‘Les sales Boches’. Morrison walked up to him and said quietly: ‘Stop that now, we’ve had enough of that from you.’

  The Frenchman looked at him in aggrieved amazement, then turned and shouted after the party: ‘A bas les Boches, les sales Boches’

  Morrison did not say a word; he simply lifted his fist and knocked the Frenchman down.

  ‘How would you like it if you had been taken prisoner,’ ‘he said’ ‘and some dirty civilian who hadn’t been within thirty miles of the line began to jeer at you?’

  I was taken prisoner during the big retreat in March, 1918, and on repatriation I was transferred to the Reserve. I presumed that I had lost touch forever with my brothers-in-arms, but under the new formation of machine-gun companies into battalions, my old company had as its adjutant a Captain Brownleigh who had been a good friend of mine at Sandhurst. He invited me to spend a week with him in Cologne before I started my London life as a civilian. ‘We are living,’ he said, ‘in the Deutsche Ring in the private house of a German millionaire. You will be very comfortable.’

  I arrived on one of those warm days that surprise us in early spring with a promise of summer; the Rhine flowed smoothly; sunshine glittered on the proud curves of the Hohenzollern Gate and the towers of the Cathedral. I felt eager, buoyant, expectant. I was delighted when I found my old friend Morrison at the bank. arguing with the cashier who had, he maintained, swindled him over the exchange.

  ‘The limit, these German bankers,’ he protested, ‘absolutely the limit. I know the mark’s only worth a penny, I saw it in The Times this morning, and here’s this fellow refusing to give me more than 235 marks to the pound.’

  ‘But, my dear sir,’ the cashier explained, ‘cannot you understand; today the mark is a penny, tomorrow it may be a penny farthing, things change so fast. We cannot afford to lose; we have to make our profit.’

  ‘To hell with your profit; I want my 240 marks.’

  In the end he got 238 marks and was as proud over his triumph as though he had succeeded in obtaining a reduction of his income tax.

  ‘That’s the way to treat them,’ he said. ‘I know how to manage the Boche.’

  We found a quiet café on the Hohe Strasse. I asked him what he was going to do now the war was over.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think I shall stay on here as long as they’ll have me. It’s a lazy job.’

  He was, I felt, reluctant to leave a mode of life of which he had mastered the technique, in place of another of which he was ignorant.

  He asked me what England was like now.

  ‘I can’t imagine it,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’ll go back to what it was in 1913 and we shall find that everyone’s forgotten all about this little interruption.’

  He talked about Cologne and how the civilians had expected us to sack the place; at first they had been very servile. But things were settling down.

  ‘They’ve begun to see that we don’t worry about them at all; they go their way, we ours.’

  He told me about the exchange and how they had raffles on it in the mess. ‘Money can be made that way,’ he said. ‘There’s a sergeant in the orderly room who invested thirty pounds in it; he gambles, buys in one day, sells out the next. He told me he made about fifteen pounds a month. He’s smart, that chap. Our fellows used to chuck their ten-pfennig notes away, or else used them as pipe-lighters. What was the use of a tenth of a penny to them? But the sergeant decided to make a bank. Every man who comes into the orderly room has to turn out his pockets, and all the notes under a mark are handed over to the stores. The company has been kept in soap for the last month.’

  He talked about the girls. ‘They’re quite different from what I expected. I thought they’d be heavy and dull. I suppose they’ve been keyed up by the excitement of the war and the lack of food; life seems to have flamed up in them suddenly.’

  The girl at his billet was something very special. He talked a good deal about her, but I did not take what he said too seriously. It had seemed to me the usual bluff that one associated with Morrison. But Brownleigh shook his head when I mentioned it to him.

  ‘It isn’t anything to laugh about,’ he said. ‘One doesn’t mind what a fellow does in private—after all, we’re none of us perfect—and as long as he keeps quiet he can do what he likes, but Morrison’s been going about all over the place with this girl, in day time too; there’s bound to be a row. The General’s frightfully against fraternizing and we don’t know what to do. We don’t want trouble and Morrison’s not an easy man to tackle.’

  He certainly was not. And, being one of those men who never asked intimate questions about others, he wouldn’t welcome interference. I didn’t envy Brownleigh his job.

  But it was obviously a situation. I went to the Opera that night, and there was Morrison sitting with his girl in one of the boxes. She was a pretty flaxen-haired little creature, pale-faced, with half-closed, darkly lidded eyes. He had obviously from the conditions of his life had very little experience of women, and that little must have been confined to cheap intrigues, squalid and furtive, with shop girls and the wives of elderly businessmen. He had been swept off his feet by the refined and unabashed sensuality of this foreigner. I saw several people looking at them.

  ‘You see what I mean,’ said Brownleigh.

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve seen a good deal of Morrison one way and another. We were in the same company in France, but I never got to know him. He’s always been a stranger. There’s a point in him beyond which one never gets. I’d let him alone if I were you.’

  But Brownleigh was a conscientious creature. At Sandhurst we had used the phrase G.S.—the letters of General Service—to describe anyone who took his duties too seriously. We all liked Brownleigh, but he was definitely G.S. We were relieved when he was not made a sergeant.

  ‘I must do something,’ he said ruefully.

  He did it two days later, when I was in the mess. I suppose he cho
se that night so that I should be there as one of the old crowd to back him up.

  It happened just after we had left the table, when there were no waiters in the ante-room. Brownleigh stood up, looking extremely awkward.

  ‘Now that we are all here, there’s something that I’ve been thinking—that we’ve all been thinking—for some time past. As we are all friends, I think we ought to have it out. We’ve been thinking, Morrison, that you’ve been going about rather a lot lately—’

  But Morrison was now standing too and Brownleigh checked. Morrison looked slowly round him. His face was taut.

  ‘I’ve been with you fellows for nearly two years. I’ve done the jobs I’ve had to do as well as I could. I’ve done my best to make things go smoothly in the mess. I’ve not interfered with any of you. I’ve gone my way and I’ve let you go yours. I expect you to do the same with me. My life’s my own. I’m not going to discuss it. Let’s cut in for bridge.’

  He walked to the table and spread a pack of cards across it. Half a dozen of us followed him and cut. Scarcely a word was said that evening. Morrison won 400 marks.

  Brownleigh was in a self-accusing mood next day. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I couldn’t say a word. He looked at me and I dried up.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll find a way.’

  He did. Within a month Morrison was posted back to England to be demobilized.

  I had given Morrison my address in London, but I had not expected to hear from him. Friendship was not his game, and it was not in terms of friendship that he wrote to me six months later. He thought I could be of use to him. ‘I’m going back to Germany,’ he wrote, ‘to buy up curios and pictures. The old families are starving. They’ll sell anything. They must have books that collectors here would care to have. You’re in the trade. You could tell me the kind of book to look out for.’

  We had tea together in a café off the Strand. He was not enthusiastic about his prospects, but he was glad to be leaving England. He had been offered his old post at the bank, but had refused it.

  ‘I’m spoilt for all that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the itch to be about and doing. Can you imagine me sitting down at a desk day after day, with the other clerks grinning at me behind the backs of their hands, saying to each other, “He was an officer in the Great War; he used to order men about and have his boots cleaned by a servant, now he’s adding up rows of figures at four pounds ten a week!” They are jealous, horribly jealous; and it’s the same with the old men and women. They pretend to be sympathetic, they say, ‘What a change it must be for you, coming back to this after the war, but I suppose you are glad, really, aren’t you, to get a little quiet?’ They are jealous, they grudge me the last five years, they hate me for having made a success of it, for having risen out of their class, they want to drag me back, to say “This is where you belong”.’

  ‘There’s another thing too that I can’t stand,’ he said, ‘this mad attempt to forget there was a war. People don’t want to be reminded that they owe anything to us ex-soldiers. They say “Get down to work and save the nation”. They’re beginning to regard the ex-soldier as a fellow who has been on a holiday and is coming back to school. “You’ve had your fun,” they say, “now you must take off your coat and roll your sleeves up.” It makes me sick; before we know where we are, the country will be run by the fellows who got cushy jobs at Whitehall and the conscientious objectors who spent the last two years at Dartmoor. They had a poorish time, no doubt, those C.O.s, but they enjoyed being martyrs, and Lord help us, what about those fours years in Flanders. I’m not saying that it was the blind misery the pacifists would make people think it was. We had our good times. I was happier then than I am now and so were hundreds of others. But it was worse than Dartmoor. They want us to forget all that, they want to shove us back into drudgery, to drug us so that we shan’t remind them. I can’t stand it. That’s why I’m going back.’

  I could see his point. London was not an easy city in the autumn of 1919. I could imagine his thoughts turning nostalgically towards Cologne.

  ‘What about that girl of yours?’ I asked. ‘Have you kept in touch with her?’

  ‘In a kind of way. I’m not a letter-writer.’

  That night I wrote to Brownleigh. ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ I said, ‘if he marries her out of that perverse chivalry of his. If it had been an English girl or a French one, he wouldn’t worry, he’d be the cynical man of the world. “That’s her look-out.” But because she is a German, an enemy, he’ll think that he owes her something, that he must make things right. Please keep me posted.’

  A month later I got the letter I expected. Yes, Morrison had married her and taken her to live in a small house on the far side of the river.

  I could picture the social embarrassments that would arise. There was Morrison, a civilian, settled in what could only be described as a conventional military society, married to a German and expecting to be treated as though he were still an officer. Some of his old friends would stick to him, but Cologne must have changed a good deal since he had left. Peace had been signed, many of the officers had their wives out, the town was full of English women.

  He got his first rebuff, so the letter told me, when he walked into the Officers’ Club as though he were still in uniform. The German porter told him that civilians were not allowed inside.

  ‘You get out of my light,’ said Morrison and pushed past him into the lounge.

  A few minutes later the Secretary of the Club, an officer, came up to him.

  ‘I’m very sorry, but you really can’t come in here. If you care to fill in a form I’ll see if you can be put up for membership, but till then you can’t come unless you are introduced by a member.’

  ‘Are any ex-officers members of the club?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Well then, I’m going to be one and you can hurry up and get me elected.’

  It was no good though; this was different from the case of the Australian officer and the relief. He had not the cards in his hand any longer, and the secretary took good care that he did not get elected.

  That was a nasty blow, but if he had kept quiet it might have been all right. He could have visited the mess, his old friends would not have let him down. But he was confoundedly obstinate. It had to be a struggle with him all the time. Then he took his wife to the Opera; and that settled it.

  The Opera House in Cologne is very different from an English theatre. The performance begins at half-past six and does not end till close on midnight. There are long intervals between the acts, during which one may either walk up and down the long, wide promenade that runs behind the boxes or avail oneself of the excellent supper that is served downstairs. The Opera House is the fashionable centre of the town and even those officers who did not care greatly for classical music regarded their attendance there two or three times a month as a social obligation.

  And here in this delicate atmosphere of etiquette and polite properties, Morrison was inspired by some hideous folly to walk up to his old colonel, shake him by the hand and say before the embarrassed colonel realized what was happening: ‘Let me introduce you to my wife.’

  The colonel had his wife with him, and she had to be introduced too. When he got back to the battalion he gave the strictest instructions that, on no account, was Morrison to be allowed into the mess. ‘Fellow’s a disgrace to the service.’

  For the next week or so Morrison must have had a poorish time.

  He again took his wife to the Opera, and several fellows cut him. He went on bringing her for a little and then suddenly realized what was happening.

  ‘My God! it makes me sick,’ he said to Brownleigh. ‘Here are these fellows going on the loose whenever they get the chance, and they cut me because I’ve had the decency to marry my girl. How many of these fellows do you think have been carrying on with German women?’

  Brownleigh was the only one of his friends who kept
up with him.

  Brownleigh might be G.S., but he was not the man to turn against an old friend when he was down.

  ‘I don’t think he can be doing very well,’ he wrote. ‘I see him now and then, hanging round second-hand shops, trying to pick up bargains whenever there’s an auction. He looks untidy, as often as not unshaven, his shoes unpolished, and he’s begun to stoop. I went down to his place and it had the melancholy, depressing appearance of respectable poverty. A supper had been laid, a miserable meal of cold meat and some sort of pickles and cheap wine.’

  I could guess from that letter at the sort of life they led, the endless friction, the embarrassment of a couple who are trying to make both ends meet. I could imagine too how love under such conditions dies out quickly, how self-respect is lost and a man and a woman begin to hate each other, remaining together through associations of the past, through a lack of the courage to own that they have failed, through a baffled sensuality. In its first stages their love had been fresh and adventurous; there had been secret meetings, the lure of the forbidden. ‘Love mixed with fear is sweetest.’ But it was a different thing altogether, this dreary marriage; the setting was altered, a new technique was required; and that was just what they lacked.

  I could see them sitting there hostile to each other, both conscious of their own failure. I suppose she must have found things difficult. She had married an enemy, and although the fierce hatreds of the war were dying out, her family must have felt that she had been untrue to her people, that she had separated herself from them. Her old friends rarely came to see her. They did not like her husband. And, during the lonely mornings when Morrison wandered about the streets in search of bargains, she must have felt cruelly resentful.

  They used to have fierce and bitter quarrels, so Brownleigh told me.

  ‘Women can be pretty fair cats,’ Morrison said once to him. ‘For no reason at all they suddenly burst out and rant and curse. Eva couldn’t get the soap she wanted the other day and began to abuse the English. “You are all the same,” she said, “you think about nothing but yourselves. You talk big and you use fine words about the rights of little nations; and all the time you’re blockading Europe, you’re murdering Ireland, you’re selling coal to France at a price that’s ruining them. You have sent the value of the mark down to a penny, we can’t get the necessities of life. Look what sort of a life I’m leading, thanks to you! Hardly enough to eat, no fun at all! No one ever comes to see me, and there you sit glowering all the time. What sort of life do you think I lead?” That’s what it’s like, old man. I suppose this is the sort of thing that one’s got to expect at first. It’s a trial though.’