Thirteen Such Years Read online

§

  In the middle of March Morrison went home on leave. A few days later I was taken prisoner. I did not see Morrison again for nearly two years till I went out to Cologne, a civilian, as the guest of a gunner major.

  He was billeted in the Deutsche Ring in the house of a rich banker. From my bedroom window I could see the proud curve of the Hohenzollern Gate, the cathedral towers, the Rhine sparkling in the sunlight. Soldiering must have been pleasant in such an atmosphere. I felt almost sorry that I had sent in my papers as I strolled along the river side to cash a cheque.

  Inside the bank was the sound of a familiar voice: leaning across the counter was a familiar figure: suitably and familiarly employed. Apparently Morrison was being swindled over the exchange.

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

  “But, my dear sir, cannot you understand?” the cashier explained. “To-day the mark is a penny, to-morrow it may be a penny ha’-penny. Things change so fast. We cannot afford to lose; we have to make our profit.”

  “Confound you and your profit; I want my 240 marks.”

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

  “Splendid, splendid, that’s the way to treat him,” he said. “I know how to manage the Boche.”

  As we walked out down the Hohe Strasse in search of a quiet café, I asked him what he was going to do now it was all over.

  “I don’t know. I think I shall stay on here as long as they’ll have me. It’s a lazy job.”

  He asked me what England was like now.

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

  He seemed reluctant to leave a mode of life whose technique he had mastered, for another of which he was ignorant. He preferred to talk about the present, about Cologne: at first the civilians had expected that we were going to sack the place and they had been very servile. But things were settling down now. “They’ve begun to see that we don’t worry about them at all; that they can go their way and we ours.”

  He told me about the exchange and how they had raffles on it in the mess. Money could be made that way. “There’s a sergeant in the Orderly Room,” he told me, “who invested thirty pounds in it. He gambles, buys in one day, sells out the next. He makes about fifteen pounds a month by it. He’s a smart man, 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 of them. 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 free for the last month by it.”

  Life in Cologne was seemingly not only comfortable, but romantic.

  “German girls are quite different from what I expected. I thought they’d be heavy and dull,” he said. “They aren’t. 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.”

  He had fallen in love, he told me, with a girl, himself. He talked a good deal about her, but at the time I didn’t take what he said very seriously. It seemed to me the usual bluff that one associated with Morrison. When I paid a visit to his mess that afternoon I soon learnt, however, that the romance was by no means the joke that I had thought it.

  It was strange to be in that machine gun mess again. There were hardly any of the old lot there: only Matthews, the adjutant, and a subaltern who had joined a week or so before I had left. The three of us sat for a long time talking about the times we had had and how glad we were it was all over.

  “You seem to be making up for it all right out here,” I said. “I saw Morrison this afternoon. He seemed to be enjoying himself all right.” At that there was an awkward silence. Everyone looked embarrassed.

  “Oh yes,” said one of them; “we don’t have a bad time.” And the conversation was changed quickly.

  Afterwards I asked Matthews what he meant.

  He hesitated. “I suppose there’s no harm in you knowing, as you’re one of the old lot, but we are all rather upset about it. He’s been making the most awful ass of himself with one of the girls at his billet. 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 pretty well 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 about it soon. The Colonel’s frightfully against that sort of thing. We’re still at war with these people really. We’ve got enough on hand to stop the troops marrying these girls and when officers set them an example of that kind we don’t know what to do. We don’t want a row about anyone in the Company and Morrison’s not an easy man to tackle.”

  He certainly was not. And, being one of those fellows who never asked intimate questions about anyone, he would be mad if anyone interfered with him. I did not envy Matthews his job. But the situation from his point of view was clearly difficult.

  §

  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. It was easy to see how it had happened. He had obviously from the conditions of his life very little experience of women; that little had probably been squalid, furtive, and premeditated. For months he had been surrounded by the grey masculinity of the line. The direct unabashed sensuality of this foreigner had swept him off his feet. I saw several people pointing at them and whispering behind their programmes.

  Next day I met Matthews at the officers’ club.

  “Were you at the Opera last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw them together?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen a good deal of Morrison one way and another. We were in the same section 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 Matthews was one of those conscientious creatures, a nuisance in a community, who makes himself unpleasant and then calls it doing his duty.

  “No,” he said, “that won’t do. I’ve got to do something.”

  §

  He did it two days later, on an evening when I was a guest of the mess. I suppose he chose that night so that I should be there as one of the old crowd to back him up if there was need. But I wish he hadn’t; it was one of the most uncomfortable evenings of my life.

  It was just as we had finished coffee. Matthews stood up in the anteroom, looking very 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 and, 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—”

  Morrison rose to his feet. I have never seen anything sterner than his face.

  “I have been with you fellows now for nearly three years,” he said. “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 left you to 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 over and spread a pack of cards across the table; we followed him and cut. Hardly another word was said that evening. Morrison won over four hundred marks.

  Matthews was in a pitiable state about it.

  “I don’t know what came o
ver me,” he said. “I simply couldn’t say a word. He just looked at me and it was no use.”

  “What are you going to do now?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I only hope he’ll buck up and get back to England.”

  §

  A fortnight later Morrison was told to send in his papers for demobilisation and, strongly though he denied it, I shall always believe that it was Matthews who had wangled it with Division. They gave Morrison a good send-off, with the best champagne that they could buy, but he was in a sullen mood as he walked down to the station.

  “Perhaps it’s just as well I’m going,” he said. “I was getting fond of that girl.”

  It was the first time that he had revealed himself to me in any way. I asked him to write and tell me how he got on and he gave me some address in Lincoln that he said would find him.

  I wrote to him a few weeks later, but I got no reply. A second letter was returned by the dead letter office. It was from Matthews, back on leave, that I heard of him.

  “You remember Morrison?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “He’s back, you know.”

  “What, in Cologne?”

  “Yes, as a civilian, to buy up old pictures and curios on the strength of the exchange, and sell them in England at a profit.”

  It seemed incredible. Morrison back in Cologne—as a civilian.

  “And that girl?” I asked.

  “He’s married her.”

  Which was what one would have expected him to do, out of that perverse chivalry of his. If it had been an English girl, or a French girl he would not have worried; he would have been the cynical man of the world. “That’s her own look-out,” he would have said. But, because she was a German, an enemy, he would think that he owed her something; that he must make things right.

  He had married her and taken her to live in a wretched little house on the other side of the river.

  It was not hard to understand why he had come. On his return he had been offered his old job in the bank at the same salary.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” he had told Matthews. “After all I’ve seen these last five years it was no good expecting me to go back. I’m spoilt for all that. I’ve got the itch to be about and doing. Can you imagine me sitting down at a desk day after day with all the other clerks grinning at me behind the back 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 for him by a servant. Now he’s adding up rows of figures at two pounds ten a week!” They are jealous, horribly jealous. It’s the same with them all; 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 from their class into yours, they want to drag me back again, to say ‘This is where you belong’.

  “And it wasn’t only that. England was horrible to me. There’s a mad attempt to forget there was a war; people don’t want to be reminded that they owe us anything. They say ‘Get to work and save the nation.’ They’re beginning to regard the ex-soldier as a fellow who has been for 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 chaps, but they rather enjoyed being martyrs, and Lord help us, what about those four years in Flanders? I’m not saying that it was the sort of 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 other fellows. 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 couldn’t stand it. I came back here.”

  It was easy to understand why he had felt homesick for Cologne, remembering it as a place where he had been happy. Nor would he have had the imagination to appreciate the complicated embarrassment that must arise from such an action. For it was awkward. Here was Morrison, a civilian, settled in a conventional military society, married to a German, an enemy, and expecting to be treated as though he were still an officer. Some of his old friends would stick to him, but Cologne had 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 when he walked into the Officers’ Club as though he were still in uniform. The 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 as a member, 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; it was a bit different from the case of the Australian officer and the relief. He had not the cards in his hand any longer. The secretary took good care that he was not elected.

  That was a nasty blow, but if he had kept quiet it might still have been all right. He could have come up to the mess and 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. He settled things for himself at the Opera.

  The Opera House in Cologne, during the occupation, was very different from an English theatre. The performance began at half-past six and did not end till well after eleven. There were long intervals between the acts, during which one could either walk up and down the wide promenade that runs behind the boxes, or avail oneself of the excellent supper that was served downstairs. The Opera House was 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 proprieties, 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 realised what was happening:

  “Let me introduce you to my wife.”

  The Colonel had his wife with him; 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.

  “The fellow’s a damned disgrace to the army,” he said.

  For the next week or so Morrison must have had a pretty poor time. He again took his wife to the Opera and several fellows cut him dead. He went on bringing her for a little then suddenly realised what was happening.

  “My God!” he complained, “it makes me sick. Here are all these fellows going on the loose whenever they get the chance; they cut me just 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?”

  “But that’s different, my dear fellow, that’s altogether different,” Matthews said. “You can’t expect these chaps to want their wives introduced to her. You may call it prejudice if you like, but it’s our idea of self-respect; if we lost it we’d be nothing. We’ve got to stick to the things that we believe in.”

  “Oh, I daresay! I daresay! But you’re a pretty rotten crowd, you know.”

  §

  That had been some months back.

  I asked Matthews if he still saw anything of him.

  “Occasionally, hanging round second-hand shops and auction rooms.”

  “What
does he look like?”

  “Shabby. Unshaved quite often, with his boots unpolished.”

  “You’ve been to his house?”

  “Once.”

  “What’s that like?”

  Matthews shrugged his shoulders.

  “Respectable poverty. The most depressing thing there is. Unwashed plates on the dresser; the remains of a meal on the table; cold meat and pickles of some kind.”

  “Did they seem happy?”

  “They quarrelled most of the time when I was there.”

  It was not difficult to imagine the kind of life they led: the endless friction and embarrassments of a couple that is trying to make both ends meet. There is no need to describe in any detail the process of degradation by which love under such conditions dies out, by which self-respect is lost and a man and a woman begin almost to hate each other, but remain together through associations of the past, through a lack of the courage to own that they have failed, through a sort of baffled sensuality.

  In its first stages their love must have been fresh and adventurous; there had been secret meetings, the lure of the forbidden. But this marriage was a different thing altogether.

  §

  I went and saw them next time I was in Cologne. Their home was much as Matthews had described it. There was hostility between them; a consciousness of their own and the other’s failure. I suppose she must have found things pretty difficult. Her own people no doubt made things none too easy for her. She had married an enemy and although the fierce hatreds of the war were gradually dying out it was 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.

  “Women can be pretty fair cats,” he said to me once. “For no reason at all they suddenly burst out and rant and curse. She couldn’t get the soap she wanted the other day so she began abusing 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 now; there you sit glowering at me all the time. What sort of a life do you think I lead?’