Thirteen Such Years Page 9

  “What way is it?”

  But the dejected creature was in no condition to face a cross-examination.

  “When one’s been through four years of fighting, guv’nor, been wounded twice, seen most of his chums go west and been in some half-dozen battles, it ain’t too easy to go into competition with young chaps what haven’t done all that.”

  As he spoke the watery eye became more watery, the trembling lip more mobile, the self-pitying voice more cringing. There was nothing, obviously, to be learnt about this fellow’s past.

  “Now you’re on the dole, I suppose?” said Jeffries.

  “Yes.”

  “Got any children?”

  “Two.”

  “Does your wife do anything?”

  “A little charring now and then.”

  “And you, what do you do about trying to get a job?”

  “I’ve given my name to most of those organisations you were speaking of.”

  “But, besides that, do you apply for jobs? Do you read the advertisement columns? Do you go about seeing people?”

  “Well, guv’nor, now and then. But one loses hope, you know. It doesn’t seem any use after all this time.”

  The navvy was apparently right. This was just a worthless person, undeserving of help or pity, who did not want to work, who preferred to draw the dole and let his wife go out and char. Himself idling away the days at street corners with two boxes of matches and a proffered hat.

  “I’ve got a job in my office that might just suit you,” said Jeffries at length. “It won’t bring you in much, fifty shillings a week, as packer.”

  The man blinked furtively.

  “Would it be hard work, guv’nor, lifting heavy things?”

  “Fairly.”

  “I’m not the man I was. I’d try it, heaven bless you for offering it me. I’d try it like a shot, but I wouldn’t like to disappoint you by doing the work badly, which I feel I should. It would be too heavy for me. I’m not the man I was.”

  The navvy had been right: a worthless person, frightened of work, trying to beat up unmerited sympathy out of that row of medals. There was nothing to be done. He was best left to the dole. But to my surprise Jeffries took out his note case.

  “Look here,” he said, “this is my card, and here’s a sovereign. Try and get work for heaven’s sake, but if you can’t, you’d better let me know about it.”

  “It was silly of me, I suppose,” he said as we walked away. “I’ve probably saddled myself with an encumbrance for life. It was stupid and wrong. There are plenty of charities, the man’s worth nothing. All the same, oh, I don’t know, he did go through the war with us. One can’t forget that. And seeing him abused.… Well, see you Saturday.”

  §

  It was months later that Jeffries told me that evening’s sequel. He told it to me vaguely, indirectly; with a great many repetitions, and “I mean’s” and “I felt’s.” But this is what had happened.

  He had walked along the Embankment slowly, pondering the episode. He had been a fool, he told himself, doubtless. He would have done much better to have given that money, and the money he almost certainly would give in the future, to some charitable society.

  All the same, he could not regret what he had done. There had been a personal appeal about the cringing creature that the most human of societies lacked. Ten years ago this man and he had been within a few miles of one another, perhaps in the same set of trenches, perhaps had even gossiped together at some dump or other. They had shared the exacting experience of four years of war and, sharing it, had helped to make it tolerable for each other. “This business would be impossible,” a fellow officer had once said, “if it wasn’t for the people one was in it with.”

  It was not that there had been particular acts of heroism, devotion and self-sacrifice to recall. It had been far less spectacular than that. It had just been a general spirit of fellowship and forbearance, the feeling that anyone wearing khaki was your friend; that it was up to you to help him. You couldn’t just forget all that by getting into mufti.

  As Ackroyd Jeffries walked homewards through the bleak January night, the memory was very actual to him of those other January evenings when he had splashed through muddied trenches, cold and wet and miserable, dreaming of London firesides.

  It was half-past six, two hours after sundown, the time for rations to be coming up. He could picture the scene so clearly: the little group waiting by the dump; himself, his runner, a lance corporal and ten fatigue men, smoking and chatting while the guns rumbled in the sunken roadways and the Vérey lights, arching in the sky, coated the ruined gables with flickering radiance. It was a tranquil hour; the evening bombardment was at an end, both sides were resting before the serious business of the night. The patrols, the reliefs, the working parties. It was pleasant enough to loiter listening for the rattle of the mule’s harness along the road. It was pleasant swapping gossip with the driver, hearing what was happening and picking up the latest rumour from division; and afterwards there was the sorting of the bags in the sergeant’s dugout; seeing whether it was bread or biscuits that had been sent up; going through the mail; turning over the letters hurriedly for that pale blue envelope with the squiggly handwriting, finding it and slipping it into his tunic pocket. Going away to his own dugout, he would read it quietly; coming out into the starlight afterwards, his spirit tranquillised, as by the touch of something holy. As he went round the guns, inspecting orders, setting the sentinel questions, he would plan an answer to that letter.

  Every night he had written to her. Every night there had been a letter from her. His whole life during those days had been bound up in Mabel, in their letters to each other, in the photograph in his Service pocket-book, in the memory of the happiness they had shared, in their hopes for a continuing future, in their counting of the days and hours to the leave that would bring them again into each other’s arms. Mabel had been everything to him in those days.

  “I don’t know,” he thought, “how I should ever have got through the show without her.” Thought it naturally, as the inevitable climax to his reverie, without at first realising its implication. “I don’t know,” he repeated, “how I should have got through the show without her.”

  Jeffries began to stammer and hesitate and blush a little when he came to this point of his story.

  “It’s not too easy to explain,” he said, “but, well, that ex-soldier and Mabel… I don’t know if you’ll follow, but it seemed as though they were the same thing somehow: that as I couldn’t go back on that ex-soldier, I couldn’t go back on Mabel.”

  I could follow him. They were parallel in a way. Parallel lines across his life and heart. In their separate ways, the friends in the trenches and the girl in England, had managed between them to make tolerable for him four years that would have been intolerable otherwise. It might be that no great merit attached to either on that account. It was circumstance, rather than any intrinsic quality in them, that had placed them in that relationship to himself. The man who was now hawking matches outside a station had joined up with his other friends, out of no particular gallantry, because it was the thing that seemed to be expected of him, because nobody cared to be out of things. While Mabel had happened to be his girl at a time when a man had to have a girl if he was to keep his faith and his hold on life. That had been all there was to it; the parallel had continued. When the war was over, they had failed in their separate ways to stay the course. They had been set slightly more difficult tasks than they had been trained to expect. The man had turned to a cringing beggar; Mabel to a tiresome, complaining woman, who made no attempt to make home tolerable for her husband.

  They had neither of them any real claim on him. There was no logical reason why he should have let himself in for the probably permanent support of an utterly useless person; no logical reason why he should continue to live in a house that had long since ceased to be home for him. No logical reason, and yet the fact remained that these two people, or r
ather, perhaps, what these two people had stood for, had stood by him through the most testing experience of his life. If the war had said anything it had said this: that you did not go back afterwards on those who had been your friends through it.

  The memory came back to him of the last night of a fortnight’s leave that had been their honeymoon; a fortnight of which every waking second lived for him in crystal clarity. They had been sitting in the window-seat of a darkened room, looking out upon a London street. They were silent, their hearts were overfull, the minutes were carrying them with too desperate a haste to the morning’s leave-taking. It was very softly that she had said at length:

  “Darling, I’ve never asked you, but I suppose you must have been in love before?”

  He had shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m nearly thirty,” he had said. “What would you?” adding, when she had sighed: “But you must have known, you must have guessed.…”

  “Oh, yes, I guessed. Only, oh my dear, I should so hate it if I thought that this hadn’t meant a fearful lot to you.”

  He had taken her in his arms and reassured her. At the moment she had represented to him all that there is in life of beauty and gentleness and truth. All that makes life worth having and worth holding, things that it seemed worth warring to protect. She had meant that to him, at that time. Would not to go back upon her now be to go back upon everything that war had stood for? Love passed, and desire passed. But kindness needn’t; but gratitude needn’t. “At any rate,” he thought, “I can go on being kind to her.”

  §

  He returned home only a few minutes before dinner, to be welcomed by the same sullen face that had glowered good-bye at him. Mabel returned immediately to the assault.

  “I’ve not answered that letter of Mrs. Featherby’s; what do you want me to do?”

  “You can refuse for us both.”

  “So you’re going to martyrise yourself? There’s no need for you to. I don’t care what you do, provided I don’t have to have these people to my house.”

  Her description of their house as hers had never failed to exacerbate Jeffries in the past, nor did it on this occasion; but he made no retort.

  “I’ve only five minutes to change in; I must rush,” he said.

  At dinner she was as morose and unamiable as ever. With a sensation of glum foreboding, Jeffries looked across the table at her. Had he really got to put up with this for thirty years? Could nothing be done to take away that sullen look? What was it that made her so unhappy?

  “Do you ever hear from any of your old friends?” he asked.

  She was on her guard immediately.

  “Occasionally; why?”

  “I was wondering whether you didn’t miss them sometimes.”

  She laughed harshly. “It’s a bit late to start worrying about that, isn’t it?”

  “I am surprised that you’ve never asked them here to see you.”

  “It’d take them the best part of a day to get here.”

  “There’s no need for them to go back at once.”

  “Do you expect people like that to treat themselves to holidays in London?”

  “I don’t see that staying here would cost them much.”

  “Staying here?”

  “Why not?”

  She looked at him curiously, cautiously. Then suddenly she laughed. When she spoke the sneering note had come back into her voice.

  “Yes, likely, isn’t it? So that you and your friends can laugh at them. No, thank you. I’m not having my friends treated that way.”

  “My dear, don’t be ridiculous. Do you imagine I’m going to be rude in our house to our guests?”

  Grudgingly she admitted it was unlikely. “Still, there are your friends,” she persisted.

  “I don’t see that there’s any need for them to meet my friends.”

  He had not stifled her suspicions; but when she picked up a novel he could see that it was not to read. She was still thinking over what he had said. Had he, he wondered, hit upon the secret of her discontent? Was it that she had been missing her friends as he would be missing his? She had never spoken of her friends. She had never shown any signs of needing them; but it might be that he had found by chance the way to make her happy.

  For ten minutes without turning a page she mimicked engrossment in a novel. Then suddenly she lifted her head.

  “Did you mean that about my having some of my friends to stay here?”

  “Of course.”

  “Because—well, as a matter of fact, there are one or two I’d rather like to have here.”

  She spoke timidly; her cheeks were slightly flushed.

  “That’ll be splendid. Ask them as soon as you like. We’ll do our best to give them a good time.”

  The flush deepened, her eyes softened, her mouth trembled, she looked young and pretty. She appeared to be on the point of saying something almost pleasant. Then a cautionary instinct warned her it was early days to start giving away matrimonial points. The flush disappeared, the mouth ceased trembling, but for all that she had thought better of that first impulse, it was reluctantly that the softness left her eyes, as though it were offering a promise that, if bidden kindly, it would return.

  Chapter IV

  With ties loosening on all sides, with marriages breaking, with husbands and wives ‘going their own ways’ it was a difficult world for marriage to survive in; for the girl on the brink of womanhood the situation was far more testing. So much had been telescoped. A girl in the early twenties was accorded a freedom that in the course of ordinary development scarcely her grandchildren would have enjoyed.

  It was a problem that I discussed more than once with Olivia Sergeant. She was very typically of her day. When the war began she was fifteen years old. She had no brothers. Her father’s service was spent for the most part in the East. Her mother was occupied for seven hours of every day in a V. A. D. hospital. For the first three years of the war, those so critical years of adolescence, Olivia Sergeant was, if not actually neglected, overlooked. She was promised that she could leave school and work in a canteen the moment she was seventeen. She lived for that day. When that day came she found herself by the accident of employment entitled to a freedom as complete as any soldier’s could have been. Her work demanded irregular hours. Her mother, herself extremely busy, could keep no check on her daughter’s movements. Olivia went where she liked, when she liked, with whom she liked. “It’s lucky,” she used to say, “that I was too romantic to get into any serious mischief.” She was romantic, right enough: in those days. During the last eighteen months of the war she was engaged three times. “I loved them so much when they were there,” she said, “but when they were away, it was so easy for someone else to take their place.”

  With the war ended, she found herself at a loose end. Her father was a tea merchant in the city. He was comfortably off, living the quiet life of the London professional man, in a West London square. Occasional, rather formal dinner parties, a theatre once a week, golf over the week-end. Born in Warwickshire with his own way to make, he had worked unsparingly during his first ten years in London. His friendships were either the result of business or the survival of school, college and early days in London. He had not, that was to say, the network of contacts that would have made it possible for him to introduce his daughter to “a world.” Olivia had to make her own world for herself.

  It was a heterogeneous world.

  When I met her first, towards the end of 1922, she had become the kind of girl whom you had to date up ten days ahead. But the majority of her engagements were not to parties but with individuals. Her acquaintance was wide and vast. I asked her how she had gotten to know all these people.

  “In odd ways. My parents’ friends were, of course, too old for me. I didn’t often like their children. But I used to meet other people through them that I did like. And you can’t see a lot of any one person without seeing a great deal of his friends as well. Some of them I’ve liked; then
it’s been the same thing over again with them.”

  It was usually, I fancied, her meeting some man she liked, his saying “Couldn’t we go to a show one evening?” and her accepting. Her invitations came from men, not women; which gave an unrooted feeling to her life.

  She had become uncomfortably conscious of this by the time I met her. I was living then in a first floor flat in Earl’s Terrace that looked out over Edwardes Square. Her house was five minutes’ walk away. The weeks were few when we did not see each other. It was one of the most delightful comradeships I have ever known. Whatever we of this generation may have lost in the way of permanence and deepness through the changed footing on which the sexes meet, there can be no doubt of our enormous gain in the way of friendship. Only in the last years has it been possible for men and women to be friends with one another: to recognise at a first glance, as almost invariably one can, the unlikelihood of love; but compensatingly the possibility of friendship. I do not often see Olivia Sergeant nowadays. But it would be hard to overestimate the unalloyed happiness of those many afternoons when she would fill the interval between one excursion and another, curled up in an armchair before a fire; a graceful, gracious figure, exchanging gossip and points of view.

  She was twenty-two when I met her, and was beginning to wonder a little what she was headed for.

  “They say women can do anything nowadays: that every profession is open to them,” she said. “But are they? There are jobs at two to three pounds a week for secretaries and office girls. There are masculine professions like medicine and the law open to those who are strong enough to go into open competition with men. But it’s not so easy for people like myself who aren’t equipped for a serious career, and who don’t really need three pounds a week. If I take fifty shilling work in an office, I’m simply taking a job that some other girl really needs. There’s not so much for a girl like me to do.”

  She was doing what most girls in her position were doing. She would pose occasionally as a mannequin. She would take Berlitz courses in Spanish and Italian. She had an idea that she could write; began and, after a fortnight, abandoned a novel that made me feel that, had she been dependent on her pen for livelihood, she might have had success there. She felt the need to be doing something, but had no idea what that something was.