A Test to Destruction (50 page)

Richard waited as though expecting agreement. Phillip sat still, exhausted. “Well, have you nothing to say further?” as his son put down his knife and fork.

“You are a curious chap,” went on Richard. “I can never quite make you out. You have hardly said a blessed word before or since leaving the army, unless, I might add, it was something to the advantage of the King’s enemies.”

“You mean those in the House of Commons, Father?”

Anxious to change a dangerous turn in the conversation, Hetty said brightly, “Where are you going for your walk this afternoon, Phillip? Do eat your dinner, dear, before it gets cold.”

Phillip sat so still that the cat was emboldened to jump upon his lap, and begin to pound with clawed feet. Phillip lifted it up and dropped it on the floor, where it stood still, mewing faintly.

“Poo-or Zippy,” crooned Richard. “At least you have a tongue in your head, haven’t you, Zippy?”

“I’m rather lucky to have a tongue in my head, too, sir. At least it isn’t hanging out all the time.”

Richard put down his knife and fork. “I don’t quite see what that means, unless you are deliberately trying to be offensive?”

“Oh, I’m sure Phillip did not mean anything of the sort, Dickie!”

“Ah, I was forgetting,” said Richard. “You, too, like to take the contrary view to what is generally accepted, don’t you, Hetty? You, too, have a soft spot for mice, encouraging them in your kitchen by not seeing that it is kept as it should be. Zippy is wrong to catch mice, and I am wrong for standing up for my country.” He pushed back his chair, and looked at Phillip. “Having made that clear, may I ask what you meant by your remark about my tongue just now? I warn you to be careful in choosing your words this time, for I intend to put up with no further rudeness, even if I am only a despised civilian!”

“I merely said, Father, that I was lucky to have a tongue in my head. I was thinking of one of Wilde’s Rifles, of the Lahore division at Messines in 1914. This sepoy, or whatever he was, wandered into our lines at twilight, still wearing his turban, but with his tongue hanging on his tunic, since his lower jaw had been shot away that morning. He tried to tell our Colonel something, with signs, and cheered up no end when the Colonel spoke a few words in Hindustani.”

“Whatever has that got to do with what we were talking about, I’d like to know?”

“Those sort of things, which were the
real
war, never got into the papers, Father.”

“Isn’t Phillip awful?” cried Elizabeth. “He’s not like any of the other men in the office! He talks like that to upset everybody!”

“Elizabeth,
do
please be quiet! Now, Phillip, tell us where you are going for your walk this afternoon,” pleaded Hetty. “I suppose you wouldn’t like Doris to go with you? The walk would do her good, she has been working so hard.”

“I’m going with Ching, Mother.”

“I knew it!” cried Elizabeth, turning unnaturally bright eyes to her mother. “Why does he choose such awful people for his friends? If it isn’t Ching, it’s Warbeck, both of them rotters, if you ask me!”

“That reminds me, my girl!” said Richard. “Did you take my November
Nash’
s
Magazine
with you out of the house yesterday evening? You did! Then kindly do not do so again! I do not take your things, why should you take mine?”

“Elizabeth only borrowed it for a little while Dickie, to show Nina something. She did ask me first, so it is my fault entirely.”

“There you go again! Always condoning what is wrong!”

“Elizabeth, please do not forget to bring back your Father’s magazine by tea-time!”

Phillip said to the tablecloth. “Father—please listen. If some student of the future had only
Nash’s
and other popular magazines as evidence for a historical study of the war, he would be utterly in the dark to know how our fellows
really
got across to the German trenches during the Somme—or how Ypres was
really
held in 1914—or Passchendaele reached in 1917. He would have no idea of what the war was
really
like—minute by minute—hour by hour—day after night—night after day—week after week—month after month——” He looked at his father’s face, and quickly down again at the table-cloth—“or how it happened that hundreds of thousands of faceless bloody half-sacks were left lying near spectral spinneys—rifles swaying in the wind on bayonets—he would learn nothing! nothing! nothing!!!” he cried, getting to his feet.

“What’s he going to do now, attack Father?” cried Elizabeth. “What’s he saying it all for? Is he mad?”

“Go on, Phil,” said Doris quietly.

“Doris, how dare you!” said Hetty, ineffectually.

“Well, I must say I don’t altogether like your attitude or your language,” said Richard, in a strained voice. “Also, I do not see what all this has to do with what I asked you. Of course men get killed in war—just as we stay-at-homes sometimes got killed in air-raids—the effects of which aren’t pleasant, to say the least of it! But the Germans began it, and we had to finish it! I said, and I still say!—that we should have carried fire and sword into Germany, to give them a taste of what they gave others!!”

“The Germans were the same as ourselves, Father.”

“Oh! Have you read, by any chance, the Bryce Report on atrocities?”

“There were blackguards in every army, Father. But the great majority of the Germans were brave, decent, humane soldiers.”

“You can sit there, and talk like that?”

“Yes, I can!” cried Phillip, starting up again. “Brave!—brave!!—brave!!! Decent!—decent!!—decent!!! Their Government didn’t fight with lies! Their newspapers didn’t slander Englishmen with print in order to make people sleeping in beds at night determined to keep the war going!”

“If you keep on like this, I shall not answer for the consequences! I warn you——!”

“Have you heard about the German Corpse Factory, Father? Do you know where it went to work, tieing up the corpses ‘in bundles of four’! In
Fleet
Street! Only they were in bundles of twelve, for the newsboys to carry under their arms, and they were called
Daily
Tridents
!”

“What are you saying? Are you tipsy again?”

Phillip took a deep breath, and said quietly: “Father, I saw some beautiful German graveyards, with carved stones, when we advanced over green country to the Hindenburg Line! I sent Mother some pansies growing on the graves, didn’t I, Mother? Not one British soldier who was there believed in the Corpse Factory idea. It was one of a lot of false reports. Incidentally, the British soldiers did some pretty dirty things in France, you know. Did you ever read Willie’s letter, which I showed Mother, about the British bombardment, exactly at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, 1915, German midnight—blowing poor little devils in mouse-grey uniforms to hell while they were singing carols—and about to come out in No-man’s-land to offer us presents of cigars and sausages, as they did in 1914? You never read about that British ‘atrocity’ in
The
Daily
Trident,
or any other British paper or magazine, did you? It was always the Huns who were unhumorous and atrocious, and always the British who were chivalrous and humorous, in our newspapers and magazines!”

Richard left the room. He came back to say, “If you keep on in this strain, I shall say something to you for which I might be sorry afterwards!”

“Please sit down, and eat your food, Dickie! Phillip,
please
do not say things to annoy your father!”

“But, Mother, I am only telling what every soldier out there knew at the time! There can never be real peace in the world until we understand other people’s points of view! For instance, it is a fact that our Guards Division seldom brought back any prisoners! If they did happen to have some ‘Huns’ surrendering, the aforesaid ‘Huns’ were put conveniently in a communication trench and treated to a present of Mills bombs lobbed in, accidentally on purpose.”

“What are you saying?” cried Richard. “Are you in your right senses?”

“I’m telling you about
our
‘frightfulness,’ sir! At Cambrin, near Loos, in 1915, the Coldstream band played in the trenches, the Germans being thirty yards away. A very pleasant concert, Germans soon singing away, and asking for German tunes. The next evening, the same concert, plenty of Hans’ and Carls’ and Heinrichs cheering the Coalie band. But they didn’t cheer for long, for they lay in bloody rags under a rain of sporting hand grenades. Hubert Cakebread told me that himself! He was there!”

Richard was white in the face.

“I repeat: If you go on like this I may find myself calling you a name that you will not like!”

“
Please
don’t go on, Phillip,” said Hetty. “
Please
stop—for my sake——”

“It’s rather late in the day for you to talk like that!” cried Richard, turning on his wife. “It was
your
doing in the first place that made the boy grow up as he did, neither one thing nor the other! It’s all coming out in the wash, now! Everything I tried to tell the boy, you invariably countered!”

“You’ve made my Mother cry!” said Doris, in a firm voice, staring at her father.

“Mother, don’t cry,” said Phillip. “I know exactly what Father means, only it wasn’t, the war, I mean, as he imagines. No doubt he thinks that my mind is warped by my Jewish streak, but the finest General in the war was an Australian Jew called Monash!”

“I have not said so,” replied Richard. “But from the trend of your remarks, it is plain to me that in your eyes the fault can be laid entirely at my door! You who as a boy showed yourself to be untruthful, cowardly, and a sneak-thief, not to mention a bully!”

“Yes, you are entirely right there, Father. You see, when I left home to go into the Army, I had to learn, or rather to unlearn, all over again. I had to start from scratch. The first thing I had to realise, was that men who bullied others did so from fear in their own souls. They used scapegoats, in other words. I found out that the really brave man was a calm man, and he was calm because he had grown up in a calm household, and not been bully-ragged, as you used to say. I found out that men who came from loving homes were invariably steady and courageous, in other words that a sense of honour came from
love. I learned this from a Roman Catholic priest, and saw again and again that it was true.”

“A Roman Catholic priest!” Richard sat down. “Well, that could explain quite a lot! About your muddled ideas, I mean. But even your Mother’s persuasion towards Roman Catholicism would hardly explain how it happened that you came to command a battalion!”

“I also failed to understand many things, until I tried to shed my own preconceived notions, Father.”

“Well, that is an admission for which I suppose I should be grateful? What do you think of that, Hetty? Your best boy admits that there are some things that he does not understand!”

“Father,” said Phillip, looking at him steadily. “Father, I wish you could believe me that I do not mean to be personal, when I say this——”

“Oh no,
you
are not being personal! Not in the very least! You are merely criticising me in my own house, after living in it for two months, the while more or less treating me as if I did not exist—getting up in the morning late, presumably to be waited on hand and foot by your Mother—in whose eyes you can never do wrong, it would appear—coming home usually nearer midnight than any other hour—in fact, treating the place like an hotel! Now let me tell you this!” cried Richard, rising to shake a warning finger at Phillip. “I have said very little to you in this matter, but if you think I have not known what is going on, you deceive yourself! You seem to think that those whom you despise, or consider your inferiors, have deluded themselves by doing nothing but read magazines during the past four years——”

“I’m sorry, Father, I should not have said that. I was rather intolerant——”

“Perhaps you will allow me to finish saying something I have wanted to say for a long time? It is this! I am tired of being treated in my own house as though I have no right to exist in it! And I will tell you this—it is fully time that you thought of finding a home of your own!”

“Oh, Dickie, please—Phillip is not well——”

“And whose fault is that, pray?” Rising indignation caused a rise in pitch of his voice. “If you think that I have not been aware of what has been going on, you are entirely mistaken, let me tell you! It never occurred to you, I suppose, that innocent
people might have been made to suffer because of your condition, to put it at its mildest possible aspect? Yes, you know what I mean, I think!”

“What does he mean, Mother?” asked Elizabeth. “What is Father talking about? What has Phillip been doing?”

“Oh,
do
please be quiet, Elizabeth! What your Father says to Phillip is nothing to do with you!”

“Well, what have you to say?” cried Richard to his son, now silent again. “You don’t answer! Very well, I now make a formal request to you that you leave this house by this evening! If you do not leave, if you are on these premises tomorrow night at the latest, I shall have no alternative but to summon you for trespass! Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Father,” replied Phillip, getting up and leaving the room.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Hetty, in tears.

As he turned the corner he waved to Mrs. Neville sitting at her window, Sprat with cocked ears by her side. It was twenty past one; he had forty minutes before Ching, who would be coming down Ivy Lane, was due to meet him at the junction with Charlotte Road.

He felt thirsty, and thought to go into the Randiswell for a pint of mild ale, and perhaps some bread and cheese. One pint of mild, and no more. But he reckoned without Dr. Dashwood, who put his bulk between Phillip and the bar counter, saying, “I insist, my dear Middleton, in doing the honours!”

“Thank you, doctor, may I have a pint of mild ale, please? I’m not awfully well at the moment.”

“My dear Middleton, good beer is much less likely to upset one, than swipes! And as your honorary medical adviser, who has your welfare very close to his heart, I suggest the best Burton. A pint of your best Burton, and the usual for me, please, Mrs. Purvis! Well, Middleton, I must congratulate you——”

It seemed ungracious to refuse the dark brown ale, which soon induced freedom from tension. Returning the compliment,
Phillip put down another pint. Then Ching came in, having come from the Bereshill Jack, so named because Jack Cade, a peasant leader in revolt, had assembled his men there for the final march upon London. Ching had been drinking rum since opening time at noon. Now, in the Randiswell, there was a party; and at closing time, with three quarters of a gallon of strong ale to walk off, Phillip led the way to the Recreation Ground, a place trodden dead under gravel paths: of black patches, wide and bare, in the grass; sooted trees, and tarred railings; a slow-moving, poisoned river.

Ching was making an effort to appear sober; Phillip strode on fast in front, dreading a return of Ching’s wallowing self-depreciation, which was somewhow in keeping with the L.C.C. park enclosed by ghastly brick houses.

It was not easy going, after they had left Fordesmill Bridge, on the broken-bottled and old-iron’d banks of a narrowing stream which now moved below back-gardens, sheds, and commercial buildings. Soon they were leaping across the bends, once landing short in the water, Phillip to scramble out laughing at the muddy streaks on his own face and that of Ching, who began to look doleful.

“I’ve got on my second-best suit,” he complained. “If I’d’ve only known, I’d’ve put on my third-best.”

“Only think!” cried Phillip, as they went on with squelching shoes and dripping trousers, “We are free! We can be under a real roof at night! And sit by a fire, and
sleep
!” He would find a shed somewhere, or make a lean-to in Knollyswood Park, and have a fire. “Forward, the crab-wallahs! The Steenbeke used to be something like this, I suppose. No! It was in the country. It wasn’t debased by yellow-brick suburbanism creeping out like dry-rot. I wish I had seen the Steenbeke before the war. I wonder if they will ever get it back to what it was, with trout and roach in it. Blast the London County Council! They had no excuse for polluting this Kentish stream! They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it has to come through the mind, not the pocket. Look at this ghastly muck-up!”

He peered through a gap in a tattered garden fence, to see sickly rows of thin-stalked cabbages, the upper leaves of which had been riddled by caterpillars in the past summer, while the lower leaves were grey with blight, stricken upon a limeless soil.

“‘Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, Thy tribute wave deliver: No more by thee my steps shall be, For ever and for ever,’” he declaimed to the air.

“F—k everybody except me!” shouted Ching, and kicked in two planks of the garden fence.

“Oi!” yelled a face out of a little window. “Mind what you’re at, knocking down my fence like that!”

Ching shoved his head through the gap, crouching and waggling his arms like an ape, then gave the face at the little window a double two-finger insult; while Phillip raised his cloth cap to the face and bowed, and stepping backwards, fell sprawling over a broken galvanised pail half-hidden among tangled grasses.

“Serve you bloody well right!” shouted the face at the lavatory window, as Ching helped Phillip to his feet before flinging the pail into the stream.

“Don’t add to the filth in the water, you bloody hooligan!” shouted Phillip. “What the hell are you doing? Come on, let’s get on with our walk, or we’ll never get to Reynard’s Common!”

Ching’s answer was to jump into the stream, haul out the bucket, and heave it over the tattered fence.

“Oi!” yelled the man at the window. There was the noise of a lavatory plug being pulled, again and again.

“Poor chap, his ball-cock’s out of adjustment,” said Phillip. “Come on, get a move on!”

They approached the dying hamlet of Bellingham, with its occasional elm trees, tumbledown field-barns, and yellow-brick cottages dulled by coal-smoke.

“Jack Cade’s men assembled here you know, Tom, before they marched on London, not to raise rebellion, but to protest against starvation conditions. Did you know that?”

“More bloody fools they! What did they get out of it?”

“A row of heads stuck on the spikes of London Bridge, I suppose. At least there are no bones here on what, if the City of London lawyers hadn’t been so cunning, might have been a battlefield.” He stared around, and said bitterly, “It would have been better if they had all been killed here. ‘And never a bone the less dry for all the tears,’ as Francis Thompson wrote of Keats in his essay on Shelley.”

“‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit,’ bird thou never f——g well wast!” replied Ching.

Phillip went on, “I remember my father telling us children about Jack Cade, when we came here for walks. The brook was alive then, and one winter day we saw wild duck flying down to feed, a wonderful sight.”

Scum moved slowly down the surface of the water-course. Ching said, “See those soap-suds? When I ran with my bayonet at the colonel, to dodge the attack on Inverness Copse, I had it all worked out. I munched up a bit of soap in my mouth to make it frothy, as though I was in a fit. Luckily I spewed when I fell in the mud, so there wasn’t any evidence left.”

“I really don’t want to hear, Ching. Let’s get on, why must you always stand still when you talk?”

“As soon as I got up the line, and saw hundreds of corpses lying about, I made up my mind to get away as soon as I could,” persisted Ching. “I tried eating cordite, to give me a bad heart——”

“I know, I know. You weren’t the only one. See those birds over there, like an eyebrow? They’re green plover. Thank God they’re still about.”

“—but all I got from the M.O. was a No. 9 pill. Then I tried to get a few breaths of phosgene when we were carrying up duck-boards one day, but the sergeant saw me lifting my mask, and said he’d get me a court-martial if I tried to swing it that way——”

Phillip tried to jump across to the other side, to get away from Ching, but he jumped short and fell in. He floundered about among old tins, bottles, and nearly went face-down over a bent bicycle frame, but recovered; to be splashed a moment later by Ching jumping in beside him.

“Let’s pretend we’re in the Steenbeke near Langemarck, Tom! If we raise our heads, we’re for it. At any moment the counter-barrage will come down. Listen!
Psst-psst-psst-psst!
Their machine-gun barrage sweeping the timber tracks! That’s the Cockroft in front! Our only hope is to keep down until the tanks come up the road to Poelcappelle. Ah, there they are! See the smoke screen?” A train going into Kent was passing to the west side of the brook. “The Jerries are running out!” He stood still. “I don’t feel a bit tight, do you? Vörwarts Cutler’s Pond! Let’s wade there.” Perhaps that would take Ching away from his self-accusing memories.

It was too slow, too muddy, too cold, playing this game. He
got out and pulled up Ching, and they squelched onwards, leaving behind the last of the run-out streets of terrace houses. Now the course of the stream lay through cabbage and potato fields, fighting a forlorn rear-guard action against the London County Council he thought. The burst heads of bulrushes gave an illusion of the old brook, and he peered hopefully for fish, sign that the water was not yet dead, but he could see not even a stickleback, which had lived there when he had walked along those same banks, leading his Bloodhound patrol of Boy Scouts, and tried to tell ragged boys from Deptford and Botany Bay not to take them home in jars, to die in airless water: some poor little father fish, faint red marks on its scales, raced away from a small bundle of sticks and drowned grasses, the nest made for its wife to lay her eggs in.

Why had he come back again? All the old life was hopelessly gone; so was his own life, now that he had a chronic disease.

“Come on, Tom, we must get a move on if we’re going to get to the Fish Ponds on Reynard’s Common, and see the source of this stream.”

They had by now reached the main road, the stream running shallow in a stony bed beside it. Electric trams ground past, to the terminus at Cutler’s Pond. When they reached the woods, the real walk could begin. They approached the Tiger’s Head, once an inn for carters and waggoners coming in with vegetables by night to Covent Garden market, but now a modernised flash place, rebuilt about the time, he recalled, that King Edward had died.

“Perhaps we could get a drink if we tried the back door,” suggested Ching.

“I don’t want any, I’m still feeling muzzy. Come on!”

“We might want a drink later. I’m going to try to get a bottle.”

“I’m going on. I shan’t wait this time!”

Relenting by the railings of the pond, his thoughts returned to the Salient, no bird or animal or even earth-worm could have lived on or in the battlefield of Third Ypres. Were there any
watermills in Flanders before the war, or were they all driven by wind? There used to be a windmill on the crest near Passchendaele village; would it be rebuilt, or was it a thing of the past, like the original pond here, which used to have posts-and-rails, and reeds around the edges, before the L.C.C. built a brick wall below the road and crowned it with a spiked iron railing?

At the foot of the wall the muddy bottom was pale with newspapers thrown in; and the old mill-house, where Father had told them that bayonets were ground for the Crimean War, was ruinous and overgrown with ivy. Did nothing remain in the world the same, for year after year, or was all doomed to fall into ruin, and pass away? Was there hope anywhere? Bones and flesh came from the earth, as phosphates, calcium, and carbon; and back they went after a space of time. Must natural beauty die, too?

He strolled to the top of the pond and waited by the road-bridge under which ran the brook coming from a wood which hid a house said in boyhood days to be filled with the lunatics of a private asylum. There Ching joined him, the top of a rum bottle wrapped in a page of
The
People
sticking out of his third-best jacket pocket. Phillip felt scorn for this concern with clothes, until the idea came that Tom’s father, the bread-winner, was dead, and Tom was probably the main support of his mother. Supposing
his
father had died; where would Mother be then? It was too late now to go back to the office, he thought, as they climbed down beside the bridge and pushed through undergrowth along the bank of the stream. Out of sight of the road Ching offered him the bottle.

Phillip ignored him, and pushed on by himself, regretting that he had ever had anything to do with Ching; he had only tried to help him, out of a slight resemblance, in face only, of Ching to Driver Mobbs, a genuinely shell-shocked infantryman transferred to his transport section of 286 Machine Gun Company in 1917. Mobbs had been fundamentally decent; Ching always had been soggy, human fungoid. Perhaps some human beings had pre-evolutionary primeval traits still in their natures; others—the killers without self-knowledge—had traits of tigers and predatory beasts, Zippy-like torture-pleasure which stimulated the sex instinct. Somehow all cruelty was involved with thwarted sexual appetites …

“How about a drink?”

“I thought you wanted to know the names of birds?”

“There aren’t any left here, are there?” Ching tipped the bottle and poured past his back teeth.

They were being watched. A man in an old-fashioned tweed suit with high lapels and knickerbockers was standing, with the aid of two sticks, on a path leading away from the water. Behind him was a wheeled chair. As Phillip went near he saw that the stranger had dark hair and eyes with a dark look in them. By his attitude, confirmed by his speech, he was a gentleman.

“You have a problem on your hands, I see.”

“He’s a sort of faked shell-shocked case. And a bore, because nothing about him is real. Morally disintegrated by knowledge that his father committed incest with his own daughter, after having rated the son for the same offence.” Phillip felt himself disintegrating as he spoke; for Ching had told him that in confidence.

“A case of paternal idealism gone wrong! Although in my case it is the other way round.”

Phillip, now recovered, told himself that he must on no account show curiosity or ask personal questions. The other man observed this and went on frankly, as to an equal, “My father cannot forgive me for having a bullet in the base of my spine.”

“Is it still there?”

“Unfortunately yes. But an operation might kill my father’s remaining son, which would entirely upset what remains of his hopes of partial immortality of his possessions through me.”

Phillip wondered if the set stare in the eyes indicated a mental case, but what was next said made things clear.

“I was hit in the spine by a sniper when going to help one of my men hit by the same sniper a minute or two before. It was against regimental orders, of course, for an ensign of Guards to do that, you follow me? And my father is a soldier, regarding himself pre-eminently in that character, but with a confusion similar to that of Nicodemus, who, you may recall, had great possessions. I am, or was, his heir, my two elder brothers having been killed.”