The Elderbrook Brothers (26 page)

‘No, no., About the war?' Philip insisted.

He got an effect this time. But even now, in the first moment, Felix was not so much astonished as puzzled. He knew Philip by now, or thought he did; knew him too well to imagine that he would have words to spare for any other war
than the one in which, world without end, the faithful were for ever mortally engaged against the powers and principalities of darkness; never resting, never sleeping, unwinkingly vigilant, in prayer and praise calling upon their God; for the Devil waiteth to ensnare them, the Devil watcheth, the Devil bideth his time. That war was no news to Felix, and he did not wish at the moment to discuss it with Brother Philip. He had learnt to go cautiously in his dealings with this embarrassingly ardent spirit: in which attitude he was perhaps not alone, for Philip too had lessons to learn. When he spent his nights in the dormitory lying unblanketed on the bare boards, instead of in the sufficiently humble bed provided for him, the brethren had glanced at each other, but refrained, in charity, from comment; but his going barefoot about the Priory grounds, and limping into chapel at evensong on bloodstained feet, provoked Hemner to lay a hand on his shoulder and say gently, in his private ear: ‘We are sufficiently edified, my son. More would be too much. Put on your sandals.' Philip, resolute to mortify the spirit if not the flesh, had himself confided the story to Felix, and to some others, but whether in true or false humility Felix dared not decide.

The lesson Philip was slowest to learn was how to keep his tongue still. He was engagingly ready for rebuke, and apparently sincere in penitence; but nothing, it seemed, would persuade him to consume his own smoke, that incense of devotion which rose from him, a thought too conspicuously by Minsterbourne standards, at all times and seasons.

But today the world was with him. For a while, at least, he was full of an alien excitement.

‘What war?' Felix asked. He felt he must risk that much.

‘England is at war with Germany,' Philip said. ‘We sent an ultimatum. It expired at midnight.'

Felix could only stare. ‘It's impossible. At war! How … who …?'

‘A child from the village,' said Philip. ‘The place is
buzzing with it. I mean,' he added, as if in apology, ‘the world.'

‘War with Germany!' said Felix stupidly. ‘But why?'

The news had almost no meaning for him. His mind was utterly unprepared for it, and it was beyond him to imagine what it might involve. In this ignorance he was at one with the great multitude of his fellow-countrymen. They, going about their business in the world of every day, had the advantage of him by little more than a week. For if he was living a cloistered life, so in their different fashions were they all, so far as world-politics were concerned. A crisis in Ireland, with gun-running and inflammatory speeches, competed for their attention at breakfast-time with the current criminal trial. Unrest in the Balkans was no new thing; the vamped-up scare about the German naval programme was not to be taken seriously by sensible people; the murder of an archduke whom nobody outside Whitehall had heard of in this island gave the newspapers a headline, but the cricket results (and why not?) were more important. The summer had been glorious, and in the smart world of the illustrated weeklies there was the Regatta to look forward to. In general (for there were minor discontents) John Bull and his wife had lived too long in peace and prosperity to believe that disaster could be imminent. Home affairs had been lively enough, for those who read the parliamentary debates and wore red or blue rosettes on election days: ‘scenes' in the House, Mr Asquith shouted down, the Lords after a bitter fight curtailed of their power of veto, Cabinet ministers personally assaulted by vote-hungry women, the imprisonment and hunger-striking and forcible feeding of these offenders, Ulster's defiance of Home Rule, and so on and so on, all very agreeable reading for comfortable people. But of foreign affairs the man in the street knew nothing and cared less. The comings and goings of the diplomats were kept secret from him, and nothing had occurred in the world to bludgeon him into political consciousness or weaken his fond persuasion that war, so far as his country was concerned, was
a thing of the past, and had been since that tiresome affair in South Africa. There had been no mass-persecution of German Jews; no Munich; no year of cumulative warnings. Poison gas had not been heard of, and the aeroplane was in its puling infancy, something to gape at on an afternoon at Hendon. Even at the end, with the lamps of civilization beginning to go out in Europe, there was nothing but an exchange of cautious, too cautious, diplomatic cablegrams, conducted for our part by a distinguished English gentleman with a talent for ornithology; until the armies in Europe were on the march, and our decision, which some said might earlier have stemmed the tide of darkness, could no longer be evaded.

Philip retailed the story, so far as he knew it. The German-inspired Austrian ultimatum to Serbia; the intervention of France; the mobilization of Russia; Belgium's appeal to Britain in the face of Germany's threat; and at last the British ultimatum. He did not know much; but Felix surmised, and at any other time would have been amused by the surmise, that he knew more than any ‘child from the village' could have told him. But perhaps the child had brought a morning paper with him.

‘I can't believe it,' Felix said. ‘It doesn't make sense.'

But he was something of an adept in believing things that didn't make sense, and his disbelief evaporated even in the moment of its avowal.

‘So we really are at war,' he said, staring at the pastoral peace that surrounded him. Men are already dying in battle, he thought.

‘Not we, Brother Felix,' Philip gently corrected him. ‘The world. England.'

‘You're English, aren't you?' said Felix impatiently. ‘So am I. What's the good of talking nonsense?'

Philip smiled sweetly, forgiving the asperity. There was not an ounce of malice in him.

‘You said yourself: “We are at war”,' Felix reminded him.

‘I was wrong. A slip of the tongue. The world is at war,
yes. But we are not of the world, Brother Felix. We have God's work to do, you and I.'

‘What work? Saving our own souls?'

‘Yes, indeed. But how? How but by knowing and living the love of Christ? Isn't that what the Reverend Father has told us? Philip flushed under his senior's bland, critical scrutiny. ‘Those were
his
words,' he confessed ingenuously, ‘not mine. How splendid he is, isn't he! I wonder if he will speak to us about the war this evening, in chapel?'

‘I should think it extremely probable,' said Felix. After a pondering silence he remarked, more to himself than to Philip: ‘It's a strange world. I shall have been ordained before the year's end.'

‘If it's God's will, Brother Felix,' said Philip, with a loving smile.

GUY'S lodging, which he had now occupied for two and a half years, had much to recommend it, and not least its address, or at any rate half its address. 23 Whitehall Avenue sounded good in his ears; the name of the northern suburb that followed was respectable, but alas not so distinguished; to live in the unexceptionable western region cost more than he had thought it worth while at that time to spend on a point of mere prestige. In the light of the dazzling future to which he looked forward, the double-fronted villa with its half-basement and its stone steps up to the front door struck him as dingy, the furniture heavy, the wallpaper drab, the amenities meagre and old-fashioned; but, compared with that cheap bedsittingroom at Walham Green, to have two large rooms to himself and the run of a comfortable house was luxury itself. Most of all was he lucky in his landlady. As much by what she was as by what she did, though in an unobtrusive fashion she did a great deal, it was she who made the place a home.

Mrs Macfarlane was an elderly gentlewoman who had ‘seen
better days' but had never, in Guy's conversations with her, made use of the phrase or betrayed any interest in the fact. She had been a widow for some years, living on very slender resources, unable to afford a full-time domestic servant. The chief personal interest in her life was her son Charlie, who was now entering his twenty-third year. They were made, both of them, of heroic stuff; they enjoyed a singular incapacity for self-pity, and each, without either displaying or seeming to demand affection, habitually put the other first. This much was visible even to Guy, who from his own restricted point of view had nothing to gain by observing them closely. The son was a stalwart, quietly cheerful young man who contrived, without effort, to be as Scottish in appearance as one parent and as English in speech as the other; and the mother tall, grey-haired, austere-looking, with high-arched brows, high cheekbones, and a complexion which, though parchment in texture and scored with time and troubles, retained a warm reminiscence of its earlier bloom. In her clear glance, and in the fine contours of her autumnal face, the story of a spirited girlhood was still legible. From the first she had treated Guy rather as guest than lodger, though ‘paying guest' was another of the euphemisms she privately considered vulgar. Charlie was doing well in the Civil Service, plodding with perpetual industry from one examination to another in an endeavour to rise higher in his division. His secret bent was for science, but, seeing no chance of pursuing that, he had set himself, without visible repining, to do what had to be done.

The two young men liked each other well enough. Their ways did not throw them much together, but when they did meet they were conscious of a pleasant unintimate friendliness. Guy's regard was not quite unmixed with envy of young Charlie's serenity of bearing, at once modest and assured; he sometimes felt a need to impress him with the larger knowledge and superior wisdom of a man of affairs; and Charlie, ingenuously ready to learn, no matter from whom, could not but think well of one who thought so well, as Guy manifestly did,
of his mother. Guy was perhaps more charmed by Mrs Macfarlane than he knew; and where he was charmed he could be charming. She had three claims on his notice: she was his hostess, she was a woman of breeding, and she represented something indefinable which, not quite consciously, and not at all willingly, he surmised to be of a rarer quality, a higher price, than the kind of success he was resolved on achieving for himself. Implicit in his attitude was the fond assumption that if he got the one, the other would be mysteriously added unto him. Let me have everything I want and I'll be the nicest fellow in the world and not ask for a thing more: this or something like it was his unspoken, unformulated promise to himself.

For the Macfarlanes the outbreak of war was an event of immediate and drastic significance, not something to be merely wondered at and pushed into the back of the mind. For Charlie was a Territorial, and had been for some years: not as a matter of patriotic duty but because, half against his sober convictions, he enjoyed the weekly drills and the annual camp. Before the day of decision came he was already encamped with his regiment, the London Scottish. Within three months he was in France. Quick work that: it made Guy think a bit. Letters and cards came trickling home. Charlie, said Charlie, was having a good time; plenty to do; a good crowd of fellows; he'd always wanted to see France, and here he was; it reminded him a bit of Hertfordshire. Don't believe everything you see in the papers, mother. It's not half so bad. He wrote, surprisingly, to Guy. Dear Guy, he began: he had never called him that before, and the sudden intimacy gave Guy a curious pang. It was the usual letter, half-a-dozen straightforward uncommunicative sentences in neat Civil Service calligraphy, followed, after the signature, by a postscript containing perhaps the point of it all: I'd be grateful for a line or two about my mother, when you have time.

In mid-November there came a somewhat different kind of letter. Guy came downstairs and found Mrs Macfarlane
standing at the breakfast-table, staring in a perplexed way at what her son had written.

‘Good morning, Mr Elderbrook.'

‘Good morning, Mrs Macfarlane.' Her stillness made him look at her again. ‘Any news?'

She handed him the letter. He read it with some difficulty. Darling Mother, I have had the bad luck to be shot by a German sportsman, but don't worry, they are looking after me beautifully. In case you would like to come over and see me Nurse is writing to tell you how. It will be very nice if you can. Your loving son Charlie.

Guy looked up from his reading.

‘It's not a bit like Charlie's writing,' said Mrs Macfarlane.

The comment startled him, just though it was. Those large scrawling words had not been easily achieved.

‘Difficult, you know, writing in bed,' Guy said.

‘Charlie's always so neat.' She seemed unwilling to leave the point.

‘Yes, I know. But he sounds—cheerful.'

‘He would, that,' said Charlie's mother.

‘Have you the other letter, from the nurse?'

‘So good of her. Yes. It came in the same envelope.'

‘Well, how about having breakfast? And then—perhaps you'll let me see you to the station, Mrs Macfarlane?'

‘How will you manage about your meals?'

He gave her a half-smile. ‘I shall eat them, as usual. Now …
please
don't talk nonsense.'

‘How kind of you!' she said.

Breakfast was a silent meal; and very soon afterwards, for it took her only twenty minutes to pack her few things, he escorted Mrs Macfarlane to the boat-train at Victoria. It was the least he could do, he thought ruefully, and on the heels of that thought came the question: what more, what was the most? There was no clear conflict in his mind, no choice between simple alternatives, and his mind refused to define the question more precisely. War was a matter for professional soldiers,
and for any others who had a taste for it. And this particular war would be over in six months, if not earlier. That Territorials as well as Regulars were being sent to France surprised not only Guy; and that Charlie Macfarlane had happened to be still a Territorial was a piece of sheer bad luck, because, as his mother explained, during the summer of this very year he had come near to leaving the Force in obedience to a sanguine anti-war sentiment which he shared with other thoughtful spirits of his day and generation. He had stayed for his own pleasure, because he ‘liked the work', as he put it; and in the latter days of peace he had stayed because it looked as though there might soon be more serious work to do. Home service was all he was committed to, legally or morally, when the war came; but his mother was not surprised when he told her, apologetically, that he had volunteered to go abroad. It would be such fun seeing France, he said: the opportunity was too good to miss.