Cotter's England (22 page)

She sighed, "It's lovely, but you've been through fire and flood and life has nothing more to teach you. None of us would have the courage voluntarily to join you. Living is our weakness. It's a wonderful rare loneliness, the thing they've left you. Ah, poor pets! My heart's breaking for you. It's a terrible inheritance, the inheritance of life. Then you know that death is the friend."

Camilla looked at Tom and saw his eyes were wet. Nellie observed this, smoking away, sighing and tossing her cigarette butt into the grate and starting to smoke again.

She said to Camilla who was not wet-eyed, "Don't cry, pet. I feel for you, Camilla. I know what it is. Life for you is a kind of life in death. You work, pet: you're brave. You accept a simulacrum of human warmth, but the real day is over. You would like to sublimate your emotions and work for society. I understand you. Your father was a brave man. He went to jail. He suffered for society. Society rejected him. It did not accept his offerings. The martyr, the agitator is offering society what it does not want. I imagine the suffering of the rejected votary. Ah, society is a cruel god. It can only reject. But you must be true to yourself, Camilla. Every situation has its temptations, they say; and I wouldn't want to see you salve your aching heart with delusions. You're a socialist, Camilla, you're a true heart. You have been about the world and seen injustice and the horror of poor pitiful bereaved homes. But must you think of setting vengeance in action? That's what political action is. You want to change the laws, you say, not upset society. Aye, but isn't any man-made law an iron hand reaching out to squeeze us poor creatures into faceless mud? Isn't any political action the same as fascism, the same as repression? You must repress someone to get your way. Isn't it a paradox, pet? Don't let your regret for human sufferings turn you into a Philistine; you'd lose my respect. For your intelligence and sensitivity; for the unusual individual I thought you."

"My father died in jail but I'm not worthy of him. I am no agitator," said Camilla.

"Yes, you know in your own family that law is tyranny and vengeance and the iron heel. You can't meet tyranny with tyranny, oppression with vengeance. What is revolt? It's tearing open the body of society to satisfy private feelings. It's bestial. You take a bad man and make him worse. He won't say, I was wrong: he'll say, They were out to get me and they got me: the vultures got me. Society is a vulture to the lonely soul."

They were disturbed to see that she had begun to cry.

She wiped her eyes but went on in a mournful and menacing, an excited way, "You don't understand. You're good people. I often tremble when I see the law pursuing someone and I read the list of his crimes and he gets a heavy sentence. He'll come out, not reformed, but worse. He'll say, I was going my way, the way society showed me, and they fell on me. They have armies and police Philistines, the stiff-necked bloody-minded Philistine, the blood-red bystander, the mock civic, and I have nothing, nothing but my own soul. They took me and forced me and branded me. And they've created an outlaw, a man who hates life. Instead of trying to understand her, they've ruined her to satisfy their vengeance; but first they've used her. And their guilt. They're all guilty. She's innocent; or she was till that day. She did no more than earn a crust in their way. You can't be a success in the bourgeois world unless you've committed incessant crimes starting as a child. And what you see around you, Camilla love, convinces you that there is no compassion, no fairness, it's all private self-indulgence, back-yard calumny, public vengeance and the death of the poor creature."

Tom, smoking calmly, said, "That's silly non-sense. That's the kind of stuff we used to talk when we were half grown and you're just coughing it up again now. You don't believe a word of it, Nell."

"Yes, I do, Tom. Political action is wrong. A political man is no good man. You should see Robert Peebles and you'd know. He's a man with a machete clearing a path for himself through a jungle of other egotisms and cutting down the innocent wild creatures in his path, the creatures who know life. It's vindictive and selfish and cruel to pretend to work for the world when you're only satisfying yourself. Ah, man is only a small whirling atom in a universe which itself will perish, and here we all are fighting and struggling and satisfying our petty passions or mangling our sacred true perceptions to suit a Juggernaut and calling it the higher life, the higher perception. It's an ugly picture, Tom. Isn't it all hopeless?"

"You're very tired, Nellie. It's nearly three. Let us go to bed."

With a wild cry, she said, "Ah, Tom, Peebles won't let me be. He's trying to change me and make me give a daub where I see nature. He'll ruin me: I won't be myself. I won't see things in my way. I told him, If you're going to correct anything I write from the armchair point of view, if I'm to become an armchair socialist, dreaming it up in an office and sitting in a classroom at night, I'm quitting. It's not for me. I'm leaving and leave you to go whirling along in your Laputa till you reach empty space. But I'm getting off and staying here with reality and the real people. Your socialism is vanity and conceit."

"You resigned, Nellie?" said Tom with anxiety.

"Aye," she said somberly.

"I must work tomorrow, I'll go upstairs," said Camilla.

When she had gone they faced each other. Tom made another pot of tea and with a contented face, he sat down next to her.

"You looked peaked, Nell."

"Ah, pet, it's all fight, no truce. But I won't give up my principles."

They sat for a while, resting, in silence.

Then Tom said, "So you threw it in, Nell."

"Ah, no. They're kind to the ignorant northern sod. They'll give me another chance. It's damnable. I'm tired of the fight. I'll go with George."

But she said it in a reckless bitter tone; and she continued, "I see his point. This is my country and they don't want my opinions."

Tom said nothing.

She continued, "Well, I admit I was upset. Not by him. My friend in Southwark—I had a message and I went to see her; she was home again and all right, but her neighbor on the landing told me they'd put her in the van and taken her away. She's in jail. For what? Because she's a victim of society. Ah, Tom, the poor frail waif, like my own sister to me, almost. And I know why. I know why. I'll never forgive it. I'll never forgive society. Nor anyone that arrogates pride and position to himself, all those that chain up the others."

"You mean the prostitute?"

"Don't you dare, Tom Cotter, put that hard name on her. You, one of the worst of men, going back on me and cheating all the women."

"Well, thanks for the kind words. I'll go to bed. And you go, too."

"If it wasn't for my friend Caroline I wouldn't know where to turn. You're all black hearts but hers," she said bitterly.

When he had left, she put both elbows on the table, squeezed her face between her hands and stared ahead. She brushed her fingers over both eyes, got up, emptied the teapot and went up to bed. Through the night those waking heard her coughing and sighing.

Camilla, sleeping in Eliza's bed, slept well; but she was awakened by strange sounds and could not understand their source. They came from the rug beside her. Nellie was there wrapped in an old eiderdown, bent half over two pillows, her shoulder blades showing through the washed-out pajama coat. She was in one of her paroxysms.

When it was over, she said weakly, "I didn't mean to wake you, Camilla. I come here when I cough too much, and sleep beside Eliza. When George is here he tells me to get out, or he'll get out. He has to have his sleep straight through or he's wretched all day. And it's me cigarettes. He has a nicotine reaction, dizziness and nausea, poor sod. And it's me talk. So he says. Go to sleep, Camilla. I am sorry, love."

The smoke rose through the air from the floor and began to get sharp in Camilla's nostrils.

She coughed. "You're awake, are you?"

"Yes."

"I've been thinking of you all night," said Nellie.

Camilla smiled to herself.

"But you want to sleep, Camilla?"

"I must work all day tomorrow; and get up early to relieve Eliza of the children."

"Yes, pet. Well, I won't trouble you. You must sleep and work."

She began to get up, pulling her bed things off the floor. With them in her arms, she stood and looked down at her guest, "Do you love him, Camilla?"

"Edmund? I think so. He makes it home."

"But you're not decided?"

"I can't break with my father-in-law. He will help with the children. He likes me. He wants to give me a home. I went to look at a flat in the West End the other day that he picked out for us. There was a room for him too, to visit us. He has the money. But I would be tied up, bound to him."

"So it's not a great love, with you and Edmund?"

"There are so many kinds of love. One for each man."

"I see, pet. Well, I'll leave you to your sleep. Sweet dreams."

Nellie went upstairs. Tom awoke, looked up and smiled.

He yawned, "I was having a lovely dream. I dream a lot: it interests me. How did you girls get on? Did you swap all the dirt?"

She flicked a sharp glance at him, "It's no laughing matter, Tom. I'm afraid the poor woman's a castaway, driftwood, Tom. Driftwood can sink. Give it a push with your heel. Will that be work to be proud of, lad?"

He lay flat, his glance shining out of the skylight, her words to him like other bright living things in the air.

He heard her say, "Whom the gods love die."

"The gods sure get around." He laughed lightly.

"Ah, pet, 'tis the final taunt."

"Who's taunting?"

She said solemnly, "Death is, I mean. But what other remedy is there to despair, endless despair? Venna sees things as they are."

"Venna?"

"My friend in Southwark. Or Camilla. Or poor Caroline. All despoiled women: castaways."

Tom said, "You have to keep thinking to yourself that there are people for whom everything is finished. You have to force yourself to realize it. It changes the look of the grass, even the grass. But the grass grows up. You see how green it is. It's the advance banners of new life."

"There's one thing I don't understand," said Nellie, promptly, shaking out her cigarette and getting another.

"Give me one, Nell."

They began smoking in harmony; their long strong fingers played at the cigarettes. Their attitudes and faces were in harmony by starlight, too; neither showed any emotion.

"I don't understand how you could be friendly with a person so long and be deceived. It's beyond me, Tom."

He didn't mind her attentions. He took them as a compliment. "I didn't ask any questions."

"But when you were introspecting, didn't she ever make a slip about Patrick?"

"We didn't do any introspection. She was always making plans."

"But you must have talked."

"We talked all the time—about her projects and affairs. She was a woman like that. We talked about the orchard. Connie— Ilger—was very much interested in Michurin and what Huxley was saying. We talked about books that came out—how we were wasting the resources of our planet. I said I worked in Newtonian factories in an Einsteinian universe. They were interested in that."

"You're evading the issue. You're not frank with me. Confess, lad, tell the truth. You're hiding something. You're ashamed of something."

"I'm not. I told them what happened at work. They liked to know. They were the only people I had to talk to. At work I couldn't tell anyone about the Ilgers. You didn't want to hear. I couldn't mention it at Bridgehead. I had them."

"That showed shame, lad. That's where the rotten patch is."

"She had plans and ideas. She made those two men. Ilger knew nothing; he was like a ward of his mother's, an old bachelor. She took him, taught him farming and orchard work, learned it herself first; she made Patrick learn accounting. I had engineering. She thought we could run an efficient farm that way."

A look of irritation passed over her face. "Come, Tom, when people are sitting alone with each other, you know they talk about fundamentals, serious subjects: they confess."

"She never did. She said it was a great mistake to talk about fundamentals."

"There you are! She couldn't bear the truth."

"It was her life, Nellie. I wanted her to do what she wanted."

"But she was a bad woman, Tom; and you're a good man. Now she's gone—what's left? She took away your name, took you from your family, got into your soul tooth and nail; and for this vampire you left me and told me nothing. If you'd come to me and explained, I could have cleared it up for you. You need not have wasted those years. You wouldn't have this corruption to look back to. Yes, cover your eyes. How could you be fond of such a woman? It's killing me."

"It was just an attraction at first; and it was fading as such things fade, when I found out how ill she was; and we had to begin to try every cure; from plants and snake venom to mesmerism. I took a great interest in it. I learned a lot. I was glad to help and gradually it grew into a great passion."

He shut his eyes, "There never was any question after that of leaving her, or asking questions or of selfish ignoble motives. What is my name anyway, if I don't have someone to love? Do you know, Nell, when I was a boy at school I wanted to change my name; and often afterwards, I thought, I'd like to change my name, be no one, begin again. I did it. I was for her only. She needed me and it was a great joy and relief. It was hard at times; but I made up my mind that that was what I ought to do; and I would do it again and with the same joy, the same passion."

Nellie said impatiently, "Aye, that's very well. I honor you for your good feelings, lad; but what sticks in my throat is they knew the truth and no one there took you into their confidence, when they all knew."

"I see it all as you do; but I don't care."

She continued to reason and upbraid. He was thinking of his past and did not hear her at first. She persisted, trying to get some words from him that would ease her torment for the night; and they spent a long time yet, this night, smoking together and going over things.