I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (7 page)

‘Week-end leave.’

‘Do you know these people, then?’

‘A friend brought me. I thought I'd like some social life for a change.’

‘I'm very glad to see you, Ken.’

‘I'd have got in touch with you if I'd known your address. Now I've got to go back to-morrow. Too queer running into you this way.’

‘It's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.’ While they were speaking she Saw on his face small new lines of eye-strain but otherwise nothing altered. But the eyes themselves looked like the eyes of a man waiting to ride a difficult race. There was the same fixity and the brightness did not seem natural.

‘Do you remember the last time we saw each other?’ she asked him.

‘The morepork,’ he said, smiling.

She did not smile. She was very startled, somehow, that he should remember and more startled that the picture should come up so clearly then. Sometimes the picture was there at night and sometimes it came when she was alone and she could understand that; but now in the noise of the party it came so much stronger and clearer than it should and there was the low house at the end of the point with water on three sides and there were the big trees with cormorants in them, and she had been happier there with Frank than with other men she had been around with but she had left it as she left every place; and there it was clear in the picture, only it startled her now. That picture was part of the woolgathering and most nights she saw it. It was very familiar but it startled her still, especially coming clear in the crowded room with the lights and the party voices, the room inside it wasn't like this room. It was plainer and emptier, no stars or candles although there were glasses, only the three people there, the troopship waiting for Ken down in the harbour, she herself waiting to travel towards the war in another
ship, the morepork calling outside, the ill-omened bird of disaster. Frank laughing about the native superstition, holding his hands tight on the arms of the chair to keep from getting up and shouting to scare the bastard away. Knowing all the good well-known things that were ending. Knowing the danger and the loss and all the rest that mustn't be spoken. Knowing exactly what bad-luck symbols were worth. One could scare the morepork away but that would make everything worse. And there was Frank, gruesomely enough, joking badly about it, for whom the morepork calls; and perhaps it was calling out for all three of us really, we used to watch between the trees on the point when the ships lined up for the convoys and she could see those trees every time in the picture with the cormorants, wings held out stiff to dry, like small scarecrows. But that was another country and why was it here now? When it came at night or when she was by herself that was all right. But coming sudden and inopportune it confused her as now, she standing glass in hand at a party, talking to Ken with his unnatural eyes and he looking entirely too natural in the damned uniform. She lifted her glass and drank out of it; the punch had gone cold. Ken was still smiling. She lowered the glass again.

The woolgathering was part of her and she was not troubled by it except when it came between her and the people she wanted; and the fear that she would finally lose the last chance. That was all that was troubling in that. Being queer didn't matter much. She didn't worry about being different and queer but what startled her so that she felt cold in the warm room was the low brown house appearing and the morepork calling outside. The picture could not really be at the party, she had heard the morepork call, and there was no morepork. Nor was there any sense in believing in evil omens. Then what was she hearing and looking at and what was disturbing, and why did she feel colder than she had felt in the cold streets because of a picture and a bird's mournful cry thousands of miles away underneath the world?

She put her glass down on a little table amongst cactuses. It must be obvious, she was thinking. It must be obvious to everyone that she felt the way she was feeling. Ken surely would notice something.
It was suddenly imperative that she escape from the eyes that were surely collecting. This was the sort of thing you got let in for by being the way she was. This was the work of the saboteur in the nerves.

‘I must go, Ken,’ she said, hoping it didn't sound stupidly urgent.

He did not express surprise. He said, ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Come back to my place, then. It's not far and we'll have something to eat there. One can't talk at a party, anyway.’

The words came without thought, and then, seeing the hesitation or whatever it was on his face, she remembered to think and said, ‘Oh, but of course you don't want to come away from the party. Good-bye.’

But he was behind her when she said something to the host and to Mia and when she went downstairs and pulled her coat from the pile he was still there and held it up for her while she put it on. Only when the closed door shut out the noise of the party and the sinister noise of the bombers was back again deep and strong and inevitable as if it would always be filling the sky day and night, as if it were the noise of the earth's self revolving, he hesitated and seemed to hold on to the handle of the closed door so that she wondered if he would really rather have stayed. But he came with her into the street.

‘Shall we go by bus or by tube?’ she asked him. With distant surprise she heard him answer at once, ‘By tube’, when he couldn't have known which was better, not knowing where she lived.

The moon was up now showing the empty bed of the street and the black bank of the opposite houses and the whitened, moon frosted roofs which might have been snowy escarpments. It was all very drear and deserted and becoming traditional and no different from the other cities unlighted and waiting amongst their ruins under the moon. In her travelling she had seen so many cities change over from darkness to light, and she remembered suddenly and completely a harbour at nightfall, the waterfront brilliant with lights, the lost sun still ghostly gold on the Kaikoura mountains across the Strait.

‘It's queer how it grows on you,’ he said. They were walking towards the tube station.

‘What?’

‘Having one's life up there instead of on the ground.’ She saw his face lifted up to the noise of the planes and his head tilted. ‘I don't feel at home down here. I don't belong any more. There seems to be no place where I fit in. I wanted to feel like other people again, so I thought I'd go to parties and talk to women and that would make it all right. But it doesn't work out somehow. I still feel outside. I'd like to be the same as I used to be and feel like other people again.’

‘I suppose you never write anything now?’

‘Good God, no.’

What a fiendishly efficient machine war is, she thought, remembering him as he was and the writing, a bit immature but sensitive and direct and with much integrity. Now he would never write the things he might have written when he had learned to write well enough. It destroyed very thoroughly this war machine, this incinerator of individuality and talent and life, forging the sensitive and creative young into the steel fabric of death, turning them out by the million, the murder men, members of Murder Inc., the big firm, the global organization. Suddenly, she felt acutely angry with him.

‘How could you let them do it to you?’ she said. ‘How can you let us all down?’

He was not listening, walking beside her in the uniform that he wore as if he had never worn anything else. He was walking too fast for her, like a man in a hurry to get somewhere, and now he said, looking up still at the throbbing sky, ‘They've got a great night for it,’ and she said, ‘The others have too.’

‘I'd hate to be on the ground in a bad raid,’ he said. ‘I certainly would hate to be down here.’ He stared up at the sky.

‘Don't you ever think what it is you're doing up there?’ she asked him.

They were at the tube station, and going into the light she noticed again in his eyes the nervous intent look of a rider waiting for the start of a hard race, his movements rather jerky and stiff, and she
began to feel sorry because something was wrong somewhere. She looked to see what was wrong, but in place of the man with the young face who looked at her with bright bloodshot eyes there came the house in another country and the trees with cormorants in them and the morepork was calling and there was no way of seeing anything else.

Then in the train it was gone and she attended to him again: but now with anger reviving in her he was only the murder man, and having no clear idea of the inside of a plane, she saw only an anonymous robot, padded, helmeted, hung about with accoutrements and surrounded by switches and dials, sowing catastrophe from a lighted box in the sky.

‘How do you ever sleep?’ she asked the man who was sitting by her in the blue clothes, here, in the underground. ‘Don't you feel frightened to go to sleep?’

‘It's our people or theirs. You know that.’

‘I know that because there's a murder committed next door all the rest of us in the street don't have to start killing our neighbours.’ ‘It's war,’ he said. ‘I simply do my job. Do you suppose I enjoy bombing civilians? Is it my fault?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you know what you're doing and acquiesce in it that makes you guilty.’

‘No. You're not fair.’

She looked at him and saw his eyes screwed up painfully as they would be when he looked into the sun. The wrinkles around his eyes looked strange on the young face, almost like painted lines.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘The morepork was calling for you all right. This is the worst badness that could have happened to you, that you should turn into a murderer.’

The train was stopped in a station and a woman, hearing, turned in the doorway as she was getting out and said, ‘How dare you speak like that to one of our glorious boys?’ Then the doors slid shut in front of her outraged face and Ken made a sound like a laugh that was not really amused and she, sitting beside him, laughed too and said, ‘Spreading dismay and despondency among His Majesty's forces. I could be put in jail.’

And, because of the laughter, she recognized the young face for which, somewhere, she had had some affection, regretting again dimly the eyes strained and screwed up as if they were hurting, and said, ‘Don't take any notice of me; I suppose I'm a bit crazy’, falling easily into the pattern she ran her life by.

That was the easy pattern, to let people think she was a little mad. And it was true that she was a way they never would be able to understand, with the woolgathering, and now the picture and that bad luck bird that had come with Ken in the light in front of them all. She heard him say, ‘It's all right’, and then there was nothing more said and it was time to get out of the train.

The platform was crowded and most of the bunks occupied. Here and there people slept already and a man near the tea urns was wandering up and down selling buns from a tray slung on a strap round his neck. There were more shelterers than there usually were.

‘Warning's just gone,’ one of them said, close to her, as they passed, and Ken said quickly, ‘What?’

‘The warning,’ she told him, stopping because he had stood still suddenly. ‘The glorious boys in the different uniform.’

Of course it's lunacy: we've all of us gone insane, she said to herself, thinking of the planes streaming out, crossing the incoming enemy stream up there in the freezing sky. Did they signal like passing ships or just ignore one another? The demented human race destroying itself with no god or external sanity intervening. Well, let them get on with it. Let it be over soon. She was very tired of the war-world and only wanted everything to be over. It seemed not to matter any more what happened. There had been far too much happen already. Queer how tired apprehending a war made you. The war had always been there in the different countries, but it had taken London to bring her the apprehension of war. This can't go on, she thought sometimes, waking suddenly in the night or moving about a room: this can
not
go on. But it went on and on and she went on somehow, only feeling always more and more tired. She thought a little about how tired she was.

Walking along the platform, keeping pace with Ken who walked slowly now, the woolgathering took possession of her and all the way up in the lift she was dreaming the double stream of destruction, feeling the composite entity of the bomber-streams, gigantic cruising serpents of metal horror circling and smashing the world.

Guns were firing and searchlights were setting their geometrical snares when they came out of the station. The searchlights had not caught anything. They closed and opened and closed and drew blank again.

‘Hadn't we better wait a bit?’ Ken said.

‘It's only a minute from here and there doesn't seem to be any shrapnel,’ she answered, not quite out of the woolgathering.

She started along the pavement in black shadow. There would be moonligh t on that side of the street when they turned the corner. The moon was just past the full. It was under this moon that, walking home by herself, she had seen the morepork perched on the roof and calling its ominous cry. The budgerigars in their cage twittered with fright. No, that was somewhere else. Where was that? Her eyes refusing the lighted sky she was not sure what part of her life she was in; and then she was back from wherever it was to the war and the war-locked town.

The gunfire died down briefly and a plane began making its familiar maddening, hysterical, unescapable sound. She did not notice at first that Ken had stopped walking beside her. Then the noise of the plane got louder and she remembered about him and he was not there and that startled her and the night seemed unreal. Looking back then, she could see a darker bulk against the dark wall of a house, and she got the torch out of her bag and flashed it and saw his face lifted and turned to the sky. The light fell full on his face and she looked once and switched off the torch quickly and went to him and said, ‘Ken’. But the guns started again and he did not look at her but moved away fast, looking up, back towards the tube station, the way they had just come.

She called, ‘Ken, Ken’. And then, not knowing where the words came from or thinking them even, ‘Oh, no, no. Oh, please no. Oh, Ken’.