Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (28 page)

Words which no time can touch are my life’s refrain,
But each picture flies.
All that was left to hold till I meet you again,
Your mouth’s deep curve, your brows where the shadow lies,
These are the things I strive to capture in vain,
And I have forgotten your eyes,
And the way that your hair spun curls in the beating of rain.

Reminiscent as the lines were, they embodied my own failure of memory as well as his. Try as I would I could never, once we were apart, recollect his face, nor even in the silence of night hear his voice, with its deep notes and its gay, high laugh. I used to think that if, by closing my eyes or sitting in the dark, I could picture his eyes as they looked when I last saw them, or in imagination listen to him speaking, it would not be so hard to be separated. It is years now since I have been able to recall his face, and I know that, even in dreams, I shall never hear the sound of his voice again.

Except for a few hurried moments, we did not come near to one another after that evening on the cliff. On the Monday - our last day together, for I was due back at the Devonshire Hospital on the Tuesday morning - Roland and his mother and I went up together to London, where he had arranged to spend the rest of his leave. At Heather Cliff he said good-bye to Clare and his brother, and at the station to his father; in spite of these farewells he seemed preoccupied, as though living in an inner world from which experience excluded even those whom he dearly loved.

All day I felt inordinately tired, and so, I think, did Roland. His mother and I had sat up till 3 a.m. the previous night talking about him and our possible future; we had been obliged to get up early to catch the London train, so that none of us had spent more than three hours in bed. Roland and I, weary and depressed, passed most of the day in shops, renewing his equipment for the winter. To the disappointment of his mother, who thought a ring the only true symbol of union between a man and a woman, and to the subsequent surprised incredulity of other engaged Buxton girls - who used to remove their gloves in church in order to display a diamond half-hoop on the conspicuous third finger of their left hands - we both reacted violently against the idea of an engagement ring, Roland saying that he ‘detested the obvious’, and I fiercely determined to exhibit no ‘token of possession’. I could not endure the thought of displaying a conventional jewel in order to indicate to other men that I was ‘appropriated’ and to suggest to other women that I had won a long-sought prize after a successful hunt; it seemed too typical of the old inequality.

Throughout the remaining hours the shadow of the approaching end of day - and perhaps of so much more - lay heavily upon us. I made Roland go to Dunlop’s and choose himself a pipe, and he bought me an extravagant bouquet of deep red roses, but despite these lover-like transactions we felt jarred and irritated by the knowledge that the little time left to us had to be spent in the noise and tantalising publicity of shops and streets. At Savory & Moore’s he restocked his medical case with morphia; I was glad, later, to remember that he had bought a good supply.

After tea - for both of us a sullen, subdued meal, at which we had joined his mother and an old novelist friend - I had to go to St Pancras to catch my train back to Buxton. I felt sadder and more listless than ever; so much that I had meant to say to him was still unsaid, and yet it seemed of no use to say anything more. He told me at last, very bitterly, that he didn’t want to go back to the front; he had come to loathe its uncongenial monotony, and this glimpse of England and ‘real life’ had made him hate it more than before.

At St Pancras there was no empty carriage in which we could talk for the few moments left to us, so we had perforce to walk up and down the noisy platform, saying nothing of importance, and ferociously detesting the cheerful, chattering group round my carriage door.

‘I wish to God there weren’t other people in the world!’ he exclaimed irritably.

‘I agree,’ I said, and remarked wearily that I should have to put up with their pleasant company in a lighted dining-car all the way to Buxton.

‘Oh,
damn
!’ he responded.

But when, suddenly, the shriek of the whistle cut sharply through the tumult of sound, our resolution not to kiss on a crowded platform vanished with our consciousness of the crowd’s exasperating presence. Too angry and miserable to be shy any more, we clung together and kissed in forlorn desperation.

‘I shan’t look out of the window and wave to you,’ I told him, and he replied incoherently: ‘No - don’t; I can’t!’

To my amazement, taut and tearless as I was, I saw him hastily mop his eyes with his handkerchief, and in that moment, when it was too late to respond or to show that I understood, I realised how much more he cared for me than I had supposed or he had ever shown. I felt, too, so bitterly sorry for him because he had to fight against his tears while I had no wish to cry at all, and the intolerable longing to comfort him when there was no more time in which to do it made me furious with the frantic pain of impotent desire.

And then, all at once, the whistle sounded again and the train started. As the noisy group moved away from the door he sprang on to the footboard, clung to my hand and, drawing my face down to his, kissed my lips in a sudden vehemence of despair. And I kissed his, and just managed to whisper ‘Good-bye!’ The next moment he was walking rapidly down the platform, with his head bent and his face very pale. Although I had said that I would not, I stood by the door as the train left the station and watched him moving through the crowd. But he never turned again.

12

I suppose, as I took a seat in the dining-car, that I must have had some dinner that evening, but I remember nothing of the next four hours; I only became conscious of myself when I had to change into the local train at Miller’s Dale station. It was getting on for midnight, and a cold moon, bland and indifferent, gleamed above the deep blue hills. As I looked dazedly at their familiar outline they seemed to say to me: ‘You’re changed! Everything’s changed!’

At home I found an upset which I would have given, on that evening of all others, the world to avoid - an upset which reminded me that in wartime, even more than usual, life was just one damned thing after another. The parlour-maid met my train at Buxton with the news that a wire had come earlier in the day from Edward; his battalion was ordered to leave for France that night, and my parents had rushed off to Farnham to say good-bye. Cold and unutterably fatigued as I was, I entered the desolate house sick with the consciousness that fate was simultaneously sending into danger the two human beings for whom I cared most deeply. If only I had known, I thought wretchedly, I could easily have gone to Farnham too; Edward just
would
be sent to the front on the one day that I was inaccessible by telegram.

Though the three maids had been unoccupied all evening, not one of them offered to help me unpack or to get me a cup of tea, and I was far too much absorbed in my misery to ask them for anything. Shivering, and beyond description lonely, I huddled senselessly over my suitcase, too tired to cry, to unpack, or to go to bed. There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past. So instead of trying to sleep I sat down at my desk and began a letter to Roland.

‘I can only express the feeling that this deserted house gives me to-night by the word
désolée
- it was something less passive than depression and more active than loneliness . . . I am trying to recall the warmth and strength of your hands as they held mine on the cliff at Lowestoft last night. So essentially You. It is all such a dream. Often as I have come home by the late train I have seen the moonlight shining over the mountains, but it has never looked quite the same as it did to-night . . . I should have been really thankful if I could have gone away somewhere and cried.
Mais - que voulez-vous?
One does not cry in a brightly lighted dining-car full of Philistines. One studies the menu and pretends one enjoys one’s dinner. And later when the Philistines are sleepy and well fed, one gazes into the blue darkness, and dreams of the dream, and one’s eyes hurt, but one is too sore by that time for tears to heal.’

The whole of the next day in hospital had the grim, mechanical vagueness of a nightmare. In the afternoon came a tiny note from Roland, which bitterly renewed the passion of impotent grief that had seized me on St Pancras Station.

‘I could not look back, dear child,’ it began; ‘I should have cried if I had. I am writing this in a stationary taxi drawn up in a corner of Russell Square. The driver thinks I am a little mad, I think, to hire him and then only sit inside without wanting to go anywhere at all. But although it is past dinner-time I cannot bring myself to go . . . I don’t know what I want to do and don’t care for anything except to get you back again . . .’

That same evening my parents came home, tired and exasperated, to tell me that after all they had been to Farnham on a futile errand. Some at least of the previous night’s desolation might have been avoided, for though Edward’s regiment had gone to France, he himself, with eight other supernumerary subalterns - including the friend with whom he had long shared billets - had been left behind to be attached to the 13th Reserve Battalion.

Edward attributed this omission of himself to the fact that his elderly commanding officer disliked him. In a despondent letter to Roland - which Roland afterwards sent me in the hope that it might explain a little the unsatisfactory situation - he expressed in no uncertain terms his opinion of the sceptical C.O., and went on sadly: ‘I suppose it is no good being depressed and I suppose the future will disclose something good in the end. As you say the difficulties the Triumvirate has had in trying to do that most ordinary thing which men call fighting for your country have been most gigantic - difficulties in getting a commission, delay caused by illness, and my insuperable difficulties in trying to get out.’

The decision to leave Edward behind - although, as he said, he was among neither the eight most junior nor the eight most incompetent officers - no doubt provided a form of humiliation very gratifying to the colonel’s prejudice, for it was a bitter experience to be sent to Lichfield while the 11th Battalion, with a large number of new officers who did not know their men, went to the front. With a heavy heart Edward watched the platoon that he had commanded for nine months leave Farnham for France. On hearing the news I secretly concluded, without surprise or distress, that my musical and peace-loving brother was probably no soldier, but events were to prove me completely mistaken.

As we were all three too tired to be anything but laconic, I told my parents, without preface, of my engagement to Roland. Having accepted the fact with less perturbation than I had feared, they decided to make it public, and though I argued successfully against a
Times
announcement, I could not prevent my jealously guarded privacy of heart from being invaded during the next few weeks by the grotesque congratulatory observations of relatives and friends.

‘Rowland, by everyone’s account, seems a very nice sensible young fellow,’ commented my grandmother, but I forgave this singular conglomeration of inaccuracies more readily than the unjustified conclusions of the aunt who wrote: ‘I hear that but for this terrible War he would now be at Oxford. This explains to me your eagerness to go to college!’

‘I can’t help feeling rather sad,’ I remarked to him, ‘when I think that either very few people indeed have ever really loved, or else they have quite forgotten what they felt like when they did.’

In the meantime my letters from the ‘nice young fellow’ continued to be very far from ‘sensible’.

‘Everything now gives me a dust and ashes feeling since you are gone,’ he wrote on his last day in London. ‘In a way I am glad that I am going back to-morrow. If I cannot be with you I prefer to be as far away as possible . . . And not being able to, I feel an insane desire to rush back to France before I need, and leave all to memory only.’

Back again in billets, he continued in a similar strain. ‘And now it seems to count for so little that I did come back after all, so little that I saw and talked with what was no longer a dream but a reality, and found in My Lady of the Letters a flesh-and-blood Princess . . . I am feeling very weary and very, very
triste
- rather like (as is said of Lyndall) “a child whom a long day’s play has saddened.” . . . There is sunshine on the trees in the garden and a bird is singing behind the hedge. I feel as if someone had uprooted my heart to see how it was growing.’

As August slipped imperceptibly into September, his letters dominated the days. For two or three weeks one came almost every morning or evening, and my nursing dropped into the background like Pass Moderations earlier in the year - though there were moments when I regretted a little ruefully the lost tranquillity of steady work undisturbed by passionate preoccupations.

‘I could have done so well without love - before it came - I with my ambitions and life work . . .’ I wrote in my diary. ‘I shall never again now be able to work towards worldly triumphs with the same disinterested concentration. It was so pleasant when I had only myself to care for most instead of someone else. My peace of mind is gone for ever - it will never completely return again.’

People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. ‘No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right - ultimately. But I don’t think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.’