Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (76 page)

The next day, at Siena, we returned from exploring the black and white cathedral and counting the familiar names of the Popes whose sculptured heads looked down over the arches like faces gazing from a balcony, to find Oswaldo, who was staying with an uncle in an adjacent village, waiting for us at our
pension
. He insisted upon taking us that afternoon to the top of the tower of the Palazzo Communale - which swayed alarmingly in a howling wind that nearly blew me off altogether when the huge clock just over our heads suddenly struck two and I jumped about three feet into the air - and afterwards gave us ices at a café. Over these ices, constituting himself the protector of our maidenhood, he warned us with all the solemnity of his eighteen years against making chance acquaintances.

‘Signorine,’ he began, ‘the soul of the Italian is as clear as crystal!’ - but the designs of this noble-minded national upon unprotected young females were not, apparently, always so innocuous. In spite of this moral homily, Oswaldo himself did not appear in the least interested in our sex; no doubt, like a good little Black Shirt, he was merely fulfilling instructions to ‘put over’ Fascist propaganda to foreigners at every possible opportunity. After we had gone to Perugia, where a stormy autumn gale blew down from the heights across the wide Umbrian plain to Assisi nestling beneath the gaunt curve of Monte Subasio, he sent us a picture post-card of Dante meeting Beatrice; with discreet impartiality it was addressed to us both.

At Assisi we found a Festival of St Francis in progress and the ground floor of our hotel was crowded with ‘pilgrims’, amongst whom the proprietor gesticulated in helpless frenzy. About them hovered an affluvia which lingered on to remind visitors of their insistent presence even when they had departed. In a walk across the hills to the Carceri, a small monastery in the ilex-grove where St Francis used to pray, we temporarily forgot them, but they reappeared on the long journey to Rome, crowding us into the third-class corridor with their bundles and their baskets and the crumby exuberance of their garlic-scented repasts. Rome seemed a very different city from the tense, austere capital of 1917; so completely was my week there eclipsed by the subsequent days in Paris and the melancholy journey from Amiens through the battlefields, that I remember now only the red, sweet-scented roses blooming against the grey ruins of the Forum, and the tall pomposity of Trajan’s Column, the enclosure of which, judging from the number of its vociferous occupants, had apparently become a maternity home for cats.

At Amiens, with a sense of having strayed into the heart of an old, tragic legend, we stood in the dimness of the once threatened Cathedral; everything had deliberately been left, we were told, as it was just after the 1918 offensive, and we looked up with reminiscent melancholy at the still-boarded stained-glass windows smashed by German shells. How long will this bitter hatred continue? I wondered, thinking what æons ago seemed the Retreat in which that damage was done, and realising with sudden surprise that in my own mind the anger and resentment had died long ago, leaving only an everlasting sorrow, and a passionate pity which I did not yet know quite how to use or to express. But then, I reflected, I have only a personal and not an historical memory; the Germans didn’t really mean to kill Roland or Victor or Geoffrey, but they did intend to hold on to Alsace-Lorraine.

To-day, tours of the battlefields in France are arranged by numerous agencies; graves are visited in parties, and a regular trade has been established in wreaths and photographs and cemeteries. But that level of civilisation had not been reached in 1921, so Winifred and I hired a car in Amiens, and plunged through a series of shell-racked roads between the grotesque trunks of skeleton trees, with their stripped, shattered branches still pointing to heaven in grim protest against man’s ruthless cruelty to nature as well as man. Along the road, at intervals, white placards were erected in front of tumbledown groups of roofless, windowless houses; were these really the places that we had mentioned with gasping breath at Étaples three and a half years ago? I asked myself incredulously, as with chill excitement I read their names: BAPAUME - CLÉRY - VILLERS-BRÉTONNEUX - PÉRONNE - GRIVESNES - HÉDAUVILLE. At Albert a circumspect row of Army huts, occupied by reconstruction workers, stood side by side with the humped ruin which had once been the ornate Basilica, crowned by its golden Virgin holding her Child aloft from the steeple. Was this, I wondered, apart from the huts, the place as Edward had known it?

But the day’s real purpose was my visit to Louvencourt - as the words of the dead American poet, Alan Seeger, restlessly hammering in my head against the grinding of the car’s sorely tried gears, had reminded me at intervals all afternoon:

I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill . . .

As the car drove through the village to the cemetery, I realised with a shock, from its resemblance to a photograph in my possession, that the grey château half hidden by tall, drooping trees had once been the Casualty Clearing Station where Roland had drifted forlornly and unconsciously into death. We found the cemetery, as Edward had described it, on the top of a hill where two roads joined; the afternoon was bright and sunny, and just beyond the encircling wall a thin row of elms made a delicate pattern against the tranquil sky. The graves, each with its little garden in front, resembled a number of flower-beds planted at intervals in the smooth, wide lawn, which lay so placidly beneath the long shadow of the slender memorial cross. As I walked up the paved path where Edward had stood in April 1916, and looked at the trim, ordered burial-ground and the open, urbane country, I thought how different it all was from the grey twilight of the Asiago Plateau, with its deep, sinister silence. The strange irony which had determined the fates of Roland and Edward seemed to persist even after death: the impetuous warrior slept calmly in this peaceful, complacent earth with its suave covering of velvet lawn; the serene musician lay on the dark summit of a grim, far-off mountain.

I left Louvencourt, as I thought, unperturbed; I had read the inscription on Roland’s grave and gathered a bronze marigold to keep in my diary without any conscious feeling of emotion. Whatever, I decided, might be true of 1918, I was beginning to forget the early years of the War and to recover from the anguish of its second Christmas.

But late that night, back in the Paris hotel, I picked a quarrel with Winifred over some futile trifle, and went to bed in a fury of tears.

11

Piping for Peace

THE SUPERFLUOUS WOMAN

Ghosts crying down the vistas of the years,
Recalling words
Whose echoes long have died,
And kind moss grown
Over the sharp and blood-bespattered stones
Which cut our feet upon the ancient ways.

But who will look for my coming?

Long busy days where many meet and part;
Crowded aside
Remembered hours of hope;
And city streets
Grown dark and hot with eager multitudes
Hurrying homeward whither respite waits.

But who will seek me at nightfall ?

Light fading where the chimneys cut the sky;
Footsteps that pass,
Nor tarry at my door.
And far away,
Behind the row of crosses, shadows black
Stretch out long arms before the smouldering sun.

But who will give me my children?

V. B. July, 1920.

1

Soon after we returned from Italy I became ill with jaundice, which kept me in bed for nearly three weeks. It was probably due, said my doctor, to a revival of the mysterious Malta germ which had remained latent since my leave in 1918, and might never completely vanish. But though this particular disease involves a good deal of discomfort and is supposed to be accompanied by colossal depression, I lay in bed after the first few days in saffron-hued contentment, happily drafting the middle chapters of
The Dark Tide
, which was then often referred to by Winifred and myself as ‘Daphne’, the name of the character who shared the role of heroine with another called ‘Virginia Dennison’. Italy, with its new scenes and experiences, had made all the difference; in spite of Asiago, in spite of Louvencourt, those weeks abroad had somehow healed the acutest soreness of the War’s deep hurt. After them, apart from occasional dreams, I had no more hallucinations nor night terrors nor insomnia, and by the time that I joined Winifred at the end of the year in the Bloomsbury studio which we had taken as the result of our determination to live independently together, I was nearly a normal person.

From the moment that the War ended I had always known, and my parents had always tolerantly taken for granted, that after three years at Oxford and four of wartime adventure, my return to a position of subservient dependence at home would be tolerable neither for them nor for me. They understood now that freedom, however uncomfortable, and self-support, however hard to achieve, were the only conditions in which a feminist of the War generation - and, indeed, a post-Victorian woman of any generation - could do her work and maintain self-respect. After the Armistice my father, with characteristic generosity, had made over to me a few of his shares in the family business, in order that I might pay my own college bills and be spared the ignominy of asking him for every sixpence after so long a period of financial self-sufficiency.

Although I could not live upon this tiny income and a growing accumulation of rejection-slips, it enabled me to give more attention to writing and politics than would otherwise have been possible, and less to the part-time lecturing and teaching which Winifred and I had alike decided were the most accessible and least exacting methods of earning our living until journalism could be made to pay.

As both our families expressed a desire for a few weeks of our company before we finally left them for good, we postponed our joint migration to the end of 1921, and spent the interval after our return from Italy in planning future work and acquiring enough small ‘money-making’ jobs to occupy about three days a week. Almost daily I wrote long letters to Winifred, coloured by that curious mixture of maturity and childishness which was so long characteristic of our dislocated generation; they palpitated with schemes for writing and lecturing and travelling, and for the dissemination of those internationalist ideas the teaching of which, I still felt, alone justified my survival of the War. In this ingenuous eagerness for every kind of new experiment and reform I resembled many other contemporaries who were at last recovering from the numbing shocks of the wartime years; our hopefulness was due to a belief that the War was really over, and to a failure as yet to understand completely how deep-rooted and far-reaching its ultimate consequences must be.