The Balliols (59 page)

In October a medical board reported that Hugh was fit for light duty and he was posted to an instructor's course at Grantham. An attempt was made to retain him on the staff at Fernhurst, but the War Office replied that it could not dispense with the services of so experienced an officer. If the headmaster of Fernhurst were to apply for an officer to take charge of the O.T.C., that would be another matter. But in that case they would appoint an officer who was capable of full military duties. The chief made no such application.

“You'd be doing more good here than you will there,” he said to Hugh. “If you ever feel like coming back here after the war, which I know you won't, remember that there's always a place on the staff waiting you. In the meantime I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am to you for the help that you've given me. The Shell won't forget their lesson in a hurry.”

At Grantham life was very much as he had left it a year and a half back. He was on an instructor's instead of on a student's course. As an instructor he was lecturing not to recruits but to officers and to N.C.O.s. It amounted to the same thing. There was the same kind of mess; the same kind of officer in the mess; the Sunday leaves to Nottingham; the dinners at the George; the week-end leaves to London when in the light of that new knowledge that had come to him on that last night in the line in France, he lived in the moment with an eager, calculating haste, as though he were making it up to himself for what he had missed; almost as though he were taking a
revenge, in the way that a batsman will steadily and relentlessly pile up a score after the match is virtually won, forcing a victory home.

It was the kind of life that he would have considered ideal two years ago. His share in the war finished, himself justified, graduated in the university of the trenches, with nothing to do but to wait comfortably for the war to end. People called him a lucky devil. And he knew himself to be a lucky devil. He could wish, however, that he were well enough to enjoy his good fortune oftener. He felt ill half the time. He would get sick headaches, the result of mustard gas. Wet weather would send a dull throbbing, punctuated by sharp twinges, down his leg from thigh to ankle. Whisky was the only remedy and whisky in sufficient quantity to numb that throbbing, woke him at six next morning with a dry mouth and a drear sunk sensation that warned him that he would have to exercise severe self-control if he were to get through the day without loss of temper. The mess president told him with a laugh that he was the most profitable member of the mess; that his whisky bill was twice anybody else's. Then added: “You are hitting the high spots, you know.”

Hugh laughed away the implied criticism.

“I'm between the devil and the deep sea. If I don't drink at night I feel like hell. And if I drink at night, I feel like hell next morning. On the whole I prefer good nights and bad mornings, to good mornings and bad nights.”

It would be a relief, when the war was over; when he could get away from the chill and draughts and damp of army huts. He'd never get colds and rheumatism when he was in a properly built house with fires and central heating, doors that fitted, windows that didn't rattle, roofs that didn't leak. He remembered the way Rickman had wheezed and groaned with asthma. He was never like that at home, he'd said. He would be all right himself, too, when the war was over.

Like Ruth and Francis, Lucy and Helen, like his parents too, in their way, he marked time, waiting for the war to finish.

Stella was the only one of them who was carrying on with her ordinary career; who was in full exercise of her capacities. For her every month brought new duties, new responsibilities. Wherever there was talk of women's war work, whenever an article appeared on
Women in the War
, whoever's name might be omitted or included, hers, invariably, inevitably, was there. She had not only organized
the activities of women, she had harnessed them to her own leadership, inspiring them with a feeling of loyalty and trust very similar to that which had made her four years earlier one of the government's most dreaded foes. So absorbed was she in her work, so occupied by it that it was with no more than the half of her attention that she followed the slow passage to the Statute Book of the Bill that would admit women to the suffrage. Within three years public opinion had completely altered: or it might be more accurate to say the cabinet had become aware of what on that particular issue public opinion was. For so long now the Bill's passage had been accepted as a matter of course that Stella Balliol scarcely realized on the bleak January evening of the final House of Lords debate that the goal for which so many women had worked so long, so bravely, so recklessly, at times so blindly, had been reached at last.

Or rather, she could not believe that it had come like this: so quietly, without conflict, without opposition, with no parade, no celebration. She had thought of the Cause as her life's work. She had sacrificed everything for it: comfort, safety, personal happiness; almost, she could say, her womanhood. She had pictured the day of triumph in terms of banners, processions, speeches, massed meetings in Trafalgar Square. Displays that would match the demonstrations of the pre-war movement. But it had come and there were no cheers, no speeches. Those who would have marched with waving flags, were scattered. They were in munition factories, working upon farms; they were driving lorries, sweeping hospital wards; they were in charge of 'uses, tubes, lifts: they were collecting tickets at railway stations; they were in danger, many of them; they were worn out with a day's labour; they wore the uniform of service. They had other things than the Vote to think about.

Just as she herself had other things to think about.

She had imagined that with the Vote won, her work would be accomplished; that there would be no more for her to do. It was a high ridge beyond which from the valley of her struggle she could not see. Now that she had reached that ridge she could see the succession of ridges that lay beyond. No one could think of their work as having done more than pass a stage at a time like this, when the very liberty of the country was in danger; when beyond the Rhine the enemy were already massing for the last desperate assault, that might achieve who could tell what effects. Beyond that ridge of the moment's immediate needs who knew what succession of ridges waited? You followed a dream that was beyond your dream. You set yourself a mark. When you reached that mark you found that
the thing you sought was farther on. Admitted now to the franchise, women would have to prove themselves worthy of it.

As she walked westward through the chill dark night the solemn sentences of Curzon's speech echoed through her mind. Curzon had been the most implacable enemy of the Cause. He was the leader of the House. It was from him if from anyone that opposition was expected. There was a slight shuffle in the gallery as he had risen; as he had lifted his head in that familiarly disdainful gesture as though there were a faintly unpleasant smell beneath his nose. The suffragettes had been prepared for opposition. But none had come. His speech had been an acceptance of the inevitable. He could not, he said, recommend their lordships to embark upon a conflict with a majority of 350 in the House of Commons of whom nearly 150 belonged to the party to which most of their lordships belonged also; a conflict from which their lordships would not emerge with credit.

But he had not on that account approved the measure.

When other peers had spoken in praise, he had spoken in dispraise of women's political responsibility. He regarded the bill frankly as a mistake “vast, incalculable, almost catastrophic, without precedence in history, without justification in experience … the opening of floodgates to something more than a mere tidal wave.” There were the familiar arguments to which she had listened often in the past, by which she had been exasperated, to which no Englishwoman would be again forced to listen; arguments to which for that very reason she found herself listening for the first time with respect. Curzon's solemn periods had the quality of prophetic utterance. By an irony of contrast, Curzon, a man destined by the world's and nature's gifts to success of the most marked order, precluded from full and proper employment of those gifts by the evil fairy who had denied him that leaven of humanity which would have preserved him from the insensitiveness, the pomposity, the arrogance that made his successes unpopular and harsh; Curzon, a man who, through being unlovable, was deprived of the leadership to which his gifts entitled him, possessed in a high degree that rare gift of being able to achieve dignity in defeat. In spite of his many triumphs, his biggest moments were moments of failure, not of victory.

His stern sentences rang through her head as she turned westward towards Piccadilly. A time would come when those sentences would seem justified. There were two pictures to women's share in the war. There were the nurses, the lorry-drivers, the farm girls.
the munition workers; but there were also the silly addle-pated flappers to whom the war had been one glorious Luna Park: a succession of night clubs and flirtations; an unparallelled opportunity for breaking parental discipline. When it was all over; when the men came back to their jobs; when there was no need for land girls and nurses and tram conductors; when women would be faced with the problem of finding an economic place for themselves in the economic structure, the frivolous and empty-headed would remain, flitting from night club to love affair. It was on them that the limelight would fall. They would justify the mocking comment, “Well, you've asked for freedom. Now you've got it, what use are you making of it? Aren't you behaving just as we always said you would?”

That time would come. And those who disbelieved in progress, who saw only a change in externality that was at the most relative; who refused to look far enough back or far enough forward to appreciate how vast a way the human race had travelled towards civilized fellow-feeling, would shrug their shoulders, would say: “Well, and was the struggle worth it?”

The end of the war as far as women were concerned would mean the start of another struggle to hold the ground that they had won in face of what men would call the laws of economic necessity. For a moment Stella felt weary and disenchanted at the prospect of this opening panorama of fresh campaigns. Then she squared her shoulders. That was a long way off. She had this present business. She was due to make a speech to a detachment of Waacs going overseas to-morrow. She would only have time for a hurried sandwich supper. She dismissed the future and began to phrase in her head the opening and concluding sentences of her speech.

Nature can provide vivid contrasts to the moods of man. During that slow, sad March of 1918 over which hung the shadow of the big offensive, the sun shone with a gentle radiance from skies of watered cobalt. Day followed day in leisurely calm procession. Lord Hunter-coombe pottering about his garden, watching first snowdrops, then crocuses, spray the leaf-strewn copse with colour, found it difficult to believe in this atmosphere of sun-washed tranquillity that only a few miles away within earshot almost, plans were maturing for the greatest battle in the world's blood-soaked history; that summer and peace were not already on their way.

Loitering down the moss-covered paths, pacing the smooth lawns, aware only of the blue sky above him, the sun's warmth upon his face, deluded by the sun and warmth into a belief in summer's actual return, he ignored the dampness of the ground beneath his feet, the treacherous chill that rose from a fresh-turned earth as the sun grew larger and redder behind the leafless trees; just as the sentries looking out over the plains of Picardy might have been lured out of suspicion by the seeming innocence of that long stretch of ground, within whose folds the plans of battle were concealed. Just as the sentry might not have recognized as the proof of a tunnelled mine shaft the sprinkle of new-turned earth upon a parapet, so the old man deliberating with the head gardener as to whether patriotism demanded that the archery should be planted with potatoes, suspected no danger in the slight huskiness with which for the last three mornings he had woken, the wheeziness which had troubled his breathing after dinner.

He was utterly unprepared for the sickness which struck him as suddenly as the big offensive broke upon the English troops in France. One afternoon he had come in rather earlier than usual from the garden; though the sun was shining he had felt cold. He had told the butler to bring him a rug to tuck round his knees as he sat after tea before the fire reading. But he had felt disinclined to read, although only that morning he had received from the library a detective story to which for several days he had been looking forward. He was
content to sit there, dozing. At dinner he had no appetite. He had gone to his room early. He had taken two aspirins and a hot whisky. A good sleep and a sweat would put him straight.

He had woken out of a nightmare, with the hands of his luminous clock pointing to five to three; with the sensation that someone was kneeling upon his chest. He struggled, heaved himself with his elbows upon the pillow, rested there, half upright, his forehead damp from the effort, gasping, each breath coming like the quivering sigh which a runner takes at the end of a long and hard-run race; with the struggle growing harder instead of easier with each breath. He turned on the switch of his electric lamp. He turned so that he could see himself in the mirror above his dressing-table. “I'm in pretty bad shape,” he thought.

All through the day the sense of struggle gathered. It lessened towards evening. But only because his strength was lessening; not because the passages of his lungs were clearer. He lay there, his eyes closed, his cheeks flushed, his forehead damp, his chest rising and falling in short, quick gasps that gave the impression that he was gathering his strength for one sudden effort, one desperate heave to fill his lungs with the air that was being pressed inexorably from them. The doctor stood pensively by his side.