The Charioteer (11 page)

The flowers had been arranged in jam-pots, the cakes and sweets crammed into lockers, the locker-tops wiped over; the disorderly invasion of the visitors left no material trace. The evening dressings had started; but Laurie’s was done only in the morning now; it was nearly healed. The A.P.C. had helped the pain. If he changed the stick for the crutch, which they had left with him for a few days longer, he could escape for a little while. He even knew of somewhere to go.

Once out of the gate, he turned off the main road into a lane. A short way down was a rose hedge, with a little white gate. Inside the gate was an old brick path, bordered with lavender. A few late bush roses, yellow and red, were crisped with frost at the tips; but they looked rich, and faintly translucent, in the pale-gold light of the September sun. As Laurie approached the green latticed porch of the cottage, the door opened, and a little birdlike old woman peered out. She had on a brown stuff dress with a high lace neckband in the fashion of thirty years before; her wide black straw hat was trimmed with cherries made of glazed papier mâché. Laurie said, “Good evening, Mrs. Chivers.”

“Evening, sonny. I always know
your
step. Have you come to sit in the garden, then?”

“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“All of our boys are welcome any time. That’s what I told the officer, right at the beginning.” Laurie had never been able to identify the officer, and was even doubtful about the war. “There’s one or two nice Victorias ripe on the trees. You know the eating apples. Don’t you go taking the cookers, now, they’ll gripe you.”

“No, I won’t. Thanks so much.”

“You eat all you can pick, sonny. Fruit’s good for the blood. Back in the trenches, you won’t get it fresh, I know that. If the good Lord had meant us to take our food out of tins, that’s how we’d find it growing. The Creator knows best. Wait a minute.”

She popped back into the shadowy parlor, like a bird into a nesting-box, the cherries on her hat clicking dryly together. “Here you are, sonny,” she said returning. “And when you’ve read it, pass it on to one of the other lads.”

He thanked her, and took the tract. He had had this one before, though she had several varieties. They were all of a lurid evangelical kind, trumpeting Doomsday and exhorting him to wash his sins in blood. Laurie had seen, felt, and smelt enough blood to last him some time, but the paper and print had a fragrance of age about them. He was the richer for her zeal; it had caused his comrades to shun the old lady, as in the fourteenth century they might have shunned the local witch. No one came but Laurie, and it was his only sanctuary. He always missed it badly over operation times. Mrs. Chivers, however, had never noticed his absences.

The orchard ran beside the house, and continued behind it. He paused to knock down an apple with his crutch from his favorite tree, and picked his way carefully through the long pale grass, in which early windfalls were already treacherous to the foot.

Beyond the oldest of the apple trees, too gnarled to bear, the bank grew lush; the stream ran over a gravelly shallow, then tinkled down a foot-deep fall of stone. On the far side of the stream was a row of beeches. Already the breeze, passing under them, raised a whisper from the first crispings of the autumn fall.

Laurie lowered himself down gingerly by a branch. There would be sun, still, for the best part of an hour. He loosened his battle-blouse and felt the gentle warmth on his face and throat. The jagging of worry was smoothed in him; his unhappiness became dark and still. Tomorrow and next week kept their distance, dimmed by the huge presence of time, love, and death. He felt that kind of false resignation which can deceive us when we contemplate trouble at a moment of not actually experiencing it. This tranquil solitude seemed to him like loneliness made reconcilable by an act of will.

A foot rustled in the beech-mast across the stream. He didn’t want his peace disturbed; he sank deeper in the grass and pretended to doze. A voice said, “Why, Laurie. Hello.”

Laurie said, “Hello. Come over and talk to me.” He felt, evident as the sunlight, a great shining inevitability, and the certainty that something so necessary must be right.

Andrew took off his socks and shoes, and paddled across. Sitting beside Laurie, he worked his bare feet into the grass, to get off the mud. Now he was here, Laurie could think of nothing to say. Andrew on the other hand seemed to have gained assurance. As he stretched against the grass, his eyes, narrowed against the bright sky, reflecting its light clear blue, he looked at home in the place, freer, more sharply defined. “You
have
found yourself a private Eden, haven’t you?”

“It isn’t private,” Laurie said. “Everyone’s invited; but only the serpent comes.” He produced Mrs. Chivers’ tract.

Andrew rolled over on his elbows, skimmed the first page, and remarked, “I always think one of the world’s most awkward questions is ‘Are you saved?’ One’s more or less forced to sound either un-co-operative and defeatist, or complacent beyond belief.”

“I think I said one can only hope for the best; but she seemed to think it rather evasive.”

“Well, what else could one say? I should like to take my shirt off; would it upset her?”

He rolled it into a bundle and put it behind his head. His body was slim, but more solid and compact than one would have thought, and very brown, with the tan deepest across the backs of the arms and shoulders, as it is with laborers who bend to their work. His hands, which were structurally long and fine, were cracked and calloused, and etched with dirt which had gone in too deep to wash away.

Laurie, who had been some time silent, looked up from the tract he had seemed to be reading. “I suppose the polite comeback would be ‘No, but I should like you to save me.’ ” He flipped the paper over quickly. “Do you believe in hell?”

Andrew, who was holding a frond of fern against the sky, said, “Well, I should think your opinion would be the one worth having.”

At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense. But intensity can be a powerful solvent of thin and brittle protective surfaces, and at twenty-three one is well aware of this. Laurie looked around at the pale gentle sunshine, the ripe fruit mildly awaiting its passive destiny, sleeping around the life in the core.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’m just a do-it-yourself amateur. Boys! Get this smashing outfit and make your own hell. Complete with tools and easy instructions. Not a toy, but a real working model which will take in your friends and last for years. Or isn’t that what you meant?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. I’m taking advantage of you, you see, because you give me the chance. What’s the joke?”

“Nothing. It’s the sun in my eyes. Go on.”

“Oh, it’s just that you could tell me so much I ought to know; but I don’t know if you want to think about it any more.”

“No, it’s all right.” Laurie pulled a long tassel of field grass and slid the smooth seeds off the stem. “Carry on, what is it?”

“Well, for instance—when it started, did you have any doubt about what you’d do?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, of course, I thought the whole thing was a bloody muckup and ought to have been prevented. But then it just seemed something that had happened to one, like getting caught in the rain.” Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different. “Probably,” he said, striving for honesty, “I didn’t think too much in case it got awkward. I can’t remember now. Of course, one had other sorts of doubt. What would become of one, not just that sort of thing”—he jerked a quick thumb at the crutch half buried in the grass—“but what one would turn into, how one would make out. You know.”

“Yes, of course. Has it been like you thought?”

“No, not really. Months of boredom, followed by a sort of nightmare version of one of those ghastly picnics where all the arrangements break down. One thing, it shakes you out of that sort of basic snobbery which makes you proud of not being a snob. On the other hand it doesn’t alter your own tastes, I mean things like music, and however you look at it the people round you don’t share them, and when you feel less superior it seems you feel more lonely. Except in action, of course, which is what one’s there for but for me it didn’t last very long.”

“You’ve got a sense of proportion out of it, though you didn’t say that.”

“It’s a very limited one, I assure you.”

Suddenly Andrew sat up, and clasped his bare arms around his knees. His face had hardened with some inward resolution. He was looking straight before him; his profile, firm, intent, and for a moment absolutely still, had a clear austerity imposed on a latent sweetness, which seemed to Laurie unbearably beautiful. As he looked away Andrew turned around. “We can’t go on like this, can we?”

“Meaning?” said Laurie. His heart gave a racing start that almost choked him. The sky, the water, the fine leaves through which the late sun was shining, had the supernal brightness which precedes a miracle.

“You know what I mean. What about
your
question? Am I afraid to fight? After all, you’ve got a right to know.”

Laurie couldn’t speak for a few seconds. The lift and the drop had been too much. Then he remembered how silence might be taken. “Good God, what bull, I’ve never thought of it. Anyway, if you were you wouldn’t bring it up.”

“Why not? It would still be just as important. Actually, of course, the answer is I don’t know. It’s not a thing you can know in theory. I wish I did know for certain, naturally one would rather have it proved. But that only matters to me. I mean, the lightness of a thing isn’t determined by the amount of courage it takes. It must have taken a lot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, for instance.”

“Fair enough. I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.”

“Well, about six months before the war started I went off walking for a week to think about all this. It was rather a shock to the Friends that I could have doubts, but they were wonderful about it, especially Dave. I thought all around it. I thought there might conceivably even be some circumstances when I felt it was right to kill. If I knew whom I was killing and the circumstances and the nature of the responsibility. What I finally stuck at was surrendering my moral choice to men I’d never met, about whose moral standards I knew nothing whatever.”

“Yes, I know; but in Napoleon’s day if you wanted to cross the Channel in the middle of the war and talk sensibly to the enemy there was almost nothing to stop you. Even in 1914 they had the Christmas Truce and it very nearly worked. Nowadays we’re all sealed off in airtight cans and there’s nothing between war and surrender. You can’t convert a propaganda machine.”

“ ‘Machine’ is journalese.” Often in his concentration he made statements whose brusqueness he didn’t notice. “Inexact terms like that are part of the war psychosis. People are never machines, even when they want to be. You have to start somewhere.”

“Only an awful lot of innocent people are going to suffer meanwhile.”

“I know,” said Andrew. “That’s the whole crux, of course.” His blue eyes stared at the moving water. “One could say, which is true, that war’s such a boomerang it’s impossible to guarantee anyone’s protection in the long run. We went into this to protect Poland, and look what’s happening to the Poles now. But that would really be side-stepping the issue. It’s a very terrible responsibility, or it would be if one had to take it without help.”

“Whose help did you ask, then?” asked Laurie rather coldly. He had not been pleased by the introduction of Dave’s name a few minutes before, and jealousy made him stupid. Andrew’s meaning broke on him, devastatingly, a second too late.

“Sorry,” he said with difficulty. “I really am a clod. Have you been a Quaker—a Friend I mean—all your life?”

“I’m not a very good one; please don’t judge the Society by me.”

“Your people don’t belong, then?”

“No, they’ve always been soldiers.”

“God! This must have been difficult for you.”

“Not compared with a lot of others. I’ll tell you about my father sometime; but now I’d rather talk about you.”

Laurie sat for a few moments collecting his thoughts. Presently he said, “I never can put these things very well. But I suppose, though it sounds cockeyed, I don’t fancy the idea of a State where your lot would all be rotting in concentration camps. I know you’d be ready to go there and I suppose that ought to alter my feeling, but it doesn’t, so there you are.”

“It should,” said Andrew. His face had stiffened and the light in it was gone. Now he looked just a stubborn boy with good bones and a brown skin.

Laurie took the point. He saw how it is possible to idealize people for one’s own delight, while treading on their human weaknesses like dirt. “Look,” he said, “get this straight. I’m not trying to put you under an obligation to the army for defending you, I’m not so bloody unfair. You haven’t asked to be defended, you don’t want to be, and I suppose it makes me your enemy, in a way, as much as Hitler is. I’m only trying to explain how some of our lot think.”

“Nothing could make us enemies,” said Andrew in a rush. Laurie didn’t look around, in case his happiness showed in his eyes. Andrew said with sudden awkwardness, “I’m sorry to be so adolescent. It was what you thought, of course. Sometimes one can get one’s mind straight but one’s feelings take longer.”

“You’re telling me,” said Laurie smiling. But he mustn’t indulge this private humor, he thought, it was far too dangerous. He said briskly, “I thought you wanted to ask me about the army, or something.”

Andrew paused hesitantly, trailing a foot in the stream. Laurie watched with a moment’s sharp envy his relaxed body unconscious of its own ease. The knee had started a cramp, from the evening chill and lying in one position; he moved it stiffly and carefully when Andrew wasn’t looking. “I can guess what you want to ask anyway. Have I killed anyone and how did it feel? Well, my answer’s as good as yours. I don’t know. Any half of us will tell you the same. Our lot fired, and some of their lot died, that’s all. It encourages loose thinking, like you say. Funny thing, though, when you think, all those murder trials before the war, people coming for miles to stare at a man merely because he’d killed just one human being. And then overnight, snap, homicides are much commoner than bank clerks, they sit around in pubs talking boring shop about it. ‘Oh, by the way, Laurie, how many men have you killed, approximately?’ ‘Honestly, my dear, I was so rushed, you know, I couldn’t stop to look, a couple perhaps.’ Have an apple.”