Chapter I

Anthony Arden closed his eyes; he was trying to let the unutterable misery of two years slip from him. It was over; it was all over, as over as an extracted tooth, but he could not yet feel relief or exultation. These feelings must come later, when he saw England. When he closed his eyes he escaped seeing the very fat, red neck, passing without gradation into the round-shaped head of his German guard.

In two hours he would be over the frontier into Holland and have no guard. He kept saying to himself, “Free! free! free!” The word sounded perfectly meaningless. Fears assailed him; he was quite used to fears, ordinary fears about food, vermin, a bullying sergeant, or the collapse of a fellow-prisoner. These were reasonable fears; the new kind were not. They were too much like hopes; they were really terrible.

He had never been one of the men who collapsed; but he knew all about collapses. He had fought them as St. Paul fought with the beasts at Ephesus.

He knew their beginnings, the ominous vacillations of the will, when a man could wait for a quarter of an hour before deciding which foot to put his boot on. This would be the prelude to a fearful lethargy. Anthony had watched the restlessness of the driven body before the mind suddenly ceased to drive it; the rush and flutter of the helpless thoughts till the interludes came; the blank spaces when the thoughts subsided, and the thinker, exhausted, overwrought, and trembling, would appeal to him for drugs. Bromide was useful if there was any tiding over to be done, but too often it edged stupor with despair, and one could seldom tide over the illimitable seas of prolonged imprisonment.

Anthony was a wonderful hand at keeping people up. Even the Germans appreciated his power, and as they had by that time learned to prefer sane prisoners to mad ones, they gave him all the drugs he asked for and freedom to apply what other methods occurred to him.

Anthony had entered the war as one of the fighting forces; but in another life, a strange, safe, horizonless, dignified world, where men thought and acted without compulsion and knew next to nothing of fear, he had been a rising young surgeon with an unshakable nerve. He was the type of man who always rises; he could absorb himself in his aims and control his desires and yet escape the tyranny of self.

The universe was his center; he was not the center of the universe. He had no use for emotions and was not easily put out. He loved his home and went there very seldom. He disagreed with his father whenever they met, and wrote to his mother regularly once a week, on half-sheets of paper, without telling her anything.

Daphne, his favorite sister, infuriated and delighted him; he disapproved of everything she did, and generally found himself helping her to do it. His eldest brother Tom, he never wrote to, seldom saw, and loved ineradicably. Anthony would not have called it “love,” neither would Tom; but neither would have hesitated an instant to die for the other. Tom had been killed. There was a third brother, Henry, cleverer than Tom, who fortunately had varicose veins. Owing to this he knew nothing about the war except what he was told and what he had gathered from the newspapers. He had a flat in London. Anthony was going there now.

London! He didn’t really believe in it; that was why he shut his eyes to see it better. While he was a prisoner he had never dared to make pictures he could see; that was one of the ways in which men collapsed. They got to seeing things; quite sensible things at first, things that were there. Then they started seeing things that were not. It was always better to keep one’s eyes fixed on little, every-day facts.

Anthony knew that London was safe. Zeppelins had done their best, aëroplanes had touched London as a boy’s catapult drops pebbles into a field. You had to hunt to find the pebbles; the field remained placidly unshaken.

Daphne always slipped into her letters, “Funny old London is just the same.” It was one of the faults he used to find with Daphne that she overlooked the essential, but he had not known how realistic it made letters. All his people had been wonderful about writing; they had arranged it among themselves so that somebody, even if it was only an aunt, wrote to him every day in the week. And they had thought of everything in the way of parcels.

There had been six months’ hell first. Hell is a place where you are forgotten by all you love and remembered by all you hate. Fortunately, this was at the beginning, when Anthony had his self-control intact, except for the first forty-eight hours. Anthony hadn’t been self-controlled then, but he had not expected to have his broken leg kicked. It had startled him very much. He had resented it, and they had hurt him. They had hurt him so that when he remembered it he began to tremble all over and to feel like ice. It wasn’t the actual physical pain alone; it was the cruelty and the surprise. It was such a strange feeling, to be quite powerless and hated, especially when one had lived a particularly normal and kindly life and never known anything about hate.

Hate is such a funny, medieval little word, like devil or hell; it means nothing till one has tried it. When Anthony was a young man and knew everything, and had learned nothing, he had laughed at these little medieval words. He had called them, rather proudly, to his mother, “theological nursery toys,” and she had said, “I wonder.” But he wouldn’t have believed then that men could cry like children, or stop crying and go to pieces—utterly to little pieces before other men’s eyes. He hadn’t supposed, either, that other men could laugh at them or have such cruel eyes.

It had shot through him once or twice, during those first six months, that he had believed, actually believed, that people always behaved like human beings. He might just as well have swallowed the old story of Jonah and the whale. It was much better afterward. He himself had helped to make it better; he hadn’t realized his own struggles. It just seemed very gradually to have got bearable; and when it was bearable, he had discovered that he was old.

All the top of his short, tight curls were gray, he could walk straight with a very slight limp, and hold his head up; but his keen, gray eyes were not as steady as they used to be, and if any one spoke loudly, he jumped, or if they moved near him quickly, he flinched like a beaten dog. Yes, he knew all about hate, and when the letters and the parcels broke through, and he found the other world still existed and he was remembered, passionately remembered and loved, just as if he were alive, he learned something about love.

His mother ceased to be a not very clear-thinking, extremely old-fashioned, middle-aged lady who had lived in the country all her life, and who would keep asking him to go to church; she became instead a steady hand to hold on to in a darkened room.

And as for Daphne, incapable, inconsequent, and most flirtatious Daphne, who forgot everything and never answered any one, and was always doing what she had much better not, and suggesting you should bear the consequences of it because you were so sensible, he couldn’t have told any one what Daphne meant to him. She never forgot a post, and knew mysteriously the very moods in which he would meet her letters, and she would go on being just what she always was, only regularly. Her very voice reached him, like a lark singing under his window at dawn. It was her letter he got first about Tom; he always saw it in her words, but as if she had first put her own heart between him and the blow.

It was incredible to him that he could once have thought it a bore to go down to Pannell for week-ends. The whole of his body and all his being ached for home. Every night for a few minutes before he slept, if sleep were possible, he had allowed himself to think of Pannell. First, the railway station “Boscott,” with its blue lobelias picked out with white chalk stones by Tuppins, the station-master. Then Daphne with her hair half down her back, because she’d driven the pony in by herself and it “hadn’t exactly” bolted; then, beyond Daphne’s hair and eyes, the line of the downs, sometimes swathed in milky mists, and sometimes very firm and velvety under a fleet of flying clouds. Boscott was a small village with yellow barns dropped in a hollow.

Pannell Manor was in Pannell woods. There was an open space for it, and the downs rose up in front of it. The church had been built at its gate, on a lawn with flitting shadows of deer. The deer slipped delicately in and out of patches of bracken. A wall separated them from the smooth green terrace in front of the house, but you could always look over it toward the downs, and watch the deer steal between the trees.

Pannell was an Elizabethan house, and the front of it was a mass of tall, thin windows shining out of old gray and yellow stone. It had suited Tom to perfection. It made Anthony sick to remember how it had suited Tom. It would be Anthony’s now, and he wasn’t a landowning type; he would simply have to do what he could with it in the intervals of his profession. Unfortunately, Pannell wasn’t a place with which to do things at intervals. It wanted the steady landlore of a practical, unimaginative Sussex man. It wanted Tom. It had always belonged to people like Tom; slow, patient, good-natured people who knew how to leave things alone and never hurried anything except a fox. The land would have to miss them for a generation now, because most of them were dead.

* * * * *

They were at the frontier at last. Anthony got out on to the platform with several other men. They all looked dazed and a little uncomfortable, and tried to pretend that they knew how to move about on platforms and get freely, without shouted directions, into trains. Fortunately, the Dutch guards helped them.

They had very little to say to one another. They lit cigarettes with shaking hands and grinned nervously when they met one another’s eyes. Of course they were enjoying themselves awfully and weren’t afraid of an accident on the train or the boat going down or suddenly finding they were dying of some acute disease, and couldn’t get home first. It was absurd to suppose that they could have such fears, for they were all quite ordinary young Englishmen who had been in German prisons only a few years. They were perfectly all right, really; they had made a point of saying this in all their letters home.

Anthony knew exactly how they felt. He advised them to get a drink, but they were all too afraid of missing their connection, which couldn’t start for half an hour. Anthony forced himself to go into the waiting-room and order a drink. He was very proud of still being able to make himself do things, and a little self-conscious about it. He had forgotten the time when he wasn’t self-conscious and never had to make himself do perfectly obvious things.

They took the journey through Holland by moonlight. The country stretched out in a sheet of silver; water and land melted together into a delicate mist. The windmills moved across it like the black wings of strange, inanimate birds. There were no walls and no barbed wire; just wide-open spaces, with a low, broad sky above them.

They got on to the boat at midnight, and some one said it was England already, for boats were always England. There were a few wives who had not been able to wait for their husbands to reach England. They met them shyly and without words; and afterward, Anthony noticed, even though they were together, they still had a look of stubborn longing in their eyes.

Anthony was not going to be met at all; he had arranged everything with Henry. He would go to Henry’s rooms for a night and just hear how everything was and be told about Tom; that would make things easier for his mother. He would go down to Pannell next day; he had particularly said he didn’t want Daphne to come up. He wanted to get into things gradually.

There could be no possible danger of the boat sinking; he told several fellows who asked him that all the accursed mines were swept away, the seas were free. They were English and they were free. Of course he didn’t say this, nor did the other men; they merely felt it moving stubbornly in their hearts without words.

Anthony fully intended to go to sleep. He had wired for a berth, and the other men were quiet as mice; but he was under the impression that none of them slept; they were all quite ready to run up on deck if by any chance one of the mines had been overlooked. His idea had been to get up very early and watch the cliffs creep close across the sea. He remembered a poem of Macaulay’s which he had learned as a boy—it was called “The Jacobite’s Epitaph” and was a short reticent poem, with a line in it which had always haunted him,—

By those white cliffs I never more may see—

Well, he wanted to see them; but when the boat arrived, England was lost in a blur of rain. He saw nothing but a solid wall of grayness rising up in front of him. The other men were on deck very early, too; apparently the same idea had occurred to them, but none of them said anything about Macaulay’s poetry.

It took an eternity to get alongside the wharf, and lots of accidents might have happened. Nobody spoke except the youngest of them, who had been in prison only a few months, and he remembered that it would be jolly to get a good hot cup of tea, and wondered if they still made dear old moldy buns.

There was no cheering to greet them, because they were not the first boat-load of prisoners to reach England, and it was particularly early in the morning. But there were two trains waiting, small, comfortable English trains that ran on velvet lines through an endless expanse of wet, green fields.

Two hours later the London Terminus closed on them like a large black shell. Nobody took any notice of them; they weren’t, of course, any different from anybody else, except that they weren’t quite so smart at picking up a taxi as people who haven’t been in German prisons. They let opportunities slip.

Anthony was one of the first to get one. He shook hands with several of the fellows who hadn’t been specially met, and gave a lift to a particularly bewildered looking boy who had forgotten where he lived for the moment, but thought they’d remember it for him at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. He was very proud because, although he had forgotten his address, he could remember his own name perfectly.

Anthony wanted to explain to the boy that they had got back into a world where people were in the habit of remembering their own names, and that they must try to appear as much like ordinary people as possible. But when Anthony began to explain, he was brought up short, because he realized that he himself couldn’t quite remember how ordinary people behaved.

Just as the quick, organized traffic in the streets was a dangerous blur to his unaccustomed eyes, so were those old unconscious ways of normal people a strange, a perilous blur to his insecure and unaccustomed senses.

Fortunately, some one at the club did remember the boy’s address, but there was no one who could fill in the curious unexpected gaps in Anthony’s hidden mind.