Chapter VII

At the table in the alcove at Miss Mowbray’s, Antoinette sat with Barnaby a few weeks later. He had let her know that he had heard from Dennis, and would pass on the news if she cared to meet him at the usual haunt.

“He’s doing hard labour now, breaking stones in a quarry, but he says even that’s a relief after solitary confinement. They put them into that at first, as if they were wild animals that had to be tamed.”

“Does he—say anything else?” she asked tentatively, hoping that Dennis might have sent her some word or message.

Barnaby shook his head. “No, he doesn’t say much, except that his hands will never be fit to play the piano again, and that one of the greatest torments is not being able to write down his music. You know what he was like over that—directly he’d got an idea, down it had to go, or he was afraid of losing it. He must be losing a good many now. Rather a waste.” He pulled at his pipe, and continued more vehemently: “The silly waste of it all.... That boy Alan—hot-headed young devil he was, but he had the right stuff in him, and the personality and the understanding to make him a good leader of the people. Only instead of utilising his brains they have to let them rot!”

Antoinette sighed. “The utter futility of hoping that anyone from the other side will ever see our point of view.... When I was in the country with Dennis’s people, I did try to make them see, but I couldn’t budge one of them; not an inch. And then his little sister’s _fiancé_ was killed at the Front—gassed—such a good-looking, golden-haired boy—and it was too ghastly ... and suddenly I felt—I mean, I understood how they might feel towards pacifists. They don’t seem to realise that going to prison isn’t fun.... ‘Prison’s safe,’ that’s their argument. Or ‘What are their sufferings compared with what the men in the trenches have to go through?’ They almost made one feel—as if one hadn’t the right....”

Barnaby broke in: “It’s not a case of measuring the sufferings of the men in the trenches with those of the men in prison. No one can be childish enough to pretend that shrapnel-wounds and poison-gas aren’t a hundred times worse than whatever the conscientious objectors may have to endure in prison. The point is, that men who genuinely objected to take part in warfare, because they could see no possible good that would result therefrom; men who refused to shelter themselves by enabling others to go in their place, and who exposed themselves to ridicule and vilification, loss of friends and loss of financial position, rather than be faithless to their principles, should be flung into prison, and in some cases treated worse than ordinary criminals. This, mark you, in spite of the assertion that they would be given a fair hearing! The Government regretted that clause relating to the conscience-men in the Military Service Act, as soon as it was out. They realised the folly of giving a loophole of escape to any man, when the need of cannon-fodder was so great. So the whole business became a mockery—mock trials at which the men, having been invited to state their views, stood condemned before their cases were heard. How many of them were given the total exemption to which they had the right, according to the clause? And England is said to be fighting to uphold justice...! Look at the uproar created by the so-called murder of Edith Cavell: the woman was a spy, and they were strictly within their military rights to shoot her. But it doesn’t seem to strike people that shutting up some of these C.O.s in prison is deliberate, wilful murder of brains that were fine, sensitive instruments which might have brought some lasting beauty, some lasting wonder into the world. These men might be rendering far greater service to their country by following their natural bent than by doing navvies’ work or performing silly brutalising tasks in prison.

“Of course the press is eager enough to make the public believe that prison is a sort of slacker’s paradise, where they have quite a delightful time of it.... We know differently. Alan’s isn’t the only case of systematic brutality wreaked upon a defenceless victim. Only that kind of thing is carefully kept out of the papers. However magnificently England may think to figure in the world’s history after the war, the gross stupidity and cruelty of the way she has treated the genuine pacifists should stand as an eternal blot upon her honour.”

Antoinette did not interrupt him. She sat watching the bodiless legs that passed and passed in front of the blurred window, remembering the many different moods in which she had watched them. The tea-room was empty, save for the ghosts that sat grouped at the tables; almost she could have expected them to take part in the conversation.... Dennis; Alan; Everard, with his languid drawl; Crispin’s stammer; O’Farrell’s Irish phrasing; the whole chorus of familiar voices. But the chorus was silent now.

“And the war goes on, and day by day the torture of those at the Front and those in the prisons goes on; and the schoolboys, the striplings of sixteen and seventeen, are growing up to face the choice of the two alternatives—children cherished and carefully reared, so that when they are still little more than children they may be ready for this....”

“Oh, I know, I know,” cried Antoinette, “there was poor little Oswald.... He talked to me once in a queer burst of confidence, and he said almost the same thing: ‘It’s waiting for you now, when you’re eighteen....’ And I’m glad he’s dead,” she passed her hand over her eyes, as if to shut out some horror. “He took the cowards’ way out, if you like, but I’d rather know him dead than think of him like the others, going on, and on....”

Suddenly the door to the street was opened and banged. Footsteps came pelting down the crooked stairs, and Benny Joseph hurled himself into the tea-room.

“I’ve been turned down!” he cried incoherently, “turned down by the doctor after I was arrested. I’m a free man, Barnaby, do you hear? Totally exempt.... And I’ve got a part—this is my lucky day—I just walked into it—I’m going on tour in musical comedy for eighteen weeks!”

Benny was radiant and breathless, but he spoke to an audience of ghosts; ghost of Everard, long dead on the field in Flanders; ghost of Harry Hope, drilling drearily on Salisbury Plain; ghosts of the many professionals of all grades who had once frequented Miss Mowbray’s, and been gradually sucked into the army, and who would have overwhelmed him with a flood of questions. Which towns was he doing? Who was in the company? Did he want addresses of rooms?

“I’m so awfully glad, Benny ...” Antoinette said warmly; she could not bear that he should shout his joyful tidings into unresponsive space; “do let me know if you’re anywhere near London; I’d love to see you in your show.”

“Thanks ever so much. Yes, I’ll let you know. I say, I wish the others could have been as lucky.... Well, I must be off now—millions of things to do—letters to write—we start rehearsing next week. Lord, it’s a queer sensation not to have it hanging over you any more.... And when the war’s over, I’ll be able to go to Vienna and Paris and Berlin and Budapest again, without feeling I’ve helped to muck up any of the countries I’m staying in. I _must_ be off. Good-bye....”

He was gone.

Barnaby smiled. “So Benny’s aunts in the various parts of Europe will at least be safe from Benny’s ridiculously inadequate shooting.”

But Antoinette was not thinking of Benny’s aunts: she was thinking of the girl whose existence she had once heard rumoured—the little Jewish girl, somewhere in Hampstead, to whom he would ultimately turn. Antoinette envied that girl the moment when she heard Benny’s news.

“So they’ve all found their destiny,” mused Barnaby; then he bent his shaggy brows to a kindlier scrutiny of Antoinette herself. “And what about you...?”

She did not answer. Her thoughts were with the couples, the many couples who had the right to each other: Lily, who had the right to cherish her battered, broken Clive; Doreen, who through all her pain, still had the right to cling to her memory of Hugh; Millie, who could actually cling to Griggs; Pegeen, who had probably died at her man’s side; little Mrs. Mansfield, staunchly awaiting her husband’s release from prison; even the pasty-faced girl in the train ... her man would write her illiterate love-letters from the Front, for a little while, perhaps....

And all these women had the right to stand by their men, in prison or at the Front; in the cause of rebellion or in the cause of stamping out rebellion; wounded or even after death, they had this right because their men loved or had loved them.

Doreen, by virtue of being on the popular, the militarist side, had had the right to an official joy and an official sorrow; to official congratulation and official condolence. Antoinette’s joy and sorrow had alike been “unofficial.” Not that she minded being on the unpopular side. She could have enjoyed being an Ishmaelite outside the gates of Eastwold, enjoyed the rebel-sense of her unofficial right to stand by him, if only he had loved her. But—by his lack of love, he debarred her from this right, just as she had been debarred from official congratulation and condolence. She was an outcast in a double sense; an Ishmaelite twice over.

“Well?” said Barnaby.

“I? Oh, I don’t know where I come in. I think I don’t come in at all....”

He nodded. “I understand. May I say I’m sorry for you? You know I don’t mean it as an insult.... What is to become of you, though?”

She smiled wearily. “I suppose I too—just go on....”

“Yes. I’m afraid you’re the symbol of what has to be sacrificed to the love between man and man.”

“He couldn’t have done otherwise”—loyally she was prepared to defend Dennis against anything that even his friend might have to say about him. “He was made like that, and he made things more difficult for himself by bottling up all his thoughts and feelings, and being terribly afraid of them, and never telling anyone about them—till he told me.”

“He never told me,” said Barnaby, “at least not in so many words. But I could see for myself. He’s got a queer strain of the maternal in him. It’s obvious in the way he looks upon his work, and in the way he looks upon that boy.... It’s a woman’s passion as well as a man’s that he feels for Alan; virile and yet tender; stronger even than death or madness; a wonderful motive-force that might accomplish much ... only the world would condemn it as an evil, vicious growth that should be stamped out! We want more light, more breathing-space, more tolerance and understanding: not this narrow-minded wholesale condemnation and covering-up; this instinctive shuddering and turning away from a side of nature that, like every other side, has its right to a hearing, its right to open discussion.”

“Everybody seems to imagine that you’re abnormal because you _like_ being abnormal,” Antoinette burst out, “just as they imagine that men go to prison because they like it better than going to the Front. As if being different from normal people weren’t curse enough in itself, without having them think it’s your own choice, and that you enjoy being different!”

“Of course there are those who enjoy it—who wallow in the perverted sensations of their abnormality, as normal sensualists wallow in their own ‘permissible’ lusts. And by these, the worst types—or perhaps the most to be pitied—the multitude judges them all, just as they judge the whole class of conscientious objectors by those actuated only by fear for their own skins. They don’t attempt to separate the grain from the chaff: the innocent have to suffer with the guilty.”

“It’s a pity no one thinks of saving the guilty for the sake of the innocent!” she cried.

“Christ thought of it, my dear girl, many long years ago; and look what a mess they’re making of His teachings now.... But perhaps these men who stand mid-way between the extremes of the two sexes are the advance-guard of a more enlightened civilisation. They’re despised and rejected of their fellow-men to-day. What they suffer in a world not yet ready to admit their right to existence, their right to love, no normal person can realise; but I believe that the time is not so far distant when we shall recognise in the best of our intermediate types the leaders and masters of the race.”

He paused, and went on: “They _do_ wander through dark ways at present, there’s no denying it; and some of them understand themselves and the eternal conflicts of their nature as little as others understand them. The normal person cries: ‘Don’t encourage them—stamp them out—imprison them—crush them——’ You can’t crush them; you can’t stamp them out; they’ve got to be reckoned with. From them a new humanity is being evolved, and in the process of evolution Nature produces all sorts of poor little deformities and abnormalities as samples. They’re necessary to the production of the higher type, though, the bad specimens put out from every factory or workshop. Bad specimens—and yet forerunners! For out of their suffering, out of pain and confusion and darkness, will arise something great—something God-given: the human soul complete in itself, perfectly balanced, not limited by the psychological bounds of one sex, but combining the power and the intellect of the one with the subtlety and intuition of the other; a dual nature, possessing the extended range, the attributes of both sides, and therefore loving and beloved of both alike.”

With brimming eyes she listened to him; and then she put the question that Mrs. Blackwood had so often put to her:

“Do you ... think Dennis will be all right?”

“I think he’ll keep his reason, if that’s what you mean, even if he’s never able to write a note of music again. But even so—one can’t say that it is all for nothing: those train-loads and boat-loads of cheery boys taken from the land, the workshops, the universities, who go out singing and joking to their death; who never did anything remarkable in their life before, and yet who do incredibly plucky things on the battlefield; the patient heroes on both sides who do their bit and much more than their bit, because it’s been instilled into their faithful hearts that it’s right that they should do it—it is for love of these, and to save these and such as these in the generations to come that Alan and Dennis and others like them are making their sacrifice! And then to label the lot of them cowards——” He broke off, and sat a while silently brooding. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well: people don’t think....”

THE END.

Transcriber’s Notes

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical and punctuation errors as well as variations in hyphenation were silently amended. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

[p. 59]:
... At least, so though Antoinette, who from childhood ...
... At least, so thought Antoinette, who from childhood ...

[p. 83]:
... I’d got to be musician, even if it did mean being ...
... I’d got to be a musician, even if it did mean being ...

[p. 116]:
... it’th nithe to thart booking up before the danthe ...
... it’th nithe to thtart booking up before the danthe ...

[p. 118]:
... be a drug upon the market,” exclaimed Griggs with ...
... be a drag upon the market,” exclaimed Griggs with ...

[p. 237]:
... she’s takes Belgium’s name in vain to hide her ...
... she takes Belgium’s name in vain to hide her ...

[p. 273]:
... “Letters has passed between them. Then the ...
... “Letters had passed between them. Then the ...

[p. 321]:
... him accordingly. Crispin led them cherish. It ...
... him accordingly. Crispin lets them cherish. It ...

[p. 339]:
... her so happy—I feel is if I’d lost a son, too.” She ...
... her so happy—I feel as if I’d lost a son, too.” She ...