Chapter IV

At last, thank goodness, he had found sufficient energy to break away from this deadlock, to end this weary game of pretence! He had thought that with Antoinette he could escape definitely from his abnormality; escape from his loneliness; from the ever-present terror of himself; from the nightmare of his own music; and his thoughts of Alan.... From all these things he had sought refuge in Antoinette’s arms; she would make him forget that they existed. And besides, Antoinette was of those who understood; he had not the slightest intention of deceiving her; some day they would talk everything out openly together.

But Antoinette had failed him; failed him in her moments of recoil, as she had failed him in her moments of insincere passion. He knew all along that her passion was insincere, and it frightened him. Was he, then, in truth so abnormal, so different from other men, that he was incapable of rousing real passion in a woman, real love? She did not love him; yet she would not let him go, even when he begged her to make her decision.

“We must go on, dear—or go back.”

“I can’t go on yet, and ... and I don’t want to go back. It’ll leave such a big hole in my world if you’re not there, Dennis.” ... Always appearing to give herself with one hand, and to withhold herself with the other.

He began more and more to doubt the possibility of her understanding, and to revise his previous judgment of her—judgment based upon some flimsy illusion created that night at Amberhurst. She was after all just an ordinary normal girl, who would turn from him in shuddering aversion, if she knew.... And she was rather immoral, he thought, in her simulation of passion that she did not feel; and endowed too, with the ordinary woman’s vanity, that could not bear to lose an admirer, and must keep him dangling, even though he meant nothing to her.

But it became more and more difficult to break as time went on; he knew that there would have to be scenes and explanations. And he dreaded the idea of explanations now.... Of mental kinship between them, there was no longer any trace; neither of the warm tenderness which he had felt for her at first. He shut his inner self away from her, and, when they met, since they could not talk—he kissed her. It was evidently what she wanted, now that she had overcome her first distaste, and what he—well, not what he wanted, but what for the moment, could in some small measure content him.

He was rapidly sinking back into the nightmare out of which he had hoped to rise; nightmare of loneliness and strangeness and being different.... And the old hunting-mood had him again, when for hours together he paced the streets, courting danger and the thrill of danger from a flung glance or smile or whispered word ... and with burning cheeks and beating heart, fleeing danger ... and courting it again.

And all Antoinette’s kisses could not content him now, even though she gave them so lavishly in response to the passion that was not for her, but only venting itself on her. That last day at Wargrave—surely some instinct must have told her? Was she so dense or so insatiable that she had really perceived nothing? She must have perceived nothing, or she could not for an instant have endured his kisses. More than time for them to break—so at last he had broken with her; and his letter would eliminate all possibility of a further compromise—of further drifting. He was not hurting her, at the most her vanity; and that did not matter. She would console herself easily enough; find some other man to fill his place.

And now he was free—for what, though? Free to take anybody, anything that could reach him through his charmed circle of isolation. For in this isolation of a soul terrified of itself, and doomed to eternal misunderstanding and misjudgment, lay the greatest temptation of all: the temptation to stretch out a hand to others like himself, and to own himself frankly to be one of them. It would be so much easier.... But his abhorrence of himself, and his honest desire to be as other men; above all, the æsthete in him insisted on a perpetual wearying struggle between his principles and instincts for the existence of which he was no more responsible than for the colour of his eyes. He had done his best to fight them down, only sometimes he was very tired, tired of having to keep this ceaseless watch over himself, tired of having to suppress and thwart desires that were natural to him, but would be classified as vicious and perverted by the world of ordinary people, lacking understanding of his peculiar temperament. Yet, even while he craved for understanding, he dreaded it: for this reason he had not been near Barnaby for weeks. He guessed that Barnaby’s attitude would not be one of conventional intolerance, and therefore deliberately avoided him. Once he allowed himself the luxury of confiding in someone, he could not tell what effect this greater freedom might have upon him. Fear, mingled with some strain of asceticism, made him deny himself that luxury, even as in his schooldays, it had prevented him from accepting Eric Rubenstein’s sympathy and friendship.

But London was too dangerous to him in his present condition. He almost welcomed a letter from his mother, asking him to come down to Eastwold. Hugh Clavering was expected home on leave, and his engagement to Doreen was to be made public. Dennis went; but Hugh’s leave was several times postponed, so that he did not actually arrive till after Christmas.

Dennis soon realised that the ladies of Eastwold were experiencing considerable difficulty in the matter of how to treat his mother. Of course if Mrs. Blackwood had only been _his_ mother, one could quite simply have cut her; but as she was also Clive’s mother and Hugh’s future mother-in-law, it complicated things. Clive was in the trenches and had been mentioned in dispatches.... But there was Dennis who steadily refused even to attest under the Derby scheme, and who thought that all war was wrong (which was ridiculous, at least as far as the British were concerned) and said so on every possible occasion.

Some of the ladies argued that one should condole with Mrs. Blackwood on the subject of Dennis, rather than reproach her; some thought that his disgraceful views more than outweighed Clive’s deeds of valour, so that they felt justified in cold-shouldering Mrs. Blackwood. But the majority contented themselves when they met her, with enquiring enthusiastically after each individual member of her family, and leaving a frigid gap in the conversation to mark the place where Dennis would have been enquired after, had he been worthy of such enquiries....

Lily Hallard, very military indeed in her V.A.D. uniform, openly confessed that she didn’t like the prospect of having a shirker for a brother-in-law; and in her loud-voiced aggressive manner tried to convert Dennis to a proper frame of mind.

“How you can bear to sit at home, while other men—while your own brother is in the trenches!”

“They’re doing what they think is right—or rather, they don’t think at all.”

“And you think it’s right to let others go out and be killed for you?”

“Killed for me.... Good Lord, do you think I _want_ them to go out into that infernal mess and muddle? I’d hold every one of them back with my own hands, if it were in my power!”

“You make me sick,” said Lily. “That’s not a man’s way of talking. Look at Tom Sanderson—he’s exchanged into an infantry regiment, because he says there’s nothing doing in the cavalry, and he’s so eager to get to the Front. That’s the proper spirit.”

“Not unless you can believe, with all your intellect and soul, that you’re doing some good by taking part in that wholesale butchery.”

“A fat lot most of our boys think of ‘intellect and soul.’ They just go and do their bit, and don’t talk about it.”

“If they did—if people talked and thought about it more, there might be some hope of ending the war altogether.”

“We don’t want the war ended that way!”

“No, you want it to be ended by fighting, rather than by thinking.... To hear you, one would positively imagine that you enjoyed the idea of the war going on and on.”

“It must go on till we win. Oh, if only I were a man! I’d give anything to lead a fine cavalry charge....”

Dennis did not doubt that she was quite competent to do so.

Altogether, he suffered no lack of attempts to convert him.

There was Griggs—Lance-corporal Griggs—who had not been out yet, but was dying to go, and expecting to do so next week, as he had been expecting every week since the outbreak of war.

“What—not yet in khaki, Dennis, old man? What’s all this about pacifism? Come, come, come, that’s nonsense—artistic temperament, that’s all. You’ll make as good a soldier as anyone, just the same. We’re all in this—don’t let anyone stand out. What I say is, rope ’em all in—rope ’em all in.”

Dennis was reminded of the day at Amberhurst, when Griggs with just as much fervour, had sought to induce him to play the piano during the theatricals. “Rope ’em all in—everybody’s got to do something....”

No one must stand out. No one must be an exception. Not even if they had no leanings towards the particular form of entertainment advocated by Griggs.

Even Doreen, gentlest of sisters, did her best with Dennis.

“Don’t you think you ought to go, Denny dear, now that everybody else has gone?”

“Do you imagine, Doreen darling, that I should have waited till now—waited till everybody else had gone—if I had intended to go at all?”

A letter from Ottilie had come through _via_ Switzerland, saying that “she herself with a hotly-beloved Bavarian officer on the West Front engaged had;” also that she hoped to see her dear friend Doreen again “as soon as the dreadful war over was.”

Dennis went on: “Surely you’d rather that your Hugh and Ottilie’s soldier-man didn’t have the chance of shooting each other to bits?”

“But the Army’s so big, Denny: they’re not likely to meet.”

“In all probability they won’t. But there are thousands of others in the same respective positions, facing each other in battle. Don’t you wish they weren’t?”

“Y-yes, of course I do, but ... everybody’s going, Denny.”

And then the Ryan girls.... Millie cut him dead when she met him in the town, but Amy, not prompt enough to achieve the cut direct, had begun to smile before she realised what she was doing ... tried to retrieve the smile, blushed, and finally stopped to say: “We all think it’th thuch a pity about you, Dennith. All really nithe men go and fight, don’t they?” Then, having said so much, she could not resist the temptation to continue: “I’m keeping up a Correthpondeth with _three_ Lonely Tholdierth—jutht ordinary Tommieth, of courthe, but being in khaki maketh all the differenth, doethn’t it? Ethpethially if you never thee them ...” with which somewhat ambiguous statement, she vanished.

The only one who made no assaults upon Dennis’s convictions, was young Hugh himself, very tanned and handsome, very much the hero of his native village, and the same unspoilt and charming boy he had always been.

“Doesn’t want to kill the Huns? Well, neither do we—part of the time. Some of them are awful decent little chaps, quite pally with our men. Still, I suppose it’s our job to do ’em in, if we can.”

The biggest discussion took place at the Blackwoods’ Sunday lunch party, the occasion on which the engagement was officially announced. Lily and her mother came, and Hugh and his parents, and Griggs, and the Ryans—poor Millie had to exchange a few civil words with Dennis after all, thus marring the effect of the previous cut.

The ladies had retired from the dinner-table; Hugh had vanished in Doreen’s wake; and Griggs, as a non-smoker, had been accorded the freedom of the drawing-room. Dennis was alone with his father, Mr. Ryan and Dr. Clavering. Griggs, on his exit, gazing after Hugh and Doreen, provided the old gentlemen with the necessary cue.

“There they go—the gallant and the fair! Doesn’t it make your heart envious to see them, Dennis? It’s the uniform that does it, my lad, the uniform....” He slapped his narrow chest, and went off, beaming.

“Yes, we believe you right enough,” grumbled Mr. Blackwood, “if I were a young man, I’d be ashamed to be seen about in anything but khaki.”

“They say conscription’s coming in,” Mr. Ryan wheezed hopefully.

“That’ll be the end of all our slackers and shirkers, and a good job too. What’ll you do then, my son?”

“Precisely what I’m doing now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Refuse to fight.”

“But you can’t,” cried Mr. Blackwood, “they’ll put you in prison, or shoot you as a deserter.”

“Let them.”

“You mean to tell me,” expostulated Mr. Ryan, “that you’re afraid to go out to the Front and die like a gentleman, and yet you’ve no objection to staying at home and being shot like a dog? It’s monstrous, sir, monstrous.”

“My objection to going to the Front isn’t entirely fear for my own skin, Mr. Ryan, though I know you’re convinced that that is my sole reason for staying behind. I don’t suppose I’m any more or less afraid of death than the average man of my age.”

“Prove it,” muttered his father, “prove it....”

“I daresay I shall prove it, when conscription comes in. I would rather be shot, as Mr. Ryan says, ‘like a dog,’ than submit to a law that orders me to murder men with whom I’ve no personal quarrel. And if I did have a quarrel with a man, I shouldn’t murder him.”

“There would be some cases in which it would be your duty to do so: what would you do if a German attacked your mother?”

Dennis smiled as Mr. Ryan put the inevitable question. “I could defend my mother by incapacitating him for the moment, without resorting to the extreme measure of taking his life.”

“Tommy-rot!” snorted Mr. Blackwood, “when a man’s blood is up, he kills.”

“Perhaps in the case of a personal quarrel. But you can’t say it’s his duty to kill when he has no quarrel at all.”

“It’s his duty to his country——” began Mr. Blackwood, and Mr. Ryan’s breathless voice broke in: “His country’s quarrel should be good enough for him.”

“But it’s not the quarrel of the whole of this country, any more than it’s the quarrel of the whole of Germany. Why not try and restrict the quarrel to those who made it, without dragging in millions of innocent people on either side ... people, some of whom don’t even know what the quarrel is about, and what they’re fighting for? German peasant boys taken straight from the plough—English lads raked out of remote sleepy villages: how much do you think they know?”

“There can be no doubt that every Englishman knows what he’s fighting for,” declared Mr. Blackwood.

“Yes, he’s told that he’s fighting for honour and glory and freedom, and to defend his home and country from a dastardly enemy. And the German boy is told exactly the same. And they both believe it, bless them. When they’re both out there, dying a foul death side by side, perhaps they may wonder if it was true, and if it was worth while, and why they let themselves be driven out to kill and kill and be killed by each other.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Ryan testily, “we all know that war is very dreadful——”

“Yet you won’t even attempt to stop it!” cried Dennis. “You encourage it to go on. It’s like a fire that instead of confining to the smallest area possible, you’re fanning and fanning till it spreads from one end of the country to the other, and flinging on more material every day to feed it. Why in heaven’s name won’t you try to stamp out the blaze?”

“Yes, it’s all very well to talk like that,” said Mr. Blackwood, “but there always have been wars, and there always will be. Nations that have had no wars have become degenerate, and gone to the wall.”

“Oh, I can’t stick all this humbug about war being necessary, and war being good for us! How can people talk such stuff, if they have the slightest conception of what war really implies?”

“Well, you won’t alter human nature,” answered Mr. Blackwood, “man is a fighting animal, and for my part I should be very sorry to see the fighting instinct knocked out of him.”

“That’s setting yourself deliberately against all idea of progress, Father: because certain evils have existed up to the present, is that a reason to declare categorically that they are bound to exist in the future? Why not root them out? What is there to be proud of in the instinct that leads one man to kill another? Why deny all possibility of conquering an instinct that can only make for misery?”

He looked from one to the other of the two red-faced elderly gentlemen; his father angrily fingering the stem of his wine-glass; Mr. Ryan glowering at him through the heavy wreaths of his cigar-smoke. Only the doctor, on the opposite side of the table, gave the impression of an impartial spectator.

“I’ve no patience with all this rot!” cried Mr. Blackwood, “if a man’s got no fight in him, he’s unnatural, that’s what I say, unnatural.”

“You’ll allow a man to conquer nature with his ships and his railways—you’ll allow him to widen as much as possible the gulf that separates him from the beast; but when it comes to rooting out the war-instinct—_No!_ He can’t overcome that. Why should he? It’s always been there, always will be. In fact, you’re rather proud of it: it’s part of a gentleman’s equipment. You want progress and the conquest of natural difficulties in every possible direction, and yet you won’t admit that a man can conquer _himself_. You’re shouted down as ‘unnatural,’ if you as much as speak of overcoming an instinct that is nothing but a hindrance to civilisation and progress.”

“Oh, you and your artist friends, I daresay you talk a lot of twaddle, but you won’t convince _me_.” Mr. Blackwood drained his glass of port, and rose from the table. Mr. Ryan followed him. Dr. Clavering remained where he was.

Dennis smiled at him across the table. “Well, Doctor, you’ve been very silent all through this.”

“I was umpiring.”

“They were two to one.”

“Oh, you were quite capable of holding your own. But you’ll never convince them, Dennis, my boy.”

“And you, Doctor?”

“I don’t say that you’ve convinced me, but I can understand why, as an artist, you take that point of view.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to have excuses made for me on that ground,” cried Dennis, “nor am I pretending for a moment that Clive and Hugh and others like them, can go out and kill, because they’re more brutalised than I am. It’s their belief that I’m up against—their belief that they’re doing right.”

“Dennis, Dennis, you’re fighting a losing battle! It’s too late for pacifism now. The war’s started and the only thing for us to do is to make every effort in our power to end the unfortunate business; and that can only be done by fighting to a finish.”

“And what then? Doctor, it’s no use pretending that ‘this is a war to end war.’ I don’t believe it. Do you believe that the British are fighting for disarmament, for democracy, for world-peace, any more than the Germans are? The governments of the big nations—not the mass-peoples, because they weren’t asked—but the governments of all big nations organise warfare with the same ends in view—extension of power; consolidation of empire; commercial and political advantages. If we go on fighting till Germany has to cry ‘Pax’ from exhaustion, it simply means that the balance of military power will be shifted, and that _we_, instead of the Germans, will be the war-lords of Europe. Do you call that a goal worth the sacrifice of one man’s life-blood—let alone of millions?”

“But that’s only a hypothesis, Dennis: you can’t be certain what will happen after the war. We must end it first and then see. And surely, on the strength of a mere hypothesis, you wouldn’t wish to see the Germans win?”

“Of course not. It’d be a tragedy for any one of the great powers to attain the complete military victory they’re each striving for.”

“But, my dear boy,” the doctor protested with some heat, “now that we—now that all the nations—have sacrificed so much, we can’t go back. Think of the utter futility of the whole thing ending in a draw!”

“I still maintain that that’s better than fighting till one side (whichever it is) is beaten to its knees, and the other in the position to dictate terms of bondage; and free to go on, through the years, preparing for wars more terrible even than this one.”

“Well: and if it’s a draw?”

“If the so-called fruits of victory are withheld from them all alike, there’s some chance that the people of each nation, seeing the true nature of the war-machine by which they’ve been driven, will clamour to have it broken up; will protest against the maintenance of great armies and navies for their mutual destruction. There’ll be some chance of an era of real peace—not the sham peace of the lull before the storm, which will exist if the powers can be definitely divided into conquerors and conquered, with the conquered merely biding their time to reverse those titles, and the conquerors ever on the watch to see that they shan’t do so. A lasting peace can never be achieved by war, because war only breeds war.”

Dr. Clavering smiled. “You’re a Utopian dreamer, Dennis, but I sincerely respect you, just as I respect my own boy, and all the other boys who do their bit in their particular way.” He added after a moment: “And I doubt if you’ll find your way easier than theirs....”

* * * * *

Later that afternoon, Dennis wandered out for a walk in the hills surrounding Eastwold, thus cheating Mrs. Ryan of the opportunity to draw him into a renewed discussion on militarism versus pacifism.

The first breath of Spring lay upon the land; just a breath, and no more. The woods were not even faintly misted over with the green of budding foliage, but stood out as massed shadows of purple and bronze against the pale sky. Except for the deeper colouring of the woods, it was entirely a day of half-tints; light fawn of the ploughed fields; light green of the pastures where the cattle grazed; tenderest blue of the sky. The hedges that separated the fields were lines of brown, curving rhythmically about the undulations of the hills. Scattered farms nestled in the hollows, and from them went up a medley of animal sounds; lowing of cattle; barking of dogs; bleating of lambs; sounds that were blended with the rapturous outpourings of larks, and the drowsy distant peal of church bells, rippling eight notes down the scale.

Dennis lay at full length on a ridge above a chalk-pit, and looked out at the hazy blue view, while the soft wind blew in his face, and flung up the good strong scent of freshly-ploughed earth and young grass. Railway-tracks gleamed in the sun; chalk-white roads wound their crazy way up and down the hilly country; and across fields to meet them, just as the brooks and rivulets, born of the winter’s heavy rains, meandered along to join the placid shining river that followed its leisurely course to the sea.

And Dennis thought of all the roads and railways that had been made throughout Europe to connect one country with another; of how these same roads and railways had been torn up or blocked and barred to form frontiers and sever the connection between one country and another. And he thought of the rivers that flowed through one country and another; rivers, some of which ran red now with the mingled blood of nations locked in this death-grapple of hatred and lust and vengeance—nations each and all inspired by the thought that they were fighting in self-defence for justice, for glory, for their honour, for their fatherland, for their God ... each and all fighting blindly against each other for the same abstract principles.

And the rivers flowed on, imperturbable; calm; oblivious of all artificial frontiers; oblivious if it was French or German or British or Austrian blood that reddened them.

If there remained enough sane people in this world gone hideously mad, could they not put an end to it all? Could they not open the eyes of those blindly fighting—of those in government who organised and were responsible for the fighting? Surely it must be the aim of every rational human being to stop the war: not to secure the victory of this nation or that, but to lay the foundations of a lasting peace for all humanity? But people holding such views were looked upon as cowards, shirkers, traitors. And if they stood rigidly by their views, allowing themselves to be deviated neither by scorn nor insults; allowing themselves to be persuaded into no weak compromise or half-measures, they would in all probability be shot or put in prison.

It must come to that for him too. For months, the Harmsworth press had been agitating for conscription; the Bill would be passed that _ordered_ every man to go out and shed the blood of his fellow-men. And then....

If only sufficient people had the courage to fight against the war, then might the other countries of Europe lie as peacefully as this spread, misty landscape at his feet. The roads and the railways might link them together again; the barriers of racial hatred and racial envy be swept away; art and civilisation arise once more in place of murder and barbarity.

Already, as was usual with him, thought was translating itself into sound, into music that was no longer morbid as a nightmare, but strong, triumphant, a pæan of peace—the peace of all nations. Into it would be blended the characteristics of each; the steadfastness of the English and the indomitable fire of the French; the depth and the innate good-heartedness of the German people; and the easy tears and laughter of the Austrians; the Italians’ hot-blooded rhetorical love of their country, and the incurable melancholy of the Irish, the Russians and the Poles.

The voice of each he would transfuse into his music. He would make himself the medium through which their individuality, their thoughts, their dreams, their yearnings should be expressed. His brain teemed with the new bold harmonies into which they would be orchestrated. This symphony of his should be as international as art itself; as international as the heart of the man who, seeing beyond hedges and frontiers and class-distinctions, claims the whole world as his “country,” and claims kinship with all people who walk upon the face of it.

He got up and wandered back into the straggling little town. A new recruiting-poster on one of the hoardings caught his eye: a pink-kneed Highlander with arm outflung against a highly-coloured patchwork of field and hedge, demanding: “Isn’t this worth fighting for?”

Dennis smiled as he answered the question: “It’s worth more than that; it’s worth—_not_ fighting for!”