Kitabı oku: «Up and Down», sayfa 14

FEBRUARY, 1917

Germany has proposed a toast. She drinks (Hoch!) to the freedom of the seas. And she couples with it the freedom (of herself) to torpedo from her submarines any vessel, neutral or belligerent, at sight, and without warning.

So now at last we know what the freedom of the seas means. The seas are to be free in precisely the sense that Belgium is free, and Germany is free to commit murder on them.

This declaration on the part of Germany was followed three days later by a declaration on the part of the United States. Diplomatic relations have been instantly severed, and President Wilson only waits for a "clear overt act" of hostility on the part of Germany to declare war.

America has declared her mind with regard to the freedom of the seas, and that abominable toast has led to the severance of diplomatic relations between her and Germany. Count Bernstorff has been dismissed, and in Berlin Mr. Gerard has asked for his passports. There is no possible shadow of doubt what that means, for we all remember August 4th, 1914, when we refused to discuss the over-running of Belgium by Germany. War followed instantly and automatically. "You shan't do that," was the equivalent of "If you do, we fight." It is precisely the same position between America and Germany now. Germany will torpedo neutrals at sight, just as Germany would overrun Belgium. The rest follows. Q.E.D.

But it is impossible to overstate the relief with which England has hailed this unmistakable word on the part of the United States. Many people have said: "What can America do if she does come in?" But that was not really the point. Of course she will do, as a matter of fact, a tremendous lot. She will finance our Allies; she is rich, beyond all dreams of financiers, with the profits she has reaped from the war, and the loans she will float will eclipse into shadow all that England has already done in that regard. "But what else?" ask the sceptics. "What of her army? She has no army." Nor for that matter had England when the war began. But even the sceptics cannot deny the immense value of her fleet. In the matter of torpedo-boats and of light craft generally, which we so sorely need for the hunting down of those great-hearted champions of the freedom of the seas, the German submarines, she can double our weapons, or, as the more enthusiastic say, she can more than double them. All the Government munition factories will be working like ours, day and night; she may even bring in conscription; she will devote to the cause of her Allies the million inventive brains with which she teems. This is just a little part of what America could have done, when first the Belgian Treaty was torn over, and it is just a little part of what America will do now.

But all that she can do, as I said, is beside the point. The point is, not what America can do, but what America is. Now she has shown what she is, a nation which will not suffer wrong and robbery and piracy. The disappointments of the past, with regard to her, are wiped off. She was remote from Europe, and remote from her was the wrong done to Belgium… There is no need now to recount the tale of outrages that did not exhaust her patience. She waited – wisely, we are willing to believe – until she was ready, until the President knew that he had the country behind him, and until some outrage of the laws of man and of God became intolerable. It has now become intolerable to her, and if she is willing to clasp the hands of those who once doubted her, and now see how wrong it was to doubt, a myriad of hands are here held out for her grasping.

The splendour of this, its late winter sunrise, has rendered quite colourless things that in time of peace would have filled the columns of every newspaper, and engrossed every thought of its readers. A plot, unequalled since the days of the Borgias, has come to light, the object of which was to kill the Prime Minister by means of poisoned arrows, or of poisoned thorns in the inside of the sole of his boot. Never was there so picturesque an abomination. The poison employed was to be that Indian secretion of deadly herbs called curare, a prick of which produces a fatal result. A party of desperate women, opposed to conscription, invoked the aid of a conscripted chemist, and Borgianism, full-fledged, flared to life again in the twentieth century, with a setting of Downing Street and the golf-links at Walton Heath. To the student of criminology the Crippen affair should have faded like the breath on a frosty morning, compared with the scheme of this staggering plot. But with this Western sunrise over America to occupy our public minds, no one (except, I suppose, the counsel in the case and the prisoners) gave two thoughts to this anachronistic episode. And there was the Victory War Loan and National Service as well.

But though the public mind of any individual can be satiated with sensation, my experience is that the private mind "carries on" much the same as usual. If the trump of the Last Judgment was to sound to-morrow morning, tearing us from our sleep, and summoning us out to Hyde Park or some other open space, I verily believe that we should all look up at the sky that was vanishing like a burning scroll, and consider the advisability of taking an umbrella, or of putting on a coat. Little things do not, in times of the greatest excitement, at all cease to concern us; the big thing absorbs a certain part of our faculties, and when it has annexed these, it cannot claim the dominion of little things as well. And for this reason, I suppose, I do not much attend to the Borgia plot, since my public sympathies are so inflamed with America; but when work is done (or shuffled somehow away, to be attended to to-morrow) I fly on the wings of the Tube to Regent's Park, and, once again, ridiculously concern myself with the marks that it is possible to make on ice with a pair of skates, used one at a time (unless you are so debased as to study grape-vines). There is a club which has its quarters in that park, which in summer is called the Toxophilite, and in winter "The Skating Club" ("The" as opposed to all other skating clubs), and to the ice provided there on the ground where in summer enthusiastic archers fit their winged arrows to yew-wood bows, we recapture the legitimate joys of winter. Admirals and Generals, individuals of private and public importance, all skulk up there with discreet black bags, which look as if they might hold dispatches, but really hold skates, and cast off Black Care, and cast themselves onto the ice. An unprecedented Three Weeks (quite as unprecedented as those of that amorous volume) have been vouchsafed us, and day after day, mindful of the fickleness of frost in our sub-tropical climate, we have compounded with our consciences, when they reminded us that it was time to go back to work, on the plea that skating was so scarce, and that in all probability the frost would be gone to-morrow. To snatch a pleasure that seldom comes within reach always gives a zest to the enjoyment of it, and we have snatched three weeks of this, under the perpetual stimulus of imagining that each day would be the last. Indeed, it has been a return to the Glacial Age, when we must suppose there was skating all the year round. Probably that was why there were no wars, as far as we can ascertain, in that pacific epoch of history. Everyone was so intent on skating and avoiding collisions with the mammoths (who must rather have spoiled the ice) that he couldn't find enough superfluous energy to quarrel with his fellows. You have to lash yourself up, and be lashed up in order to quarrel, and you are too busy for that when there is skating… Was it to the Glacial Age that the hymn referred, which to my childish ears ran like this:

 
That war shall be no more;
And lusto, pression, crime
Shall flee thy face before.
 

I never knew, nor cared to inquire, what "lusto" was, nor what "Thy face before" could mean. For faces usually were before, not behind.

While we have been enjoying these unusual rigours, Francis, "somewhere in Italy," at a place, as far as I can gather, which not so long ago used to be "somewhere in Austria," has not been enjoying the return of the Glacial Age at all. He has written, indeed, in a strain most unusual with him and as unlike as possible to his normal radiance of content. "On the calmer sort of day," he says, "the wind blows a hurricane, and on others two hurricanes. I can hear the wind whistling through my bones, whistling through them as it whistles through telegraph wires, and the cold eats them away, as when the frost gets into potatoes. Also, the work is duller than anything I have yet come across in this world, and I am doing nothing that the man in a gold-lace cap who stands about in the hall of an hotel and expects to be tipped because of his great glory, could not do quite as well as I. Besides, he would do it with much greater urbanity than I can scrape together, for it is hard to be urbane when you have an almost perpetual stomach-ache of the red-hot poker order. But in ten days now I go down to Rome, where I shall be for some weeks, and I shall sit in front of a fire or in the sun, if there is such a thing as the sun left in this ill-ordered universe, and see a doctor. I dislike the thought of that, because it always seems to me rather disgraceful to be ill. One wasn't intended to be ill… But I daresay the doctor will tell me that I'm not, and it will be quite worth while hearing that. Anyhow, I shall hope to get across to the beloved island for a few days, before I return to this tooth-chattering table-land. This is too grousy and grumbly a letter to send off just as it is. Anyhow, I will keep it till to-morrow to see if I can't find anything more cheerful to tell you."

But there was nothing added, and I must simply wait for further news from him. It is impossible not to feel rather anxious, for the whole tenor of his letter, from which this is but an extract, is strangely unlike the Francis who extracted gaiety out of Gallipoli. There is, however, this to be said, that he has practically never known pain, in his serene imperturbable health, which, though I am not a Christian Scientist, I believe is largely due to the joyful serenity of his spiritual health, and that probably pain is far more intolerable to him than it would be to most people who have the ordinary mortal's share of that uncomfortable visitor. But a "red-hot poker" pain perpetually there does not sound a reassuring account, and I confess that I wait for his next letter with anxiety.

The ruthless submarine campaign has begun, and there is no use in blinking the fact that at present it constitutes a serious menace. Owing to the criminal folly of the late Government, their obstinate refusal to take any steps whatever with regard to the future, their happy-go-lucky and imperfect provision just for the needs of the day, without any foresight as to what the future enterprise of the enemy might contrive, we are, as usual, attempting to counter a blow after it has been struck. Pessimism and optimism succeed each other in alternate waves, and at one time we remind ourselves that there is not more than six weeks' supply of food in the country, and at another compare the infinitesimally small proportion of the tonnage that is sunk per week with that which arrives safely at its destination. Wild rumours fly about (all based on the best authority) concerning the number of submarines which are hunting the seas, only to be met by others, equally well attested, which tell us how many of those will hunt the seas no more. There appear to be rows and rows of them in Portsmouth Harbour; they line the quays. And instantly you are told that at the present rate of sinking going on among our merchant navy, we shall arrive at the very last grain of corn about the middle of May. For myself, I choose to believe all the optimistic reports, and turn a deaf ear, like the adder, to anything that rings with a sinister sound. Whatever be the truth of all these contradictory and reliable facts, it is quite outside my power to help or hinder, beyond making sure that my household does not exceed the weekly allowance of bread and meat that the Food Controller tells me is sufficient. If we are all going to starve by the middle of May, well, there it is! Starvation, I fancy, is an uncomfortable sort of death, and I would much sooner not suffer it, but it is quite outside my power to avert it. Frankly, also, I do not believe it in the smallest degree. Pessimistic acquaintances prove down to the hilt that it will be so, and not knowing anything about the subject, I am absolutely unable to find the slightest flaw in their depressing conclusions. They seem to me based on sound premises, which are quite unshakeable, and to be logically arrived at. But if you ask whether I believe in the inevitable fate that is going to overtake us, why, I do not. It simply doesn't seem in the least likely.

In addition to this development of enemy submarine warfare (for our discomfort), there have been developments on the Western front (we hope for theirs). The English lines have pushed forward on both sides of the Ancre, to find that the Germans, anticipating the great spring offensive, which appears to be one of the few certain things in the unconjecturable unfolding of the war, have given ground without fighting. In consequence there has ensued a pause while our lines of communication have been brought up to the new front across the devastated and tortured terrain which for so many months has been torn up by the hail of exploding shells. And for that, as for everything else that happens, we find authoritative and contradictory reasons. Some say that the Germans could not hold it, and take this advance to be the first step in the great push which is to break and shatter them; others with long faces and longer tongues explain that this strategic retreat has checkmated our plans for the great push. But be this as it may (I verily believe that I am the only person in London who has not been taken into the confidence of our Army Council), all are agreed that the bell has sounded for the final round of the fight, except a few prudent folk who bid us prepare at once for the spring campaign of 1918 (though we are all going to be starved in 1917).

The frost came to an end, and a thaw more bitter and more congealing to the blood and the vital forces set in with cold and dispiriting airs from the South-East. For a week we paid in mud and darkness and fog for the days of exhilarating weather, and I suppose the Toxophilites took possession of the skating rink again. And then came one of those miracle days, that occasionally occur in February or March, a moulted feather from the breast of the bird of spring, circling high in the air before, with descending rustle of downward wings, it settled on the earth…

I had gone down into the country for a couple of nights, arriving at the house where I was to stay at the close of one of those chilly dim-lit February days, after a traverse of miry roads between sodden hedgerows off which the wind blew the drops of condensed mists that gathered there, and it seemed doubtful whether the moisture would not be turned to icicles before morning. I had a streaming cold, and it seemed quite in accordance with the existing "scheme of things entire" that the motor (open of course) should break down on the steep ascent, and demand half an hour's tinkering before it would move again. Eventually I arrived, only to find that my hostess had gone to bed that afternoon with influenza, having telegraphed too late to stop me, and that the two other guests were not coming till next day.

Now I am no foe, on principle, to a solitary evening. There is a great deal to be said for dining quite alone, with a book propped up against the candlestick, a rapid repast, some small necessary task (or more book) to while away an hour or two in a useful or pleasant manner, and the sense of virtue which accompanies an early retirement to bed. But all this has to be anticipated, if not arranged, and I found a very different programme. I dined in a stately manner, and dish after dish (anyone who dines alone never wants more than two things to eat) was presented to my notice. At the conclusion of this repast, which would have been quite delicious had there only been somebody to enjoy it with me, or even if all sense of taste had not been utterly obliterated by catarrh, I was conducted to the most palatial room that I know in any English house, and shut in with the evening paper, a roaring fire, half a dozen of the finest Reynolds and Romneys in the world sailing about and smiling on the walls, and the news that my hostess was far from well, but hoped I had everything I wanted. As a matter of fact I had nothing I wanted, because I wanted somebody to talk to, though I had the most sumptuous milieu of things that I didn't want. Reynolds and Romney and a grand piano and an array of books and a box of cigars were of no earthly use to me just then, because I wanted to be with something alive, and no achievement in mere material could take the place of a living thing. I would humbly have asked the footman who brought me my coffee-cup, or the butler who so generously filled it for me to stop and talk, or play cards, or do anything they enjoyed doing, if I had thought that there was the smallest chance of their consenting. But I saw from their set formal faces that they would only have thought me mad, and I supposed that the reputation for sanity should not be thrown away unless there was something to be gained from the hazard. And where was the use of going to bed at half-past nine?

The most hopeful object in the room was the fire, for it had some semblance of real life about it. True, it was only a make-believe: that roaring energy was really no more than a destructive process. But it glowed and coruscated; the light of its consuming logs leaped on the walls in jovial defiance of this sombre and solitary evening, it blazed forth a challenge against the depressing elements of wet and cold. It was elemental itself, and though it was destructive, it was yet the source of all life as well as its end. It warmed and comforted; to sit near its genial warmth was a make-believe of basking in the sun to those who had groped through an endless autumn and winter of dark days. The sunshine that had made the trees put forth the branches that were now burning on the hearth was stored in them, and was being released again in warmth and flame. It was but bottled sunshine, so to speak, but there was evidence in it that there once had been sunshine, and that encouraged the hope that one day there would be sunshine again.

Quite suddenly I became aware that some huge subtle change had taken place. It was not that my dinner and the fire had warmed and comforted me, but it came from outside. Something was happening there, though it never occurred to me to guess what it was. But I pushed back my chair from the imitation of summer that sparkled on the hearth, drew back the curtain from the window that opened on to the terrace, and stepped out. And then I knew what it was, for spring had come.

The rain had ceased, the clouds that had blanketed the sky two hours before had been pushed and packed away into a low bank in the West, and a crescent moon was swung high in the mid-heaven. And whether it was that by miraculous dispensation my cold, which for days had inhibited the powers of sense and taste, stood away from me for a moment, or whether certain smells are perceived, not by the clumsy superficial apparatus of material sense, but by some inward recognition, I drank in that odour which is among the most significant things that can be conveyed to the mortal sense, the smell of the damp fruitful earth touched once again with the eternal spell of life. You can often smell damp earth on summer mornings or after summer rain, when it is coupled with the odour of green leaves or flowers, or on an autumn morning, when there is infused into it the stale sharp scent of decaying foliage, but only once or twice in the year, and that when the first feather from the breast of spring falls to the ground, can you experience that thrill of promise that speaks not of what is, but of what is coming. It is just damp earth, but earth which holds in suspense that which makes the sap stream out to the uttermost finger-tips of the trees, and burst in squibs of green. Not growth itself, but the potentiality of growth is there. The earth says, "Behold, I make all things new!" and the germs of life, the seeds and the bulbs, and all that is waiting for spring, strain upwards and put forth the green spears that pierce the soil. But earth, young everlasting Mother Earth, must first issue her invitation; says she, "I am ready," and lies open to the renewal of life…

I hope that however long I happen to inhabit this delightful planet, I shall never outlive that secret call of spring. When you are young it calls to you more physically, and you go out into the moonlit night, or out into the dark, while the rain drips on you, and somehow you make yourself one with it, digging with your fingers into the earth, or clinging to a wet tree-bough in some blind yearning for communion with the life that tingles through the world. But when you are older, you do not, I hope, become in the least wiser, if by wisdom is implied the loss of that exquisite knowledge of the call of spring. You have learned that: it is yours, it has grown into your bones, and it is impossible to experience as new what you already possess. You act the play no longer; it is for you to sit and watch it, and the test of your freedom from fatigued senility, your certificate to that effect, will lie in the fact that you will observe with no less rapture than you once enjoyed. You stand a little apart, you must watch it now, not take active part in it. But you will have learned the lesson of spring and the lesson of life very badly if you turn your back on it. For the moment you turn your back on it, or yawn in your stall when that entrancing drama of unconscious youth is played in front of you, whether the actors are the moon and the dripping shrubs and the smell of damp earth, or a boy and a girl making love in a flowery lane or in a backyard, you declare yourself old. If the upspringing of life, the tremulous time, evokes no thrill in you, the best place (and probably the most comfortable) for you is the grave. On the other side of the grave there may be a faint possibility of your becoming young again (which, after all, is the only thing it is worth while being), but on this side of the grave you don't seem able to manage it. God forbid that on this side of the grave you should become a grizzly kitten, and continue dancing about and playing with the blind-cord long after you ought to have learned better, but playing with the blind-cord is one of the least important methods of manifesting youth…

I was recalled from the terrace by decorous clinkings within, and went indoors to find the butler depositing a further tray of syphons and spirits on the table, and wishing to know at what time I wished to be called. On which, taking this as a hint that before I was called, I certainly had to go to bed (else how could I be called?), I went upstairs, and letting the night of spring pour into my room, put off into clear shallow tides of sleep, grounding sometimes, and once more being conscious of the night wind stirring about my room, and sliding off again into calm and sunlit waters. Often sleep and consciousness were mixed up together; I was aware of the window curtains swaying in the draught while I lay in a back-water of calm, and then simultaneously, so it seemed, it was not this mature and middle-aged I who lay there, but myself twenty-five years ago, eager and expectant and flushed with the authentic call of spring. By some dim dream-like double-consciousness I could observe the young man who lay in my place; I knew how the young fool felt, and envied him a little, and then utterly ceased to envy him, just because I had been that, and had sucked the honey out of what he felt, and had digested it and made it mine. It was part of me: where was the profit in asking for or wanting what I had got?

There we lay, he and I, while the night wheeled round the earth, which was not sleeping, but was alert and awake. Some barrier that the past years thought they had set up between us was utterly battered down by those stirrings of spring, and all night I lay side by side with the boy that I had been. He whispered to me his surmises and his desires, as he conceived them in the wonder of spring nights, when he lay awake for the sheer excitement of being alive and of having the world in front of him. He wound himself more and more closely to me, nudging me with his elbow to drive into me the urgency of his schemes and dreams, and I recognized the reality of them. How closely he clung! How insistent was his demand that I should see with his eyes, and listen with his ears, and write with his hand. And, fool though he was, and little as I respected him, I could not help having a sort of tenderness for him and his youth and his eagerness and his ignorance.

"I want so awfully," he repeated. "Surely if I want a thing enough I shall get it. Isn't that so?"

"Yes; that is usually the case," said I.

"Well, I want as much as I can want," he said. "And yet, if you are what I shall be (and I feel that is so), you haven't got it yet. Why is that?"

"Perhaps you aren't wanting enough," said I. "To get it, would you give up everything else, would you live, if necessary, in squalor and friendlessness? Would you put up with complete failure, as the world counts failure?"

He drew a little away from me; his tense arm got slack and heavy.

"But there's no question of failure," he said. "If I get it, that means success."

"But it's a question of whether you will eagerly suffer anything that can happen sooner than relinquish your idea. Can you cling to your idea, whatever happens?"

He was silent a moment.

"I don't know," he said.

"That means you aren't wanting enough," said I. "And you don't take trouble enough. You never do."

"I wonder! Is that why you haven't got all I want?"

"Probably. One of the reasons, at any rate. Another is that we are meant to fail. That's what we are here for. Just to go on failing, and go on trying again."

"Oh, how awfully sad! But I don't believe it."

"It's true. But it's also true that you have to go on acting as if you didn't believe it. You will get nothing done, if you believe it when you're young."

"And do you believe it now?" he asked.

"Rather not. But it's true."

He left me and moved away to the window.

"It's the first night of spring," he said. "I must go and run through the night. Why don't you come too?"

"Because you can do it for me."

"Good-night then," he said, and jumped out of the window.

All the next morning spring vibrated in the air; the bulbs in the garden-beds felt the advent of the tremulous time, and pushed up little erect horns of vigorous close-packed leaf, and the great downs beyond the garden were already flushed with the vivid green of new growth, that embroidered itself among the grey faded autumn grass. A blackbird fluted in the thicket, a thrush ran twinkle-footed on to the lawn, and round the house-eaves in the ivy sparrows pulled about straws and dead leaves, practising for nesting-time; and the scent, oh, the scent of the moist earth! In these few hours the whole aspect of the world was changed, the stagnation of winter was gone, and though cold and frost might come back again, life was on the move; the great tide had begun to flow, that should presently flood the earth with blossom and bird-song. Never, even in the days when first the wand of spring was waved before my enchanted eyes, have I known its spell so rapturously working, nor felt a sweeter compulsion in its touch, which makes old men dream dreams and middle-aged men see visions so that all for an hour or two open the leaves of the rose-scented manuscript again, and hear once more the intoxicating music, and read with renewed eyes the rhapsody that is recited at the opening of the high mass of youth. The years may be dropping their snowflakes onto our heads, and the plough of time making long furrows on our faces, but never perhaps till the day when the silver bowl is broken, and the spirit goes to God Who gave it, must we fail to feel the thrill and immortal youth of the first hours of spring-time. And who knows whether all that this divine moment wakes in us here may not be but the faint echo, heard by half-awakened ears, the dim reflection, seen in a glass darkly of the everlasting spring which shall dawn on us then?