The Charioteer Page 9

  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.”

  They bit into the glossy winesaps; on the sunny side of the fruit, the clear crimson had run below the skin and streaked the crisp, white flesh.

  “You see,” said Laurie presently, “it’s all a muddle, nothing clear-cut.”

  Andrew didn’t answer. As soon as Laurie turned he looked away, not furtively but rather shyly. During his last term at school, when it had seemed to be a fairly generally held view that he hadn’t made too bad a job of the House, Laurie had sometimes caught the tail-end of looks like that. But this time it seemed too much that it should be true, and he dared not believe in it. He put his head back in the grass, watching its fine stalks laced against the sky. The world was full of a golden undemanding stillness. Even the wretchedness of the afternoon now seemed only the gate that had brought him to this place. But this reminded him to look at his watch; it was time to go.

  Andrew got up first and held out his arm smiling, managing to make it seem a light-hearted gesture like that of children who pull each other up from the ground for fun. Laurie had observed sometimes in the ward how his tact would conquer his diffidence. His grip was firm and his rough hand had a kindly warmth in it. He had remembered to have the crutch ready in the other hand before he pulled.

  As they walked back through the orchard the grass was deep green in the twilight; but across the stream the tops of the beeches, catching the last sun, burned a deep copper against a cloudless aquamarine sky.

  “My gramophone’s come,” said Laurie. “But—” He stopped, because the door of the cottage had opened, disclosing a square of dusky lamplight against which Mrs. Chivers stood sharply black and animated, like a figure in an early bioscope. She still had her hat on.

  “Hello, Mrs. Chivers,” said Laurie. “We’re just going. Thank you so much. This is a friend of mine, Andrew Raynes.”

  Mrs. Chivers came nearer. As she left the lamplit door she grew three-dimensional again. Her little face, yellow and creased with wrinkles as if the skin had been wrung out and hung over the bone, peered up at them, bright-eyed.

  “Young man,” she said, “why aren’t you in khaki?”

  Laurie gazed at her blankly; it was as if one of the ripe apples had proved, as one bit it, to contain a bee. Andrew said seriously, “I’m a pacifist, Mrs. Chivers, I belong to the Friends.”

  Mrs. Chivers looked up under her hat, rattling the cherries; she stood no more than five feet, and had to tilt the brim to see them. “Take shame to yourself. I’ve heard of that. Friends, indeed. A big strong lad as you be, I wonder you can look your friends in the face. It’s all foretold in the blessed Scriptures, Battle of Armageddon, that’s what our lads are fighting. Conscientious, I never heard such stuff.”

  “Mrs. Chivers,” said Laurie when he could get it in endways, “Andrew’s a friend of mine. He’s doing war work, you know. He’s all right.”

  Ignoring him, she thrust her head out at Andrew, like a furious little wren. “And mark my words, young man, if you come here talking your wicked nonsense to this dear wounded boy of mine, and trying to make him run away from the war, I’ll write to Lord Kitchener myself about you. He’ll know what to do.”

  “I won’t hurt him,” said Andrew gently. “I promise you that.”

  “I should think not indeed. Get away with you out of my garden, it’s no place for the likes of you. Now, sonny, that’s enough, I’m ashamed of you speaking up for him, and you in the King’s uniform. Run away home, the pair of you. I’ve no patience.”

  The orchard smelt of September and early dew; the grass in the deep light was now the color of emerald. A blackbird, the last awake, was meditating aloud in a round, sweet whistle. Everything had the colors of farewell.

  Andrew was walking ahead, but when he noticed Laurie’s awkward haste behind him he waited, surrendering his breathing space: Laurie reflected that being a cripple involves special kinds of social finesse, which only c
ome gradually. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.

  “No, I ought to have thought, it’s being with you that makes me forget. I shouldn’t have come in and spoilt all this for you.”

  “She’ll have forgotten by tomorrow.” They had come to the tall yews by the gate; it was very old, and flakes of paint and rust came away as he touched it. He had said the sensible thing and it would be wise to leave it there. The huge bulk of the yew trees was like dark-veined malachite against the bronze-gold sky. He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him. He smiled at Andrew in the shadow of the yews.

  “They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld

  Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,

  Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate

  With dreadful Faces throng’d and fiery Arms …”

  Andrew put his hands on the top of the gate and swung it open. His face had a solemn improvising look. He said,

  “… They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

  Through Eden took their solitary way.”

  Laurie went through the gate, out into the lane. Two great horses, ringing with idle brass, were being led home, their coats steaming in the cool. He felt absolute, filled; he could have died then content, empty-handed and free. All gifts he had ever wished for seemed only traps, now, to dim him and make him less. This, he thought with perfect certainty, this after all is to be young, it is for this. Now we have the strength to make our memories, out of hard stuff, out of steel and crystal.

  The steam of the horses, a good strong russet smell, hung on the air. Sailing in a deep inlet of sky off the black coast of an elm tree, the first star appeared, flickering like a riding-light in a fresh wind. Andrew walked beside him silently.