Part 28 (2/2)
I'm not a curate. I'd like to smash something--crush it to a jelly.” Val mincingly pointed out that such a consummation was not far off, but he was ignored. ”Oh d.a.m.n the war! and d.a.m.n England too--what did we go to fight for? What a.s.ses we were!
Did we ever believe in a reason? Give me these ten years over again and I wouldn't be such a fool. Who cares whether we lick Germany or Germany licks England? I don't.”
”I do.”
Bernard stared at him, incredulous. ”What--'freedom and honour' and all the rest of it?”
”In a defensive war--”
”Oh for G.o.d's sake! I've just had my supper.”
”--any man who won't fight for his country deserves to be shot.”
”You combine the brains of a rabbit with the morals of a eunuch.”
Val crossed his legs and withdrew his cigar to laugh.
”Ah! I apologize.” Clowes shrugged his shoulders. ”'Eunuch' is the wrong word for you--as a breed they're a cowardly lot. But I used the term in the sense of a Palace favourite who swallows all the slop that's pumped into him. 'Lloyd George for ever and Britannia rules the waves.' Dare say I should sing it myself if I'd come out covered with glory like you did.”
”I met Gainsford today. He says the longacre fences ought to be renewed before winter. Parts of them are so rotten that the first gale will bring them down.”
”d.a.m.n Gainsford and d.a.m.n the fences and d.a.m.n you.”
”Really, really!” Val stretched himself out and put his feet up.
”You're very monotonous tonight.”
”And you, you're tired: I wear you both out, you and Laura--and yet you're the only people on earth. . . . Why can't I die?
Sometimes I wonder if it's anything but cowardice that prevents me from cutting my throat. But my life is infernally strong in me, I don't want to die: what I want is to get on my legs again and kick that fellow Hyde down the steps. What does he stop on here for?”
”Well, you're always pressing him to stay, aren't you? Why do you do it, if this is the way you feel towards him?”
”Because I've always sworn I'd give Laura all the rope she wanted,” said Clowes between his teeth. ”If she wants to hang herself, let her. I should score in the long run. Hyde would chuck her away like an old shoe when he got sick of her.” There was a fire not far from madness burning now in the wide, dilated eyes. ”Afterwards she'd have to come back, because those Selincourts haven't got twopence between the lot of them, and if she did she'd be mine for good and all. Hyde would break her in for me.”
”You don't realize what you're saying, Berns, old man. You can't,” said Val gently, ”or you wouldn't say it. It is too unutterably beastly.”
”Ah! perhaps the point of view is a bit warped,” Bernard returned carelessly to sanity. ”It shocks you, does it? But the fact is Laura has the whip hand of me and I can't forgive her for it.
She's the saint and I'm the sinner. She's a bit too good. If Hyde broke her in and sent her home on her knees, I should have the whip hand of her, and I'd like to reverse the positions. Can you follow that? Yes! A bit warped, I own. But I am warped-- bound to be. Give the body such a wrench as the Saxons gave mine and you're bound to get some corresponding wrench in the mind.”
”That's rank materialism.”
”Bos.h.!.+ it's common sense. Look at your own case! Do you never a.n.a.lyze your own behaviour? You would if you lay on your back year in year out like me. You're maimed too.”
”No, am I?” Val reached for a fourth cus.h.i.+on. ”Think o' that, now.”
”Or you wouldn't be content to hang on in Chilmark, riding over another man's property and squiring another man's wife. The shot that broke your arm broke your life. You had the makings of a fine soldier in you, but you were knocked out of your profession and you don't care for any other. With all your ability you'll never be worth more than six or seven hundred a year, for you've no initiative and you're as nervous as a cat. You're not married and you'll never marry: you're too pa.s.sive, too continent, too much of a monk to attract a healthy woman. No: don't you flatter yourself that you've escaped any more than I have. The only difference is that the Saxons mucked up my life and you've mucked up your own. You fool! you high-minded, over-scrupulous fool! . . . You and I are wreckage of war, Val: cursed, senseless devilry of war.-- Go and play a tune, I'm sick of talking.”
Val was not any less sick of listening. He went to the piano, but not to play a tune. Impossible to insult that crippled tempest on the sofa with the sweet eternal placidities of Mozart or Bach. His fingers wandered over the lower register, improvising, modulating from one minor key to another in a cobweb of silver harmony spun pale and low from a minimum of technical attention. For once Bernard had struck home. ”The shot that broke your arm broke your life.” Stripped of Bernard's rhetoric, was it true?
Val could not remember the time when his ambition had not been set on soldiering: regiments of Hussars and Dragoons had deployed on his earliest Land of Counterpane: he had never cared for any other toys. But as soon as war was over he had resigned his commission, a high sense of duty driving him from a field in which he felt unfit to serve. He had pitilessly executed his own judgment: no man can do more. But what if in judgement itself had been unhinged--warped--deflected by the interaction of splintered bone and cut sinew and dazed, ghost-ridden mind? Have not psychologists said that few fighting men were strictly normal in or for some time after the war?
<script>