Some Do Not... — Part 2, Chapter 4, Section 2
"We'll leave you to have your war talk out," Mr. Jegg said.
He added: "For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of things that's preservable.
I can't help saying that."
She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day.
She said to herself: "Now he must take me in his arms.
He must.
He _must_!"
The deepest of her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly known to her.
She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils the peculiar scent of his hair--like the scent of the skin of an apple, but very faint.
"You must!
You _must_!"
she said to herself.
There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him.
A sudden lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall.
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She saw the white disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm night.
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Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing on the silver places of his hair.
It had grown nearly dark outside: they had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great dining-room at the Duchemins.
He got down from the fire-seat with a weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high.
He said, with a little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue: "Well, I've got the business of telling Macmaster that I'm leaving the office.
That, too, won't be an agreeable affair!
Not that what poor Vinnie thinks matters."
He added: "It's queer, dear .
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In the tumult of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said "dear."
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"Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have just used.
Almost the exact words.
She talked of her inability to sleep at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at night.
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And she, too, said that she could not respect me.
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She sprang up.
"Oh," she said, "she didn't mean it.
_I_ didn't mean it.
Almost every man who is a man must do as you are doing.
But don't you see it's a desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines?
How can we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men?"
She added, and it was another stone that she didn't leave unturned: "Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from your point of view?
You're more useful--you know you're more useful to your country here than .
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He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great gentleness and concern.
"I can't reconcile it with my conscience," he said.
"In this affair there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience.
I don't mean that we oughtn't to be in this affair and on the side we're on.
We ought.
But I'll put to you things I have put to no other soul."
The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of the glibnesses she had heard.
It appeared to her as if a child were speaking.
He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as soon as this country had come into the war.
He even described the sunlit heather landscape of the north, where naïvely he had made his tranquil resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his conviction that that would give him, as he called it, clean bones again.
That, he said, had been straightforward.
Now there was nothing straightforward: for him or for any man.
One could have fought with a clean heart for a civilisation: if you like for the eighteenth century against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against the enemy countries meant.
But our coming in had changed the aspect at once.
It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a catspaw to bash the other half of the twentieth.
It was true there was nothing else for it.
And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was just bearable.
One could keep at one's job--which was faking statistics against the other fellow--until you were sick and tired of faking and your brain reeled.
And then some!
It was probably impolitic to fake--to overstate!
--a case against enemy nations.
The chickens would come home to roost in one way or another, probably.
Perhaps they wouldn't. That was a matter for one's superiors.
Obviously!
And the first gang had been simple, honest fellows.
Stupid, but relatively disinterested.
But now!
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What was one to do?
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He went on, almost mumbling.
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She had suddenly a clear view of him as a man extraordinarily clear-sighted in the affairs of others, in great affairs, but in his own so simple as to be almost a baby.
And gentle!
And extraordinarily unselfish.
He didn't betray one thought of self-interest .
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not one!
He was saying: "But now!
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with this crowd of boodlers!
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Supposing one's asked to manipulate the figures of millions of pairs of boots in order to force someone else to send some miserable general and his troops to, say, Salonika--when they and you and common-sense and everyone and everything else, know it's disastrous?
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And from that to monkeying with our own forces.
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Starving particular units for political .
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He was talking to himself, not to her.
And indeed he said: "I can't, you see, talk really before you.
For all I know your sympathies, perhaps your activities, are with the enemy nations."
She said passionately: "They're not!
They're not!
How dare you say such a thing?"
He answered: "It doesn't matter .
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No!
I'm sure you're not .
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But, anyhow, these things are official.
One can't, if one's scrupulous, even talk about them .
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And then .
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You see it means such infinite deaths of men, such an infinite prolongation .
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all this interference for side-ends!
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I seem to see these fellows with clouds of blood over their heads.
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And then .
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I'm to carry out their orders because they're my superiors.
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But helping them means unnumbered deaths.
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He looked at her with a faint, almost humorous smile: "You see!"
he said, "we're perhaps not so very far apart!
You mustn't think you're the only one that sees all the deaths and all the sufferings.
All, you see: I, too, am a conscientious objector.
My conscience won't let me continue any longer with these fellows.
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She said: "But isn't there any other .
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He interrupted: "No!
There's no other course.
One is either a body or a brain in these affairs.
I suppose I'm more brain than body.
I suppose so.
Perhaps I'm not.
But my conscience won't let me use my brain in this service.
So I've a great, hulking body!
I'll admit I'm probably not much good.
But I've nothing to live for: what I stand for isn't any more in this world What I want, as you know, I can't have.
So .
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She exclaimed bitterly: "Oh, say it!
Say it!
Say that your large hulking body will stop two bullets in front of two small anæmic fellows.
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And how can you say you'll have nothing to live for?
You'll come back.
You'll do your good work again.
You know you did good work .
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He said: "Yes!
I believe I did.
I used to despise it, but I've come to believe I did.
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But no!
They'll never let me back.
They've got me out, with all sorts of bad marks against me.
They'll pursue me, systematically.
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You see in such a world as this, an idealist--or perhaps it's only a sentimentalist--must be stoned to death.
He makes the others so uncomfortable.
He haunts them at their golf.
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No; they'll get me, one way or the other.
And some fellow--Macmaster here--will do my jobs.
He won't do them so well, but he'll do them more dishonestly.
Or no. I
oughtn't to say dishonestly.
He'll do them with enthusiasm and righteousness.
He'll fulfil the order of his superiors with an immense docility and unction.
He'll fake figures against our allies with the black enthusiasm of a Calvin and, when _that_ war comes, he'll do the requisite faking with the righteous wrath of Jehovah smiting the priests of Baal.
And he'll be right.
It's all we're fitted for.
We ought never to have come into this war.
We ought to have snaffled other peoples' colonies as the price of neutrality.
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"Oh!"
Valentine Wannop said, "how can you so hate your country?"
He said with great earnestness: "Don't say it!
Don't believe it!
Don't even for a moment think it!
I
love every inch of its fields and every plant in the hedgerows: comfrey, mullein, paigles, long red purples, that liberal shepherds give a grosser name .
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and all the rest of the rubbish--you remember the field between the Duchemins and your mother's--and we have always been boodlers and robbers and reivers and pirates and cattle thieves, and so we've built up the great tradition that we love.
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But, for the moment, it's painful.
Our present crowd is not more corrupt than Walpole's. But one's too near them.
One sees of Walpole that he consolidated the nation by building up the National Debt: one doesn't see his methods.
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My son, or his son, will only see the glory of the boodle we make out of this show.
Or rather out of the next.
He won't know about the methods.
They'll teach him at school that across the counties went the sound of bugles that his father knew.
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Though that was another discreditable affair.
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"But you!"
Valentine Wannop exclaimed.
"_You_!
what will _you_ do!
After the war!"
"I!"
he said rather bewilderedly.
"I!
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Oh, I shall go into the old furniture business.
I've been offered a job.
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She didn't believe he was serious.
He hadn't, she knew, ever thought about his future.
But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things.
He would come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage sale.
She cried out: "Why don't you do it at once?
Why don't you take the job at once?"
for in the back of the dark shop he would at least be safe.
He said: "Oh, no!
Not at this time!
Besides the old furniture trade's probably not itself for the minute.
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He was obviously thinking of something else.
"I've probably been a low cad," he said, "wringing your heart with my doubts.
But I wanted to see where our similarities come in.
We've always been--or we've seemed always to me--so alike in our thoughts.
I daresay I wanted you to respect me.
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"Oh, I respect you!
I respect you!"
she said.
