“We will be cured.”
“But not in time. It will be over by Christmas. It can’t last another year. You don’t believe me, do you? Sometimes I believe you want to go back. But it will be. It will be finished by Christmas, and then I’m off. Canada. Nothing at home for us now.” He looked at the other, at the gaunt, wasted figure with almost white hair, lying with closed eyes in the fall sunlight. “You’d better come with me.”
“I’ll meet you in Givenchy on Christmas Day,” Gray said.
But he didn’t. He was in the hospital on the eleventh of November, hearing the bells, and he was still there on Christmas Day, where he received a letter from home:
You can come on home now. It will not be too soon now. They will need ships worse than ever now, now that the pride and the vainglory have worn themselves out.
The medical officer greeted him cheerfully. “Dammit, stuck here, when I know a place in Devon where I could hear a nightingale, by jove.” He thumped Gray’s chest. “Not much: just a bit of a murmur. Give you no trouble, if you’ll stop away from wars from now on. Might keep you from getting in again, though.”
He waited for Gray to laugh, but Gray didn’t laugh. “Well, it’s all finished now, damn them. Sign here, will you.” Gray signed. “Forget it as quickly as it began, I hope. Well—” He extended his hand, smiling his antiseptic smile. “Cheer-O, Captain. And good luck.”
Matthew Gray, descending the hill at seven oclock in the morning, saw the man, the tall, hospital-colored man in city clothing and carrying a stick, and stopped.
“Alec?” he said. “Alec.” They shook hands. “I could not — I did not . . .” He looked at his son, at the white hair, the waxed moustaches. “You have two ribbons now for the box, you have written.” Then Matthew turned back up the hill at seven oclock in the morning. “We’ll go to your mother.”
Then Alec Gray reverted for an instant. Perhaps he had not progressed as far as he thought, or perhaps he had been climbing a hill, and the return was not a reversion so much as something like an avalanche waiting the pebble, momentary though it was to be. “The shipyard, Father.”
His father strode firmly on, carrying his lunchpail. “‘Twill wait,” he said. “We’ll go to your mother.”
His mother met him at the door. Behind her he saw young Matthew, a man now, and John Wesley, and Elizabeth whom he had never seen. “You did not wear your uniform home,” young Matthew said.
“No,” he said. “No, I—”
“Your mother had wanted to see you in your regimentals and all,” his father said.
“No,” his mother said. “No! Never! Never!”
“Hush, Annie,” his father said. “Being a captain now, with two ribbons now for the box. This is false modesty. Ye hae shown courage; ye should have — But ’tis of no moment: the proper uniform for a Gray is an overall and a hammer.”
“Ay, sir,” Alec said, who had long since found out that no man has courage but that any man may blunder blindly into valor as one stumbles into an open manhole in the street.
He did not tell his father until that night, after his mother and the children had gone to bed. “I am going back to England. I have work promised there.”
“Ah,” his father said. “At Bristol, perhaps? They build ships there.”
The lamp glowed, touching with faint gleams the black and polished surface of the box on the mantel-shelf. There was a wind getting up, hollowing out the sky like a dark bowl, carving house and hill and headland out of dark space. “‘Twill be blowing out yon the night,” his father said.
“There are other things,” Alec said. “I have made friends, you see.”
His father removed the iron-rimmed spectacles. “You have made friends. Officers and such, I doubt not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And friends are good to have, to sit about the hearth of nights and talk with. But beyond that, only them that love you will bear your faults. You must love a man well to put up with all his trying ways, Alec.”
“But they are not that sort of friends, sir. They are . . .” He ceased. He did not look at his father. Matthew sat, slowly polishing the spectacles with his thumb. They could hear the wind. “If this fails, I’ll come back to the shipyard.”
His father watched him gravely, polishing the spectacles slowly. “Shipwrights are not made like that, Alec. To fear God, to do your work like it was your own hull you were putting the ribs in . . .” He moved. “We’ll see what the Book will say.” He replaced the glasses.
On the table was a heavy, brass-bound Bible. He opened it; the words seemed to him to rise to meet him from the page. Yet he read them, aloud: “. . . and the captains of thousands and the captains of ten thousands . . . A paragraph of pride. He faced his son, bowing his neck to see across the glasses. “You will go to London, then?”
“Yes, sir,” Alec said.
VI
His position was waiting. It was in an office. He had already had cards made: Captain A. Gray, M.C., D.S.M., and on his return to London he joined the Officers’ Association, donating to the support of the widows and orphans.
He had rooms in the proper quarter, and he would walk to and from the office, with his cards and his waxed moustaches, his sober correct clothes and his stick carried in a manner inimitable, at once jaunty and unobtrusive, giving his coppers to blind and maimed in Piccadilly, asking of them the names of their regiments. Once a month he wrote home:
I am well. Love to Jessie and Matthew and John Wesley and Elizabeth.
During that first year Jessie was married. He sent her a gift of plate, stinting himself a little to do so, drawings from his savings. He was saving, not against old age; he believed too firmly in the Empire to do that, who had surrendered completely to the Empire like a woman, a bride. He was saving against the time when he would recross the Channel among the dead scenes of his lost and found life.
That was three years later. He was already planning to ask for leave, when one day the manager broached the subject himself. With one correct bag he went to France. But he did not bear eastward at once. He went to the Riviera; for a week he lived like a gentleman, spending his money like a gentleman, lonely, alone in that bright aviary of the svelte kept women of all Europe.
That was why those who saw him descend from the Mediterranean Express that morning in Paris said, “Here is a rich milord,” and why they continued to say it in the hard-benched third-class trains, as he sat leaning forward on his stick, lip-moving the names on sheet-iron stations about the battered and waking land lying now three years quiet beneath the senseless and unbroken battalions of days.
He reached London and found what he should have known before he left. His position was gone. Conditions, the manager told him, addressing him punctiliously by his rank.
What savings he had left melted slowly; he spent the last of them on a black silk dress for his mother, with the letter:
I am well. Love to Matthew and John Wesley and Elizabeth.
He called upon his friends, upon the officers whom he had known. One, the man he knew best, gave him whisky in a comfortable room with a fire: “You aren’t working now? Rotten luck. By the way, you remember Whiteby? He had a company in the — th. Nice chap: no people, though. He killed himself last week. Conditions.”
“Oh. Did he? Yes. I remember him. Rotten luck.”
“Yes. Rotten luck. Nice chap.”
He no longer gave his pennies to the blind and the maimed in Piccadilly. He needed them for papers:
Artisans needed
Become stonemason
Men to drive motorcars. War record not necessary
Shop-assistants (must be under twenty-one)
Shipwrights needed
and at last:
Gentleman with social address and connections to meet out-of-town clients. Temporary
He got the place, and with his waxed moustaches and his correct clothes he revealed the fleshpots of the West End to Birmingham and Leeds. It was temporary.
Artisans
Carpenters
Housepainters
Winter was temporary, too. In the spring he took his waxed moustaches and his ironed clothes into Surrey, with a set of books, an encyclopedia, on commission. He sold all his things save what he stood in, and gave up his rooms in town.
He still had his stick, his waxed moustaches, his cards. Surrey, gentle, green, mild. A tight little house in a tight little garden. An oldish man in a smoking jacket puttering in a flower bed: “Good day, sir. Might I—”
The man in the smoking jacket looks up. “Go to the side, can’t you? Don’t come this way.”
He goes to the side entrance. A slatted gate, freshly white, bearing an enameled plate:
NO
HAWKERS
BEGGARS
He passes through and knocks at a tidy door smug beneath a vine. “Good day, miss. May I see the—”
“Go away. Didn’t you see the sign on the gate?”
“But I—”
“Go away, or I’ll call the master.”
In the fall he returned to London. Perhaps he could not have said why himself. Perhaps it was beyond any saying, instinct perhaps bringing him back to be present at the instant out of all time of the manifestation, apotheosis, of his life which had died again. Anyway, he was there, still with his waxed moustaches, erect, his
