The Moment of Truth Read online

  What’s the old fool after? thought Kent. As curtly as he dared, he said,

  “Yes. We got what you might call involved in the first week.” He hesitated and went on, “We—I mean Miss Hugh-Brown, too—were all on the same Station in Norfolk, when the war started.”

  Clarke had been listening to him with an air of sly benevolence: he asked abruptly,

  “How old are you, my boy?”

  “Twenty-three. …” For no reason at all, he added, “Miss Hugh-Brown is twenty.”

  “Well,” Thorburn said, broke off, rubbed his head, and muttered, “it’s a poor business.”

  He meant that he would have preferred a war in which young women knew their place as nurses, that Clarke’s lumbago was very tiresome, that his own stomach was out of order—and no wonder, since what had happened in the last weeks was more than any stomach could bear. The pilot was staring at him with an obstinate, rather stupid look on his face, and after a moment said quietly,

  “I suppose this is the end, sir?”

  “End? What d’you mean, the end?” He had no wish to soften things for the young man, but he disliked having to put it into words. “There’s no end, short of the end of the world. I don’t think that’s in sight—for all their devilry.” Tell him the truth, he thought. And yourself, at the same time. “If you mean, have we been driven off the island?—yes. … London, the south, nearly all the ports—no more ships will leave any of the large ports—are … have you ever seen a man reduced to a—fly-blown—whimpering—no…” he checked himself and went on, “That’s what has happened. And you’d think, standing on that cliff out there—there was nothing except peace, silence, bog-myrtle, gorse …”

  He was silent. He felt old, heavy, useless.

  “Oh—it’s like that?” Kent said.

  “It’s like nothing you can imagine.”

  The young man said nothing for a moment; he straightened his long body, as though calling it to order, and said,

  “It makes what happens to two or three people seem not very important. … Well, if you’ll excuse me, sir. …”

  He made off, with his quick careless walk, shoulders rounded slightly, to the inner door, and closed it noisily behind him.

  Clarke had been watching him with an inquisitive kindness: if the young man had noticed it—disliking what he called interference—it would have mortified him extremely.

  “What’s the matter with him?” he asked.

  “Is anything the matter?” Thorburn said, with indifference. “Why should there be?” He was more compassionate in other people’s troubles than Clarke—but rarely noticed them. Clarke always did—and that was all: he did nothing further. “How d’you feel now? Heaven knows how you managed to-day’s drive in that damned truck. Well, it’s the last.”

  Clarke pulled a dog’s face.

  “By God it is. Another mile and I’d have been in Abraham’s bosom. More than once, I may tell you, I thought of ordering myself to roll into a ditch and wait there for the wicked enemy to come along and put me out of my misery. He’d have done it like a shot.”

  “Yes, very like a shot,” Thorburn said. He chuckled. “Back of the neck, I’m told.”

  They were silent, glad to be alone together, with their old aching bodies and oppressed minds. Clarke glanced round him at the room; he had the eyes of a peasant, shrewd, greedy, malicious.

  “Decent place, this. … Queer thing—all the time these last days, sitting in my poor bones like in a lump of lead, red-hot lead, by God, I was thinking—back … First day of your holidays, eh, Harry. Me knowing you were back home—and getting my poor mother, old devil she was, too, to work the pump over me while I cleaned up. I used to think: No, he won’t come this time, why should he?—all right when we were kids, but it’s got to stop some time, hasn’t it? … And there you’d be, and the old woman bawling: Will, here’s Master Harry for you. And by God you might never have been away. … Fifty years—nearly. And here we are.”

  They were silent for a moment. Thorburn said,

  “I can’t have been eight—which makes you six—when you showed me how to take trout out of the river.”

  “Yes, your own dad’s trout,” said Clarke. He laughed and groaned. “Oh, Lord, my back. If I’m to get into any plane to-morrow you’ll have to roll me, I say, across the airfield.”

  “Don’t worry,” his friend said, impatient.

  “I never worry,” Clarke said placidly. “But—fifty years. I’m fifty-eight. I feel a hundred and fifty. … Harry, m’boy, what use’II I be in America? Tell me that. You’ve got to be young and confident to start again. And in a noisy impatient country.” He sighed. “I’m a fool. Fifty-eight—ex-ranker officer. … I s’d never have stayed in the army in 1918. I should’ve gone back to farming …” he stopped—he did not want to look too closely at anything, least of all at himself: his instinct for playing the fool saved him. “To be a farmer’s boy-hoy-hoy” he roared, “to be a farmer’s boy.… I did it because—you were a soldier for life, I thought I could be, too.”

  As willing as his friend to avoid feeling much, Thorburn said roughly,

  “Well? You made a fine job of it. And it hasn’t been a bad life.”

  “Damned good one,” said Clarke.

  “Then what are you grumbling about, you old fool?”

  Clarke gave him a sly glance.

  “The fact is … no, never mind what it is. Tell you later, old boy. Not the time. Too many people about. …” He had contorted his face into a preposterous look of cunning. “Tell me—who’s the chap we picked up at that last airfield?”

  “You mean Breuner?” Thorburn said. “Oh, a scientist of some kind. Austrian. I gathered from him he’s been in this country for more than twenty years. You wouldn’t think so. I don’t care for scientists. Never did. Illiterate brutes. What we ought to have done, after the last war, when we knew what they were capable of, was pack them all off to a Devil’s Island in the middle of the Antarctic and let them destroy each other.”

  “Scientist? Is he? What’s he do? They come all sorts, you know.”

  “Bio-physicist, I think,” Thorburn said, yawning.

  Baffled, Clarke said,

  “What? Oh, come again to-morrow, will you?” He brooded a minute, and said sourly, “He’ll find a job waiting for him. … Maybe I could raise hogs over there, eh?”

  Thorburn glanced at him with affection and impatience.

  “Leave it, leave it,” he said, bored. “You’ll be all right.”

  Clarke did not answer. After a time he said,

  “It’s getting dark—well, not exactly dark.”

  “Deceitful,” said Thorburn. He stood up, and rolled his heavy body as far as the window. Suddenly he exclaimed, “See those birds?”

  Turning his head, Clarke saw, crossing the oblong of sky, black against that pale greenish blue, arched wings. He knew what they were, but, because it would please Thorburn to tell him, he asked,

  “What are they?”

  “Geese. Wild geese.”

  “Leaving, eh? I wonder. …” Recklessly, he let himself tumble into one of the cracks opening in his mind. “By God, Harry, it’s all wrong. V.I.P.’s. Damn all V.I.P.’s. Why bother with them? They s’d have loaded the cruisers and aeroplanes with young men. And young women.”

  “So they have,” Thorburn said. “Some of them.”

  Clarke did not notice him.

  “So long as I live, old boy,” he said slowly, “so long as I live—if it’s ten years or ten days—I shan’t forget that place we came through—you remember it—a church on the hill and the people going up to it, families, children and all. Th’ whole of the village must ha’ gone to church that day. … And that other place—town—and the planes going over in a great flight. … People standing there in the streets looking up, watching them leave. … There was a man shook his fist. He must have cursed them, because a woman struck his arm down. She said something. I couldn’t hear.”

  “Yes, I h
eard,” Thorburn growled. “What she said was: Keep your ill mouth shut, I hope my boy’s in one of them.”

  “Ay, that’s it, that’s it,” Clarke stammered, “that’s what it’ll be.”

  He stared at Thorburn, and even in his grief he could not help looking like a buffoon and rolling his eyes. Neither of them spoke. With relief, they heard someone walking along the passage. When the door opened and Major Heron came in, Thorburn’s face changed, becoming gentler, and anxious.

  “There you are, my dear George,” he exclaimed. “You look pretty done in. You’d better get some rest.”

  “I’m all right,” Heron said carelessly. “Tired, of course. How do you feel?”

  Lumbering back to his chair, Thorburn laughed—a nearly inaudible laugh, which shook his ungainly body and made him look younger and a little sly.

  “It takes more than a week’s battering about in a truck to damage my hard old bones,” he said.

  Heron smiled.

  “If you can stand it, sir, I hope I can,” he said, with a trace of indulgence in the respectful tone of his voice.

  Clarke had never been able to make up his mind about George Heron. He felt that his old friend’s affection for the younger man was more than a little absurd. If Heron had been his son … not that fathers and sons are always or more than rarely devoted … but it would at least have been an excuse for Thorburn’s fondness. When George Heron was a child, Thorburn bored his friends with stories about his godson’s remarkable intelligence, and when, as a schoolboy at Westminster, he proved to be fully as brilliant as Thorburn had always said he was, his godfather’s pride became pathetic; people smiled at it behind his back. Infuriating. And now look at the fellow, thought Clarke—dandified breeches, shirt like a biscuit, hair hanging over his collar—wa-a-h.… He was shrewd enough with himself to admit that he would have disliked the fellow less if Heron had been less cool during a singularly unpleasant raid. Showing off, of course, he thought quickly. The thought pleased him.

  “Ah, my boy,” he said, grinning, “you’re cut out of finer material than two old animals like us. If you weren’t, you’d be a soldier, not a writer. Writing—eh? It must be a damned wearing life.”

  Uncertain whether he were being laughed at or not, Heron drawled,

  “It has its points.”

  “No doubt, no doubt,” said Clarke, in a submissive voice. “If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have chosen it.”

  Heron swallowed a yawn.

  “It chose me.”

  “We were never in any difficulty about his career,” Thorburn said. (Exasperated, Clarke thought: Does he know how fatuous that sounds?) “He knew what he was going to do and went for it. And, thank God,” he added, looking with calm pride at Heron, “you’re taking your career with you. You might have had to begin again.”

  A nervous twitch deepened the lines on Heron’s face, too many of them for his age—at thirty-five he had the cracked skin of an old woman: when he smiled, his lips moved only at one side, with distorting effect. His mouth was delicate and very small: from a wide forehead, his face narrowed to this short peevish mouth and pointed chin.

  “Yes—but shall I be able to write in America? It’s a different language.”

  The general rolled in his chair, impatient and loving.

  “Rubbish, my dear, rubbish. They read your books now, don’t they? Don’t talk nonsense. … Where’s your wife?”

  “Upstairs, with Nick. His supper disagreed with him. He’s over-excited.”

  “It was stupid to make him eat it,” Thorburn said, vexed. “He didn’t want anything.”

  “Lord knows what’s wrong with children nowadays,” Clarke jeered. “I was brought up like a healthy young dog, beaten, kicked round, up till all hours, never a lick of water on me lower than my neck, and what was put on the table for th’ others to eat I ate it—I was stronger and a damn sight saner than these unique models—washed and trimmed every day. Mind you, I’m not saying a word against Nick. He’s a nice lad.”

  He broke off as Emil Breuner came into the room. He came in very quietly, and strolled towards them with an air of reserve; not that he looked nervous—on the contrary, he was very much at his ease—but as though he were hardly aware that there were people in the room. Heron being nearest him when he noticed them, or noticed they were people he knew, he said gently and politely,

  “I think we shall stay here to-night—don’t you think so?”

  “I’m afraid we shall,” Heron answered.

  Breuner looked at him for the first time, smiling. He smiled charmingly, with his whole face.

  “You are anxious to go?”

  “Aren’t we all?” said Heron coldly.

  Clarke made sounds between a laugh and a strangled groan.

  “I don’t know that I am … if I could stay here in peace.”

  Abruptly, with the quite unconscious arrogance he felt towards foreigners, however distinguished—and even when he happened to like them—Thorburn said,

  “You’ve had some experience of going into exile. What’s the best thing about it?”

  Half smiling, half meditative,

  “The best?” Breuner said. “Most people would ask: What is the worst? … The best. … I don’t know—I think—to possess nothing any more. Nothing but your mind and your hands.” Looking absently at Heron again, he said, “You are very fortunate. You do not need even any tools to go on with your work.”

  “You’ll be quite safe yourself, won’t you?” said Heron.

  Breuner did not appear to notice the younger man’s wish to snub him. Either he was so preoccupied that his thoughts protected him, or he was unused to discourtesy, and did not recognise it. With a serious air, he said,

  “I think there will be some work; I hope so.”

  Unable not to make mischief—he did it even when it might damage himself—Clarke interrupted,

  “If the general here had his way, you’d be in jug, with the rest of your breed.”

  “Indeed?” Breuner turned to Thorburn with something of the eager radiance of a child who has been told he must be polite to grown people, and can’t help being surprised by the inexplicable way they behave. “You don’t care for scientists?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Thorburn said roughly, “I don’t. You’ve spoiled soldiering—made it a filthy business, no better than butchering. A slaughter of the innocents. For all I know—thanks to your senseless curiosity—the world will never be fit to live in again.”

  “It’s not entirely the scientists’ fault,” drawled Heron.

  “It is not more my fault than yours,” Breuner said. “If you could silence all curiosity, the human race also would be quite silent. It would become an animal. And—being a weak animal—it would die out.”

  “We are but little children weak…” Clarke sang—croaked.

  “Children can be murderers,” Breuner said, almost gaily. “But, it is really very fortunate, until they are shown they don’t know how to do it effectively. … Humanity was a great risk. To arrive somewhere, it had to be inquisitive. Now—simply to have a chance to live, to exist—” he hesitated—” we shall have to climb down, not be so greedy. … I don’t know. It may be too late.”

  “I confess,” Heron said, “I find your—I don’t know whether it’s stoicism or egoism—or if there’s any difference between them—irritating.”

  Breuner glanced at him.

  “I am sorry.”

  Something in the way Thorburn got up and walked across the room to the open doorway silenced the others. They—even Breuner—watched him. He stood there, head lowered, as if he wanted to charge the airfield, his shapeless untidy body rigid. Seeming to divide round him, the light entered the room in two streams, faintly bronzed, reflecting the dry grass between the runways. It was far from dark in the room, nor was it light: everything was visible and nothing quite clear; when the general turned round, his face in this light had the grey-ness of a stone.

  “You think we’r
e finished, do you?” he said to Breuner. “I mean us, not—not the rest.”

  Breuner considered him for a moment, with what might have been pity if it had been less detached, less tranquilly unmoved. He might have been asking himself: How much can he bear? Or: What does he understand? More likely—since even after twenty years in the country he still had difficulty in forcing the whole of his thought into English words—he was only anxious not to make any mistakes. Dishonesty, even unwilling, is an unforgivable sin.

  “No. I am not so pessimistic,” he said softly. “It is true—England is defeated; and all Europe is defeated. The defeat has gone too far now to be stopped.” In his careful voice, each word was distinct. “But Europe had collapsed already, before the barbarians began moving across it. It died its own death. Now, as barbarians do, they will destroy out of suspicion and ignorance—or just from impatience. When they don’t understand they will lose patience, and kill things or people … cities—Paris, Florence, London—villages … the cathedrals, Chartres, St. Paul’s … the great libraries—invaders always destroy libraries. Besides—in a sense barbarians are puritans, don’t you think? Anything very beautiful alarms them—as well as the things they don’t understand. So they will distrust and kill writers, schoolmasters, professors, doctors, along with the millions of humbler people. There will be ironies as well as terror. A great poet will die so obscurely that no one will ever know how or where, and they will move men and women, and children, about Europe in herds—I remember a friend of mine once saw hundreds of Polish women and children being driven out of their village: he said they turned their eyes as they walked just like other cattle. … Things will break down and there will be famines and typhus. Some intellectuals will survive, they will work for the barbarians, as educated Romans did. And Europe will survive. It will not of course be Europe as we know it. It will be broken up and each of the fragments struggling to exist. And then—after a long time—perhaps a century, or two centuries—the corruption will begin. I don’t mean of Europe—that will be over. I mean of the barbarians.” He smiled as if to himself, a quick bright smile. “Instead of burning the old manuscripts he has found, a young man will keep them, and read them secretly at night. Or a clever hard-headed official will be bewitched by an old house, or perhaps the ruins of Chartres will stretch out a hand to take hold of him. …” Or, he thought soberly, history itself will betray him: some evening as light as this, when he is walking by the Thames or the Seine—or some village stream without even a name—its drowned memories will seize their chance to glide into his brain and avenge themselves—and us—by weakening him. … “A workman digging for something useful will break through into an air-raid shelter and find a famous painting its owner hid there. For people who never saw anything like it, it will be blinding. They will begin—it will be very rash of them—to trust beautiful things; they will have forgotten that these things burn you. Corruption will do its work, the seeds will grow in it—the passion we Europeans feel for—for discovery. … I think only Europeans, none of the others. …”