The Moment of Truth Read online

  “Very likely the world—or our world—has grown too complicated. It could only break.”

  Kent looked at him with a defensive mockery.

  “So it’s the end of us, is it?”

  Throwing his head back, Thorburn said with suppressed passion,

  “No. By God, it’s not. The English fight better than anyone in the world. Give us a faith—” he laughed angrily—“give us something less absurd as a religion than insurance and wireless sets, and we shall rise from the dead. By God, we shall.”

  “Wars never kill everyone,” Breuner said. “There is always one man or one child left, to begin again.” To begin again what? he thought. The dialogue between finite and infinite, between men and God. He looked at Kent. “It could be your child.”

  “Born in America?” said Kent.

  “And to think,” muttered Thorburn, “that America is now the bulwark, the hope, the only, yes, future, of our—” he hesitated—“of all our deeds and words since we began here.” It offended him beyond bearing. Not that he had not thought about it often enough, in the uneasy years since 1945, as being possible, even likely. But to think a thing, and then to know it as the body knows a knife entering it—why, the difference is mortal.

  Kent laughed.

  “It never struck me until yesterday that I was running away,” he said with a light bitterness.

  “You’re not only running away, you’re running to something,” Breuner said quickly. “What is America? A country of immigrants. A test everyone who goes there must pass or fail in. … You would be foolish to expect to be safe there. Or anywhere. If you realise that nowadays there is no place to be safe in. … I should say, no home … if you live knowing it, you will be free—you may even be very happy.”

  Just at this moment, Nicholas Heron dropped the pen he had been jerking with mad energy over the paper, and came across the room to them. He thrust the page into Breuner’s hand.

  “Read it, please.”

  Breuner peered at it. The figure I stood alone at the top of the page: below it, close together, were lines of marks very like written words.

  “What are all these marks?” he asked.

  Nick burst out laughing. As soon as he began to talk, his face lost the air of sadness it had in repose—which so many young children have—and became mischievous and lively.

  “Writing, of course—can’t you see?” He snatched the paper away from Breuner. “I’ll read it to you, shall I? All of you had better listen. It’s the first chapter of a book I’ve written. … Once an aeroplane landed in a field and there were wild bulls. The ambassador said—”

  “The ambassador? What ambassador?” Thorburn interrupted slyly.

  “He was in the aeroplane—” Nick frowned at the interruption— ”So they killed the bulls, and roasted them—”

  “Who killed them?”

  Impatiently,

  “Who do you think? The ambassador, and the other people—and what they couldn’t eat themselves they gave to the farmer’s wife.” He stopped, and burst out laughing again. “That’s all I’ve written.”

  “I don’t think you need anything more,” said Breuner. “I should think it’s finished.”

  “It’s for you,” said Nick. “Here you are. … I know how to write, don’t I?”

  But before Breuner could answer, the young soldier, Hutton, appeared in the doorway: he was afraid to come any further, and stood there without speaking. The child saw him, and forgetting his “book,” cried out, “Oh, there you are, my darling,” in a voice of such anxious and joyful love that the three men looked at him with amazement. Is there such love?

  Running to the door, he flung himself at Hutton, and they went away together. Kent mumbled an excuse and took himself off: outside the door he almost knocked into Clarke—returning alone, sweating and out of breath. He looked sourly after Kent and remarked,

  “No need to be sorry for the young; they’re young.”

  “Sit down,” Thorburn said to him.

  The door into the corridor opened. Smith came in. Hesitated. Looking at him, the general thought that he had known him all his life and seen him hundreds of times—the same man; short, rather in the legs than the body, with broad shoulders and thin muscular arms; small eyes of no definite colour; at the back of them usually an ironic gleam, half friendly, half derisive and guarded: he was shrewd, mistrustful, competent, knew your place as well as he knew his, and, if a chance took you back of his shrewdness, surprising you by his charity.

  “Excuse me, sir, I wanted to speak to the colonel.”

  “What is it you want?” asked Thorburn. “You can speak to me about it.”

  “It’s about this Home Army,” Smith said quietly and slowly. “I thought I should let him know I’m not joining. I have a wife and children and I’m off home. That’s all.”

  “But weren’t you going with the aeroplane?”

  “No, sir. They thought I was, because of I said I’d wait back for Flying-Officer Henderson—I’m his fitter—but I wasn’t. Not me.”

  Genially inquisitive, Thorburn asked him,

  “What are you going to do with yourself?”

  “Oh, I can always have a job.”

  “What were you— in civil life?”

  “Tool-setter, sir.”

  “A very skilled job,” Breuner said in his friendly voice.

  “It is.”

  “Keep whippets?” Clarke asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A good Labour man, too, I’ll be bound. You needn’t answer, it’s written all over you.”

  Only a man from his own part of the country would have known, from Smith’s face, that he resented these questions. He said quietly,

  “I wasn’t going to answer, sir.”

  Thorburn showed all his strong discoloured teeth in a smile.

  “I’ve always wanted to ask one of you chaps what you thought you were winning. … If you had to strike—a fatuous thing to do, in a country as poor and dependent as ours—but if you had to, I say—why hadn’t you the guts, or the wit, to strike for something worth having? For a share of authority—and not, like the docile silly devils you must be, for a few miserable shillings. Eh?”

  Snapping his fingers, Clarke bawled,

  “We saw them, we saw them,

  Lying on their backs at St. Omer,

  We saw them, lying on their…

  Sorry, old boy, sorry. Out of my turn.”

  A jeering ironic gleam crossed Smith’s face.

  “Maybe you were never put to it for a few miserable shillings—” he began.

  Thorburn cut him roughly short.

  “Nonsense, damned nonsense. You asked for shillings because you hadn’t the courage or sense to ask for anything more. You bent your backs for a lot of clever ambitious monkeys to climb on and talk down to you about freedom and justice and the rest of it while you went on living like the poor creatures you always were. Freedom! Equality! Revolution! Good God, you don’t know what the words mean. Your monkeys told you you’d had a revolution and you took their word for it: they did themselves damned well out of it and you went on strike for another half-crown. Well—it takes all sorts of fools to prepare a defeat, and all sorts of cowards.”

  Smith was silent. His eyes lay like stones in their bruised sockets. Thorburn’s quick overbearing voice—the words cutting down on him so fast that he missed a few of them—angered him more than the insult.

  “Nay, if you weren’t in such a flawter to clear off,” he said, “you’d find out if there are more cowards among our lot than yours.”

  “I don’t think it is any use to blame each other,” said Breuner quietly.

  Thorburn got heavily up. Taking no notice of Breuner, he said,

  “And do you think you’ll get freedom and justice from the savages coming in?”

  “We can stand poverty better nor your class; we’ll maybe survive.”

  “Survivors,” Thorburn said bitterly. “Is that all?” He turned h
is back.

  As, awkwardly, even, in spite of his anger, disconcerted, Smith was going, Breuner stepped in front of him.

  “I hope,” he said, “that you will get home all right and be allowed to live there.”

  Smith turned on him a stolid glance.

  “Why not? I s’ll be nobody. Who’s going to be able to tell me from scores of Smiths?” He stopped, moved his head as if loosening it in a collar—and added, almost under his breath, “And don’t make any mistake—I shan’t forget to see what I see and think what I think, and I s’ll teach th’ lad the same. If he’s mine and his mother’s he won’t forget it, neither.”

  “For once it is better to be poor?”

  “I won’t say it’s not.”

  “Are you leaving now?” Breuner asked.

  “Nay, how can I leave before I’ve seen you lot out?”

  Breuner smiled.

  “Oh, well, we shall see each other again,” he murmured.

  Not knowing what to do with Breuner’s politeness, suspicious of it, Smith turned and went off.

  Clarke spoke with the sly not very amiable contempt of the countryman for the factory-worker.

  “I know his sort. They learn everything in factories but what’s what. Time was he used to have a fine life playing in David Smith and Goliath—full houses, where’s me sling? whang! over goes the big capitalist bully, good old David, hip hip hurrah, and off we go for a quiet one with Goliath before the pub closes. Goliath gets himself nationalised, what?, slings are out of order, nowt for little David to do but wish himself the compliments of the season and ask Goliath to spare a copper.”

  “I had no business to blame him,” Thorburn said, “he’s less to blame than anyone. Certainly less than his so-called betters—men without religion or charity. They made his life a mean little affair—hardly worth losing.”

  “He is rather lucky,” Breuner said.

  Thorburn turned on him a cold and overbearing glance.

  “What did you say?”

  “He is lucky,” Breuner repeated quietly, “he is going to his wife.”

  Chapter Four

  HOW gentle, how friendly, is a summer night in the north. After the heat of the day it was cool, yet not cold, and, half an hour off midnight, neither light nor dark. Looking into it from the narrow window of their bedroom, Elizabeth Heron knew that nothing, none of the warm, vivid, incontestably lovely places she knew they could find to live in—over there—would blunt the pain of losing just this, the kindness of the north.

  She turned away from it, and bent over the child’s bed. At last he was asleep. She crept out. Downstairs, when she pushed open the door of the common room, she found only her husband. In the moment when she came in he was working the heel of his boot through an illustrated paper lying open on the floor. It disturbed her—but she glanced smilingly at the obliterated page.

  “Who are you killing? … Oh, poor man, it’s not his fault. He couldn’t work a miracle, and what else could have saved us?”

  Very slightly ashamed, Heron said vehemently,

  “No, it’s myself I’m cursing. Why didn’t we leave five, ten, years ago? Why wait until the last minute, and have to bolt like rats? I was a fool.”

  “We talked about it often enough. Perhaps it was my fault we didn’t.”

  “No,” he answered, “it was mine. The truth is I was afraid.”

  “You? What nonsense. … If I’d encouraged you, we should have gone. I hated to leave our house—we were going to live in it for ever. Now it’s a heap of ashes, and your books with it. You’ll never forgive me!”

  He looked at her.

  “If I came in and told you I’d murdered someone, you’d say it was your fault.”

  “It might well be,” she said, smiling. “I might have poisoned your brain with my coffee. Why is it I can’t make good coffee?”

  Half leaning on her, his arms round her shoulders, he said,

  “You’re the only person I love. Except myself, of course,” he added bitterly.

  “Yes,” she said, “I think you love me.”

  “I love you, I depend on you, I trust you. If it weren’t for you, I couldn’t face America. I should have stayed here—until finally I had to swallow the poison old Lambert gave us for the worst.”

  She was careful not to let him see that she was afraid.

  “I don’t think I should ever be sure I’d reached the worst. I always want to go as far as the next corner.”

  “The worst would have been to be arrested. … I shall throw Lambert’s little present out of the aeroplane when we leave—where did the fellow say?—Labrador.”

  “Throw it away now.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then give it me to keep. My—my curiosity will see to it that we don’t swallow it too soon.”

  Turning from her, he made an impatient gesture, then said in a voice he tried to make gentle,

  “We must decide where we can live. New York is impossible. Too many people, too violent and restless—I should have a duodenal ulcer in a week. What would you feel about some rather isolated part of California? The sea there would remind us of Antibes, there are hills, pine forests, cypresses. There’ll be sand. In fact, very like the Mediterranean. And we can live cheaply—so that I needn’t ruin myself by writing quickly. I must have time, and I must have quiet. Time to work myself out of the despair we’ve been living in. I have things to say. But before I can say them, I shall have to learn—it will be painful enough—to detach myself from Europe—and the agony and despair of Europe.” He contorted his face. “You don’t write properly about a deathbed when you can still smell it. Over there they don’t know what it is to be a European. They don’t want to know. After all, why should they? Why should the living want a corpse dragged into their rooms? Time enough to worry about dying when it happens … and aren’t they right? What a monstrous difference it makes now whether you’ve been born on this side of the Atlantic or that. Here we’re prisoners, there we shall be exiles. Heaven knows how long it will take me to learn to breathe without anguish. I may be too old. God knows I feel an old man. No one can live in a dying civilisation as if it were a living one. It’s impossible. Everything I’ve written so far has been in spite of our rottenness, and it has exhausted me. If I’d been born in an age of faith, I’d have had all the force of the age with me, I might have been a great writer. Why didn’t I leave Europe sooner? … free myself. …” He had been walking feverishly a few steps forward and back: now he turned on her. “Am I too old to begin living? Can I, when I get over there, can I become disinterested—detached—in the way a priest is—not like a man drowning on a raft and trying to live his last minutes calmly? That’s no use, that’s not life. Elizabeth. …”

  His wife looked at him with a tranquil face.

  “Why not?”

  “Think. … To get away from the fear, the cruelties, the hatred—all the poisons we breathe here. They were choking me … even before this. …”

  There were times when her voice was another and less severe form of laughter. As now—

  “But do you believe there are no hatreds over there?”

  “Oh, of course there are—but they needn’t touch us.”

  “You mean, because we shall be safe?”

  Vexed, he said curtly,

  “If you like.”

  She was silent. Something in her face—she was looking down—puzzled him. He was just going to ask her if she felt anxious when she looked up at him, and said,

  “George, are you positive we can’t stay in this country?”

  He was startled—shocked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “No, I haven’t gone mad,” she said quickly, “or lost my nerve about going. Simply—we’ve had nine years, nearly ten. Oughtn’t we to be satisfied?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  She smiled at him, with an air of confident love.

  “I’ve been thinking about it the whole evening. Ten yea
rs. And we’ve been gloriously happy. Better than that, we’ve been content. How do you know that, over there, we shan’t forget to be content, and be like most people—disappointed, anxious, rather greedy?”

  He looked at her with cold anger.

  “What is this, Elizabeth?”

  “Partly those children. Only partly. The rest is—you and me.”

  “What children?”

  “That boy, Andrew Kent—and the girl. They’re just married.”

  “I don’t want to be unkind,” he said, exasperated. “But I don’t see what it has to do with us?”

  His wife hesitated.

  “She’s started a child.”

  “And haven’t we a child? Really, Elizabeth!”

  She was trembling. It was not likely he would notice it—but she turned away and walked airily to one of the leather couches, and arranged herself on it, crossing her legs and smoothing her skirt into place.

  “I thought—I would ask the girl—Cordelia—to take him with her and give him to your friends the Hoyts in New England. They’re rich, kind, they’ll look after him, and bring him up as if he were their own.”

  His exasperation had become fear.

  “Impossible,” he said. “You must be mad.”

  “To think of staying here?”

  “No. To think of handing our son over to strangers.”

  “Friends … kind, utterly reliable friends.”

  She was speaking so unemotionally, almost lightly, that again he wondered: Is she out of her mind? If she isn’t … His head throbbed with anger: he said coldly,

  “Are you really prepared not to see your child again? Not even to know whether he’s alive … simply to abandon him?”

  Without answering, she closed her eyes, lifting her head, so that the tear which forced itself under each eyelid did not run down. Rigid, her face was purely her grief. She shuddered, and said, “No—don’t.”