A Solitary War Read online

  Mrs. Carfax sat within the miniature boudoir. Its walls were of pine-wood panelling painted white. On them were displayed the knick-knacks and old family portrait miniatures and silhouettes of Lucy’s forebears. At least there was a hot fire to sit by. Its own flames and smoke went up its own chimney. Even so, it was impossible to sit on the left side of the hearth, owing to the draughts that cut through the cracks of the staircase door like several scythes. On the other side of the room, where Mrs. Carfax sat, it was warm. And with both electric radiator and oil-stove going as well, Mrs. Carfax did not look so cold and distraught as usual. When Phillip had seen her, before the concert began, she was sitting at Lucy’s Sheraton desk writing figures on a piece of paper.

  “I prefer a room in firelight only,” said Teddy, feet stretched out before him. “How lucky to find those old bricks. I think a raised hearth is the cure, you know. I love this hearth. The music is marvellous. Listen to the horns!”

  Legs stretched out to the hearth, eyes watching the play of flames. Mrs. Carfax’s bitch lay upon Phillip’s lap and chest: a unilateral friendship entirely, he told himself. Still, if it added to the gaiety of nations …

  “I could watch a wood fire for hours,” said Teddy, during an interval. “It isn’t the same with coal. I like the old black kettle hanging down like that, too.” The music was in flow. “That’s the b-bit I love!” he exclaimed, stuttering slightly in his excitement. There was deep tenderness, deep hunger, in the music. Phillip felt at one with Teddy. If only Teddy and he were by themselves they would have got on well.

  Pale flames arose from the hawthorn brands. The embers burned with a blue lambency. They sat there until the opera was finished, while a log fell and sparks shot up, wavered and swirled, some to go up the chimney, others to descend again.

  “There’s still a down-draught in that chimney,” said Teddy. “I’ve been thinking. I notice that smoke is forced out of the little baking oven damper in the wall beside the hearth. That denotes back-pressure. Yet the chimney seems wide enough at the top.”

  “It’s a fourteen inch square brick chimney on top. I had it built when the old pot was removed.”

  “It would make a great difference if this hearth burned efficiently. The room is very damp, you know.”

  “Want to hear the nine o’clock news?”

  “No, I’m sick of the goddam phoney war. I’d like to hear Haw-Haw at nine-thirty, though. Some bloody sense in what he says. What do you think of him?”

  “I met him in London a year ago. He had a razor-gash scar down one cheek. He seemed quite young to me. He had composure. There was a pale rose-pink look about him, yet no fragility, he seemed solid. I thought that he had both courage and single-mindedness. But sarcasm is no good.”

  They stared at the play of potassium flames over the embers.

  “You know,” said Teddy, presently, “I’ve been thinking over the partnership business, Phillip.” He fumbled for a cigarette, and lit it. “I’ve got a scheme which I’m sure would make us both good money.” He inhaled. He seemed to ponder. Quietly Phillip put on another log. Teddy watched it dulling the embers, but said nothing.

  “It’s seasoned, Teddy.”

  A small yellow flame moved from under the log. It started to creep sideways and upwards. Teddy watched it, and when it spread to a blaze he said, with an effort, “‘Yipps’ and I have been talking. I don’t like to rush into anything. I don’t like to decide all in a hurry. Now here’s my idea. On the day of the shoot, while you were reading from that old journal, I saw how you were being wasted, and how inevitably things were standing still. And I had an idea. Now Phillip, please listen to me—let me say what I have been thinking before you decide. You can’t go on wasting yourself forever on a glorified labourer’s job that gets you nowhere. Nor can I. I don’t mind working with the next man, but where the hell does it lead to? That’s what I say to ‘Yipps’. Do you follow me?”

  “I’m listening, Teddy.”

  “Well, old boy, my idea is this. Now don’t laugh at it, will you? Take your time to think it over. In The Times today is an advertisement, someone offering to take a pupil on a farm for three hundred quid. People are talking of investing money in land. At present our overseas trade interests are trying to keep their markets by buying up in Europe what we don’t really want, so that Germany shan’t have it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that won’t last, in my opinion. Hitler’s not the Ruhr-industrialists’ stooge that the papers make out. That’s newspaper twaddle. Hitler’s always a move ahead. He’ll sterilise our trade with his barter system, and if he can’t, he’ll walk over Europe to get commercial travellers’ territory.”

  “Like Napoleon——”

  “J-just a minute, Phillip. Just hear me a moment. Now you think Hitler will succeed bloodlessly—”

  “Don’t forget Churchill—”

  “Let me speak—you think of Hitler as—what did you call him—a pacificist? Well, I don’t forget Churchill. The Jews’ war isn’t started yet. Anyway, what I’m driving at is this. Through necessity, and all our gold leaving this country, most of it to the Yanks, and no foreign markets being open for investment and speculation, money will flow into the land. That is the basis of my scheme. You and I anticipate this trend. Now you have a name as a country writer, and parents with plenty of money who appreciate what you write would like their sons to be trained by you. What an advertisement Billy is, with his healthy glowing cheeks! The little beggar’s full of life—I love that boy, you know—well, we could have a lot looking like Billy.”

  “I can’t take on any more jobs, Teddy. There’s too much on my mind already. Also I’m the worst schoolmaster in the world. I’ve no patience.”

  “That’s because at present you’re trying to function in your wrong element. You’re being poisoned by all those details which shouldn’t be your concern. You’ll crack up if you go on like this. Your element is the one you revealed in your reading the day of the shoot. I watched the other’s faces while you were reading, and believe me, they were absorbed in it. You put it over on all of us. That’s your true line. Anyway, here’s my idea—only please, Phillip, don’t turn it down before you consider it. I can do all the organisation. I propose to put an advertisement in The Times saying that you are ready to take pupils on your farm, at three hundred pounds a year each. Now hold your horse, old man. Don’t say anything until I’ve finished. Hear me out first. I’ll do all the work on it. First, we want a decent house.”

  “I don’t think there are any to be had in the neighbourhood, Teddy.”

  “That’s where you’re behind the times, old boy. There’s an old yeoman type of farmhouse to be vacant in the near future, not a quarter of a mile from here, in this village.”

  “Where?”

  “Penelope’s.”

  “Penelope leaving?”

  “She told ‘Yipps’ she’s thinking of going somewhere quieter. I gather the camp, and the anti-aircraft range, which may be resumed any time now, anyway, they’ve spoiled the marshes for her. The question of a house can come later. That’s a mere detail. It hasn’t got to be on the farm, necessarily. And you don’t have to do any executive work. I’ll get a couple of trained masters, one of them an agricultural expert. They’ll be the staff. You will direct policy only, and lecture sometimes. We might form a company, I’ll get the money. ‘Yipps’ has some capital available, several thousands, she says, and she likes the idea. She’d run the place, as dame or matron. We’d do it properly—have a film projection room, among other things. Of course the farm must be modernised, a proper electric milking machine installed in the cow-house, et cetera. It would prove a very good thing, I’m convinced. If we started with only thirty pupils, say, we’d gross nine thousand quid a year. We could afford to pay for a decent manager, and better men on the farm than those old-fashioned duds you have now. People talk about the new world after this war is over, of efficiency and planning, well, let’s have a start here, and make you
r ideas a reality!”

  Teddy threw away his cigarette, and with fingers slightly shaking, lit another.

  “Now please, old boy, hear me out before you say anything. Remember, you will have none of the details to worry you. I will guarantee that. None of this worry about paint for priming and paint for the hard gloss finish, brushes not being cleaned after use, who left the lid off the tin of distemper and let the frost get in, or where can you get a half ton of cement, or rebuilding chimneys that smoke, or de-lousing old fat sows with disused engine oil and other ideas, all good I admit, but which now are making you negative, and which if you continue as you have been, will cause a crack up. I listened carefully to your reading, to the way you made vivid the ‘rosy-cheeked countryman’s child becoming the pale ricketty creature of the slums’, all the effects of the industrial revolution. It was absolutely obvious that you are a lecturer, a savant don’t the French call it, first and last. You’ve got considerable knowledge to impart, and what’s more, you can make it interesting to the ordinary man. Those are the lines on which you should expand, and I’d like to do it. I could do it, too. I—I’m keen on the idea, so don’t say ‘no’ until you’ve thought it all over, Phillip.”

  Teddy flicked his cigarette into the fire, seized the two-pronged fire-pick as though to alter Phillip’s arrangement of the lie of the logs, thought better of it, and laid the pick down.

  “Well, I’m going to The Hero to have a game of darts. You won’t come, I suppose? Now let the idea simmer, old man. Cheerio.” He got up and opened the door of ‘Yipp’s’ room. “I’m just going down to The Hero, dear,” he said, in his soft and gentle voice. “I’ve told Phillip my scheme. He’s promised to think it over. It was a wonderful dinner you gave us tonight. I’d like to thank you once again, dear. It was grand, wasn’t it, Phillip?”

  “Yes, it was first-class, ‘Yipps’, rather! I did so enjoy it,” said Phillip, forcing himself. He thought it was extravagant; and Lucy and the children existing on three pounds a week which included lodging, food, clothes and education——

  ‘Yipps’ said nothing. While the boudoir door remained open, the smoke in the parlour hearth hesitated, and vagged about; then it descended in grey skeins that began to move across the floor towards the boudoir.

  “Close the door!” cried Phillip.

  “All right, all right, I’m going now,” said Teddy, quietly. “I won’t be long, dear, I’ll bring something back for you. Cheerio.”

  ‘Yipp’s’ door was closed softly; then the outside door. Phillip sat in the unlit silence of the parlour, wondering what was coming next.

  *

  Teddy’s cautious, fumbling footsteps on the frozen path outside had ceased about a couple of minutes when the between-room door opened. Smoke immediately vagged about in the parlour chimney. The electric light snapped on. He got up from his chair, holding the retriever bitch in his arms.

  “Oh, am I disturbing you? Do you want the light off?”

  “Oh no, no. Teddy and I only had it off for Parsifal. It was a beautiful performance. Do keep the light on if you want it.”

  “I don’t want it on. It’s really for you to say if you’d like it off. I don’t want to offend you more than I can help.”

  Tired of holding the retriever, he put the agonised-eyed animal in his leather chair, where with a sigh of contentment it curled to sleep.

  “Really, I like the light on now, thank you.”

  “But you had it off just now.”

  “Just too lazy to switch it on. I was relaxing before the fire.”

  “Then of course you’d prefer it off. Why don’t you say so?” She moved to switch off. “But there, all. genii are supposed to be difficult, aren’t they?” she went on, with forced cheerfulness. “Well, how’s the ‘Little Ray? Angry with me for disturbing him in his meditation? Now, please sit down. A man ought to feel at ease in his own house.”

  “Do have this chair, ‘Yipps’, won’t you?”

  He lifted the other leather chair nearer for her, and stood by the Morris-type armchair, the first furniture he had bought for himself twenty years before.

  “No, you have the saddle-bag,” said Mrs. Carfax. “I like to see you in it. It’s a man’s chair. I don’t think a woman should sit in a man’s chair. Or perhaps you think she should?”

  This opened up a new aspect of the hunting woman who wore breeches and according to Teddy had hunted her own pack of hounds.

  “Do you believe in equality for the sexes?” she demanded, with a brilliant smile.

  “Yes, but equality is earned, not given. Wild animals are equal in the sexes, only they have different jobs.”

  “You’re a queer man,” she said, with a change of voice. She became meditative. Sitting on the edge of the saddle-bag chair occupied by her bitch she took the two-pronged fire-pick and began to prod the burning sticks with false energy. “But I think I understand you.”

  She turned and looked at him. Her face was sad. He could see that it was no longer a cheerful mask of her interior hopelessness. The reddish-brown eyes looking at him had dropped their guard, lost their remote blankness. He began to feel a slight flow between them, a stir of sympathy, but only superficially. Yet it was enough to evoke a sort of desperate desire to confide in her. But no: the petrification in her stopped the little hesitant flow.

  He looked into the scattered fire which now had lost the eager play of flames and was but a dull smoulder. She was, like himself, always suffering. Her brittle pride concealed a desperate nihilism because she was unloved. Her true self was away most of her time: hovering tremulous and sighful, imprisoned within. Like himself she was accompanied in her living by a doppelganger, a wraith of lost love, which she felt was dragging her down to the shades. Like every living thing not too far sunk in the death-wish she was hoping to make herself whole again, to renew her integrity in love, and so come to grace.

  “Penny for your thoughts, ‘Little Ray’.”

  “I was thinking of Teddy’s plan.”

  Was she, like him, afraid of growing old, fixed by the crystallisation of life? All men and women, feeling themselves overworn, sought relief through another, for biologically man and woman were something that had become two parts, and each part, by the very nature of life, sought its complement. And when one gave up hope, as the little sun within the breast declined, so one felt to be in the cold shade of life, one’s doppelganger to be enclosing one. Gradually the instinct of creation became weaker, and one wanted to be alone—and finally, to die. Poor ‘Yipps’: poor Runnymeade—kneeling at the feet of young women, seeking Mother Eve—feeling himself to be lost to life … as boys in battle, mortally wounded, cried out for their mothers.

  “I try hard to please you, ‘Little Ray’,” she said, her eyes upon his own.

  With what hopes had this girl—over-gay to conceal a shattered heart—this girl who through the imperceptible processes of time had become a woman approaching middle-age, feeling herself still to be a happy girl if only she had a chance—with what hopeful anticipation had she come with Teddy to start a new life, to become young once more, as an anemone in a drained rock-pool waved its fronds when the tide flowed in again?

  To avert the danger of the pleading in her eyes he leaned his face on his hands, elbows on knees, and stared into the smouldering hearth. He must dissemble his thoughts, which were nearly always of Melissa.

  With clasped hands Mrs. Carfax also stared into the fire, once again withdrawn into the merciless despairs of life.

  “There is the iron god of truth, the only common denominator of the struggling human world,” he said. Then, because she would not understand this he hastened to add, “‘Yipps’, I am sorry there is this constraint between us. I’ll try to tell you how I feel about it. I’ve always felt it is unnecessary to be at odds with anyone, if only one can see clearly, and then speak clearly, without the confusing emotion of self. Beyond one’s own prejudices one can see another point of view, even that opposed to oneself, and accep
t it as true. I learned that in No-man’s-land at Christmas nineteen-fourteen. I believe scholars call it empathy.”

  She had no idea of what he was saying. Giving him a glance both mournful and appealing she replied, “When I first saw you, I knew you were very unhappy.”

  Pretending not to have perceived the implication, he said, “I can’t bear to be at odds with anyone. But there must be common ground. I’d feel happier if things could be settled here on a business-like basis. You see, I don’t know where I am, or how long I can go on like this. My overdraft is increasing all the time, and nothing is coming in. I feel the Combined Household may be living beyond its income. And mine at present is about nil.”

  “I thought you were in a bad spot and needed help. That is why I came. To help you,” she persisted.

  “Yes, I realise how you and Teddy came out of a generous impulse. But I can’t feel that generosity should be the basis of a proposed partnership. It should be based on strict attention to detail.”

  “One must give and take in this life, ‘Little Ray’.”

  “Yes. Now about Teddy——”

  “Oh, I’m not concerned with Teddy, my dear man! I didn’t come here because of him, but to help you and Billy. What a splendid boy he is! And he will be entirely spoiled if he is allowed to go on as he is now. Well, as I said, I came here to help you, and I’m made to feel entirely useless.”

  “Well, you see, ‘Yipps’, I thought that you and Teddy were very close friends, and wanted to start farming together. After all, Teddy wrote to me out of the blue asking if I would consider taking him as a partner. We agreed, as you know, before the Corn Barn that afternoon, that we all would have a month together, on certain terms to be observed, and then we would decide. Well, the month is more than up, and——”

  “My dear man, you delude yourself! Teddy and I are good friends, but nothing more. We’ve known each other for years. All we ever had in common is that we played golf together. He used to live in a guest-house near my home, and was a good companion. I came here to run the house for you, because Lucy was going away. Someone had to do the work, you know!”