Mr. Standfast
I mumbled something about not talking rot—the conventional phrase. What
worried me was that the man was suffering. You could see it in his
eyes. But that evening I got nearer Wake than ever before, and he and I
became true friends, for he laid bare his soul before me. That was his
trouble, that he could lay bare his soul, for ordinary healthy folk
don’t analyse their feelings. Wake did, and I think it brought him
relief.
“Don’t think I was ever your rival. I would no more have proposed to
Mary than I would have married one of her aunts. She was so sure of
herself, so happy in her single-heartedness that she terrified me. My
type of man is not meant for marriage, for women must be in the centre
of life, and we must always be standing aside and looking on. It is a
damnable thing to be left-handed.”
“The trouble about you, my dear chap,” I said, “is that you’re too hard
to please.”
“That’s one way of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I hate
more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our
mainspring. Odd, isn’t it, for people who preach brotherly love? But
it’s the truth. We’re full of hate towards everything that doesn’t
square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our lady-like nerves.
Fellows like you are so in love with their cause that they’ve no time
or inclination to detest what thwarts them. We’ve no cause—only
negatives, and that means hatred, and self-torture, and a beastly
jaundice of soul.”
Then I knew that Wake’s fault was not spiritual pride, as I had
diagnosed it at Biggleswick. The man was abased with humility.
“I see more than other people see,” he went on, “and I feel more.
That’s the curse on me. You’re a happy man and you get things done,
because you only see one side of a case, one thing at a time. How would
you like it if a thousand strings were always tugging at you, if you
saw that every course meant the sacrifice of lovely and desirable
things, or even the shattering of what you know to be unreplaceable?
I’m the kind of stuff poets are made of, but I haven’t the poet’s gift,
so I stagger about the world left-handed and game-legged.... Take the
war. For me to fight would be worse than for another man to run away.
From the bottom of my heart I believe that it needn’t have happened,
and that all war is a blistering iniquity. And yet belief has got very
little to do with virtue. I’m not as good a man as you, Hannay, who
have never thought out anything in your life. My time in the Labour
battalion taught me something. I knew that with all my fine aspirations
I wasn’t as true a man as fellows whose talk was silly oaths and who
didn’t care a tinker’s curse about their soul.”
I remember that I looked at him with a sudden understanding. “I think I
know you. You’re the sort of chap who won’t fight for his country
because he can’t be sure that she’s altogether in the right. But he’d
cheerfully die for her, right or wrong.”
His face relaxed in a slow smile. “Queer that you should say that. I
think it’s pretty near the truth. Men like me aren’t afraid to die, but
they haven’t quite the courage to live. Every man should be happy in a
service like you, when he obeys orders. I couldn’t get on in any
service. I lack the bump of veneration. I can’t swallow things merely
because I’m told to. My sort are always talking about ‘service’, but we
haven’t the temperament to serve. I’d give all I have to be an ordinary
cog in the wheel, instead of a confounded outsider who finds fault with
the machinery.... Take a great violent high-handed fellow like you. You
can sink yourself till you become only a name and a number. I couldn’t
if I tried. I’m not sure if I want to either. I cling to the odds and
ends that are my own.”
“I wish I had had you in my battalion a year ago,” I said.
“No, you don’t. I’d only have been a nuisance. I’ve been a Fabian since
Oxford, but you’re a better socialist than me. I’m a rancid
individualist.”
“But you must be feeling better about the war?” I asked.
“Not a bit of it. I’m still lusting for the heads of the politicians
that made it and continue it. But I want to help my country. Honestly,
Hannay, I love the old place. More, I think, than I love myself, and
that’s saying a devilish lot. Short of fighting—which would be the sin
against the Holy Spirit for me—I’ll do my damnedest. But you’ll
remember I’m not used to team work. If I’m a jealous player, beat me
over the head.”
His voice was almost wistful, and I liked him enormously.
“Blenkiron will see to that,” I said. “We’re going to break you to
harness, Wake, and then you’ll be a happy man. You keep your mind on
the game and forget about yourself. That’s the cure for jibbers.”
As I journeyed to St Anton I thought a lot about that talk. He was
quite right about Mary, who would never have married him. A man with
such an angular soul couldn’t fit into another’s. And then I thought
that the chief thing about Mary was just her serene certainty. Her eyes
had that settled happy look that I remembered to have seen only in one
other human face, and that was Peter’s.... But I wondered if Peter’s
eyes were still the same.
I found the cottage, a little wooden thing which had been left perched
on its knoll when the big hotels grew around it. It had a fence in
front, but behind it was open to the hillside. At the gate stood a bent
old woman with a face like a pippin. My make-up must have been good,
for she accepted me before I introduced myself.
“God be thanked you are come,” she cried. “The poor lieutenant needed a
man to keep him company. He sleeps now, as he does always in the
afternoon, for his leg wearies him in the night.... But he is brave,
like a soldier.... Come, I will show you the house, for you two will be
alone now.”
Stepping softly she led me indoors, pointing with a warning finger to
the little bedroom where Peter slept. I found a kitchen with a big
stove and a rough floor of planking, on which lay some badly cured
skins. Off it was a sort of pantry with a bed for me. She showed me the
pots and pans for cooking and the stores she had laid in, and where to
find water and fuel. “I will do the marketing daily,” she said, “and if
you need me, my dwelling is half a mile up the road beyond the new
church. God be with you, young man, and be kind to that wounded one.”
When the Widow Summermatter had departed I sat down in Peter’s
arm-chair and took stock of the place. It was quiet and simple and
homely, and through the window came the gleam of snow on the diamond
hills. On the table beside the stove were Peter’s cherished
belongings—his buck-skin pouch and the pipe which Jannie Grobelaar had
carved for him in St Helena, an aluminium field match-box I had given
him, a cheap large-print Bible such as padres present to well-disposed
privates, and an old battered _Pilgrim’s Progress_ with gaudy pictures.
The illustration at which I opened showed Faithful going up to Heaven
from the fire of Vanity Fair like a woodcock that has just been
flushed. Everything in the room was exquisitely neat, and I knew that
that was Peter and not the Widow Summermatter. On a peg behind the door
hung his much-mended coat, and sticking out of a pocket I recognised a
sheaf of my own letters. In one corner stood something which I had
forgotten about—an invalid chair.
The sight of Peter’s plain little oddments made me feel solemn. I
wondered if his eyes would be like Mary’s now, for I could not conceive
what life would be for him as a cripple. Very silently I opened the
bedroom door and slipped inside.
He was lying on a camp bedstead with one of those striped Swiss
blankets pulled up round his ears, and he was asleep. It was the old
Peter beyond doubt. He had the hunter’s gift of breathing evenly
through his nose, and the white scar on the deep brown of his forehead
was what I had always remembered. The only change since I last saw him
was that he had let his beard grow again, and it was grey.
As I looked at him the remembrance of all we had been through together
flooded back upon me, and I could have cried with joy at being beside
him. Women, bless their hearts! can never know what long comradeship
means to men; it is something not in their lives—something that belongs
only to that wild, undomesticated world which we forswear when we find
our mates. Even Mary understood only a bit of it. I had just won her
love, which was the greatest thing that ever came my way, but if she
had entered at that moment I would scarcely have turned my head. I was
back again in the old life and was not thinking of the new.
Suddenly I saw that Peter was awake and was looking at me.
“Dick,” he said in a whisper, “Dick, my old friend.”
The blanket was tossed off, and his long, lean arms were stretched out
to me. I gripped his hands, and for a little we did not speak. Then I
saw how woefully he had changed. His left leg had shrunk, and from the
knee down was like a pipe stem. His face, when awake, showed the lines
of hard suffering and he seemed shorter by half a foot. But his eyes
were still like Mary’s. Indeed they seemed to be more patient and
peaceful than in the days when he sat beside me on the buck-waggon and
peered over the hunting-veld.
I picked him up—he was no heavier than Mary—and carried him to his
chair beside the stove. Then I boiled water and made tea, as we had so
often done together.
“Peter, old man,” I said, “we’re on trek again, and this is a very snug
little _rondavel_. We’ve had many good yarns, but this is going to be
the best. First of all, how about your health?”
“Good, I’m a strong man again, but slow like a hippo cow. I have been
lonely sometimes, but that is all by now. Tell me of the big battles.”
But I was hungry for news of him and kept him to his own case. He had
no complaint of his treatment except that he did not like Germans. The
doctors at the hospital had been clever, he said, and had done their
best for him, but nerves and sinews and small bones had been so wrecked
that they could not mend his leg, and Peter had all the Boer’s dislike
of amputation. One doctor had been in Damaraland and talked to him of
those baked sunny places and made him homesick. But he returned always
to his dislike of Germans. He had seen them herding our soldiers like
brute beasts, and the commandant had a face like Stumm and a chin that
stuck out and wanted hitting. He made an exception for the great airman
Lensch, who had downed him.
“He is a white man, that one,” he said. “He came to see me in hospital
and told me a lot of things. I think he made them treat me well. He is
a big man, Dick, who would make two of me, and he has a round, merry
face and pale eyes like Frickie Celliers who could put a bullet through
a pauw’s head at two hundred yards. He said he was sorry I was lame,
for he hoped to have more fights with me. Some woman that tells
fortunes had said that I would be the end of him, but he reckoned she
had got the thing the wrong way on. I hope he will come through this
war, for he is a good man, though a German.... But the others! They are
like the fool in the Bible, fat and ugly in good fortune and proud and
vicious when their luck goes. They are not a people to be happy with.”
Then he told me that to keep up his spirits he had amused himself with
playing a game. He had prided himself on being a Boer, and spoken
coldly of the British. He had also, I gathered, imparted many things
calculated to deceive. So he left Germany with good marks, and in
Switzerland had held himself aloof from the other British wounded, on
the advice of Blenkiron, who had met him as soon as he crossed the
frontier. I gathered it was Blenkiron who had had him sent to St Anton,
and in his time there, as a disgruntled Boer, he had mixed a good deal