Dastrey, in the last days of January, had been sent home from his ambulance with an attack of rheumatism1; and when it became clear that he could no longer be of use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had reluctantly taken his place behind a desk at the Ministry2 of War. The friends had dined early, so that he might get back to his night shift; and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the mist of their cigars floating across lustrous3 cabinet-fronts and the worn gilding4 of slender consoles.
“It always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously6. “What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and your nephew?”
Again and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant’s visit, he had turned over in his mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that last taunt7 of hers?
Not long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he could have submitted such a 187problem. Dastrey, in the black August days, starting for the front in such a frenzy8 of baffled blood-lust, had remained for Campton the type of man with whom it was impossible to discuss the war. But three months of hard service in Postes de Secours and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home with a mind no longer befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost, and knew it; and the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons and nurses steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among. Those few months had matured and mellowed9 him more than a lifetime of Paris.
He leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend’s difficulty.
“I see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble10 kind of job that I’ve been assigned to, you’ve no right not to try to keep your boy out of it if you can?”
“Well—by any honourable11 means.”
Dastrey laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. “The word’s not happy, I admit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers. So many of them, you see,” said Dastrey smiling, “we’d taken good care not to uncork for centuries. Since I’ve been on the edge of what’s going on fifty miles from here a good many of my own words have lost their 188meaning, and I’m not prepared to say where honour lies in a case like yours.” He mused13 a moment, and then went on: “What would George’s view be?”
Campton did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have welcomed the chance of explaining that George’s view, thank God, had remained perfectly14 detached and objective, and that the cheerful acceptance of duties forcibly imposed on him had not in the least obscured his sense of the fundamental injustice15 of his being mixed up in the thing at all.
But how could he say this now? If George’s view were still what his father had been in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view alone: Campton himself no longer thought that any civilized16 man could afford to stand aside from such a conflict.
“As far as I know,” he said, “George hasn’t changed his mind.”
Boylston stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and looked up at the ceiling.
“Whereas you——” Dastrey suggested.
“Yes,” said Campton. “I feel differently. You speak of the difference of having been in contact with what’s going on out there. But how can anybody not be in contact, who has any imagination, any sense of right and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you—or those books over there, when you turn to them after your day’s work? Perhaps they do, because you’ve got a real job, a job you’ve been ordered to do, 189and can’t not do. But for a useless drifting devil like me—my God, the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!”
“There are a good many people who wouldn’t call you useless, Mr. Campton,” said Boylston.
Campton shook his head. “I wish there were any healing in the kind of thing I’m doing; perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come naturally to love your kind.” (Boylston laughed.) “Service is of no use without conviction: that’s one of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up has brought to the surface. I was meant to paint pictures in a world at peace, and I should have more respect for myself if I could go on unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all the places where I’m not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That’s why——” he paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey’s friendly gaze: “That’s why I respect George’s opinion, which really consists in not having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to him. The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one’s individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman’s scream at an accident she isn’t in.”
Even while he spoke17, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself. He did not in the least believe that any individual sentiment counted for nothing at such a time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in rejoining: “Every one can at least contribute an attitude: 190as you have, my dear fellow. Boylston’s here to confirm it.”
“An attitude—an attitude?” Campton retorted. “The word is revolting to me! Anything a man like me can do is too easy to be worth doing. And as for anything one can say: how dare one say anything, in the face of what is being done out there to keep this room and this fire, and this ragged20 end of life, safe for such survivals as you and me?” He crossed to the table to take another cigar. As he did so he laid an apologetic pressure on his host’s shoulder. “Men of our age are the chorus of the tragedy, Dastrey; we can’t help ourselves. As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic21, goading22 on the combatants in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner be spinning among the women.”
“Well,” said Dastrey, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to my spinning at the Ministry; where, by the way, there are some very pretty young women at the distaff. It’s extraordinary how much better pretty girls type than plain ones; I see now why they get all the jobs.”
The three went out into the winter blackness. They were used by this time to the new Paris: to extinguished lamps, shuttered windows, deserted23 streets, the 191almost total cessation of wheeled traffic. All through the winter, life had seemed in suspense24 everywhere, as much on the battle-front as in the rear. Day after day, week after week, of rain and sleet25 and mud; day after day, week after week, of vague non-committal news from west and east; everywhere the enemy baffled but still menacing, everywhere death, suffering, destruction, without any perceptible oscillation of the scales, any compensating26 hope of good to come out of the long slow endless waste. The benumbed and darkened Paris of those February days seemed the visible image of a benumbed and darkened world.
Down the empty asphalt sheeted with rain the rare street lights stretched interminable reflections. The three men crossed the bridge and stood watching the rush of the Seine. Below them gloomed the vague bulk of deserted bath-houses, unlit barges27, river-steamers out of commission. The Seine too had ceased to live: only a single orange gleam, low on the water’s edge, undulated on the jetty waves like a streamer of seaweed.
The two Americans left Dastrey at his Ministry, and the painter strolled on to Boylston’s lodging28 before descending29 to the underground railway. He, whom his lameness30 had made so heavy and indolent, now limped about for hours at a time over wet pavements and under streaming skies: these midnight tramps had become a sort of expiatory31 need to him. “Out there—out 192there, if they had these wet stones under them they’d think it was the floor of heaven,” he used to muse12, driving on obstinately32 through rain and darkness.
The thought of “Out there” besieged33 him day and night, the phrase was always in his ears. Wherever he went he was pursued by visions of that land of doom34: visions of fathomless35 mud, rat-haunted trenches36, freezing nights under the sleety37 sky, men dying in the barbed wire between the lines or crawling out to save a comrade and being shattered to death on the return. His collaboration38 with Boylston had brought Campton into close contact with these things. He knew by heart the history of scores and scores of young men of George’s age who were doggedly39 suffering and dying a few hours away from the Palais Royal office where their records were kept. Some of these histories were so heroically simple that the sense of pain was lost in beauty, as though one were looking at suffering transmuted40 into poetry. But others were abominable41, unendurable, in their long-drawn useless horror: stories of cold and filth42 and hunger, of ineffectual effort, of hideous43 mutilation, of men perishing of thirst in a shell-hole, and half-dismembered bodies dragging themselves back to shelter only to die as they reached it. Worst of all were the perpetually recurring44 reports of military blunders, medical neglect, carelessness in high places: the torturing knowledge of the lives that might have been saved 193if this or that officer’s brain, this or that surgeon’s hand, had acted more promptly45. An impression of waste, confusion, ignorance, obstinacy46, prejudice, and the indifference47 of selfishness or of mortal fatigue48, emanated49 from these narratives50 written home from the front, or faltered51 out by white lips on hospital pillows.
“The Friends of French Art,” especially since they had enlarged their range, had to do with young men accustomed to the freest exercise of thought and criticism. A nation in arms does not judge a war as simply as an army of professional soldiers. All these young intelligences were so many subtly-adjusted instruments for the testing of the machinery52 of which they formed a part; and not one accepted the results passively. Yet in one respect all were agreed: the “had to be” of the first day was still on every lip. The German menace must be met: chance willed that theirs should be the generation to meet it; on that point speculation53 was vain and discussion useless. The question that stirred them all was how the country they were defending was helping54 them to carry on the struggle. There the evidence was cruelly clear, the comment often scathingly explicit55; and Campton, bending still lower over the abyss, caught a shuddering56 glimpse of what might be—must be—if political blunders, inertia57, tolerance58, perhaps even evil ambitions and connivances, should at last outweigh59 the effort of the front. There was no logical argument against such a possibility. All civilizations 194had their orbit; all societies rose and fell. Some day, no doubt, by the action of that law, everything that made the world livable to Campton and his kind would crumble60 in new ruins above the old. Yes—but woe61 to them by whom such things came; woe to the generation that bowed to such a law! The Powers of Darkness were always watching and seeking their hour; but the past was a record of their failures as well as of their triumphs. Campton, brushing up his history, remembered the great turning-points of progress, saw how the liberties of England had been born of the ruthless discipline of the Norman conquest, and how even out of the hideous welter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had come more freedom and a wiser order. The point was to remember that the efficacy of the sacrifice was always in proportion to the worth of the victims; and there at least his faith was sure.
He could not, he felt, leave his former wife’s appeal unnoticed; after a day or two he wrote to George, telling him of Mrs. Brant’s anxiety, and asking in vague terms if George himself thought any change in his situation probable. His letter ended abruptly: “I suppose it’s hardly time yet to ask for leave——”
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1
rheumatism
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| n.风湿病 | |
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ministry
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| n.(政府的)部；牧师 | |
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lustrous
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| adj.有光泽的；光辉的 | |
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gilding
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| n.贴金箔，镀金 | |
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hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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nervously
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| adv.神情激动地，不安地 | |
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taunt
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| n.辱骂，嘲弄；v.嘲弄 | |
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frenzy
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| n.疯狂，狂热，极度的激动 | |
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mellowed
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| （使）成熟( mellow的过去式和过去分词 )； 使色彩更加柔和，使酒更加醇香 | |
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humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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honourable
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| adj.可敬的；荣誉的，光荣的 | |
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muse
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| n.缪斯（希腊神话中的女神），创作灵感 | |
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mused
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| v.沉思，冥想( muse的过去式和过去分词 )；沉思自语说（某事） | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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civilized
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| a.有教养的，文雅的 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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18
grunted
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| （猪等）作呼噜声( grunt的过去式和过去分词 )； （指人）发出类似的哼声； 咕哝着说 | |
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assent
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| v.批准，认可；n.批准，认可 | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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elastic
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| n.橡皮圈，松紧带；adj.有弹性的；灵活的 | |
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goading
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| v.刺激( goad的现在分词 )；激励；（用尖棒）驱赶；驱使（或怂恿、刺激）某人 | |
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deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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sleet
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| n.雨雪；v.下雨雪，下冰雹 | |
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compensating
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| 补偿，补助，修正 | |
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barges
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| 驳船( barge的名词复数 ) | |
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lodging
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| n.寄宿，住所；(大学生的)校外宿舍 | |
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descending
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| n. 下行 adj. 下降的 | |
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lameness
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| n. 跛, 瘸, 残废 | |
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expiatory
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| adj.赎罪的，补偿的 | |
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obstinately
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| ad.固执地，顽固地 | |
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besieged
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| 包围，围困，围攻( besiege的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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fathomless
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| a.深不可测的 | |
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trenches
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| 深沟，地沟( trench的名词复数 )； 战壕 | |
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sleety
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| 雨夹雪的，下雨雪的 | |
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collaboration
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| n.合作，协作；勾结 | |
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doggedly
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| adv.顽强地，固执地 | |
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transmuted
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| v.使变形，使变质，把…变成…( transmute的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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41
abominable
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| adj.可厌的，令人憎恶的 | |
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42
filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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recurring
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| adj.往复的，再次发生的 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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obstinacy
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| n.顽固；（病痛等）难治 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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fatigue
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| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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emanated
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| v.从…处传出，传出( emanate的过去式和过去分词 )；产生，表现，显示 | |
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50
narratives
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| 记叙文( narrative的名词复数 )； 故事； 叙述； 叙述部分 | |
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51
faltered
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| （嗓音）颤抖( falter的过去式和过去分词 )； 支吾其词； 蹒跚； 摇晃 | |
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52
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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53
speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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54
helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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explicit
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| adj.详述的，明确的；坦率的；显然的 | |
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56
shuddering
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| v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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57
inertia
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| adj.惰性，惯性，懒惰，迟钝 | |
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58
tolerance
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| n.宽容；容忍，忍受；耐药力；公差 | |
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59
outweigh
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| vt.比...更重，...更重要 | |
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60
crumble
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| vi.碎裂，崩溃；vt.弄碎，摧毁 | |
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woe
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| n.悲哀，苦痛，不幸，困难；int.用来表达悲伤或惊慌 | |
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