The First of July (13 page)

While I was agitating over these matters, Mr. Nugent came in holding his newspaper one day. He had acquired a habit of standing at the center of the shop, when it was empty, to proclaim news of battles or the King, like he was a town crier from the olden days and we peasants unable to read. John Quickseed always made a point of absenting himself. Today the news was that they were drawing up a list of all single men between eighteen and thirty-five who were fit for service. Mr. Nugent shook his head, looking not at Jakob or old Albert or Joe but at me.

“Mark my words,” he said: “it’s a list today, but it will be conscription tomorrow. Just as you’re getting the grasp of the business.” He looked sorrowful. “To think we made a uniform for the Kaiser when he was a young man.”

Then old Jakob spoke, and direct to me. “So, you vill be in invantry?”

“The poor bloody infantry,” said Mr. Nugent.

“In var,” Jakob said, using “V” for “W” and “F,” as he did, “invantry soldier eating rat and each other body.”

Mr. Nugent looked quite put out. “Not in
our
war,” he said.

Later on Joe said to me, “No British soldier would be a cannibal. Have the Russkies had any other wars?” Neither of us was going to ask Jakob. He wasn’t right in the head, and it wasn’t just a matter of his neighbors burning his workshop down.

But I thought that if Mr. Nugent’s newspaper was correct, it was, like as not, the “bloody infantry” would have me. I thought of old Dick and thought he’d been proud of the Bedfordshires—which was just as well, as he’d had to die for them. And I thought of Hercules and was bothered.

The afternoon was busy; three officers came in, one after the other. One officer was scarcely more than an excited boy about to join his regiment and was whisked off to be measured by Mr. Quickseed. Cavalry men were always high spenders. Then an older officer of engineers. We didn’t see many sappers in Duke Street; most of our gentlemen had private means and the Royal Engineers, as a rule, did not, but Mr. Nugent obviously knew him and I noticed he wore a purple-and-white ribbon, very small on his tunic. He too was taken through to the back.

Seconds later, a tired-looking gunnery officer came in. Much my age, I thought, and in some way, I thought at first, familiar. He wasn’t there for full equipping; he just wanted more shirts and gloves and to inquire about a cased compass he’d seen in the window.

“It’s for my friend,” he said. “He’s in the Flying Corps, and I thought it would be useful.”

I didn’t like to say that they would be standard issue, but anyway by the time we’d added up the shirts, gloves, and a dozen of our best India cotton handkerchiefs, he couldn’t afford it. He didn’t say it, but I knew; and, at that moment, I knew where I’d seen him before.

He bought the compass anyway.

Then, when I was wrapping up his packages, I caught him looking at me, as if he too thought we’d met before. He frowned slightly and then looked embarrassed.

“Before. You were at Debenhams?” he said.

And then I was awkward on account of my reasons for leaving being not entirely creditable.

“I’m sorry,” he said and I could see he was feeling awkward too. “You were once very kind to my friend,” he said.

He waited to see if I was making a link.

“It was over a pair of gloves for his fiancée.”

I always knew it was his friend who had stolen the gloves, and always knew that the man now in front of me had been quite unaware of it until I accosted them in the street. But he was in uniform, and an officer, so the less said, the better.

“I think I remember, sir,” I said; “what a coincidence.” Folding the paper neatly, as I’d been taught. Then, to change the subject, I said, “Are you on leave for long, sir?”

He shook his head. “Back to my regiment tomorrow. We’ve taken a great many losses,” and he looked toward the window as if ghostly gunners might be trundling by.

“If there’s anything—” he said.

An uneasy silence fell—the sort of silence that is full of sounds: rain on the windowpanes, faded discussions in the back room, a motorcar idling outside the shop, even, I fancied, Jakob’s sewing machine, though I had never heard it before from out front.

Perhaps it was the silence or because we’d met before, in a manner of speaking, that I blurted out: “Well, excuse me for asking, but do soldiers make wills in case they might die?”

I looked behind me for Mr. Nugent, who had strong views on talking out of turn to customers and had even drawn up a list of approved subjects on which we might engage them. It was short.

“It’s just that my friend left his Hercules in my care and now he’s been killed and I don’t know what to do.”

He thought for a minute. “And Hercules is … a dog?”

“No, sir. It’s a bicycle.”

“A bicycle.” He looked puzzled. “Is it hard for you to store it?”

“No. No. It’s a fine bicycle, compares with the Raleigh Superbe, the Resilient Royal Centaur, or even the French machines, though it’s more for straight roads than agility, but that’s the point. It’s very fine and it’s not mine.”

It all came tumbling out. Mr. Nugent would have had a fit.

“But my friend had no family, you see.” And then, to my surprise, I heard myself saying, “I’ll probably be joining up soon. I want to have things straight.”

He smiled a little. “Well, that’s splendid,” he said, though he said it without the conviction of Mr. Richmond. He looked at me again as if assessing what kind of soldier I’d be.

“Are you a West Country man?” he said.

It was a small blow—I had hoped I sounded like a Londoner now.

“My own father is a clergyman in Devon,” he went on, though I noticed he had no kind of West Country tone to
his
voice, but then it aways seemed to me that all officers spoke the same.

“Yes, sir. My father has a business near Totnes.” That was overstating it a bit, but I hoped he wouldn’t ask.

“Splendid,” says he. “The Devons. Fine old regiment. You want to join the infantry?”

I shrugged politely.

“You obviously like bicycles, so I suppose you might consider joining a cyclist’s battalion?”

You could have knocked me down with a feather. A cyclist’s battalion. I must have looked surprised, because he said “I’ll tell you what: there’s a good unit I know of, and the adjutant’s an old school friend. If you report with a bicycle in good working order, then I think you get an allowance. I’d say that would be quite a good use of your deceased friend’s machine, wouldn’t you? If you aren’t set on the Devons, that is.”

I was hardly able to reply. If I had to go to war, to take Hercules would be like taking a friend. “Is that an infantry unit?” I asked.

“More like cavalry, I suppose,” he said. “Mounted troops, you see.” And then he really did smile.

“Do you know where Huntingdon is?” he said. “They were a territorial outfit before the war… .” He hesitated and looked less confident. “Anyway, if you would care for an introduction, I could give you details.”

I hardly knew what to say. In the end, I just said yes. “Yes, please. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir.”

He wrote down a name. “Go to this recruiting office in Huntingdon, or write direct perhaps to see if it’s worth the journey. And what’s your name?”

So I told him, and he wrote it down in his pocketbook (officer’s, pigskin), and while he wrote he added, in a nonchalant way, “Mine is Chatto, by the way. Benedict Chatto. If they take you, with any luck all your service will be at home. Patrolling the eastern coast and so on. A lot of birds, I’m told. Flat roads and wind.”

Then he looked up and shook my hand, as if we had a bargain. And I said “Thank you, sir.”

Then he said “Good luck,” cheerily. I think they taught them that, because I was to hear a lot of officers speak in that tone.

A while after Mr. Chatto had gone, Mr. Nugent came out with the officer that he’d taken for measuring and opened the shop door for him.

“You know who that was?” he said. “My officer?”

I shook my head, and Mr. Nugent shook his as if he was shocked.

“Captained the MCC. Wonderful fast bowler. Military Cross.”

He looked back to the door where the spirit of cricketing manhood still lingered, this hero having just passed through it. I had never been one for cricket, so I nodded again, up and down this time, thinking how I would have felt if it had been François Faber on his bicycle.

Despite Lieutenant Chatto’s good wishes, in matters of luck I had both sorts. Connie, once I said I was going to be a soldier, would have nothing more to do with me; no matter that everybody knew we’d soon be conscripted, she wanted me to be a conchie, a conscientious objector, a martyr for her cause incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs.

I went to tell Florence, and she said “Ooh, I hope you don’t end up like poor Dick.” But she didn’t kiss me.

Nor was Mr. Nugent the type to hand out guineas. For a start, he was too inconvenienced by my leaving and, anyway, going to serve King and country was no novelty now, even with a bicycle. So I was surprised when, just as I was leaving, he held up a hand.

“Wait!” he said and pulled open a drawer. Out came a box holding a cigarette lighter, our basic model, with khaki cloth, which hadn’t sold well, which was odd as it was good value. He handed it to me, looking embarrassed and surprised at himself.

“Good luck,” he said.

I walked home, thinking I would start smoking as soon as I took the King’s shilling. I stopped on Lambeth Bridge, gray as the water and the sky, and I looked toward parliament in its haze of drizzle, and what I felt was quite different from what I’d expected. Not fear, but a sort of relief in a decision. Now I was part of things; now I would know what other men knew. So I was grateful that my path had crossed twice with Lieutenant Chatto, as if the second meeting had made good our first.

The recruiting office acted like they were doing me a favor in taking me, given that the cyclists were mostly territorials.

“But we have been sent a recommendation,” the officer said, as if that settled it. Good old Lieutenant Chatto had been as true as his word. Fate is a funny thing: “It’s who you know” was a phrase I’d often heard but never grasped until now.

The sergeant said that my bicycle would need mudguards and front and rear lights and handlebars that did not curve down. I was all right regarding the handlebars, but the lights were a cost. Still, I was to get a 2
s
. 6
d
. allowance for the bicycle. I walked home and was thinking how I’d give Hercules a run on Saturday evening so he’d be ready. Then I nearly bumped into a young lady, very pretty with soft curls and a rather pert little hat. I had become so much the hero of my little daydream that I must have smiled. Her hand came toward me, touched me, so fast that I was caught off my guard. But then I looked down and saw she had tucked a white feather in my lapel.

“You should be in the trenches,” she said. “My brother died at Gallipoli so you could loiter enjoying the view.”

Then she was gone; I had a sense she was scared to linger in case I laid one on her. After all, she had no idea what sort of man I was; just because I was a coward in her eyes didn’t mean I might not also be violent. The feather had fallen to the ground, but I picked it up; it seemed only polite. There was grit on it, and I wiped it away. There it lay, across my hand, perfectly white. I wondered where these young ladies found them. It was probably a goose feather and from a butcher’s. I kept the feather, but as I walked across the bridge I thought about Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, Egypt and places in Africa where men were fighting. I wondered whether I might be cycling through deserts or jungles and whether I’d be good at it and whether Hercules had the right tires for sand, and I thought I would buy a bigger map than the one I’d had when I dreamed of bicycling on the Continent. For who knew where this war might take me?

In three weeks, I’d had my medical and received my initial instructions for the 7th Hunts (Cyclists) Battalion and could claim a train ticket for Hercules as well as myself, and so we set off to do our bit.

Harry, England,
August 1914–Winter 1915

T
EDDY WAS FULL OF QUESTIONS
about the war.

“I hope it goes on until I can join,” he’d said. “I’d like to fly an aeroplane and drop grenades on the Germans.”

“Well, I hope it doesn’t,” Isabelle said sharply. “It’s not a game. France has already seen its boys killed—they all have to fight. Not like here, where they can choose whether to join. My cousin’s boy will be a soldier now. She has nobody but him, but he’ll still have to go.”

Teddy had sat, half subdued, for a while; but then he said, with a glance at his mother, “Will you go, Harry? You’d look awfully good in uniform. You could use Papa’s sword—the one he killed Russians with. Wouldn’t you like to fly an aeroplane?”

“No, I’d be hopeless,” Harry said. “And no, I shan’t be joining up, whatever the allure of the uniform.” He smiled at Teddy. “I have Marina to look after, and our home isn’t here in England.”

“But you
are
English,” Teddy persisted. “I mean, Marina’s American, but you can’t change if you’re born something, can you? And why aren’t you coming back here to Abbotsgate for good, now that you’re Sir Henry? Cook says the estate needs a man’s hand. Anyway, you could be in charge and tell everybody what to do.”

“Teddy,” Isabelle had said, in mock outrage, “stop interrogating your brother, or he won’t come back at all.”

“I’m sure you can be in charge on my behalf,” Harry said, “with your mother’s help.”

He had already appointed a good land agent who would come to live on the estate, but a little bit of him hoped that, in time, the adult Teddy might take it on. He had promised Teddy that he could come out to see them in America next year.

“Your mother too,” he’d said. “When this war’s over.”

And so they had returned to New York, different people entering a different world. Marina had been dutiful and not at all unpleasant to him, but it was like living with a considerate stranger. At night she curled away from him and went to sleep, and although he drew some comfort from resting his hand on her hip and was glad she didn’t move to dislodge it, there was nothing more. Until she specifically told him otherwise, he could only hope that she still loved him.

The Atlantic journey had seemed endless. After four days of waiting in the Adelphi, they had eventually departed from Liverpool in a second-class cabin and on a ship teeming with extra passengers. Their steward, apologetic, told them the crew was short-staffed because so many of the men had been called up by the Naval Reserve. The women and older men they had taken on to replace them had never really had time to learn their duties, and service was haphazard.

They had passed a recruiting office on their way to the docks, where a queue of seemingly good-hearted, jostling lads and men stretched for a hundred yards. Some had brought children with them, and one man was playing a harmonica. They seemed a jolly crowd. On the dockside, soldiers were checking manifests, and at the far end a warship was docked with sailors drawn up on deck. He felt—and, in the old days, would have told Marina that he felt—irrelevant. There seemed to be so many men of his age in uniform, and those that were not were busy and serious. Having left their luggage in Paris, he had a choice only of summer clothes suitable for a wealthy man on a leisurely European honeymoon, or the formal dress he had worn for his father’s funeral.

As an RNR officer checked off his name on the passenger list, he gazed at the anchors on the man’s gleaming buttons and felt like a lightweight fool in his blazer and boater.

“You’re British, sir?” the officer asked. “Leaving for America?” and Harry had perceived it as a condemnation, but it also irritated him. That night, as Marina pretended to sleep, he made a compact with himself. He would not use his title, and if in time America joined the war, he would join the American Army. What better statement of his commitment to his new country? But he was troubled by a feeling that he was, yet again, running away.

The following months seemed unreal to him, and the distant war was always present. They spent a week in Nantucket, where the wind grazed the skin and whistled through the coarse grasses and the sea was dark and marbled. They returned to see newspaper photographs of the bombardment of the medieval city of Ypres. The city had been destroyed; human casualties were terrible on all sides. The grinning, skinny soldiers with bad teeth, whose pictures had accompanied headlines a few weeks ago, were now weary, knowing faces under muddy tarpaulins.

Back in New York, the majority view—and Harry sympathized with it—was that America should stay out of a purely European war. But among their friends, there were different levels of sympathy. They could discuss it intelligently, although at times it seemed obscene to reduce the suffering of a continent to the level of a Harvard debate.

Among those with German or British roots and interests, there were certain conversations one avoided at dinner. Once, when he was in the company of friends complacent about America’s geographical distance and political wisdom, he had made some observation about war sometimes coming to find you even if you didn’t choose to go to it. A man had turned to him and said “Well, of course, you’re British; you would say that,” and he’d retorted “Personally, I thought Britain should have stayed neutral” and realized from Marina’s face that he had spoken too sharply. They went out less, by tacit agreement. Over a decade ago he had remade himself as a content, forward-looking American; now, through no choice of his own, he was being unmade again.

Britain was blockading German ports; Germany had declared British waters a war zone. Harry’s business was booming as imports from Europe dried up, but it could only be a matter of time, he thought, until the markets he sold to faltered. He started buying the London papers and reading them each day. The situation in Europe was grim and relentless. After a quiet Thanksgiving, Christmas was upon them; they exchanged modest presents. Marina let him make love to her, but he was left with the feeling that, even in her pleasure, she was self-contained; the moments of abandon they’d once shared had been left behind in Europe. They saw the Ballets Russes and heard Caruso sing in
Carmen
at the Met. Meanwhile, uncertain of his own motives, Harry interviewed three men for the job of managing his business.

News came of setbacks in the Dardanelles so severe that even the British papers couldn’t disguise the strategic miscalculations. Walking unwillingly to a concert later that day, one that Marina had told him excitedly would be the talk of New York, he knew he was increasingly acting a part, but he had no idea how to break free. He owed so much to Marina that her interests had to be paramount.

Yet the evening turned into something extraordinary. Carnegie Hall was crammed, the atmosphere electric, the audience curious or preparing to be shocked. The music was by Alexander Scriabin, but included what he called a clavier of light, an instrument of his own imagination. Even at the Moscow première, they had not attempted to provide such a fantastic instrument; but now, here in New York, a machine had been constructed that projected color onto fine screens in harmony with the notes. Harry understood none of it but had a sense of music escaping into another kind of expression, a new world of possibility; even the name of the piece,
Prometheus: The Poem of Fire
, seemed right for the music and the times. Listening, he knew that where once he had been grateful to escape the conflict, now merely to watch was becoming impossible.

A Christmas card arrived from Isabelle in late January 1915, enclosing a letter from her and one from Teddy. It had taken ten weeks to reach them. The autumn colors at Abbotsgate had been wonderful, she wrote, but high winds made the house cold and the roof needed repairing. The father of one of Teddy’s closest friends had been killed in Flanders, and Teddy was very troubled by it. Jeremy Hope, the estate agent, was having trouble replacing young workers on the estate as they left to join the local regiment.

Teddy had sent a photograph of himself on his pony, Venables. His letter was short—an account of rugger scores, his Common Entrance examination for Eton, and a talk they’d had at school on diamond farming in Bechuanaland.

Harry had come home tired that day, forgetting that they were expected at a soirée, and was irritable as he dressed in a hurry. A harpist, wearing a spangled green gown and looking, he thought, like a rather stout lizard, played at one end of a fine drawing room. At dinner he sat next to an almost silent and blotchy debutante; he found himself hoping that she was accompanied by a large fortune. On his other side was the considerably more interesting wife of the editor of a leading Boston newspaper. She was, he had been told, a cousin of Andrew Carnegie.

Amid all the small talk, she was refreshingly frank. “It must be hard,” she said, “watching your country suffer from so far away.”

“Yes.”

“I hear that your government will bring in conscription within months at this rate—my husband has heard that the losses have made this inevitable. Do you think it will apply to you?”

While he considered this matter, which had been hovering just outside his consciousness for days, she added “I mean, would you want it to?”

“I certainly wouldn’t try to avoid it,” he said. “But the truth is,” and as he spoke, he realized that it was, indeed, an absolute truth, “there would seem to be something undignified about waiting until I’d been tracked down and forced to do my duty.”

She smiled, mischievously, but evidently pleased with his words. “So you do feel it is your duty, then?”

“How would you feel, seeing pictures of your countrymen being slaughtered every day and then going out to—to listen to some—harpist—play Celtic folk songs?”

She touched his sleeve. Her voice was low. “I am so sorry. That was abominably insensitive of me. I was interested, genuinely, but it is not a good topic for dinner-party talk.”

“No. No, I am very glad you asked me. I should have been asking myself. And I rather hate dinner-party talk.”

On his other side, the debutante’s knife grated on the gold-scrolled dinner plate, and she stared at it as if trying to pare it back to china clay.

“Are you enjoying the evening?” he asked her. “The harpist was rather good, wasn’t she?”

The girl, with a mouth full of sole, stared at him, panic-stricken and chewing earnestly, her fork brandished like a weapon on the end of her chubby forearm. He put his hand up. “Sorry. I always ask questions at the wrong time!”

He turned back to the editor’s wife.

“What would you do, if you were me?” he said with what he hoped was levity.

“Do you have children?”

He was caught by surprise. His eyes flickered across to Marina, who was in polite conversation with an elderly banker.

“No. No, we don’t.” Then he added, as if it were an excuse, “We haven’t been married very long.”

It struck Harry that he had thought very little about children. He knew of Marina’s longings, but she was healthy and young: presumably children would come. For himself, he had taken it for granted that Teddy would be his heir—at least to Abbotsgate, his home—in his own right. Yet Marina had every right to expect that any son of theirs, if they had one, would inherit the estate. He thought again of what an inadequate husband he had been, isolated, detached from real life; even in his passionate exploration of this great city, he had been a spectator; his pursuit of Marina had been like selecting a particularly beautiful, interesting souvenir. If he had had the simple courage to explain his circumstances to a woman who had trusted him enough to become his wife, then these things could have been discussed. Now, it was impossible.

He was startled for a second when his neighbor spoke again.

“I would talk to your ambassador,” she said. “Informally. He will know how things stand. You could see about taking a commission without committing yourself yet. Perhaps they won’t want you. But your position is to either wait until they drag you off to fight, or to stay here and gawp from afar at horrors facing your childhood friends.”

He nodded very slowly. “Thank you.” Then he told her that if America joined the war, he’d enlist as an American.

She looked unflatteringly amused.

“I’m sure they’d be glad to have you. But President Wilson is quite determined that we should merely watch and stay well away.”

“And you agree?”

“Of course. It’s terrible. I hate war. My grandfathers were generals on different sides of the Civil War. North, South: we burned and destroyed each other, and we planted deep roots of hatred and distrust. I don’t even know why you—Britain—are involved in this war. Truly, I don’t. I’m not a religious woman, but as the saying goes, ‘They have sown a wind but shall reap a whirlwind.’ I hope that whirlwind doesn’t engulf my country too.”

“Of course—” he began.

“But do I think it will be possible for us to stay out?” She didn’t let him interrupt. “No. The money says we’ll be drawn in. Business interests have kept us out so far; and now that there’s a blockade, it’s proving impossible. . . . Maybe Mr. Roosevelt is right and we should be preparing ourselves.”

“You talk like a man,” he said, attracted to her forthright views and her passion, and conscious too of her dark eyes, her white neck and curls of dark hair in which nestled tiny diamond stars.

“And you like an Englishman,” she said, briskly, but then laughed loud enough to make the couple opposite her look up. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask me what my husband thinks. Or my notoriously pacifist relatives.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to patronize you. It’s been a great help to talk to you.” As he said it, he felt disloyal. What was stopping him from revealing his doubts to Marina?

“But, you know,” she said, “your country’s right in there. They’re beyond choice. If I were an Englishman, even a legitimate exile, I might just want to see what kind of soldier I’d make.”

She was watching him, perhaps to see if she’d gone too far. His eyes met hers.

“You mean what kind of
man
I’d be.”