I’m going to, and when I’ve finished you’ll see where weakness and inevitability shade off. No, I don’t believe in Zola.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Well, my dear, Zola said that environment is environment, but he referred to families and races, and this is the story of a class.”
“What class?”
“Our class.”
“Please,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to hear.”
She settled herself against his shoulder and, gazing out at the vanishing country, began to talk very deliberately.
“It was said, before the war, that England was the only country in the world where women weren’t safe from men of their own class.”
“One particular fast set,” he broke in.
“A set, my dear man, who were fast but who kept every bit of their standing and position. You see even that was reaction. The idea of physical fitness came in with the end of the Victorians. Drinking died down in the universities. Why you yourself once told me that the really bad men never drank, rather kept themselves fit for moral or intellectual crimes.”
“It was rather Victorian to drink much,” he agreed. “Chaps who drank were usually young fellows about to become curates, sowing the conventional wild oats by the most orthodox tippling.”
“Well,” she continued, “there had to be an outlet—and there was, and you know the form it took in what you called the fast set. Next enter Mr. Mars. You see as long as there was moral pressure exerted, the rotten side of society was localized. I won’t say it wasn’t spreading, but it was spreading slowly, some people even thought rather normally, but when men began to go away and not come back, when marriage became a hurried thing and widows filled London, and all traditions seemed broken, why then things were different.”
“How did it start?”
“It started in cases where men were called away hurriedly and girls lost their nerve. Then the men didn’t come back—and there were the girls—”
He gasped.
“That was going on at the beginning?—I didn’t know at all.”
“Oh it was very quiet at first. Very little leaked out into daylight, but the thing spread in the dark. The next thing, you see, was to weave a sentimental mantle to throw over it. It was there and it had to be excused. Most girls either put on trousers and drove cars all day or painted their faces and danced with officers all night.”
“And what mighty principle had the honor of being a cloak for all that?” he asked sarcastically.
“Now here, you see, is the paradox. I can talk like this and pretend to analyze, and even sneer at the principle. Yet I’m as much under the spell as the most wishy-washy typist who spends a week-end at Brighton with her young man before he sails with the conscripts.”
“I’m waiting to hear what the spell is.”
“It’s this—self sacrifice with a capital S. Young men going to get killed for us—we would have been their wives—we can’t be—therefore we’ll be as much as we can. And that’s the story.”
“Good God!”
“Young officer comes back,” she went on; “must amuse him, must amuse him; must give him the impression that people here are with him, that it’s a big home he’s coming to, that he’s appreciated. Now you know, of course, in the lower classes that sort of thing means children. Whether that will ever spread to us will depend on the duration of the war.”
“How about old ideas, and standards of woman and that sort of thing?” he asked, rather sheepishly.
“Sky-high, my dear—dead and gone. It might be said for utility that it’s better and safer for the race that officers stay with women of their own class. Think of the next generation in France.”
To Clay the whole compartment had suddenly become smothering. Bubbles of conventional ethics seemed to have burst and the long stagnant gas was reaching him. He was forced to seize his mind and make it cling to whatever shreds of the old still floated on the moral air. Eleanor’s voice came to him like the grey creed of a new materialistic world; the contrast was the more vivid because of the remains of erotic honor and sentimental religiosity that she flung out with the rest.
“So you see, my dear, utility, heroism and sentiment all combine and le voici . And we’re pulling into Rochester.” She turned to him pathetically. “I see that in trying to clear myself I’ve only indicted my whole sex,” and with tears in their eyes they kissed.
On the platform they talked for half a minute more. There was no emotion. She was trying to analyze again, and her smooth brow was wrinkled in the effort. He was endeavoring to digest what she had said, but his brain was in a whirl.
“Do you remember,” he asked, “what you said last night about love being a big word like Life and Death?”
“A regular phrase; part of the technique of—of the game; a catch word.” The train moved off and as Clay swung himself on the last car she raised her voice so that he could hear her to the last—“Love is a big word, but I was flattering us. Real Love’s as big as Life and Death, but not that love—not that—” Her voice failed and mingled with the sound of the rails, and to Clay she seemed to fade out like a grey ghost on the platform.
III.
When the charge broke and the remnants lapped back like spent waves, Sergeant O’Flaherty, a bullet through the left side, dropped beside him, and as weary castaways fight half listlessly for shore, they crawled and pushed and edged themselves into a shell crater. Clay’s shoulder and back were bleeding profusely and he searched heavily and clumsily for his first-aid package.
“That’ll be that until the Seventeenth Sussex gets reorganized,” remarked O’Flaherty, sagely. “Two weeks in the rear and two weeks home.”
“Damn good regiment it was, O’Flaherty,” said Clay. They would have seemed like two philosophic majors commenting from safe behind the lines had it not been that Clay was flat on his back, his face in a drawn ecstasy of pain, and that the Irishman was most evidently bleeding to death. The latter was twining an improvised tourniquet on his thigh, watching it with the careless casual interest a bashful suitor bestows upon his hat.
“I can’t get up no emotion over a regiment these nights,” he commented disgustedly. “This’ll be the fifth I was in that I seen smashed to hell. I joined these Sussex byes so I needn’t see more o’ me own go.”
“I think you know everyone in Ireland, Sergeant.”
“All Ireland’s me friend, Captain, though I niver knew it ’till I left. So I left the Irish, what was left of them. You see when an English bye dies he does some play actin’ before. Blood on an Englishman always calls rouge to me mind. It’s a game with him. The Irish take death damn serious.”
Clayton rolled painfully over and watched the night come softly down and blend with the drifting smoke. They were certainly between the devil and the deep sea and the slang of the next generation will use “no man’s land” for that. O’Flaherty was still talking.
“You see you has to do somethin’. You haven’t any God worth remarkin’ on. So you pass from life in the names of your holy principles, and hope to meet in Westminster.”
“We’re not mystics, O’Flaherty,” muttered Clay, “but we’ve got a firm grip on God and reality.”
“Mystics, my eye, beggin’ your pardon, Captain,” cried the Irishman. “A mystic ain’t no race, it’s a saint. You got the most airy way o’ thinkin’ in the wurruld an yit you talk about plain faith as if it was cloud gazin’. There was a lecture last week behind Vimy Y.M.C.A., an’ I stuck my head in the door; ‘Tan-gi-ble,’ the fellow was sayin’, ‘we must be Tan-gi-ble in our religion,