No Man's Land (8 page)

‘Good God!' thought Somers. ‘Naked men in civilised jackets and nothing else make the most heaven-forsaken sight I have ever seen.'The big stark-naked collier was being measured: a big, gaunt, naked figure, with a gruesome sort of nudity. ‘Oh God, oh God,' thought Somers, ‘why do the animals none of them look like this. It doesn't look like life, like a living creature's figure. It is gruesome, with no life-meaning.'

In another section a youth of about twenty-five, stark naked too, was throwing out his chest while a chit of a doctor-fellow felt him between the legs. This naked young fellow evidently thought himself an athlete, and that he must make a good impression, so he threw his head up in a would-be noble attitude, and coughed bravely when the doctor- buffoon said cough! Like a piece of furniture waiting to be sat on, the athletic young man looked.

Across the room the military buffers looked on at the operette; – occasionally a joke, incomprehensible, at the expense of the naked, was called across from the military papas to the fellows who may have been doctors. The place was full of an indescribable tone of jeering, gibing shamelessness. Somers stood in his street jacket and thin legs and beard – a sight enough for any gods – and waited his turn. Then he took off the jacket and was cleanly naked, and stood to be measured and weighed – being moved about like a block of meat, in the atmosphere of corrosive derision.

Then he was sent to the next section for eye-tests, and jokes were called across the room. Then after a time to the next section, where he was made to hop on one foot – then on the other foot – bend over – and so on: apparently to see if he had any physical deformity. In due course to the next section where a fool of a little fellow, surely no doctor, eyed him up and down and said:

‘Anything to complain of?'

‘Yes,' said Somers. ‘I've had pneumonia three times and been threatened with consumption.'

‘Oh. Go over there then.'

So in his stalky, ignominious nakedness he was sent over to another section, where an elderly fool turned his back on him for ten minutes, before looking round and saying:

‘Yes. What have you to say.'

Somers repeated.

‘When did you have pneumonia –?'

Somers answered – he could hardly speak, he was in such a fury of rage and humiliation.

‘What doctor said you were threatened with consumption? Give his name.' – This in a tone of sneering scepticism.

The whole room was watching and listening. Somers knew his appearance had been anticipated, and they wanted to count him out.

But he kept his head. – The elderly fellow then proceeded to listen to his heart and lungs with a stethoscope, jabbing the end of the instrument against the flesh as if he wished to make a pattern on it. Somers kept a set face. He knew what he was out against, and he just hated and despised them all.

The fellow at length threw the stethoscope aside as if he were throwing Somers aside, and went to write. Somers stood still, with a set face, and waited.

Then he was sent to the next section, and this stethoscoping doctor strolled over to the great judgment table. In the final section was a young puppy like a chemist's assistant, who made most of the jokes. Jokes were all the time passing across the room – but Somers had the faculty of becoming quite deaf to anything that might disturb his equanimity.

The chemist-assistant puppy looked him up and down with a small grin as if to say ‘Law-lummy, what a sight of a human scarecrow!' Somers looked him back again, under lowered lids, and the puppy left off joking for the moment. He told Somers to take up other attitudes. Then he came forward close to him, right till their bodies almost touched, the one in a navy blue serge, holding back a little as if from the contagion of the naked one. He put his hand between Somers' legs, and pressed it upwards, under the genitals. Somers felt his eyes going black.

‘Cough,' said the puppy. He coughed.

‘Again,' said the puppy. He made a noise in his throat, then turned aside in disgust.

‘Turn round,' said the puppy. ‘Face the other way.'

Somers turned and faced the shameful monkey-faces at the long table. So, he had his back to the tall window: and the puppy stood plumb behind him.

‘Put your feet apart.'

He put his feet apart.

‘Bend forward – further – further –'

Somers bent forward, lower, and realised that the puppy was standing aloof behind him to look into his anus. And that this was the source of the wonderful jesting that went on all the time.

‘That will do. – Get your jacket and go over there.'

Somers put on his jacket and went and sat on the form that was placed endwise at the side of the fire, facing the side of the judgment table. The big, gaunt collier was still being fooled. He apparently was not very intelligent, and didn't know what they meant when they told him to bend forward. Instead of bending with stiff knees – not knowing at all what they wanted – he crouched down, squatting on his heels as colliers do. And the doctor puppy, amid the hugest amusement, had to start him over again. So the game went on, and Somers watched them all.

The collier was terrible to him. He had a sort of Irish face with a short nose and a thin black head. This snub-nosed face had gone quite blank with a ghastly voidness, void of intelligence, bewildered and blind. It was as if the big, ugly, powerful body could not obey
words
any more. Oh God, such an ugly body – not as if it belonged to a living creature.

Somers kept himself hard and in command, face set, eyes watchful.

He felt his cup had been filled now. He watched these buffoons in this great room, as he sat there naked save for his jacket, and he felt that from his heart, from his spine went out vibrations that should annihilate them – blot them out, the
canaille
, stamp them into the mud they belonged to.

He was called at length to the table.

‘What is your name?' asked one of the old parties. Somers looked at him.

‘Somers,' he said, in a very low tone.

‘Somers – Richard Lovatt?' – with an indescribable sneer.

Richard Lovatt realised that they had got their knife into him. So!

He had his knife in them, and it would strike deeper at last.

‘You describe yourself as a writer.'

He did not answer.

‘A writer of what?' – with a perfect sneer.

‘Books – essays –'

The old buffer went on writing. Oh yes, they intended to make him feel they had got their knife into him. They would have his beard off, too! – But would they? He stood there with his ridiculous thin legs, in his ridiculous jacket, but he did not feel a fool. Oh God no. The white composure of his face, the slight lifting of his nose, like a dog's disgust, the heavy, unshakeable watchfulness of his eyes brought even the judgment table to silence: even the puppy-doctors. It was not till he was walking out of the room, with his jacket above his thin legs, and his beard in front of him, that they lifted their heads for a final jeer.

He dressed and waited for his card. It was Saturday morning, and he was almost the last man to be examined. He
wondered
what instructions they had had about him. Oh, foul dogs. But they were very close on him now, very close. They were grinning very close behind him, like hyaenas just going to bite. Yes, they were running him to earth. They had exposed all his nakedness to gibes. And they were pining, almost whimpering to give the last grab at him, and haul him to earth – a victim. Finished!

But not yet! Oh no, not yet. Not yet, not now, nor ever. Not while life was life, should they lay hold of him. Never again. Never would he be touched again. – And because they had handled his private parts, and looked into them, their eyes should burst and their hands should wither and their hearts should rot. So he cursed them in his blood, with an unremitting curse, as he waited.

They gave him his card: C.2. – Fit for non-military service. He knew what they would like to make him do. They would like to seize him and compel him to empty latrines in some camp. They had that in mind for him. But he had other things in mind.

He went out into accursed Derby, to Harriett. She was reassured again. But he was not. He hated the Midlands now, he hated the North. People here were viler than in the South, even than in Cornwall. They had a universal desire to take life and
down
it: these horrible machine people, these iron and coal people. They wanted to set their foot absolutely on life, grind it down, and be master. Masters, as they were of their foul machines. Masters of life, as they were masters of steam-power and electric-power and above all, of money-power. Masters of money-power, with an obscene hatred of life, true, spontaneous life.

Richard Lovatt knew it. They had looked into his anus, they had put their hand under his testicles. –That athletic young fellow, he didn't seem to think he ought to mind at all. He looked on his body as a sort of piece of furniture, or a machine, to be handled and put to various uses. That was why he was athletic. Somers laughed, and thanked God for his own thin, underweight body. At least he remained himself, his own. He hoped the young athletic fellow would enjoy the uses they put him to.

Another flight. He was determined not to stop in the Derby Military Area. He would move one stage out of their grip, at least. So he and Harriett prepared to go back with their trunks to the Oxfordshire cottage, which they loved. He would not report, nor give any sign of himself. Fortunately in the village everybody was slack and friendly.

Derby had been a crisis. He would obey no more: not one more stride. If they summoned him, he would disappear: or find some means of fighting them. But no more obedience: no more presenting himself when called up. By God, no. Never while he lived, again, would he be at the disposal of society.

So they moved south – to be one step removed. They had been living in this remote cottage in the Derbyshire hills: and they must leave at half-past seven in the morning, to complete their journey in a day. It was a black morning, with a slow dawn. Somers had the trunks ready. He stood looking at the dark gulf of the valley below. Meanwhile heavy clouds sank over the bare, Derbyshire hills, and the dawn was blotted out before it came. Then broke a terrific thunderstorm, and hail lashed down with a noise like insanity. He stood at the big window over the valley, and watched. Come hail, come rain, he would go: forever.

This was his home district – but from the deepest soul he now hated it, mistrusted it even more than he hated it. As far as
life
went, he mistrusted it utterly, with a black soul. Mistrusted it and hated it, with its smoke and its money-power and its squirming millions who aren't human any more.

Ah, how lovely the South-west seemed, after it all. There was hardly any food, but neither he nor Harriett minded. They could pick up and be wonderfully happy again, gathering the little chestnuts in the woods, and the few last bilberries. Men were working harder than ever felling trees for trench-timber, denuding the land. But their brush fires were burning in the woods, and when they had gone, in the cold dusk, Somers went with a sack to pick up the unburnt faggots and the great chips of wood the axes had left golden against the felled logs. Flakes of sweet pale gold oak. He gathered them in the dusk, in a sack, along with the other poor villagers. For he was poorer even than they. – Still, it made him very happy to do these things – to see a big, glowing pile of wood-flakes in his shed – and to dig the garden, and set the rubbish burning in the late, wistful autumn – or to wander through the hazel copses, away to the real old English hamlets, that are still like Shakespeare – and like Hardy's
Woodlanders
.

Then, in November, the Armistice. It was almost too much to believe. The war was over! It
was
too much to believe. He and Harriett sat and sang German songs, in the cottage, that strange night of the Armistice, away there in the country: and she cried – and he wondered what now, now the walls would come no nearer. It had been like Edgar Allan Poe's story of the Pit and the Pendulum – where the walls come in, in, in, till the prisoner is almost squeezed. So the black walls of the war – and he had been trapped and very nearly squeezed into the pit, where the rats were. So nearly! So very nearly. And now the black walls had stopped, and he was
not
pushed into the pit, with the rats. And he knew it in his soul. – What next then?

He insisted on going back to Derbyshire. Harriett, who hated him for the move, refused to go. So he went alone: back to his sisters, and to finish the year in the house which they had paid for for him. Harriett refused to go. She stayed with Hattie in London.

At St. Pancras, as Somers left the taxi and went across the pavement to the station, he fell down: fell smack down on the pavement. He did not hurt himself. But he got up rather dazed, saying to himself, ‘Is that a bad omen? Ought I not to be going back?' But again he thought of Scipio Africanus, and went on.

The cold, black December days, alone in the cottage on the cold hills – Adam Bede country, Snowfields, Dinah Morris' home. Such heavy, cold, savage, frustrated blackness. He had known it when he was a boy. – Then Harriett came – and they spent Christmas with his sister. And when January came he fell ill with the influenza, and was ill for a long time. In March the snow was up to the window-sills of their house.

‘Will the winter never end?' he asked his soul. May brought the year's house-rent of the Derbyshire cottage to an end: and back they went to Oxfordshire. But now the place seemed weary to him, tame, after the black iron of the North. The walls had gone – and now he felt nowhere.

So they applied for passports – Harriett to go to Germany, himself to Italy. A lovely summer went by, a lovely autumn came. But the meaning had gone out of everything for him. He had lost his meaning. England had lost its meaning for him. The free England had died, this England of the peace was like a corpse. It was the corpse of a country to him.