Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (67 page)

Half
an
hour
later
I
stood
on
the
outer
steps
again
in
the
evening air,
the
street
now
draped
with
dusk
turning
towards
night.
I
decided I
must
find
Dr.
Vronski.
I
must
see
him
at
once,
without
delay.
He, rather
than
the
police,
was
the
one
to
be
informed.
But
at
my
rooms I
found
peremptory
orders
that
admitted
of
no
delay
or
compromise. I
left
England
a
few
hours
later,
the
key
still
in
my
pocket,
the
door it
belonged
to
unlocked.
There
had
just
been
time
for
me
to
send
a hasty
letter
to
Dr.
Vronski
giving
the
facts
as
I
knew
them,
and
for
a word
of
reply
to
reach
me:
"No
cause
for
anxiety.
I've
heard
from S.
M.
Do
your
job—but
don't
forget
him."
With
this
measure
of
relief —for
I
should
otherwise
have
thought
that
Mantravers
had
shot
himself
or
leaped
from
a
window
to
his
death—I
crossed
the
Channel,
an insignificant
unit
in
that
heroic
B.E.F.
Since
Vronski
had
"heard from
him,"
he
was
still
alive—somewhere.

What
happened
to
men's
minds
during
those
four
years
lies,
of course,
beyond
easy
understanding—by
those
who
never
experienced the
strains
and
stresses
they
were
subject
to.
Any
man
capable
of going
over
the
edge
went
over
it.
For
myself,
I
cannot
say.
After
a year's
anguish,
tension,
suffering
that
I
swear
lie
beyond
human
expression
in
words,
I
was
taken
prisoner,
and
for
the
next
three
years
I
languished
in
a
German
prison
camp.
Nothing
can
extenuate
or
excuse the
inhuman
horror
of
a
bad
German
prison
camp.
My
own
was
of
the worst.
Any
prisoner
who
survived
the
process
that
stunned,
stupefied, brutalised
his
soul
had
in
him
something
unusual.
The
life
taught
him to
search
the
very
marrow
of
his
soul's
bones
to
find
relief
from
daily and
nightly
torture
of
excruciating
kind.

My
point
here
is
that,
while
I
could
not
honestly
find
myself unusual
in
any
way,
I
did
find
relief;
and
I
found
a
good
deal
of
this relief
in
speculating
about
escape—but
I
mean
escape
in
space
and time.
Any
real
relief
inside
that
barbed
wire
had
to
be
of
mental
or spiritual
kind,
imaginative
if
you
will.
The
point
is
that
I
found
it
to some
extent
in
speculating
about
the
wild
ideas
of
Vronski
and
Man-travers.
My
mind,
quite
possibly,
went
a
bit
over
the
edge,
as
I
called it
above,
though
I
cannot
judge
of
that.

My
speculations,
such
as
they
were,
began
after
a
letter
I
received from
Dr.
Vronski:
"You
will
like
to
know
about
your
cousin,"
it
ran briefly,
also
disconnectedly,
since
the
censor's
attentions
had
maimed it
badly.
"The
police
gave
up
the
search
long
ago.
The
Courts
have given
leave
now
to
assume
him
dead.
But
I
know
he
is
.
.
.
not
dead .
.
.
conceivably
within
reach
even.
He
is
not
unhappy,
nor
is
he happy,
for
he
is
different.
I
am
not
in
communication
with
him,
but I
know
.
.
.
alive
and
well
.
.
.
will
come
back
when
you
come
back .
.
.
you,
so
to
speak,
the
point
in
our
space
and
time
.
.
.
point
he left
at
.
.
.
Shown
the
way
by
de
Frasne
into
other
conditions.
He is,
for
the
moment,
elsewhere
and
otherwise
...
for
him
literally
for a
moment
only.
If
this
reaches
you,
do
not
worry
.
.
.
think
about
it only
...
no
help
from
you
needed,
but
sympathetic
thought
of
most concentrated
kind
can
keep
open
.
.
."
and
the
letter
closed
thus abruptly
as
though
the
censor
rather
late
in
the
day
imagined
a
code.