Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (20 page)

Time, so desperately brief, so immeasurably precious, suddenly seemed to be racing. At dinner that night I wore my prettiest frock, a deep blue ninon over grey satin, with a wide
chiné
sash, and afterwards, though my father kept Roland smoking and talking in the dining-room too long for my impatience, we were left to ourselves in the dim, lamplit drawing-room.

Still too much bewildered and distressed by the love that had descended upon us with such young intensity to make any coherent plans for the future - even supposing that the War allowed us to have one - we nevertheless mentioned, for the first time, the subject of marriage.

‘Mother says that people like me just become intellectual old maids,’ I told him.

‘I don’t see why,’ he protested.

‘Oh, well, it’s probably true!’ I said, rather sharply, for misery had as usual made me irritable. ‘After the War there’ll be no one for me to marry.’

‘Not even me?’ he asked very softly.

‘How do I know I
shall
want to marry you when that time comes?’

‘You know you wouldn’t be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.’

‘That rather narrows the field of choice, doesn’t it?’

‘Well - do you need it to be so very wide?’

The rest was fragmentary. We sat on the sofa till midnight, talking very quietly. The stillness, heavy-laden with the dull oppression of the snowy night, became so electric with emotion that we were frightened of one another, and dared not let even our fingers touch for fear that the love between us should render what we both believed to be decent behaviour suddenly unendurable.

I was still incredibly ignorant. I had read, by then, too much to have failed to acquire a vague and substantially correct idea of the meaning of marriage, but I did not yet understand the precise nature of the act of union. My ignorance, however, was incapable of disturbing my romantic adoration, for I knew now for certain that whatever marriage might involve in addition to my idea of it, I could not find it other than desirable. I realised as clearly as he did that a hereafter in which we should both be deprived of our physical qualities could mean very little to either of us; he would not be Roland without his broad shoulders, his long-lashed dark eyes, and above all the singularly attractive voice which I could never recall when he was absent.

‘“I want no angel, only she,” ’ Olive Schreiner had written in the strange little novel which had become our Bible: ‘“No holier and no better, with all her sins upon her, so give her me or give me nothing.” . . . For the soul’s fierce cry for immortality is this - only this: Return to me after death the thing as it was before. Leave me in the Hereafter the being that I am to-day. Rob me of the thoughts, the feelings, the desires that are my life, and you have left nothing to take. Your immortality is annihilation, your Hereafter is a lie.’

So I, too, wanted to find no angel after the War, after the Flood, after the grave; I wanted the arrogant, egotistic, vital young man that I loved.

The next day I saw him off, although he had said that he would rather I didn’t come.

In the early morning we walked to the station beneath a dazzling sun, but the platform from which his train went out was dark and very cold. In the railway carriage we sat hand in hand until the whistle blew. We never kissed and never said a word. I got down from the carriage still clasping his hand, and held it until the gathering speed of the train made me let go. He leaned through the window looking at me with sad, heavy eyes, and I watched the train wind out of the station and swing round the curve until there was nothing left but the snowy distance, and the sun shining harshly on the bright, empty rails.

When I got back to the house, where everyone mercifully left me to myself, I realised that my hands were nearly frozen. Vaguely resenting the physical discomfort, I crouched beside the morning-room fire for almost an hour, unable to believe that I could ever again suffer such acute and conscious agony of mind. On every side there seemed to be cause for despair and no way out of it. I tried not to think because thought was intolerable, yet every effort to stop my mind from working only led to a fresh outburst of miserable speculation. I tried to read; I tried to look at the gaunt white hills across the valley, but nothing was any good, so in the end I just stayed huddled by the fire, immersed in a mood of blank hopelessness in which years seemed to have passed since the morning.

At last I fell asleep for some moments, and awoke feeling better; I was, I suppose, too young for hope to be extinguished for very long. Perhaps, I thought, Wordsworth or Browning or Shelley would have some consolation to offer; all through the War poetry was the only form of literature that I could read for comfort, and the only kind that I ever attempted to write. So I turned at once to Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, only to be provoked to new anguish by the words:

O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?

But the lovely cadences stirred me at last to articulateness; there was no one to whom I wanted to talk, but at least I could tell my diary a good deal of the sorrow that seemed so fathomless.

‘I can scarcely bear to think of him,’ I wrote, ‘and yet I cannot bear to think of anything else. For the time being all people, all ideas, all interests have set, and sunk below the horizon of my mind; he alone I can contemplate, whom of all things in heaven and earth it hurts to think about most.’

Certainly the War was already beginning to overshadow scholarship and ambition. But I was not ready, yet, to give in to it; I wanted very badly to be heroic - or at any rate to seem heroic to myself - so I tried hard to rationalise my grief.

‘I felt,’ I endeavoured subsequently to assure myself, ‘a weak and cowardly person . . . to shrink from my share in the Universal Sorrow. After all it was only right that I should have to suffer too, that I had no longer an impersonal indifference to set me apart from the thousands of breaking hearts in England to-day. It was my part to face the possibility of a ruined future with the same courage that he is going to face death.’

So I finished up the miserable morning by looking through some of the short verses that he had left with me, and especially one in which - as in two or three of his poems - some prophetic instinct led him to a truer knowledge of the future than the strong, dominant consciousness that felt certain of survival:

Good-bye, sweet friend. What matters it that you
Have found Love’s death in joy and I in sorrow?
For hand in hand, just as we used to do,
We two shall live our passionate poem through
On God’s serene to-morrow.

4

Learning versus Life

VILLANELLE

Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head;
It is strange they should be blue.)

Violets from Plug Street Wood—
Think what they have meant to me—
Life and Hope and Love and You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay,
Hiding horror from the day;
Sweetest, it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.

R. A. L. Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915.

1

Roland went to the front on March 31st, 1915. For those who cared to remember such things, it was Wednesday in Passion Week. ‘
Je suis fiancé; c’est la guerre!
’ he announced before leaving to his mother, who accepted the news, which cannot altogether have astonished her, with commendable toleration.

In the interval between his leaving me and his crossing over to France, there was time for each of us to reinforce the other’s courage with letters; time, too, for me to receive a large amethyst set as a brooch, and sent with a tiny card inscribed: ‘In Memoriam. March 18th, 1915.’ I held it up in front of the fire; the red glow reflected in its surface made it shine like a great drop of blood.

‘All that is left is to wait and work and hope,’ he had written to me from Maldon on the evening of the day that we said good-bye. ‘But I
am
coming back, dear. Let it always be “when” and not “if”. As yet everything is incomplete, but last night, unreal as it seems to be, must have some consummation. The day will come when we shall live our roseate poem through - as we have dreamt it.’

Determinedly I responded in the same confident strain: ‘It is hard that on that difficult path I can do nothing to help you face the Death you will meet with so often. But when you are fighting the fear of it - bravely, as I know you will - I too shall be facing that fear, and can at least be with you in spirit then . . . Sometime after you had gone, I began again to dream of all that may still be after the War -
when
you return, and to plan out work to make me worthier of the future and to fill up the hours until the sorrowful time is past . . . It would not be right for us to be given a vision of the Promised Land only to be told we were never to enter it. We shall dwell in it in the end, and it will seem all the fairer because we have wandered in the desert between then and now . . . Good-bye, my dear, and as much love as you wish.’

Confidence, however, was difficult just then, for immediately after Roland left me, the casualties began to come through from Neuve Chapelle. As usual the Press had given no hint of that tragedy’s dimensions, and it was only through the long casualty lists, and the persistent demoralising rumour that owing to a miscalculation in time thousands of our men had been shot down by our own guns, that the world was gradually coming to realise something of what the engagement had been. The 6th Sherwood Foresters, which included many of the Buxton young men, had left for France three weeks earlier; they were incorrectly reported to have been involved in the battle, and rumours of death and wounds were already abroad. It was not an encouraging moment for bidding farewell to a lover, and, as often happened in periods of absorbing stress, a quotation from Longfellow slipped, unimpeded by literary eclecticism, into my diary:

The air is full of farewells to the dying,
And mournings for the dead;
The heart of Rachel for her children crying
Will not be comforted.

The determination to work hard and to plan out the days so that each moment would be occupied became singularly hard to fulfil, for I could not open a book without finding some subject that I had discussed with Roland or seeing words which reminded me of his characteristic phrases; I could not even seek solitude in a favourite refuge beyond the town without passing some road along which I had walked with him, or thinking that perhaps some day we should walk there again. Latin and Greek became even more irksome than before, and I began to feel that some kind of vigorous, practical toil would be better adapted to a chaotic wartime world. Rather lamely I tried - as the majority of Oxford dons, had I but known it, were trying also - to find some compelling reason for continuing the former when the latter seemed so much more appropriate.

‘I suppose he is right,’ I argued with myself, ‘and the only thing, which is the hardest thing, is to work and wait - and certainly to hope, which one must do or die.’

How fortunate we were who still had hope, I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die. Roland’s letters - the sensitive letters of the newly baptised young soldier, so soon to be hardened by the protective iron of remorseless indifference to horror and pain - made the struggle to concentrate no easier, for they drove me to a feverish searching into fundamental questions to which no immediate answers were forthcoming.

‘It seems delightfully incongruous,’ he wrote from Armentie‘res, ‘that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour’s walk from the trenches . . . A bullet whizzed uncomfortably near my head on the way in last night. I myself cannot yet realise that each little singing thing that flies near me holds latent in it the power of death for someone. Soon perhaps I may see death come to someone near and realise it and be afraid. I have not yet been afraid . . . There are three German graves a little further down along the trench. There is no name on them, but merely a piece of board with “German Grave - R.I.P.” scrawled on it. And yet somebody once loved the man lying there.’

Torn by inward conflict and continually keyed up to the highest pitch by the constant reading and writing of letters, I spent the rest of the vacation in riding my bicycle about the hills and dales, feverishly inventing analogies and distinctions between life and death, soul and intellect, spirit and immortality. Certain Derbyshire names - Ashwood Dale, Topley Pike, Chee Tor, Miller’s Dale, King Sterndale - always bring back to me those desperate struggles after a philosophy of life.