AS suddenly as the first wave from the wash of a great liner breaking on the shore of a tranquil sea, a billow of utter loneliness reared itself up and thundered over Helen Grote. It came without warning, for she had not been looking seawards.

Robin had just left her with a very troubled face, but with his determination absolutely unshaken. On the morning after the declaration of war he had come straight up to town from Cambridge, and had been given a commission in the Grenadier Guards. That had met with her entire approval, she loved to think that her son had been among the very first to answer to the call, even anticipating it. Then she had done her part, and had got a promise for him of a staff appointment, which implied useful and necessary work, would give scope to his excellent abilities, and, above all, would not plunge him after a few months of training into the fiery hell, which, having by now burned its way almost within gun-range of Paris, had at length been stayed, and the edges of it turned back upon itself. But there was other work to do in the service of the country, just as important, just as primarily essential as being plunged into that inferno of shot and shell,{208} and this appointment, so entirely suitable to Robin’s capabilities, was his if he chose to take it: it would be offered him in answer to his grateful assent. Instead, he had given an ungrateful negative, and had left her in order to request that the offer might not be made him in any form that obliged him to accept it.

She had looked forward to this interview with the most delighted anticipations, for she knew what Robin’s feelings with regard to his duty were. He, personally, hated and loathed the idea of war, and all that military service implied. He was a peaceful, easy-going young gentleman, fond of friends, and cricket, and Cambridge and the sunshine of the secure and pleasant life into which he had been born. But the moment the call had come, he had responded to it, he had put everything else aside, habit, and inclination and security, and had been among the earliest to present himself, never contemplating it as possible to do anything else. Surely, then, he had done his part: he had said, “Here am I, take me,” and they had taken him. Now, as if in reward of that, had come this offer, which she had procured for him.... But at the back of her delighted anticipation of telling Robin about it, there had been a doubt lurking in the dark, which she trusted would never open its baleful mouth in discourse, but sit there dumb. Instead, the doubt had instantly leaped out into the light, and instead of being dumb, had expressed itself with great lucidity through Robin’s mouth.

“It’s awfully good of you,” he had said, “to take so much trouble, but don’t you see—I’m sure you do—that for me it would be mere shirking to take it? It’s a job which a fellow with four fingers on his hand could do. I’ve got five.”

Even while he spoke some instinct within her cordially agreed. But she did not intend to heed that{209} instinct: she slammed the door on it. Mightn’t a mother avert a great peril from her only son?...

“Shirking, darling?” she said, still only faintly doubting his eventual acquiescence. “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know much about war, any more than you do, but I’m sure it doesn’t merely consist in having men with guns and rifles. There have to be supplies, haven’t there, brought up? Armies have got to be fed; there must be lines of communication, there must be organization behind them, transport, intelligence.”

A little soft crease appeared between Robin’s eyebrows, which she knew. It appeared there when he was proposing to be obstinate about something, and familiarly it was known as the mule-face.

“Of course there must,” said he, just as if there wasn’t such a thing in the world as a mule.

“Well, then, don’t make the mule-face, Robin,” she said. “Listen to what I am saying. All that organization is the brain behind the mere mechanism. When you doubt about taking this appointment, it is the same as if you were not sure that you would not sooner be a puff of steam that came from an engine, than part of the intelligence of the man who drives it.”

For a moment the “mule-face” vanished, and Robin laughed with boyish appreciation.

“Oh, mother, you are clever!” he said. “That’s just like you.”

“My dear, I’m not clever in the least: it’s the plainest common sense.”

He shook his head.

“No, it was clever,” he said. “I am bound to admit the excellence of your simile. But you can’t convince people by similes.{210}”

“You can if the simile is just,” she said, “and if people are logical.”

He got up, the creased forehead outlining itself again, and pulled at his sword strap and belt which were still not quite familiar, as if he was wearing some new sort of cuff or collar.

“Well, the simile is just, and I am logical,” he said. “If I choose to think, I see your logic. But as well as thinking, I feel. I don’t say that I choose to feel, but I have to feel. I wonder if you understand that.”

Suddenly she became aware of the immense change between the Robin of two months ago and the Robin who stood before her now. He was still the same Robin, too; the change, immense though it was, was not due to any new characteristic that had come to him: it was but the emergence and revelation of what she had known was there all along. The secure prosperity of his active, unreflective boyhood had but veiled it over as with thin ice: that bright, dazzling covering had caused a glitter on the surface, and you had not been able actually to see below it. But now that had melted and she could see into the deep water that lay so tranquilly beneath. Yet it was not that he had become a man: he was just as young as ever....

“Yes, darling,” she said, “but feeling is no guide. If we all did what we felt, the world would become a madhouse. It is the control of reason that keeps it sane.”

He looked at her with a sort of humorous interrogation.

“I wondered if you would say something of the sort,” he said. “You don’t believe it, you know, in so far as it applies to my choice now!”

She thought over her simile about the engine’s puff{211} of steam and the engine’s driver. It seemed to her extremely apt.

“I do believe it,” she said. “It is mere common sense.”

“Then I’ll ask you another question. You would be very much relieved if I took this appointment. But shouldn’t I lose a little of your respect?”

She fancied she could quibble that away.

“Respect?” she said. “What a word to use. As if that had got anything to do with love!”

He laughed outright, and in the fashion that was so common with him, sat down on the arm of her chair.

“That’ll never do,” he said. “You must learn to respect me.”

“I do,” she said hurriedly, for the instinct on which she had slammed the door asserted itself. “I respected your joining up as you did. You did all you could do.”

“And hasn’t it got anything to do with love?” he asked.

She paused before replying and Robin went on:

“It’s not only your respect,” he said. “It’s the respect of everybody who is serious. They wouldn’t tell me I had lost their respect: they would only congratulate me on getting a staff-appointment. But what would Jim feel, or Badders, or Jelf?”

“But you told me that Mr. Jelf was a pacifist,” she said. “You said that he loved the Germans and hated the English.”

“That was all his way of talking. I haven’t told you what he’s done. He has not applied for a commission at all: he has joined as a private.”

She made another appeal.

“Robin, you are all I have got,” she said simply.{212}

She looked up at him, and saw that the soft, firm crease still sat between his eyebrows.

“So don’t make the mule-face,” she added.

He shook his head.

“Can’t help it,” he said. “I’m going to be a mule: I—I must look like one.”

“Will you think it over then, first,” she asked, “before you do anything?”

“I have thought it over. Will you think it over? I know you agree with me really, but I can’t get at the part of you that agrees. It’s there, though.”

She knew that just as well as he did, but made no promise, and with a face troubled and yet determined he left her.

It was that which started the wave of loneliness far out on the sea, and she sat there idly, after he had gone, not yet aware of its approach, but only of the deadly, bored depression that had settled down on her, never lifting, since the day that she had driven down to Grote alone and late on a Saturday night in July. She no longer wanted to see him who should have been her companion then, though for a day or two after that, she would have forgiven even that monstrous letter of his revelation of himself, could her forgiveness have brought him back. And yet Robin had said that respect had something to do with love....

When he had said it she, or some part of her, had acquiesced, and yet when she read Kuhlmann’s letter, though there was no one in the world for whom she had so profound a contempt, she still longed for his presence. Was that, then, another sort of love, something possibly not less real, certainly not less insistent, but more animal, essentially lower? She had always hated seeing Robin and Kuhlmann together, and had rather laughed at herself for her sentimentality, her squeam{213}ishness. And then, by degrees almost imperceptible, any other feeling for the man who had so grossly insulted her, but mere contempt, had been distilled away, leaving just that sediment which unemotionally despised him.

But that draining away of the boiling, bubbling liquid which had filled her heart, had left it totally apathetic to all the myriad interests and diversions of her life. Even the tremendous impact of the breaking-out of war had failed to rouse her from it, her whole soul seemed drugged into a drowsy, depressed somnolence. She cared for nothing, and she disliked nothing, except only that which concerned Robin. The live tissues of the mind that record the emotions were not dead: she still wanted to want, wanted to enjoy, wanted to feel, but they lay as if under some opiate that deprived them of sensation.

The only thing that for these last days had in the least interested her was the obtaining for Robin the post that would keep him in town, doing work which undeniably must be done, dressed in khaki as every self-respecting young man was, with little red tabs on his shoulders and a red band on his cap to show that he was not merely a puff of steam from the engine, but part of the intelligence that directed it. All that was alive in her clung to the sound sense of the simile, which Robin himself had admitted.... But somewhere in the drowsed, drugged part of her mind some instinct within her despised that sound sense as completely as Robin himself despised it. He, too, had drawn the distinction between “thinking” and “feeling,” wondering if she understood. Good heavens, did she not understand? Was not three quarters of life a battle between thinking and feeling?

She was not one of those optimistic lunatics who{214} talked about the exposure of the enemy’s lengthening lines of communication, when day by day the tide of the black advance swept across the map towards Paris and the Channel ports, nor did she number herself with the large mass of folk who cheerfully maintained that the great steam-roller from the East was now giving forth encouraging hoots, as a signal for its starting on its relentless journey to Berlin. But at present, though not cheerful, she cared about the war as little as they, because she could not care about anything. It had broken out at a time when she was still stunned by the greatest emotional blow, delivered with every circumstance of insult and contempt, that she had ever experienced. It had taken away all her power of keen feeling, except as regards Robin. All but that slim passage between her emotions and life was choked with dead leaves.

She took up the morning paper, at which she had not yet cared to look. The black line had not moved either backwards or forwards, but there was a long list of casualties. She read it, and found that it contained notices of intimate bereavement for some half-dozen of her friends, to whom she must write a line of condolence. Then, in imagination, she saw herself reading some similar list, on a morning but a few months ahead, and finding it contained the beloved name concerning which she had already received communication from the War Office. At that the great wave of loneliness soared high above her and engulfed her.

On that day, so vivid at the moment to her imagination, that she felt that it was already actually here, there would be nothing whatever left for which she cared to live. She made no sentimental pictures of herself as a mother bereaved of her only son, or of the blow killing her, for a blow, in order to kill, has to strike{215} some vital place, and there was nothing vital in her to strike. She would just go on living, if that could be called life, which had not enough keenness of edge to it to be termed either happy or unhappy, until the dark door opened, or, as she had phrased it once to herself, the great fish gulped down the fly that floated, water-logged on the stream, and she went back into the nothingness out of which she came.

What had it all been about, this tedious story, which she had once read with such intense interest? Hitherto life had denied her nothing which she cared to take, and she had taken freely, grasping it by the armful, and sucking out of it the utmost of its sweetness. But henceforth life seemed to hold nothing that was worth taking; she no longer cared what it gave her or denied her, since “desire had failed.” No longer had she any part in it: all those who hitherto had been active with herself in its pageants and movements, seemed no longer to be alive, but to be mere marionettes, bobbing about in meaningless antics, while she had become the one spectator of the show, quite alone in this infinite array of empty benches....

 

By a violent effort she pulled herself together: she was meeting trouble before it came, in imagining what the world would be to her when there was Robin’s name in the daily............