You Can't Be Too Careful

I. Catspaws

The unpleasant buzzing of disturbing ideas and untoward events that Edward Albert had kept at a distance for the first ten years of his contentment in Morningside Prospect crept nearer to him by such imperceptible degrees that it is almost impossible to mark any definite date for the end of his agreeable stagnation. Take Morningside Prospect throughout the week of years that preceded the actual onset of the Great Warfare. What touch of foreboding wrinkled the smooth reflection it presented to the world? What catspaws warned it of the gathering hurricane?

The World War of 1914-18 had not struck the Tewler imagination as bringing with it a new ordering of life for mankind. It was, from the Tewler point of view, a fight like a dog-fight for the upper hand among things called Powers, essentially the same in their nature. They rose and they fell, like football clubs. It was just another chapter of the old history. The academic Tewlers who taught history throughout the world knew nothing, and almost passionately wanted to know nothing, of the space-time process that continually puts a fresh face on life and continually sweeps away the working appearances of the past. Their mental equipment could not handle such ideas. So how could they be expected to transmit them?

There was not a country in the world where what passed for the teaching of history was more than a training in national conceit and xenophobia, and Edward Albert, according to his rank and scale, participated in the prevalent mental perversity. He was ready at any time to assert that the scenery of England, the wild flowers of England, the skilled labour of England (when not disturbed by foreign agitators) the horsemanship and seamanship of England, the gentry of England, the agriculture of England, the politics of England, the graciousness and wisdom of her Royal Family, the beauty of the Englishwomen, their incurable healthiness of mind and body, were not to be surpassed, not even to be disputed by any other people. For that he “stood up”, and all Morningside Prospect, all England, from Sir Adrian von Stahlheim down to the dirtiest child coughing its life out in the dirtiest slum of East London “stood up.” And all over the world, with the simple substitution of whatever name the local, community happened to possess, Homo Tewler was of the same persuasion.

But the various British and French and American varieties of the species were now more cock—a-hoop and contented, because they had won the great war, than was Homo Tewler var. Teutonicus, who was suffering acutely in his pride and material conditions through having lost it. He was gradually persuading himself that he had never lost the war, but had been cheated in some complicated way out of his victory, and he was screwing himself up, through his schoolmasters, professors, politicians, industrialists, romantic pederasts and out-of-work professional soldiers, to the idea of a return match with the great Powers that would restore and realise his dream of world ascendency. Homo Tewler Gallicus was uncomfortably aware of this state of mind beyond the frontier, but Anglicanus and Americanus thought this awareness uncharitable....

One might go on thus describing the Tewler mentality in terms of that masterpiece of Tewler thought, published in 1871, The Fight In Dame Europa’s School. To that period stuff, to the same old nationalist mythology, the schoolmasters of each successive generation put back their prey....

Yet certain things did appear dimly beneath the surface of these traditional appearances, as being novel and challenging even to Edward Albert. A wave of ill-conceived and ill-organised expressions of popular discontent that disturbed the tranquil resumption of power and property by the larger salesmanship and die old authorities in the Period of Reconstruction, would have passed without any but the most incidental remarks by the contemporary historian in the general sauve qui peut (and then grab a bit more) of the influential classes, if it had not been for the complete collapse of the established social order throughout the vast areas of Russia. There had been social upthrusts in the past, the Commune in Paris, and talk of socialism in England, but no normally educated English child was ever allowed to know anything about these things. “ ‘Oo are these Bolsheviks?” Edward Albert had asked old Mr Blake in the middle Doober days, when the decision of Russia to go out of the Great War was shocking the minds of Power-politics-fans throughout the world.

“Thieves and bloody murderers,” said old Mr Blake. And then and subsequently he confided to Edward Albert the horror of this Sovietic Russia that had come upon the world. These Bolsheviks were hate and evil incarnate; they put Satan in the shade; they delighted in bloodshed, lust and the repudiation of their just debts. They shared their women in common and drove out their children to grow up like wild animal in the woods. They had massacred millions of people; every day they had a massacre before breakfast. This man Lenin was conducting frightful orgies in the Kremlin, and his wife was prancing about covered with the Crown jewels and any others she could lay hands on. Nobody in Russia had had anything to eat for months. The rouble went down and down. Mr Blake had bought roubles when there was reason to suppose they would recover, and had they recovered? And he had had a bit in Lena Goldfields. No good crying over spilt milk.

The streets of Moscow, he explained, were littered with dead—“murdered people like you and me.” You had to pick your way among them. Everywhere the Churches had been turned into anti-God Museums. Everywhere aristocrats and respectable people were being treated with incredible brutality and bestiality. Mr Blake seemed to have sources of information of his own, and he gave Edward Albert the most circumstantial and revolting details with an indignant gusto. “Take, for instance, something I heard the other day....”

“You’d wonder how they can bring themselves to do it,” said Edward Albert, not doubting in the least. Old Mr Blake offered no explanation.

The newspapers Edward Albert glanced over and the talk he heard about “these here Bolshies” during the two decades of later Georgian decadence, did little to attenuate the shock of those early impressions. When he blended his mind with the general unanimities of Morningside Prospect, he found a practical agreement that for the rest of the world outside the Soviet sphere, the less one thought about Russia the better, the “Bolshies” were thorough rascals and also blind fanatics, they were incredibly incompetent and a menace to the whole world; Stalin was just another Tsar, he was certain to be assassinated and he would found a new dynasty; private enterprise would be restored because you cannot do without it. Communism did not matter; it was spreading insidiously; it stirred up a lot of discontent among the working classes, and it ought to be put down with a firm hand. It was the hidden hand of Communism that caused labour unrest that kept wages and prices, rates and taxes, mounting and mounting, to the serious disadvantage of decent independent people who had retired and wanted to keep retired.

So round and round they went, perpetually evading the realisation that there was something in the stars and in the wicked hearts of men that would not endure Morningside Prospect for very much longer, whatever else ensued,

Mr Pildington of Johore was disposed to take a serious view of Communist activities in the East. These frightful ideas were spreading in India and China and even in Japan.

“They nibble and they nibble at our prestige. It’s no laughing matter.”

“These ideers,” said Edward Albert gloomily.

“Let’s hope it will last our time,” said Mr Pildington and turned to pleasanter topics,...

So the first transient intimations of social revolution appeared and vanished in Edward Albert’s mind; the sense of something out of order and something impending. But it was not simply the Bolshie menace alone. There was the whisper of something unsatisfactory and inadequate in the control of public affairs. In the great days of Gladstone and Disraeli, political life had been pompous and respected. Gentlemen in top hats and frock coats, used parliamentary language, obeyed the division bell, and passed through the division lobbies, and no Briton doubted that the Mother of Parliaments was the ultimate legislative and administrative machine. Then as the century unfolded, the new journalism, the unruly Irish, the appearance of a Labour Party (in all sorts of hats), votes for women and women members of Parliament, the accumulating effects of elementary education, robbed the legislature, step by step, of its male and gentlemanly prestige.

This new Parliament was by no means as agreeable to the larger Tewlers, the salesmen, the great interests and profit-making enterprises, as the old. Parliament was passing out of the hands of an essentially conservative oligarchy into those of an incoherently progressive democracy, and the oligarchy, through its press lords and its social and business influences, was developing a spirit of resistance to Parliamentary institutions, to the taxation and control of enterprise and the ever-increasing expenditure upon public services. Everywhere in the pseudo-democratic countries the process followed parallel lines. The newly enfranchised masses, awakening to the power of the vote, were reappropriating the goods of the community bit by bit to a collective use, and everywhere among the employers and wealthy, the spirit of resistance sought expression. Everywhere, in the Scandinavian countries, in blue-swastika Finland, in America after the socialisations of the New Deal in France, in Spain before Franco, there were Quislings seeking a saviour from this awakening democracy and not knowing to whom to turn.

“Parliament is played out,” said this gathering counter. revolution. “Democracy is played out.”

Mr Copper of Caxton felt the need of some resistance to these unending concessions to labour demands. “What this country needs,” said Mr Copper, “is leadership, firmer leadership. We want a middle-class party led by a Man.” Mr Stannish of Tintern was inclined to agree with Mr Copper, but Mr Droop of London Pride, who was suspected of religious unsoundness, was disposed to be critical not of the idea but of the leader towards whom their thoughts were turning. He exhibited newspaper pictures and invited his neighbours to look at them.

“He’s herring-jawed, and I like teeth that meet,” said Mr Droop. “Why does he dress up in this sort of tights he wears? His shape ain’t English. It isn’t even decent, He seems to attach too much importance to his behind. Look at that one. It’s a sort of hind bosom he’s got. And why does he imitate them Dagos? Can’t he think anything out for himself? Anything fresh? Fine outlook for us to have a leader without an original idea in his head! Ask him what we are to do, and he’ll go round asking, What would Musso do? If we want a strong Englishman, let’s have a strong English Englishman with a mind of his own, and not that sort of flibberty-gibbet. Flibberty-gibbet, I call him. Something that sways about and dangles. For good old England? No, thank you.”

“Well, anyhow, we’ve got to be quit of this Parliament nonsense,” said Mr Copper, “and all this criticising of everybody and doing nothing, while the Bolshies and Jews run away with everything we’ve got.”

“Jews?” said Edward Albert, questioning himself.

It is interesting to note that our specimen Englishman for the first thirty years of his life was practically unaware of contemporary Jews. He thought they were a disagreeable lot of people in the Bible whom even God had had to give up at last, and that had been the end of them. We lived in the New Dispensation. He went to school with Jews and half-Jews and quarter-Jews and never perceived any distinctive difference between them and his other school-fellows. He thought Circumcision was something religious, and enquired no further into the matter. Was Buffin Burleybank a Jew? Was Jim Whittaker? Was Evangeline Birkenhead, on either side, Jewish? It never occurred to Edward Albert to ask, and there is no need to introduce irrelevant information into this story. If Jews are so different you ought to be able to tell.

But as the vague uneasiness of the Georgian decadence spread and sought forms of expression, it was necessary to protect oneself from any sense of responsibility in the matter by finding scapegoats, and almost any outstanding group of people was exposed to the honour of vicarious atonement. A certain section of the mixture of peoples called the Jews, especially those hailing from Eastern Europe, is ghetto-conscious and suffers from an. Adlerian assertiveness, and it has always been a temptation to bright young men of the Armenoid type to set up as “champions” for their “people”, to revive the sense of being downtrodden if it threatens to wane and insist upon a preferential association. Jew must help Jew. Such economic bad manners reveal a universal human tendency; Scotchmen hang together, Welshmen control the milk and drapery trades in London, and so on; only the drastic contempt of more broadly civilised individuals can do anything to correct this exclusiveness.

Unhappily at the conclusion of the 1914-18 phase of the world war, the professional Jewish “champions” set themselves with particular energy to inflame this racial segregation in every possible way and to ignore as blatantly as possible the common need for a world settlement. They did not want to go on to a new world; they headed their “people” for Zion, They became Maccabean, they became heroic; boys in West Kensington dreamt of being Davids and their sisters Esthers, No public man, no writer, no journalist could go anywhere without having the Jewish Problem thrust into his face as though it was the one supreme interest of mankind. He was threatened implicitly or explicitly with boycotts and mischief if he refused his appointed role as a Gideonite, hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the Great Race. The mildest, most broadminded of humanitarians found themselves provoked into saying, “Oh, damn those Jews!”

Admittedly the Jews are tactless and vain and clannish but that after all is the worst that can be said about the worst of them. The most they did was to irritate. The great Jewish conspiracy is and always has been a fantasy.

But it was disastrous of these champions and leaders of Jewry, considering how widely dispersed and how vulnerable their “people” were, to make them so conspicuous in a world in urgent need of scapegoats. Homo Tewler Teutonicus, licking his sore vanity after defeat, found himself all too ready to be persuaded that he had been betrayed to defeat by the Jews. Morningside Prospect throughout the western world, looking for some scapegoat to explain the increased rocking of the financial boat, found it plausible to attribute it to “international finance” and easy to believe that international finance was essentially Jewish, It is not. It is less so than ever it was.

And come to think of it, said the Christian Churches, why, in spite of all our educational efforts, are congregations shrinking and our people losing their religious ardour? Some one, something, not ourselves, must be to blame. Why are our flocks restricting their birth-rate, while Jews, as we all know, invariably have enormous families? Why is there this increasing incredulity in the beautiful incomprehensible dogmas of our religion? How can people disbelieve what they cannot possibly understand unless they are stirred up by mischief-makers? And what is there at the back of this upset in Godless Russia, which was once so devoted to the Little Father on earth and his and Our Father in Heaven? ,You can read all about the ramifications of these satanic plottings in Mrs Nesta Webster’s Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. Or you can study how the new pogromism was revived in that curious and impudent forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There you see how craziness festers into mania.

That, in terms of general contemporary history, is the why and wherefore of the world epidemic of pogrom fever in the second Georgian period, and that is why Edward Albert, our microcosm, leaning over his garden gate and talking to Mr Copper, remarked, “These here Jews seem to be doing a lot of mischief in the world, one way and another.”

And why Mr Copper, already thoroughly infected, replied,

“And we let ’em get away with it—every time.”

You see here in Morningside Prospect in our Edward Albert just the same threefold mental stir that was to be found in the whole Morningside Prospect side of civilisation; the sick dread of some profound rearrangement of economic and social relationships impending, a dread expressing itself defensively in an irrational fear of “Bolshevism”; the same unpleasant realisation of a common nerveless conduct of affairs leading to the craving for a saviour and leader, and the same disposition to discover a scapegoat, for which role the Jewish Champions were already preparing their “people.” The world now and henceforth is doomed to live in an increasing community of interpretations, and these three factors were to be found among the threatened governing classes, all round the globe from pole to pole. The Bolshie, the Jew and the inspired Leader, all essentially imaginary beings, were becoming the three cardinal figures in a new mythology of escape from thought, starkness and courage.

Wherever the pound sterling and the dollar were current and freely exchangeable with local money, this mythology prevailed, masking the hard realities of the abolition of distance, the ever-increasing release of physical and human energy and the gathering resentment of the poor, the exploited and the frustrated majority of mankind. These triple ingredients brewed the final explosion of the Old Order, which that triple mythology prevented men from anticipating and averting.

But if that mythology was world-wide, it still varied greatly in its realisation in different regions of the earth. There were great differences in phase. Homo Tewler in his Western, Scandinavian and Polish varieties was not so widely different from Anglicanus; he presented the same mythological triangle and the same underlying forces, but until America had that rather alarming financial jolt in 1932 which put an end to its “sturdy individualism” for ever, there was not the same apprehension of possible calamity that was setting all Europe peering about for scapegoats and conspirators. But, as the New Deal unfolded, American myth and reality began to take on an increasing parallelism with Europe. In Russia the Muscovite Homo Tewler, after a tremendous constructive effort after the war, and after a phase of experimental strain and stress, lapsed for a time under the autocratic rule of a Saviour, forgetting or liquidating the old Bolshies and feeling no need for any other victims.

Homo Tewler Teutonicus, sharing the new mythology, was nevertheless in a different and more formidable mood than any of its neighbours in the world. It was smarting from a sense of accepted defeat and sustained disadvantage. It was very much in the state of mind of Edward Albert in the days when he endured .the punches of Horry Budd and pretended not to mind them. It was working up to the “Vad—a-nuff-o-vis” phase and the hysterical and vicious smacking of that young gentleman’s face. Sooner or later Homo Tewler Teutonicus was bound to fight. The particular event that. fired the magazine belonged to the chapter of accidents. The British Government played the part of those Bolter’s College Old Boys who lost the match through stupid over-confidence, and so put spunk into Edward Albert. They put spunk in the faltering German patriot. If it had not been the Nazi triumvirate of Goering, Goebbels and Hitler, it might have been the much more formidable Germany of the Strasser brothers. Or some other combination. But at the contemporary level of world intelligence it was as inevitable as dawn a week ahead, that Germany would start a war.

But what the world mind had still to grasp was the tremendous increase in destructive energy that had occurred since the clearing-up wars that followed the Treaty of Versailles. Even the people, the Fascists and Nazis who were most obviously and ostentatiously getting their feet upon the war path, had only a very feeble premonition of the immense smash they were going to make. Many people thought that war was approaching again; even Edward Albert remarked that “all this here armament don’t look like peace for ever, does it? Something ought to be done about it.” But they thought always of the old sort of war and not of war right out of control and a world blown to smithereens. And Morningside Prospect thought no more of warfare on its own golf links than of Martians out of the sky. Talk about disarmament went on among the representative Tewlers gathered at Geneva, but the arms salesmen made sure that these deliberations came to nothing.

Edward Albert became aware of Adolf Hitler, not as a personal enemy who was going to Shatter all the complacencies of his life, but as a strange, rather comic, figure in that pleasantly defeated Germany, somewhen about the time of the Reichstag fire. Mrs Tewler was shopping in Gage and Hopler’s emporium and Edward Albert was waiting for her in die convenient waiting-room beyond the soda fountain and the Hairdressing. He picked up an illustrated paper and found pictures of the Fuehrer in full blast.

“Look at that,” said Edward Albert.

“What’s he so excited about?”

“Politics.”

“Looks as if he ought to be took care of somewhere. He’s worse than that great ugly Mussolini. People like that didn’t ought to be let go about loose, all dressed up and ’owling and threatening everyone who don’t agree with them. You don’t know what mischief they may do sensible people.”

Thus Mary, revealing an anticipatory gleam of sapiens in her composition.

“No affair of ours,” said Mr Tewler, true to type, true to the specific quality that will never see what is coming to it until after it has been hit.

Later on he became more aware of the Nazi triumvirate and more particularly of” This here Hitler M.

Mr Copper of Caxton and Mr Standish of Tintern, in particular, were inclined to take a favourable view of this now rising star. “He may have his faults,” said Mr Copper, “but he and Musso stand like bulwarks between us and the Bolshies. Never forget that. And as for his treatment of them Jews—well, they ask for it.”

“They do do that,” said Edward Albert.

“You can’t trust a Jew with a fair-haired girl-servant. Same thing at Hollywood. I expect poor Hitler has his story to tell. And then these French. They’ve treated the Germans badly. How would you like to go out on the links and find some great. Senegalese nigger running about and raping every English girl he sets eyes on? I was reading a bit in a book the other day by Mr Arthur Bryant. There’s things flesh and blood won’t stand.”

That gave Edward Albert food for thought. He tried to think of himself as Sir Galahad clearing Soudanese niggers off the links and comforting their victims by a kind word or so before starting his round.

Mr Pildington, said that bringing coloured soldiers to Europe had been a great mistake. “The tales they take back! No respect left in them.... We did it and the French did it and we shall pay for it. Mark my words....”

“One thing we must never forget about Mussolini,“ ‘ said the vicar of Casing to Mrs Rooter in an earnest friendly talk at Harvest Thanksgiving. “Mustard gas or no mustard gas, he did put back the crucifix in the schools. I could forgive him many things for that.”

But Mrs Tewler took a different view. “These violent men ought to be put under control now,” she said. “They’ll do the world a mischief.”

“The more mischief they do the Bolshies and Jews the better I shall be pleased,” said Edward Albert. “There’s worse things in the world than holding up a hand and saying “‘Heil Hitler!’ After all, it’s only like standing up to ‘God save the King’ in their German way.”

II. The Storm Breaks

Up to the middle of 1939 the incredulous confidence of Morningside Prospect sustained itself throughout all the regions of the earth that were still untouched by destruction. In Spain, in the May of ’37, Goering boasted that he demonstrated the strength of the German air force—at that time—by the destruction of the ancient Basque city of Guernica. The place was practically destroyed, the population massacred and the world horrified. But it was done with planes and bombs that would have seemed beneath contempt to the airmen of four years later.

So, too, the exploits of the Japanese bombers in China; the blazing houses, the heaped dead, the smashed women and children, and the rapes and murders of the invaders, were accepted by the world as the last word in frightfulness instead of mere earnests of worse ahead. When again the Italians clenched their conquest of Abyssinia by the surprise use of mustard gas, which they had expressly agreed to abandon, it seemed as though treachery and bad faith had made their crowning triumph. All these events which people with untrammelled imaginations would have realised were mere intimations and sketches of things to come, were treated as being the final achievement of destructiveness. Why were people so stupid? The facts are plain enough. There was and there is no visible limit to the size and range of aircraft. They were, they are, certain to go on increasing in power and speed so long as air war remained a possibility. What else can happen? Neither was there any limit apparent to the destructive power of a bomb, which again must increase to world-destroying dimensions. Nor was there any perceptible limit to the amount of misdirection and social disorganisation that could be achieved by sustained lying, by the use of poisons, infections, blockades and terrorism. The human mind was amazingly reluctant to look these glaring inevitabilities in the face.

Tewler Americanus in particular was irritated by a harsh logic that overrode his dearest belief in his practical isolation whenever he chose to withdraw himself, from the affairs of the rest of the world. He had escaped from the old world and he hated to feel that he was being drawn back to share a common destiny with the rest of mankind.

By the summer of 1939 the blowing-up of the old civilisation was proceeding briskly. It was a progressive process. It went from strength to strength. It was a spreading fire in an uncharted wilderness of explosives. There was not one forthright bang of everything. It was much more like a big series of magazines and oil stores of unknown depth and extent blowing up and blazing one after another, each outbreak starting and incorporating still more violent explosions. The fighting of ’39 was mild in comparison with ’40, and ’40 was mild in comparison with ’41. Nobody had planned this. There is no sign in Mein Kampf of any realisation on the part of Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler that they had fired a limitless mine. They felt they were brilliant cynical lads who had taken the world by surprise. As a matter of fact, modern warfare took them by surprise. By 1941 they were as helplessly anxious as everybody else to put out the fire again and crawl away with any loot they could lay their hands on.

Goering promised that no allied air raids should ever distress the German homeland. He probably made that promise in perfect good faith. For a time he had the upper hand and the German public had little to complain of. They made war in the lands of other peoples according to a century-old tradition. War has still to come home to them. Whatever the allies did to Germany, said Goering, he would retaliate tenfold. What he did not realise until it was too late was that he had no monopoly in this war weapon he was using and that the Luftwaffe he had launched would not only kick back but grow to overwhelming dimensions.

In ’40 the Germans nearly won the war with the great tank and the dive-bomber. Then opportunity passed. In ’41 tanks were pouring out of factories by the thousand, and both Britain and Russia and America were drawing ahead of the German outfit in quantity and quality alike.

In 1941 the Nazis, feeling the nets closing about their adventure, struck hysterically at Russia, and for the first time encountered a people who had divested themselves of their Morningside encumbrance, who were united in their dislike to the German Herrenvolk and fought with an undivided mind. They had discovered that in warfare you cannot be too careless. “Safety last!” said the Russians. The Russians, falling back slowly upon their main line of defence, “scorching the earth” before this last convulsive thrust of the Nazi, were something very different from the crowded fugitives in the milder, already outmoded warfare of Holland, Belgium and France. War mounted another step in the scale of destruction, and aeroplanes and tanks by the thousand fought gigantic fleet actions upon land.

The old wars of history ebbed as they exhausted the scanty resources of their period, but this new warfare gathered destructive force as it went on.

In the summer of 1941 it was evidently dawning upon the central group of Nazis that the theory of totalitarian war was unsound, because of this unanticipated and uncontrollable crescendo. They began to gabble of a new world order. But they had lied so unscrupulously and professed lying so unblushingly that now even the British Hessians and the American Lindberghs could hardly pretend to believe them. They had destroyed their own ladder of escape and, as a gang at any rate, they were doomed. But that does not mean that the crescendo of destruction would come to an end. Their elimination would be of little more significance by itself than the sinking of a ship or the destruction of a tank. Even the Germans would hardly miss them. There is no dearth of feeble-minded mascots in central Europe. The world would still have a vindictive post-Hitler Germany recovering its strength for a new Fuehrer and a new convulsion; pluto-Christian democracy would still be showing its unclean and irregular teeth at the dreaded Bolshevik. World disaste would at the best, take breath, before deeper and higher and wider detonations scattered the shreds of the Christian peace Billions of lies, millions of foul murders, persecution, organised indignity, none of these things can save a world still dominated by mercenary Christian nationalism from the Avenging Fates,

But none of the people who embody the Tewler mind in governments and authorities seem able to see a yard ahead of anything they do. They are as capable of starting trouble as monkeys with matches, and as little capable of coping with the result.

“Cosmopolis in thought and life, or extinction,” says Destiny, toying idly with the bones of a Brontosaurus and awaiting the decision of Homo Tewler without haste indeed, but also without any touch of hesitation. “Time is almost up, Homo Tewler. Which shall it be?”

III. A.R.W. and H.G.

Which shall it be? We may set about the answer in either of two reciprocal ways. Throughout this story from the very beginning the same choice of aspects has confronted us, We can ask, can the species as a whole achieve this tremendous feat of adaptation demanded of us? Or we can turn to the individual samples we have selected for examination and .ask whether, with such material, there is any hope of arresting the blazing catastrophe that now detonates about us? If there is hope, however faint it may be, in Edward Albert Tewler, then there is that much hope for the world. If world revolution is not latent and credible in his circle, in his offspring and outcome, in the reactions he evokes and the chain of consequence he transmits, then is it equally impossible and incredible of his species as a whole.

Our double answer must end in a note of interrogation.

Let us tell first of all, as simply and plainly as possible, the behaviour of our hero during the world conflagration, and then swing our attention round to the battling ideas and interpretations in which that behaviour was framed and shaped. We have to deal faithfully with the traditions and wisdom of the human past, the divinities, the mighty reputations, the vast long-unquestioned assumptions by which the Tewler mind has been enslaved and stultified. If the Tewlers are timid and disingenuous fools by education and enslavement rather than by birth, there may be hope for them. There may be salvation for them yet, without the intervention of a quite impossible saviour.

As the storm broke, Edward Albert’s first reaction was an extreme indisposition to take any part in it whatever.

At the outset we had to tell of the marked reluctance of Edward Albert to live at all. The normal human being is born against its will. It has to be thrust and lugged into this chilly and disconcerting universe. Edward Albert, you will remember, took twenty-three hours. The first noise he made was a cackle of protest. We have told with all necessary particularity of his cowering childhood and the slow appearance in him of an urge of revolt and self-assertion. Even as a child he was not purely fear and submission. He could put out his tongue at caged lions; he could feel a stir of scepticism about the All-seeing God. Lust broke through a net of dread and religious uglification to the squalid satisfactions we have detailed. Something could rebel in him.

The education he received was cramping and old-fashioned even for his time. But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. “All that has been changed,” cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of wilful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness and self-protective illusion.

The opening phase of world catastrophe took Edward Albert completely by surprise.

A slogan that dominated the English world at that time was “Safety First.” In his childhood, Edward Albert remembered there had been a card with that inscription upon the mantelshelf of his mother’s living-room, but that had been a chance anticipation. He could not remember how it had got there or what became of it. The Safety First phase in British history came later, and it was largely due to an organised campaign on the part of the Insurance companies, transport services, and all the great damages-paying corporations, to train the public not to incur damage. It spread through the whole social body; it intensified the respectful feudal tradition that you cannot be too careful if you want to avoid trouble; it infected and dominated the administration of the country; it became the national motto. Dieu et mon Droit was felt to be an old-fashioned piece of swagger that might easily get us into difficulties. So that when at last Mr Neville Chamberlain gave up appeasement, in a fit of exasperation at the unendurable mockery of his umbrella, and declared war, Edward Albert, in common with a very considerable number of his comfortable independent fellow-citizens, made no attempt whatever to join in the fray. He concentrated his thoughts very largely on the discreet husbanding of his investments and whatever safe forms of tax evasion could be discovered.

Throughout the later months of 1939 Tewler England and Tewler France did not so much wage war as evade it. They potted at the enemy from behind the Maginot line and left Poland to its fate. They watched Russia readjust its frontiers in preparation for the inevitable struggle against the common enemy with profound disapproval. That Prince of Tewlers, the young King of the Belgians, obstinately refused to prepare a common front against the gathering onslaught. He was neutral, master in his own country, he insisted, and nothing could happen to him. He uttered a squeal for help when his frontier collapsed upon him and vanished from the scene, and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will never restore a Europe that will have any rôle for him again. The military science of France and England required that when an army is outflanked it should either retreat headlong or surrender. When confronted by a pincer-like movement, a soldier and a gentleman abandons his men and material and bolts home, ascribing his defeat to the decadent morals of the time. The British tradition then was a Day of Prayer, But wars are won by ungentlemanly persons who break the recognised rules of war and swear freely. The reaction of Almighty Providence to these Anglican praying bouts was ambiguous. The English and French strategists got themselves soundly licked by tanks, planes and this professional horror of nippers, and they were rather scandalised by the obstinacy of their men who insisted upon going on fighting until disaster took on an appearance of glorious retreat. Goebbels had only to say “Envelopment” or “Penetration”, and the confidence of the American and English military experts ran out at their heels. Pétain surrendered France. Until that happened Morningside Prospect had seemed a whole world away from bloodshed and violence. But the French collapse sent a shock through the villas. Newspapers fluttered at the garden gates and men sat in the golf club house with grave faces and stopped to talk war upon the tees. The Prospect had felt very stout-hearted about the U-boat sinkings and the German sea raiders. Its confidence in our navy was uncritical and complete. It gloried vicariously when the ship-saving instincts of the Admiralty were outraged by the Ajax and the Achilles, and Nelson came down from his aloofness in Trafalgar Square to revive the traditions of mutinous in-fighting. Morningside had never believed that our island frontiers could be scaled. And then came a positive air invasion of Britain. This scared and impressed the Prospect very badly, and it was only a year later that a belated but well-written pamphlet told them and the world all about the Battle of Britain. What was more obvious was that air raids were increasing at a great pace and that the Battle of the Atlantic was affecting the grocers’ bills. There had been black-out regulations in operation after November 1939, but the Prospect had never taken them very seriously until the autumnal raids of 1940. Then the mutual watchfulness of the neighbours was stimulated to the pitch of acerbity. Mr Copper of Caxton, in spite of his mature years, almost had a fight with a young fool on leave who was actually smoking a cigarette! outside one of the Celestial Prospect villas, and he followed this up by a denunciatory visit to the Brighthampton Police. The Brighthampton Police asked Mr Copper if he couldn’t perhaps do something to help, instead of just giving trouble,

Mr Copper was before all things a clear-headed man.

“It’s come to a point when people like us have got to look after things a bit,” he said to Mr Pildington. “We ought to have some sort of Vigilantes about.”

Mr Pildington thought there ought to be a Committee of Public Safety. “There’s people,” he said, “been coming up air raid nights and sleeping out on the links. It isn’t safe. It isn’t—orderly. We ought to call a meeting.” In a week the idea was well in hand. There was a suggestion that either Sir Humbert Compostella or Lord Foundry, formerly Sir Adrian von Stahlheim, be made chairman, but Sir Humbert, it seemed, was on a mission to America for an indefinite period, with his entire family, to organise American and British trade relations, and Lord Foundry was too deeply occupied with the production of munitions to be able to spare the time. He was known to advocate the production of tanks of the land ironclad type on a large scale, but so far the British military authorities had only been badly defeated twice by these unsportsmanlike weapons, and Lord Foundry had an up-hill job to put his ideas into operation. By the summer of ’41, however, he was making the country tank-conscious. But I anticipate. The meeting was in October, ’40. There was some doubt about inviting Mr Droop to the meeting.

“I can’t stand that leg-pulling of his,” said Mr Copper, “when it comes to serious things.” But liberal ideas prevailed and Mr Droop came to the meeting and didn’t bring up any nasty remarks about Sir Oswald Mosley or anything unpleasant of that sort. Indeed in some ways he was almost helpful.

The Committee met and passed several resolutions. They would employ the two jobbing gardeners who worked the Prospect as night watchmen and they would make a subscription to the Local Defence Volunteers. They then dispersed, thinking heavily. “I don’t like the way things are going,” said Edward Albert to his Mary. “I feel somehow we ought to be doing more about it.”

“What could you do?” asked Mary.

“I think we ought to have drilling on the links.”

“They’d cut up the greens,” said Mary.

“We could keep ’em off the greens,” said Edward Albert.

“We could keep a member on the links to see to that.”

The Local Defence Volunteers became a useful receptacle for elderly military men conversant with the tactics of fifty years ago, but still anxious to impart ideas of duty, discipline, social respect and restrain the notorious panic possibilities of the lower orders. Presently the Volunteers were actually drilling, three days a week, with sticks and old rifles, while representatives of the committee watched over the amenities of the links.

These formidable preparations were subjected to a certain amount of ungenerous criticism by people who had seen something of the fighting in Spain, France, Holland and elsewhere, and after due consideration the military authorities issued their white armlets and changed their names to the Home Guard, H.G.s.

The larger and richer British Tewlers had always had a profound and perhaps justifiable fear of an armed population, and for a time it was debated whether such weapons as were available ought not to be kept under armed guard at some strategic point and only actually issued to the men when the invader was already in ^he country. Time enough then for a policeman or somebody to knock them up and tell them what was afoot. In the event of German troops actually appearing, the Home Guard was to communicate the sinister news to the nearest policeman, who would act according to the printed instructions which in most cases had not yet been delivered to him. All road signs were removed, all maps called in, and every arrangement made for any British forces that might be in being, to get hopelessly lost in their own country.

Meanwhile the detonations of the war mounted to new levels of horror and violence. The ever-mounting flames advanced more and more closely towards Edward Albert. He found his own anxiety reflected in the faces of his neighbours, He talked in his sleep. He dreamt of a gigantic figure, the War God Mars, but rather like Lord Kitchener in the early posters, pointing a vast forefinger at him. “What is that fellow there doing? I want him”

It was no good pleading his defective health. He had already gone down to a Brighthampton doctor for a thorough overhaul. He had said nothing about it to Mary for fear of alarming her needlessly. He had been stripped, punched, X-rayed, sampled, tested for eyesight (slight astigmatism), everything. “Sound as a bell,” said the doctor. “Congratulations. They’ll be calling up you forty-twos in no time now,”

“I can’t stand by and do nothing,” he told Morningside.

“I’m going to qualify for the Home Guard now.”

His action brought Mr Droop to the same decision, but Mr Copper and Mr Stannish preferred to do clerical work in Brighthampton that would release younger men for the forces. But the designer of tessellated pavements who had been holding out as a conscientious objector with an unsound lung, was suddenly excited by Edward Albert’s example, recanted his objections and joined up for training. His wife was already in uniform as a tram conductor. Mrs Rooter also appeared in an authoritative get-up. She was some sort of accessory policewoman, detailed to protect the stray girlhood of Brighthampton from the immoral impulses that brought them up like moths at twilight to the Prospect Estate. Her flickering electric torch, her sudden challenge like the voice of conscience, was apt to be belated. “What’s this?” she would say. “You can’t do this, you know, here. You really can’t.”

They had thought otherwise, and more often than not they had.

Naturally enough Edward Albert and his friends discussed the Home Guard from various points of view. At first very few people had considered it as an actual fighting force. It was just another unimplemented threat to Hitler. “Let him come and he’d jolly well see,” was the idea. “We’d see what Jerry would do first and then we’d tackle him,” We were not like these here Frenchies. And so forth.

Mr Copper’s idea was that the job of the Home Guards was first and foremost to keep order and prevent any guerrilla fighting that might provoke Jerry to reprisals. “Don’t give him an excuse,” said Mr Copper. “And when the war is over you’ll be a sort of supplementary police to suppress strikers and mutineers and all that sort of thing. The country’s bound to be in a rotten state.”

But Mr Droop held that when the war began to turn at last against Germany we might send an expeditionary force into Europe (“God help us!” said Mr Stannish), and then the Home Guards would have to defend the country against any counter-raids. So it ought to be armed and trained as a real modern fighting force. Apparently that was being done in some parts of the country, but not in others. There was, said the authorities, “considerable local autonomy.” That is to say, the authorities suffered from the common characteristic of Homo Tewler the whole world over, an undetermined confusion of ideas. So long as they behaved with a certain mean discretion, the particular things they did were of secondary importance.

Throughout the early months of ’41, the Brighthampton Home Guard was a black-out and curfew Home Guard. Then came a violent change of policy. Somewhere higher up, there was positive knowledge that Jerry had carefully worked-out plans for an experimental raid on the Brighthampton district. There was to be a try-out in the Cretan fashion with parachutists and crashed troop carriers. There was to be a support of small swift craft. The British were in possession of the German plans a month ahead of the event. At a stroke preparations became swift, secret and competent. Suddenly Canadian and some Polish troops appeared in the district in a sort of unobtrusive abundance, and the local Home Guard reinforced by specially trained key men, was put through a course of combatant training at headlong speed.

“Practically I’m a guerrilla so’jer,” said Edward Albert to his wife. “Think of it I If I see a German I’ve got to shoot him or disarm him and he has the right to shoot me at sight, if he sees me first. It isn’t at all the sort of thing I’m good at. I’ve said that very likely I’d be much more useful somewhere else. And now they’re asking for you to come and help with this here camouflage. They paint a chap up so’s he don’t look like anything on earth, green and black and great dabs like cow droppings and things. They say I’ve got to paint my face and hands green. Then I’ve got to crawl about there on the links with a rifle, ready to take up a position and pot at them when they come.”

“Maybe they won’t come.”

“We got to be ready.”

“The world’s gone mad,” said Mary Tewler, and added after reflection; “I suppose we got to ’umour it.”

So she camouflaged Edward Albert until you might have trodden on him before you realised he was there.

IV. Heroic Moment

Inch by inch Edward Albert was sucked nearer and nearer towards the vortex of this ever more frightful war. He who had always dressed so carefully, became a jumble of garbage crouching on the links, a flattened Jack on the Green....

If you had told him late in 1940, that in a year’s time he would be an invisible man crawling through the midst of a raid to some position of comparative personal security, with a deafening anti-aircraft barrage beating the wits out of him, and flares and parachutists and a number of gigantic troop carriers raining down upon him, he would probably have contrived some minor mutilation that would have absolved him from any active participation in that sort of thing. A vague self-reproach floundered through the thudding and jumping in his brain.

“Bloody fool I been,” he muttered. “Never saw a thing ahead.”

That was his state of mind, within ten minutes of the moment that transfigured him into a national hero.

What happened was very simple. Tucked up at last under a bunker, Edward Albert felt secure from anything but a direct hit. There he could abide the issue, prepared to emerge either for surrender or the cheering when comparative quiet was restored. And then he became aware of men crawling discreetly up the other side of the bunker. He screwed his head round to look at them and perceived a gleam of bayonets. There were at least three of them. The heads whispered and waited for an interval. Then one of these shadowy men fired a shot at something ahead and a second jumped down within a yard of Edward Albert and pointed. They began to talk very rapidly—in Polish. But to Edward Albert, Polish and German were all one. The next man might tread on him and he’d be bayonetted for a certainty. They’d all stick their bayonets into him. With a wild yell he leapt to his feet and ran. They shouted something and ran after him. And right ahead he saw a group of dark figures struggling with parachutes and encumbrances. And they too were shouting German!

Germans behind him, Germans before him, and no quarter!

I have told my story badly if I have given you the impression that Edward Albert was an abject coward. Probably no human being who is properly nourished is that. Young children are easily terrified, but I am speaking of adults.

I have shown you a human being growing up in a debasing and discouraging social atmosphere, so that he was not so much born mean as had had meanness thrust upon him. All Edward Albert’s story, like the true story of every human being, is a story of resentments and rebellions, cramped and limited though they were. You have seen how he broke through his discretions and astonished Horry Budd. You have seen him astonishing the female of his species. Now, cornered as he imagined himself to be and hopeless, he broke through his cowering “instinct of self-preservation”, as they call it, altogether, and revealed himself a thing of frantic violence. His yell became a yell of despair and hatred. He leapt upon his fate. His green face and fluttering scraps of garbage bounding out of the night amidst the concussions of the battle must have had a nightmare effect upon those fumbling and uncertain young Nazis. He whirled his rifle round his head, smiting these dismayed and entangled men to the earth, beating them down, heedless of their belated cries of “Kamerad!” He had killed four men and disabled seven others before the three Poles who had been running after him came up to complete his victory.

“While we were waiting for supports to come up,” they testified, “he leapt out of the ground at our feet, shouted to us to follow him, and rushed the position the enemy detachment was trying to consolidate....”

It became apparent to Edward Albert that he was having his hand shaken by a Polish officer who spoke some English. The climax of the uproar within his brain and without, was past. Slowly but surely the realisation of what he had done dawned upon him.

He rearranged the facts with the same readiness with which he had accepted his triumph in the annual cricket match. The sunrise revealed the complete failure of the German attempt to test the strength of the Brighthampton coast defences. They had established no foothold. The mopping-up was over and there had been remarkably few casualties among the defenders. Mostly these had occurred among the exposed gunners on the beach beyond Casing East Cliff. A minimised account of the whole affair—lest panic be created—was released in the one o’clock bulletin. And Edward Albert, his heroism further developed by a liberal experience of Polish vodka, returned, weary, excessively dirty, drunk and triumphant to his home. Mr Droop and the pavement designer had preceded him. They had reported that he had been in the thick of the fighting with some Poles and Canadians, but he had not been hurt, they had seen him afterwards drinking at the Polish canteen, and so Mary and the whole of battle-scarred Morningside (for there were scores of broken windows) were out to receive him,

He was not singing, but if you had seen him on a silent film you would have thought he was singing. There was song in his gestures. He looked less like the seemly, almost punctiliously dressed golfer for whom she did her wifely duty than an intoxicated piece of hedge.

As he drew near her, and the neighbours closed in around him, he uttered these words.

“We mopped ’em up,” he said.

“Taint all you’ve mopped up,” said Mrs Tewler,

“Them Poles are so’jers and gent’men. Gent’men, mind you. They’re the boys! Nat’lly I had to have a drop with them. This vodka.... Cleanest drink I ever ’ad....”

“Tell us all about it,” said Mr Pildington.

“Not till he’s had a wash and a rest,” said Mrs Tewler.

“He’s fairly done up.”

“I’m fairly done up,” said this staggering mass of garbage, leaning heavily upon her. She guided him home,

“I’m so glad they didn’t hurt him,” she said. “He hasn’t got a scratch.”

As she mothered him through his bath and into his bed, he was partly asleep and partly meditative on his own astonishing exploits.

“I let ’em have it—right and left....

“Get out of England, I says, you come to the wrong place...

“Just me with these Jerries—they don’t know ’ow to fight Gaw knows what they thought they were doing—“Kamerad, he says, Kamerad! One chap I ’it. Fat lot of Kamerad ’e got out of me....”

In the course of twenty-four hours Edward Albert reappeared in the world of men clean and in his right uniform, as anxious as anyone to learn the particulars of the great fight he had been in. His camouflage suit had been injured beyond repair, and his wife was reconstructing it. Stephen Crane, when he wrote his Red Badge of Courage, found that what he got from the ordinary veteran of the American Civil War, was what the man had read about his battles in the newspapers. That had served to rationalise and give phrases for his own fierce jumble of memories. Edward Albert was in an exactly parallel state of mind. His reconstruction of his story was greatly facilitated by the romantic generosity of the gallant Polish officer, only too anxious to give an Englishman credit for leadership in the little affair, and only too eager to elaborate the story with all and sundry, over a glass or so of vodka. In spite of the Ministry of Information, a rumour that a real Cretan air landing had been repulsed at Brighthampton spread to London. About ten days later a “postcript” upon the London wireless told the Polish officer’s version of the story, suppressing all names and dates, and the incident was cabled in appreciative terms to America, to illustrate the invincible spirit of the ordinary unpretending Englishman. Edward Albert began to realise where he stood now in the world’s esteem. He was the ordinary unpretending Englishman, who had to be stung to show his mettle; and then it was he thought of his chosen epitaph, “Deeds not Words .”

Only in one quarter did he feel the chill breath of scepticism and that was where a happy husband might least expect it. She listened; she asked no questions; but she made him fed unreal even to himself.

So that when at last the people up there decided to mark their appreciation of the Brighthampton incident by a temperate distribution of honours, and the George’s Cross fell to Edward Albert, it was Mary to whom he hurried first.

“I don’t deserve it,” he said

“Don’t deserve what?”

“I only did what any Englishman would have done.”

She waited patiently.

“It’s really meant for the whole platoon of us. It’s what I have to wear for all of them.”

“You can’t wear it until it’s dry.”

“Wear what?”

“That camouflage.”

“I wasn’t talking of that. No. Mary! They’re going to give me the George’s Cross, The George’s Cross for courage. Aren’t you glad?”

“If it’s a pleasure to you, Teddy.”

“But it’s wonderful, Mary! Don’t you see how wonderful it is?”

“It’s wonderful. Yes.... There’s no telling what they won’t do next,” said Mary.

V. The End of Homestead

Mrs Tewler, for reasons that she never made clear, refused to go up to Buckingham Palace and see her husband decorated by the King. “It isn’t anything I did,” she said “All I did was to camouflage your clothes and hope you wouldn’t get into trouble. I shouldn’t know what to do or where to look up there. I suppose we should be pushed about by a lot of dressed-up officials in uniforms and orders and stars and stared at by Princes and Court Ladies watching us like animals, watching to see how we took it. There’ll be the King wearing his crown and the Queen wearing hers, and I’d be so worked up that if either of their crowns got a bit cock-eyed I’d have hysterics. You don’t want your wife to have hysterics, do you, Teddy? I’m afraid of that. And I’m afraid of those other women we shall meet, all those poor souls, widows who’ve lost their men and mothers who’ve lost their sons, being made a show of, and us—just glorying. I couldn’t look them other women in the face. No. It would be indecent of us, Teddy, King or no King....”

It crept into Edward Albert’s mind, almost for the first time in his married life, that perhaps Mary had “ideers.” But he dismissed the horrid thought forthwith. No. Mary was shy. She was not sure of herself and she saw the whole business in the wrong colours. It was going to be much more like shaking hands. She had to be reassured and laughed out of these notions. So he began by being instructive and persuasive, and it was only as her inflexible firmness gave no sign of yielding to his urgency that he passed on to deep offence.

“Oh, what’s the good of argument?” he cried. “I understand. Don’t I understand! Whatever I was or whatever I did, I don’t believe you’d take a pride in me.”

But Mrs Tewler was a wise woman and she preferred an inexpressive silence to repartee.

She spoke again presently. “I couldn’t get any sort of proper dress made in time, and you’d be the last person to have me go shabby. With all them photographers about, not to mention their Majesties.”

“I’ve never grudged your dress allowance,” said Edward Albert. “Now have I? And mostly you’ve spent it getting treats for that boy.”

“It’s my fault,” said Mrs Tewler. “But that won’t make dresses now. It’s all been so sudden.”

“Can’t you do something? It’s for you I want to go morn’ myself. Shabby or not shabby; I’d like to say, ‘This is the woman I owe everything to, bar my mother. She’s made me what I am to-day. I’d tell my story to the interviewer chaps. Love Story of a ’Ero. They’d take your portrait and put it in all the papers. One on the eye for Mrs Evangeline, eh? She’s bound to see it somewhere. I been thinking of that all along.”

Even that triumph did not allure Mary.

“No, you don’t mean to come,” he said at last at a climax of exasperation. “You don’t mean to come and you won’t. D’rectly I answer one objection, you make another. You can be as obstinate as a mule, Mary, as obstinate and unreasonable. You don’t seem to realise what all this means to me. You don’t care. I did all this for you—I said to myself, whatever danger there is, whatever happens I won’t let Mary down. And then—you let me down. All the other fellows will be there with their loved ones about them. People will say ’Oo’s this fellow? Lonely bachelor? Oh no, he’s got a wife but she didn’t care to come.’ Didn’t care to come! Think of it. Think of the disloyalty. Royal command it is practically. ‘Yes, Your Majesty, I got a wife but she didn’t care to come!’”

Mrs Tewler might have been listening to a dramatic rehearsal.

“You’ll get over it, Teddy,” she said, after his last poignant phrase. “You’d better let me pack your bag for you. I’ll put up your shaving things, but you’d better get a shave in the hotel in the morning. You might cut yourself in your excitement....”

So he went to London alone and indignant. The morning paper said that enemy activity over this country for the previous night had been inconsiderable. A few bombs had been dropped and there had been a certain destruction of house property and a casualty or so in one south coast town. Nothing much. But the house property in question was Homestead, and the chief casualties were Mary Tewler, one of her cats and the general servant next door. Mr Pildington of Johore had been blown off his feet and was suffering from contusions, and Caxton was badly damaged.

Mary Tewler recovered consciousness in the afternoon. She said she wanted to see her son. She did not know precisely where he was, but she thought his battalion was in Wales. She gave all the particulars.

“We’ll trace him, my dear,” said the sister in charge.

“They do that sort of thing now wonderfully. “But—your husband, Mrs Tewler?”

“Not so urgent. Plenty of time for that. He’s in London. He’s being decorated by the King,” she said. “Don’t spoil it for him by upsetting him. There’s plenty of time. It won’t matter for a day or so. I just feel numb you know. And tired.”

The sister in charge became a person of infinite delicacy.

“I think your husband ought to be told now.”

“You mean I’m worse than I think?”

“No need to deceive a brave woman like you. We’re doing all we can for you,”

Mary shut her eyes and thought. Then she spoke.

“Telegram?”

“Yes.”

“If I could see it—”

On these conditions she gave the name of the Palace Hotel at Victoria.

The telegram Edward Albert received informed him that his wife, very gravely injured by enemy action, was in Brighthampton Emergency Hospital. Mary had proposed to omit “very”, but the request was tactfully forgotten.

“Gaw!” said Edward Albert. “It’s like a Judgment. If only she’d have listened to reason! If only! If only....”

Then for a time he sat quite still. “Mary,” he whispered. Something quivered within him, a deeper distress for which his habits of mind gave him no form of expression.

“Maybe it’s not so bad.” One mustn’t give way to “ideers” in war time. “They don’t take risks,” he reflected.

He sent his telegram after a meditative tea. “Must be at Palace, special command of His Majesty, to-morrow as arranged. Will be with you before six. Teddy.”

But just before his supreme moment, that deeper stir within him, that undeveloped possibility of feeling, overwhelmed him again, and he sobbed. Of course she ought to have been here. He was astonished at his sob....

At the hospital they told him Mary was dying, and even then the reality did not seem to be real.

“Is she hurting?” he said.

“She’s numb. Her body is paralysed.”

“That’s good,” he said.

He found his son had preceded him at the hospital.

“He wanted to sit with her to the end but I thought better not,” said the sister in charge. “It’s an effort for her to speak. She’s troubled in her mind about something.”

“Has she been asking for me?”

“She wants to see you very much. She’s asked three times.”

That again distressed him inexpressibly. Somehow he ought to have been there.

“We had a sort of little difference,” said Edward Albert, trying to put unspeakable things into words. “Nothing reely—just a tiff you might say. I expect now she’s sorry she didn’t come and she wants to hear all about it.” (Sob).

“She must want to hear all about it. If only she’d come,....”

But that was not what was worrying Mary.

Their conversation was at cross-purposes,

“Promise me something,” she said unheeded.

“It was wonderful, Mary,” said Edward Albert. “Wonderful. Not a bit pompous. Not a bit high and mighty.”

“He’s your son.”

“Royal and democratic. Marvellous.”

“Don’t let anyone set you against him, Teddy. Don’t do that,” said the fading voice.

He did not hear what she was saying, for the glorious story he had prepared filled his mind.

He expatiated on the approach to Buckingham Palace; the crowd; the polite way in which he was picked out and asked in; how there were fellows taking snapshots and some cheering.

“Promise me,” she murmured. “Promise me.” They were her last words.

“The King was there and the Queen. Naturally. Such a nice young unaffected feller. No crowns for him. And her with that sort of jollying smile of hers. Nothing stuck-up about her. Oh! I wish you could have been there and seen how. different it was from what you supposed. It might have been a tea party rather than a court ceremony. And yet all the time a sort of dignity. You felt, here is something that will go on, the heart of a great empire like . . . All the time I was thinking of you and how I’d come back and tell you everything. But I wish you could have been there to see. Yes, yes. If you’d been there.

“I ’urried down to show it to you. And here it is, Mary. Here it is....”

For a few seconds she stared at her husband’s evident self-satisfaction as though it was something strange to her and then as steadfastly at the cross in his hand. She made no further effort to speak. Slowly her interest faded. She closed her eyes like a tired child. She closed them on him and on this clumsy stupid world for ever....

Presently the sister put a hand on his arm,

“She was such a wife to me.” said Edward Albert, sobbing freely. “What I shall do without her I don’t know.”

Sob, “Oh! I reely don’t know. I’m glad I was able to show her this. I am glad of that.... It ain’t much. It’s something; isn’t it?.... Something to show her....”

The nurse let him have his cry out.

He found his son in a mood of lethargic misery in the corridor. He had travelled all night for a last glimpse of her. “She’s gone, my boy,” said Edward Albert. “Our Mary. I was just able to show it to her before she closed her eyes.”

“Show what to her?” asked Henry.

Edward Albert held out the decoration.

“Oh! that,” said Henry, and lapsed into himself again.