‘Why in the world?’ I asked in amazement.
‘Because I am going away. And I may be away for quite a time.’
When I found words, and that took some time, I asked if he had grown tired of England.
‘Bless you, no! I love it better than any place on earth. The autumn scents are beginning, and London is snugging down for its blessed cosy winter, and the hunting will soon be starting, and last Sunday I heard the old cock pheasants shouting—’
‘Where are you going? Canada?’
He nodded.
‘Have you fallen in love with it?’
‘I hate it worse than hell,’ he said solemnly, and proceeded to say things which in the interest of Imperial good feeling I refrain from repeating.
‘Then you must be mad!’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m quite sane. It’s very simple, and I’ve thought it all out. You know I ran away from my duty eighteen months ago. Well, I was punished for it. I was a howling failure in Canada… I haven’t told you half… I pretty well starved… I couldn’t hold down any job… I was simply a waif and a laughing stock. And I loathed it – my God, how I loathed it! But I couldn’t come back – the very thought of facing London gave me a sick pain. It took me a year to screw up my courage to do what I knew was my manifest duty. Well, I turned up, as you know.’
‘Then that’s all right, isn’t it?’ I observed obtusely. ‘You find London better than you thought?’
‘I find it Paradise,’ and he smiled sadly. ‘But it’s a Paradise I haven’t deserved. You see, I made a failure in Canada and I can’t let it go at that. I hate the very name of the place and most of the people in it… Oh, I daresay there is nothing wrong with it, but one always hates a place where one has been a fool… I have got to go back and make good. I shall take two hundred pounds, just what I had when I first started out.’
I only stared, and he went on: ‘I funked once, and that may be forgiven. But a man who funks twice is a coward. I funk Canada like the devil, and that is why I am going back. There was a man there – only one man – who said I had guts. I’m going to prove to that whole damned Dominion that I have guts, but principally I’ve got to prove it to myself… After that I’ll come back to you, and we’ll talk business.’
I could say nothing: indeed I didn’t want to say anything. Jim was showing a kind of courage several grades ahead of old Jonah’s. He had returned to Nineveh and found that it had no terrors, and was now going back to Tarshish, whales and all.
Tendebant Manus
Send not on your soul before
To dive from that beguiling shore,
And let not yet the swimmer leave
His clothes upon the sands of eve.
A. E. HOUSMAN
One night we were discussing Souldern, who had died a week before and whose memorial service had been held that morning in St Margaret’s. He had come on amazingly in Parliament, one of those sudden rises which were common in the immediate post-war years, when the older reputations were being questioned and the younger men were too busy making a livelihood to have time for hobbies. His speeches, his membership of a commission where he had shown both originality and courage, and his reputed refusal, on very honourable grounds, of a place in the Cabinet, had given him in the popular mind a flavour of mystery and distinction. The papers had devoted a good deal of space to him, and there was a general feeling that his death – the result of a motor smash – was a bigger loss to the country than his actual achievement warranted.
‘I never met him,’ Palliser-Yeates said. ‘But I was at school with his minor. You remember Reggie Souldern, Charles? An uncommon good fellow – makings of a fine soldier, too – disappeared with most of his battalion in March ’18, and was never heard of again. Body committed to the pleasant land of France but exact spot unknown – rather like a burial at sea.’
‘I knew George Souldern well enough,’ said Lamancha, whom he addressed. ‘I sat in the House with him for two years before the war. That is to say, I knew as much of him as anybody did, but there was very little you could lay hold of. He used to be a fussy, ineffective chap, very fertile in ideas which he never thought out, and always starting hares that he wouldn’t hunt. But just lately he seems to have had a call, and he looked as if he might have a career. Rotten luck that a sharp corner and a lout of a motor-cyclist should have put an end to it.’
He turned to his neighbour. ‘Wasn’t he a relation of yours, Sir Arthur?’
The man addressed was the oldest member of the Club and by far the most distinguished. Sir Arthur Warcliff had been a figure of note when most of us were in our cradles. He began life in the Sappers, and before he was thirty had been in command of a troublesome little Somaliland expedition; then he had governed a variety of places with such success that he was seriously spoken of for India. In the war he would have liked to have returned back to soldiering, but they used him as the Cabinet handy-man, and he had all the worst diplomatic and administrative jobs to tackle. You see, he was a master of detail and had to translate the generalities of policy into action. He had never, as the jargon goes, got his personality over the footlights, so he was only a name to the public – but a tremendous name, of which every party spoke respectfully. He had retired now, and lived alone with his motherless boy. Usually, for all his sixty-five years, he seemed a contemporary, for he was curiously young at heart, but every now and then we looked at his wise, worn face, realised what he had been and was, and sat at his feet.
‘Yes,’ he said in reply to Lamancha. ‘George Souldern was my wife’s cousin, and I knew him well for the last twenty years. Since the war I knew him better, and in the past eighteen months I was, I think, his only intimate friend.’
‘Was he a really big man?’ Sandy Arbuthnot asked. ‘I don’t take much stock in his profession – but I thought – just for a moment – in that Irish row – that I got a glimpse of something rather out of the ordinary.’
‘He had first-class brains.’
Sandy laughed. ‘That doesn’t get you very far,’ he said. The phrase ‘first-class brains’ had acquired at the time a flavour of comedy.
‘No. It doesn’t. If you had asked me the question six years ago I should have said that George was a brilliant failure. Immensely clever in his way, really well educated – which very few of us are – laborious as a beaver, but futile. The hare that is always being passed by every kind of tortoise. He had everything in his favour, but nothing ever came out as he wanted it. I only knew him after he came down from Oxford, but I believe that at the University he was a nonpareil.’
‘I was up with him,’ said Peckwether, the historian. ‘Oh, yes, he was a big enough figure there. He was head of Winchester, and senior scholar of Balliol, and took two Firsts and several University prizes in his stride. He must have sat up all night, for he never appeared to work – you see, it was his pose to do things easily – a variety of the Grand Manner. He was a most disquieting undergraduate. In his political speeches he had the air of having just left a Cabinet meeting.’
‘Was he popular?’ someone asked.
‘Not a bit,’ said Peckwether. ‘And for all his successes we didn’t believe in him. He was too worldly-wise – what we used to call “banausic” – too bent on getting on. We felt that he had all his goods in the shop window, and that there was no margin to him.’
Sir Arthur smiled. ‘A young man’s contemporaries are pretty shrewd judges. When I met him first I felt the same thing. He wasn’t a prig, and he had a sense of humour, and he had plenty of ordinary decent feeling. But he was the kind of man who could never forget himself and throw his cap over the moon. One couldn’t warm to him… But, unlike you, I thought he would succeed. The one thing lacking was money, and within two years he had remedied that. He married a rich wife; the lady died, but the fortune remained. I believe it was an honest love match, and for a long time he was heart-broken, and when he recovered he buried himself in work. You would have said that something was bound to happen. Y
oung, rich, healthy, incredibly industrious, able, presentable – you would have said that any constituency would have welcomed him, that his party would have jumped at him, that he would have been a prodigious success.
‘But he wasn’t. He made a bad candidate, and had to stand three times before he got into the House. And there he made no kind of impression, though he spoke conscientiously and always on matters he knew about. He wrote a book on the meaning of colonial nationalism – fluent, well expressed, sensible, even in parts eloquent, but somehow it wasn’t read. He was always making speeches at public dinners and at the annual meetings of different kinds of associations, but it didn’t seem to signify what he said, and he was scarcely reported. There was no conspiracy of silence to keep him down, for people rather liked him. He simply seemed to have no clear boundary lines and to be imperfectly detached from the surrounding atmosphere. I could never understand why.’
‘Lack of personality,’ said Lamancha. ‘I remember feeling that.’
‘Yes, but what is personality? He had the things that make it – brains and purpose. One liked him – was impressed by his attainments, but, if you understand me, one wasn’t impressed by the man… It wasn’t ordinary lack of confidence, for on occasion he could be aggressive. It was the lack of a continuity of confidence – in himself and in other things. He didn’t believe enough. That was why, as you said, he was always starting hares that he wouldn’t hunt. Some excellent and unanswerable reason would occur to him why he should slack off. He was what I believe you call a good party man and always voted orthodoxly, but, after four years in the House, instead of being a leader he was rapidly becoming a mere cog in the machine. He didn’t seem to be able to make himself count.
‘That was his position eight years ago, and it was not far from a tragedy. He was as able as any man in the Cabinet, but he lacked the demonic force which even stupid people sometimes possess. I can only describe him in paradoxes. He was at once conceited and shy, inordinately ambitious and miserably conscious that he never got the value of his abilities out of life… Then came the war.’
‘He served, didn’t he?’ Leithen asked. ‘I remember running across him at GHQ.’
‘You may call it serving, if you mean that he was never out of uniform for four years. But he didn’t fight. I wanted him to. I thought a line battalion might make a man of him, but he shrank from the notion. It wasn’t lack of courage – I satisfied myself of that. But he hadn’t the nerve to sink himself into the ranks of ordinary men. You understand why? It would have meant the realisation of what was the inmost fear of his heart. He had to keep up the delusion that he was some sort of a swell – had to have authority to buttress his tottering vanity.
‘So he had a selection of footling staff jobs – liaison with this and that, deputy-assistant to Tom, Dick and Harry, quite futile, but able to command special passes and staff cars. He ranked, I think, as a full colonel, but an Army Service Corps private was more useful than ten of him. And he was as miserable as a man could be. He liked people to think that his trouble was the strain of the war, but the real strain was that there was no strain. He knew that he simply didn’t matter. At least he was candid with himself, and he was sometimes candid with me. He rather hoped, I think, that I would inspan him into something worth doing, but in common honesty I couldn’t, for you see I too had come to disbelieve in him utterly.
‘Well, that went on till March 1918, when his brother Reggie was killed in the German push. Ninth Division, wasn’t it?’
Palliser-Yeates nodded. ‘Ninth. South African Brigade. He went down at Marrières Wood, but he and his lot stuck up the enemy for the best part of a Sunday, and I solemnly believe, saved our whole front. They were at the critical point, you see, the junction of Gough and Byng. His body was never found.’
‘I know,’ said Sir Arthur, ‘and that is just the point of my story.’
He stopped. ‘I suppose I’m right to tell you this. He left instructions that if anything happened to him I was to have his diary. He can’t have meant me to keep it secret… No, I think he would have liked one or two people to know.’
He looked towards Palliser-Yeates. ‘You knew Reggie Souldern? How would you describe him?’
‘The very best stamp of British regimental officer,’ was the emphatic reply.
‘Clever?’
‘Not a bit. Only average brains, but every ounce of them useful. Always cheery and competent, and a born leader of men. He was due for a brigade when he fell, and if the war had lasted another couple of years he might have had a corps. I never met the other Souldern, but from what you say he must have been the plumb opposite of Reggie.’
‘Just so. George had a great opinion of his brother – in addition to the ordinary brotherly love, for there were only the two of them. I thought the news of his death would break him altogether. But it didn’t. He took it with extraordinary calm, and presently it looked as if he were actually more cheerful… You see, they never found the body. He never saw him lying dead, or even the grave where he was buried, and he never met anybody who had. Reggie had been translated mysteriously out of the world, but the melancholy indisputable signs of death were lacking.’
‘You mean he thought he was only missing and might turn up some day?’
‘No. He knew he was dead – the proof was too strong, the presumption was too heavy… But while there was enough to convince his reason, there was too little for his imagination – no white face and stiff body, no wooden cross in the cemetery. He could picture him as still alive, and George had a queer sensitive imagination about which most people knew nothing.’
Sir Arthur looked round the table and saw that we were puzzled.
‘It is a little difficult to explain… Do you remember a story of the French at Verdun making an attack over ground they had been fighting on for months? They shouted “En avant, les morts”, and they believed that the spirits of the dead responded and redressed the balance. I think it was the last action at Vaux… I don’t suppose the poilu thought the dead came back to help him, but he pretended they were still combatants, and got a moral support from the fancy… That was something like George Souldern’s case. If you had asked him, you would have found that he had no doubt that what was left of Reggie was somewhere in the churned-up wilderness north of Péronne. And there was never any nonsense about visitations or messages from the dead… But the lack of visible proofs enabled his imagination to picture Reggie as still alive, and going from strength to strength. He nursed the fancy till it became as real to him as anything in his ordinary life… Reggie was becoming a great man and would soon be the most famous man in the world, and something of Reggie went into him and he shared in Reggie’s glory. In March ’18 a partnership began for George Souldern with his dead brother, and the dead, who in his imagination was alive and triumphant, lifted him out of the sticky furrow which he had been ploughing since he left Oxford.’
We were all silent except Pugh, who said that he had come across the same thing in the East – some Rajput prince, I think.
‘How did you know this?’ Lamancha asked.
‘From the diary. George set down very fully every stage of his new career. But I very nearly guessed the truth for myself. You see, knowing him as I did, I had to admit a sudden and staggering change.’
‘How soon?’
‘The week after the news came. I had been in Paris, and on my return ran across George in the Travellers’ and said the ordinary banal words of sympathy. He looked at me queerly, as he thanked me, and if I had not known how deeply attached the brothers were, I would have said that he was exhilarated by his loss. It was almost as if he had been given a drug to strengthen his arteries. He seemed to me suddenly a more substantial fellow, calmer, more at peace with himself. He said an odd thing too. “Old Reggie has got his chance,” he said, and then, as if pulling himself up, “I mean, he had the chance he wanted.”
‘In June it was clear that something had happened to George Souldern. Do you remember
how about that time a wave of dejection passed over all the Allied countries? It was partly the mess in Russia, partly in this country a slight loss of confidence in the Government, which seemed to have got to loggerheads with the soldiers, but mainly the “drag” that comes in all wars. It was the same in the American Civil War before Gettysburg. Foch was marking time, but he was doing it by retreating pretty fast on the Aisne. Well, our people needed a little cheering up, and our politicians tried their hand at it. There was a debate in Parliament, and far the best speech was George’s. The rest was mere platitude and rhetoric, but he came down on the point like a steam-hammer.’
‘I know,’ said Lamancha. ‘I read it in The Times in a field hospital in Palestine.’
‘In his old days nobody would have paid much attention. He would have been clever and epigrammatic – sound enough, but “precious”. His speech would have read well, if it had been reported, but it wouldn’t have mattered a penn’orth to anybody… Instead he said just the wise, simple, stalwart thing that every honest man had at the back of his head, and he said it with an air which made everybody sit up. For the first time in his life he spoke as one having authority. The press reported him nearly verbatim, for the journalists in the Gallery have a very acute sense of popular values.
‘The speech put George, as the phrase goes, on the political map. The Prime Minister spoke to me about him, and there was some talk of employing him on a mission which never materialised. I met him one day in the street and congratulated him, and I remember that I was struck by the new vigour in his personality. He made me come home with him to tea, and to talk to him was like breathing ozone. He asked me one or two questions about numbers, and then he gave me his views on the war. At the time it was fashionable to think that no decision would be reached till the next summer, but George maintained that, if we played our cards right, victory was a mathematical certainty before Christmas. He showed a knowledge of the military situation which would have done credit to any soldier, and he could express himself, which few soldiers can do. His arguments stuck in my head, and I believe I used them in the War Cabinet. I left with a very real respect for one whom I had written off as a failure.