The Refuge (11 page)

He was unusually excited.

‘The chance was there,’ he said, his mild eyes snapping strangely. ‘The Empire could have fought and won a war, as it did before. Hundreds—thousands of men in my position were waiting for it. Don’t imagine I’m a complete scoundrel, old boy. What I know, what the rest of us know, is that a war would have been the making of this country. Not just financially, though that would have come. It would have brought us political maturity. When a young country gets that, it goes ahead in a big way . . . And now that bastard Chamberlain . . .’

‘Pardon the interruption,’ I said, for I was beginning to feel angry, ‘but I think if you take a long, calm look at the situation you will see that that bastard Chamberlain, as you call him, has done more than any other man living to guarantee you your war all in good time. Think it over.’

‘These fluctuations in the popular state of mind,’ he said, ‘are bad for other things than business. A war all in good time is not what I meant. It might be another five years—another ten. We can’t afford to wait that long.’

‘All my information points to next year, and at about this time,’ I said, made reckless by anger. That caused him to put on a blank face, to hide the suddenness of his feelings, no doubt. He wished to appear neither dubious, out of respect towards me as a newspaper man with—as he had always supposed—a huge store of secrets; nor yet hopeful, out of respect for himself. He looked down to stir his coffee.

I had, in fact, told him the truth as far as guesswork could hit upon it. The men and women with whom I worked had shared, perhaps too freely and more fully than most, that appalling wave of panic of which I have spoken. The raw cablegrams and wireless messages, in the very brevity of the jargon in which they are written, at these times always look so much worse than the fluidly formal English into which the sub-editors translate them, according to the
Gazette
’s invariable ‘no-panic’ ruling on the handling of crisis news of that sort. It was the crude messages: ‘Chamberlain Munichwise tomorrow conciliatory more Sanger’ and the replies: ‘Urgent Sanger Hellbach Munichwise full cover Sydney’—things like that were what we saw or heard about, before the more shocking and reassuring copy began to flood in after the office rumours, let loose somehow by private secretaries and made impetuous by the very lack of facts, had taken hold of all imaginations.

The same thing happened as happened when even the least of domestic office changes was foretold. The men fell into murmuring groups, the women came down more than was customary from their own floor, and the talk went on and on, turning supposition into fact, and from fact brewing a slow-working but potent fearfulness. I recall most particularly the strange new look of life in the women’s faces. It was partly fear, partly an unconcealed nervous excitement such as I have seen on the faces of women at the scene of some filthy crime, or in the streets when a brawl is on the point of beginning. It was the few older women on the staff who were the more frankly excited and wet-lipped; the younger ones and the cadets were no less frankly scared; but I recall also, still with the same sense of pain and shame now dulled by time passing, that on the day when the agreement at Munich was made known to the world, when I paid my usual brief afternoon visit to my friend Barbara Conroy, who had recently become women’s editor of the
Gazette
, I found her in tears at her big table, in a distraction of grief over something she could not express or even understand, and of relief that the shrill strain of the foregoing days was ended.

Her son Brian, barely seventeen, had been accepted by the Royal Australian Air Force fourteen months earlier and was training at Point Cook; and though there were two other boys she favoured him most, secretly and with much self-criticism as I knew, because he was most like her dead husband, whom she had loved with joy and passion. Her feeling of relief, I could perceive, was intensely personal to herself, and would not last; the other distracting emotion, of mysterious physical shame which many of us felt, as at having touched in the dark some disgusting substance, was beyond description or measurement to her—‘a world of shame’ was what she said when she had composed herself after I entered. It was the shamed feeling, almost too deep to be borne, which a good man suffers after having done a bad deed unwittingly. The deed is so foreign to what he knows himself to be that he wonders in the end whether his own sanity is in doubt. Seek as he will, he cannot find in himself the fault which, he now perceives, had momentarily endangered the structure of what he was used to think of as a life of integrity; and such moments of remorseful bewilderment can sound as it were the frightening prelude to calamity.

‘Why is it,’ I said to Barbara, ‘that so many of us are simply disappointed, instead of feeling what you and I feel—this sort of shame? Who is right? If we do feel shame, does that mean that we would have preferred to be party to a state of war? Surely, if we had preferred that, we would have even more cause to feel ashamed? No sane person deliberately wishes for the sort of war the next one must be.’

‘Must be?’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s inevitable?’

‘I know it is,’ I said, ‘and so do you. Words are irrevocable. “Peace in our time” was a mad thing for that unfortunate man to say. The ancients would have killed him on the spot for defying the gods. The best that can be said about this business is that it gives Britain a little more time, a very little, but some, anyhow.’

Unexpectedly—for I had as I thought forgotten her—there came to my mind the grave face and clear voice of the refugee girl on the
Empire Queen
in that airless cabin just after sunrise, several weeks ago now. ‘There will be war. It is certain. He is not ready this year. It will be next year . . .’ she had said in her suddenly gentle tone as though speaking to a child.

‘It will be next year now,’ I said vaguely, not seeing Barbara’s fine, tired face and beautifully kept grey hair in the September afternoon sunlight that fell down into the narrow ravine of the street outside. ‘Germany is not quite ready yet, it seems. One of these refugees who has been mixed up in politics in Europe gave me to understand that there is still a good deal of consolidation to be done in Europe before Herr Hitler feels he can defy the English-speaking world openly.’

Woman-like, Barbara brought the conversation back to the personal.

‘What will our children say of us—what will they think of us, Lloyd?’ she said with passionate inquiry.

‘Does it matter?’ I said. ‘All children think unkindly of their parents at some time or another, for this reason or that. I recall a period when I disliked my father because of his Homburg hat and his beard. Beards were going out of fashion. To me he seemed coarsely conspicuous, and I hated being seen in his company by boys of my own age who knew me. Well—look at me now.’

‘I love your beard, Lloyd. It’s perfect for you. In fact, I love you altogether, probably because I’m nearly old enough to be your mother—your sister, anyhow,’ she added, looking at me with a deep, tired look.

‘Whatever they think of us,’ I said, ‘they will know in time that although we were ashamed of Munich we were not among those who were disappointed just because there was no firmer stand—and so no war this year. They will know we were not on the side of the people who are ready to shed other people’s blood. Could you kill anyone yourself, or even agree to someone else’s death, if it lay in your hands?’

‘No more than you could,’ she said. ‘You know that. Excuse me just a moment.’

She used the house telephone to speak to the printer, referring to a page-proof in front of her from which—a minute sign of the times—a twelve-inch double-column advertisement had been dropped the day before. From time to time she looked up from the proof to me where I sat in the comfortable visitors’ chair facing the light. Her eyes were unseeing, but although her face looked weary there was no dullness in it; the strained and hectic manner of most of the older newspaper women I knew was not her manner, but instead she had an air of constant and intelligent watchfulness which, with her perfection of dress and bearing, made her always seem younger than she was. She was, at most, twelve years my senior—in her early forties, perhaps, a splendid age for many women of her physical type, so long as they be not employed on a daily newspaper.

In addition to editing the special Women’s Supplement which we published in the middle of each week, and supervising a small staff of variously dependable juniors, she personally covered most of the city’s important social occasions. She was related to the paper’s chief proprietor in some obscure tie of blood; but in spite of all this, and because she had what I can only call ‘style’, she never looked completely at home anywhere in the building outside her own rooms. Meeting her walking quickly along one of the corridors, you could well suppose her to be some visiting society woman whose slight eccentricity was to come hatless into the city’s fretful afternoon; but the sight of her down on the printing floor, apologetically making last-minute cuts on the stone, or in cool, smiling conclave with a few members of the chapel, was—to me at least—always rather astonishing. I had known her, we had been friends, since we joined the staff of that newspaper almost at the same time, and in all those long and sometimes embittered years I had never heard her say an unjust word or do anything petty or ungraceful. Among newspaper people this would not be a common record. If I say also that she was as easy in her generosity as she was shy in the frank bestowal of her affectionate regard, I flatter not her but myself, who had admired the one and enjoyed the other.

Not in spite but because of these two characteristics, she might well have been out of place even among the fairly conservative members of the
Gazette
staff of those days before the war; but she had social as well as personal grace, and moved as easily in vice-regal company as in that of the overalled, ink-stained members of the chapel downstairs. Nothing quite dismayed her, until today.

At this time—above all at this particular time—I had never so much admired a woman since Jean died when Alan was born. That girl’s death, as it were in the very ecstasy of life, so affected me that I very soon came to believe I had had and done with love for any woman. The fact that in time I found absolute celibacy no painful or unnatural state confirmed me in this belief, nor was I any way moved from it by my quite intimate association with Barbara. In marriage, my young wife and I had known, in due course, something near the absolute of bodily and mental and spiritual union and content. Death came like a wind; but, while it extinguished her as a lamp that has burned steadily and bright may be extinguished in an instant, to me it gave—I thought in my despair of those days—only a mortal coldness from which I could not die.

My mother, who lived on disconsolately after my father, reminded me at once that I had the child to think of, and must not give way to grief for too long. In fact, I had not given way to grief at all. Grief had given way to me. If I speak of despair, I mean chiefly the state of mind that would be suffered by a musician who had lost one hand, suddenly and for no apparent earthly or divine reason. Such a man, fatally wounded in mind and spirit, does not die. He lives on, perhaps in immaterial ways a little nobler as in obvious ways he is a little less perfect, physically, than his fellows. He does not die.

Nothing died in me except (as I thought) the power, and it is indeed a power, to love women. I see now that to say merely ‘the power to love’ would be wrong. Few who have had it lose that and live on. I had been deeply schooled in affection all my life; there remained, as my mother had hurriedly reminded me, the child; and I decided that another life, particularly a life so newly begun, so innocent, and so buoyantly sprung as it were from the dying body of my love, must be well worth cherishing with all my heart. I did honestly think, at that time, that it was indeed a conscious decision, so extremely had I come to rationalize and in a sense excuse even my simplest natural impulses. It is plain enough now that I had been intellectually over-educated but left in a pretty state of social ignorance. As a father and a newspaper reporter I was obliged, without knowing it, to narrow the gap between the two states. What happened, in fact, was that in most ways I put the child in the place of my wife. His life and being came as near to obsessing me as anything human ever did, until I began to know Irma: and even my relationship with her was conditioned, intensified and of course finally concluded by my deep and compassionate awareness of the whole identity of my son.

At the time of the Munich conference, in nineteen thirty-eight, he was in his eighth year. As Barbara pointed out, with simple pleasure on my account, I had nothing to worry about there. She was right, but only in a large and limited sense; for she could not really know how profound had become my mistrust of a world in which wars could still come into evil flower, and in which individuals could play with and brutally alter the myriad personal fates of whole nations of men and women. In such a world I thought I could find plenty of cause to be concerned for Alan; in such an insane, dangerous world, where the very soul, unawares, was vulnerable, I could impersonally imagine a father willingly and painlessly ending the life of a son before that life should fade and fray into the common background pattern of greedy passions and deliberate violence which is also the pattern of inevitable self-destruction.

Barbara was not to know of that grievous secret distrust of the human world and human society which later found its only self-forgetfulness in the Lithuanian refugee, for I could put it from my conscious mind in her calmly observant company. As I looked at her across the wide table’s spread of files and clippings, across the still, listening telephones and the first, earliest Queensland roses standing sweetly in a crystal bowl between us, I thought for one unwonted moment how strange it was that the extreme of our physical intimacy had been, in all these years, only an occasional brief handclasp at parting, after one of our rare evenings spent together when it had happened that we were both off duty; for I very well knew that she was a healthy and desirable woman. Possibly we were both impressed more deeply than we ever realized by the fact, scarcely spoken of between us, that we had first met in almost identical circumstances of bereavement; for though I had known Brian Conroy slightly, as a staff man much my senior, I did not even see Barbara until the day after his death, and did not meet her until some time later.