It's a Battlefield Read online

  ‘Shall I whistle a taxi, sir?’

  He called to his servant through the closed door, ‘Can’t you leave me alone, Davis? I can look after myself,’ and twisting in the seesaw of pride and humility between the window and the door, between the mirror and the bust of Lenin, he heard his wife’s voice saying with fierce dislike: ‘You haven’t practised that expression enough.’ Suddenly through the stillness, like the ghost of old dinners, he heard a nut crack. He stayed very still, half expecting to smell the bouquet of port, to hear the clink of a glass, but there was a silence, except for the hiss of the gas fire, the faint rat-tat of the postman on the opposite side of the square. Not until he began to stride the room again was the sound repeated; it was unmistakably the cracking of a nut.

  Mr Surrogate gazed at the glass bowl of cobnuts on the sideboard and then stealthily approached the bookcase. All along one shelf stood the record of his intellectual progress: Forward to Free Trade, Back to Protection, in their English and American editions; only with The Capital Levy had his writing reached the Continent and German and Czechoslovakian publishers. His eye followed with pride the record of his increasing humility: The Nationalization of Industry, with An Appendix on Scales of Compensation was followed by the brief triumphant title, No Compensation. The shelf was not quite full. The American edition of The Dictatorship of the Worker leant at an angle against the shelf end. Mr Surrogate stooped and put his ear against The Capital Levy; a nut cracked boisterously in the darkness behind.

  Mr Surrogate spread his fingers and withdrew suddenly and simultaneously three editions of No Compensation. There, surprised in the act of dining, a nut between its paws, sat a mouse. Mr Surrogate and the mouse were both startled. For quite a long while they stared at each other without moving. The mouse did not even drop the nut. Perhaps it hoped to remain unnoticed. It may never have seen before a human face so close, almost within reach of an extended tail, and the great white moony expanse may have had the appearance of a natural phenomenon. All round it, and all along the bookcase, lay the débris of uncounted meals and worse, breadcrumbs, broken shells, scraps of old envelopes and of discarded manuscript, toffee papers, for Mr Surrogate had a sweet tooth. It had evidently dined nightly and dined well. Mr Surrogate cautiously drew back, and the mouse, dropping the nut, whisked into the darkness behind The Capital Levy.

  With his hand already outstretched to rob it of that refuge, Mr Surrogate became compassionate. His whole face softened and relaxed. ‘Poor little mouse.’ His mouth fell a little open, and he yearned towards it in its shelter. ‘Poor, poor little mouse.’ He thought of the great Russian novelist comforted in the Siberian prison by the nightly visitation of a mouse. ‘I too. The prison of this world,’ and his eyes filled with tears, withdrawing from The Capital Levy to gaze through the window at the lamps and the plane trees. He went to the sideboard and found a little bit of cheese.

  For some time the mouse resisted the temptation of the cheese. It obviously suspected Mr Surrogate’s intentions. It lay so quiet behind The Capital Levy that Mr Surrogate feared that it had escaped to a hole. He began to feel irritated by a mouse. He withdrew the cheese and toasted it for a moment before the gas fire.

  The smell of the toasted cheese had an immediate effect. The mouse emerged, picked up the cheese, and disappeared behind The Capital Levy. It had a shiny satin rump and an air of great respectability. One expected a bunch of keys to dangle at the waist; but it preferred to eat in private, in the housekeeper’s room. Mr Surrogate did not fetch another piece of cheese; he was no longer compassionate; the tedium of Siberia came terribly home to him when he thought of anyone depending for amusement on a mouse. The clock struck a quarter to seven.

  ‘Davis, fetch a taxi. I shall be late.’

  Mr Surrogate found his hat and looked back once from the door. The mouse was still in hiding. It had nibbled a corner off The Dictatorship of the Worker, and it had certainly not used the bookshelf only for meals. ‘Davis,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘set a mousetrap by the bookcase.’

  *

  Jules Briton dried his hands on the towel which hung behind the counter and warmed them close to the great copper urn. A French prostitute leant on the counter and talked to him; she had left her beat in Lisle Street to swallow some coffee. Jules answered in good careful uneasy French; so long as his mother was alive he had been allowed to speak nothing but English, for she had borne a grudge against her husband, who had left her with a bankrupt business and disappeared to his native country. Jules had never been to France, but his mother had beaten into him with a hard English rectitude the idea of something shameful, irresponsible, and at night, when, under the influence of drink, she moaned for lost love, beautifully gay. France meant the women in pairs trudging up Wardour Street and down again, the false coins slipped into the cigarette machine, Mass in the dim, badly decorated L’Eglise de Notre Dame, French illustrations, French postcards, French letters. It had the furtiveness of lust, the sombreness of religion, the gaiety of stolen cigarettes.

  The café door opened, and Jules fluttered a hand to Conder advancing through the steam. ‘I’ve got something good for you,’ he said.

  ‘Come upstairs then,’ Conder said. Conder’s bed-sitting-room was on the first floor. On the wall hung a picture of the royal family taken before the war, the King, the Queen, a crowd of unidentifiable scared children in sailor suits, a princess with frizzy protuberant hair and a large bow. ‘Well,’ Conder said, ‘what is it?’

  ‘A paper rouble,’ Jules said. He spread it out on the eiderdown.

  ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘Found it on the floor when I was sweeping up.’

  ‘Well, that is good, that really is good,’ Conder said, standing back and gazing at it, passing one hand across his bald head. ‘I never expected to get a rouble. They aren’t allowed to take them out of the country, you know. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if that was worth – well, a couple of shillings. To a collector, of course.’ He fetched a tin box, which had once been used for chocolate biscuits, from the drawer of his table and turned the contents out on the bed beside the rouble note. Whenever he acquired a new coin or a new note he examined the old ones. ‘That’s pretty, that Australian shilling. And those Greek lepta. This Turkish one I got on a bus. I could tell extraordinary stories of what I’ve picked up on buses.’ He handled the coins tenderly, rubbing them with his handkerchief, flattening out the creases in the notes. Outlandish names tripped off his tongue – taels, libras, pengos, schillings, zlotys and santims, piastres, annas and lats, centavos and sens.

  Jules looked in Conder’s shaving mirror and then at a copper coin. ‘I think, you know, I am very like Napoleon III. If I grew a little beard . . .’

  ‘I’ve got a full set now of these Irish coins,’ Conder said.

  ‘An Imperial.’

  ‘This pig.’

  Jules’ mind wandered from the Emperor to Sedan, from Sedan to Paris, from Paris to the Commune.

  ‘Are you going to the party meeting? We ought to be off.’

  ‘A symbolic figure representing Plenty.’

  ‘Conder,’ Jules said, ‘what’s happened about Drover?’

  ‘Appeal dismissed. A Sower and a Plough.’

  ‘I know his wife’s sister.’

  ‘A symbolic figure representing Peace.’

  Conder laid the coin carefully with the others on the flowered eiderdown. ‘Did you say you know his wife?’

  ‘Her sister. They live together.’

  ‘I might get an interview out of that,’ Conder said with faint interest.

  ‘She’ll be at the meeting,’ Jules said.

  Conder looked at his watch. ‘We’d better be off.’ The brief exhilaration of the collector had left him; he was a journalist again dissatisfied with his pay, his profession and life.

  ‘Will they hang him?’

  ‘One can’t tell,’ Conder said. A journalist was supposed to understand the working of the world, but Conder had spent his life i
n learning the incomprehensibility of those who judged and pardoned, rewarded and punished. The world, he thought, as they walked between the coffee-stalls, past the lit restaurants, the foreign newspaper shops, and the open doorways, was run by the whims of a few men, the whims of a politician, a journalist, a bishop and a policeman. They hanged this man and pardoned that; one embezzler was in prison, but other men of the same kind were sent to Parliament. Conder, the revolutionary, became a little flushed with the injustice of it, but he knew well enough that it was not systematic enough to be called injustice.

  ‘I hope they don’t hang him. He used to come to meetings sometimes. He never spoke.’

  ‘You should ask the Bishop of London.’

  ‘How can he know?’

  ‘He’s as likely to know as anyone.’

  ‘Isn’t it any good doing anything? Petitions? Anything?’

  ‘That’s just the thing. You can’t tell. Petitions have been signed for every murderer who’s ever been hung. Good simple people will sign a petition for anyone. This Streatham rape and murder. When the man’s caught hundreds of women in Streatham will sign a petition for him.’

  ‘Then it’s no good. It can’t have an effect.’

  ‘Ah, but you can’t tell. Once in fifty times it has an effect. The minister picks up the papers and sees a name he knows. It may be only the name and not the man at all, but it makes him look again and think a bit. Or he’s just spoken to a big meeting and been cheered, and then he feels democratic and that the people know best. Or he’s had a good dinner. Perhaps he’s drunk too much. Perhaps he’s the one minister in twenty years who drinks too much. But it makes the difference. You can’t tell. You’ve got to try. None of us knows what motives they may have for hanging Drover or for reprieving him. Politics and religion are all mixed up in it.’

  They turned into the darkness and quiet of Charlotte Street. The policeman at the next corner watched them approach with cynical amusement. Jules said suddenly, ‘We are playing at this.’

  ‘Playing at what?’

  ‘Being Reds.’

  A saloon car with a high yapping horn tore by them, shattering the street with the brilliance of its headlights, so that doorways and shop-fronts and newsagents’ posters sprang out and receded. The car took the corner in a wide skid and disappeared in the direction of King’s Cross. The policeman at the corner saluted. ‘Who was that?’ Jules asked. He had caught sight as the car passed of a lit interior packed tight with large men in soft hats, sitting in two rows, staring at each other without speaking.

  ‘The Flying Squad,’ Conder said.

  Jules thought of their silence and of the talk to which he was going. Men would be making speeches to a late hour, reconstructing England in theory, abolishing poverty on paper. He felt sullen and dissatisfied as he turned the corner by the policeman and met the man’s amused glance. He wanted something he could follow with passion, but Communism was talk and never action, and patriotism puzzled him; he was not English and France meant nothing but holy statues and Napoleon III, prostitutes and stolen cigarettes. He wanted someone to say to him: ‘Do this. Do that. Go here. Go there.’ He wanted to be saved from the counter and the tea urn, the ‘Weights’, and the heartless flippancy of the café.

  ‘Will something be done about Drover tonight?’

  ‘Surrogate will speak, I expect, and Bennett. There may be a delegate from the garage.’

  He would have dedicated himself to any cause, any individual, even a woman, if he could have been given a motive to be as serious as those six policemen driving down Charlotte Street.

  ‘This girl,’ Conder said, ‘Drover’s sister –’

  ‘His wife’s sister.’

  ‘Is she pretty?’

  Jules nodded. Nothing satisfied him that evening. Kay’s pretty, he told himself with depression, and amiable and light as myself.

  They were late at the meeting, and as they passed through the unlit vestibule, past the empty booking office, they could hear snatches of a speech. The dreary syllables rose and fell like tired feet. All through the hall one heard the tread of hunger marchers; the ugly makeshift banners dipped and fell in the hopeless rioting of innumerable Red Sundays. Jules was moved by the sincerity of the thousands who did not wrangle for leadership, who were ready to follow in patience and poverty. Three rows in front he saw Kay Rimmer crying with her head in her hands. He whispered to Conder: ‘We must save Drover. Somehow. There are thousands of us.’ Until the next speech began he thought that he had found the cause he wanted.

  ‘There is no one here,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘who would not gladly now change places wth Comrade Drover, no one so vile who would not with a joyful heart have struck the same blow against capitalist oppression.’ At the sound of his own voice realities receded like the tides; he had no picture in his mind of the condemned cell, the mask, the walk to the shed; he saw Caesar fall and heard Brutus speak. He called out with a breaking voice across the tip-up seats and the green faces, over the disused cinema, to Antony standing against the furthest wall: ‘Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended.’ Somewhere in the shadows a girl was weeping and Mr Surrogate called again through the streets of imperial Rome: ‘There is no cause for grief. Every faith demands its sacrifice. When Drover dies, the Communist Party in Great Britain will come of age.’ The intellectual in the horn-rimmed glasses said, ‘Hear! Hear!’ and clapped.

  A man called Bennett asked: ‘What measures are being taken?’

  Mr Surrogate raised his hand. ‘I was coming to that. I am not on the executive committee of the party. I am trying to speak for the ordinary member. I propose that a collection be taken on the spot in aid of Comrade Drover’s widow and that a proportion of the collection recently held in London for the fighting fund be allocated to a suitable memorial.’

  Bennett said: ‘He’s not dead yet.’

  ‘We can’t disguise from ourselves,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘that there’s little hope. The petition sheets, of course, will be handed to everyone as he goes out.’

  A man in a heavy overcoat stood up. ‘I’ve been asked to come ’ere,’ he said, ‘by the garidge. Couldn’t we pass some sort of resolution now, on the spot, askin’ Parliament . . .’

  The horn-rimmed intellectual rose beside Mr Surrogate. ‘Quite impossible,’ he said. ‘Quite impossible. We are more than ten persons. By 13 Charles 2, Stat. 1, we should all be liable to imprisonment. It’s out of the question.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Bennett called, and Mr Surrogate and the man from the garage sat down hastily. ‘Sit down,’ Bennet repeated.

  The treasurer said: ‘I’m not taking my orders from you, Comrade Bennett. If the meeting –’

  ‘Sit down.’

  Mr Surrogate crouched over his shoe-lace. He was wondering bitterly whether all movements ended in a scrimmage of individuals for leadership. He thought of the first Fabian Society, of the ladies in their Walter Crane dresses and shorn heads and cigarettes, their belief in the perfectibility of the human character, and their patronage of house painters and plumbers. He remembered the arguments at midnight going home over Chelsea Bridge in a hansom with a chosen companion.

  ‘Now,’ Bennett’s voice said above him, ‘we can get on to business.’ Mr Surrogate looked up and away. He knew only too well his mind’s trick of remembering causes in human terms: the Fabian Society in terms of that midnight hansom and the first tentative pure-minded discussions of Free Love and the Emancipation of Women with a girl who would not be serious even when she was in bed with him.

  ‘Or is there any other intellectual who wants to ’ear ’is own voice?’ Bennett continued with his eyes on Mr Surrogate; but Mr Surrogate looked away in deep despair. For years now, passing through every stage of socialism, he had believed with complete sincerity that he would one day get into touch with the worker; but the plumber who had written a Fabian Essay was the man of that class he had known most intimately. He was the only one, an elderly man with
steel spectacles and a background of religion and hedge schooling, who had been wholly serious, who could bandy back and forth with Mr Surrogate the abstractions he loved: Social Betterment, the Equality of Opportunity, the Means of Production.

  Personalities! Mr Surrogate shuddered. They had always betrayed him. Women whom he had wished to emancipate flirted with him, and when the lovely abstractions of Communism had lured him into the party – Comradeship, Proletariat, Ideology – he found there only Bennett. He resented even Drover’s intrusion as an individual to be saved and not a sacrifice to be decked for the altar. In a cause was exhilaration, exaltation, a sense of Freedom; individuals gave pain by their brutality, their malice, their lack of understanding. He could live in a world of religions, of political parties and economic creeds; he would go mad rubbing shoulders at every turn with saviours, politicians, poor people begging bread. And yet he could not be happy alone among his glamorous abstractions; he wanted a companion to help to confirm his belief that these things were real – Capitalism and Socialism, Wealth and Poverty – and not these other things, champagne and charity balls and women bearing their twelfth child in an overcrowded room.

  ‘Is that girl here?’ Conder asked.

  Jules said: ‘We’ll catch her after this.’

  ‘There’s a story here for the morning papers,’ Conder said, ‘but how can I use it? My faith to the party would be broken.’ He ran his hand distractedly over his bald head, talking on in a low voice, listening to what Bennett was saying, thinking of several things at once. Drover’s wife, there might be a good interview, ‘not sit down under it like bloody intellectuals,’ suppose there are other newspaper men here, ‘pamphlet 36’, mustn’t risk being thrown out of the party, if it’s in the morning papers I shall be blamed, ‘three volunteers to distribute at the gates,’ I shall be blamed, I shall be blamed.