The Complete Stories (53 page)

  By the time that they arrived in Italy Major Gordon was back in Yugoslavia for a brief appointment as liaison with a camp of escaped prisoners of war, but he got news of the move and for the first time tasted the sweet and heady cup of victory. "At least I've done something worthwhile in this bloody war," he said.

  When next he passed through Bari it was on his way home to England, for the military mission was being wound up and replaced by regular diplomatic and consular officials. He had not forgotten his Jews, however, and, having with difficulty located them, drove out to a camp near Lecce, in a flat country of olive and almond and white beehive huts. Here they rested, part of a collection of four or five hundred, all old and all baffled, all in army greatcoats and Balaclava helmets.

  "I can't see the point of their being here," said the Commandant. "We feed them and doctor them and house them. That's all we can do. No one wants them. The Zionists are only interested in the young. I suppose they'll just sit here till they die."

  "Are they happy?"

  "They complain the hell of a lot but then they've got quite a lot to complain about. It's a lousy place to be stuck in."

  "I'm particularly interested in a pair called Kanyi."

  The Commandant looked down his list. "No trace of them here."

  "Good. That probably means they got off to Australia all right."

  "Not from here, old man. I've been here all along. No one has ever left."

  "Could you make sure? Anyone in the Begoy draft would know about them."

  The Commandant sent his interpreter to inquire while he took Major Gordon into the shed he called his mess, and gave him a drink. Presently the man returned. "All correct, sir. The Kanyis never left Begoy. They got into some kind of trouble there and were jugged."

  "May I go with the interpreter and ask about it?"

  "By all means, old man. But aren't you making rather heavy weather of it? What do two more or less matter?"

  Major Gordon went into the compound with the interpreter. Some of the Jews recognized him and crowded round with complaints and petitions. All he could learn about the Kanyis was that they had been taken off the truck by the partisan police just as it was about to start.

  He had one more day in Bari before his flight home. He spent it revisiting the offices where he had begun his work of liberation. But this time he received little sympathy. "We don't really want to bother the Jugs any more. They really cooperated very well about the whole business. Besides the war's over now in that part. There's no particular point in moving people out. We're busy at the moment moving people in." This man was in fact at that moment busy despatching royalist officers to certain execution.

  The Jewish office showed no interest when they understood that he had not come to sell them illicit arms. "We must first set up the State," they said. "Then it will be a refuge for all. First things first."

  So Major Gordon returned to England unsatisfied and he might never have heard any more of the matter, had he not a cousin in the newly reopened Ministry at Belgrade. Months later he heard from him: "I've been to a lot of trouble and made myself quite unpopular in getting information about the couple you're interested in. The Jugs are very close but at last I got matey with the head of the police who wants us to return some refugees we've got in our zone in Austria. He dug out the file for me. Both were condemned by a Peoples' Court and executed. The man had committed sabotage on the electric light plant. The woman had been a spy for a "foreign power." Apparently she was the mistress of a foreign agent who frequented her house while the husband was busy destroying the dynamo. A lot of foreign propaganda publications were found in her house and produced as evidence. What very unsavoury friends you seem to have."

  It so happened that this letter arrived on the day when the Allies were celebrating the end of the war in Asia. Major Gordon was back with his regiment. He did not feel inclined to go out that evening and join in the rejoicing. The mess was empty save for the misanthropic second-in-command and the chaplain (although of Highland origin the regiment was full of Glasgow Irish and had a Benedictine monk attached to them).

  The second-in-command spoke as he had spoken most evenings since the General Election..... "I don't know what they mean by ‘Victory.' We start the bloody war for Poland. Well that's ceased to exist. We fight it in Burma and Egypt—and you can bet your boots we shall give them up in a few months to the very fellows who've been against us. We spent millions knocking Germany down and now we shall spend millions building it up again....."

  "Don't you think, perhaps, people feel better than they did in 1938?" said the chaplain.

  "No," said the second-in-command.

  "They haven't got rid of that unhealthy sense of guilt they had?"

  "No," said Major Gordon. "I never had it before. Now I have."

  And he told the story of the Kanyis. "Those are the real horrors of war—not just people having their legs blown off," he concluded. "How do you explain that, padre?"

  There was no immediate answer until the second-in-command said: "You did all you could. A darn sight more than most people would have done."

  "That's your answer," said the chaplain. "You mustn't judge actions by their apparent success. Everything you did was good in itself."

  "A fat lot of good it did the Kanyis."

  "No. But don't you think it just possible that they did you good? No suffering need ever be wasted. It is just as much part of Charity to receive cheerfully as to give."

  "Well, if you're going to start preaching a sermon, padre," said the second-in-command, "I'm off to bed."

  "I'd like you to tell me a bit more about that," said Major Gordon.

  LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

A ROMANCE OF THE NEAR FUTURE

  I

  Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate. The State Meteorological Institute had so far produced only an unseasonable fall of snow and two little thunderbolts no larger than apricots. The weather varied from day to day and from county to county as it had done of old, most anomalously.

  This was a rich, old-fashioned Tennysonian night.

  Strains of a string quartet floated out from the drawing-room windows and were lost amid the splash and murmur of the gardens. In the basin the folded lilies had left a brooding sweetness over the water. No gold fin winked in the porphyry font and any peacock which seemed to be milkily drooping in the moon-shadows was indeed a ghost, for the whole flock of them had been found mysteriously and rudely slaughtered a day or two ago in the first disturbing flush of this sudden summer.

  Miles, sauntering among the sleeping flowers, was suffused with melancholy. He did not much care for music and this was his last evening at Mountjoy. Never again, perhaps, would he be free to roam these walks.

  Mountjoy had been planned and planted in the years of which he knew nothing; generations of skilled and patient husband-men had weeded and dunged and pruned; generations of dilettanti had watered it with cascades and jets; generations of collectors had lugged statuary here; all, it seemed, for his enjoyment this very night under this huge moon. Miles knew nothing of such periods and processes, but he felt an incomprehensible tidal pull towards the circumjacent splendours.

  Eleven struck from the stables. The music ceased. Miles turned back and, as he reached the terrace, the shutters began to close and the great chandeliers were one by one extinguished. By the light of the sconces which still shone on their panels of faded satin and clouded gold, he joined the company dispersing to bed through the islands of old furniture.

  His room was not one of the grand succession which lay along the garden front. Those were reserved for murderers. Nor was it on the floor above, tenanted mostly by sexual offenders. His was a humbler wing. Indeed he overlooked the luggage porch and the coal bunker. Only professional men visiting Mountjoy on professional business and very poor relations had been put here in the old days. But Miles was attached to this room, which was the first he had ever called his own in all his twenty years of Progress.

  His next-door neighbour, a Mr. Sweat, paused at his door to say good-night. It was only now after twenty months' proximity, when Miles's time was up, that this veteran had begun to unbend. He and a man named Soapy, survivals of another age, had kept themselves to themselves, talking wistfully of cribs they had cracked, of sparklers, of snug bar-parlours where they had met their favourite fences, of strenuous penal days at the Scrubs and on the Moor. They had small use for the younger generation; crime, calvinism and classical music were their interests. But at last Mr. Sweat had taken to nodding, to grunting, and finally, too late for friendship, to speaking to Miles.

  "What price the old strings tonight, chum?" he asked.

  "I wasn't there, Mr. Sweat."

  "You missed a treat. Of course nothing's ever good enough for old Soapy. Made me fair sick to hear Soapy going on all the time. The viola was scratchy, Soapy says. They played the Mozart just like it was Haydn. No feeling in the Debussy pizzicato, says Soapy."

  "Soapy knows too much."

  "Soapy knows a lot more than some I could mention, schooling or no schooling. Next time they're going to do the Grosse Fugue as the last movement of the B-flat. That's something to look forward to, that is, though Soapy says no late Beethoven comes off. We'll see. Leastways, me and Soapy will; you won't. You're off tomorrow. Pleased?"

  "Not particularly."

  "No, no more wouldn't I be. It's a funny thing but I've settled down here wonderful. Never thought I should. It all seemed a bit too posh at first. Not like the old Scrubs. But it's a real pretty place once you're used to it. Wouldn't mind settling here for a lifer if they'd let me. The trouble is there's no security in crime these days. Time was, you knew just what a job was worth, six months, three years; whatever it was, you knew where you were. Now what with prison commissioners and Preventive Custody and Corrective Treatment they can keep you in or push you out just as it suits them. It's not right.

  "I'll tell you what it is, chum," continued Mr. Sweat. "There's no understanding of crime these days like what there was. I remember when I was a nipper, the first time I came up before the beak, he spoke up straight: ‘My lad,' he says, ‘you are embarking upon a course of life that can only lead to disaster and degradation in this world and everlasting damnation in the next.' Now that's talking. It's plain sense and it shows a personal interest. But last time I was up, when they sent me here, they called me an ‘antisocial phenomenon'; said I was ‘maladjusted.' That's no way to speak of a man what was doing time before they was in long trousers, now is it?"

  "They said something of the same kind to me."

  "Yes and now they're giving you the push, just like you hadn't no Rights. I tell you it's made a lot of the boys uncomfortable your going out all of a sudden like this. Who'll it be next time, that's what we're wondering?

  "I tell you where you went wrong, chum. You didn't give enough trouble. You made it too easy for them to say you was cured. Soapy and me got wise to that. You remember them birds as got done in? That was Soapy and me. They took a lot of killing too; powerful great bastards. But we got the evidence all hid away tidy and if there's ever any talk of me and Soapy being ‘rehabilitated' we'll lay it out conspicuous.

  "Well, so long, chum. Tomorrow's my morning for Remedial Repose so I daresay you'll be off before I get down. Come back soon."

  "I hope so," said Miles and turned alone in his own room.

  He stood briefly at the window and gazed his last on the cobbled yard. He made a good figure of a man, for he came of handsome parents and all his life had been carefully fed and doctored and exercised; well clothed too. He wore the drab serge dress that was the normal garb of the period—only certified homosexuals wore colours—but there were differences of fit and condition among these uniforms. Miles displayed the handiwork of tailor and valet. He belonged to a privileged class.

  The State had made him.

  No clean-living, God-fearing, Victorian gentleman, he; no complete man of the renaissance; no genteel knight nor dutiful pagan nor, even, noble savage. All that succession of past worthies had gone its way, content to play a prelude to Miles. He was the Modern Man.

  His history, as it appeared in multuplet in the filing cabinets of numberless State departments, was typical of a thousand others. Before his birth the politicians had succeeded in bringing down his father and mother to penury; they, destitute, had thrown themselves into the simple diversions of the very poor and thus, between one war and the next, set in motion a chain-reaction of divorces which scattered them and their various associates in forlorn couples all over the Free World. The aunt on whom the infant Miles had been quartered was conscribed for work in a factory and shortly afterwards died of boredom at the conveyer-belt. The child was put to safety in an Orphanage.

  Huge sums were thenceforward spent upon him; sums which, fifty years earlier, would have sent whole quiversful of boys to Winchester and New College and established them in the learned professions. In halls adorned with Picassos and Légers he yawned through long periods of Constructive Play. He never lacked the requisite cubic feet of air. His diet was balanced and on the first Friday of every month he was psychoanalysed. Every detail of his adolescence was recorded and microfilmed and filed, until at the appropriate age he was transferred to the Air Force.

  There were no aeroplanes at the station to which he was posted. It was an institution to train instructors to train instructors to train instructors in Personal Recreation.

  There for some weeks he tended a dish-washing machine and tended it, as his adjutant testified at his trial, in an exemplary fashion. The work in itself lacked glory, but it was the normal novitiate. Men from the Orphanages provided the hard core of the Forces, a caste apart which united the formidable qualities of Janissary and Junker. Miles had been picked early for high command. Dish-washing was only the beginning. The adjutant, an Orphan too, had himself washed both dishes and officers' underclothes, he testified, before rising to his present position.