The Great Fog (13 page)

The fact remained, however, that progressive educators and B.R., Freud, and Kretschmer, and Batscombe to a man, and woman didn't really believe in a soul at all. They believed in mind-bodies; and frankness and truth, their twin god, compelled one to add that the accent was wholly on the body. A soul was the state of mind of a rationally satisfied body. And Miss Potts, in that searching sense, had been far from satisfied. Indeed, things had come to such a pass that, after an effort at psychoanalysis and another at endocrine dosage and a third at orthostasis, Miss Potts very quietly, but all the more broodingly, began to think of opium. Not of the druggist's variety, of course. Her digestion had never been her strong point; she hated sticking needles into herself and her hangover of Oxford good taste still made her feel a reactionary disgust when younger members of the faculty became tipsy. The opium, she, daughter of “dreaming spires,” began to hanker for was religion.

So it was that she faced the middle years. It was not a cheerful outlook. Often she felt acutely miserable. Sometimes she thought in a sort of adolescent, melodramatic way of suicide, that sort of suicide in which you are not the “demmed damp body” but an onlooker at the sympathetic and shocked onlookers, hearing all their remorse-stricken eulogies and following a handsome funeral to a charmingly situated grave.

And then came the war. That certainly raised the pressure from the personal front. It also brought relief for all the Progressives. They had been against war. It was part of the new creed that war was simply due to sex-repression. Sex, being unrepressed by Progressives, they naturally maintained that they had debunked war and they dismissed it with a laugh. But this war was different. It was present, pressing. The enemy was obviously suffering frightfully from sex-repression. The free, unrepressed peoples must unite now to oppose and end this sex-repression. So the Progressives found themselves freed from their awkward loyalty to peace, which, anyhow, was only a by-product of being unrepressed. After all, if little Alec is permitted to hit Susie on the head for fear he'd grow up repressed if he didn't, surely if I have been repressed during childhood—not allowed to kick and bite father and mother—I had better get it out of my system now, especially when the enemy is so reactionary and would never permit children their charter right to kick their elders.

And it worked. During those first months of the “waiting war” there had been a new friendship between the school and the town and country, which at first had been very cold to this new intrusion. Now all was warm and friendly. There was also, not less warming, a new friendship in the school itself. Those common room meetings, from which Miss Potts had for some time come away feeling out of the fun and the frank talk, now held her; she was wanted and she wanted to stay on. The young ones wanted to hear about the last war. She and her contemporaries compared experiences, were listened to as they showed how the present war was different from the last one; how right all of them were then to protest, how right now, to co-operate. And, best of all, there was a new truce in Miss Potts herself. A full sex life or religion ceased to be the only choice, the horned dilemma. A third way opened: the life of devoted action—clear, progressive thought, framing a really lasting peace. Everyone of intelligence was wanted now, and there could be complete accord and understanding with the dear old Church, which, after all, was doing its bit, and far from a little bit, by keeping up morale and keeping war aims high.

But that was only during the “waiting war,” while one sighed vicariously for poor Poland, read all about concentration camps—as a duty to keep the edge of one's resolution whetted—and, when one went to town, carried, with a sense of humorous seriousness, one's little neatly satcheled gasmask. Month by month one became acclimatized to the war. It was clear this war was going to be a repetition of the last. The poor Poles were obviously unready. The West would, however, be rigid. Jokes about the blitz that failed to burst were clichés.

Then came May. For weeks you simply couldn't get your bearings. Everything seemed to be going from under you. After all, war is war, and you had accepted it, surely. But if you did make that sacrifice, then war should keep the rules the experts had said were followed. The soldiers had said it was grim but, in its way, law-abiding. But this thing was nothing you could call by any name you knew. It was not a battle or a siege. It was an obliterating deluge, a human typhoon. You saw it, hour after hour, sweeping away everything: impregnable defenses, inviolable countries, unbreakable alliances—everything went down into the maelstrom. You still ate food, but it tasted like damp paper. If you slept, your dreams seemed worse than being awake—until you awoke. The sun shone—“June's blue weather”! Why couldn't it rain! “A night in June”! Oh, for a blizzard!

And now, today, Miss Potts had left the common room as early as she used to leave it before the war. Then, on those days, she'd often felt she couldn't be more unhappy, more unhappy, with less to live for: leaving all those silly, gay, date-making young people—yes, and some of them, her age, still doing it successfully; she, who had never even started.… And now, though they had all been friendly, yes, pathetically friendly; though they had all been tied together as never before—one of the young ones, handsome as those T.B. cases often are, had actually said, “I envy you your age; you've lived and had the good years”—still, she had to get away. For everyone now agreed that it was all up. It was really no more than a matter of days. The new mechanized military machine would just continue to sweep over everything. The very latest of fortifications had not stood against it; why should our dear old-fashioned fleet? All defenses would be air-bombed out of existence.

And then? She had looked forward so dolefully to the prospect of long, unchanging, empty years ahead of her. How utterly stupid that kind of expectation seemed now! How ridiculous those “better dead” wishes appeared. Indeed, what wouldn't she now give just to feel again that basic security in which one could believe that one's own love-life mattered. She had thought herself desperately ill-used because, lying awake in her warmed room on her spring mattress, she was, as Sappho had cried, “alone.” Now, how long could she hope to have any privacy left her? She remembered every detail of what she had read about the concentration camps, had read, she now realized, not to get ready for one herself, but to steel herself to tell the boys she had taught that now they must man the planes that must beat the enemy peoples till they compelled their tyrant leaders to make peace. Today all that dreadful reading had quite another meaning.

As she looked down into the little valley at the bottom of which she could see the sea shining in the sunlight, there flashed into her mind the picture of a horrid woodcut in an old
History of England
which she had read as a child. It showed the nuns of Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire gathered together by their Abbess. There was a basin on the table around which they stood. The caption was: “At the approach of the Danes, the nuns, to save themselves from a worse fate, instructed by their abbess, took each in turn a razor and cut off their noses and their lips.” As a child, she had laughingly shuddered at such a conventual defense. But now? Would not death be better than capture, insult, confinement, torture?

For years she had played with suicide possibilities. If one had an incurable disease? If one was in a bad accident? If one was caught in a burning house? Taking out of her pocket the key that she always carried, she went to her locked drawer. Yes, there was the small bottle.

She remembered one day some summers ago. She had been in the biological laboratory; one of the butterfly-killing bottles had been dropped by its owner, a boy of fourteen. Being a good Progressive, he had called out, “Oh, I say, Potty, I've broken that bloody killing-bottle. Do be a peach and help me clear it up.” She then set him to picking up the scattered pieces of glass. The cake of cyanide itself had split. One half lay out on the floor. The other had rolled under the laboratory bench. She stooped down to where she thought it must be, then reeled, and found herself sitting with her back against the wall.

The reek of almonds, the migraine split in the brain—she knew enough chemistry to know what had happened. A glance showed that she had had only a whiff. A crumb of the cake had fallen into a few drops of water under the bench. Hence the sudden mouthful of gas that had knocked her out. The boy had gone, leaving her to clear up.

“That's just like all these Progressives,” she remembered thinking, “an old maid, old Potty can finish up the mess they make, and be finished off for all they care.”

A sudden hatred of life had swept her and with it an instant sense of how easy it was to end it all. “So every bondsman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.” She got up carefully, carefully collected the cyanide in one of the wide-mouthed, glass-stoppered bottles.

It was this bottle that she now drew out. She knew what to do: take the soap dish, put enough water in it just to cover the bottom of it, crumble the cyanide. Then empty the paper into the water, as she sat on the floor with her face over it, like the Delphic Sibyl snuffing up the laurel fume. It would all be over in less than five seconds. She wouldn't know anything after the first couple. She went through the steps in her mind. It was all so simple, practical, fool-and-knave-proof. Here was ultimate armor, a fortified line which was impregnable. She realized, with a distinct relief, that just by thinking this out and making up her mind about what to do, she had gained a sort of reprieve.

She felt a wave of dignity and detachment swell in her. It rose, she told herself, from winning back the initiative against life. She was no longer a whimpering rabbit running hopelessly from the pursuing weasel. She was at bay, and being at bay meant that you turned; and, once you had turned, you could judge the precise distance between yourself and your pursuer.

She remembered someone saying that it was hope that hurt; full despair was an anesthetic. Certainly, now with the poison bottle out in her hand and the method thought out, she felt quite secure, actually, at her ease.

She had time. They were still on the other side of the Channel. Of course, they would be on this side sometime during the month. There must be no nonsense of hope revived. That would be like letting circulation come back into an anesthetized limb. But, before they came, there was pretty certainly a fortnight ahead, perhaps more than that.

So the next thing she must do was fix a dead line. She went over to the window. When those troops appeared down in the village—when it was quite clear—then she'd reconnoiter like this from the window, she'd turn back to the room, and go through her rite with the soap dish. She had time till the enemy captured Batscombe. That, she reflected again, was certainly a fortnight off. Quite time enough, if you didn't eat, to become so weak that by then you'd hardly care who came.

So, since all arrangements were made and there was really nothing more to do, one had better have lunch. Still, you never knew what surprise might be sprung—a raider squadron from the sky, for instance. Pop a piece of cyanide in your mouth, and that would serve quite as well as the planned inhaling. Though, if there was time enough, she was set on having her ritual, still, just against “eventualities,” she took her bottle with her.

Every noon, though, she would come back to her room. The news remained frightful. True, the central blow was rearing over their heads; but meanwhile right and left any possible side supports were dashed away. Therefore, after the daily meeting at the common room, Miss Potts retired to her own room. She would first take out the bottle; then she would look down through the glass stopper into its little shaft. She called it her evacuation route. It contained a magic mushroom like the one Alice in Wonderland had to eat to get through the tiny door into that other world. She would then take the soap dish, solemnly place it on the floor, fetch the water bottle, kneel down, carefully pour in the specified amount until the bottom of the dish was covered, and then, placing the poison bottle just the other side of the dish, she would turn and loosen the glass stopper. Yes, it moved easily enough. She could see the yellow-white paste inside. Indeed, as she bent over, she could smell the almond flavor distinctly.

Since the news refused to get better, and yet the climax, the actual invasion, refused to emerge, the drill had to be continued. Miss Potts had begun it just to be sure that she would know all the moves without slip or fail when, in a fortnight or three weeks hence, she would actually carry it out. The three weeks became three months, and still the blow was just as imminent. The ax was upraised over the victim's neck, so it was silly to take one's head off the block. Yet Time itself, Miss Potts began to discover, is something, even when the events which should keep time won't turn up according to schedule. She went through the daily rite and it still fortified her. There was just as much reason for going on with it as when it was begun, just as much reason for being ready for “a fate worse than death.” More countries were going under the machine and more populations were engulfed. Their cries rose out of the daily paper megaphoned by propaganda. She was never permitted to forget. But something else was creeping into her drill. It was becoming something of an end in itself—more ritual than drill. As, day by day and week by week, she withdrew to what she was now calling her boat drill, as torpedoed ships and fear of starvation by blockade began again to figure more in the press and in talk than the invasion itself, she found dread beginning to fade, to modulate—she could hardly believe it—almost into disappointment.

The first time she recognized it was when, as the first step in her ritual, after she had locked her door, she went to the window to make her official inspection of the village street a mile away and to draw down the sash. Her rule ran: When, on looking down to the main street, it is seen to be empty of all save those deadly gray or black uniforms, then the rite is to be completed and the “mystery celebrated.” But, as she looked down at the village, she realized she could scarcely see it, so misty was it; and the near-by trees at which she glanced were almost leafless. A whole season was gone. The dreadful, incongruous beauty of summer had vanished. The protective fog and cloud were here.