The Great Fog (14 page)

Still, the news
was
desperate. She could not stop her practice. In the common room several people had remarked that she really seemed quite serene. She knew on what her serenity was founded; she put her hand on the little bottle concealed in her dress. Gradually, though, even the common room's tone began to change. In June, Stetson, the mathematics master, had said, “Well, I'm having my bottle of '92 port tonight—not going to let those brutes spill that, too.” But now he had just told them what care he was taking of a small cabinet in which he protected his last dozen cigars from damp. “Never get any more of those till hell knows when.”

Of course, though, it was only a reprieve, and the reprieve was really a ruse. She wasn't going to be caught. There was not the slightest ground for hope, and, if she admitted hope again, she would have to go through its deadly sickness and death again. No, once bitten, twice shy. She would keep up her ritual. She would not let the local anesthetic fail; she would not let feeling come back again.

So she fought the insidious invader threatening to sap her defenses and lure her from her impregnable lines. For a long time, therefore, nothing disturbed her life. She refused to look at the calendar. There was only one event which could again start time for her. She didn't read the papers, but she knew that nothing had changed—the situation was still so desperate that it was only to be confronted by the attitude she had taken up. At the back of her mind, though, the faintest questioning went on like those telephone conversations sometimes heard on long-distance, so faint that a word can be heard only here and there. She had rewon the initiative, the initiative to turn around and face life. What then? Wasn't life itself going on? Was that enough? Did it give you enough initiative, just to turn around and face a pursuer who wouldn't come up?

Of course, she did her wartime duties as well as her school work. But the former was no more defense against inner defeat than the latter. No, the only defense was to know, to demonstrate daily—ritually, as she did, alone by herself—that hope was dead, that there was nothing to fear, because hope, fear's accomplice, was being duly and daily certified as dead and buried.

She was meditating over this on her knees one day, with the soap dish with its water in it, the bottle with its stopper “officially” loosened till you could just smell almonds, when she noticed that her tongue, running idly around the inside of her mouth, had found a cavity in the back of one of the lower bicuspids. She hadn't been to the dentist for months-she was due for a routine inspection just at the time that time stopped. But, of course, she couldn't go now; that wouldn't do. Utterly inconsistent. Why keep up roof repairs in a house you have mined and mean to blow up the moment a long-expected event materializes? Through that small repaired cavity hope and the reacceptance of life would steal in on its own terms and not on one's own rational conditions. Even if the tooth ached, it would be a constant reminder to her not to forget, not to settle down again. Even if it was septic—well, death by premature aging was perhaps kinder and better for everyone than the cyanide way—if there was time. One thing was clear: just the wish to avoid natural death should not lure her back to going on with life-at-any-cost.

Then, there was Simpkins at the farm. She remembered vividly how he had said to her, that day she'd given up hope and resolved to die, “I'm fifty, Miss, but good for another twenty years, and to think I'd have to live out my life under
them!
I've got to stick to the farm. It's my skilled way of keeping them out. But, by George, if I see them in these fields with their dirty boots on my land, I'll pitchfork the first couple like stooks, right over the hedge. I'm as strong as any lad of twenty-five.” And he was. Yet she had suddenly been called into the farmyard as she was going along the lane that led from the school buildings to her rooms.

There he lay. He had been pitching straw; the pitchfork was still stuck in a truss. He was down in the straw, his strong, worn left hand clawed against his chest. “Lord,” he panted, “Lord.” She saw at once that he mightn't last till the Doctor came, and, naturally, she had no injections with her—only her precious bottle. It wasn't much help. She knelt beside him.

“You've done your bit grandly,” she said. It was all she could think of.

His eyes rolled around to hers. “What,” he whispered.

“You've helped, as much as anyone, all of us, to resist.”

Then she thought she had better add something stronger to help him in his deafening pain.

“You've helped us to win.” He'd never be there to see, one way or the other.

“To win?” he whispered; puzzled, querulous. “God, is Doctor coming?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, he's just here.”

Suddenly the clawed hand opened. Simpkins spoke very faintly but without strain. “Whew, that was hell,” he said. “Lord, I'm comfortable … but weak, awfully weak.”

Then, with surprise all the more intense because it seemed to be conveyed from such an immense distance, as he spoke in the thinnest whisper, “What's this?
What's
this?” His mouth fell open with what seemed ultimate amazement. He was dead.

And he was her age, much stronger, of course, too. Last June, if anyone had said, “Which of those two would go first?” she surely would have been the choice. So time did go on. Men wore out and died, just as they did when there was no war. She found that she had come to think that you simply couldn't die unless you were killed or you killed yourself. And here, right at her feet, was death at his work, taking his average yield. And his partner, pain, worked beside him just as efficiently without bayonet or bastinado, and just as though gas and bombs weren't needed to make life intense and to make time count.

That noon, as she knelt before her bowl of “happy dispatch,” her mind wandered beyond her bicuspid cavity. These two things, her fate and the country's defeat—the one entailing death for the other—no longer seemed to embrace everything between them. They really didn't go down—as she had assumed—to the foundations of everything. Something else went on underneath, like an immense ocean current on which all the sea wrack, foam, and waves, churned and floated.

Still, for the time being, the war and its overarching breaker must be all, for all of them under its shadow. She must be ready to plunge at a moment's notice. She could not and she would not withdraw her ultimatum. She could and would accept life only on her own terms: victory or death. Surely there could no longer be any doubt about that. That was the only possible Realism. Yes, in Simpkins' death one saw that life was going on its own way and, of course, victory would and could mean only death deferred. “We all live under an indefinite reprieve.” Who had said that? Wasn't it one of those comfortable Victorians whose security and firm expectation of living seemed almost fabulous now? Yet the daily news always reconfirmed her grim faith. She would quote Chesterton. “I bring you nought for your comfort: Yea, nought for your desire: Save that the sky grows darker yet: And the sea rises higher.” The storm must, it simply must, sooner or later blot out everything. About that there could be no doubt. And that was the issue, the only issue for practically everyone. Of course, some hundreds, thousands—if the suspense could really be sustained—might go as Simpkins had gone; slipping out in the pause before the blow. They must go by the law of averages, but they would only be those exceptions which prove nothing.

She thought rapidly of the national statistics she had read: some five hundred thousand people died “from natural causes” every year. That number would represent a big battle, even today. But, of course, they were nearly all old or very young. And what were the latest figures about fewer people in the island dying by accident because, in spite of the great number butchered by bombs, the check on the motor traffic had greatly reduced the road casualties? Somehow one had never thought of the civilian's motor car as a monster destroying life. Yet there it had been, a worse Juggernaut than many a tank.

Simpkins' last moment kept on coming back to her. She could hear his voice, passionate and strong last June, utterly involved in the one issue, victory or death; and then across that resolute tone she heard the thin whisper cutting through all that assurance. When he was actually dying, all he had said, about dying with brave good faith, meant just nothing. It all melted away in something far bigger that underflowed it.

Yet she wasn't dead; wasn't likely to be, soon. The one likelihood, the one pretty certainty (how odd to call such a degree of high risk by that vapid little word “pretty”), the one thing they must all still count on, was the invasion, and then, when it came off, then she must do her bit and call in death.

So the ritual was continued right into the spring, and outwardly it continued to be fully sanctioned. People came down regularly from Town, half stunned. The preliminary barrage for the invasion, one could see, was being kept on at full blast. Life surely was hell; and though one might “stick it out,” one could never think of lessening, even by a jot, one's minimum terms. There they stood, starkly rational: victory, or defeat and death. If it was victory, then one would reconsider the terms on which one might take back the deceiver. But to think of victory was to let hope get its nose out of the bag and begin to breathe again.

The facts, the bare facts without a shred of wishful thinking, came just to this: Though a few irrelevant deaths—a sort of seepage—might go on, for practically everyone everything else had stopped or had ceased to matter. Time had stopped, for all private life had stopped, arrested until the Great Event on which it would be decided whether life again would ever be livable. Of course, some private affairs did go on. Now and then, people were married—just as now and then, the older ones died. But in its way marriage was simply—like any other rations—an aid to one's war work. Relaxation, concerts, movies, dances, these were all part of mental and physical hygiene, and so was marriage. Of course, no one could.…

And then Adelaide, her only first cousin, whom she had treated as a younger sister, called suddenly, without notice. Adelaide, she remembered, as though in another life, had married during the “gray war,” the war of waiting. They hadn't seen each other or heard of each other during this next life, the life of accepted death, death as an everyday possibility. Now, the moment Adelaide stepped into the room, Miss Potts knew that she had no need to be told. She made the easy calculation instantly.

“But,” she stammered, and couldn't help herself, “but you must have done it that very month! How could you!”

Adelaide burst into tears and was actually out of the room before Miss Potts realized that, as “elder sister,” she had failed in an immemorial “actor-proof” part. She ran out and dragged the girl back.

“I'm so glad,” she managed to say.

She noticed her own flat tone and noticed, as clearly, that it had failed to register on the pregnant mother. Her cousin turned with a kind of animal satisfaction, brute, insensitive to all but its own race-enforced impression of life.

“I knew you'd be delighted. Jim and I are so pleased. We're sure it'll be a boy. We've made all the arrangements. The doctor says it's as easy as appendicitis now. Anyhow, just think, when he's born.… Oh, I'm so happy!”

Yes, Miss Potts remembered having read all about the endocrine glands and what they do during pregnancy. But now, at this crisis, at this culmination of crises, to bring into this world, into this beleaguered, bombed, invasion-threatened, crowded island, to bring another life, another mouth, to fill another hospital bed …!

And Adelaide had been so keen-minded, yes, even to being hard-boiled. She'd been the first to mock propaganda and blah. She was for the war, of course, but only because, as she used to say, if there was a fight, she liked the gloves off. “Call butchery butchery” she used to say coldly. “We've got to clean up the bloody mess. If we fail, we'll be done, and we'll deserve it. If we succeed, well, then we'll get out the old virtues again and see if we can make something efficient out of them this time.” Yes, here was the body which a few months ago had uttered all that and much more good, telling, Progressive pitchforking. And now here she was, a cow, big, swollen, diffuse, drugged.

It was later than she thought. Adelaide stayed to tea. Jim, she said, had to be in the district and had left it to her to tell her “sister” the good news. He'd call back. Exercise was all the thing nowadays in pregnancy, right up to the date. And it was, literally, up to the date. Tea was hardly begun—they had hardly taken their first sip of that hay-and-hot-water that now passed for tea—when Adelaide said she felt a little queer.

Miss Potts' anxiety was a good diagnostician. She ran to the telephone. Fortunately, Dr. Charles was at home. He did not come, however, until she had had her second treatment in detachment from the horned dilemma, Victory or Death. She saw Adelaide before her eyes, as she had seen Simpkins; torn out of the present setting, the crisis, rushed, in a moment, out of what had seemed to them all the world of basic realism and plunged into something vaster and deeper. But whereas Simpkins had been snatched by Death, had gone off into some vast unknown, Adelaide, infinitely more puzzling, was being snatched by Life, for something more instant and actual than any simply man-made activity like war.

Here at her knees, instead of her hard-boiled adequate, war-minded cousin, was simply an animal that writhed and bellowed in contest, not with a mortal enemy but with the remorseless drive of Life itself; Life that was so much more agonizing than Death and yet was what people always chose rather than Death: Life that rent and tore, mired and bestialized until, beside this exhibition of birth, a concentration camp seemed an austere, cleanly, monastic order. Even Adelaide's face seemed to be smudged out, all personal expression and character gone, while her body seemed a shapeless bag within which some violent animal was kicking and pounding to break its way out.