The World as I Found It (53 page)

But she only pressed back, saying, Oh, please, not now. They always pack you in absolutely hours before anything happens. And I hate it, being shut up with so many people, really I do. And the chances are one in two million — they said so in the papers. Besides, they never come over this end.

She gave him no time to object but instead went into the bathroom. Looking around, hearing the familiar running of water, his stomach fluttery now, he wondered if the shoes of absent Husband Harold, the understudy, were in the closet, then dourly figured that this made him the understudy's understudy — Daddy Dearest. And then Colette reappeared, her white skin faintly stippled in the wafer-thin light. She snipped open his shirt buttons with her fingers, then gently laid him down, saying, You know, you really are a dear, lovely man …

Her sheets were agreeably cool but did not smell quite clean, and he wondered again if it was Harold or some other young admirer he smelled as her mouth opened into his. Colette was wet and eager, but she was spoiled for him. In his mind, he heard Lawrence wrathfully saying that he was only masturbating himself with her, not yet fit for the new world. Yet who was? Two weeks before, according to Ottoline, Lawrence had been about to leave for Florida with a handful of followers when he suddenly decided, for no apparent reason, to postpone the exodus for a month. He'll never do it now, Ottoline had predicted. Lawrence fears he'll be as powerless in America as he is here.

And hovering over Colette, peering into the little lights of her eyes, Russell wondered if he himself would ever do it — pierce that hard shell and become, as Lawrence said, a
creature
. But he couldn't cede himself to the Eden of this life, couldn't break free from what he was. In himself now, he saw only a man of sublime but basically fraudulent promise, who, like an onion, would peel away through time, layer after layer, until at last he was reduced to a hard, translucent kernel of nothing, attached to nothing. And sexually he was failing. Damp. Limp. Colette, so hatefully patient, was whispering,
There's no hurry. Lie down. We'll just hold each other
.

But he didn't wish to hold or be held. Feeling trapped, he just lay there, sweating and inert, when in the distance they heard the first thumps of the anti-aircraft guns. Then the attacking English airplanes monotonously droning, circling, circling, desperately trying to attain the altitude necessary to attack the airships. Forcefully then he said:

Colette, I insist! We really
must
go downstairs now.

But she only clung to him more tightly. I can't bear it down there in that cellar, she said. I hate it, worrying that I'll be buried alive. But you can go — honestly, I won't blame you.

His male pride wouldn't permit him to leave. For pride, then, he remained. Remained, he thought, for just the same reason the war continued. He was thinking of Lawrence's parable of the war, of the poor dumb brutes who dug coal, the boys from the little towns, the donkeymen and dock workers, the bricklayers and glass blowers, and all their masters, too, the bankers, brokers and merchant men. Arm in arm, in endless legions, they marched out into the salient, there to die in the mud, tide upon tide. First one man went, and because he went, his mate went as well. Because one man went, all men went; and because one man died, they all died, as in a chain, ringing the world from end to end. So Russell stayed. Stayed as the whistles blew, then went silent. Stayed even as the first bombs exploded with a rumbling that persisted in the night air with a whorling sound, like the sea rushing in a shell.

Russell couldn't stand it. He didn't want to die with this woman or with any woman. After all his complaints of loneliness, after all those nights he'd spent wishing to be curled up with someone, he saw he wanted to die alone — even with her, he'd die alone. Fate had tricked him. He did not love, and because he did not, he would die covered with plaster dust with this stranger from a foreign species, coiled within the bowels of a mother he hardly knew.

And now the city was going up. Above the ivy planter on the far windowsill, reflected in the clouds, they could see the glow of fires burning in the west end of the city. And then a draft sucked the curtains out the other window, whisking them up like two waving sleeves. Colette sat up, saying, Do you hear it? I hear it, don't you?

It was the throb of engines flogging the air. Don't go to the window! he ordered, but heedless she ran across the room and peered out, then looked back excitedly. He's just passing by, quite out of line with us! We're safe — he can't hit us from there. Come look.

Russell wrapped the sheet around him like a toga, then crept over and crouched by the sill beside her. Like foghorns came the droning engines. They saw the airship's pointed black nose, the long expanse as it swept by, gigantic and dark. For several minutes they watched as it tacked eastward toward the river, pursued by the nattering planes. Then, as the airplanes abandoned their pursuit, another battery began firing, bursts flashing like lightning against the zeppelin's metallic black skin. He was gone, Russell thought. The last zeppelin had slipped through. All-clear whistles were blowing. Voices were in the air. Below, following the beam of a warden's flashlight, people were emerging from the shelter. Flocking across the courtyard, they were all talking at once, amazed, and perhaps slightly let down, to see that everything was as before.

Russell was peering low over the sill; Colette was stroking his neck. The airship was a mile away now, curving toward the harbor, where a few vain shells were still bursting. And then, suddenly, the airship began to glow, swelling and pulsing with fulminous light before it burst into a boiling sheet of flame that lit the sky. Fiery pieces of fabric whipped up and fell away, followed by two, then three drops of liquid fire — burning crewmen, he realized, as they fell through the darkness. A cry went up. In the streets, and then all across the city, there was a steady, roaring, fist-beating chant, ancient and superstitious, as the exploding airship slid down and down, going dark like a star behind the squat rooftops.

Colette had it right. Taking him decisively by the hand, she said sharply, Come to bed. There's nothing to be gained in watching this.

Now?
he asked, with a sickened look.

Especially now, she insisted.

I don't know if I can, he replied, and he meant it. But his groin saw through his scruples, and later he peeled another layer of the onion as he rolled off the sheath of lambskin. Yes, he had managed. He had managed just fine.

O
NE DAY
early that fall, as it was nearing evening, Moore was pushing his baby, Nicholas, down the lane in a white wicker pram and worrying about zeppelins.

No airship had ever come within twenty-five miles of Cambridge, which was both out of effective range and strategically unimportant. On the other hand, as Moore well knew from the newspapers, zeppelins were notoriously erratic, prey not only to strong winds, which blew them off course, but to clouds and fog, which confused their crews, leading them to mistake Goole for Hull or forcing them to jettison their bombs over obscure villages or farms. Nothing, it seemed, was impossible for the airships. One crippled zeppelin had blown clear to Norway, crashing in a tiny seaside village, which the papers said was practically enveloped by the giant craft.

Lately, Dorothy Moore would find her husband poring through the papers and magazines, reading lurid accounts of the Raiders. The arrival of Nicholas in June only raised Moore's anxieties. It reached such a pitch that one night Dorothy found Moore on his knees in the cellar hiding candles, medicine and tinned milk in a nook used for garden tools.

What on earth are you doing? she asked, holding her candle aloft as she peered down the darkened stairs. You know perfectly well we're in no danger here.

Almost
no danger, he snapped. If bombs can land in Bedford, they can land in Cambridge. In theory, we
are
in range of them.

And
in range of lightning and meteors and assorted acts of God, she said in disgust. Good heavens, Bill, what sort of assurances must you have?

Up from the darkness, he bellowed, I'm not asking for
assurances
. I'm merely being
prudent
. PRUDENT!

Oh, bosh, she sniffed. You're just being daft!

At first, the war had not especially bothered Moore. Indeed, he found people's reactions to it intensely curious. Why was it, he wondered, that people who were not themselves fighting, or even associated with anyone in the fighting, felt so
badly
about it?

Perhaps I am deficient, he confessed to Keynes. I do truly believe that war is horrible, and I would, if I could, put an end to it. But I do not find myself feeling
miserable
about the war, as Russell so clearly does. Oh, I would, I suppose, if I were on the front, seeing men killed. No, if anything, I find the war quite fascinating, don't you? Most people do — otherwise, why should wars last so long? People love reading about the war. They love it better than football matches or horse races, and they line up in droves to volunteer, even though they risk getting killed — and killed in rather sizable volumes. Politicians like it, as do factory owners and even workers, who with overtime make better incomes, I'm sure, than you or I do. Papers sell better, and there are books and songs written. I'm not being arch, you understand. I just find it curious. Except for widows and war orphans, and so forth, it seems that nearly everyone gets what he wants.

Many had been anxious to secure Moore's prestigious blessing for or against the war, but for the first two years he straddled the fence, leaning distinctly more to the side of opposition but for the most part undecided. In the end, it was not the slaughter in Flanders or even the sinking of the
Lusitania
that finally led Moore to actively oppose the war; it was the imposition of conscription. Like Russell, Moore saw conscription as a fatal infringement of liberty, a law so wicked that for the first time since his boy preacher days he openly proselytized, passing out anticonscription leaflets and even advising nonreligious C.O.s like Lytton Strachey on effective moral arguments they might use in their defense.

Once Dorothy became pregnant, though, the war shrank in comparison to the things Moore worried about. He got her a second maid and was always on her arm, watchful for slippery stairs, sudden drops or sharp projections. In the first months of her pregnancy, when she spent her mornings throwing up, he felt terribly guilty — and queerly cheated — that she should have so much pain while he himself had none. Lying beside her, stroking her stomach, he found himself wishing that he could transfer some of the pain to himself. Considering his own girth pressed between his hands, he would insistently ask, But what precisely does it feel like? — I mean to have something
not oneself
dwelling inside oneself?

Dorothy did her best to explain, but Moore still couldn't imagine it, the feeling of something growing
inside
him, stretching and sleeping, drawing nourishment from his blood. Later, when Dorothy had ballooned out and the baby was furiously kicking, he would watch amazed as it raised eggs under her skin with its traveling foot. And then, cupping his mouth to her stomach, Moore would gently talk to this rambunctious indigestion, this effect of which he was partly the cause, sounding him like his own echo.

Nicholas was born after a hard labor that had lasted all evening and most of the night. Afterward, Dorothy was bedridden for several weeks with a bad case of hemorrhoids — just one more of the ill effects of pregnancy that Moore found so shocking. The baby, too, gave him several scares, first with a persistent cough, then with several weeks of crying and vomiting in the middle of the night, when it seemed they could do nothing to quiet or comfort him. Moore feared diphtheria and croup. He was always jumping to the worst conclusion, mistaking the golden morning light on the child's skin for jaundice, persistent crying for colic and a simple rash for measles. At other times the sleeping child would seem too still and Moore would anxiously place his palm on his chest, relieved to feel him still breathing. To him, the infant always seemed too cool or too hot, exhibiting pains that he couldn't express and emotions that were often unreadable, hiddenness for the child seemingly being as natural as his instinct to suck. Sometimes Moore would just stare at him, seeing in those eyes not his beautiful son but a willful state of nature, a system of flux and even chaos that was always striving for moments of equilibrium, when the child was dry, fed and contented.

Even more complex was the interplay between the child's peace and the father's. Stopping along the lane now, Moore lifted the gauze and peered into the pram with its sour milky smell. Lightly then, he passed his hand over the child's damp forehead before deciding to remove the thin shawl that covered him. And then, morbidly — unavoidably — Moore felt the pulpy, nearly hairless spot on the crown of the child's head where the bones of his skull had not yet sutured.
Achilles heel
, he thought, then reminded of an arctic bird he had heard about whose heart could be stopped by the merest pressure of a finger on its breast.

Worries of this kind would arise from time to time, but despite them, Moore was generally happy, feeling fortunate to be able to immerse himself in such matters when other fathers were struggling just to survive. Now forty-three, Moore had spent several depressed months that winter, when there had been talk of calling men up to the age of forty-five. But when forty became the cutoff age, his relief quickly turned to guilt. And then one day on King's Parade his guilt turned to shame when a militant-looking old woman wearing an arm band suddenly presented him with a white feather, saying with acidic sweetness, A feather for the faint-hearted, dear boy.

In his humiliation, his first instinct was to throttle the old beast, but his second was to think that it was half deserved — that he really was nothing but a coward and a slacker. Moore was still smarting over that humiliation. Conscious of his still boyish face, he was increasingly concerned that his neighbors, many of whom had husbands or loved ones not much younger than he on the front, thought him a slacker. There was no getting away from it. In the streets — everywhere now — there were soldiers. In the stations, there were always wounded soldiers, maimed stumps of lives hobbling or tied on gurneys. In Hall, where Moore still ate two nights every week, officers and old students busily recounted their adventures and talked of all those who would not return. Every few weeks, it seemed, he would hear about the death of some student, neighbor, distant relative or friend of a friend. Loss was one thing, but what bothered him most was how numbing and abstract it all became. With death it seemed he should feel something, something morally immense. But all too often he felt little or nothing, nor could he pretend about it. When a person went away, thought Moore, he was effectively silenced — dead. And when he reappeared? Then he was returned, resuscitated from the dead. You brushed him off and reestablished your mutual life, and so it continued until the next parting.