In December of 1935, on the day when the Viscount Shawcross of Handforth was seventy years old, a large gilded basket of red carnations was delivered at his door in Half Moon Street early in the morning. The card tucked into the flowers said: “How beautifully you stand up to the years. Sic semper tyrannis. Lettice.”
Pendleton, very old and white, stood the basket on the breakfast table. He looked to the fire, switched on the table light, for it was a drear morning, and then listened for Hamer’s footsteps. They came, as he knew they would, punctually at eight. “Good morning, my lord. Many happy returns of the day.”
“Thank you, Pendleton, thank you. Ha! Flowers?”
It was still the old enchanting voice, still the tall, unstooping figure, the hale face, the clear eye. He sat down to the table and pulled the card out from among the flowers. Yes: he had known they would be from Lettice. He was eager to ring her up and thank her at once, but glanced at the clock and desisted. He pulled one of the flowers out of the basket and put it in his buttonhole. “You shouldn’t do it, you know. You can’t really afford it.” But he was very glad, very glad, that she had done it.
It was a bit extravagant, perhaps, to say she couldn’t afford it. But she hadn’t the money to fling about that she once had had. Her world had gone upside down. That wild daughter of hers had run off with a Dago prince and sickened of him in six months. He had demanded a fortune before he would consent to a divorce, and Lostwithiel had paid it. Then he had gone to fetch the girl home from Antibes. She insisted on driving herself, in a racing car in which she had terrorized the countryside. Something of old Buck’s lunacy was in this girl’s blood; and perhaps, as Lostwithiel roared along the country roads towards Paris at his daughter’s side, he remembered the far-off night when he had sent the grooms to wait with stretchers beneath the bridge at Castle Hereward. So Buck’s father had driven down the road to Brighton; so Buck himself had driven; and so Buck’s granddaughter drove now. “I’m gettin’ very bored with this, Daddy,” she shouted in his ear. “You’ll have to buy me an aeroplane – something that moves.”
He looked askance at the fair helmeted head, the eyes wild with excitement, the thin nervous hands playing with the wheel. He wondered in his heart at the mystery of his life: that he could love this daughter so much while hating everything she did. His love for her was profound, and by that much more a torment.
They died together. No one saw what happened. In the morning they were found beneath the car at the foot of an embankment. In the last extremity of his love, Lostwithiel had got his arm about her neck; her wild unruly face was pulled close to his.
That was two years ago. When Lostwithiel’s complicated affairs were straightened out, his widow found herself poorer than she had expected. But she was nevertheless a very rich woman. If she gave up the mansion in Belgrave Square and took a small house in Green Street, that was only because she did not want any longer to be bothered with estate; and if, when she went north, she did not live in the dower house at Castle Hereward but in a house that had belonged to the bailiff, she did that for the same reason. “I’m just an old widow, my dear, whose days are nearly done,” she said to Hamer. “I won’t be worried with big places and lots of servants. I’ve never felt my soul was my own so much as I do now. If my hopes are gone, so are my illusions, and that’s the great thing, after all.”
Yes, it was the most utter nonsense for him to say that she couldn’t afford a bunch of carnations! But it pleased him to imagine that she would have made that small sacrifice for him if necessary. He knew that she would. They had never seen more of each other than they did now; they had never understood one another better. She never omitted him from the small, unpolitical dinner-parties that she liked to give in Green Street, and occasionally they had a dinner tête-à-tête, there or in Half Moon Street. Each felt there was something wrong with the week which had not brought a meeting.
Pendleton came in with a telegram. “Many happy returns. I’m coming to lunch. Alice.”
He got up from the table with a quizzical smile. “What do you think of that, Pendleton?” he said. “A man can live in this world for seventy years and have only two greetings on his birthday: one from a countess and one from a Bolshevist. What d’you make of that?”
“Well, my lord,” said Pendleton, with a brave attempt at humour, “it seems to me like making the best of both worlds, as one might say.”
Hamer looked at him sharply. “Yes, yes, there’s that about it,” he said, and went into his study.
He felt as if he were dropping – had dropped – out of the world in which he had battled for so long. Not one of his old political colleagues had remembered his birthday. You stepped off the stage and you were soon forgotten. New players arose to earn alike the hisses and the applause. The play went on, and now he was merely a spectator of its accelerating rush. He thoughtfully pierced a cigar, as he stood before the fire, thinking of this play in which his interest had never waned, though he had chosen to withdraw from the stage to a seat in the stalls. The rise of Hitler, the Italian march into Abyssinia, the rush of Europe to rearm. His ear was as acute as ever, and he heard afar off the roar and turmoil of the battle that 1918 had halted but had not ended.
Framed in passe-partout and hanging over the fireplace behind him was a cartoon by Will Dyson that he had clipped out of the Daily Herald. It was drawn on the occasion of Philip Snowden’s receiving a peerage, and showed Snowden as a candle, his arctic face roughly adumbrated in the tallow. The candle was guttering, and, reaching out of the vast dark of the background, came a hand placing over the flame an extinguisher shaped as a coronet. “Out, out, brief candle.”
It was a superb piece of work, and its mordant truth had greatly appealed to Hamer, none the less because he had known that he himself would shortly be in the same case. He turned now and looked at the bitter caustic lines of the drawing, and he knew that in his case at any rate it was not wholly the truth. No, no. The coronet had not extinguished him. “No, by God, it hasn’t,” he swore softly to himself. An observer of the game could be as alert as the foremost player, and never had his own brain been more sensitive to the subtle and hidden drift of mankind towards the precipice whose boiling waters filled with dark premonition his sense of the years to come.
“My dear, you look radiant,” he said when Alice came. “I didn’t know you were in London. Did you come over specially for my birthday?”
She kissed him with real affection. “I’m forty years of age,” she said. “Reserve your flattery for infants.”
“Forty? Good God!”
It was incredible. He did not feel old except in these moments when he realized the age of people he had known as children. Alice was forty! He looked at her keenly, holding her by both hands at arm’s-length. There was a grey strand or two in her dark hair. Around the eyes, black as onyx, creases were deepening their channels. Charles, then, is thirty-eight, he thought; and he said: “The most radiant forty I’ve ever seen.”
“And you’re a fine mellow old seventy,” said Alice.
“‘Mellow old seventy.’ Sounds like the name of a ripe port.”
“You rather look like that, you know.”
He laughed, and led her in to lunch. “Well,” he asked, “how’s Russia?”
“A country of human beings, like any other.”
“Ha! Now there’s an admission! You’re the first Bolshevist I’ve met who’s admitted that a Bolshevist could sin. We differ from the beasts in being able to sin and in knowing that we are sinning.”
“Whenever we meet,” said Alice, “you treat me to a sermon.”
“You forget that I was once a local preacher.”
“Yes, you’ve been that too, haven’t you? You’ve been everything: politician, author, traveller, preacher, linguist, proletarian and peer. You really are a rather remarkable person.”
“Now you see one of the advantages of being forty. Your eyes are beginning to open.”
“Well, go on. Give me the sermon. I can see you’re dying to do it. But keep to the headlines.”
“I’m glad you see that Bolsheviks are human. The Communist usually sees them as inspired by a more than human wisdom. Whatever they do must be right. This feeling is getting a hold in Germany, too. And don’t fly at me when I tell you that Germany and Russia are tarred with the same brush. In both countries is this self-worship, this refusal to admit the possibility of error: that is, the possibility of sin. It is quite literally true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, because how can we fear the Lord unless we are conscious of sin? That is, unless we admit that we can go wrong? The refusal to make that admission permits any abomination to be committed in the name of our own infallible godhead. Which is a myth, my dear – at the moment the most dangerous myth in the world. Admit that we are human, that we can err, and half the battle’s won. Then we look round for a cure. We don’t go blindly on, smashing and crushing, as Germany and Russia will smash and crush, if they get half a chance, for a long time to come. That’s all.”
“You are quite right,” Alice said – rather surprisingly, Hamer thought. “Quite right, anyway, in your general notion. I differ from you on two points. I don’t see a ha’p’orth of similarity between Germany and Russia, and I still feel that Russia, though I can see the faults of the country and of the men in it, is on the right track. Russia, I have learned, is no paradise, but show me the land that is. I have been disillusioned in much that I have found in Russia, but I am not disillusioned about Russia’s direction. To say that Russia would smash and crush into other countries is utter nonsense. If it did, my heart would be broken. The foundations of all I believe in would crumble. But I don’t believe it. Russia is huge, still blundering, but benign. If necessary, I would die for Russia.”
She spoke so earnestly that Hamer could almost imagine tears behind her eyelids, And what, he wondered, is the meaning of that? So he had seen and heard mothers passionately defend their children. though troubled with an unadmitted doubt of their integrity.
“Well, well,” he said, rising from the table and leading her into his study, “come and sit down here and tell me all about yourself. I’m willing to let politics look after themselves for an hour or two if you’ll do the same. What’s your happiest news?”
“I’ve heard from Charles,” she said.
Charles, whom Hamer and Alice had long since given up mentioning in their letters to one another because in each heart the pain was too deep, too keen; Charles, whom he and she never through these years had ceased to track to the farthest limit of any possible hint or clue, but always in vain; Charles, who had succeeded in so little, but had succeeded past belief in dropping from sight like a stone dropped into the sea: she had heard from Charles!
Hamer stood arrested, with a lit match burning down towards his fingers. He threw the match into the fire. “Where is he? How is he?”
“He’s in South America, and he seems to be happy.”
“Well – well—” he exclaimed impatiently. “Go on.”
He held a light to her cigarette and she saw that his fingers were a little unsteady. She was glad of that. She would not have liked news of Charles to be coldly received.
“I got his first letter about a year ago,” she said.
“What a woman you are! Why on earth didn’t you let me know?”
“Because Charles asked me not to let anyone know. You yourself once described the root of Charles’s trouble. He’s been surrounded by too many successes. You were a success at your own game. I was a success at mine. I suppose Charles’s mother and Auntie Lizzie were successes, too, in their way: they had learned to live successfully. After his one little burst, Charles was a failure among all of us shamelessly successful people. I think perhaps the little burst with Fit for Heroes was the most unfortunate thing of all. Charles knew what we were all enjoying. He’d tasted it, and he couldn’t get a second helping.”
“Yes, I see that,” said Hamer. “Well?”
“Well, in the first letter he wrote to me he was contrite about running away, and burning with shame for what he’d said to me before he went. You never heard what that was and there’s no reason why you should. I knew it was just lunacy, that he didn’t in his heart believe a word of it; but it was the sort of lunacy that haunts the person who utters it rather than the person who hears it. Though I did not for a moment believe he meant it, yet through all these years he’d thought I did.”
“Yes, yes, I understand.”
Alice moved up closer to him on the couch. He took her hand and held it and looked at the rings: the wedding-ring and the diamond engagement ring. “I’ve never met anyone,” she said, “who understands so much.”
Ah, my dear, he thought, if only that were true! This engagement ring: how he had hated the thought of Charles’s association with Alice! How little he had understood then!
“Well,” he said, “I suppose what made him write was that he was beginning to find success coming his way at last in whatever it was he took up?”
“Yes, and would you believe what it was! Aeroplanes!”
“What? Is he flying?”
“He wasn’t when he first wrote. He was just finding his feet as a representative in South America for an English firm of aeroplane manufacturers. That was the very first thing he wrote about: he was doing well in the job, and he was full of hope. What he’d been doing before that I don’t know. Having a thin time I should think, but anyway he’d learned Spanish. Then his letters became more frequent. I don’t know how on earth one sells aeroplanes, but he was doing it with increasing success. His firm gave him a wider and wider commission, and now he’s going from one South American state to another, selling to private companies and to governments. He mentions his first big success in selling to a government in the last letter I got.” She took the letter out of her bag. “‘If you’re ever in London, you can tell my father. I don’t know who the supreme chief of our show is in London, but whoever he is, he seems to like me. It’s almost as though there’s some influence at work pushing me on. Anyhow, there it is. I’m on my feet. On my foot, anyhow. The one that’s missing doesn’t matter on this job. I can fly without it. I’m working for my pilot’s ticket now. You’ll see me soon, my dear, showing War Ministers over the Andes and selling them a consignment of “buses” soon afterwards. If José goes to Europe soon, I expect to be able to wangle leave to accompany him. Then, my love—’” She folded the letter hastily.
Hamer got up. “Extraordinary!” he said. “To think that his talent, after all, was a sort of commercial-cum-diplomatic mix-up. Well. And José. Who is José?”
“José Esquierra. I don’t know much more about him than you do, except that he comes into every letter Charles writes. He’s a pilot, too. I don’t think Charles has ever had a man friend before. This José is on his brain.”
He patted her hand. “Now I know why you’re radiant. This has made me too very happy, my dear. Tell me – what is the name of Charles’s firm? Do you know?”
“No. But their aeroplanes all have fancy starry names: Pleiades and Capricorns and Orions and so forth. Why, are you going to hunt down Charles’s benefactor? I think it’s a myth. He’s succeeding because he’s found his job. That’s all there is to it.”
“No. I was just interested,” Hamer said vaguely. But when she was gone he sat for a time by the fire. He could not say it to her, but he hated the whole thing. He detested aeroplanes, whether for civil or military use. He considered them the major curse of all man’s meddling inventions. He remembered the letter which John Galsworthy had written to the newspapers after the last war, urging the nations to destroy once for all, and for all purposes, this thing that they had made. He was convinced to the bone and marrow that there had spoken the voice of wisdom.
Selling aeroplanes! He would rather sell poison to a murderer.
Presently he took up the telephone and rang through to an address in the City. In two minutes he knew what he wanted to know. Pleiades, Orions and the rest of them were all within the vast ring of Consolidated Public Utilities.
Then, with a succession of calls, he ran Sir Thomas Hannaway to earth at his club at four o’clock in the afternoon.
“Look here, Hannaway, I just want to say a word of thanks about what you’re doing for that boy of mine.”
Sir Thomas was in a jovial mood. He laughed huskily into the microphone. “Eh! Tha’s rumbled me at last, lad,” he said, doing his best Lancashire imitation. Then he became the responsible man of the world. “There’s no reason why the boy should know anything about it, Shawcross.”
“He doesn’t. I made a lucky guess.”
“Well, you know, by the merest fluke I found that he was doing some little bits and pieces for our people out there, and I told ’em to give ’im ’is ’ead. That’s all.”
“It was good of you.”
“Well,” said Tom. “I don’t forget things, you know, Shawcross. The old lettuces, eh? There’s a lot between us two. And that night you turned up in Eaton Square. You were a Cabinet Minister then, and that meant something to me. Why should I deny it? I’m a simple man. I don’t forget those things.”
“You mean to say that influenced you with Charles? Good Lord, Hannaway. You’re a caution.”
“I ’ope I’m a Christian,” said Tom with simple dignity.
“I hope you are,” Hamer thought as he hung up and returned to the fireside.
*
This José, this Esquierra, with a face almost as black and wrinkled as a pickled walnut, this short, long-limbed, ugly little monkey of a man, whose superabundant vitality sparkled in his dark eyes and flashing teeth, was tickled to death that his dear friend Charles should be the son of Viscount Shawcross. José had an immense knowledge of European statesmen: their biographical records and their achievements in office. José was an anarchist from Barcelona. One of these days, he hoped, all these Jacks-in-office, tee’d up above the generality by no more than the little piles of self-esteem they sat on, would be swiped into the rough, and stay there. His restless animal vitality was equalled by his fierce and unreflecting animal courage. He had himself tried a bit of swiping with a few home-made bombs. Spain became too hot for him. Enrique Valdar found it necessary to disappear; and so this José sprang up in South America, Enrique’s reincarnation. He knew how to knuckle down to authority when authority had anything to give him or teach him. His job in Barcelona had been that of motor engineer, and he laid his talents humbly at authority’s feet in South America because he wanted to learn all about aeroplanes. It seemed to him that, singing through the air in an aeroplane, and dropping death on his enemies, he would find the deepest satisfaction life could offer. The moment for this, José believed, would surely come, and he lived for it with the simple intensity with which a child lives for a promised picnic, counting off the worthless days between. On the great day when he mounted up with wings like an eagle, he would sing the song of life and know why he was born. It gave him great pleasure at the moment to be the viper warming in the bosom of those he would destroy.
José’s straightforward uncomplicated fanaticism was fed from his old organization in Barcelona. Hardly a week went by without his receiving some seeming-harmless letter or newspaper whose import he understood. Daily he longed for the import to be what he knew some day it must be: Come home. The moment is at hand.
*
Charles Shawcross walked briskly across the blazing aerodrome. He had thought he would never walk briskly again, never do anything briskly again. It was the slavish subjection of his mind to other and more successful people that had brought him to South America. His father, he knew, had landed in South America and set out thence to conquer the world. So to South America he went himself. But Charles found the world a hard place to conquer. His thin embittered personality did not expand in this sunshine, did not cheer in the dry harsh startling colour of his new environment. He dragged his old life with him like a heavy corpse. His heart was full of blended love and hatred for Alice, almost of pure hatred for his father, of hatred undiluted for “them” – the vague, undefined powers that had turned down his pretensions to a writer’s excellence.
His life for a long time was miserable and poverty-stricken. His old ambitions dogged him. He found an unexpected aptitude for Spanish, and tried to sell articles and stories, written in Spanish, to the newspapers. He began a novel, in English, of South American life: a self-pitying autobiographical novel of a worthy soul rejected by fools and struggling desperately with fate. It limped along, till he began to loathe the record as much as the life it recorded. One night he burned it and threw his pen into the fire in a gesture of desperate symbolism. He never tried to write again.
Within a week, abandoning all pretensions, he was working as a clerk in an English house. He was surprised to find that at once he felt happier. Miserable and mechanical as his work was, he was its master and his soul was uncankered by the old disastrous assaults upon an impossible objective.
A year later he entered the office of Sky Traffic. Here his work was more interesting and more responsible, though it was still unimportant enough. But again he was the master of it, and he received a number of small promotions. Then one day, out of the blue, came a promotion that he had not expected. It meant responsibility in a real degree, and money that, for the first time since the writing of Fit for Heroes, left him something to play with.
If failure in the midst of success had been the bane of Charles’s life, this success was the wine he needed to warm his heart. Merely to walk into the office, to pass by the room of undenominated clerks in which he once had worked, and to enter the room with “Mr. C. Shawcross” painted on the door: this squeezed the gall out of him and left him a sweeter and more reasonable being. He went home that night and wrote to Alice. He felt for the first time in his life that he was not a child.
And then came the day when he was told to fly to a neighbouring country in order to conduct a business negotiation that would need every pennyworth of his powers. He walked briskly on to the aerodrome. His leg didn’t worry him. An observer would not have known anything about It. An aeroplane came taxiing toward him, and under the pilot’s goggled eyes gleamed the white teeth of a man he had not seen before – José Esquierra.
*
Charles had not flown before. The sky was cloudless: a hard light-blue enamel. They soared towards it, and he discovered that his emotion, concerning which he had been troubled by some doubts, was one of supreme elation. Merely to watch the altimeter pointing to eight, ten, twelve thousand feet was exhilarating. To look down on the green seas of prairies, on the inconceivable remoteness of towns and villages, on railways drawing their slender lines into infinity: this was to have experience heightened to a pitch he had not imagined possible. So this was an aeroplane; this was what he had to sell! His commission presented itself in a new romantic light.
In this exalted state of mind, it seemed to him a natural thing that José Esquierra should turn to him and say: “You permit, señor, that I occasionally sing?”
Charles laughed outright. “Sing your head off, man, if you want to,” he said, and above the roaring of the propellers José lifed up his voice and sang. Thus José loved to be hurtling through the air, imagining, as he pulled his levers, that he was operating at last the switch that would drop his lethal eggs upon the enemies of the people. He sang, but it was only a rehearsal of the great song of life that he believed he would sing one day as he sowed the instruments of death.
For the last hour they flew with the sea on their right hand. José brought the machine down low, and Charles could see the waves sewing their lacy fringe for mile after mile along the calm blue quilt of the water. White and pink villas clustered at the mouth of a stream flowing into the sea; gardens; bathers running up the beach; little yachts, mere pleasurable toys, scudding before a propitious wind in a pygmy contest towards a painted buoy.
It seemed years to Charles since such sights as these had given him pleasure; and when at last the aeroplane touched the ground and he stepped out into late afternoon sunshine, he turned to José and said: “Thank you. I enjoyed that. I hope we’ll have many trips together.”
A taxi was waiting to take him to his hotel. He had not realized that now he and José would part. Rooms had been booked for Charles at a resplendent white hotel overlooking the sea, as befitted one who on the morrow would interview members of the government. The company’s knockabout pilot, the aerial taximan of Sky Traffic, could hardly hope to share such quarters. José was not perturbed about this, but Charles was in an expansive mood. “You must at least come and see me after dinner,” he said. He didn’t want this glorious day to end in loneliness.
José, out of his aeroplane, looked a different being. Charles found him at the time appointed in the hotel lounge, wearing a blue suit off the hook, cracked glacé leather shoes, a lilac shirt with a yellow tie. He was rolling a cigarette, bending his inquisitive monkey face over the task, and the light caught his hair, shining as synthetically as his shoes. Charles asked him to have a drink, but José declined. He was a teetotaller. He did not tell Charles – not at that time – that he had taken a teetotal vow until his great mission was accomplished. His eye and hand must be steady. He was capable of such a dedication.
They wandered out into the street together. Though the sun had set, the night was as warm as an English midsummer noon. Charles had not been in the town before, but José knew it well. Charles asked him about the possibilities of amusement, and José detailed them with a frankness that was startling. Charles gave him to understand that he had not asked his company as a pander. José was at once contrite, and for a time silent. Then, bridging with one leap the gulf between the exotic and the hygienic, he suggested that they might bathe. They had come out upon the seashore. To right and left the esplanade ran, hung with lamps whose coruscation dwindled to a violet darkness where the two horns of the bay pointed inwards. Before them the moon was riding high, trailing a dance of glittering sequins upon the water. The sea came whispering in as though its voice had never known the tones of thunder.
Charles was tempted. He had been a magnificent swimmer. Of all the forms of sport, this was the only one he had mastered and enjoyed. But since he had lost his leg he had not tried to swim. Alice swam as well as he did, and he would sit on the shore watching her with a furious envy, his pinched heart refusing to allow him to join in the sport in which he knew she must now master him. Standing that night with the warm foreign air blowing about him, with that exquisite moon-lacquered sea sighing at his feet, and watching the bathers running along the beach with towels draped over their shoulders, he felt so painful an urge to go in and swim that he burst out resentfully: “Damn it all, man! How can I swim? You know I’ve got only one leg.”
José was overcome. He had known nothing of the kind, and said so volubly. He said further that he had known men with one leg aye, and women with one arm – such magnificent swimmers that clearly Señor Shawcross was making something of nothing. He, José, could say without boasting that he was veritably a fish in the water. He detailed his life-saving achievements at length, holding back nothing of the beauty, grace and gratitude of some of those whom he had saved from death. Even if Señor Shawcross found himself in difficulties – which he refused to believe was possible – he would stake his own life that no harm should befall him.
Charles succumbed to this overwhelming onslaught. They took a taxicab back to the hotel and procured towels and costumes. Then the taxicab ran them to the end of the esplanade. Charles, again full of misgivings and hating the thought of being stared at, insisted on walking a mile to a spot where the beach was utterly deserted. When he had undressed and put on his costume, he felt overcome with shame. A few doctors and nurses and Alice: no one else had seen him in that condition. He started absurdly to try to hop on one leg towards the water, thrusting away pettishly José’s offers to help. But José good-humouredly persisted, encouraging him with loud cries, and at last Charles found himself concluding the hop with one hand on José’s shoulder. He hopped till the water was round his thighs, and then José with a shout of “Hola!” let him go. Charles fell over on to his back. The sea bore him up. The old sense of happiness and well-being came flooding in. He lay finning gently with his fingers, staring up into the serene face of the moon. The warm water lulled him, buoyed him. He felt as safe and content as if he had resigned himself to maternal arms.
Presently, he floundered over on to his breast and struck out. It was not easy. He had to invent, to improvise, but he swam, he progressed; and José, making circles round him, encouraged him, declared that he had never seen such mastery of a handicap, all the time as watchful as a duck over a duckling’s first swim.
When they came out, Charles was tingling with well-being. He made no bones about allowing José to help him up the beach. José, a grotesque long-limbed, little-bodied creature, glistening in the moonlight, went first, and Charles, with a hand on each of his shoulders, hopped behind, shouting with laughter at his own clumsiness when, once, he nearly fell. He allowed José to hold him up while he towelled himself, to help him into his clothes; and then he lit a cigarette and blew ambrosial smoke through his nostrils while José dressed.
José was delighted. “It was as I said, eh, señor?” he kept on demanding; and Charles as often replied: “I didn’t want your help, eh?”
“No, no, señor. Before the misfortune you must have been a fish, an electric eel. Even now—” and José spread his arms expressively.
Charles slept soundly, and awoke full of a happiness that seemed an unreasonable consequence of so slender a cause. But he had conquered something, and mainly he had conquered his own shrinking from enterprise; and therefore, going out that morning on a task whose like he had not undertaken before, he went with more than usual confidence and buoyancy of spirit. His negotiations lasted for three days. He did not swim with José again, for his evenings were now caught up in hospitality given to his clients and received from them; but he saw José from time to time when the pilot was called on to explain and demonstrate the machine; and when finally he took his seat for the return journey and José said: “We have sold the aeroplanes, señor – yes?” he replied wholeheartedly: “Yes, Esquierra, we have sold the aeroplanes.”
“I will teach you also to fly them,” said José; and that, in due course, happened. Charles represented to his firm the advantages of his practically understanding the machines, and, the hidden influence from London still operating, no obstacle was put in his way. He expressed a preference for Esquierra as his instructor, and Esquierra was attached to him. Charles’s success in selling the areoplanes had made him a person of greater consequence than ever. His desires now carried weight.
*
Charles could never remember what slip of the tongue, what lift of the eyebrow, what small unguarded trifle first revealed that he and José were, equally, political rebels. But that day came, the day when, except before some third party, he ceased to be Señor Shawcross and became Carlos, and Esquierra became José. Once that intangible barrier was down, it was not long before José, the stronger spirit, was the dominant partner in their friendship.
In the darkness of night José would come to Charles’s rooms, and night after night Communist and Anarchist talked their hearts out. Now that Charles was in communication with Alice again, his flagging political beliefs stiffened. Left alone, he would have soon forgotten them, for they were not so much beliefs as absorptions from a personality overflowing into his. He was surprised to find how little he knew of the confused welter of sect and passion and opinion in which mankind found itself.
“But I don’t understand, José,” he said one night, “why you are not back in Spain. Spain’s a republic now.”
José spat: one of the unpleasant habits he permitted himself in this new intimacy. “Pah! How little you understand, Carlos! It is this republican government that I fly from. Have you not heard then of the Anarchist rebellion in Aragon in 1931? The dog Azafia, leader of the republic, put us down. Firing-pom-pom-pom,” said José, his little eyes sparkling with anger. “Troops – the troops of the republic – they maimed us and killed us. One hundred of us were sent off – deported – to the desert. I escaped.”
He rolled a cigarette, brooding angrily. The room was drowsy with heat, blue with tobacco smoke, a waving chiaroscuro like Charles’s mind which was hazy with names: Anarchists, Communists, Socialists, Advanced Liberals: all at loggerheads in a tormented country which till now he had conceived, as he conceived the world, to be a clear-cut field for the simple opposition of Right and Left, which to him meant Right and Wrong.
One day, early in 1936, José was not at the aerodrome. He was not at his lodgings. “When I go, Carlos, I go – like that!” he had once said to Charles, doing a disappearing trick with a coin. “There I am! There I am not! Like that.”
And now he was not. The company was perturbed at the loss of its best pilot. Charles kept his peace. He had not expected any farewell letter, even any farewell word, from José. When the newspapers announced that all the parties of the Left in Spain, including the Anarchists, had united to form a Popular Front, he knew where José was headed for. He was lonely and unhappy, and looked the more eagerly for Alice’s letters, pouring out passion in reply.
Six months later, the army rebellion was launched against the Popular Front. Charles often thought then of José. Whether he ever sang the song of life and death over the riven body of Spain Charles never knew. José, so important in Charles’s life, was a cipher in the life of the world. His deeds, if there were deeds, did not create an echo.