THE SHOP WAS SMALL, a few doors from the Warming Pan, and so inconspicuous that strangers, unless they knew, dismissed it as a warehouse. There was a dingy, Victorian quality about the windows, and the white canisters standing on the counter reminded Horatio, as he stepped inside, of an apothecary’s den. He longed to run his fingers over the blue spirals down their sides or sniff the lids; they must hold spices, he thought, as well as coffee. One expected the owner to be eccentric and bad-tempered, and sometimes Mr. Dobbie was both; at a first glance he looked like an innkeeper, but to the initiate the passivity of his oblong face suggested tea and china.
Horatio had timed his visit exactly. Jim, the boy, was still polishing the handles of various doors. In ten minutes shoppers would arrive, from real households where they had a wad of ration books and bought not in miserable ounces but in pounds. He looked forward to this chat, for it was a contact with the life he missed so sorely now that his wife was dead and there were no more Sunday suppers where his pupils (“Quite Bohemian, my dear, from all ranks and classes, but art—art is unity”) were welcomed.
“Good morning, Mr. Dobbie, and how are you this morning? You had rather a noisy night of it, I am afraid.”
“Noisy! We were up till two with that fire in the Square.” A ledger banged as if its owner would like, with such a gesture, to smash up the war.
“Ah, yes, incendiaries. Well, well, to think I didn’t hear them, but my hearing’s not so good as it used to be; age, Mr. Dobbie, age, but it’s uphill work quarrelling with time!”
“Quite.” Mr. Dobbie stared at the empty packing cases that cut off most of the light. “Take the mat outside and shake it, Jim, we must try to get rid of that dust.”
“Sometimes I feel that to be hard of hearing these days is a blessing in disguise.”
“Certainly it has its compensations. And what can I do for you this morning, Mr. Rashleigh?”
It was an inauspicious day, Horatio reflected; Mr. Dobbie was tired. “Why, the same as usual, with Whitehall’s permission.” He handed over his book. “All this rationing must be very bad for business.”
“Bad! It’s ruinous. And to think,” Mr. Dobbie’s forehead wrinkled into as many lines as the Chinese characters above him, “to think that the Conservative Party did this to me. Lied to us, they did, lied to us… and I voted for them at the last election!” Dobbie could bear any stupidity ill, least of all his own.
“Don’t say that, Mr. Dobbie, I am sure Mr. Baldwin meant well even if he was misinformed.”
“Misinformed! Misinformed, Mr. Rashleigh, is hardly the word to use. What do we pay the Government for, I should like to know, with good money taken from your pocket and mine, if they go and deliberately mislead us? They knew—half a pound of second-quality breakfast, Jim, for the gentleman—they knew what those Germans were arming for; and where are they now? Helping us to put out fires and freeze in the dark? Oh, no, most of them are in Canada, safe and warm and toasting their toes at a log fire whilst we, who were idiotic enough to vote for them, catch bronchitis and pay for Spitfires.” He snatched the funnel from Jim’s hand and poured tea through it into a twist of paper.
“I have heard,” Horatio ventured timidly, “that in Canada they have radiators.”
“Doesn’t matter, they’ve feathered their nests all right. It’s a shame,” he added kindly, “that a gentleman of your age can’t have a pot of tea when he chooses without having to count the leaves.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dobbie, it is a little hard, especially, if I may say so, for one who has a palate for the beverage. Better a cup a day of the best, though, than four out of some nameless packet.” He hoped Mr. Dobbie had not noticed how many months it was since he had been able to afford his favourite blend.
“You are right, you are supremely right; now which was it that Mrs. Rashleigh used to come in for at Christmas?” Dobbie glanced admiringly up at the jars above his head. “This one, wasn’t it?” He pointed to a canister.
“Yes, that was Margaret’s gift to me for years. Such a bitter loss,” he sighed, “I was thinking of her only this morning.”
“Quite, quite,” Dobbie answered vaguely; he was a bachelor and proud of it. “There’s a lot to be said for the single life, all the same.”
There was something about Dobbie, Horatio reflected, that stamped him as commercial. He was like—Rashleigh could not think of the term, then all at once the memory surged back to him—a big, vulgar trader selling blankets on the cover of a book of Indian stories, the one, he smiled to think of it now, that had frightened him so as a child. A simple mind could smash itself against that broad, impervious smile. Not that Dobbie was a bad fellow, he knew his place and kept to it, but he was a materialist. Imagine trying to explain to him the meaning of the word “ideal”!
Jim kicked a pail at the back of the counter and looked up guiltily at the noise. He flicked his duster over an already shiny shelf. “See the grinder’s all right,” Dobbie snapped, reopening the ledger. A merchant was busy enough these days without wasting time in idle conversation. He glanced at the clock. “Funny how much you miss a night’s sleep,” he grumbled, thinking of the glorious moment when he could cross the road and sit down in front of a pint of beer.
Horatio put a half crown on the counter deliberately, though he had some change in his pocket. The longer that he could remain in the warm shop the better; the hardwood crates with their exotic labels, French or Chinese, suggested the ships that he had sketched for fifty years. Why, he could see the Solent in front of him again, the short blue waves slapping the little tugs and beyond them, an etching rather than a water colour, for the lines were so exquisite, the bow of a liner, Asia-bound.
“I think I must be due for my tea.” Horatio started, for he had not heard the door click, and looked up, a little suspiciously, at the grey-haired stranger beside him.
“Yes, Colonel Ferguson,” Dobbie thumbed over a dozen dirty pages fastened with a clip, “you deposited your coupons, didn’t you?” He extracted a paper and looked at it. “Half a pound. Will you take it today?”
“Please. You had a bad time last night, I am afraid?” “I miss my sleep. We had quite a blaze in the Square.” “It’s marvellous to me the way that people stand it.” “Well, as one of our Ministers remarked the other day, what else is there to do? It isn’t war, though, it’s murder.” Dobbie blew his nose violently, an aggressively white handkerchief floating like a flag against the dust. “Anything more I can do for you, Mr. Rashleigh?” he inquired, for Horatio was still fumbling with his change.
“No, no, thank you.” Rashleigh slid the coins into his pocket. If he had still been able to afford the six and twopenny China, no tradesman would have dared dismiss him in such a manner. Colonel Ferguson! He gazed icily at his neighbour whilst buttoning his coat. Just because the man had a military title, though with his blue, far-off-looking eyes he seemed more of a sailor, Dobbie wanted to clear the coast, no doubt, before handing him something from “under the counter.” That was the worst of war, the artists suffered first. Horatio turned, almost knocking over the scarlet canister painted with pansies that held a ball of string, and stamped into the street. He would lose himself, and that was something these other people could not do, painting a petite water colour in case Miss Johnson should reply to his letter, an impression of the Golden Hind perhaps or else Rose Cottage with his dear white ducks waddling towards the pond.
“A cold morning,” Ferguson remarked, watching the merchant knot two pieces of string together; “somehow it would be easier to put up with these disturbances if we had some sun.”
“Everyone to their fancy, sir.” Dobbie sifted the tea into a bag and shook it. “Give me a sharp, December day myself.” His plump neck bulged out of its collar as he turned towards the cash register. “That will be three and a penny, or shall I book it to your account?”
Unlike Horatio, Colonel Ferguson preferred to shop as expeditiously as possible. He put down the exact amount, thrust his parcel into his pocket, and with a brisk “Good morning” left, closing the door carefully behind him. Fire fighting must be a new experience for a man like Dobbie, and he did not look as if he were a fellow who was used to discomfort. He was making a good job of it all the same, the Colonel thought; it was wonderful the way these wardens had tackled the crisis. He crossed the street and turned up towards the park. It would be deserted, but he meant to round the Serpentine for it would be fatal to give up exercise just because this raw, damp, miserable climate took away the heart for it. He had never had to force himself to walk in Lausanne; there he had known the hills from the first wild clump of chicory up to the highest hepaticas, but today he would be as shivery when he got indoors as he was now, having just had breakfast. It was not age, he could swear it was not age. Why, he had felt as gay and young in Lausanne as if he had been fourteen, with life—and the East—still in front of him.
England had changed. It was less familiar, certainly less friendly, than the Continent. There were still the old colours in the fabric; people stood up nightly to the raids as if they were merely thunderstorms, but there was a new, ugly, bureaucratic class without guts and without what he called “empire imagination.” They laughed at his fifty years of service as if he had been some petty tax collector. He was still fuming over yesterday’s interview. “I don’t understand, sir, why you returned to London,” the official had said, pursing his lips as if he nibbled a pencil permanently. “You have been domiciled abroad ever since you left India and you are well over military age.” Colonel Ferguson had not even troubled to reply, “To offer my services.” After half a dozen young men in as many different Ministries had turned him down in varying tones of boredom and icy politeness, the logical part of his mind was saying “Why?” to himself.
It would be different this afternoon. Finally Ferguson had unearthed Harris, his old chief. With Departments evacuated all over the countryside, his letter had gone to a dozen places before it had reached its destination. Harris himself was marooned in Yorkshire but had sent him an introduction to a London colleague who would be sure, he wrote, “to fix you up at once.” Ferguson was seeing the man at three, and tomorrow, or at latest next week, he would be back, surely, in harness?
There were no children in the park, not even an old maid with her dog. Along the entire row there were only himself and a French soldier, walking towards him, looking frozen and miserable. For a moment Colonel Ferguson felt tempted to speak, to say, “I don’t feel at home here myself,” but his French was rusty and the fellow might not have understood him. How they must miss the sun, the funny shutters with the paint scratched off, not with nails but with light, the clusters of … what did they call it … glycines, that were so formal in spite of their abundance, and reminded him of grapes in an architectural drawing. It was all very well to make speeches, but imagine the landing that these men had had, struggling up the salt-stained steps of some West Country port, with everything lost, no news, and nobody to welcome them. Two wars in a single generation asked too much of any race.
The trees reminded Ferguson of the brooms in a shop that he had just passed. It was not their stiffness, for they were soft against the autumn sky, but their tiny, bristling edges made just the same patterns as the brushes against the glass window. A piece of parachute silk fluttered from a branch near the explosive circle of a new crater. Patches of grass were corroded as if by acid, a piece of broken railing stuck out of the earth. The whole landscape had the bare, haunted loneliness of the moors in Lear; only a fretful succession of necessary acts, eating, sleeping, getting warm, differentiated life from nightmare.
It was strange how impressions returned, as if they were no isolated events but had separate echoes vibrating along memory. Lausanne was a blur in his mind; it was coming home, that final day in Paris, that he could not get out of his head. He saw himself (it must be meeting that French soldier) walking up the Champs Élysées under absurd catkincoloured little clouds whilst the different faces brought back the journeys of his life as if it were farewell, not to France only but to all the harbours of a long experience.
Ferguson had had the whole afternoon in front of him and no friends to visit. There had been fewer taxis but nearly as many cars, most of them unmistakably civilian, racing powerfully towards the Bois. The wind had been sharp in spite of the April colours, and because he was a little tired after the long night in the train he had drifted into a spiral of people waiting outside a cinema. He liked a good picture now and again though it was hard work to find one. For a moment he had seen an earlier Paris, carriages drawn by grey and roan horses, children in pinafores holding the hands of governesses in big, feathered hats. Nothing changed really, he had thought, except environment; it was easier to develop some years than others. There had been the usual bourgeois couple in the queue, the wife in black, with a square, shiny handbag tucked under her arm as she clung to her plump husband’s rather rumpled sleeve. Why was it that French materials seemed to crush immediately? Froissé, it was a better word than creased but unsuited to the texture of English, either language or cloth. They were discussing the price of butter, the Colonel thought, though it was easy to miss a phrase after the leisurely sung Vaudois. A Senegalese was staring at the poster whilst a soldier slouched beside them in a grease-stained tunic and the worst military boots that he had ever seen. Of course, the French could improvise, but wasn’t there also something to be said for English smartness? Perhaps he had listened too much to his neighbours in Lausanne; they were always showing him photographs of sunburnt faces under steel helmets. There was one picture of tanks crawling round a road in a gigantic question mark that had haunted his mind for months. Morale was more important than machinery and yet, Colonel Ferguson looked up suddenly at another ribbon of silk flapping beside a dead, solitary leaf, in that moment of memory he had seen personified in a single soldier the story of an end of France.
It was too cold, too lonely; even if the war ended in an hour, there would always be a rift, a sense of loss. History repeated itself, but in each age there was something as ephemeral as these autumn reds and russets that no reconstruction could replace. The bright ochre leaves rolled away into the gutters, and under a scarred tree that had half its roots in the air the pathway was littered with small branches and green twigs. Death is not dissolution, the Colonel thought, turning towards the park gates; it is the moment when humanity needs our services no longer. He must not be foolish, however, just because the morning was so desolate; there were years of work in him still if he could only get a job. An old lady, waiting at the corner, looked up at the sky; the sirens began again, shaking the air and picking each other up among the buildings until he thought of wolves, answering from hill to hill. “That’s the second alert this morning,” the conductor grumbled as he boarded a calm but half-empty bus. “Wouldn’t you think, sir, that they could find something better to do?”
It was possible to catch a glimpse of the street through small diamonds cut out of the splinter netting across the windows, but they altered the perspective strangely and gave an illusion of speed. Ferguson’s neighbour went on reading his paper. He had read it, no doubt, for twenty years in the same manner and, raid or no raid, the habits of a lifetime were not easily broken. An old lady in a brown fur jacket that hung shapelessly to her waist clasped a hamper containing not parcels but a Pekinese. The bow of her grey felt hat stuck up like an ear. “They have got some really good bath towels, dear, at Barlow’s,” she chattered, “an absolute bargain. I got a dozen yesterday, and three little striped bathing ones for Woggles. Darling,” she glanced at the black rose resting on the rim of the basket, “he will get his toes so wet.”
“But do you think in these days it is right to buy anything?” Her friend’s face was almost green with terror and she gripped a black handbag tightly with both hands.
“Of course. You should be a fatalist like me. Besides, if you are really nervous, you can always send a trunk to the country.”
“I wonder you haven’t evacuated Woggles.”
“He doesn’t seem to mind. If it is very noisy, he barks.” “Pekes always were good watchdogs in spite of their size, but do you suppose he realizes the danger?”
The gunfire slackened in the distance. “Barlow’s,” the conductor shouted. Most of the passengers stood up. How extraordinary people were, Ferguson thought, getting up with the others, armoured against defeat with this sublime stupidity. They had ignored all warnings only to be ready to fight to the last dog for some unpredictable reason of their own that, born here though he was, he was unable to analyse. Woggles, released from his basket, sniffed a piece of shell and his mistress smacked him. An old man went on gravely painting white lines along a row of sandbags. Nobody had even thought of going to a shelter; and, looking up at the grey, dismal sky, Ferguson was almost sorry for the Germans.