I Was looking for a wedding present costing about three pounds and I was looking for it in a jeweller’s shop in Hampstead where one often picked up bargains. I was browsing round its show cases when my attention was caught by a familiar voice. I turned to see beside the desk, a tall dark bearded man arguing with the proprietor.
‘I must show you these samples. I insist. I know my firm is German. But we aren’t at war with Germany any longer. I can sell you stuff at a third of the price they charge you here. A bargain is a bargain. We’re businessmen not politicians.’
I stared. His back was three-quarters turned to me; the beard was thick; it covered the line of his jaw and hid his mouth, but the voice was unmistakable. It could not be any one’s but Morrison’s. Morrison, a man whom I should remember as long as I remembered anything.
He had joined our machine-gun company in the autumn of 1917. We had just come down from Ypres; we had been in the line eight days, had taken the remains of a village, a few kilometres of ruined land, and had lost four officers and twenty men. We had been hurried south and were waiting to take over a quiet sector to the east of Bullecourt. We were in tents at the foot of a hill, and the fierce October rains that turned Passchendaele into a swamp were driving over us.
We sat in our leaking mess-tent, huddled round the stove, trying to be thankful that we had seen the last of the salient. Jones, who had spent most of his life in Malaya and who loathed the cold, had wrapped his sleeping-bag around his knees and was chanting a song that he had learnt from an Australian in an estaminet at ‘Pop’ the night after we had been relieved. We only knew the chorus; it went:
Cheerioh, cheeiray,
and a rolling stone gathers no moss so they say.
Cheerioh, cheeriay,
and a rolling stone gathers no moss so they say.
Cheerioh, cheeriay …
Every few minutes he would pause, take a sip at his glass, and mutter, ‘I expect that poor bastard is gathering moss himself now, up in that bloody salient,’ adding, ‘And bloody well out of it, too.’ The rest of us joined in the chorus when we felt inclined.
Then Morrison arrived. It was just before tea-time, and I can see him now as he strolled into the tent, a black figure against the night, letting in the wind and the rain. He stood there, blinking at the candle, and Jones broke off his song to growl over his shoulder, ‘Who the hell is that?’
‘Me, Morrison. I’ve just come to join you. Let’s come near the fire. I’m ruddy damp.’
He was tall and burly with undistinguished features, and his uniform did not suit him. Some men look right in uniform and others don’t. Morrison looked as though he had called at the Army Ordnance Stores on his way up, and asked for a stock size. He seemed to be in his later twenties.
We moved aside to make a place for him and he sat on the bench, his hands pressed forward, with the light from the open stove falling on his chest and knees, leaving his face in shadow.
‘Heavens, but this is good. I had a job to get here from Bapaume,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I’d ever have got here at all if I hadn’t bribed an A.S.C. wallah to drive me out in the town major’s car. I knew he wouldn’t think of moving on a day like this and it was a pity to see the old bus standing in a shed.’
It is usual for subalterns who have just joined a unit to keep quiet in the mess at first, but Morrison did not stop talking till we had heard the whole account of his journey from Grantham: how he had a row with the R.T.O. at Boulogne, how he had managed to break his journey at Amiens, and how the fool of a sergeant at Bapaume had wanted him to come up in the light railway.
‘The light railway!’ He laughed. ‘I could see myself coming up in that damned thing. No cover to it, nothing to keep the rain off, and then I and my damned valise would have been dumped in one of these blown-up villages with no prospect of getting anywhere. I know that game!’
We thought at first he was merely the talkative ass who was anxious to make a good impression and was going the wrong way about it. We looked forward to his first turn in the line. He might not talk so much when he had to inspect his guns along a communication trench that was being shelled. It is a national heritage, that prejudice against the actor, that belief in the strong silent Englishman: we can’t believe that the other sort, at its best, can be more than an amiable Falstaff. I soon learned, however, that there was a good deal to Morrison.
The evening we moved up the line, my batman, Carter, came up to me with his features set in a serious expression.
‘That new officer, sir, he’s got too much kit. He’ll have to dump some.’
Carter was the one man in the company of whom I really stood in awe. He was very respectful, but how he looked at me when he disapproved! When I first joined the section I washed inside the tent and I heard afterwards that he had gone up to my section officer and said: ‘That new officer, sir, do you mind asking him not to wash inside the tent?’
It was always ‘that new officer, sir’. Carter hated them: it took him a long time to get used to people, and I looked forward to seeing how he would deal with Morrison.
At that moment Morrison came in to start what threatened to be a long story about the price of cigarettes at the Expeditionary Force canteen. Carter interrupted him.
‘That kit of yours, sir, there’s too much of it. I can’t get it all on to the limber; you’ll have to dump some, sir.’
Morrison swung round impatiently.
‘My kit! I need everything I’ve got. Now, look here, my good man, you get along and pack it up at once.’
Carter was not used to being addressed as ‘my good man’. The expression of his face was respectful but obstinate.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t do it; you’re the only officer in the company that’s brought a bed out with him; I can’t get it all in.’
‘You can’t? Then I’ll have to show you. Come here.’
He opened out his valise, spread its contents on the ground, then began to pack, talking at full pace all the time. ‘This hold-all goes in there, my boots there, and be very careful that my boots don’t knock against my shaving glass; my collars in here, that blanket there and riding breeches here, and then the bed in there, and then the bucket.’
Within five minutes he had packed the whole thing, strapped it up and, as it lay on the floor of the tent, it looked about the smallest valise I had ever seen.
‘That’s the way to do it. If you know how things fit in you can pack ‘em away in your pocket. It’s only a question of method. I’ve thought it out very carefully. Now unpack it again so to see if you know how it’s done.’
And the great Carter dutifully unpacked the valise and packed it all again with Morrison standing there beside him talking.
‘Not so bad,’ he said, when Carter had finished, ‘not perfect yet, not by a long chalk, but you’ll get the hang of it in time; only a matter of practice.’
From that moment I respected him. He is the only man I ever saw get the upper hand of Carter.
I saw a good deal of Morrison during the next few weeks, but we never got intimate. He was a lonely man, the most lonely man I think I have ever met. His extreme volubility masked a gloomy, taciturn nature. He cared for no one. ‘Friendship’s not my game,’ he said. I never discovered what his real game was. I don’t know that he had one; he appeared to have no ambition; apart from a fierce determination to get even with some force that was, he felt, working contrary to him. Fate had loaded the dice against him, but he was not going to be beaten, he was going to see it through. In the waging of that struggle lay failure or success in life.
He had been brought up outside London in one of the northern suburbs. He had gone to a local school, thence to a local bank. He had loathed it there. ‘I don’t know what I shall do after the war,’ he said. ‘But I can’t go back to that, I don’t see why I should; I’ve got no home, no one is dependent on me; it does not matter to anyone what happens to me; I don’t know how I managed to stand it for so long. But one drifts into habits. I had to, while my father was alive and afterwards—well, it’s hard to break a habit, and I didn’t see what else I was to do; there was the club where I played bridge and billiards in the evening, there was football every Saturday in the winter and cricket in the summer; always some little thing to look forward to. I felt sure that something must turn up soon; that it could not go on like that for ever; that’s the mistake we all make, waiting for something to turn up instead of going out and finding it. Some of us have good reason to be grateful to the war.’
He had, I soon found, a hard side to his nature. If he had once made up his mind he let nothing stand in his way.
Once we were taking over a piece of line from the Australians. They had had a bad time; it was a filthy night of rain and mud and the officer whom Morrison was relieving had a cold; probably trench fever coming on.
‘Do you mind if my sergeant takes you round the guns? I’m feeling “dud”,’ he said.
Headquarters had issued strict instructions that we were to be shown round by an officer and not a sergeant, but it was a rule that no one worried about very much; as far as I remember, Morrison nearly always sent his sergeant round himself. But on this night, for some reason or other, he was determined that the officer should come round with him.
‘No, I’m sorry, the captain’s very strict on this. If anything went wrong there’d be the hell to pay. I’m afraid you’ll have to come round with me.’
‘But we never worry about that. My sergeant’s been round the guns as often as I have. He knows all there is to know about them. I got shown round by a sergeant when I took over.’
‘I don’t care about that. I’ve got my orders. Come along. I can’t wait here all night.’
‘I’m damned if I come. The sergeant can take you.’
‘All right then. Just as you like. But I shan’t sign the relief paper till you do.’
They stood looking at each other. Morrison had every card in his hand.
‘It’s just as you like,’ he said. ‘Either you show me round—’ For a moment I thought the Australian was going to hit him; but
he turned and pulled on his steel helmet.
‘Come on,’ he said. All the way up the dug-out steps he coughed and choked.
Morrison included among his peculiarities a type of perverse chivalry. He always backed the losing side; in the mess he stuck up for the Sinn Feiners and Bolshevists simply because we were against them. At the Café Royal he would have been equally violent as a militarist with overwhelming arguments in favour of the knock-out blow. This was not in itself unusual. We all like to be martyrs in the abstract. But it is unusual to find anyone who puts the minority theory into practice, and Morrison did.
He was invariably courteous to German prisoners. Once we were brewing a dixie of tea, when a Prussian officer was brought along the trench. We offered him a cup, but before he had time to drink it a shell pitched on the back of the trench, scattering us with mud; the German’s tea was ruined. It was a frequent tragedy of the trenches and usually an occasion for mirth. Morrison, however, had been sheltered by a traverse; without a word he handed his cup over to the prisoner. He would not have done that for one of his own men under any conditions: ‘War is war,’ he would have said.
On another occasion a party of prisoners were being marched through Albert and a large fat Frenchman stood in the doorway of his house shouting after them ‘Les sales Boches’. Morrison walked up to him and said quietly: ‘Stop that now, we’ve had enough of that from you.’
The Frenchman looked at him in aggrieved amazement, then turned and shouted after the party: ‘A bas les Boches, les sales Boches’
Morrison did not say a word; he simply lifted his fist and knocked the Frenchman down.
‘How would you like it if you had been taken prisoner,’ ‘he said’ ‘and some dirty civilian who hadn’t been within thirty miles of the line began to jeer at you?’
I was taken prisoner during the big retreat in March, 1918, and on repatriation I was transferred to the Reserve. I presumed that I had lost touch forever with my brothers-in-arms, but under the new formation of machine-gun companies into battalions, my old company had as its adjutant a Captain Brownleigh who had been a good friend of mine at Sandhurst. He invited me to spend a week with him in Cologne before I started my London life as a civilian. ‘We are living,’ he said, ‘in the Deutsche Ring in the private house of a German millionaire. You will be very comfortable.’
I arrived on one of those warm days that surprise us in early spring with a promise of summer; the Rhine flowed smoothly; sunshine glittered on the proud curves of the Hohenzollern Gate and the towers of the Cathedral. I felt eager, buoyant, expectant. I was delighted when I found my old friend Morrison at the bank. arguing with the cashier who had, he maintained, swindled him over the exchange.
‘The limit, these German bankers,’ he protested, ‘absolutely the limit. I know the mark’s only worth a penny, I saw it in The Times this morning, and here’s this fellow refusing to give me more than 235 marks to the pound.’
‘But, my dear sir,’ the cashier explained, ‘cannot you understand; today the mark is a penny, tomorrow it may be a penny farthing, things change so fast. We cannot afford to lose; we have to make our profit.’
‘To hell with your profit; I want my 240 marks.’
In the end he got 238 marks and was as proud over his triumph as though he had succeeded in obtaining a reduction of his income tax.
‘That’s the way to treat them,’ he said. ‘I know how to manage the Boche.’
We found a quiet café on the Hohe Strasse. I asked him what he was going to do now the war was over.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think I shall stay on here as long as they’ll have me. It’s a lazy job.’
He was, I felt, reluctant to leave a mode of life of which he had mastered the technique, in place of another of which he was ignorant.
He asked me what England was like now.
‘I can’t imagine it,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’ll go back to what it was in 1913 and we shall find that everyone’s forgotten all about this little interruption.’
He talked about Cologne and how the civilians had expected us to sack the place; at first they had been very servile. But things were settling down.
‘They’ve begun to see that we don’t worry about them at all; they go their way, we ours.’
He told me about the exchange and how they had raffles on it in the mess. ‘Money can be made that way,’ he said. ‘There’s a sergeant in the orderly room who invested thirty pounds in it; he gambles, buys in one day, sells out the next. He told me he made about fifteen pounds a month. He’s smart, that chap. Our fellows used to chuck their ten-pfennig notes away, or else used them as pipe-lighters. What was the use of a tenth of a penny to them? But the sergeant decided to make a bank. Every man who comes into the orderly room has to turn out his pockets, and all the notes under a mark are handed over to the stores. The company has been kept in soap for the last month.’
He talked about the girls. ‘They’re quite different from what I expected. I thought they’d be heavy and dull. I suppose they’ve been keyed up by the excitement of the war and the lack of food; life seems to have flamed up in them suddenly.’
The girl at his billet was something very special. He talked a good deal about her, but I did not take what he said too seriously. It had seemed to me the usual bluff that one associated with Morrison. But Brownleigh shook his head when I mentioned it to him.
‘It isn’t anything to laugh about,’ he said. ‘One doesn’t mind what a fellow does in private—after all, we’re none of us perfect—and as long as he keeps quiet he can do what he likes, but Morrison’s been going about all over the place with this girl, in day time too; there’s bound to be a row. The General’s frightfully against fraternizing and we don’t know what to do. We don’t want trouble and Morrison’s not an easy man to tackle.’
He certainly was not. And, being one of those men who never asked intimate questions about others, he wouldn’t welcome interference. I didn’t envy Brownleigh his job.
But it was obviously a situation. I went to the Opera that night, and there was Morrison sitting with his girl in one of the boxes. She was a pretty flaxen-haired little creature, pale-faced, with half-closed, darkly lidded eyes. He had obviously from the conditions of his life had very little experience of women, and that little must have been confined to cheap intrigues, squalid and furtive, with shop girls and the wives of elderly businessmen. He had been swept off his feet by the refined and unabashed sensuality of this foreigner. I saw several people looking at them.
‘You see what I mean,’ said Brownleigh.
‘I certainly do.’
‘What do you make of it?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve seen a good deal of Morrison one way and another. We were in the same company in France, but I never got to know him. He’s always been a stranger. There’s a point in him beyond which one never gets. I’d let him alone if I were you.’
But Brownleigh was a conscientious creature. At Sandhurst we had used the phrase G.S.—the letters of General Service—to describe anyone who took his duties too seriously. We all liked Brownleigh, but he was definitely G.S. We were relieved when he was not made a sergeant.
‘I must do something,’ he said ruefully.
He did it two days later, when I was in the mess. I suppose he chose that night so that I should be there as one of the old crowd to back him up.
It happened just after we had left the table, when there were no waiters in the ante-room. Brownleigh stood up, looking extremely awkward.
‘Now that we are all here, there’s something that I’ve been thinking—that we’ve all been thinking—for some time past. As we are all friends, I think we ought to have it out. We’ve been thinking, Morrison, that you’ve been going about rather a lot lately—’
But Morrison was now standing too and Brownleigh checked. Morrison looked slowly round him. His face was taut.
‘I’ve been with you fellows for nearly two years. I’ve done the jobs I’ve had to do as well as I could. I’ve done my best to make things go smoothly in the mess. I’ve not interfered with any of you. I’ve gone my way and I’ve let you go yours. I expect you to do the same with me. My life’s my own. I’m not going to discuss it. Let’s cut in for bridge.’
He walked to the table and spread a pack of cards across it. Half a dozen of us followed him and cut. Scarcely a word was said that evening. Morrison won 400 marks.
Brownleigh was in a self-accusing mood next day. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I couldn’t say a word. He looked at me and I dried up.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked.
‘I’ll find a way.’
He did. Within a month Morrison was posted back to England to be demobilized.
I had given Morrison my address in London, but I had not expected to hear from him. Friendship was not his game, and it was not in terms of friendship that he wrote to me six months later. He thought I could be of use to him. ‘I’m going back to Germany,’ he wrote, ‘to buy up curios and pictures. The old families are starving. They’ll sell anything. They must have books that collectors here would care to have. You’re in the trade. You could tell me the kind of book to look out for.’
We had tea together in a café off the Strand. He was not enthusiastic about his prospects, but he was glad to be leaving England. He had been offered his old post at the bank, but had refused it.
‘I’m spoilt for all that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the itch to be about and doing. Can you imagine me sitting down at a desk day after day, with the other clerks grinning at me behind the backs of their hands, saying to each other, “He was an officer in the Great War; he used to order men about and have his boots cleaned by a servant, now he’s adding up rows of figures at four pounds ten a week!” They are jealous, horribly jealous; and it’s the same with the old men and women. They pretend to be sympathetic, they say, ‘What a change it must be for you, coming back to this after the war, but I suppose you are glad, really, aren’t you, to get a little quiet?’ They are jealous, they grudge me the last five years, they hate me for having made a success of it, for having risen out of their class, they want to drag me back, to say “This is where you belong”.’
‘There’s another thing too that I can’t stand,’ he said, ‘this mad attempt to forget there was a war. People don’t want to be reminded that they owe anything to us ex-soldiers. They say “Get down to work and save the nation”. They’re beginning to regard the ex-soldier as a fellow who has been on a holiday and is coming back to school. “You’ve had your fun,” they say, “now you must take off your coat and roll your sleeves up.” It makes me sick; before we know where we are, the country will be run by the fellows who got cushy jobs at Whitehall and the conscientious objectors who spent the last two years at Dartmoor. They had a poorish time, no doubt, those C.O.s, but they enjoyed being martyrs, and Lord help us, what about those fours years in Flanders. I’m not saying that it was the blind misery the pacifists would make people think it was. We had our good times. I was happier then than I am now and so were hundreds of others. But it was worse than Dartmoor. They want us to forget all that, they want to shove us back into drudgery, to drug us so that we shan’t remind them. I can’t stand it. That’s why I’m going back.’
I could see his point. London was not an easy city in the autumn of 1919. I could imagine his thoughts turning nostalgically towards Cologne.
‘What about that girl of yours?’ I asked. ‘Have you kept in touch with her?’
‘In a kind of way. I’m not a letter-writer.’
That night I wrote to Brownleigh. ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ I said, ‘if he marries her out of that perverse chivalry of his. If it had been an English girl or a French one, he wouldn’t worry, he’d be the cynical man of the world. “That’s her look-out.” But because she is a German, an enemy, he’ll think that he owes her something, that he must make things right. Please keep me posted.’
A month later I got the letter I expected. Yes, Morrison had married her and taken her to live in a small house on the far side of the river.
I could picture the social embarrassments that would arise. There was Morrison, a civilian, settled in what could only be described as a conventional military society, married to a German and expecting to be treated as though he were still an officer. Some of his old friends would stick to him, but Cologne must have changed a good deal since he had left. Peace had been signed, many of the officers had their wives out, the town was full of English women.
He got his first rebuff, so the letter told me, when he walked into the Officers’ Club as though he were still in uniform. The German porter told him that civilians were not allowed inside.
‘You get out of my light,’ said Morrison and pushed past him into the lounge.
A few minutes later the Secretary of the Club, an officer, came up to him.
‘I’m very sorry, but you really can’t come in here. If you care to fill in a form I’ll see if you can be put up for membership, but till then you can’t come unless you are introduced by a member.’
‘Are any ex-officers members of the club?’
‘One or two.’
‘Well then, I’m going to be one and you can hurry up and get me elected.’
It was no good though; this was different from the case of the Australian officer and the relief. He had not the cards in his hand any longer, and the secretary took good care that he did not get elected.
That was a nasty blow, but if he had kept quiet it might have been all right. He could have visited the mess, his old friends would not have let him down. But he was confoundedly obstinate. It had to be a struggle with him all the time. Then he took his wife to the Opera; and that settled it.
The Opera House in Cologne is very different from an English theatre. The performance begins at half-past six and does not end till close on midnight. There are long intervals between the acts, during which one may either walk up and down the long, wide promenade that runs behind the boxes or avail oneself of the excellent supper that is served downstairs. The Opera House is the fashionable centre of the town and even those officers who did not care greatly for classical music regarded their attendance there two or three times a month as a social obligation.
And here in this delicate atmosphere of etiquette and polite properties, Morrison was inspired by some hideous folly to walk up to his old colonel, shake him by the hand and say before the embarrassed colonel realized what was happening: ‘Let me introduce you to my wife.’
The colonel had his wife with him, and she had to be introduced too. When he got back to the battalion he gave the strictest instructions that, on no account, was Morrison to be allowed into the mess. ‘Fellow’s a disgrace to the service.’
For the next week or so Morrison must have had a poorish time.
He again took his wife to the Opera, and several fellows cut him. He went on bringing her for a little and then suddenly realized what was happening.
‘My God! it makes me sick,’ he said to Brownleigh. ‘Here are these fellows going on the loose whenever they get the chance, and they cut me because I’ve had the decency to marry my girl. How many of these fellows do you think have been carrying on with German women?’
Brownleigh was the only one of his friends who kept up with him.
Brownleigh might be G.S., but he was not the man to turn against an old friend when he was down.
‘I don’t think he can be doing very well,’ he wrote. ‘I see him now and then, hanging round second-hand shops, trying to pick up bargains whenever there’s an auction. He looks untidy, as often as not unshaven, his shoes unpolished, and he’s begun to stoop. I went down to his place and it had the melancholy, depressing appearance of respectable poverty. A supper had been laid, a miserable meal of cold meat and some sort of pickles and cheap wine.’
I could guess from that letter at the sort of life they led, the endless friction, the embarrassment of a couple who are trying to make both ends meet. I could imagine too how love under such conditions dies out quickly, how self-respect is lost and a man and a woman begin to hate each other, remaining together through associations of the past, through a lack of the courage to own that they have failed, through a baffled sensuality. In its first stages their love had been fresh and adventurous; there had been secret meetings, the lure of the forbidden. ‘Love mixed with fear is sweetest.’ But it was a different thing altogether, this dreary marriage; the setting was altered, a new technique was required; and that was just what they lacked.
I could see them sitting there hostile to each other, both conscious of their own failure. I suppose she must have found things difficult. She had married an enemy, and although the fierce hatreds of the war were dying out, her family must have felt that she had been untrue to her people, that she had separated herself from them. Her old friends rarely came to see her. They did not like her husband. And, during the lonely mornings when Morrison wandered about the streets in search of bargains, she must have felt cruelly resentful.
They used to have fierce and bitter quarrels, so Brownleigh told me.
‘Women can be pretty fair cats,’ Morrison said once to him. ‘For no reason at all they suddenly burst out and rant and curse. Eva couldn’t get the soap she wanted the other day and began to abuse the English. “You are all the same,” she said, “you think about nothing but yourselves. You talk big and you use fine words about the rights of little nations; and all the time you’re blockading Europe, you’re murdering Ireland, you’re selling coal to France at a price that’s ruining them. You have sent the value of the mark down to a penny, we can’t get the necessities of life. Look what sort of a life I’m leading, thanks to you! Hardly enough to eat, no fun at all! No one ever comes to see me, and there you sit glowering all the time. What sort of life do you think I lead?” That’s what it’s like, old man. I suppose this is the sort of thing that one’s got to expect at first. It’s a trial though.’
A little later he told Brownleigh that she was going to have a child. It was impossible to know if he was glad or not. ‘It’ll keep her quiet’; that was all he said. It was another bond holding him to Cologne. But I do not think he looked ahead. He probably felt as he had in the bank before the war. ‘This can’t go on forever. Something is bound to happen soon.’ He was tired, and he thought that when she had a child Eva would be easier to live with.
And then one morning he walked into the office of the British military police and said, ‘I wish to put myself under arrest. I have killed my wife.’
They had had another fierce quarrel the night before. It was after they had gone to bed; she had a bad cold; she had not been able to get the particular medicine that she wanted and she could not sleep. She had begun to abuse the English.
‘I hate the lot of you,’ she had said. ‘You’re killing Germany, you’re starving us, and you talk about internationalism, which means getting as much as you can for yourselves; and you, you’re just like the rest of your nation—what sort of a life do you think I am having?’
‘For God’s sake, shut up,’ Morrison had said.
‘I shan’t shut up; I’m tired of you, tired to death of you. I wish I’d never married you. I was happy before you came. I should have married one of my own people—I should—’
Morrison could stand it no longer; he took her by the shoulders and shook her, till she was quiet, then he turned round and went to sleep. In the morning he found her dead.
He was handed over to the German authorities; it was a civilian case. But the little official assured the British with great suavity that everything would be all right. ‘Crime passionnel,’ he said. ‘No jury would convict him. And besides—her state of health.’
The German police were anxious to keep on the right side of the British. There was a good deal of rowdyism in Cologne. Discharged soldiers had been causing trouble; without the British it would have been hard to maintain order. In the meantime, of course, Morrison would have to go to prison. He was sent to Düsseldorf.
The affair caused naturally a good deal of excitement in a society that depended on itself for entertainment. The general impression was that Morrison would be discharged and that it was, on the whole the best thing that could have happened to him.
‘After all,’ said the colonel, ‘what could it have led to? Think of the poor devil staying here when the armies went. There would have been no one for him to talk to. He’d have been an outcast. I doubt if his business would have paid. He could hardly have brought her back to England. She’d have hated the idea and here he’d have had to stick while his family increased, and his responsibilities along with them. It’s the best way out, really. What a life he’d have had!’
Brownleigh was tempted to point out that the colonel had not done much to make Morrison’s life in Cologne any easier, but it would have served no purpose and the colonel was an ordinary conventional man, who had lived by rule. It was not his fault, indeed it was no one’s fault. Things had turned out that way. It looked now as though the tide had begun to turn for Morrison.
The trial was awaited confidently. A strong case for the defence had been drawn up. Numberless instances of Eva’s exasperating habits were collected. A doctor was prepared to give evidence on the state of her health, and to affirm that her constitution had been weakened by the privations of war, and the lack of milk, butter and dripping. After all, ‘Crime passionnel’—that was an unfailing argument and the prosecution did not want a conviction which might be presented in the English Press as another case of German injustice.
Everything, indeed, was going along smoothly, when all these plans were overthrown by the revolution in Düsseldorf. For a few days the town was in the hands of the Spartacists. The gates of the prisons were flung open and Morrison was let free.
Brownleigh thought that he would make straight for Cologne, though some believed that he would try to cross the frontier.
‘After all, he can’t be certain that he won’t be convicted. Things go wrong. I wouldn’t run any chances if I were in his place.’
The German authorities were apathetic. ‘He has escaped with the rest,’ they said. ‘It is a little thing, that, at such a time.’
It was a fortnight before any news came through. Then the suave official appeared, bowing and scraping.
‘We have heard about your friend. It is very sad. He has been found dead in Düsseldorf.’
The statement was confirmed. Morrison’s body had been found in a cellar in a small side-street. The face was terribly disfigured with the jaw shot right away, but every article of clothing on the body belonged to Morrison and the pockets were full of his letters and papers; he had no money on him; from a tear on the inside of his finger, it would seem as though a signet ring had been torn off him by force.
‘There is nothing to be done,’ said the German. ‘We are very sorry, but after all—in times like these—’ He shrugged.
That was the story as Brownleigh told it me.
‘It was really rather amusing,’ he said, ‘to see the way in which those who had before been most against him, hastened to make excuses for him now. We heard a great deal about “the rough diamond”, and the colonel, who had been so affronted at the Opera, insisted on giving him a military funeral.’
He told it me in person when he was home on leave. I listened in silence. Morrison was the most dramatic character I had met. I remembered how he had triumphed over Carter, how he had made the Australian officer show him round the line. I thought of the evening in the mess when Brownleigh had tried to make a fuss about his girl. He was so very vital! And even afterwards, when he had been cut at the Opera, I’m not sure that he hadn’t scored. He had stuck to his self-respect. They must have been secretly ashamed of themselves, those others, as they hurried past him with eyes turned away. They must have felt uncomfortable for a long time afterwards, talking loudly to pass it off. He had been only angry. I could not realize that he was done with, finished, that his existence had been wiped out suddenly in a dark street by a chance bullet.
It was strange that I should have thought that, that I should have refused to believe that he was really dead. Perhaps mental telepathy warned me that the ending was not here. At any rate, I was not as surprised as I should have been when I heard in that jeweller’s shop in Hampstead, a familiar voice voluble and insistent.
‘I refuse to take no for an answer.’ It was saying: ‘Talk sense.
What does it matter to you how you make your profit, as long as there is a profit.’
Yes, it was Morrison all right. No one I knew had possessed to the same degree the magnetic power of making men do what he wanted.
I stood back in the shadow. I saw the old jeweller take out his magnifying glass and inspect the samples. I saw them arguing until, finally, the old man gave an order and Morrison marched out, jubilant and content, as always the master in a world of men.
I did not follow. I preferred not to find out exactly what happened in that dark side-street in a town possessed of terror. I preferred to let Morrison remain a man of mystery, to see him in my memory as I saw him first on that wet afternoon at Bullecourt, a stranger among us, standing against the sky, letting in the wind and the rain.
1920