During the long journey up to London Somers sat facing Harriet, quite
still. The train was full: soldiers and sailors from Plymouth. One naval
man talked to Harriet: bitter like all the rest. As soon as a man began
to talk seriously, it was in bitterness. But many were beginning to make
a mock of their own feelings even. Songs like “Good-byeeee” had taken
the pace of “Bluebells,” and marked the change.
But Somers sat there feeling he had been killed: perfectly still, and
pale, in a kind of after death, feeling he had been killed. He had
always _believed_ so in everything--society, love, friends. This was one
of his serious deaths in belief. So he sat with his immobile face of a
crucified Christ who makes no complaint, only broods silently and alone,
remote. This face distressed Harriet horribly. It made her feel lost and
shipwrecked, as if her heart was destined to break also. And she was in
rather good spirits really. Her horror had been that she would be
interned in one of the horrible camps, away from Somers. She had far
less belief than he in the goodness of mankind. And she was rather
relieved to get out of Cornwall. She had felt herself under a pressure
there, long suffering. That very pressure he had loved so much. And so,
while his still, fixed, crucified face distressed her horribly, at the
same time it made her angry. What did he want to look like that for? Why
didn’t he show fight?
They came to London, and he tried taxi after taxi before he could get
one to take them up to Hampstead. He had written to a staunch friend,
and asked her to wire if she would receive them for a day or two. She
wired that she would. So they went to her house. She was a little
delicate lady who reminded Somers of his mother, though she was younger
than his mother would have been. She and her husband had been friends of
William Morris in those busy days of incipient Fabianism. Now her
husband was sick, and she lived with him and a nurse and her grown-up
daughter in a little old house in Hampstead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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