When William Came/Chapter II

CHAPTER II: THE HOMECOMING

Murrey Yeovil got out of the boat-train at Victoria Station, and stood waiting, in an attitude something between listlessness and impatience, while a porter dragged his light travelling kit out of the railway carriage and went in search of his heavier baggage with a hand-truck. Yeovil was a grey-faced young man, with restless eyes, and a rather wistful mouth, and an air of lassitude that was evidently only a temporary characteristic. The hot dusty station, with its blended crowds of dawdling and scurrying people, its little streams of suburban passengers pouring out every now and then from this or that platform, like ants swarming across a garden path, made a wearisome climax to what had been a rather wearisome journey. Yeovil glanced quickly, almost furtively, around him in all directions, with the air of a man who is constrained by morbid curiosity to look for things that he would rather not see. The announcements placed in German alternatively with English over the booking office, left-luggage office, refreshment buffets, and so forth, the crowned eagle and monogram displayed on the post boxes, caught his eye in quick succession. He turned to help the porter to shepherd his belongings on to the truck, and followed him to the outer yard of the station, where a string of taxi-cabs was being slowly absorbed by an outpouring crowd of travellers. Portmanteaux, wraps, and a trunk or two, much be-labelled and travel-worn, were stowed into a taxi, and Yeovil turned to give the direction to the driver. &ldquo;Twenty-eight, Berkshire Street.&rdquo; &ldquo;Berkschirestrasse, acht-und-zwanzig,&rdquo; echoed the man, a bulky spectacled individual of unmistakable Teuton type.

&ldquo;Twenty-eight, Berkshire Street,&rdquo; repeated Yeovil, and got into the cab, leaving the driver to re-translate the direction into his own language. A succession of cabs leaving the station blocked the roadway for a moment or two, and Yeovil had leisure to observe the fact that Viktoria Strasse was lettered side by side with the familiar English name of the street. A notice directing the public to the neighbouring swimming baths was also written up in both languages. London had become a bi-lingual city, even as Warsaw. The cab threaded its way swiftly along Buckingham Palace Road towards the Mall. As they passed the long front of the Palace the traveller turned his head resolutely away, that he might not see the alien uniforms at the gates and the eagle standard flapping in the sunlight. The taxi driver, who seemed to have combative instincts, slowed down as he was turning into the Mall, and pointed to the white pile of memorial statuary in front of the palace gates. &ldquo;Grossmutter Denkmal, yes,&rdquo; he announced, and resumed his journey.

Arrived at his destination, Yeovil stood on the steps of his house and pressed the bell with an odd sense of forlornness, as though he were a stranger drifting from nowhere into a land that had no cognisance of him; a moment later he was standing in his own hall, the object of respectful solicitude and attention. Sprucely garbed and groomed lackeys busied themselves with his battered travel-soiled baggage; the door closed on the guttural-voiced taxi driver, and the glaring July sunshine. The wearisome journey was over. &ldquo;Poor dear, how dreadfully pulled-down you look,&rdquo; said Cicely, when the first greetings had been exchanged. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s been a slow business, getting well,&rdquo; said Yeovil. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m only three-quarter way there yet.&rdquo;

He looked at his reflection in a mirror and laughed ruefully. &ldquo;You should have seen what I looked like five or six weeks ago,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;You ought to have let me come out and nurse you,&rdquo; said Cicely; &ldquo;you know I wanted to.&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh, they nursed me well enough,&rdquo; said Yeovil, &ldquo;and it would have been a shame dragging you out there; a small Finnish health resort, out of the season, is not a very amusing place, and it would have been worse for any one who didn&rsquo;t talk Russian.&rdquo;

&ldquo;You must have been buried alive there,&rdquo; said Cicely, with commiseration in her voice. &ldquo;I wanted to be buried alive,&rdquo; said Yeovil. &ldquo;The news from the outer world was not of a kind that helped a despondent invalid towards convalescence. They spoke to me as little as possible about what was happening, and I was grateful for your letters because they also told me very little. When one is abroad, among foreigners, one&rsquo;s country&rsquo;s misfortunes cause one an acuter, more personal distress, than they would at home even.&rdquo; &ldquo;Well, you are at home now, anyway,&rdquo; said Cicely, &ldquo;and you can jog along the road to complete recovery at your own pace.

A little quiet shooting this autumn and a little hunting, just enough to keep you fit and not to overtire you; you mustn&rsquo;t overtax your strength.&rdquo; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m getting my strength back all right,&rdquo; said Yeovil. &ldquo;This journey hasn&rsquo;t tired me half as much as one might have expected. It&rsquo;s the awful drag of listlessness, mental and physical, that is the worst after-effect of these marsh fevers; they drain the energy out of you in bucketfuls, and it trickles back again in teaspoonfuls. And just now untiring energy is what I shall need, even more than strength; I don&rsquo;t want to degenerate into a slacker.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Look here, Murrey,&rdquo; said Cicely, &ldquo;after we&rsquo;ve had dinner together to-night, I&rsquo;m going to do a seemingly unwifely thing. I&rsquo;m going to go out and leave you alone with an old friend. Doctor Holham is coming in to drink coffee and smoke with you. I arranged this because I knew it was what you would like. Men can talk these things over best by themselves, and Holham can tell you everything that happened&mdash;since you went away. It will be a dreary story, I&rsquo;m afraid, but you will want to hear it all.

It was a nightmare time, but now one sees it in a calmer perspective.&rdquo; &ldquo;I feel in a nightmare still,&rdquo; said Yeovil. &ldquo;We all felt like that,&rdquo; said Cicely, rather with the air of an elder person who tells a child that it will understand things better when it grows up; &ldquo;time is always something of a narcotic you know. Things seem absolutely unbearable, and then bit by bit we find out that we are bearing them. And now, dear, I&rsquo;ll fill up your notification paper and leave you to superintend your unpacking. Robert will give you any help you want.&rdquo;

&ldquo;What is the notification paper?&rdquo; asked Yeovil. &ldquo;Oh, a stupid form to be filled up when any one arrives, to say where they come from, and their business and nationality and religion, and all that sort of thing. We&rsquo;re rather more bureaucratic than we used to be, you know.&rdquo; Yeovil said nothing, but into the sallow greyness of his face there crept a dark flush, that faded presently and left his colour more grey and bloodless than before. The journey seemed suddenly to have recommenced; he was under his own roof, his servants were waiting on him, his familiar possessions were in evidence around him, but the sense of being at home had vanished. It was as though he had arrived at some wayside hotel, and been asked to register his name and status and destination. Other things of disgust and irritation he had foreseen in the London he was coming to&mdash;the alterations on stamps and coinage, the intrusive Teuton element, the alien uniforms cropping up everywhere, the new orientation of social life; such things he was prepared for, but this personal evidence of his subject state came on him unawares, at a moment when he had, so to speak, laid his armour aside. Cicely spoke lightly of the hateful formality that had been forced on them; would he, too, come to regard things in the same acquiescent spirit?