"I don't see," Henry said, "why we shouldn't have buried her quietly."
"But she's a heroine," Mrs Wilcox exclaimed.
"I wouldn't be surprised," the post warden said, "if they gave her the George Medal -- posthumously. It's the first in the borough -- it would be a grand thing for the post."
"Why, Henry," Mrs Wilcox said, "she's not just your wife any more. She belongs to England."
Henry moved towards the door: the post warden still held the silver cup awkwardly -- he didn't know where to put it. "Just anywhere," Henry said to him, "anywhere." They all moved into the hall, leaving Rowe. "You've forgotten your helmet, Henry," Mrs Wilcox said. He had been a very precise man, and he'd lost his precision; all the things which had made Henry Henry were gone. It was as if his character had consisted of a double-breasted waistcoat, columns of figures, a wife who played hockey. Without these things he was unaccountable, he didn't add up. "You go," he said to his mother, "you go."
"But Henry. . ."
"It's understandable, ma'am," the post warden said, "it's feeling that does it. We've always thought Mr Wilcox a very sensitive gentleman at the post. They'll understand," he added kindly, meaning, one supposed, the post, the police band, the A.F.S., even the four salvage men. He urged Mrs Wilcox towards the door with a friendly broad hand, then picked up the uniform himself. Hints of the past penetrated the anonymity of the dungarees -- the peaceful past of a manservant, or perhaps of a Commissionaire who ran out into the rain carrying an umbrella. War is very like a bad dream in which familiar people appear in terrible and unlikely disguises. Even Henry. . .
Rowe made an indeterminate motion to follow; he couldn't help hoping it would remind Henry of the cheque. It was his only chance of getting any money: there was nobody else. Henry said, "We'll just see them go off and then we'll come back here. You do understand don't you, I couldn't bear to watch. . ." They came out together into the road by the park; the procession had already started: it moved like a little dark trickle towards the river. The steel bat on the coffin lay blackened and unreflecting under the winter sun, and the rescue party didn't keep step with the post. It was like a parody of a State funeral -- but this was a State funeral. The brown leaves from the park were blowing across the road, and the drinkers coming out at closing time from the Duke of Rockingham took off their hats. Henry said, "I told her not to do it. . ." and the wind blew the sound of footsteps back to them. It was as if they had surrendered her to the people, to whom she had never belonged before.
Henry said suddenly, "Excuse me, old man," and started after her. He hadn't got his helmet: his hair was beginning to go grey: he broke into a trot, for fear after all of being left behind. He was rejoining his wife and his post. Arthur Rowe was left alone. He turned his money over in his pocket and found there wasn't much of it.
Chapter 7
A LOAD OF BOOKS
"Taken as we are by surprise,
our resistance will little avail."
The Little Duke
1
EVEN if a man has been contemplating the advantages of suicide for two years, he takes time to make his final decision -- to move from theory to practice. Rowe couldn't simply go then and there and drop into the river -- besides, he would have been pulled out again. And yet watching the procession recede he could see no other solution. He was wanted by the police for murder, and he had thirty-five shillings in his pocket. He couldn't go to the bank and he had no friend but Henry; of course, he could wait till Henry came back, but the cold-blooded egotism of that act repelled him. It would be simpler and less disgusting to die. A brown leaf settled on his coat -- that according to the old story meant money, but the old story didn't say how soon.
He walked along the Embankment towards Chelsea Bridge; the tide was low and the sea-gulls walked delicately on the mud. One noticed the absence of perambulators and dogs: the only dog in sight looked stray and uncared for and evasive. A barrage balloon staggered up from behind the park trees: its huge nose bent above the thin winter foliage, and then it turned its dirty old backside and climbed.
It wasn't only that he had no money: he had no longer what he called a home -- somewhere to shelter from people who might know him. He missed Mrs Purvis coming in with the tea; he used to count the days by her: punctuated by her knock they would slide smoothly towards the end -- annihilation, forgiveness, punishment or peace. He missed David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop; he could no longer direct his sense of pity towards the fictitious sufferings of little Nell -- it roamed around and saw too many objects -- too many rats that needed to be killed. And he was one of them.
Leaning over the Embankment in the time-honoured attitude of would-be suicides, he began to go into the details. He wanted as far as possible to be unobtrusive; now that his anger had died it seemed to him a pity that he hadn't drunk that cup of tea -- he didn't want to shock any innocent person with the sight of an ugly death. And there were very few suicides which were not ugly. Murder was infinitely more graceful because it was the murderer's object not to shock -- a murderer went to infinite pains to make death look quiet, peaceful, happy. Everything, he thought, would be so much easier if he had only a little money.
Of course, he could go to the bank and let the police get him. It seemed probable that then he would be hanged. But the idea of hanging for a crime he hadn't committed still had power to anger him: if he killed himself it would be for a crime of which he was guilty. He was haunted by a primitive idea of Justice. He wanted to conform: he had always wanted to conform.
A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man -- a man who takes either tea or coffee for breakfast, a man who likes a good book and perhaps reads biography rather than fiction, a man who at a regular hour goes to bed, who tries to develop good physical habits but possibly suffers from constipation, who prefers either dogs or cats and has certain views about politics.
It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
Arthur Rowe was monstrous. His early childhood had been passed before the first world war, and the impressions of childhood are ineffaceable. He was brought up to believe that it was wrong to inflict pain, but he was often ill, his teeth were bad and he suffered agonies from an inefficient dentist he knew as Mr Griggs. He learned before he was seven what pain was like -- he wouldn't willingly allow even a rat to suffer it. In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality -- heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood -- for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories -- of the V.C. in the police-court dock, of the faked income tax return, the sins in corners, and the hollow voice of the man we despised talking to us of courage and purity. The Little Duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten; we cannot recognize the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place. The two great popular statements of faith are "What a small place the world is" and "I'm a stranger here myself."