The Last Enemy Richard Hillary (9 page)

‘It’s a good speech,’ I said, ‘but it’s all big words, It’s all negative. Isn’t there something positive you want?’

Peter flushed slightly. He who was the last person to clothe his feelings in big words had done so out of regard for me; and I had reproached him. But he was persistent. What he had started he would finish.

‘Something positive I want? But of course. Only, saying what it is means big words again, confound you, Richard! What I want is to see a better world come out of this war.’

‘What do you mean by better?’ I challenged him. ‘Christian, I suppose.’

‘Now who is using the big words?’ he wanted to know. ‘You’ve used the biggest word of all. Yes, Christian, of course. Nothing else. It isn’t only that I am a Christian by faith. It’s that I don’t know any other way of life worth fighting for. Christianity means to me, on the social plane, freedom, man’s humanity to man. Everything else I see as man’s inhumanity to man. I believe that we should all make our contribution, even though it’s a mere drop in the ocean, to the betterment of humanity. I know that, put into words, it sounds sentimental, and of course you don’t agree. I can see that.’

I nodded. ‘You’re quite right,’ I said. ‘I don’t. I think that your Christianity clouds the issue, makes it harder to see what we’re talking about. As I see it there are three possible philosophies. First, there is hedonism, living purely for pleasure. The rich, by and large, did nothing but that here in England until practically the other day—that is, the non-industrial rich. And that life is over. Only the rich could live that way, and now the poor aren’t going to allow it any longer. Secondly, one can live for the good of the community—or for the betterment of mankind, as you would put it. Though how one is to be certain that one’s contribution is bettering humanity, God only knows.’

‘Yes,’ Peter said, ‘He unquestionably does.’

I threw up my hands. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘All you religious people are alike. In the end you always fall back upon infallible faith. “I feel it here,” you say, with a hand on your stomachs. Well, I may feel just the same thing; but with me it’s indigestion, or the exaltation I get from an hour of great music, or from Lear and Cordelia.’

Peter stared out of the window. I was a little ashamed of that crack about the hand on the stomach. It smelled of Hyde Park oratory. And I could have gone on more easily if I felt that I had hurt him, or angered him. I knew that what was disturbing him was simply the distance between us, the gulf.

‘Look at your missionary,’ I went on. ‘He goes off to Bunga Bunga land to convert the blacks to bowler hats and spats. He’s quite certain that he has the call to dedicate himself to humanity. In point of fact he’s probably putting into practice the third philosophy, the only one in which I can believe. That is, to live for the realization of one’s self. Some do it by preaching, some by making love, others by building locomotives or smashing stock markets.’

‘If I gather what you mean,’ Peter said, ‘you mean something I should call rather base. In fact, I couldn’t imagine a lower form of life. Can you be more explicit?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘to be perfectly brutal about it—though actually it isn’t in the least a brutal thing—I mean using the world as opposed to being used by the world. Every single artist who ever lived, every great scientist, did exactly that. You couldn’t find a better example than Goethe, for instance, or Newton, or Leonardo. Would the world be poorer or richer if Goethe had been killed fighting for his native Frankfurt, or Leonardo had been stuck in the ribs by some petty Italian tyrant’s lance? Or if Einstein had been beaten to death by the Gestapo because his “soul” commanded that he fight for the Jewish peoples?’

Peter, who was not ordinarily witty or mischievous, smiled almost maliciously.

‘And is our Richard planning to be a Goethe or a Newton?’ he asked. Before I could break in he had gone on:

‘There was Joan of Arc, you know.’

‘You couldn’t cite a better instance of what I mean,’ I said quickly. ‘Obsessed with self-realization, she was. The Voices were her voices, the king of France was her king, the French were her people. God! What an egomaniac!

‘But let me go on. You don’t have to be a Goethe. I’m not concerned with genius. I’m concerned with my own potentialities. I say that I am fighting this war because I believe that, in war, one can swiftly develop all one’s faculties to a degree it would normally take half a lifetime to achieve. And to do this, you must be as free from outside interference as possible. That’s why I’m in the Air Force. For in a Spitfire we’re back to war as it ought to be—if you can talk about war as it ought to be. Back to individual combat, to self—reliance, total responsibility for one’s own fate. One either kills or is killed; and it’s damned exciting. And after the war, when I shall be writing, I’ll again be developing faster than the rest of you. Because a writer is constantly digging into himself, penetrating the life and nature of man, and thus realizing himself.’

‘Richard, I don’t understand you,’ Peter said. ‘All your talk is hard-boiled; you as much as proclaim yourself a realist. And yet you are so fuzzy-minded as to assume that you’ll be allowed to dig into yourself and the rest in a German-dominated world. You’re not a medieval mystic, you know. You’ll be able to think, perhaps, in a concentration camp, but not to write and impart what you think.’

‘Of course I won’t. Don’t take me for a bloody fool. Besides, we’re agreed about the necessity for smashing the Germans. It’s the purpose that we’re arguing about. I want to smash them in order to be free to grow; you in order to be free to worship your God and lead your villagers in prayer.’

‘Suppose we go in to lunch,’ said Peter. ‘I could do with something to eat.’

We made our way along to the dining-car, clambering over feet, kit-bags, and suitcases, tossed from compartment door to window and back again by the motion of the train. We were passing through rough river-scored mountains, deceptively clothed with a soft brown moss. ‘No place for a forced landing,’ I thought automatically.

The dining-car was full, one or two business men but mostly uniforms. We managed to get ourselves a couple of seats and I took a look at them. I wondered if these people asked themselves such questions as I was asking Peter—probably not, if what foreigners say about the English is true, that we hate thinking, analysis. Peter certainly did, and I left him alone through lunch.

When we had got back to our compartment Peter gave a sigh of content and settled back in the corner, happy in the belief that his ordeal was over. But I hadn’t said the half of what was on my mind. I knew that I should surely never get such a chance at him again. So I started.

‘Look here, Peter,’ I said. ‘Let’s begin by agreeing that I am a selfish swine and am in the war only to get what I can out of it. But what about you? You’re a landowner—a sort of dodo, a species nearly extinct… . No, don’t stop me! Even though you may not own half England, you’re representative of the type. I’m quite ready to agree that you’re not fighting to maintain the present system of land tenure. You’re fighting for all the ideals you mentioned earlier. I know that. Do you expect to make the world a better place for your dependants to live in, solely through Christianity; and if so, how?’

Peter rather pointedly opened a window and stood staring out at the passing countryside. He was struggling to arrange his thoughts, to find words; and what he said came out so slowly, in such fragments of discourse, that I shall not attempt to give it shape. It was nothing new, and it came to this. He would be as decent to those in a less fortunate position as he possibly could, more especially to those dependent on him. He hoped that his role would consist in helping them, protecting them, keeping alive that ancient sturdy self reliance of the true-born Englishman that had made England what she was.

About this I must say one thing. While Peter’s words were all clich?s on the surface, all copybook talk, underneath they were terrific. He was saying what was to him almost the most important thing he could say, something as intense as a prayer to his God. What he said was, if you like, stupidly English. But what he would do, the lengths to which he would go, the probity and charity with which he would live that extinct form of existence, would also be English; and magnificently English. Extinct is the word: Peter was the very parfit knight.

I realized all this as he spoke, but I had no intention of pulling my punches because of it. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘if I had your altruism I’d try economics and not religion as my nostrum. I’d say to myself, we must do away with this unemployment, muck, undernourishment, and the rest of the horror that is the chief characteristic of every Christian State since Constantine became a Christian. And it differs from the non-Christian State only in that the others haven’t been such raging persecutors of men of other faiths. Of course, there will still be what you’d call original sin. You still won’t be able to prevent one man wanting to pop into bed with another man’s wife. But on balance I should say you would be getting nearer to saving the world by economics than by religion, the greatest instrument of persecution ever devised.’

‘Oh, now wait a minute!’ Peter protested. ‘I don’t know much about either religion or economics, but I know this. Religious persecution has been periodic, but economic persecution has been constant, uninterrupted, never-ending. There’s no evidence in history of men being better disposed towards one another because of economics, but there is some evidence of their being so through religion.’ Now he was on a subject he could warm to. Where he got his fresh eloquence from I don’t know; but he went on more or less in this vein: ‘We’re talking about two different things, you and I. You are talking about material misery and crime, and so on; whereas I am talking about something you’re not interested in—sin, and the harm man does to himself. What I’m trying to say is this, that men who possess the religious sense know that you can’t injure others without doing harm to yourself. You agree that there has always been economic misery. You’re almost ready to admit it can’t be altogether done away with. Well, make men Christians, I say, and they won’t hurt others because they won’t want to hurt themselves, their immortal souls.’

It was queer how I, who had taken the offensive from the beginning, was now being put on the defensive by the conviction behind Peter’s words. I was convinced, too; but I was not half as collected in that compartment as I am now, writing the debate out from memory. I recall that we rambled round the subject a good deal, and that Peter admitted he’d perhaps try to stand for Parliament. I pointed out to him that he would have either to vote with his Party on every issue—if there still was a dear old—fashioned Parliament—or retire a disappointed reformer. Suppose, I said, he turned out like Neville Chamberlain, acted as his conscience prompted and then found out he’d been a—well, never mind the epithet. I told him that as a writer I should be content to go my own way and be governed by any set of politicians he or his political enemies could dish up for the misguidance of the perhaps excessively patient British people.

But Peter had an answer to this. ‘Do you realize,’ he asked, ‘that your lofty political irresponsibilities are exactly what the Nazis are drilling into the German people? You reject their system because you’re an individualist and don’t like taking orders. But if you are politically irresponsible, you have to take orders. I reject Nazism not only because I have a sense of history, but also because, unlike you, I believe its purpose is to stamp out the divine spark in Man.’

We should be pulling into Edinburgh soon. I wasn’t satisfied. Politics was an easier subject than the immortal soul, and I went back at him on that tack.

‘How,’ I asked, ‘are you going to reconcile your moral and religious convictions with being a loyal Party member? Especially if you were successful, and were taken into the Cabinet, some of the acts you committed in the name of the State would get you put away for life if you committed them as an individual.’

‘Now, Richard,’ Peter started to protest; but I stopped him. ‘No, no. Let me go on. In time of need—and politics are continuously in times of need—the rulers, the ruling classes, are always able to evoke exceptional circumstances and glibly plead the need of exceptional measures. They are for ever in a state of self-defence. You may define reform by saying that it indicates a weak state of ruling-class defence. Revolution you may define by saying that it represents the breakdown of ruling-class defence. You, as a Cabinet member, would spend your life defending a class interest—by a concession to the common people when the defences were weak, by a disguised persecution when your defences were strong. Yes, you would! You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. You’d be a cog in the Party machine—or, as I’ve hinted before, a mere overseer of your baronial acres who hadn’t been able to stand the gaff in Whitehall.’

My tirade had freshened me. I was feeling ‘fine,’ as Hemingway would say; as fine as one of his heroes when a well-born girl offers him a bottle of precious brandy if only he will go to bed with her. Peter stared at me with a glint of curiosity in his eye. The day was darkening, and in the half-light his bony face had taken on a decidedly ascetic look, so that I felt more than ever in contact with an alien spiritual world.

‘You’re not a communist, Richard,’ he said—

‘God knows I’m not!’

‘—but you are an anarchist.’

‘Nonsense!’ said I. ‘It’s simpler than that. You are going to concern yourself with politics and mankind when the war is over: I am going to concern myself with the individual and Richard Hillary. I may or may not be exactly a man of my time: I don’t know. But I know that you are an anachronism. In an age when to love one’s country is vulgar, to love God archaic, and to love mankind sentimental, you do all three. If you can work out a harmonious synthesis, I’ll take my hat off to you. The really funny thing is that I, as an individual, shall certainly do less harm to the world writing than you as a Party member, a governor of the nation, are bound to do in office.’

‘That,’ said Peter, ‘is most certainly not true. I don’t read much myself but lots of people round me do. And the harm done them by their reading these past few years has been absolutely appalling. It is taking this war to correct the flubdub of the 1920’s pacifism. All due to writers! Was there a single poet in Oxford who didn’t write surrealist economics, who didn’t proclaim that he refused to fight for king and country, instead of sticking to his cuckoos and bluebells? Not one! Besides, wasn’t it your friend Goethe who said that while an artist never writes with a moral end in view, the effect of a work of art is always moral?’