In the long interval before lunch, Martha drifted once more in front of her mirror, with the air of one prepared to be surprised by what she saw there. And from this, as a natural consequence of a long and dissatisfied examination of herself, she collected scissors and needle and material, and in a few moments she was at the table with the sewing machine. And now her look of vagueness had vanished; for the first time since she had risen that morning, she was centred behind what her hands did. She had the gift of running up sundowner frocks, dance dresses, out of a remnant from the sales, even discarded curtains or old-fashioned clothes that her mother had kept. She could transform them without effort – apart from the long, dreamy meditations which might fill half a week; for when a woman claims with disarming modesty that she has run up this dress for ten shillings, the long process of manipulating the material around her image of herself, those hours of creation, are not taken into account. Very few women’s time is money, even now. But while the clothes she made for after dark were always a success, it seemed her sureness of touch must desert her for the daytime. Her friends might exclaim loyally that her morning dress was absolutely wonderful, but it was only over the evening clothes that their voices held the authentic seal of envy. From which it follows?
The fact is that as soon as Douglas returned from the office for lunch, the day was already nearly at evening. For he returned finally at four; and after that, it was only a question of time before their eyes met on a query: at the Sports Club, everyone they knew would be delighted to see them, and afterwards there would be dancing there or at the hotels. It seemed as if the day was only a drab preliminary to the night, as if the pageant of sunset was meant only as a curtain-raiser to that moment when the lights sprung up along the streets, and with them a feeling of vitality and excitement. For in the hotels, the clubs and the halls, the orchestras struck up at eight and from every point in the town dance music was flowing like water from a concealed reservoir of nostalgia hidden below it. These were the nights of African winter, sharp, clear, cold, a high and luminous starlit dark lifting away from the low, warm glitter of city lights. In the white courts of the hotels, braziers offered a little futile heat to the cold dry air, and groups of young people formed and dissolved around them: there was no room for everyone inside, there was no room for all the people who needed, suddenly, to dance.
Night after night, they moved from the Club to the Plaza and on to McGrath’s; and the self-contained parties that began the evening expected to dissolve into a great whole as midnight approached. By midnight they were dancing as if they formed one soul; they danced and sang, mindless, in a half-light, they were swallowed up in the sharp, exquisite knowledge of loss and impending change that came over the seas and continents from Europe; and underneath it all, a rising tide of excitement that was like a poison. Uniforms were appearing here and there, and the wearers carried themselves with self-effacing modesty, as if on a secret mission, but conscious that all eyes in the room were fixed on them. The rumours were beginning. This regiment was going to be called up, they were going to conscript the whole population; but the question of conscription was surely an irrelevance when every young man in the town was thinking only of the moment when he could put on a uniform – and that before it was decided what the war was to be fought about. They were all longing to be swallowed up in something bigger than themselves; they were, in fact, already swallowed up. And since each war, before it starts, has the look of the last one, it did not matter how often stern and important young men assured hushed audiences that the world could not survive a month of modern warfare, they would all be bombed to pieces by new and secret weapons; it was necessary only for the orchestra to play ‘Tipperary’ or ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ – which they did on every conceivable occasion – for the entire gathering to become transformed into a congregation of self-dedicated worshippers of what their parents chose to remember of 1914.
In between dances, groups formed to discuss what was happening in Europe – or rather to exchange the phrases they had read that morning in the Zambesia News. The fact that this newspaper was contradicting itself with the calmest of assurance from day to day did not matter in the least; there was going to be a war, and night after night youth danced and sang itself into a condition of preparation for it. Their days and work, their loves and love-making, were nothing but a preparation for that moment when hundreds of them stamped and shouted in great circles to the thudding drums, felt less as sound than as their own pulses; this was the culmination of the day, the real meaning of it, the moment of surrender.
Then the music stopped suddenly and disastrously, the managers came forward bowing with strained politeness, ignoring the pleas and imprecations about their hard-heartedness – and the masses of young people streamed out into the still, frost-bound air, under the glitter of the Cross. It was at this point that Martha and Douglas were reminded that they were married; for ‘the gang’ – those of them that remained unbound to the girls whose one preoccupation it was to get married to the doomed as quickly as possible – went off shouting and stamping to the fun fair, which they kept going until early morning. The young married couples departed to one of the flats; and it was then that it became apparent there was a certain difference of viewpoint between husbands and wives. Stella, Alice, Martha, might have been part of that single yearning heart only half an hour before, but now they tended to fall silent, and even exchanged tolerant glances as their respective young men held forth on their plans for joining up. For it is a strain on any marriage, which after all is likely to begin with the belief that it must provide satisfaction and happiness for at least a few years, when one of the partners show signs of such restlessness to ‘rush off to the wars’ – as the girls acidly put it – the moment a war, any war, offers itself.
By the time Martha and Douglas reached home, reached the small, brightly lit, untidy bedroom, still littered with their day clothes and filled with the loud, sad, bitter music from the fun fair – for the wheel was still dragging its glittering load of cars in its circle – by this time, their elation was flagging, and there was a feeling of anticlimax. Now, drenched and submerged by the music, which it was impossible to keep out even with shut windows, Martha crept closer to Douglas and demanded the assurance that he did not really want to leave her; just as Stella and Alice were doing in their bedrooms. Douglas, manfully clasping Martha to him, murmured reassurances and looked over her head at the glitter of the wheel. He had not known how intolerably boring and empty his life was until there was a chance of escaping from it; and the more fiercely he determined not to be left out of things, the more tightly he held Martha and consoled her. He was holding a warm, confiding bundle of female flesh, he wished only to love her and be proud of her – for, above all, his pride was fed by her anxious demands for his love; but it was all no use. For, just as he was playing a role which was surely inconsistent with what he thought – the young hero off to the wars for adventure – so she began to speak in the ancient female voice which he found utterly irritating. After a long silence, during which he hoped she might have gone to sleep so that he might dream of adventure without guilt, a small, obstinate, ugly voice remarked that there would be wars so long as men were such babies. At this point he would loosen his grip and lie stiff beside her, and begin to explain in an official tone that surely, Matty, she must see they must be prepared … But it was no use; that official tone carries no conviction any longer, not even to the people who use it. She sniggered derisively; and he felt foolish.
They rolled apart and lay without touching; even apologizing in an offhand, hasty way if they happened to touch by accident. Douglas soon fell asleep. Martha could not sleep while the wheel turned and churned out music. She was in a mood of angry self-contempt for being infected by that dangerous undertow of excitement. For she had caught herself daydreaming of being a nurse, and no less than a ministering angel. But, alas, alas, we know all about that ministering angel; we know what she comes to in the end; and Martha could only return to thoughts of her father. She considered the undoubted fact that while Mr Quest might expatiate about the inefficiency and corruption of the leaders of his war, about the waste of life, the uselessness of the thing, while he might push into Martha’s hands books like All Quiet on the Western Front with an irascible command that she should read it and understand that that was war, while he might talk of that war with the bitter, savage consciousness of betrayal, yet there was always an undercurrent of burning regret. Then he had been alive. ‘The comradeship,’ he would exclaim, ‘the comradeship!
