Men at Arms Read Free

would gain?’
    As they drove they passed on every windowless-wall the lowering, stencilled face of Mussolini and the legend ‘
The Leader is always right
’. The Fascist secretary took his hands off the wheel and lit a cigarette, accelerating as he did so. ‘
The Leader is always right
’… ‘
The Leader is always right
’ flashed past and was lost in the dust. ‘War is foolishness,’ said the imperfect disciple. ‘You will see. Everything will be brought to an arrangement.’
    Guy did not dispute the matter. He was not interested in what the taxi-driver thought or said. Mrs Garry would have thrown herself into argument. Once, driving with this same man, she had stopped the cab and walked home, three hot miles, to show her detestation of his political philosophy. But Guy had no wish to persuade or convince or to share his opinions with anyone. Even in his religion he felt no brotherhood. Often he wished that he lived in penal times when Broome had been a solitary outpost of the Faith, surrounded by aliens. Sometimes he imagined himself serving the last mass for the last Pope in a catacomb at the end of the world. He never went to communion on Sundays, slipping into the church, instead, very early on weekdays when few others were about. The people of Santa Dulcina preferred Musgrave the Monster. In the first years after his divorce Guy had prosecuted a few sad little love affairs – but he had always hidden them from the village. Lately he had fallen into a habit of dry and negative chastity which even the priests felt to be unedifying. On the lowest, as on the highest plane, there was no sympathy between him and his fellow men. He could not listen to what the taxi-driver was saying.
    ‘History is a living force,’ said the taxi-driver, quoting from an article he had lately read. ‘No one can put a stop to it and say: “After this date there shall be no changes.” With nations as with men, some grow old. Some have too much, others too little. Then there must be an arrangement. But if it comes to war, everyone will have too little.
They
know that.
They
will not have a war.’
    Guy heard the voice without vexation. Only one small question troubled him now, what to do with the cake. He could not leave it in the car; Bianca and Josefina would hear of it. It would be a great nuisance in the train. He tried to remember whether the Vice-Consul, with whom he had to decide certain details of closing the Castello, had any children to whom the cake might be given. He rather thought he had.
    Apart from this, one sugary encumbrance, Guy floated free; as untouchable in his new-found contentment as in his old despair.
Sia lodato Gesù Cristo. Oggi, sempre
. Today especially; today of all days.
     2
    THE Crouchback family, until quite lately rich and numerous, was now much reduced. Guy was the youngest of them and it seemed likely he would be the last. His mother was dead, his father over seventy. There had been four children. Angela, the eldest; then Gervase, who went straight from Downside into the Irish Guards and was picked off by a sniper his first day in France, instantly, fresh and clean and unwearied, as he followed the duckboard across the mud, carrying his blackthorn stick, on his way to report to company headquarters. Ivo was only a year older than Guy but they were never friends. Ivo was always odd. He grew much odder and finally, when he was twenty-six, disappeared from home. For months there was no news of him. Then he was found barricaded alone in a lodging in Cricklewood where he was starving himself to death. He was carried out emaciated and delirious and died a few days later stark mad. That was in 1931. Ivo’s death sometimes seemed to Guy a horrible caricature of his own life, which at just that time was plunged in disaster.
    Before Ivo’s oddness gave real cause for anxiety Guy had married, not a Catholic but a bright, fashionable girl, quite unlike anyone that his friends or family would have expected.