‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Sylvia laughed.
The band played a flourish.
I sat there between Captain Negodyaev and Beastly, and listening to the inner voice in me reproaching me for the barter of my happiness, I reflected thus: the difficulty about happiness is that its technique is thoroughly unsatisfactory; that you cannot get it quickly when you want it, or easily enough to be worth having; the sacrifice demanded for its sake is apt to outweigh the motive, and, knowing that, you are loth to take it on. I was loth to take it on; and here I sit — and suffer. Still, I consoled myself that she was to me a white elephant, that on my journey in search of perfection she was a sort of luxurious trunk, a gorgeous globe-trotter for which I had no kit. She was a precious stone, a jewel I could not afford to buy. Yet beneath all these consoling reflections there lurked a truth, unheard but still disturbing, that I had missed my greatest chance of happiness in life as I might miss a train.
‘Bitter! Bitter!’ shouted the General exultantly. Sylvia and Gustave kissed. (Oh, where was my sword!) The band played a flourish.
I was not in pain; I only felt a heavy dullness — a spiritual headache. To-day was Saturday. What would I do now? Tomorrow was Sunday. A day of celebration and repose. A red-letter day — yes, red with anguish! And as for my sailing home — I could have only waved my hand!
As the first course was being removed the General rose and proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom, while the band played a flourish. After that, Captain Negodyaev got up and proposed the health of the bride’s parents. Then speeches were made of a national character, and the General drank to the glory of the Belgian Army, the band playing, somewhat inaccurately, the Belgian national anthem. Whereupon Uncle Emmanuel rose and drank to the revival of Russia, the General, as senior Russian officer present, responding, and including England and the Allies generally in his toast (having in his festal mood forgotten their betrayal of him). ‘Turning to our latest ally the Americans,’ he said, ‘I must observe that although they are a godless people they are nevertheless a deuced clever race. Gramophones, goloshes, footwear, vehicles, inventions, and all sorts of rubbish — they can do all that; or construct a railway, let us say, across the ocean — at that they are past-masters. The Americans! Hurrah!’
The band played a flourish. I and Beastly responded for England. Then Colonel Ishibaiashi rose to respond for Japan; everybody leaned forward and strained his attention.
‘I have an honour very much,’ he said, ‘to speak for the honourable officers of the Allied Forces. A band of Bolsheviki that appeared Cikotoa from north-east who proud but weak retired hearing the arrival of our alliance. Perhaps they spied us and felt very much anxiety, they retired far and far at last. Therefore we can hold the peace of Cikotoa and the safety of the principal line of the railway, unused our swords. Now it has become unnecessary to stay a strong force here any more. Therefore my Commander ordered me let the alliances to return to Harbin. Soon after you will triumph taking a great honour. We accomplished our duty by your a great many assistance. I offer you my thousand thanks for your kind relief—’
Here Beastly, very red in the face, leaned over to Colonel Ishibaiashi. ‘Stop talking shop, old bean,’ he said, ‘and tell us instead something — er — interesting — something about your damned old geisha girls, don’t you know.’
Colonel Ishibaiashi showed his teeth. ‘Ha! — Ha!—Iz zas so — zzz?’ and turning to the bridal pair, ‘I wisk,’ he said ‘your happy in this occasion. It is a little entertainment on the battlefield, but I hope you will take much saké, speak and sing cheerfully.’ And he sat down — while the band played a flourish.
The General, who only a few moments before had urged Allied solidarity after the war, now, perhaps from excessive drink, all at once displayed a weary cynicism and disenchantment. ‘Ach!’—a weary gesture—‘it’s all talk, all talk. They talk of preferential treatment for the Allies, the best-favoured nation clause, and that kind of rot. But in practice what does it all amount to? We Russians, for example, have done no end of good in Armenia. But when one of our lot went to have a shave in Nahichivan, the barber spat on the soap before lathering his face. He, of course, jumped up, disgusted, and went for him. “Don’t you get flurried, my beauty,” the barber replied. “This is a favour we’re showing you — preferential treatment. With any ordinary bloke we first spit in his snout and then rub on the soap afterwards!” Yes. That’s what it amounts to — no more — he! — he!—he!’ the General laughed feebly.
And looking at this mixed assorted crew, I thought: why the devil should nations fight? The shallow imbecility of ‘alliances’, of this or that national friendship: all nations were too uncommon and too alike to warrant any natural camping based as it were on personal preference. It was absurd. Yet they all behaved as though there were some real lasting advantage in such a stampede for safety. There were fools who advocated wars for economic reasons, and when, after the war, victors and vanquished alike rotted in the economic morass which the war had made, they forgot the economic argument (till they fomented a new war). It was incredible. No one wanted the war, no one with the exception of a score of imbeciles, and suddenly all those who did not want a war turned imbecile and obeyed the score of imbeciles who had made it, as if indeed there were no alternative to war — the simple common-sense alternative of, at any rate, not going to war about it, whatever happens: seeing that whatever happens cannot in the nature of the case be worse than war.
What a mixture we were, even within each nationality. The Russian batman Stanislav was more of a Pole than a Russian; Brown was more of a Canadian than an American; Gustave more of a Fleming than a Walloon, and I — well, you know who I am. And — to make the gathering more truly representative of the late World War — there was a youthful British officer, one of those young and simple and good chaps who, in wars waged for freedom, civilization, the avengement of national honour, the suppression of tyranny, the restoration of law and order, and such-like blood-exacting sacred causes, are freely sacrificed by the thousand, and their conception of the world is a vague sense that something is wrong somewhere and that somebody ought to be hanged.
So they set off to their doom, cheerfully, on the off-chance that their foe is that evil whose blood they are after, and having set out on their righteous (and adventurous) cause they now care but little about the origin of the wrong. And so they set out to kill and maim, and to be killed and maimed in turn, cheerfully, in the ‘old bean’ sort of fashion. Their mode of thinking, their manner of talking, is at one with the state of their soul. They go about asking everybody all day long: ‘Do barmaids eat their young?’ They strike on a happy phrase like ‘You’re all shot to pieces’, and it becomes a sort of standing sentence applicable to any person at any given moment. Or they pick up some phrase like ‘The odd slab of bread’, and then go on referring to ‘The odd slab of beer’, ‘The odd slab of sleep’, ‘The odd slab of wash’, and the odd slab of everything. Their conversation deteriorates into relating to each other in the morning the number of whisky-and-sodas they have consumed the night before.
‘Bitter! Bitter!’ shouted the General.
The band played a flourish.
Sylvia and Gustave kissed.
I have often read in novels and I have heard it said ‘How prettily she laughs’, and it has always left me cold, because I could not conceal the thought of the underlying artificiality of such a pretty laugh. A laugh to be pretty, it seemed to me, must be natural and unconscious. But now, though I had seen her laugh no end of times before, I thought with eagerness, I thought in exultation: ‘How prettily she laughs!’