At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [125]
But he could not say as much to Morel. Morel needed him to be certain of at least something—therefore he must seem so.
Finally it was Morel who broke the silence. “Will you go back to St. John’s?” he asked, staring straight ahead, avoiding Joseph’s eyes.
Joseph was appalled. Is that what Morel thought of him, that he would go back to the same old escape, exactly as if nothing had happened? Build himself another cocoon!
“I don’t imagine there’ll be much to go back to,” he said a little sharply. “I can’t see many people wanting to learn biblical languages in the aftermath of this, can you?”
“They have their uses,” Morel said with a frown. “Perhaps if we’d studied the past a little more diligently we’d have seen further into the future.”
“That’s a leisure pursuit,” Joseph said. “I don’t think we’ll have much leisure in the years after the war. It isn’t going to be the same.”
“Nothing’s going to be the same,” Morel agreed with intense earnestness. “Women are doing half the jobs men used to. A woman’s life isn’t defined by who she marries anymore. It won’t go back to that, not now. Think of your sister.”
Joseph knew he meant Judith, but even Hannah was changed. All over Europe there were women who had learned to manage alone, to find courage and learn skills that had not been imagined before the war.
“You can’t turn time backward,” he said aloud.
“Good God, no!” Morel was suddenly savage. “Not in anything! I’ve fought beside men who used to wait on me at table or clean my boots. We can’t and mustn’t go back to that.”
“We won’t.” Perhaps because Joseph had been home on leave so little, and then only to St. Giles, where social barriers were as old as the land and who owned and worked it, most of the change had made little impression on him. He had always known men like Barshey Gee, Snowy Nunn, and the others. He had played with men like them in the village school, knowing they would go on to work with their hands, and he would go up to university.
“There’ll be a new government,” Morel said thoughtfully. “If they don’t care for the sick and disabled, then we’ll force them to. There’ll be legislation so it’s every man’s right to work, or if there’s no work, then to be cared for, to have medicine, food, a roof over his head regardless, and over his children’s. And the right to be taught because he has the brains to learn.”
He was walking with his shoulders hunched, muscles tight. “Not out of charity, but because it’s every man’s right. We’re quick enough to call him up to fight in the blood and filth of the trenches and to die for his country. And he came in the millions, without a question or a complaint. We owe, Chaplain! And by God, if I live through this, I’m going to do what I can. Not just for them, but for ourselves. What are we worth if we don’t?”
It was a challenge. Joseph knew he meant it. It was for the men he led that he had been willing to mutiny against Northrup, and that was blazingly clear now. It was not one isolated anger or a personal rebellion. It was his nature, and he would be as true to it in civilian life as he was now. Joseph could imagine him in the future, a firebrand politician fighting for social justice, with a decency man to man that owed nothing to charity. The loyalty in the face of horror would not fade just because the guns were silent.
Nor would the suffering. Only a fool could imagine that. The dead would never return, nor would most of the crippled or blinded ever be whole again.
Was Morel waiting for him to say what he would do? The silence within his own head demanded it. There was only one decent answer: to go back into an active ministry, if there was one that would have him. What faith would there be after this? Millions would be desperate for help, comfort, and hope in the future,