Shortly before Christmas Mrs. Beatup decided that Steve Kadwell had “intentions.” He was now back at Eastbourne, but came over to Worge every Sunday, and after little more than half an hour beside a crushed and plaintive Mus’ Beatup would sit in the kitchen till it was time to go home.
“Never shows the end of his nose to ’em at Stilliands Tower,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Reckon thur’s someone here he liks better.”
“Do you mean me?” asked Nell wearily.
“Well, I doan’t mean me—and I doan’t mean that trug-faaced lump of an Ellen, so I reckon it’s you. You needn’t look so black at me, Nell—thur’s no harm in a maid getting wed. I’d bin wed a year at your age, surelye, and three month gone wud my fust child—the one that never opened his eyes on day.”
“Did father always drink?”
“Always a bit more or less—naun very lamentable—just here a little and there a little, as the Bible says. He’s got wuss this last few year. It’s that hemmed war.”
“You and father aren’t a very good advertisement for marriage.”
Mrs. Beatup was huffed.
“I dunno wot you want—here we are three years past our silver wedding, and five strong children still alive. It aun’t the fault of his marriage he’s bruk his leg—he might have done it single, and you cud say the saum of his drinking too.”
Further argument was prevented by the arrival of Steve Kadwell on his Sunday visit. Nell, who had been a little excited by her mother’s remarks, received him with more friendliness than usual. Certainly he was a very personable man—better-looking even than Ivy’s Corporal Seagrim, and younger. The grip of his huge hand gave her an extraordinary sense of well-being and self-confidence, and the flush which always came while his eyes appraised her was this time half pleasurable. She fidgeted a good deal while he was upstairs.
His conversational powers were not great, and she suffered a reaction of boredom during tea, which she and her mother had ready for him when he came down. He ate enormously and not very elegantly, though he was not entirely a bumpkin—for he had spent an occasional leave in London, “having a good time,” he told her with a wink. He talked a good deal about himself and various men in his platoon, whose dull doings and sayings he related in detail. Nell lost her new friendliness, and as soon as tea was over went out to feed the chickens and shut them up for the night.
She went into the barn to mix the feed. The sun had just set and there was a reddish dusk, through which she groped for the binns. She was kneading a paste with middlings, bran and barley-meal, when she heard a footstep on the frosty stones of the yard, and the next minute the barn grew quite dark as a man blocked the doorway.
“Your mother said I cud come and help you.”
Nell felt somehow a little frightened.
“I’m all right.”
“Reckon you are”—he came into the barn. “You’re fine,” and he stooped down to her, she felt his breath fanning her neck. Her hands ceased to move in the paste, and suddenly she began to tremble.
She tried to save herself with a small, faltering remark about the chicken-food—“Reckon soon we’ll have to do without the meal.”
He did not answer, but stooped closer still, so that she could smell him, his virile smell of hair and leather and tobacco. Then she suddenly snatched her hands out of the trug, all clogged and sticky with paste and meal, and tried to push him away.
“Don’t ... don’t....”
“Nellie—you’re not afraid of me?”
“Please let me go”—for his arms were round her now.
“Not now I’ve got you, little kid.... I’m justabout going to keep you till I know what you’re made of.”
He laughed, and her struggling passed suddenly into weakness.
Then his mouth pressed down on hers, and Nell, who had till that moment known nothing but the bodiless spirit of love, suddenly met him in the power of his fierce body. The contact seemed to break her. She lay back helpless in Kadwell’s arms, unable to stir or resist till he let her go, and he did not let her go till he seemed to have drawn all the life out of her in a long kiss—all the hoard of fire and sweetness which she had kept long years for another man he drew out of her with his lips and took for his own.
Then he released her, and she fell back against the binns, gasping a little, and crying, while her eyes strained to him through the dusk. She seemed unable to move, and he pointed to the bowl of chicken-food on the floor, saying, “Pick up that trug and come out.”
She did as he told her, and went out meekly at his heels.
Kadwell looked on Nell as a conquered kingdom. She herself was not so sure, for after he had gone home that night, her flagging powers revived, and she had a week in which to recruit her forces. During that week she passed through moments of sick revulsion from him, in which his strength and roughness disgusted her. But when he came again, she found herself powerless as she had been before.
He had strong allies. Nell was lonely, friendless, humbled to the dust; she was at the same time reacting from her former intellectual and ecclesiastical influences. His love helped restore her self-respect and his outstretched arms were rightly placed to catch her as the pendulum swung her away from her old tastes and glories. Nell found herself for the first time the interesting member of the family—at least in her mother’s eyes. She was the courted, the beloved—even if hand in hand with love came strange tyrannies—and her sudden change to exaltation from degradation turned her head a little.
Sometimes there were hours when she saw clearly, saw that Kadwell was impossible as her mate, that they had nothing in common, that not even his passion was really acceptable to her.... He was a coarse brute, who would always trample on her tastes and wishes and ignore her mind and soul—and in these hours she knew that it was her mind and soul which counted most, in spite of the newly-awakened body. She was not really of a passionate nature, only a little drugged. She was doping herself with Steve so that she might forget the anguish and humiliation of the past autumn.
But this clearness did not last long, and it was always fogged in the same way—by a sense of her own unworthiness. She told herself that she was wicked to despise Steve, who was much better than she in his different way. He might be uneducated, coarse, and self-willed, but he was strong and brave and resolute, all the things that she was not—“And I say unto you, despise not one of these little ones, for their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” ...
Then she would remember his wound, which he had got fighting for her and England over at Loos, and in the depths of that self-contempt which was so often with her now, alternating with her moods of self-confidence, she acknowledged that she had done nothing for the War. Though she had always prided herself on being more patriotic than the rest of her family, she had done far less than they—less than Tom, who had gone to fight, even if ignorant and unwilling; less than Harry, who had boldly flung down his challenge to the earth and taken up arms against her for his country’s sake; less than Ivy, who was cheerfully and competently filling a man’s place and doing a man’s work; less than her mother, who had borne these children for her country’s need; less even than her father, who paid rates and taxes and cultivated the ground. The fact that they were all, except perhaps Harry, more or less unconscious of their service, only made her reproach greater. She of her knowledge had done nothing, and they of their ignorance had done much. Who was she to despise them or Kadwell? Should she not take this chance to do the little she could by bringing comfort and happiness into a soldier’s life? She knew all the difference that Thyrza had made to Tom—let her do the same for Steve, humbly, simply, conscious of her failure up till now.
Early in the New Year Bill Putland suddenly came home on leave, and still more suddenly married a bewildered and delighted Polly Sinden. They had not even been definitely engaged; she had not known he was coming home till she got his telegram, fixing not only the date of his arrival but the date of the wedding. They were married at Brownbread Street, by an elderly clergyman who was taking the curate’s place during his honeymoon—Mr. Poullett-Smith had been married up at Dallington, and the joyful clash of his wedding chimes came to Nell as she sat with Steve in the sun-slatted murk of the Dutch barn, and made her more than usually submissive to his caresses.
Ivy, delighted at her friend’s good luck, forgave a long coldness, and came to Polly’s marriage. She brought with her Sergeant Staples, and after the ceremony took him to Worge for tea.
Mrs. Beatup had not been to the wedding, for Thyrza’s illness had begun, and her mother-in-law had spent most of the afternoon down at the Shop.
“Oh, she’s doing valiant,” she said in answer to their enquiries, “but ’tis unaccountable hard on a girl to be wudout her husband at such a time....”
“Where’s Nell?” asked Ivy.
“Up wud her father, surelye. He’s bin easier to-day, but he’s a tedious cross oald man these times. You’d never think the pacerfist and objectious conscience he’s got lying in bed and reading the paapers and wanting things to eat and drink as he can’t git—reckon he’d stop the War to-morrow for a bit of cheese.”
“Kadwell bin here any more?”
“Reckon he never misses—it’ll be Nell’s turn next after Polly. You’d best maake haste, Ivy Beatup, or at the raate we’re going, you’ll be the only oald maid left in the parish.”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Ivy, with her mouth full of bread.
“But Nell ull be a fool if she marries him,” she added seriously. “He aun’t her kind. I know him, and he’s a bit of a swine, I reckon.”
“Reckon he’s a valiant, stout chap, and Nell ull be a fool if she says no.”
Ivy did not argue the matter, but before she went away she made an opportunity to speak to her sister alone.
“Nell, you haven’t promised Steve Kadwell?”
Nell did not answer for a moment—she looked dazed. Then she said slowly:
“Yes—I promised him on Sunday.”
“Then write and tell him you’ve changed your mind.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a fool. You know quite well he aun’t the chap for you—you, wud all your liddle dentical ways!”
The tears came into Nell’s eyes.
“I love him.”
Ivy stared critically at her. She seemed to have altered.
“Have you told mother?”
“No.”
“When are you going to be married?”
“I dunno—we haven’t talked about it yet.”
“Well, doan’t be in a hurry—give him a good think over.”
She had no time to say more, and realised that there was not much more to be said. Nell seemed dazed and foolish, like a pilgrim lost in a strange land.
Sunday Street was dazzled by its multitude of marriages. There had been Tom Beatup’s, not a year ago, then the curate’s, and Polly Sinden’s, on the top of each other in January, and now, in February, Nell Beatup’s. The last was a surprise; who would have thought, asked the village, that Nell would be married before Ivy? One or two mothers improved their daughters’ minds with the moral of demure, gentle Nell’s marrying before her sister with her loud, friendly ways. There was some jealousy, too, for Kadwell, heir of Stilliands Tower, was considered a good match, though a certain amount of suspicion attached locally to his morals, due to his having once spent a leave in Paris.
Nell’s wedding was a shorn affair. Her father was, of course, unable to come and give her away, and she had to go up the aisle on the arm of a shuffling and miserable Harry, to be finally disposed of by Mrs. Beatup, who was full of doubts as to the legality of a marriage thus officiated. Ivy could not get another day off, so had been obliged to content herself with sending Nell a silver-plated cruet and a rather tactless message to “come to her if ever she felt things going a bit wrong.” Thyrza was not present, either. She had mended slowly, in spite of the joy of her little son, and felt unequal to the fag and excitement of a wedding, either socially or ecclesiastically. The gaps were completed by the absence of Mr. Poullett-Smith, who was still away on his honeymoon. He was expected back next week, and it was considered locally that Nell and Kadwell would have shown a more becoming spirit if they had waited for his ministrations. No one guessed that it was just this chance of being married in the curate’s absence which had finally dropped the balance, and made Nell give way to her lover’s entreaties and make him happy at once.
After the ceremony there was a breakfast at Worge, and that too was shorn. There had been no Ivy to help Mrs. Beatup with the cooking, and trug-faced Ellen had burnt the cake, which was not only sugarless, as Tom’s had been, but without peel or plums. “Might as well eat bread and call it caake,” said Mrs. Beatup drearily. “They both taaste lik calf-meal.”
There was no butter, as butter did not pay at its present price, and was no longer made at Worge. Some greenish margarine had been Ellen’s reward for standing two hours outside the grocer’s in Senlac, but the cake had swallowed it all up, and wanted more, judging by its splintering behaviour under the teeth. To balance these scarcities there was tinned salmon and tinned crab and tinned lobster—also two bottles of wine, left over from Tom’s wedding, and watered to make them go further.
“This is wot you might call a War wedding,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Nell, I’m unaccountable glad you got married in church—if it had bin a chapel marriage on the top of this”—and she waved her hand over the table—“I’d never quite feel as you wur praaperly wed.”
As a further counterblast to irregularity she had insisted on Nell’s being married in white satin, with a stiff white veil like a meat-safe bound over her hair with a wreath of artificial orange-blossom. She looked very pretty, with a becoming flush in the thick pallor of her skin. Her eyes were bright and restless, and she breathed quickly, so that her little pearl-and-turquoise locket, “the gift of the bridegroom,” heaved under her transparencies—she was too shrinking and modest to have her gown cut low—like a shallop on a wave. She scarcely spoke during the meal, but sat twisting her wedding-ring and staring at her husband—following each movement with her eyes, apparently unable to look away from him.
The meal was not lively; it lacked Ivy’s good-humour, Mus’ Beatup’s talkativeness, Bill Putland’s wit, Mr. Sumption’s big laugh and childish enjoyment of his food. The party consisted only of the two families—Beatups and Kadwells. Old Mus’ Kadwell droned about the War, and the “drore” in which he prophesied it would end, Mrs. Kadwell compared with Mrs. Beatup a day’s adventures in search of meat, Lizzie Kadwell tried to flirt with Harry, who was overwhelmed with shame and annoyance at her efforts, and Sim Kadwell, who had been best man, gave wearying details of the Indispensable’s Progress from tribunal to tribunal.
Steve Kadwell could get only a week-end’s leave, so the honeymoon would be short, and afterwards Nell would come back to Worge, and live there as before, except for her “teachering,” which her husband had made her give up, so that she might be at hand when he wanted her, free to go with him on any unexpected leave. He would have longer leave given him soon, he promised her, and they would go to London and have a valiant time. On this occasion they were going no further that Brighton, but they would stay at a fine hotel and have late dinner and a fire in their bedroom.
Nell drove away with her hand limp and rather cold in Kadwell’s big fondling clasp. The pale February sun slanted to Worge’s roof from the west, and a clammy, mould-flavoured mist hung over the hedges, like the winter ghost of those fogs which had webbed the farm with dusty gold in harvest-time. Nell looked back at the old house and the fields behind it—since she was leaving home only for two days, it was queer to feel that she was leaving it for ever.
9
It was raining and foggy when she came back. Thick white muffles of cloud drifted up the fields, and hung between the hedges, catching and choking all sound. Rain fell noiselessly, almost invisibly, apparent only in an occasional whorl, in the dripping eaves of the stacks, the shining roofs of the barns, and the whiteness of the beaded grass. Nell came from Hailsham station in a cab—her husband had told her to do so, giving her paper money for the fare. He certainly was princely in his ideas of spending, and there were loud and envious exclamations at Worge when, instead of the soaked and huddled figure expected, Nell appeared bone-dry, without even her umbrella unfurled.
“A cab from Hailsham!” cried Mrs. Beatup. “Reckon you’ve got a good husband.”
“And did you have the fire in your bedroom?” asked Zacky.
“Yes,” said Nell. “A shilling every night.”
She kissed her mother and brothers, and Ivy, who was over for the day and now came out of the kitchen, with a bear’s hug for her sister.
“You’ve got a new hat!” she exclaimed.
“Yes; Steve saw it in a shop in Brighton and bought it for me.”
“Lork!” cried Mrs. Beatup.
“But it aun’t your usual style,” said Ivy; “you most-ways wear ’em more quiet-like. I’ve seen many of that sort of hat come on the tram, and it’s generally what the boys call a tart.”
Nell flushed and looked away.
“We’ve got Thyrza here,” said Mrs. Beatup. “She came up this morning afore the rain started, and we’re kipping her till it’s a done—fust time she’s bin out, and I’m justabout fritted lest she taakes cold.”
“Has she got the baby with her?”
“Surelye.... Here’s Nell, Thyrza, come up in a cab from the station, and her husband’s guv her a new hat.”
Thyrza’s eyes opened big in wonder. She sat by the fire, with her child in her arms; she was pale, but seemed plump and healthy, and her eyes had an eager, yearning look which was new to them. Nell kissed her and the baby, and sat down by the hearth with a little shiver.
“I’ll git you some hot tea in a minnut,” said her mother, “and then I’ll tell you a surprise about Ivy.”
“Adone do, mother—you’ve half toald her now.”
“I haven’t—I only said it wur a surprise, which I reckon it aun’t much of, since you’ve near married three men in the last twelvemonth.”
Ivy groaned—“Reckon your tongue’s lik a bruk wurzel-cutter—slipping all over the plaace. Well, Nell, you know it now—but guess who he is.”
This was more difficult, as there were at least half a dozen possible claimants, and Nell restored the secret to a little of its lost glory by guessing wrong several times.
“It’s Eric Staples,” said Ivy at last, “and we’re going out to Canada soon as ever he gits his discharge, which woan’t be long now. He wur wounded and gassed at Vimy, but he’s a stout feller still, and has got a liddle farm in Saskatchewan wot me and him ull kip the two of us. He says I’m the woman born for a colonial’s wife.”
“Reckon you are,” said her mother fondly, “but I wish you cud have got a husband wot took you to hotels and guv you cab-rides and fine hats like Nell.”
“I aun’t the girl fur hotels and cabs—reckon I’m only the girl for washing the pots and scrubbing the floor, and lucky that’s the girl Eric wants. I’d never do wud Nell’s life—she’s a lady...” and she squeezed her sister’s hand.
Nell gave a faint squeeze in response. She was touched by Ivy’s affection, at the same time it made her feel a little cold, for she guessed the reason; Ivy was only saying without words, “I’m standing by you, Nell—you’ve done a stupid thing, and nobody knows it but you and I. Howsumdever you can always come wud any trouble to old Ivy.”
Tea was now on the table, with the remains of the wedding-cake. Mus’ Beatup was asleep upstairs, so it was arranged that later on Nell should take him up his tea and pay him her dutiful greetings. Harry and Zacky came in very grubby after handling roots. Harry was now a pitiless tyrant who drove and slaved his brother out of school hours, making him dig and rake and cart and dung; for the unthinkable thing of a year ago had happened, and the War was dragging on towards Harry’s eighteenth birthday, threatening to move his battle front from the furrows and ditches of Sussex to the blasted fields of France.
Thyrza had a letter from Tom, which she read to the company, every now and then stopping to hum over some passage which for obviously pleasant reasons could not be read out loud.
“To think he’s never seen his baby,” she murmured, bending towards her crooked arm.
“To think of Tom ever having a baby to see,” said Mrs. Beatup—“and you’d know he wur Tom’s by his flat nose.”
“Wot have you settled to call him?” asked Ivy. “Is it still Thomas Edward?”
“No, it’s to be Thomas William, fur Bill Putland has promised to stand godfather.”
“I doan’t lik William as much as Edward. Wot maade you change, Thyrza?”
“Tom wants him called after his best pal, surelye.”
“And after the Kayser, too—William’s the Kayser’s naum.”
Thyrza looked shocked.
“You’ll have to call him Bill fur short.”
“That ud sound more like the Kayser than ever—I always call the Kayser Bill.”
“Then call him Willie.”
“That’s the young Kayser, and Tom when he fixed William said as he must never shorten it to Willie, ’cos there’s a kind of shell called Little Willie, and he says as if, when peace comes and he gits hoame, fulks wur to say, ’Here comes Little Willie,’ he’d chuck himself down in the lane and start digging himself in—Ha! ha!” and Thyrza laughed at the joke, and tickled the baby to make it laugh too, which it didn’t.
“Reckon he’s too young to laugh,” said Mrs. Beatup.
“He aun’t too young to cry.”
“We’re none of us too young fur that, nor too oald, nuther.”
Thyrza sighed gently—
“I’m unaccountable set on Tom’s coming fur the christening—and Passon’s been wanting to christen him; he asked me at the churching. I thought maybe Tom cud git leave to see his baby christened, but seemingly he can’t.”
“They’re unaccountable short wud leave,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Steve couldn’t git more’n three days to git married in.”
“But reckon he’ll git some more later, woan’t he, Nell?”
Nell started—during the little womanly talk her mind had gone off on questionings of its own.
“Leave? Yes. He’s sure to get a week before he goes out to France.”
“You’re unaccountable lucky. Reckon he’ll taake you to another hotel and buy you another hat.”
“And send you home in another cab.”
“I’ll go up and have a look at father,” said Nell.
There was silence in the kitchen for a little while after she went. Harry and Zacky had gone back to their digging, and Ivy and Mrs. Beatup sat squatting against Thyrza’s lap, where the baby lay more helpless than a day-old kitten.
“Nell’s middling quiet,” said her mother at last.
“She’s sad at having said good-bye to Steve,” sighed Thyrza.
“I doan’t waonder as she’s vrothered,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Courted, cried, and married, all in a huddle lik that. Ivy, I hope as this ull be a lesson to you, and you’ll bide your banns praaperly and buy your bits of things in more’n one day’s shopping. Pore Nell, she sims all swummy and of a daze, and I doan’t woander, nuther, wud all the hurriment thur’s bin. Reckon she scarce knows yit if she’s maid or wife.”
“Reckon she does,” said Ivy.
TOM did not come home till March, and the baby had been christened before he arrived, Thyrza having proved too soft to resist ecclesiastical pressure. But her husband was not so disappointed as she had feared. Indeed, Tom’s whole attitude towards the miracle she had wrought in his absence puzzled her a little.
She had met him at the cottage door with the baby in her arms, and after their first greeting he had said:
“Put the baby down, Thyrza. I can’t kiss you praaperly.” Then, with his face hidden in her neck, had murmured: “It’s my wife I want.”
“But aun’t you justabout pleased wud your boy, dear?” she asked him later, when they were having tea and eggs in a cosy blur of firelight and sunshine.
“Reckon I am. But babies are unaccountable ugly; and as fur hoalding him, I’d sooner nuss a dud shell.”
“He aun’t ugly, Tom; everyone says he’s a justabout lovely child—and weighs near fourteen pounds, which is valiant fur a boy of his months.”
“Maybe—I know naun of babies. But you, Thyrza ... reckon you’re justabout the waonder of the world to me.”
Her eyes filled with tears as she felt his hand groping for hers on her knees under the table.
“Reckon you’re just another baby,” she said tenderly. “And I’m the mother of you both.”
But Tom learned to be father as well as husband in the days that followed—perhaps it was the joys of his husbandhood which woke the fatherhood in him. It did not quicken in a blinding flash, as motherhood had come to Thyrza when her baby was first laid in her arms, but grew and throve in his daily contact with the little bit of helplessness and hope which he and Thyrza had made between them. It seemed to develop out of and be part of his love for her, and in time it seemed to have a tender, mellowing effect on that love, making it less anxious and passionate, more selfless, more sweet, more friendly....
Those days were different from the days they had spent together after their marriage. They never went for long walks now, but stopped in their little garden at the back of the cottage, where crocuses splashed the grass with purple and egg-yellow, and celandines crept in under the hedge from the fields of Egypt Farm. Here in the warm spring sunshine Thyrza would sit, rocking the baby’s cradle with her foot, while she talked to Tom in her sweet, drawly voice, of the little trades and doings of the past year. Every now and then the shop-bell would ring through the cottage, and she would go off to serve and gossip, leaving baby in his father’s care.... “And doan’t you dance him, Tom, or he’ll be sick.” For Tom was bolder now, and took perilous liberties with young William, just as now, in his third year of soldiering, he had begun to take them with the dud to which he had compared him.... “Reckon he’ll start fizzing a bit before he goes off.”
In the evenings, when the child was asleep in the cradle beside their bed, they would go across the road to the willow-pond, and sit or stroll there in the March dusk. Those were wonderful days of spring, a March which was almost May, with sweet slumberous winds, so thick and hazy that the grumble of the unceasing guns was lost in them, and the War’s heart-beat never broke the meadow’s stillness. Soft primrose fogs trailed over Horse Eye Marshes under the rising stars, and away beyond them on the sea a siren crooned, like the voice of the twilight and the deep.... When the sky was dark round the big stars, and Orion’s sword hung above Molash Woods, they would go in to their supper in the lamplight, to the tender, intimate talk of their evening hours, and then up, with big reeling shadows moving before them on beam and plaster in the candlelight, to the dim spring-smelling room where their baby slept, and where Thyrza would sleep with her hair spread on the pillow like a bed of celandines, and Tom with his brown, war-calloused hand in the soft clasp of hers, and his head in the hollow of her breast.
Tom, of course, paid many visits to his family at Worge. He found Mus’ Beatup an invalid in the kitchen, his leg propped on a chair before him. Owing to his constitution it had mended slowly, but four months of forced soberness had worked a wonderful result in toning up his whole body, so that in spite of his illness his eye was brighter, his hand steadier and his voice clearer than at any time in Tom’s memory. Unfortunately, the boredom and privations of his state had only increased that “objectiousness” of disposition which Mrs. Beatup had deplored, and Tom had to sit and listen to long harangues, in which the War, the Christian Religion, God, Govunmunt, Monogamy, and War Agricultural Committees were toppled together in a common ruin. Nell no longer argued with him, his flicks and cuts had no power to wound, and he soon gave up trying to stir her into the little furies which had led to so many rousing arguments. It was queer how she had changed.... Her chief arguments were with her mother, who seemed to think that the ceremony of marriage was bound automatically to create an abstract love of housekeeping in the female breast. She was astonished to find that Nell had now no greater love for making beds and washing dishes than in the days of her spinsterhood.
“I never heard of a married woman as cudn’t maake a sago pudden,” she said to Tom.
“She’d maake it fur her husband quick enough,” said Tom with a grin.
“Well, Steve’s here most Sundays, and she’s never maade him naun but a ginger-cake, and she used to maake that before she wur wed.”
“Wait till she’s got a liddle home of her own ... that’ll be all the difference, woan’t it, Nell?”
Nell smiled faintly.
“Would you believe it, Tom?” said Mrs. Beatup, “but when we want a suet pudden now we’ve got to git it off a meat-card.”
“We’ve heard out there as all you civvies wur on rations—and Mus’ Archie one day he got the platoon for a bit of parlez-voo and toald us as how you wurn’t starved, as so many chaps had letters from their wives, saying as they cud git naun to eat.”
“Not starved! That’s valiant. And wot does Mus’ Archie know about it? Seemingly you doan’t know wot war is out there wud all your tea and your butter and your meat. Reckon there’ll never be peace as long as soldiering’s the only job you can git fed at.”
“Well, you’ve guv me an unaccountable good tea fur a starving family. And now I’ll be off and see Harry about the farm.”
Worge was in the midst of its spring sowings, and Harry spent his long days in the fields whose harvest he would not see. The Volunteer field was in potash now, dug for potatoes, and there were six more acres of potatoes over by the Sunk.
“They say as how a hunderd acres of potatoes ull feed four hunderd people fur a year,” he said to Tom—“and yit thur’s always summat unaccountable mean about a spud.”
Tom laughed. “You’ve done valiant, Harry.” Now that his brother’s adventure had justified itself, he had abandoned a good deal of his croaking attitude. Besides, if things really were getting scarce at home ... he wouldn’t like to think of Thyrza and the baby....
“I’ve done my best,” said Harry moodily, “but it’s over now. Reckon I’ll be called up in two months’ time.”
“Who’d have thought it!—you eighteen!—and the liddle skinny limb of wickedness you wur when I went away. I’d never have believed it, if you’d toald me that in two year you’d have maade more of Worge than I in five.”
“Father wants me to appeal; but it ud never do, I reckon. You cudn’t git off, so I’m not lik to.”
“And it wouldn’t be praaper, nuther,” said Tom, rather huffily. “You wud a brother in the Sussex! Farming’s all very well, Harry, but soldiering’s better. I didn’t think it myself at one time, but now I know different. A farm’s hemmed liddle use if Kayser Bill gits his perishing plaace in the sun. Besides, the praaper job fur a praaper Sussex chap is along of other Sussex chaps, fighting fur their farms. That’s whur I’d lik my old brother to be, and whur he’d like to be himself, I reckon.”
“I shudn’t,” said Harry, “any more than you did at fust.”
“I aun’t maaking out as I enjoy it—so you needn’t jump at me lik that. The chap who tells you he enjoys it out thur, reckon he taakes you fur a middling thick ’un, or he’s middling thick himself. But wot I say is, that it’s the praaper plaace fur a Sussex chap to be. Ask me wot I enjoy, and I’ll tell you”—and Tom jerked his pipe-stem over the ribbed hump of the field towards the cottages of Sunday Street, stewing like apples in the sunshine. “My fancy’s a liddle hoame of my own, and a wife and child in it, and my own bit of ground outside the door; and when we’ve wound up the watch on the Rhine, reckon I’ll be justabout glad to taake my coat off and sit in the sun and see my liddle ’un playing raound—and be shut of all that tedious hell wot’s over thur, Harry, acrost Horse Eye and the Channel, if folks at home only knew it—which seemingly they doan’t ... and I’m middling glad they doan’t, surelye.”
Harry was impressed, and a little ashamed.
“Never think as I aun’t willing, Tom. I’m willing enough, though I’d grown so unaccountable set on the new ploughs. Howsumdever, I’ve got things started like, and Zacky, maybe, when I’m gone, he’ll pull to and carry on, saum as I did; and father, he’s twice the head he had afore he bruk his leg and cudn’t git his drink. Seemingly, they’ll do valiant wudout me, and I ... well, I’ve come to love these fields so middling dear that if one day I find I’ve got to die fur them, reckon I shudn’t ought to mind much.”
“I must go and see Mus’ Sumption,” said Tom to Thyrza. He said it several times before he went, for the days swam in a golden fog over his home, shutting him into enchanted ground. It was hard to break out of it even to go to Worge, and he found himself shelving the thought of leaving for two hours of worse company the little garden where the daffodils followed the crocuses, the shop all stuffy with the smell of tea and candles, the bluish-whiteness of the little sag-roofed rooms, and his wife and child, who were not so much figures in the frame of it all as an essence, a sunshine soaking through it.... However, Thyrza kept him to his word.
“I’m tedious sorry fur Mus’ Sumption—he looks that worn and wild. Maybe you cud give him news of Jerry.”
“No good news.”
“Well, go up and have a chat wud the pore soul. Reckon he’ll be mighty glad to see you, and you’re sure to think of summat comforting to say.”
So Tom went, one evening after tea. He found the minister in his faded threadbare room at the Horselunges, writing the letter which every week he dropped into the post-box at Brownbread Street, and generally heard no more of. The evening sun poured angrily on his stooped grey head, and made the room warm and stuffy without the expense of a fire. The old, old cat sat sulkily before the empty grate, and the white mice tapped with little pink hands on the glass front of their cage. The thrush had been dead some months.
“Hello, Tom. This is kind of you, lad,” and Mr. Sumption sprang up in hearty welcome, shaking Tom by the hand, and actually tipping the cat out of the armchair so that his visitor might be comfortably seated.
Tom sat down and pulled out his pipe, and for some minutes they edged and skated about on general topics. Then the minister asked suddenly—
“And how did you leave Jerry?”
“Valiant”—certainly Jeremiah Meridian Sumption was a hardy, healthy little beggar.
But Mr. Sumption was not deceived.
“Valiant in body, maybe. But, Tom, I fear for his immortal soul.”
Tom did not know wat to say. He had never before seen the minister without his glorious pretence of faith in his son.
“It’s strange,” continued Mr. Sumption, “but from his birth that boy was seemingly marked out by Satan. Maybe it was the bad blood of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns; his mother was the sweetest, loveliest soul that ever slept under a bush; but there’s no denying that the Hearns’ blood is bad blood—roving, thieving, lusting, Satanic blood—and he’s got it in him, has my boy, more than he’s got the decent blood of my fathers.”
“Has he written to you lately?”
“Oh, he writes now and again. He’s fond of me. But he doesn’t sound happy. Then Bill Putland, when he came home to get married, he told me——”
There was silence, and Tom fidgeted.
“He told me as Jerry had got hold of a French girl in one of the towns—a bad lot, seemingly.”
“He’ll get over it,” said Tom. “Reckon he can’t have much love fur such a critter.”
“You knew of it too, then?”
“Oh, we’ve all heard. He got First Field Punishment on her account, fur——”
“Go on.”
“Thur’s naun to say. I guess she’s bad all through. Some of these girls, they’re bits of stuff as you might say, but they’d never kip a man off his duty or git him into trouble on their account. Howsumdever, the wuss she is the sooner he’s lik to git shut of her.”
Mr. Sumption groaned.
“If only he could have married your sister Ivy!”
“Ivy aun’t to blame.”
“No—she’s not. I mustn’t be unjust. She treated him fair and square all through; he says it himself. But, Tom, it’s terrible to think that one human creature’s got the power to give another to Satan, and no blame attached to either.”
“Maybe Jerry wur Satan’s before he wur Ivy’s,” said Tom sharply; then felt ashamed as he met the minister’s eyes with their tortured glow.
“Maybe you’re right. This is Satan’s hour. He’s got us all for a season, and this War is his last kick before the Angel of the Lord chains him down in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. These are the days of which the Scripture saith, that unless the Lord should shorten them for the Elect’s sake, no man could be saved.”
“I guess we’ve nearly done the Lord’s job. The perishers are even more fed up than us, which is putting it strong. Let ’em start this Big Push of theirn as thur’s bin such a talk about. Doan’t you vrother about Jerry, Mus’ Sumption—he’ll be shut of this girl before long, and you’ll git him back here and wed him to a good soul as ull do better fur him than Ivy.”
Mr. Sumption shook his head.
“This is the war which shall end the world.”
“Reckon I aun’t going out there, away from my wife and child and home, all among the whizz-bangs and the coal-boxes, and git all over mud and lice, jest to help on the end of the world. This world’s good enough fur me, and I hope it’ll go on a bit longer after peace is signed, so as I’ll git a chance of enjoying it.”
“And they shall reign with Him a thousand years.”
Tom was a little weary of Mr. Sumption in this mood; however, he felt sorry for him, and let him run on.
“You must be blind indeed,” continued the minister, “if you don’t see how the Scriptures have been fulfilled—nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and the Holy City given back to the Jews, and the sun turned to darkness with the clouds of poisoned gas, and the moon to blood ... the blood of the poor souls that are killed in moonlight air-raids....”
Tom knocked out his pipe.
“Then at last”—and the minister’s eye kindled and his whole sunburnt face glowed with the mixed fires of hope and fanaticism—“the sign of the Son of Man shall appear in the heavens, and He shall come again in power and great glory. Even so, come, Lord Jesus—but come before our hearts are all broken. What’s the use of chaining up the Dragon in the Lake if he’s already devoured the world? Shorten these days, for the Elect’s sake—save us from the burning, fiery furnace which is making frizzle of our bones and cinders of our hearts.”
He suddenly dropped his head between his hands. Tom felt a bit upset. He had again and again heard all this in chapel, but it was embarrassing and rather alarming to have it coming from the next chair.
“Reckon you mind this War more’n I do,” he remarked lamely.
“Because to you it is just war—while to me it’s Judgment. This is the day of which the Prophet spoke, the day that shall burn as an oven, and our sons and daughters shall burn as tow.... Bless you, young chap! there have been other wars—the country’s full of their dead names ... there were two lakes of blood up at Senlac.... But this war, it’s the End, it’s Doomsday. Now it shall be proved indeed that Christ died for the Elect, for all save the Elect shall perish. Tom, I have a terrible fear that I shall have to stand by and see my boy perish.”
“Oh, he’ll pull through right enough—give him his head and he’ll come to his senses afore long.”
“I’m afraid not.” Mr. Sumption rose and began walking up and down the room, his hands clasped behind him. The dipping sun poured over his burly figure, showing up in its beautiful merciless beam the seediness of his coat and the worn hollows and graven lines of his face. “I’m afraid not, Tom Beatup. I’m afraid I’ll have to stand by and see my boy damned. I’ll stand among the sheep and see him among the goats. There’s no good trying to job myself into thinking he’s one of the Elect—he knows he isn’t, and I know it. Whereas I have Assurance—I’ve had it a dunnamany years. Between us two there is a great gulf fixed. I’ll have to dwell for ever in Mount Sion, in the general assembly and church of the firstborn, and see him for ever across the gulf, in hell.”
“Then reckon you’ll be in hell yourself.”
“It seems like it. But the ways of the Lord are past finding out.... And I would willingly give my soul for Jerry’s—the soul the Lord has damned from the womb....”
Tom stood up. He felt he could not stand any more of this.
“Seemingly your religion aun’t much of a comfort to you.... Well, I must be going now.”
“You’ll come again?”
“Reckon I will, if you’re lonesome.”
“And look here, Tom; you won’t say a word to other folk of what I’ve spoken—about Jerry, I mean. It ud never do if the parish came to think that he was getting into bad ways.”
“I’ll say naun—trust me. Reckon Jerry’s middling lucky to have you stick by him as you do.”
“Jerry once said he sometimes felt as if there was only me between him and hell. Seemingly I’m the only friend he’s got.”
Tom felt very sorry for Mr. Sumption. He told Thyrza that he thought he must be getting queer with his troubles, and Thyrza immediately planned to take the baby to see him; and a day or two later they asked him down to the shop for the afternoon, and had the pleasure of seeing him momentarily forget his troubles in a good tea. “Reckon the poor soul thinks a lot of his inside,” said Thyrza, “and doan’t always git enough to fill it with.”
The last days of Tom’s fortnight seemed to rush by in spate; they blew before the March wind like the dust. Thyrza hurried on her little preparations for his departure—she was making him new shirts, and with loving hands repairing all of his that was frayed and worn, from his shirt to his soul.... For even Tom’s simple soul had been touched by the blight of war, and there was a look at the back of his eyes which came from things he never spoke of ... things he had seen out there in the land of horrors, which the folk at home did not realise—and he was unaccountable glad they did not. Thyrza’s love had driven that look to the back of his eyes and those memories to the back of his heart, though probably she would never be able to drive either the look or the memories quite away. Such things were now the lot of boys....
He still went occasionally to Worge, and sat with his father and mother in the kitchen, or gave Harry a hand on the farm. He persuaded Mus’ Beatup to engage a lad for cow and stable work, so that his brother’s burden was made lighter. One day Ivy came over with Sergeant Staples. The slow formalities of his discharge were crawling on, and she hoped to be married and to sail for Canada before the summer was out. It struck Tom that she had sweetened and sobered since he saw her last. Rumours of her affair with Seagrim had reached him, and he was glad to have her settled down. “Ricky’s a valiant pal,” she said once, and the words struck the difference between her love for him and the love she had had for Seagrim, and would have explained, if anyone had cared for an explanation, the comparative ease and quickness with which she had turned from one to the other. Seagrim had never been a pal—he had been a spell, a marvel, a magic that would never come back, a wonder which a woman’s heart must know but can seldom keep. Ricky, with his red hair and grinning monkeyish face, would never throw over Ivy’s world the glamour of those weeks with Seagrim, he would never transfigure the earth or turn pots to gold.... On the other hand, as Ivy said, he was better to jog along with, and she was certainly born for the ardours and endurances of a colonial’s wife—“So that’s settled and done with,” she thought to herself with a contented sigh—“and I reckon I’m a middling lucky girl. It’s queer how Nell and me have seemingly done just the saum—lost our hearts to one man and then gone and married another. But I kept my head and did it sensible, while she, reckon she lost hers and did it unsensible. Poor Nell! ... but I told her straight as Kadwell wur a swine.”
Nell had left the farm about four days after Tom’s return. Her husband had suddenly claimed her, and had fetched her away to spend his last leave with him in London. He expected to go to France in a week or two now. Tom did not dislike his new brother-in-law; he thought him a “good feller,” and considered him wonderfully forbearing with Nell when she cried on saying good-bye to her mother, and went away with her pretty face all marbled and blotched with tears.
“I’ve got no patience wud girls wot taake on them silly maidenish airs,” he said to Thyrza. “You never cried when you caum to me, surelye.”
“I’d no mother to say good-bye to. Some girls always cry when they say good-bye to their mothers.”
“Nell never used to be so set on mother in the oald times.”
“But it’s different now—it always is,” said Thyrza wisely—“that’s why some folks ud sooner have a darter than a son. When a son goes marrying he turns away from his parents, but a girl, the more she loves outside the more she loves at home.”
Tom pondered her words, and found himself beginning to feel a little guilty.
“Maybe you’re right. I hope Will woan’t go and disremember us when he weds.”
“Reckon he will,” said Thyrza—“it’s only nature.”
Tom went up to Worge every evening till the end of his leave.
The last evening came, and Tom’s good-byes.
“Reckon it’s always ‘good-bye’ now,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Good-bye to Ivy, good-bye to Nell, good-bye to Tom—sims as if, as if that ward ud git lik my oald broom, wore out from overuse.”
“Thur’d be no good-byes if thur hadn’t bin howdy-dos fust. So cheer up, mother, and we’ll be saying howdy-do agaun before Michaelmas.”
“And then good-bye. Oh, Tom, when ull this tedious war have done?”
“When it’s finished. Doan’t you fret over that, mother—reckon that aun’t your job.”
“I wish it ud have done, though, before our hearts are broke.”
Nell was expected home that evening, and Mrs. Beatup persuaded Tom to wait for her. He spent the interval going over the farm with Harry, and giving last advice, though it was astonishing how firm on his legs his brother now stood. He also took his chance of a straight talk with Zacky.
“Reckon you’re growing up lik a young colt, and you’ll have to taake your turn now—step into Harry’s plaace saum as he stepped into mine.”
Zacky’s besetting sin was not a lust for adventure in woods and distant fields; he moved in a more humdrum circle of dereliction—marbles and conkers and worms and string. However, Tom discovered that he had a passion for “taking things to pieces” and hoped to inspire him to zeal over the new mechanical reaper which was that year to be the wonder of Worge’s harvest.
To everyone’s disappointment, Nell did not arrive in a cab. She came on foot from Senlac station, leaving her box to follow by the carrier. Mrs. Beatup felt that Tom had been cheated, on his last day at home, of a fine spectacular entertainment, and was inclined to be peevish with Nell on his account.
“Reckon it wurn’t your husband who told you to walk six mile in the dust.”
“No—but it’s such a beautiful evening, and I felt I wanted the fresh air after London.”
She looked worn and fagged, as she sat down by the fire, spreading out her pale hands to the flames to warm.
Mrs. Beatup sniffed.
“Reckon thur’s more air-raids than air in London,” said Tom—“Ha! ha!” and they all laughed at the joke.
“But they dudn’t have naun while Nell was there,” said Mrs. Beatup, continuing her grumble. “Nell, how dud you lik the Strand Paliss Hotel?”
“Oh, pretty fair—it was very grand, but a great big barrack like that makes my head turn round.”
“How big was it?” asked Zacky. “As big as church?”
“Bigger a dunnamany times,” said Mrs. Beatup. “I’ve seen the Hotel Metropoil in Brighton, and reckon you cud git the whole street into it.”
“Did you have a fire in your bedroom?”
“No—there were hot pipes.”
“Hot pipes! How queer!—I shud feel as if I wur in a boiler.”
“And there was hot and cold water laid on.”
“Reckon you washed.”
“I had a bath.”
“In your room?”
“No—in a bathroom.”
“A real white bath in a bathroom!...” Mrs. Beatup was regaining confidence in her daughter. “You’ll be gitting too grand fur us here. They say as once you start taaking baths it’s like taaking drams, and you can’t git shut of it. I’ll have to see if I can’t fix fur you to have the wash-tub now and agaun.... Oh, you’ll find us plain folks here.”
Nell did not speak; she was stooping over the fire and her spread hands shook a little.
“Reckon she’s low,” said Mrs. Beatup in a hoarse whisper to Tom; “she’s said good-bye to her man, and she’s vrothering lest he never comes back. It’s always ’good-bye’ fur her lik fur the rest of us.”
“It’ll have to be ‘good-bye’ fur me now, mother. I must be gitting hoame.”
Mrs. Beatup stood up sorrowfully—
“Oh, Tom, I’ve a feeling as you’ll never come back.”
“You’ve always had that feeling, mother—and I’ve always come back, surelye.”
“But maybe I’m right this time. They say as the Germans ull maake a gurt push this Spring, and I reckon they’re sure to kill you if they can.”
“Reckon they’ll have a try—and if my number’s up I mun go, and if it aun’t, I mun stay. So thur’s no sense in vrothering.”
“You spik very differunt, Tom, from when you wur a lad.”
“I feel different, you can bet.”
“And yit it’s scarce two year agone since you wur naun but a boy, and now you’re naun of a boy that I can see—you’re a married man and the father of a child.”
“And whur’s the harm of it?—you needn’t look so glum.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her. Then he kissed his father—
“Good-bye, dad—you’ll be climbing fences afore I’m back, and—” in a friendly whisper, “you kip away from that old Volunteer. See wot gitting shut of the drink has maade you—you’re twice the man, fur all your leg. You kip on wud it, faather. You’ve got a start like—it ought to be easy now.”
“Kip on wud wot, my lad?—wud my leg, or the drink, or doing wudout the drink? You doan’t spik clear and expressly—reckon you’re gitting just a brutal soldier.”
“Maybe I am, Faather.”
“And you’ll never come raound me to kip teetotal when I think of them Russians—all got shut of drink the fust month of the war, and then went and bust up and ruined us. It’s bin proved as the war ull go on a dunnamany years on account of them valiant teetotallers. If we British all turn teetotal too, reckon as the war ull last fur ever.”
“Reckon you’ve got the brains!” said Tom, but not in quite the same tone as he used to say it.
He said good-bye to Harry and Zacky, and to Nell—with a pat on her shoulder and a “Doan’t you fret, my dear—he’ll come back.”
Mrs. Beatup went down with him to the end of the drive. She looked on this as her privilege, and also had some hazy idea about giving him good advice. All she could think of on the present occasion was to “Kip sober and finish the war.”
“Wish that being my faather’s son maade it as easy to do one as it does to do t’other. Now doan’t you start crying, fur I tell you I’ll be back before you scarce know I’m a-gone.”
“It’s queer, Tom ... now, thur’s summat I want to know. Tell me—is a wife better than a mother?”
“Better—but different. Doan’t you fear, mother. I’ll always want you. Maybe I went and disremembered you and faather a bit after I wur married, but now I’ve a youngster of my own it just shows me a liddle bit of wot you feel ... and I’m sorry.”
He suddenly kissed her work-soiled, roughened hand, with its broken nails and thick dull wedding-ring sunk into the gnarled finger.
“That’s wot they do to ladies in France.”
She watched him walk off down the Street, stopping to light his pipe where the oast of Egypt Farm made a lee against the racing wind. Then she walked slowly and heavily back to the house, planning a little consolation for herself in listening to Nell’s tale of wonders.
But when she came to the kitchen she found that Nell had gone upstairs—to wash, Mus’ Beatup told her. Moved by a spasm of tenderness, she took the kettle from the fire and creaked off with it to her daughter’s room.
Knocking at bedroom doors was a refinement unknown at Worge. Mrs. Beatup accordingly burst in, to find Nell sitting on the bed, with her face hidden in her hands. She had taken off her gown, and sat arrayed in a short silk petticoat and an under-bodice of a transparency that made her mother gasp; over her shoulders was nothing but two pale-blue ribbons, against which her arms showed yellowish-white and plumper than they used to be. So astonished was Mrs. Beatup at this display that she scarcely noticed the hidden face.
“Nell, how fine! But you’ll catch your death—I wonder your husband let you....” Her voice trailed off, for Nell had dropped her hands, and her face was running with tears.
“My poor liddle girl!”—the mother’s heart went out in pity. She put the kettle on the floor, and going over to the bed, sat down on it with a great creaking of springs, and put her arms round her daughter—at first rather gingerly, for fear of spoiling so much elegance, then straining them closer, as Nell, melted into an abandonment of weakness, began to sob against her breast.
“My poor liddle girl!... It’s unaccountable sad fur you. I know.... I know.... But doan’t you vrother, chick—he’ll come back. I’ve a feeling as he’ll come back.”
A long shudder passed through Nell. Then suddenly she raised herself, gripping her mother’s arms, while her eyes blazed through her tears. “Oh, mother, mother ... don’t you see? ... it’s not that I’m afraid he won’t come back ... it’s that I’m afraid he will.”
She threw herself down upon the pillow, sobbing with the accumulated misery, humiliation, rage and dread of weeks. Mrs. Beatup stared at her, dumbfounded.
“Nell—wot are you talking of? You doan’t want Steve to come back?”
“No—I hate him. I—I ... if he comes back ... and takes me away to be my husband for good, I—I’ll kill myself.”
“Reckon you doan’t know what you’re saying. You loved him unaccountable when you wur wed.”
“I didn’t love him ... not truly. And he’s killed the little love I had.”
“But all the fine things he’s guv you....”
“Doan’t talk about them. They’re just part of the horribleness.”
“Then you’re telling me as you maade a mistake?”
“Reckon I did. Reckon my only chance now is that he won’t come back.”
She began to sob again, not tempestuously, but slowly and painfully, gradually jerking to silence. A soft green twilight deepened in the room, and the low gurgling calls of starlings trilled under the eaves. The mother still sat on the bed-foot, staring at her daughter, who now lay still, a pool of blue in the dusk with her silk petticoat, her shoulders showing nacreous against the dead-white of the pillow. Mrs. Beatup was stunned, her mind slowly adjusting itself to the revelation that there was in war another tragedy besides the tragedy of those who do not come back—and that is the tragedy of some who do.
The dipping sun slanted over the fields from Stilliands Tower, and made Tom Beatup’s khaki like a knight’s golden armour as he trudged home. The sky was a spread pool of blue, full of light like water, and moss-green in the east where it dipped towards the woods of Senlac. Soft whorls of dust bowled down the lane before a fluttering, racing wind, that smelled of primroses and rainy grass.
Tom heaved a deep sigh of well-being as he stopped to light his pipe. To-morrow he would have left these sun-swamped sorrowless fields and be back in the country where the earth was torn and gutted as if by an earthquake, all scabbed and leprous as if diseased with the putrefaction of its million dead—where the air rocked with crashes, roars, rumbles, whizzes, caterwaulings, and reeked with flowing stenches of dead bodies, blood, and hideous chemicals—where any thornbush might conceal a sight of horror to freeze heart and eyeballs ... and yet he could put the dread of it out of his mind, and smile contentedly, and blink his eyes in the sun.
A few yards down the street his cottage showed its little misted shape, while its windows shone like garnets in the western radiance, and a tall column of wood-smoke rose behind it, blowing and bowing in the adventurous wind, which brought him snatches of its perfume, with the sweetness of wet banks and primroses and budding apple-boughs.... He knew that in the shop door Thyrza stood with the baby in her arms; she would be waiting for him there with the sunshine swimming over her white apron and purple gown, making the downy fluff on little Will’s head to shine yellow as a duckling’s feathers. The thought of wife and child was not cankered by the dread that he might never see them again. The parting when it came would be terrible—he might break down over it, as he had broken down before—but he had all a soldier’s solid fatalism and scorn of the future, and was, perhaps, strengthened by the inarticulate knowledge that if he were to die to-morrow he died a man complete. From the lumbering, unawakened lad of two years ago he had come to a perfect manhood, to be a husband and father, fulfilling himself in a simple, natural way, with a quickness and richness which could never have been if the war had not seized him and forced him out of his old groove into its adventurous paths. If he died, the war would but have taken away what it had given—a man; for through it he had in a short time fulfilled a long time, and at twenty-two could die in the old age of a complete, unspotted life.
He passed under the sign of the Rifle Volunteer, straddling the road in his green uniform, with his rifle and pot of beer—“Queer old perisher,” thought Tom, looking up at him—“I shudn’t like to go over the top in that rig.”
The Rifle Volunteer creaked noisily on his sign, as if the soldier of bygone years challenged the soldier of to-day.
“I am the man armed for the War That Never Was, who marched and drilled and camped to fight the French, who never came. And you are the man unarmed for the War That Had To Be, who never drilled or marched or camped to fight the Germans, who came and nearly drove you off the earth.”
“Reckon he’d have bin most use a hunderd mile away,” scoffed Tom.
“I went of my free-will and you because you were fetched,” said the Rifle Volunteer. “Two years ago I saw you walking down this road under my patriotic legs, a wretched, drag-heel conscript.”
“He never fought in any war that I know of,” thought Tom, “and yit I reckon thur used to be wars in these parts in the oald days. Minister says the country’s full of thur naums. I doan’t know naun, surelye.”
The east wind blew from Senlac, sweet with the scent of the ash-trees growing on the barrow where Saxon and Norman lay tumbled together in the brotherhood of sleep.
“Here—when a great whinny moor rolled down from Anderida to the sea, and Pevens Isle and Horse Isle were green in the bight of the bay, and the family of the Heastings had finished building their ham by the coast—here used to be the Lake of Blood, where hearts were drowned. A red tun stands on it now, and good folk come to it on market-days. Thus shall it be with all wars—out of the red blood the red town, and under the green barrows friend and foe, tumbled together in the brotherhood of sleep.”
The east wind like a Saxon ghost whistled against Tom’s neck.
“We fought as you did once—we hated the Norman as you hate the German, yet look how peacefully we sleep together.”
“They must have been funny,” thought Tom, “those oald wars wud bows and arrows.”
“Harold! Harold!... Rollo! Rollo!” cried the ghosts on the east wind from Senlac.
“God save the Queen,” said the Rifle Volunteer.