IT was early in April. A soft fleck of clouds lay over the sky, so thin, so rifted, that the sinking lights of afternoon bloomed their hollows with cowslip. A misty warmth hung over the fields, drawing up the perfume of violets and harrowed earth, of the soft clay-mud of the lanes, not yet dry after a shower and with puddles lying in the ruts like yellow milk.
Sunday Street was in stillness, like a village in a dream. Thin spines of wood-smoke rose from its chimneys, blue against the grey dapple of the clouds. The chink of a hammer came from the Forge, but so muffled, so rhythmic that it seemed part of the silence. The watery atmosphere intensified that effect of dream and illusion which the village had that evening. Through it the cottages and farms showed with a watery clearness and at the same time a strange air of distance and unreality. There was flooding light, yet no sunshine, distinctness of every line in eaves and tiling, of every daffodil and primrose in garden-borders, and yet that peculiar sense as of something far away, intangible, a mirage painted on a cloud. It was thus that the vision of his home might rise before the stretched, abnormal sight of a dying man, a simulacrum, a fetch....
Thyrza Beatup sat beside the willow pond at the corner of the Street, on the trunk of a fallen tree. In her arms she held her baby, asleep in a shawl. She felt warm and content and rather sleepy. In her pocket was Tom’s last letter from France, but she did not read it, for she knew it by heart.... “I think of you always, you dear little creature, you and baby—even when my mind is full of the things out here, and this great battle which is seemingly the biggest there’s ever been.” ... “How I wonder when I’ll get another leave. I reckon baby ull have grown a bit and you’ll be just the same.” ... “I shut my eyes and I can see your face; reckon I love you more every time I think of you and I think of you day and night, so you can guess all the love that makes.” ... Tender phrases floated in and out of her mind, and then she smiled as she remembered a funny story Tom had told her about a chap in the A.S.C....
She drew the baby closer into her arms, looking down at his little sleeping face, which she thought was growing more and more like Tom’s. She drooped her eye-lids and in the mist of her lashes half seemed to see Tom’s face there in the crook of her elbow, where it had so often been, turning towards her breast. Poor Tom! his head was not so softly pillowed these nights ... and as suddenly she pictured him lying on the bare, foul ground, his head on his haversack, his cheeks unshaved, his body verminous, his limbs all aching with cold and stiffness—he, her man, her darling, whom she would have had rest so sweetly and so cleanly, with nothing but sweetness and comfort for the body that she loved—then a sudden flame of rebellion blazed up in her heart, and its simplicity was scarred with questions—Why was this terrible War allowed to be? How was it that women could let their men go to endure its horrors? Did anyone in England ever yet know what it was these boys had to suffer? Oh, stop it, stop it! for the sake of the boys out there, and for the boys who have still to go ... save at least a few straight limbs, a few unbroken hearts.
She clenched her hands, and little Will moaned against her breast, and as she felt his little fists beating against her, the hard mood softened, and she bent over him with soothing words and caresses—words of comfort for herself as well as for her child.
“Don’t cry, liddle Will—daddy ull come back—daddy’s thinking of us. He’s out there so that you ull never have to go; he bears all that so that you may never have to bear it.”
A thick grape red had trickled into the west like a spill of wine. The afternoon had suddenly crimsoned into the evening, and ruddy lights came slanting over the fields, deepening, reddening, so that the willows were like flames, and the willow pond was like a lake of blood.... The night wind rose, and Thyrza shivered.
“We mun be gitting hoame, surelye,” and she stood up, pulling the shawl over the baby’s face.
At the same time her heart was full of peace. The questioning mood had passed, and had given place to one single deep assurance of her husband’s love. Tom’s love seemed to go with her into the house, to be with her as she bathed Will and put him to bed, to drive away her brooding thoughts when, later on, she sat alone in the lamplight at her supper. She sang to herself as she put away the supper, a silly old song of Tom’s when he first joined up:
“The bells of hell go ring-aling-aling
For you, but not for me;
For me the angels sing-aling-aling,
They’ve got the goods for me.
O Death, where is thy sting-aling-aling?
Where, grave, thy victory?
The bells of hell go ring-aling-aling
For you, but not for me.”
Now that darkness had fallen, the clouds had rolled away from the big stars blinking in the far-off peace. A soft, sweet-smelling cold was in the house, the emanation of the damp mould of the garden, where hyacinths bathed their purples and yellows in the white flood of the moon—of the twinkling night air, cold and clear as water—of the fields with their brown moist ribs and clumps of violets.
Thyrza’s room was full of light, for the westering moon hung over Starnash like a sickle, and the fields showed grey against their hedges and the huddled woods. She undressed without a candle, so bright was the moon-dazzle on her window, and after saying her prayers climbed into bed, where little Will now lay in his father’s place. Once more she tried to picture that his head was Tom’s, and that her husband lay beside her, while Will slept in his cradle, as he had slept when Tom was at home. But the illusion faltered—Will was so small, and Tom was so big in spite of his stockiness, and took up so much more room, making the mattress cant under him, whereas Will lay on it as lightly as a kitten. However, she did not badly need the comfort of make-believe, for her sense of Tom’s love was so real, so intense, and so sweet, that it filled all the empty corners of her heart, making her forget the empty corners of her bed. She lay with one arm flung out towards the baby, the other curved against her side, while her hair spread over the pillow like a bed of celandines, and the moonlight drew in soft gleams and shadows the outlines of her breast.
She lay very still—nearly as still as Tom was lying in the light of the same moon.... But not quite so still, for the stillness of the living is never so perfect, so untroubled as the stillness of the dead.
Worge knew nearly as soon as the Shop, for Nell, running down after breakfast to buy tobacco for her father, found the blinds still drawn. The door was unlocked, however, so she went in and called her sister-in-law. There was no answer, and, vaguely alarmed, she went upstairs, to find Thyrza sitting on the unmade bed, still wearing the print wrapper she had slipped on when the shop-bell rang during her dressing.
“I must go and tell his mother,” she kept repeating, when Nell had read the telegram, and had set about, with true female instinct, to make her a cup of tea.
“Don’t you worry over that, dear—I’ll tell her.”
“Reckon he’d sooner I did.”
“No—no; it would be such a strain for you. I’ll go when I’ve made your tea.”
At that moment little Will woke up, and cried for his breakfast—his mother had forgotten him for the first time since he was born. Nell welcomed the distraction, though her heart tightened as she saw Thyrza’s arms sweep to the child, and quiver while she held him with his little cool tear-dabbled cheek against her own so tearless and so dry. Nell left her with the boy at her breast, a big yellow hank of hair adrift upon her shoulder, and her eyes staring from under the tangle, fixed, strangely dark, strangely bright, as if their grief were both a shadow and an illumination.
She herself ran back on her self-inflicted errand, all her being merged into the one pain of knowing that in ten minutes she would have turned a jogging peace to bitterness, and bankrupted her mother’s life of its chief treasure. She saw herself as a flame leaping from one burning house to set another light.
Mrs. Beatup’s reception of the news held both the expected and the unexpected.
“I knew it,” she said stonily—“I felt it—I felt it in my boans. And I toald him, too—I told him, poor soul, as he’d never come back, and now he’ll never come, surelye.” Then she said suddenly—“I mun go to her.”
“Go to whom, mother dear?”
“Thyrza. He’d want it ... and reckon she feels it even wuss than me.”
Nothing could dissuade her, and off she went, to comfort the woman with whom she had so long played tug-of-war for her son.
Nell stayed behind in the dreary house, where it seemed as if things slunk and crept. It was holiday-time, so Zacky was at home, sobbing in a corner of the haystack, crying on and on monotonously till he scarcely knew what he cried for, then suddenly charmed out of his grief by a big rat that popped out of the straw and ran across his legs. Elphick and Juglery mumbled and grumbled together in the barn, and talked of the shame of a yeoman dying out of his bed, and cast deprecating eyes on the indecency of Harry, dark against the sky on the ribbed swell of the Street field, making his late sowings with the new boy at his heels. Up and down the furrows went Harry, with his head hung low, in his ears the mutter of the guns, so faint on the windless April noon that he sometimes thought they were just the sorrowful beating of his own heart—up and down, scattering seed into the earth, leaving his token of life in the fields he loved before he was himself taken up and cast, vital and insignificant as a seed, into the furrows of Aceldama or the Field of Blood....
Mus’ Beatup sat crouched over the fire, the tears every now and then welling up in his eyes, and sometimes overflowing on his cheeks, whence he wiped them away with the back of his hand. “’Tis enough to maake a man taake to drink,” he muttered to himself—“this is wot drives men to drink, surelye.” Every now and then he looked up at the clock.
The clock struck twelve, and the Rifle Volunteer called over the fields:
“Come, farmer, and have a pot with me. You’ve lost a son in your War—there were no sons lost in mine, but pots of beer are good for joy or sorrow. Come and forget that boy for five minutes, how he looked and what he said to you, forget this War through which good yeomen die out of their beds, and drink with the Volunteer, who drilled and marched and camped and did every other warlike thing save fighting, and died between his sheets.”
Mus’ Beatup groped for his stick. Then he shook his head rather sadly. “The boy’s scarce cold in his grave. Reckon I mun wait a day or two before I disremember his last words to me.”
Mrs. Beatup did not come home till after supper, and went to bed almost at once. She felt fagged and tottery, and there was a shrivelled, fallen look about her face. When she was in bed, she could not sleep, but lay watching the moon travel across the room, lighting first the mirror, then the wall, then her own head, then maaster’s, then climbing away up the chimney like a ghost. Every now and then she fell into a little, light dose, so thridden with dreams that it was scarcely sleeping.
In these dreams Tom was always a child, in her arms, or at her feet, or spannelling about after the manner of small boys with tops and string. She did not dream of him as grown, and this was the basis of her new agreement with Thyrza. Thyrza could never think of him as a child, for she had never seen him younger than eighteen; all her memories were concentrated in his few short years of manhood, and his childhood belonged to his mother. So his mother and his wife divided his memory up between them, and each thought she had the better part.
Mrs. Beatup wondered if anyone—Bill Putland or Mus’ Archie—would write and tell her about Tom’s end. So far she had no idea how he had died, and her imagination crept tearfully round him, asking little piteous questions of the darkness—Had he suffered much? Had he asked for her? Had he wanted her?—Oh, reckon he had wanted her, and she had not been there, she had not known that he was dying, she had been pottering round after her household, cooking and washing up and sweeping and dusting, and thinking of him as alive and well, while all the time he was perhaps crying out for her in the mud of No Man’s Land....
The tears rolled down her cheeks in the darkness that followed the setting of the moon. Was it for this that she had borne him in hope and anguish?—that he should die alone, away from her, like a dog, in the mud?... She saw the mud, he had so often told her of it, she saw it sucking and oozing round him like the mud outside the cowhouse door; she saw the milky puddles ... she saw them grow dark and streaked with blood. Then, just as her heart was breaking, she pictured him in the bare clean ward of a hospital, as she had seen him at Eastbourne, with a kind nurse to relieve his last pain and take down his last little messages. Oh, someone was sure to write to Tom’s mother and tell her how he had died, and perhaps send her a message from him.
The daylight crept into the room, stabbing like a finger under the blind, and with it her restlessness increased. Then a pool of sunshine gleamed at the side of the bed. She felt that she could not lie any longer, so climbed out slowly from under the blankets. She tried not to disturb her husband, but she was too unwieldy for a noiseless rising, and she heard him turn over and mutter, asking her what she meant by “waaking a man to his trouble”—then falling asleep again.
She went down to the kitchen, to find Harry, his eyes big and blurred with sleep, just going to set about his business in the yard. Moved by a quake of tenderness for this surviving son, she made him a cup of cocoa, and insisted on his drinking it before he went out to work. Then she did her own scrubbing with more care than usual—“Reckon we must kip the farm up, now he’s agone.” Urged by the same thought she went out to the Dutch barn and mixed the chicken food, then opened the hen-houses, feeling in the warm nests for eggs.
By now the sun was high, a big blazing pan slopping fire over the roofs and into the ponds. The air was full of sounds—crowings, cacklings, cluckings, the scurry of fowls, the stamping of horses, and then the whining hiss of milk into zinc pails. Hoofs thudded in the lane, the call of a girl came from a distant field, all the country of the Four Roads was waking to life and work, faltering no more than light and darkness because one of its sons had died for the fields he used to plough. Wheels crunched in the drive, and then came the postman’s knock. Mrs. Beatup put down her trug of meal, and waddled off towards the house ... perhaps a letter had come about Tom; it was rather early yet, still, perhaps it had come.
But Harry had already been to the door, and shook his head when she asked if there was anything for her.
“Thur’s naun.”
“Naun fur none of us?”
“Only fur me.”
She saw that he was carrying a long, official-looking envelope, and that his hand was clenched round it, as if he held a knife.
“Wot’s that?”
“My calling-up paapers.”
Tom was not the only local casualty that week. Bourner heard of the death of his eldest son, a youth who had somehow squeezed himself out to the front at the age of seventeen; the baker at Bodle Street lost his lad, Stacey Collbran of Satanstown had died of wounds, and the late postman at Brownbread Street was reported missing. All these had been struck down together on the ravaged hills round Wytschaete, where the Eighteenth Sussex had for long hours held a trench which the German guns had pounded to a furrow. In this furrow the body of Tom Beatup lay with the bodies of other Sussex chaps, hostages to shattered Flanders earth for the inviolate Sussex fields.
Mrs. Beatup heard about it from Mus’ Archie, who wrote, as she had expected, while Bill Putland wrote to Thyrza. Tom had been shot through the head. His death must have been painless and instantaneous, the Lieutenant told his mother. Then he went on to say how much they had all liked Tom in the platoon, how popular he had been with the men and how the officers had appreciated his unfailing good-humour and reliableness. “All soldiers grumble, as you probably know, but I never met one who grumbled less than Beatup; and you could always depend on him to do what was wanted. We shall all miss him more than I can say, but he died bravely in open battle, and we all feel very proud of him.”
“Proud”—that was the word they were all throwing at her now: Mus’ Archie, the curate, even the minister. They said, “You must be very proud of Tom,” just as if all the age-old instincts of her breed did not generate a feeling of shame for one who died out of his bed. Good yeomen died between their sheets, and her son had died out in the mud, like a sheep or a dog—and yet she must be proud of him!
Thyrza was proud—she said as much between her tears. She said that Tom had died like a hero, fighting for his wife and his child.
“He died for England,” said Mr. Poullett-Smith.
“He died for Sunday Street,” said the Rev. Mr. Sumption. “I reckon that as his eyestrings cracked he saw the corner by the Forge and the oasts of Egypt Farm.”
It appeared that Tom had died for a great many things, but in her heart Mrs. Beatup guessed that it was really a very little thing that he had died for—
“Reckon all he saw then wur our faaces,” she said to herself.
As there had been so many local deaths, both now and during the winter, it struck the curate to hold a memorial service in the church at Brownbread Street. He knew how the absence of a funeral, of any possibility of paying mortuary honour to the loved ones, would add to the grief of those left behind. So he hastily summoned a protesting and bewildered choir to practise ?terna Christi Munera, and announced a requiem for the following Friday.
Mr. Sumption saw in this one more attempt of the church to “get the pull over him,” and resolved to contest the advantage. He too would have a memorial service, conducted on godly Calvinistic lines; there should be no Popish prayers for the dead or vain confidence in their eternal welfare, just a sober recollection before God and preparation for judgment.
It was perhaps a tacit confession of weakness that Mr. Sumption did not offer this attraction as a rival to the Church service, but planned to have it later in the same day, so that those with a funeral appetite could attend both. Experience had taught him that what he had to depend on was not so much his flock’s conviction as their lack of conviction. The Particular Baptists in Sunday Street, those, that is to say, who for conscience’ sake would never worship outside the Bethel, would not fill two pews. He depended for the rest of his congregation on the straying sheep of Ecclesia Anglicana, of the Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, Ebenezers, Bible Christians, Congregationalists, and other sects that stuck tin roofs about the parish fields.
It occurred to him that perhaps now was his great chance to scatter the rival shepherds, so made his preparations with elaborate care, boldly facing the handicaps his conscience imposed by forbidding him to use decorations, anthems, or instrumental music. He even had a few handbills printed at his own expense, and canvassed a hopeful popularity by rightly diagnosing the complaint of some sick ewes belonging to Mus’ Putland.
On Thursday evening he sat in his room at the Horselunges, preparing his sermon. Of course his sermons were not written, but he took great pains with their preparation under heads and points. He felt that this occasion demanded a special effort, and it was unfortunate that he felt all muddled and crooked, his thoughts continually springing away from their discipline of heads and racing off on queer adventures, scarcely agreeable to Calvinistic theology.
He thought of those dead boys, some of whom he knew well and others whom he knew but slightly, and he pictured them made perfect by suffering, buying themselves the Kingdom of Heaven by their blood. He knew that his creed gave him no right to do so—Christ died for the elect, and no man can squeeze his way into salvation by wounds and blood. And yet these boys were crucified with Christ.... He saw all the crosses of Flanders, a million graves.... Perhaps there was a back way to the Kingdom, a path of pain and sacrifice by which sinners won the gate....
He rebuked himself, and bent again to his work. The setting sun poured in from the west, making the little room, with its faded, peeling walls, and mangy furniture, a tub of swimming light. Mr. Sumption had got down to his Fourthly when his thoughts went off again, and this time after a boy who was not dead. It was a couple of months since he had heard from Jerry, and the letter had been unsatisfactory, though by this time he should have learned not to expect so much from Jerry’s letters. He lifted his head from the paper with a sigh, and, chin propped on hand, gazed out of the window to where bars of heavy crimson cloud reefed the blue bay of light. He remembered an evening nearly a year ago, when he and Jerry had sat by the window of a poor lodging-house room in Kemp Town, and felt nearer to each other than before in their lives....
“Reckon he can’t help it—reckon he’s just a vessel of wrath.”
He bit his tongue as a cure for weakness, and for another ten minutes bobbed and fumed over his notes. The sermon was not going well. He had taken for his text: “Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand; a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains.” He told the congregation that their grief for the death of these young men was but part of the universal woe, a spark of that furnace which should devour the world. Melting together in Doomsday fires the Book of Revelation and the Minor Prophets, he pointed out how the Scriptures had been fulfilled ... the Beast, the False Prophet, the Army from the North, the Star called Wormwood, the Woman on Seven Hills, the Vision of Four Horns, the Crowns of Joshua, the Flying Roll, all these were in the world to-day, Signs in the rolling clouds of smoke that poured from the burning fiery furnace, where only the Children of God could walk unharmed. “And the Sign of the Son of Man shall be in the heavens....”
Here it was that again his thoughts became treacherous to his theme. Instead of the Sign of the Son of Man appearing in the heavens, he seemed to see it rising out of the earth, the crosses on the million graves of Flanders. Could it be that Christ was already come? ... come in the brave and patient sufferings of boys, who died that the world might live?... “It is expedient that one man should die for the people.” He drove away the thought as a blasphemy, and stooped once more to his paper, while his finger rubbed under the lines of his big Bible beside him.
“Sixthly: The Crowns of Joshua. Satan at his right hand. ‘The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan.’ The promise of the Branch. The promise of the Temple. But all must first be utterly destroyed. ‘I will utterly consume all things, saith the Lord.’ Don’t think the War will end before everything is destroyed. ‘That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness.’ The hope of the Elect. ’I will bring the third part through fire.’ ...”
There was the rattle and jar of crockery outside the door, and the next minute Mrs. Hubble kicked it open, and brought in the minister’s supper of bread and cocoa. She set it down, ruthlessly sweeping aside his books and paper, and then took a telegram out of her apron pocket.
“This has just come, and the girl’s waiting for an answer.”
Telegrams came only on one errand in the country of the Four Roads, and Mrs. Hubble felt sure that this was to announce either the wounds or death of Jerry. It is true that he might be coming home on leave, but in that case she reckoned he would never trouble to send a telegram—he would just turn up, and give her his room to sweep and his bed to make all on the minute.
She narrowly watched the minister as he read it—if it brought bad news she would like to be able to give the village a detailed account of his reception of it. But he made no sign—only struck her for the first time as looking rather stupid. It was queer that she had never noticed before what a heavy, blunted kind of face he had.
“Any answer?”
He shook his head, and put the telegram face downwards on the tray. Mrs. Hubble flounced out and banged the door.
For some minutes after she had gone Mr. Sumption sat motionless, his arm dangling at his sides, his eyes fixed rather vacantly on the steam rising from the cocoa-jug. The sun had dipped behind the meadow-hills of Bird-in-Eye, and only a few red, fiery rays glowed on the ceiling. Mr. Sumption picked up the telegram and read it again.
“Deeply regret to inform you that Private J. M. Sumption has died at the front.”
He felt weak, boneless, as if his joints had been smitten asunder. Something hot and heavy seemed to press down his skull. He could not think, and yet the inhibition was not a respite, but a torment. His ears sang. Every now and then he tried pitifully to collect himself, but failed. Jerry dead ... Jerry dead ... then suddenly his head fell forward on his hands, and he began to cry, first weakly, then stormily, noisily, his whole body shaking.
The sobs stopped as suddenly as they had begun, but the brain-pressure had been relieved, and he could now think a little. He saw, as from a great way off, himself before the telegram came—he saw that as he planned that memorial service, prepared that elegiac sermon, there had run in his veins a fiery, subtle pride that he, at least, was father of a living man. He had not seen it at the time, but he saw it now—now that his pride had been trampled and he himself was in the same abyss with the souls he was to comfort. He too was father of the dead; Jerry was dead—at last and for ever beyond the reach of his help, his efforts, even his prayers ... the son of the woman from Ihornden.
The room was almost in darkness now; fiery lights moved and shifted, and by their glow he read the telegram over again, for at the bottom of his heart was always a sick, insane thought that he must be mistaken, that this blow could not have fallen, that Jerry must still be somewhere alive and up to no good. But the message was there, and now on this third reading, he noticed something peculiar about the phrasing of it—“Private Sumption has died at the front.” Surely this was not the usual form of announcement. He had seen several such messages of woe, and they had read “killed in action” or “died of wounds.” He had never seen one put exactly like this.
However, it was not of any real importance. Jerry was dead; that was the only vital, necessary fact. But he would write to Mus’ Archie for particulars.... The lamp was on the table, and he lit it, pushing aside the unused supper-tray and the littered sermon-paper.
He wrote on into the night. He found a certain crookedness in his ideas which made him tear up several efforts—he once even found himself writing to Jerry, a proceeding which struck him with peculiar horror. The hours ticked on; the big constellations swung solemnly across the uncurtained window (luckily Policeman was in bed, and did not see the lozenge of gold lamplight that lay in Mrs. Hubble’s backyard). Inside the room the cat prowled to and fro, miaowling to be let out for a scamper on the barn-roofs—at last, he jumped on the table and, upsetting the cocoa, lapped his fill and retired to dignified repose. The mice tapped on the glass front of their cage with little pink hands like anemones.... Mr. Sumption for once did not notice his animals; he sat brooding over the table long after he had finished writing. Then, as the sky was fading into light, and big greyish-white clouds like mushrooms were banking towards the east, he dropped asleep, his head fallen over the back of his chair, with the mouth a little open, his arms hanging at his sides.
The daylight fought with the lamplight, and as with a sudden crimson rift it won the victory, Mr. Sumption woke—from dreams full of the roaring of a forge and his own arm swung above his head, as in the old days at Bethersden. He sat for a few moments rubbing his eyes, feeling very stiff and cold. Then he realised that he was hungry. The supper-tray was still before him, swimming in cocoa. He ate the bread—dry, because the minister was one of those greedy souls who devour their week’s ration of butter in the first three days, and neither jam nor cheese was to be had in Sunday Street, even if he could have afforded them. When he had eaten all the bread, he began to feel thirsty. He longed for a cup of tea. Overhead in the attic there was a trampling, which told him that Mrs. Hubble would soon be down to boil the kettle. He hung about the stairhead till she appeared—shouting back at her father-in-law, who would not get up, and generally in a bad mood for her lodger’s service.
However, to his surprise, she was quite obliging—he did not know what his night had made of him. She hurried down to the kitchen to light the fire, and bade him come too and warm himself. Mr. Sumption would have preferred to be alone, but he was beginning to feel very cold, and a kind of weakness was upon him, so he came and sat by her fire, and drank gratefully the big, strong cup of tea she gave him.
“You’ve had bad news of Mus’ Jerry, I reckon,” said Mrs. Hubble.
Mr. Sumption nodded, and warmed his hands round the cup. He could not bring himself to say that Jerry was dead.
“This is a tar’ble war,” continued Mrs. Hubble, “and I reckon those are best off wot are put out of it”—this was to find out what really had happened to Jerry. “I often think,” she added piously, “of the happy lot of the dead—no more trouble, no more pain, no more worriting after absent friends, no more standing in queues. I often think, minister, as it’s a pity we aun’t all dead.”
“Maybe, maybe,” said Mr. Sumption.
He rose and walked restlessly out of the kitchen. He both wanted companionship and yet could not bear it. When would the day end—the day that streamed and blew and shone over Jerry’s grave?... He was going upstairs, when he heard a shuffle of paper behind him, and saw that a letter had been pushed under the door. The post came early to Sunday Street, and Mr. Sumption ran down again, full of an eager, futile hope. The letter bore the familiar field postmark, and at first he thought it was from Jerry, and that he was going to suffer that rending, ecstatic agony of reading letters from the dead. But as he picked it up he saw that the writing was not Jerry’s, but in a hand he did not know. Whose could it be?—whosoever it was must be writing about his son. He tore it open as he went up to his room, and at the bottom of the folded paper saw, “Yours, with sincerest sympathy, Archibald Lamb.”
Of course, it was Mr. Archie—writing to Jerry’s father as he had written to Tom’s mother. The minister had had very little to do with the Squire, except on one occasion, when he had met him riding home from a day’s hunting, on a badly-lamed horse, and had applied a fomentation which Mr. Archie said had worked a wonderful cure. Now there were two pages covered with his big, firm handwriting. Mr. Sumption pulled them out of the envelope, and from between them a grimy piece of paper fell to the ground, scrawled over with the familiar smudge of indelible pencil.
Mr. Sumption grabbed it, letting Mr. Archie’s letter fall in its stead. As he began to read it, he wondered if it had been found on Jerry’s body—it was certainly more smeary and stained than usual. After he had read a little, he sat down in his chair. His hand shook, and he stooped his head nearer and nearer to the writing as if his sight were failing him.
“Dear Father,
“By the time you get this I will be out of the way of troubling you any more. I am in great trouble. Mr. Archie said perhaps not tell you, but I said I would rather you knew. It is like this. I kept away in —— last time we went up to the trenches, with a lady friend, you may have heard of. Beatup says he told you. Well, I am to be shot for it. I was court-martialled, and they said to be shot. Dear Father, this will make you very sorry, but it cannot be helped, and I am not worth it. I have been a very bad son to you, and done many wicked things besides. Things always were against me. Mr. Archie has been very kind, and so has the pardry here. Mr. Archie is sitting with me to-night, and he says he will stay all night, as I am feeling very much upset at this great trouble. I am leaving you my ring made out of a piece of Zep and my purse, only I am afraid there is no money in it. Please remember me to Ivy Beatup, and say if it had not been for her I should not be here now. I think that is all.
“Ever your loving son,
“Jeremiah Meridian Sumption.
“P.S.—The pardry says Jesus will forgive my sins. Thank you very much, dear father, for those fags you sent. I am smoking one now.”
It was nearly half an hour later that Mr. Sumption picked up Archie Lamb’s letter. It caught his eye at last as he stared at the floor, and he picked it up and unfolded it. Perhaps it would give him a grain of comfort.
The lieutenant afterwards described it as the most sickening job he had ever had in his life. The usual letter of condolence and explanation, such as he had over and over again written to parents and wives, became an easy task compared with this. Here he had to deal not only with sorrow, but with disgrace. He could not write, as he had so often written, “We are proud of him.” He could not refer back with congratulations to a good record—Jerry had died as he had lived, a bad soldier, a disgrace to the uniform he wore, and there seemed very little that could be decently said about him.
However, the innate kind-heartedness and good feeling of the young officer pulled him successfully through an ordeal that would have staggered many better wits. He began by explaining his reluctance, and that he was writing only because Jerry wished it—though, perhaps, it was better, after all, that his father should know the truth. “As a matter of fact, it is not so dreadful as it sounds. Your son is not to die so much as a punishment as a warning. The shooting of deserters is chiefly a deterrent—and your son is dying so that other men may be warned by his fate to stick to the ranks and do their duty as soldiers; therefore you may say that, indirectly, he is dying for his country. Moreover, his disappearance was not due to cowardice, but to other reasons which you probably know of. I don’t know if this mitigates it to you, it certainly does to me. Sumption is not a coward. I have seen him in action, and I repeat that he is as plucky as any one.
“I am sitting with him now, and I want to make your mind easy about the end. When I have finished writing this he will be given his supper, food and a hot drink. Then he will go to sleep. He will be roused just ten minutes before the time, and hurried off, still half-asleep—he will never be quite awake. There will be no awful apprehension and agony, such as I expect you imagine—please don’t worry about that.
“I have not been able to get him a padre of his own church, but a very good Congregational man has been with him, and has, of course, respected your convictions in every way.
“Now before I end up, I want to say again that it isn’t really as bad as it looks—the disgrace, I mean. Think of your son as having died so that other men should take warning by him and not desert the ranks, and therefore, in that sense he has died for his country.”
Then Archie Lamb asked Mr. Sumption to write to him if there was anything more he wanted to know, and said that he would forward Jerry’s purse and ring at the first opportunity. After the signature was added: “It is all over now, and happened as I told you. He was still half asleep, and suffered practically nothing.”
For some minutes Mr. Sumption sat with his head buried in his hands. Before his closed eyes he saw pass the last pitiful act of Jerry’s tragedy. He saw him standing defiant and furtive—he would always look defiant and furtive, even if half awake—with his back to the wall ... then—cr-r-rack!—and he would fall down at the foot of it in a crumpled heap, that perhaps still moved a little.... But he had suffered nothing ... practically nothing....
Then he saw Jerry standing all his life with his back to a wall, every man armed against him. He had but died as he had lived. Even his own father had been against him, had misused and misunderstood him. There had never been anyone to understand that mysterious, troubled heart, anyone who could have understood it—except, perhaps, Meridian Hearn, his mother—and that queer people of defiant furtive ways, whose dark blood had run in his veins and been his ruin. Meridian Hearn should not have married the gaujo preacher from Bethersden—she should have married one of her own race, and then her child would have lived among those of like passions as he, and not among strangers, who had mobbed him and pecked his eyes out, like sparrows attacking a foreign bird.
“Oh, Meridian, Meridian!—our boy’s dead....”
There was the familiar clatter and kick outside the door, and Mrs. Hubble came in with the breakfast tray. Her face was crimson and very much excited, though she tried to work it into lines of woe; for she had at last heard the news about Jerry, from Gwen Bourner, who had heard it from Mrs. Bill Putland, who had had a letter from her husband that morning. All Sunday Street now knew that Jerry Sumption had been shot as a deserter, having given the 18th Sussex the slip on the eve of the action in which Tom Beatup and Fred Bourner and Stacey Collbran and other local boys had given up their limbs and lives—he had gone to a French woman, and been found in a blouse and wooden shoes. The platoon would not miss him much, Bill Putland said; but he was unaccountable sorry for his father.
So, to do her justice, was Mrs. Hubble. She had put an extra spoonful of tea in his tea-pot, and had boiled him an egg, a luxury which was not included in his boarding fees. Moreover, she gave him a pitying glance, as she swept the litter of sermon-paper to one side.
“Will you want me to tell people?” she asked him.
“Tell people what?” His voice came throatily, like an old man’s.
“Well, I reckon you woan’t be preaching to-night?”
Something in her voice made him start up, and pull himself together. He saw her squinting compassionately at him, with the corner of her apron in readiness.
“Preach!—Why do you ask that?”
“I’ve heard about your loss. I reckon you woan’t be feeling in heart for preaching.”
He did not reply.
“I cud easy stick up a notice on the chapel door,” she continued, “and all the folkses hereabouts ud understand. They’d never expect you to spik after wot’s happened.”
“Woman!—what has happened?”
He spoke so suddenly and so loudly, that Mrs. Hubble started, and dropped the corner of her apron.
“I—I ... well, we’ve all of us heard, Mus’ Sumption....”
“Heard what?”
“I—I.... Doan’t look at me like that, minister, for the Lord’s sake.”
“Speak then. What have you all heard?”
Mrs. Hubble was recovering from her alarm and beginning to resent his manner.
“Well, reckon we’ve heard wot you’ve heard—as your boy’s bin shot fur deserting his regiment; and no one expects you to come and preach in chapel after that.”
A wave of burning crimson went over Mr. Sumption’s face, so that Mrs. Hubble said afterwards she thought as he’d go off in a stroke. Then he was suddenly white again, and speaking quietly, but in a voice that somehow frightened her more than his shouting.
“I shall certainly preach to-night. I will not have the service cancelled. Tell everyone who asks you that I shall certainly preach.”
“Very good, sir.”
She edged towards the door.
“Mrs. Hubble! Stop a moment. Say this, too. I am not ashamed of my son. I reckon you all think I am ashamed of him, and you are putting your heads together and clacking, and pitying me for it. But I am not ashamed. He died for England. Mr. Archie himself says it. These are his very words: Wait!”—for Mrs. Hubble was going to bolt.
“I’m waiting, Mus’ Sumption.”
“He says, ‘Think of your son as having died so that other men should take warning by him and not desert the ranks, and, therefore, in that sense he has died for his country.’ Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you can go.”
Mrs. Hubble fled.
All that morning heavy pacings over her head convinced Mrs. Hubble that the minister was preparing a wonderful sermon. She generally guessed the temper of his discourse by the weight and width of the stumpings which preceded it. To-day she could hear him, as she expressed it, all over the room ... he was kicking the fire-irons ... he had overturned his chair ... he had flung up the window and banged it down again. Obviously something great was in process, and at the same time she felt that Mr. Sumption was rather mad. It was nothing short of indecent for him to preach to-night, after what had happened—and the queer way he had spoken about Jerry, too....
By this time the whole of Sunday Street knew about Jerry. He was discussed at breakfast-tables, in barns, on doorsteps, on milking-stools. No one was surprised; indeed, most people seemed to have foretold his bad end. “I said as he’d come to no good, that gipsy’s brat.”
“A valiant minister wot can’t breed up his own son.” “Howsumdever, I’m middling sorry fur the poor chap; I’ll never disremember how he saaved that cow of mine wot wur dying of garget.” “And I’m hemmed, maaster, if he wurn’t better wud my lambing ewes than my own looker, surelye.”
On the whole, the news improved his chances of a congregation. It was a better advertisement than the notice on the church door, or even than his veterinary achievement at Egypt Farm. Some “wanted to see how he took it,” others openly admired his pluck; all were stirred by curiosity and also by compassion. During the years he had lived among them he had grown dear to them and rather contemptible. They looked down on him for his shabbiness, his poverty, his pastoral blundering, his lack of education; but they liked him for his willingness, his simplicity, his sturdy good looks, his strong muscles, his knowledge of cattle and horses.
All that morning people wavered up the street towards the Horselunges, and looked at it, and at the Bethel. Sometimes they gathered together in little groups, but always some way off. The Bethel stared blindly over the roof of the Horselunges, as if it ignored the misery huddled at its doors. No matter what might be the private sorrows of its servant, he must come to-night and preach within its walls those iron doctrines of Doomsday and Damnation in whose honour it had been built and had stood staring over the fields with the blind eyes of a corpse for a hundred years.
Towards noon Thyrza Beatup came up the street, walking briskly, with her weeds flapping behind her. It was the first time she had been out since her widowing, and people stared at her from their doors as she walked boldly up to Horselunges and knocked.
“How is poor Mus’ Sumption?” she asked Mrs. Hubble.
“Lamentaable, lamentaable,” said Mrs. Hubble, with eye and apron in conjunction.
“Well, please tell him as Mrs. Tom Beatup sends her kind remembrances and sympathy, and she reckons she knows wot he feels, feeling the saum herself.”
“Very good, Mrs. Beatup.”
“And you’ll be sure and give it all wot I said—about feeling the saum myself?”
“Oh, sartain.”
Thyrza walked off. Her face was very white and wooden. Mrs. Hubble stared after her.
“Middling pretty as golden-haired women look in them weeds.... Feels the saum as Mus’ Sumption, does she? That’s queer, seeing as Tom died lik Onward Christian Soldiers, and Jerry lik a dog. Howsumdever, I mun give her words ... maybe he’ll be fool enough to believe them.”
The day was warm and misty, without much sun. The sky above the woods was yellowish, like milk, and the air smelt of rain. But the rain did not come till evening. Mr. Poullett-Smith’s congregation assembled dry, and nobody’s black was spoiled on the way home. In spite of this, the service was not thickly attended. The advertisement which Jerry Sumption’s death had given the Bethel made those who had time or inclination for only one church-going decide to put it off until the evening. Only a few assembled to hear the curate pray that the souls they commemorated—among which he was not afraid to include Jerry—might be brought by Saint Michael, the standard-bearer, into the holy light.
On the other hand, the Bethel was crowded, and by this time it was raining hard. The air was thick with the steaming of damp clothes. The lamps shuddered and smoked in the draught of the rising wind, and the big, blinded windows were running down with rain, as if they wept for the destruction of the chapel weed....
Never had the Rev. Mr. Sumption such a congregation. Nearly the whole of Sunday Street jostled in the pews. Instead of the meagre peppering of heads, there were tight rows of them, like peas in pods. All the Beatups were there, except Nell, who had stayed at home to look after the house; even Mus’ Beatup had hobbled over on his stick. The Putlands were there, and Mrs. Bill Putland, and the Sindens and the Bourners and the Hubbles. Thyrza had come, with little Will asleep in her arms—she sat near the back, in case she should have to take him out. The Hollowbones had come from the Foul Mile and the Kadwells from Stilliands Tower; there were Collbrans from Satanstown, Viners from Puddledock, Ades from Bodle Street, and even stragglers from Brownbread Street and Dallington. Most of them had never been in the Bethel before, and it struck them as unaccountable mean, with its smoking lamps and windows flapping with dingy blinds, its pews that smelled of wood-rot, and its walls all peeled and scarred with moisture and decay.
There was a rustle and scrape as Mr. Sumption came in, through the little door behind the pulpit. Then there was silence as he stood looking down, apparently unmoved, on what must have been to him an extraordinary sight—his church crowded, full to the doors, as he had so often dreamed, but never seen. He looked pale and languid, and his eyes were like smoky lanterns. His voice also seemed to have lost its ring as he gave out the number of the psalm, and then in the prayer which followed it. Moreover, though the congregation, being mostly new, shuffled and kicked its heels disgracefully, he thumped at no one.
“Pore soul, he shudn’t ought to have tried it,” thought Thyrza to herself in her corner. “He’ll never get through.”
After the prayer, which was astonishingly nerveless for a prayer of Mr. Sumption’s, came a hymn, during which the minister sat in the pulpit, his hand over his face. Those in the front rows saw his jaws work as if he was praying. People whispered behind their Bibles—“He’s different, surelye—just lik a Church parson to-night.” “Reckon it’s changed him—knocked all the beans out of him, as you might say.” “Pore chap, he looks middling tired—reckon he finds this a tar’ble job.”
Then the singing stopped, and Mr. Sumption stood up, wearily turning over the leaves of his big Bible.
“Brethren, you will find my text in the Eleventh of John, the fiftieth verse: ‘It is expedient that one man should die for the people.’”
The sermon began with the unaccustomed flatness of the rest of the service. Mr. Sumption’s voice had lost its resonance, his arms no longer waved like windmill-sails, nor did his joints crack like dried osiers. He made his points languidly on his fingers, instead of thumping them out on the pulpit with his fist. The congregation would have been disappointed if they had not known the reason for this slackness; as things were, it was part of the spectacle. They noticed, too, a certain bitterness that crept into his speech now and then, as when he described the Chief Priests and Scribes plotting together to take refuge behind the sacrifice of Christ. “It is expedient for us ... that the whole nation perish not.”
“Brethren, I see them nodding their ugly beards together, and saying: ‘Let this young man go and die for us. One man must die for the people, and it shan’t be one of us, I reckon—we’re too important, we can’t be spared. Let us send this young man to his death. It is expedient that he should die for the nation.’”
Then suddenly he stiffened his back, bringing his open Bible together with a thud, while his voice rang out with the old clearness:
“Reckon that was what you said among yourselves when you saw the young men we’re thinking of to-night go up before the Tribunal, or volunteer at the Recruiting Office. You said to yourselves, ‘That’s right, that’s proper. It is expedient that these young men should go and die for the people. I like to see a young man go to fight for his country. I’m too old.... I’ve got a bad leg ... but I like to see the young men go.’”
For a moment he stood and glared at them, as in the old days, his eyes like coals, his big teeth bared like a fighting dog’s. Then once again his weariness dropped over him, his head hung, and his sentences ran together, husky and indistinct.
The congregation shuffled and coughed. The service required peppermint-sucking to help it through, and owing to war conditions no peppermints were forthcoming. Zacky Beatup made a rabbit out of his handkerchief and slid it over the back of the pew at Lily Sinden. Mus’ Beatup began to calculate the odds against the Bethel closing before the Rifle Volunteer. Old Mus’ Hollowbone from the Foul Mile crossed his legs and went to sleep, just as if he was sitting with the Wesleyans. Then Maudie Sinden pulled a screw of paper out of her pocket and extracted a piece of black gum—the very piece she had taken out of her mouth on entering the chapel, knowing that no sweet had ever been sucked there since Tommy Bourner was bidden “spue forth that apple of Sodom” two years ago. Thyrza had never seen a congregation so demoralised, but then she had never seen a minister so dull, so drony, so lack-lustre, so lifeless. “He shudn’t ought to have tried it, poor chap,” she murmured into the baby’s shawl.
Then suddenly Mr. Sumption’s fist came down on his Bible. The pulpit lamps shuddered, and rattled their glass shades, and the congregation started into postures of attention, as the minister glared up and down the rows of heads in the pod-like pews.
“Reckon you’ve no heart for the Gospel to-day,” he said severely. “Pray the Lord to change your hearts, as He changed my sermon. This is not the sermon I had meant to preach to you, and if you don’t like it, it is the Lord’s doing. I had for my text: ‘The day of the Lord is at hand, as the morning spread upon the mountains.’ That was my text, and I had meant to warn you all of the coming of that day, as I have so often warned you. It is a day which shall burn like an oven, and the strong man shall cry therein mightily; it is a day of darkness and gloominess, of clouds and thick darkness. Then I was going forward to show you how the Sign of the Son of Man shall be in the heavens, and how He shall appear in clouds with great glory.... But the Lord came then and smote me, and I lay as dead before Him, like Moses in the Mount. And when I came to myself, I knew that the Sign of the Son of Man is already with us here—not in heaven, but on earth—rising up out of the earth ... over there in France—the crosses of the million Christs you have crucified.”
They were all listening now. He could see their craning, attentive faces, and their kicks and coughs had died down into a rather scandalised silence.
“The million Christs you have crucified, all those boys you sent out to die for the people. You sent them in millions to die for you and for your little children, and their blood shall be on you and on your children. Oh, you stiff-necked and uncircumcised—talking of Judgment as if it was a great way off, and behold it is at your doors; and the Christ Whom you look for has come suddenly to His temple—in the suffering youth of this country—all countries—in these boys who go out and suffer and die and bleed, cheerfully, patiently, like sheep—that the whole nation perish not.
“Think of the boys you have sent, the boys we’re specially remembering here to-day. There was Tom Beatup—a good honest lad, simple and clean as a little child. He went out to fight for you, but I reckon you never woke up in your comfortable bed and said: ’There’s poor Tom Beatup, up to the loins in mud, and freezing with cold, and maybe as empty as a rusty pail.’ The thought of him never spoiled your night’s rest, and you never felt, ‘I’ve got to struggle tooth and nail to be worth his sacrificing himself like that for an old useless trug like me, and I’ll do my best to help my country at home in any way as it can be done, so as the War ull be shortened and Tom ull have a few nights less in the mud.’ That’s what you ought to have said, but I reckon you didn’t say it.
“There’s Stacey Collbran, too, who left a young sweetheart, and ull never know the love of wedded life because you had to be died for. Do you ever think of him when your Wife lies in your bosom, and say, ‘Reckon I’ll be good to my wife, since for my sake a poor chap never had his’?
“And there’s Fred Bourner, and Sid Viner, and Joe Kadwell, and Leslie Ades—they all went out to die for you, and they died, and you come here to remember them to-night; but in your hearts, which ought to be breaking with reverence and gratitude, you’re just saying, ‘It’s proper, it’s expedient that these men should die for the people, that the whole nation perish not.’
“And there’s my boy....”
The minister’s voice hung paused for a minute. He leaned over the pulpit, his hands gripping the wood till their knuckles stood out white from the coarse brown. His eyes travelled up and down the pew-pods of staring heads, as if he expected to see contradiction or mockery or surprise. But the Sunday Street face is not expressive, and except for the utter stillness, Mr. Sumption might have been reading the chapel accounts.
“There’s my boy, Jerry Sumption; Maybe you thought I wouldn’t talk of him to-night, that I’d be ashamed, that I’d never dare mention his name along of your gallant boys. Besides, you say, What’s he got to do with it? He never died for the people. But you thought wrong. I’m not ashamed to speak his name along of Tom and Stace and Fred and Sid and Joe, and he hasn’t got nothing to do with it, either. For I tell you—my boy died for your boys. He died as an example and warning to them, to save them from a like fate, and if that isn’t dying for them.... These are Mr. Archie Lamb’s very words: ’Your son is dying so that other men may be warned by his fate and stick to the ranks and do their duty as soldiers; therefore, in that sense he has died for his country.’ I reckon it seems a big thing to shoot a boy just for going off to see his girl when the company’s marching; but if it weren’t done then other boys ud stop away and the regiment go to pieces. Mr. Archie and the other officers said, ‘It is expedient that one man should die for the regiment, that the whole army perish not.’...
“No! I am not ashamed of my boy! If he was led astray at the last moment by his evil, human passions, who shall judge him?—Not I, and not you. He did not desert because he was a coward, because he funked the battle before him. Listen again to Mr. Archie Lamb; he says, ‘Sumption is not a coward—I have seen him in action, and I repeat that he is as plucky as any one.’ And he joined up as a volunteer, too—he didn’t have to be fetched, he didn’t go before the Tribunal and say he’d got a bad leg, or a bad arm, and his father couldn’t run the business without him. He joined up out of free-will and love of his country. The Army was no place for him, for his blood was the blood of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns, which knows not obedience. When he joined he risked his life not only at the hands of the enemy but at the hands of his own countrymen, and it is his own countrymen that have put him to death, ‘that the whole nation perish not.’
“I tell you, my boy died for your boys; my boy died for you, and you shall not look down on his sacrifice. Over his grave is the Sign of the Son of Man, Who gave His life as a ransom for many. To save your boys from the possibility of a disgrace such as his my boy died in shame. When they see the grave of Jerry Sumption they will say: ‘That is the grave of a man who died because he could not obey laws or control passions, because he was not master of his own blood. Therefore let us take heed by him and walk warily, and do our duty as soldiers; and if we must die, not die as he died....’ So my son died for your sons, and my son and your sons died for you; and I ask you: ‘Are you worth dying for?’”
Again the minister was silent, staring down at the rows of wooden, expressionless faces, now faintly a-sweat in the steam and heat of the Bethel. Then suddenly he burst out at them, loudly, impatiently:
“I’ll tell you the truth about yourselves; I’ll tell you if you’re worth dying for. What has this War meant to you? What have you done for this War? There’s just one answer to both questions. Nothing. While men were fighting for their own and your existence, while they were suffering horrors out there in France which you can’t think of, and if you could think of could not speak of, you were just muddling about there in your little ways, thinking of nothing but crops and prices and the little silly inconveniences you had to put up with. Ho! I reckon you never thought of the War, except when you got some cheery letter from your boy, telling you he was having the time of his life out there, or when the price of bread went up, or you had to eat margarine instead of butter, or you couldn’t get your Sunday joint. All that war meant to you was new orders about lights, and tribunals taking your farm-hands, and prices going up and food getting scarce, and the War Agricultural Committee leaving Cultivation orders. And all the time you grumbled and groused, and wrote out to your boys that you were dying of want, weakening their hearts—they who wrote you kind and cheery letters out of the gates of hell. You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You little, little souls, that only bother about the little concerns of your little parish in the middle of this great woe. The end of the world is come, and you know it not; Christ is dying for you and you heed Him not. Are you worth dying for? Are you worth living for? No—you’re scarce worth preaching at.”
By this time there were signs of animation among the pea-pods. The peas rolled from side to side, and a faint rustle of indignation came from them.
“I know why you’re here to-night,” continued Mr. Sumption. “You’ve come to gaze on me, to watch me in my trouble, to see how I take it. You haven’t come to hear the Gospel—you yawned and wriggled all the time I was preaching it. You haven’t come just to think of the dead boys—you did that in church this morning. You’re here to gaze at me, to see how I take it. Well, now you see how I take it. You see I’m not ashamed. Why should I be ashamed of my son? He’s worth a bundle of you—he’s died a better death than anyone in this church is likely to die; and if he lived a vessel of wrath, at all events he was a full vessel, not just a jug of emptiness. He lived like the wild man he was born, and he died like a poor wild animal shot down. But I am not ashamed of him. And though he died without baptism, without conversion, without assurance, I cannot and I will not believe that he is lost. Somewhere the love of God is holding him. The Lord tells me that my fatherhood is only a poor mess of His; well, in that case, I reckon He won’t cast out my lad. Willingly I’d bear his sins for him, and so I reckon Christ will bear them even for the child of wrath. Where I can love, He can love more, and since He died as a felon, reckon He feels for my poor boy. He knows what it is to stand with His back to the wall and see every man’s hand raised against Him, and every man’s tongue stuck out. And because He knows, He understands, and because He understands, He forgives. Amen.”
The windows of the Bethel shook mournfully in the wind, and the rain hissed down them, as if it shuddered and wept to hear such doctrine within its walls. But the sounds were lost in the shuffle of the rising congregation, standing up to sing the psalm.
That night the minister did not stand at the door to shake hands with the departing congregation. Beatups, Putlands, Sindens, Hubbles, Bourners, jostled their way unsaluted into the darkness, groping with umbrellas, fumbling into cloaks. But even the rain could not prevent an exchange of indignation. People formed themselves into clumps and scurried together over the wet road. From every clump voices rose in expostulation and resentment.
“To think as I’d live to be insulted in church!”
“Reckon he’d never dare say half that in a plaace whur folkses’ tongues wurn’t tied to answer him.”
“Maade out as we thought only of our insides,” said Mrs. Sinden. “Seemingly he never thinks of his, when all the village knows he wur trying the other day to make Mrs. Tom give him a tin of salmon fur ninepence instead of one-and-three.”
“And she did it, too,” said Mrs. Putland.
“It’s twice,” said Mrs. Beatup, “as he called me stiff-necked and uncircumcised, and I reckon I aun’t neither.”
“And he said I wur lik an empty jug,” said Mus’ Beatup.
“And his Jerry’s worth a bundle of us,” laughed Mus’ Sinden.
“Wot vrothers me,” wheezed old Father-in-law Hubble, “is that to the best of my hearing I heard him maake out as Christ died fur all.”
“And why shudn’t he?” asked Mus’ Putland.
“Because Mus’ Sumption’s paid seventy pound a year to teach as Christ died for the Elect, and so he always has done till to-night.”
“Well, seemingly thur wurn’t much Elect in gipsy Jerry, so he had to change his mind about that. Reckon he had to git Jerry saaved somehow.”
“But he’d no call to chaange the Divine council—I’ve half a mind to write to the Assembly about it.”
“Wot sticks in my gizzard,” said Mus’ Bourner, “is that to hear him you’d think as we’re all to blame for Jerry’s going wrong, while I tell you it’s naun but his own mismanaging and bad breeding-up of the boy. ’Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’ That’s Bible, but it’s sense too. It’s all very praaper for Minister to stick by the young boy now and say he aun’t ashaumed of him, but if only he’d brought him up Christian and not spoiled him, reckon he’d never have bin called upon to stand thur and say it.”
There were murmurs and assenting “Surelyes.”
“He spoiled that boy summat tar’ble,” continued the smith. “Cudn’t say No to him, and let him have his head justabout shocking. Then maybe he’d git angry when the young chap had disgraced him, and hit him about a bit. But thur aun’t no sense in that, nuther. Wot Jerry wanted wur a firm, light hand and no whip—and Mus’ Sumption ud have been the fust to see it if Jerry had bin a horse.”
“Well, he’s got his punishment now,” said Mrs. Putland. “Poor soul, my heart bleeds for him.”
“Howsumdever, he’d no call to insult us,” said Mrs. Sinden, “and I fur one ull never set foot agaun in that Bethel as long as I live.”
Thyrza Beatup did not walk with the others. Her grief was still too raw, and Mr. Sumption’s words about Tom had made her cry. She carried Will under her cloak, walking quickly over the wet ruts, home to the fire before which she would undress him and put him to bed. Mr. Sumption’s sermon had not had the same effect on her as on the others—for one thing, she thought of Tom more than of Jerry; for another, her feeling towards the minister was of pure compassion. Poor chap! how he must have suffered, how he must have hated all those Who mourned honourably, who grieved for heroes and saints, such as her Tom. What would she have felt, she wondered, if Tom had died like Jerry?...
She wished she could have seen Mr. Sumption after the service, and asked him in to a bit of supper. Poor soul! one could always comfort him through his inside. She was glad Tom had been to see him on his last leave ... he had spoken very nicely of Tom.
She came to the little house, all blurred into the darkness, with the rain scudding before it. A pale, blue light hung under the clouds from the hidden moon, and was faintly reflected in the gleaming wet of the roadway. Thyrza fumbled for her key, and let herself into the shop. The firelight leaped to meet her. As she turned to shut the door, she saw a man go quickly past, head sloped, shoulders hunched against the Wind.