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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tatterdemalion, by John Galsworthy
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Tatterdemalion
+
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2009  [eBook #28089]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TATTERDEMALION***
+
+
+E-text prepared by D. Alexander, Barbara Kosker, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from digital
+material generously made available by Internet Archive
+(http://www.archive.org/index.php)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/tatterdemalion00galsiala
+
+
+
+
+
+TATTERDEMALION
+
+by
+
+JOHN GALSWORTHY
+
+
+"Gentillesse cometh fro' God allone."
+--_Chaucer_
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+1920
+
+Copyright, 1917, 1918, 1920, by
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+Copyright, 1915, 1916, by The Ridgway Company
+Copyright, 1919, by The New Republic Publishing Co., Inc.
+Copyright, 1914, 1916, 1919, by The Atlantic Monthly Co.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+VILLA RUBEIN, and Other Stories
+THE ISLAND PHARISEES
+THE MAN OF PROPERTY
+THE COUNTRY HOUSE
+FRATERNITY
+THE PATRICIAN
+THE DARK FLOWER
+THE FREELANDS
+BEYOND
+FIVE TALES
+SAINT'S PROGRESS
+TATTERDEMALION
+
+A COMMENTARY
+A MOTLEY
+THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY
+THE LITTLE MAN, and Other Satires
+A SHEAF
+ANOTHER SHEAF
+ADDRESSES IN AMERICA: 1919
+
+
+PLAYS: FIRST SERIES
+_and Separately_
+
+THE SILVER BOX
+JOY
+STRIFE
+
+
+PLAYS: SECOND SERIES
+_and Separately_
+
+THE ELDEST SON
+THE LITTLE DREAM
+JUSTICE
+
+
+PLAYS: THIRD SERIES
+_and Separately_
+
+THE FUGITIVE
+THE PIGEON
+THE MOB
+
+
+A BIT O' LOVE
+
+MOODS, SONGS, AND DOGGERELS
+MEMORIES. Illustrated
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+TO
+ELIZABETH LUCAS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   PART I.--OF WAR-TIME
+                                                  PAGE
+
+       I. THE GREY ANGEL                             3
+
+      II. DEFEAT                                    27
+
+     III. FLOTSAM AND JETSAM                        51
+
+      IV. THE BRIGHT SIDE                           75
+
+       V. "CAFARD"                                 105
+
+      VI. RECORDED                                 117
+
+     VII. THE RECRUIT                              125
+
+    VIII. THE PEACE MEETING                        137
+
+      IX. "THE DOG IT WAS THAT DIED"               147
+
+       X. IN HEAVEN AND EARTH                      169
+
+      XI. THE MOTHER STONE                         173
+
+     XII. POIROT AND BIDAN                         179
+
+    XIII. THE MUFFLED SHIP                         187
+
+     XIV. HERITAGE                                 191
+
+      XV. 'A GREEN HILL FAR AWAY'                  199
+
+
+   PART II.--OF PEACE-TIME
+
+       I. SPINDLEBERRIES                           209
+
+      II. EXPECTATIONS                             227
+
+     III. MANNA                                    239
+
+      IV. A STRANGE THING                          255
+
+       V. TWO LOOKS                                271
+
+      VI. FAIRYLAND                                279
+
+     VII. THE NIGHTMARE CHILD                      283
+
+    VIII. BUTTERCUP-NIGHT                          295
+
+
+
+
+TATTERDEMALION
+
+
+
+
+_PART I_
+
+OF WAR-TIME
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE GREY ANGEL
+
+
+Her predilection for things French came from childish recollections of
+school-days in Paris, and a hasty removal thence by her father during
+the revolution of '48, of later travels as a little maiden, by
+diligence, to Pau and the then undiscovered Pyrenees, to a Montpellier
+and a Nice as yet unspoiled. Unto her seventy-eighth year, her French
+accent had remained unruffled, her soul in love with French gloves and
+dresses; and her face had the pale, unwrinkled, slightly aquiline
+perfection of the 'French marquise' type--it may, perhaps, be doubted
+whether any French marquise ever looked the part so perfectly.
+
+How it came about that she had settled down in a southern French town,
+in the summer of 1914, only her roving spirit knew. She had been a widow
+ten years, which she had passed in the quest of perfection; all her life
+she had been haunted by that instinct, half-smothered in ministering to
+her husband, children, and establishments in London and the country.
+Now, in loneliness, the intrinsic independence of her soul was able to
+assert itself, and from hotel to hotel she had wandered in England,
+Wales, Switzerland, France, till now she had found what seemingly
+arrested her. Was it the age of that oldest of Western cities, that
+little mother of Western civilisation, which captured her fancy? Or did
+a curious perversity turn her from more obvious abodes, or was she kept
+there by the charm of a certain church which she would enter every day
+to steep herself in mellow darkness, the scent of incense, the drone of
+incantations, and quiet communion with a God higher indeed than she had
+been brought up to, high-church though she had always been? She had a
+pretty little apartment, where for very little--the bulk of her small
+wealth was habitually at the service of others--she could manage with
+one maid and no "fuss." She had some "nice" French friends there, too.
+But more probably it was simply the war which kept her there, waiting,
+like so many other people, for it to be over before it seemed worth
+while to move and re-establish herself. The immensity and wickedness of
+this strange event held her, as it were, suspended, body and spirit,
+high up on the hill which had seen the ancient peoples, the Romans,
+Gauls, Saracens, and all, and still looked out towards the flat
+Camargue. Here in her three rooms, with a little kitchen, the maid
+Augustine, a parrot, and the Paris _Daily Mail_, she dwelt as it were
+marooned by a world event which seemed to stun her. Not that she
+worried, exactly. The notion of defeat or of real danger to her country
+and to France never entered her head. She only grieved quietly over the
+dreadful things that were being done, and every now and then would glow
+with admiration at the beautiful way the King and Queen were behaving.
+It was no good to "fuss," and one must make the best of things, just as
+the "dear little Queen" was doing; for each Queen in turn, and she had
+seen three reign in her time, was always that to her. Her ancestors had
+been uprooted from their lands, their house burned, and her pedigree
+diverted, in the Stuart wars--a reverence for royalty was fastened in
+her blood.
+
+Quite early in the business she had begun to knit, moving her slim
+fingers not too fast, gazing at the grey wool through glasses, specially
+rimless and invisible, perched on the bridge of her firm, well-shaped
+nose, and now and then speaking to her parrot. The bird could say,
+"Scratch a poll, Poll," already, and "Hullo!" those keys to the English
+language. The maid Augustine, having completed some small duty, would
+often come and stand, her head on one side, gazing down with a sort of
+inquiring compassion in her wise, young, clear-brown eyes. It seemed to
+her who was straight and sturdy as a young tree both wonderful and sad
+that _Madame_ should be seventy-seven, and so frail--_Madame_ who had no
+lines in her face and such beautiful grey hair; who had so strong a
+will-power, too, and knitted such soft comforters "_pour nos braves
+chers poilus_." And suddenly she would say: "_Madame n'est pas
+fatiguée?_" And _Madame_ would answer: "No. Speak English,
+Augustine--Polly will pick up your French! Come here!" And, reaching up
+a pale hand, she would set straight a stray fluff of the girl's
+dark-brown hair or improve the set of her fichu.
+
+Those two got on extremely well, for though madame was--oh! but very
+particular, she was always "_très gentille et toujours grande dame_."
+And that love of form so deep in the French soul promoted the girl's
+admiration for one whom she could see would in no circumstances lose her
+dignity. Besides, _Madame_ was full of dainty household devices, and
+could not bear waste; and these, though exacting, were qualities which
+appealed to Augustine. With her French passion for "the family" she used
+to wonder how in days like these _Madame_ could endure to be far away
+from her son and daughter and the grandchildren, whose photographs hung
+on the walls; and the long letters her mistress was always writing in a
+beautiful, fine hand, beginning, "My darling Sybil," "My darling
+Reggie," and ending always "Your devoted mother," seemed to a warm and
+simple heart but meagre substitutes for flesh-and-blood realities. But
+as _Madame_ would inform her--they were too busy doing things for the
+dear soldiers, and working for the war; they could not come to her--that
+would never do. And to go to them would give so much trouble, when the
+railways were so wanted for the troops; and she had their lovely
+letters, which she kept--as Augustine observed--every one in a
+lavender-scented sachet, and frequently took out to read. Another point
+of sympathy between those two was their passion for military music and
+seeing soldiers pass. Augustine's brother and father were at the front,
+and _Madame's_ dead brother had been a soldier in the Crimean war--"long
+before you were born, Augustine, when the French and English fought the
+Russians; I was in France then, too, a little girl, and we lived at
+Nice; it was so lovely, you can't think--the flowers! And my poor
+brother was so cold in the siege of Sebastopol." Somehow, that time and
+that war were more real to her than this.
+
+In December, when the hospitals were already full, her French friends
+first took her to the one which they attended. She went in, her face
+very calm, with that curious inward composure which never deserted it,
+carrying in front of her with both hands a black silk bag, wherein she
+had concealed an astonishing collection of treasures for the poor men! A
+bottle of acidulated drops, packets of cigarettes, two of her own
+mufflers, a pocket set of drafts, some English riddles translated by
+herself into French (very curious), some ancient copies of an
+illustrated paper, boxes of chocolate, a ball of string to make "cat's
+cradles" (such an amusing game), her own packs of Patience cards, some
+photograph frames, post-cards of Arles, and--most singular--a
+kettle-holder. At the head of each bed she would sit down and rummage in
+the bag, speaking in her slow but quite good French, to explain the use
+of the acidulated drops, or to give a lesson in cat's cradles. And the
+_poilus_ would listen with their polite, ironic patience, and be left
+smiling, and curiously fascinated, as if they had been visited by a
+creature from another world. She would move on to other beds, quite
+unconscious of the effect she had produced on them and of their remarks:
+"_Cette vieille dame, comme elle est bonne!_" or "_Espèce d'ange aux
+cheveux gris._" "_L'ange anglaise aux cheveux gris_" became in fact her
+name within those walls. And the habit of filling that black silk bag
+and going there to distribute its contents soon grew to be with her a
+ruling passion which neither weather nor her own aches and pains, not
+inconsiderable, must interfere with. The things she brought became more
+marvellous every week. But, however much she carried coals to Newcastle,
+or tobacco pouches to those who did not smoke, or homoeopathic
+globules to such as crunched up the whole bottleful for the sake of the
+sugar, as soon as her back was turned, no one ever smiled now with
+anything but real pleasure at sight of her calm and truly sweet smile,
+and the scent of soap on her pale hands. "_Cher fils, je croyais que
+ceci vous donnerait un peu de plaisir. Voyez-vous comme c'est commode,
+n'est ce pas?_" Each newcomer to the wards was warned by his comrades
+that the English angel with the grey hair was to be taken without a
+smile, exactly as if she were his grandmother.
+
+In the walk to the hospital Augustine would accompany her, carrying the
+bag and perhaps a large peasant's umbrella to cover them both, for the
+winter was hard and snowy, and carriages cost money, which must now be
+kept entirely for the almost daily replenishment of the bag and other
+calls of war. The girl, to her chagrin, was always left in a safe place,
+for it would never do to take her in and put fancies into her head, and
+perhaps excite the dear soldiers with a view of anything so taking. And
+when the visit was over they would set forth home, walking very slowly
+in the high, narrow streets, Augustine pouting a little and shooting
+swift glances at anything in uniform, and _Madame_ making firm her lips
+against a fatigue which sometimes almost overcame her before she could
+get home and up the stairs. And the parrot would greet them indiscreetly
+with new phrases--"Keep smiling!" and "Kiss Augustine!" which he
+sometimes varied with "Kiss a poll, Poll!" or "Scratch Augustine!" to
+_Madame's_ regret. Tea would revive her somewhat, and then she would
+knit, for as time went on and the war seemed to get farther and farther
+from that end which, in common with so many, she had expected before
+now, it seemed dreadful not to be always doing something to help the
+poor dear soldiers; and for dinner, to Augustine's horror, she now had
+nothing but a little soup, or an egg beaten up with milk and brandy. It
+saved such a lot of time and expense--she was sure people ate too much;
+and afterwards she would read the _Daily Mail_, often putting it down to
+sigh, and press her lips together, and think, "One must look on the
+bright side of things," and wonder a little where it was. And
+Augustine, finishing her work in the tiny kitchen, would sigh too, and
+think of red trousers and peaked caps, not yet out of date in that
+Southern region, and of her own heart saying "Kiss Augustine!" and she
+would peer out between the shutters at the stars sparkling over the
+Camargue, or look down where the ground fell away beyond an old, old
+wall, and nobody walked in the winter night, and muse on her nineteenth
+birthday coming, and sigh with the thought that she would be old before
+any one had loved her; and of how _Madame_ was looking "_très
+fatiguée_."
+
+Indeed, Madame was not merely _looking "très fatiguée"_ in these days.
+The world's vitality and her own were at sad January ebb. But to think
+of oneself was quite impossible, of course; it would be all right
+presently, and one must not fuss, or mention in one's letters to the
+dear children that one felt at all poorly. As for a doctor--that would
+be sinful waste, and besides, what use were they except to tell you what
+you knew? So she was terribly vexed when Augustine found her in a faint
+one morning, and she found Augustine in tears, with her hair all over
+her face. She rated the girl soundly, but feebly, for making such a fuss
+over "a little thing like that," and with extremely trembling fingers
+pushed the brown hair back and told her to wash her face, while the
+parrot said reflectively: "Scratch a poll--Hullo!" The girl who had seen
+her own grandmother die not long before, and remembered how "_fatiguée_"
+she had been during her last days, was really frightened. Coming back
+after she had washed her face, she found her mistress writing on a
+number of little envelopes the same words: "_En bonne Amitié._" She
+looked up at the girl standing so ominously idle, and said:
+
+"Take this hundred-franc note, Augustine, and go and get it changed into
+single francs--the ironmonger will do it if you say it's for me. I am
+going to take a rest. I sha'n't buy anything for the bag for a whole
+week. I shall just take francs instead."
+
+"Oh, _Madame!_ You must not go out: _vous êtes trop fatiguée_."
+
+"Nonsense! How do you suppose our dear little Queen in England would get
+on with all she has to do, if she were to give in like that? We must
+none of us give up in these days. Help me to put on my things; I am
+going to church, and then I shall take a long rest before we go to the
+hospital."
+
+"Oh, _Madame!_ Must you go to church? It is not your kind of church. You
+do not pray there, do you?"
+
+"Of course I pray there. I am very fond of the dear old church. God is
+in every church, Augustine; you ought to know that at your age."
+
+"But _Madame_ has her own religion?"
+
+"Now, don't be silly. What does that matter? Help me into my cloth
+coat--not the fur--it's too heavy--and then go and get that money
+changed."
+
+"But _Madame_ should see a doctor. If _Madame_ faints again I shall die
+with fright. _Madame_ has no colour--but no colour at all; it must be
+that there is something wrong."
+
+_Madame_ rose, and taking the girl's ear between thumb and finger
+pinched it gently.
+
+"You are a very silly girl. What would our poor soldiers do if all the
+nurses were like you?"
+
+Reaching the church she sat down gladly, turning her face up towards her
+favourite picture, a Virgin standing with her Baby in her arms. It was
+only faintly coloured now; but there were those who said that an
+Arlésienne must have sat for it. Why it pleased her so she never quite
+knew, unless it were by its cool, unrestored devotion, by the faint
+smiling in the eyes. Religion with her was a strange yet very real
+thing. Conscious that she was not clever, she never even began to try
+and understand what she believed. Probably she believed nothing more
+than that if she tried to be good she would go to God--whatever and
+wherever God might be--some day when she was too tired to live any more;
+and rarely indeed did she forget to try to be good. As she sat there she
+thought, or perhaps prayed, whichever it should be called: "Let me
+forget that I have a body, and remember all the poor soldiers who have
+them."
+
+It struck cold that morning in the church--the wind was bitter from the
+northeast; some poor women in black were kneeling, and four candles
+burned in the gloom of a side aisle--thin, steady little spires of gold.
+There was no sound at all. A smile came on her lips. She was forgetting
+that she had a body, and remembering all those young faces in the wards,
+the faces too of her own children far away, the faces of all she loved.
+They were real and she was not--she was nothing but the devotion she
+felt for them; yes, for all the poor souls on land and sea, fighting and
+working and dying. Her lips moved; she was saying below her breath, "I
+love them all"; then, feeling a shiver run down her spine, she
+compressed those lips and closed her eyes, letting her mind alone murmur
+her chosen prayer: "O God, who makes the birds sing and the stars shine,
+and gives us little children, strengthen my heart so that I may forget
+my own aches and wants and think of those of other people."
+
+On reaching home again she took gelseminum, her favourite remedy against
+that shivering, which, however hard she tried to forget her own body,
+would keep coming; then, covering herself with her fur coat, she lay
+down, closing her eyes. She was seemingly asleep, so that Augustine,
+returning with the hundred single francs, placed them noiselessly beside
+the little pile of envelopes, and after looking at the white, motionless
+face of her mistress and shaking her own bonny head, withdrew. When she
+had gone, two tears came out of those closed eyes and clung on the pale
+cheeks below. The seeming sleeper was thinking of her children, away
+over there in England, her children and their children. Almost
+unbearably she was longing for a sight of them, not seen for so long
+now, recalling each face, each voice, each different way they had of
+saying, "Mother darling," or "Granny, look what I've got!" and thinking
+that if only the war would end how she would pack at once and go to
+them, that is, if they would not come to her for a nice long holiday in
+this beautiful place. She thought of spring, too, and how lovely it
+would be to see the trees come out again, and almond blossom against a
+blue sky. The war seemed so long, and winter too. But she must not
+complain; others had much greater sorrows than she--the poor widowed
+women kneeling in the church; the poor boys freezing in the trenches.
+God in his great mercy could not allow it to last much longer. It would
+not be like Him! Though she felt that it would be impossible to eat, she
+meant to force herself to make a good lunch so as to be able to go down
+as usual, and give her little presents. They would miss them so if she
+didn't. Her eyes, opening, rested almost gloatingly on the piles of
+francs and envelopes. And she began to think how she could reduce still
+further her personal expenditure. It was so dreadful to spend anything
+on oneself--an old woman like her. Doctor, indeed! If Augustine fussed
+any more she would send her away and do for herself! And the parrot,
+leaving his cage, which he could always do, perched just behind her and
+said: "Hullo! Kiss me, too!"
+
+That afternoon in the wards every one noticed what a beautiful colour
+she had. "_L'ange anglaise aux cheveux gris_" had never been more
+popular. One _poilu_, holding up his envelope, remarked to his
+neighbour: "_Elle verse des gouttes d'ciel, notr' 'tite gran'mè_." To
+them, grateful even for those mysterious joys "cat's cradles," francs
+were the true drops from heaven.
+
+She had not meant to give them all to-day, but it seemed dreadful, when
+she saw how pleased they were, to leave any out, and so the whole
+ninety-seven had their franc each. The three over would buy Augustine a
+little brooch to make up to the silly child for her fright in the
+morning. The buying of this brooch took a long time at the jeweller's in
+the _rue des Romains_, and she had only just fixed on an amethyst before
+feeling deadly ill with a dreadful pain through her lungs. She went out
+with her tiny package quickly, not wanting any fuss, and began to mount
+towards home. There were only three hundred yards to go, and with each
+step she said to herself: "Nonsense! What would the Queen think of you!
+Remember the poor soldiers with only one leg! You have got both your
+legs! And the poor men who walk from the battlefield with bullets
+through the lungs. What is your pain to theirs! Nonsense!" But the pain,
+like none she had ever felt--a pain which seemed to have sharp double
+edges like a knife--kept passing through and through her, till her legs
+had no strength at all, and seemed to move simply because her will said:
+"If you don't, I'll leave you behind. So there!" She felt as if
+perspiration were flowing down, yet her face was as dry as a dead leaf
+when she put up her hand to it. Her brain stammered; seemed to fly
+loose; came to sudden standstills. Her eyes searched painfully each
+grey-shuttered window for her own house, though she knew quite well
+that she had not reached it yet. From sheer pain she stood still, a wry
+little smile on her lips, thinking how poor Polly would say: "Keep
+smiling!" Then she moved on, holding out her hand, whether because she
+thought God would put his into it or only to pull on some imaginary rope
+to help her. So, foot by foot, she crept till she reached her door. A
+most peculiar floating sensation had come over her. The pain ceased, and
+as if she had passed through no doors, mounted no stairs--she was up in
+her room, lying on her sofa, with strange images about her, painfully
+conscious that she was not in proper control of her thoughts, and that
+Augustine must be thinking her ridiculous. Making a great effort, she
+said:
+
+"I forbid you to send for a doctor, Augustine. I shall be all right in a
+day or two, if I eat plenty of francs. And you must put on this little
+brooch--I bought it for you from an angel in the street. Put my fur coat
+on Polly--he's shivering; dry your mouth, there's a good girl. Tell my
+son he mustn't think of leaving the poor War Office; I shall come and
+see him after the war. It will be over to-morrow, and then we will all
+go and have tea together in a wood. Granny will come to you, my
+darlings."
+
+And when the terrified girl had rushed out she thought: "There, now
+she's gone to get God; and I mustn't disturb Him with all He has to see
+to. I shall get up and do for myself." When they came back with the
+doctor they found her half-dressed, trying to feed a perch in the empty
+cage with a spoon, and saying: "Kiss Granny, Polly. God is coming; kiss
+Granny!" while the parrot sat away over on the mantelpiece, with his
+head on one side, deeply interested.
+
+When she had been properly undressed and made to lie down on the sofa,
+for she insisted so that she would not go to bed that they dared not
+oppose her, the doctor made his diagnosis. It was double pneumonia, of
+that sudden sort which declares for life or death in forty-eight hours.
+At her age a desperate case. Her children must be wired to at once. She
+had sunk back, seemingly unconscious; and Augustine, approaching the
+drawer where she knew the letters were kept, slipped out the lavender
+sachet and gave it to the doctor. When he had left the room to extract
+the addresses and send those telegrams, the girl sat down by the foot of
+the couch, leaning her elbows on her knees and her face on her hands,
+staring at that motionless form, while the tears streamed down her broad
+cheeks. For many minutes neither of them stirred, and the only sound
+was the restless stropping of the parrot's beak against a wire of his
+cage. Then her mistress's lips moved, and the girl bent forward. A
+whispering came forth, caught and suspended by breathless pausing:
+
+"Mind, Augustine--no one is to tell my children--I can't have them
+disturbed--over a little thing--like this--and in my purse you'll find
+another--hundred-franc note. I shall want some more francs for the day
+after to-morrow. Be a good girl and don't fuss, and kiss poor Polly, and
+mind--I won't have a doctor--taking him away from his work. Give me my
+gelseminum and my prayer-book. And go to bed just as usual--we must
+all--keep smiling--like the dear soldiers--" The whispering ceased, then
+began again at once in rapid delirious incoherence. And the girl sat
+trembling, covering now her ears from those uncanny sounds, now her eyes
+from the flush and the twitching of that face, usually so pale and
+still. She could not follow--with her little English--the swerving,
+intricate flights of that old spirit mazed by fever--the memories
+released, the longings disclosed, the half-uttered prayers, the curious
+little half-conscious efforts to regain form and dignity. She could only
+pray to the Virgin. When relieved by the daughter of _Madame's_ French
+friend, who spoke good English, she murmured desperately: "_Oh!
+mademoiselle, madame est très fatiguée--la pauvre tête--faut-il enlever
+les cheveux? Elle fait ça toujours pour elle-même._" For, to the girl,
+with her reverence for the fastidious dignity which never left her
+mistress, it seemed sacrilege to divest her of her crown of fine grey
+hair. Yet, when it was done and the old face crowned only by the thin
+white hair of nature, that dignity was still there surmounting the
+wandering talk and the moaning from her parched lips, which every now
+and then smiled and pouted in a kiss, as if remembering the maxims of
+the parrot. So the night passed, with all that could be done for her,
+whose most collected phrase, frequently uttered in the doctor's face,
+was: "Mind, Augustine, I won't have a doctor--I can manage for myself
+quite well." Once for a few minutes her spirit seemed to recover its
+coherence, and she was heard to whisper: "God has given me this so that
+I may know what the poor soldiers suffer. Oh! they've forgotten to cover
+Polly's cage." But high fever soon passes from the very old; and early
+morning brought a deathlike exhaustion, with utter silence, save for the
+licking of the flames at the olive-wood logs, and the sound as they
+slipped or settled down, calcined. The firelight crept fantastically
+about the walls covered with tapestry of French-grey silk, crept round
+the screen-head of the couch, and betrayed the ivory pallor of that
+mask-like face, which covered now such tenuous threads of life.
+Augustine, who had come on guard when the fever died away, sat in the
+armchair before those flames, trying hard to watch, but dropping off
+into the healthy sleep of youth. And out in the clear, hard shivering
+Southern cold, the old clocks chimed the hours into the winter dark,
+where, remote from man's restless spirit, the old town brooded above
+plain and river under the morning stars. And the girl dreamed--dreamed
+of a sweetheart under the acacias by her home, of his pinning their
+white flowers into her hair, till she woke with a little laugh. Light
+was already coming through the shutter chinks, the fire was but red
+embers and white ash. She gathered it stealthily together, put on fresh
+logs, and stole over to the couch. Oh! how white! how still! Was her
+mistress dead? The icy clutch of that thought jerked her hands up to her
+full breast, and a cry mounted in her throat. The eyes opened. The white
+lips parted, as if to smile; a voice whispered: "Now, don't be silly!"
+The girl's cry changed into a little sob, and bending down she put her
+lips to the ringed hand that lay outside the quilt. The hand moved
+faintly as if responding, the voice whispered: "The emerald ring is for
+you, Augustine. Is it morning? Uncover Polly's cage, and open his door."
+
+_Madame_ spoke no more that morning. A telegram had come. Her son and
+daughter would arrive next morning early. They waited for a moment of
+consciousness to tell her; but the day went by, and in spite of oxygen
+and brandy it did not come. She was sinking fast; her only movements
+were a tiny compression now and then of the lips, a half-opening of the
+eyes, and once a smile when the parrot spoke. The rally came at eight
+o'clock. _Mademoiselle_ was sitting by the couch when the voice came
+fairly strong: "Give my love to my dear soldiers, and take them their
+francs out of my purse, please. Augustine, take care of Polly. I want to
+see if the emerald ring fits you. Take it off, please"; and, when it had
+been put on the little finger of the sobbing girl: "There, you see, it
+does. That's very nice. Your sweetheart will like that when you have
+one. What do you say, _Mademoiselle_? My son and daughter coming? All
+that way?" The lips smiled a moment, and then tears forced their way
+into her eyes. "My darlings! How good of them! Oh! what a cold journey
+they'll have! Get my room ready, Augustine, with a good fire! What are
+you crying for? Remember what Polly says: 'Keep smiling!' Think how bad
+it is for the poor soldiers if we women go crying! The Queen never
+cries, and she has ever so much to make her!"
+
+No one could tell whether she knew that she was dying, except perhaps
+for those words, "Take care of Polly," and the gift of the ring.
+
+She did not even seem anxious as to whether she would live to see her
+children. Her smile moved _Mademoiselle_ to whisper to Augustine: "_Elle
+a la sourire divine_."
+
+"_Ah! mademoiselle, comme elle est brave, la pauvre dame! C'est qu'elle
+pense toujours aux autres._" And the girl's tears dropped on the emerald
+ring.
+
+Night fell--the long night; would she wake again? Both watched with her,
+ready at the faintest movement to administer oxygen and brandy. She was
+still breathing, but very faintly, when at six o'clock they heard the
+express come in, and presently the carriage stop before the house.
+_Mademoiselle_ stole down to let them in.
+
+Still in their travelling coats her son and daughter knelt down beside
+the couch, watching in the dim candle-light for a sign and cherishing
+her cold hands. Daylight came; they put the shutters back and blew out
+the candles. Augustine, huddled in the far corner, cried gently to
+herself. _Mademoiselle_ had withdrawn. But the two still knelt, tears
+running down their cheeks. The face of their mother was so transparent,
+so exhausted; the least little twitching of just-opened lips showed that
+she breathed. A tiny sigh escaped; her eyelids fluttered. The son,
+leaning forward, said:
+
+"Sweetheart, we're here."
+
+The eyes opened then; something more than a simple human spirit seemed
+to look through--it gazed for a long, long minute; then the lips parted.
+They bent to catch the sound.
+
+"My darlings--don't cry; smile!" And the eyes closed again. On her face
+a smile so touching that it rent the heart flickered and went out.
+Breath had ceased to pass the faded lips.
+
+In the long silence the French girl's helpless sobbing rose; the parrot
+stirred uneasily in his still-covered cage. And the son and daughter
+knelt, pressing their faces hard against the couch.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+DEFEAT
+
+
+She had been standing there on the pavement a quarter of an hour or so
+after her shilling's worth of concert. Women of her profession are not
+supposed to have redeeming points, especially when--like May Belinski,
+as she now preferred to dub herself--they are German; but this woman
+certainly had music in her soul. She often gave herself these "music
+baths" when the Promenade Concerts were on, and had just spent half her
+total wealth in listening to some Mozart and a Beethoven symphony.
+
+She was feeling almost elated, full of divine sound, and of the
+wonderful summer moonlight which was filling the whole dark town. Women
+"of a certain type" have, at all events, emotions--and what a comfort
+that is, even to themselves! To stand just there had become rather a
+habit of hers. One could seem to be waiting for somebody coming out of
+the concert, not yet over--which, of course, was precisely what she
+_was_ doing. One need not forever be stealthily glancing and perpetually
+moving on in that peculiar way, which, while it satisfied the police
+and Mrs. Grundy, must not quite deceive others as to her business in
+life. She had only "been at it" long enough to have acquired a nervous
+dread of almost everything--not long enough to have passed through that
+dread to callousness. Some women take so much longer than others. And
+even for a woman "of a certain type" her position was exceptionally
+nerve-racking in war-time, going as she did by a false name. Indeed, in
+all England there could hardly be a greater pariah than was this German
+woman of the night.
+
+She idled outside a book-shop humming a little, pretending to read the
+titles of the books by moonlight, taking off and putting on one of her
+stained yellow gloves. Now and again she would move up as far as the
+posters outside the Hall, scrutinising them as if interested in the
+future, then stroll back again. In her worn and discreet dark dress, and
+her small hat, she had nothing about her to rouse suspicion, unless it
+were the trail of violet powder she left on the moonlight.
+
+For the moonlight this evening was almost solid, seeming with its cool
+still vibration to replace the very air; in it the war-time precautions
+against light seemed fantastic, like shading candles in a room still
+full of daylight. What lights there were had the effect of strokes and
+stipples of dim colour laid by a painter's brush on a background of
+ghostly whitish blue. The dreamlike quality of the town was perhaps
+enhanced for her eyes by the veil she was wearing--in daytime no longer
+white. As the music died out of her, elation also ebbed. Somebody had
+passed her, speaking German, and she was overwhelmed by a rush of
+nostalgia. On this moonlight night by the banks of the Rhine--whence she
+came--the orchards would be heavy with apples; there would be murmurs,
+and sweet scents; the old castle would stand out clear, high over the
+woods and the chalky-white river. There would be singing far away, and
+the churning of a distant steamer's screw; and perhaps on the water a
+log raft still drifting down in the blue light. There would be German
+voices talking. And suddenly tears oozed up in her eyes, and crept down
+through the powder on her cheeks. She raised her veil and dabbed at her
+face with a little, not-too-clean handkerchief, screwed up in her
+yellow-gloved hand. But the more she dabbed, the more those treacherous
+tears ran. Then she became aware that a tall young man in khaki was also
+standing before the shop-window, not looking at the titles of the books,
+but eyeing her askance. His face was fresh and open, with a sort of
+kindly eagerness in his blue eyes. Mechanically she drooped her wet
+lashes, raised them obliquely, drooped them again, and uttered a little
+sob....
+
+This young man, Captain in a certain regiment, and discharged from
+hospital at six o'clock that evening, had entered Queen's Hall at
+half-past seven. Still rather brittle and sore from his wound, he had
+treated himself to a seat in the Grand Circle, and there had sat, very
+still and dreamy, the whole concert through. It had been like eating
+after a long fast--something of the sensation Polar explorers must
+experience when they return to their first full meal. For he was of the
+New Army, and before the war had actually believed in music, art, and
+all that sort of thing. With a month's leave before him, he could afford
+to feel that life was extraordinarily joyful, his own experiences
+particularly wonderful; and, coming out into the moonlight, he had taken
+what can only be described as a great gulp of it, for he was a young man
+with a sense of beauty. When one has been long in the trenches, lain out
+wounded in a shell-hole twenty-four hours, and spent three months in
+hospital, beauty has such an edge of novelty, such a sharp sweetness,
+that it almost gives pain. And London at night is very beautiful. He
+strolled slowly towards the Circus, still drawing the moonlight deep
+into his lungs, his cap tilted up a little on his forehead in that
+moment of unmilitary abandonment; and whether he stopped before the
+book-shop window because the girl's figure was in some sort a part of
+beauty, or because he saw that she was crying, he could not have made
+clear to any one.
+
+Then something--perhaps the scent of powder, perhaps the yellow glove,
+or the oblique flutter of the eyelids--told him that he was making what
+he would have called "a blooming error," unless he wished for company,
+which had not been in his thoughts. But her sob affected him, and he
+said:
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+Again her eyelids fluttered sideways, and she stammered:
+
+"Not'ing. The beautiful evening--that's why!"
+
+That a woman of what he now clearly saw to be "a certain type" should
+perceive what he himself had just been perceiving, struck him forcibly,
+and he said:
+
+"Cheer up."
+
+She looked up again swiftly: "Cheer up! You are not lonelee like me."
+
+For one of that sort, she looked somehow honest; her tear-streaked face
+was rather pretty, and he murmured:
+
+"Well, let's walk a bit, and talk it over."
+
+They turned the corner, and walked east, along streets empty, and
+beautiful, with their dulled orange-glowing lamps, and here and there
+the glint of some blue or violet light. He found it queer and rather
+exciting--for an adventure of just this kind he had never had. And he
+said doubtfully:
+
+"How did you get into this? Isn't it an awfully hopeless sort of life?"
+
+"Ye-es, it ees--" her voice had a queer soft emphasis. "You are
+limping--haf you been wounded?"
+
+"Just out of hospital to-day."
+
+"The horrible war--all the misery is because of the war. When will it
+end?"
+
+He looked at her attentively, and said:
+
+"I say--what nationality are you?"
+
+"Rooshian."
+
+"Really! I never met a Russian girl."
+
+He was conscious that she looked at him, then very quickly down. And he
+said suddenly:
+
+"Is it as bad as they make out?"
+
+She slipped her yellow-gloved hand through his arm.
+
+"Not when I haf any one as nice as you; I never haf yet, though"; she
+smiled--and her smile was like her speech, slow, confiding--"you stopped
+because I was sad, others stop because I am gay. I am not fond of men
+at all. When you know, you are not fond of them."
+
+"Well! You hardly know them at their best, do you? You should see them
+at the front. By George! they're simply splendid--officers and men,
+every blessed soul. There's never been anything like it--just one long
+bit of jolly fine self-sacrifice; it's perfectly amazing."
+
+Turning her blue-grey eyes on him, she answered:
+
+"I expect you are not the last at that. You see in them what you haf in
+yourself, I think."
+
+"Oh! not a bit--you're quite out. I assure you when we made the attack
+where I got wounded, there wasn't a single man in my regiment who wasn't
+an absolute hero. The way they went in--never thinking of themselves--it
+was simply superb!"
+
+Her teeth came down on her lower lip, and she answered in a queer voice:
+"It is the same too perhaps with--the enemy."
+
+"Oh yes, I know that."
+
+"Ah! You are not a mean man. How I hate mean men!"
+
+"Oh! they're not mean really--they simply don't understand."
+
+"Oh! you are a baby--a good baby, aren't you?"
+
+He did not quite like being called a baby, and frowned; but was at once
+touched by the disconcertion in her powdered face. How quickly she was
+scared!
+
+She said clingingly:
+
+"But I li-ike you for it. It is so good to find a ni-ice man."
+
+This was worse, and he said abruptly:
+
+"About being lonely? Haven't you any Russian friends?"
+
+"Rooshian! No!" Then quickly added: "The town is so beeg! Haf you been
+in the concert?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I, too--I love music."
+
+"I suppose all Russians do."
+
+She looked up at his face again, and seemed to struggle to keep silent;
+then she said quietly:
+
+"I go there always when I haf the money."
+
+"What! Are you so on the rocks?"
+
+"Well, I haf just one shilling now." And she laughed.
+
+The sound of that little laugh upset him--she had a way of making him
+feel sorry for her every time she spoke.
+
+They had come by now to a narrow square, east of Gower Street.
+
+"This is where I lif," she said. "Come in!"
+
+He had one long moment of violent hesitation, then yielded to the soft
+tugging of her hand, and followed. The passage-hall was dimly lighted,
+and they went upstairs into a front room, where the curtains were drawn,
+and the gas turned very low. Opposite the window were other curtains
+dividing off the rest of the apartment. As soon as the door was shut she
+put up her face and kissed him--evidently formula. What a room! Its
+green and beetroot colouring and the prevalence of cheap plush
+disagreeably affected him. Everything in it had that callous look of
+rooms which seem to be saying to their occupants: "You're here to-day
+and you'll be gone to-morrow." Everything except one little plant, in a
+common pot, of maidenhair fern, fresh and green, looking as if it had
+been watered within the hour; in this room it had just the same
+unexpected touchingness that peeped out of the girl's matter-of-fact
+cynicism.
+
+Taking off her hat, she went towards the gas, but he said quickly:
+
+"No, don't turn it up; let's have the window open, and the moonlight
+in." He had a sudden dread of seeing anything plainly--it was stuffy,
+too, and pulling the curtains apart, he threw up the window. The girl
+had come obediently from the hearth, and sat down opposite him, leaning
+her arm on the window-sill and her chin on her hand. The moonlight
+caught her cheek where she had just renewed the powder, caught her fair
+crinkly hair; it caught the plush of the furniture, and his own khaki,
+giving them all a touch of unreality.
+
+"What's your name?" he said.
+
+"May. Well, I call myself that. It's no good askin' yours."
+
+"You're a distrustful little party, aren't you?"
+
+"I haf reason to be, don't you think?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose you're bound to think us all brutes?"
+
+"Well, I haf a lot of reasons to be afraid all my time. I am dreadfully
+nervous now; I am not trusting anybody. I suppose you haf been killing
+lots of Germans?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"We never know, unless it happens to be hand to hand; I haven't come in
+for that yet."
+
+"But you would be very glad if you had killed some?"
+
+"Glad? I don't think so. We're all in the same boat, so far as that's
+concerned. We're not glad to kill each other. We do our job--that's
+all."
+
+"Oh! it is frightful. I expect I haf my broders killed."
+
+"Don't you get any news ever?"
+
+"News! No indeed, no news of anybody in my country. I might not haf a
+country; all that I ever knew is gone--fader, moder, sisters, broders,
+all--never any more I shall see them, I suppose, now. The war it breaks
+and breaks, it breaks hearts." Her little teeth fastened again on her
+lower lip in that sort of pretty snarl. "Do you know what I was thinkin'
+when you came up? I was thinkin' of my native town, and the river there
+in the moonlight. If I could see it again, I would be glad. Were you
+ever homeseeck?"
+
+"Yes, I have been--in the trenches; but one's ashamed, with all the
+others."
+
+"Ah! ye-es!" It came from her with a hiss. "Ye-es! You are all comrades
+there. What is it like for me here, do you think, where everybody hates
+and despises me, and would catch me, and put me in prison, perhaps?"
+
+He could see her breast heaving with a quick breathing painful to listen
+to. He leaned forward, patting her knee, and murmuring: "Sorry--sorry."
+
+She said in a smothered voice:
+
+"You are the first who has been kind to me for so long! I will tell you
+the truth--I am not Rooshian at all--I am German."
+
+Hearing that half-choked confession, his thought was: "Does she really
+think we fight against women?" And he said:
+
+"My dear girl, who cares?"
+
+Her eyes seemed to search right into him. She said slowly:
+
+"Another man said that to me. But he was thinkin' of other things. You
+are a veree ni-ice boy. I am so glad I met you. You see the good in
+people, don't you? That is the first thing in the world--because there
+is really not much good in people, you know."
+
+He said, smiling:
+
+"You're a dreadful little cynic!" Then thought: "Of course she is--poor
+thing!"
+
+"Cyneec? How long do you think I would live if I was not a cyneec? I
+should drown myself to-morrow. Perhaps there are good people, but, you
+see, I don't know them."
+
+"I know lots."
+
+She leaned forward eagerly.
+
+"Well now--see, ni-ice boy--you haf never been in a hole, haf you?"
+
+"I suppose not a real hole."
+
+"No, I should think not, with your face. Well, suppose I am still a good
+girl, as I was once, you know, and you took me to some of your good
+people, and said: 'Here is a little German girl that has no work, and no
+money, and no friends.' Your good people they will say: 'Oh! how sad! A
+German girl!' and they will go and wash their hands."
+
+Silence fell on him. He saw his mother, his sisters, others--good
+people, he would swear! And yet--! He heard their voices, frank and
+clear; and they seemed to be talking of the Germans. If only she were
+not German!
+
+"You see!" he heard her say, and could only mutter:
+
+"I'm sure there _are_ people."
+
+"No. They would not take a German, even if she was good. Besides, I
+don't want to be good any more--I am not a humbug--I have learned to be
+bad. Aren't you going to kees me, ni-ice boy?"
+
+She put her face close to his. Her eyes troubled him, but he drew back.
+He thought she would be offended or persistent, but she was neither;
+just looked at him fixedly with a curious inquiring stare; and he leaned
+against the window, deeply disturbed. It was as if all clear and simple
+enthusiasm had been suddenly knocked endways; as if a certain splendour
+of life that he had felt and seen of late had been dipped in cloud. Out
+there at the front, over here in hospital, life had been seeming so--as
+it were--heroic; and yet it held such mean and murky depths as well! The
+voices of his men, whom he had come to love like brothers, crude burring
+voices, cheery in trouble, making nothing of it; the voices of doctors
+and nurses, patient, quiet, reassuring voices; even his own voice,
+infected by it all, kept sounding in his ears. All wonderful somehow,
+and simple; and nothing mean about it anywhere! And now so suddenly to
+have lighted upon this, and all that was behind it--this scared girl,
+this base, dark, thoughtless use of her! And the thought came to him: "I
+suppose my fellows wouldn't think twice about taking her on! Why! I'm
+not even certain of myself, if she insists!" And he turned his face, and
+stared out at the moonlight. He heard her voice:
+
+"Eesn't it light? No air raid to-night. When the Zepps burned--what a
+horrible death! And all the people cheered--it is natural. Do you hate
+us veree much?"
+
+He turned round and said sharply:
+
+"Hate? I don't know."
+
+"I don't hate even the English--I despise them. I despise my people
+too--perhaps more, because they began this war. Oh, yes! I know that. I
+despise all the peoples. Why haf they made the world so miserable--why
+haf they killed all our lives--hundreds and thousands and millions of
+lives--all for not'ing? They haf made a bad world--everybody hating, and
+looking for the worst everywhere. They haf made me bad, I know. I
+believe no more in anything. What is there to believe in? Is there a
+God? No! Once I was teaching little English children their
+prayers--isn't that funnee? I was reading to them about Christ and love.
+I believed all those things. Now I believe not'ing at all--no one who is
+not a fool or a liar can believe. I would like to work in a hospital; I
+would like to go and help poor boys like you. Because I am a German they
+would throw me out a hundred times, even if I was good. It is the same
+in Germany and France and Russia, everywhere. But do you think I will
+believe in love and Christ and a God and all that?--not I! I think we
+are animals--that's all! Oh! yes--you fancy it is because my life has
+spoiled me. It is not that at all--that's not the worst thing in life.
+Those men are not ni-ice, like you, but it's their nature, and," she
+laughed, "they help me to live, which is something for me anyway. No, it
+is the men who think themselves great and good, and make the war with
+their talk and their hate, killing us all--killing all the boys like
+you, and keeping poor people in prison, and telling us to go on hating;
+and all those dreadful cold-blooded creatures who write in the
+papers--the same in my country, just the same; it is because of all them
+that I think we are only animals."
+
+He got up, acutely miserable. He could see her following him with her
+eyes, and knew she was afraid she had driven him away. She said
+coaxingly: "Don't mind me talking, ni-ice boy. I don't know any one to
+talk to. If you don't like it, I can be quiet as a mouse."
+
+He muttered:
+
+"Oh! go on, talk away. I'm not obliged to believe you, and I don't."
+
+She was on her feet now, leaning against the wall; her dark dress and
+white face just touched by the slanting moonlight; and her voice came
+again, slow and soft and bitter:
+
+"Well, look here, ni-ice boy, what sort of a world is it, where millions
+are being tortured--horribly tortured, for no fault of theirs, at all? A
+beautiful world, isn't it! 'Umbug! Silly rot, as you boys call it. You
+say it is all 'Comrade'! and braveness out there at the front, and
+people don't think of themselves. Well, I don't think of myself veree
+much. What does it matter--I am lost now, anyway; but I think of my
+people at home, how they suffer and grieve. I think of all the poor
+people there and here who lose those they love, and all the poor
+prisoners. Am I not to think of them? And if I do, how am I to believe
+it a beautiful world, ni-ice boy?"
+
+He stood very still, biting his lips.
+
+"Look here! We haf one life each, and soon it is over. Well, I think
+that is lucky."
+
+He said resentfully:
+
+"No! there's more than that."
+
+"Ah!" she went on softly; "you think the war is fought for the future;
+you are giving your lives for a better world, aren't you?"
+
+"We must fight till we win," he said between his teeth.
+
+"Till you win. My people think that, too. All the peoples think that if
+they win the world will be better. But it will not, you know, it will be
+much worse, anyway."
+
+He turned away from her and caught up his cap; but her voice followed
+him.
+
+"I don't care which win, I despise them all--animals--animals--animals!
+Ah! Don't go, ni-ice boy--I will be quiet now."
+
+He took some notes from his tunic pocket, put them on the table, and
+went up to her.
+
+"Good-night."
+
+She said plaintively:
+
+"Are you really going? Don't you like me, enough?"
+
+"Yes, I like you."
+
+"It is because I am German, then?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then why won't you stay?"
+
+He wanted to answer: "Because you upset me so"; but he just shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"Won't you kees me once?"
+
+He bent, and put his lips to her forehead; but as he took them away she
+threw her head back, pressed her mouth to his, and clung to him.
+
+He sat down suddenly and said:
+
+"Don't! I don't want to feel a brute."
+
+She laughed. "You are a funny boy, but you are veree good. Talk to me a
+little, then. No one talks to me. I would much rather talk, anyway. Tell
+me, haf you seen many German prisoners?"
+
+He sighed--from relief, or was it from regret?
+
+"A good many."
+
+"Any from the Rhine?"
+
+"Yes, I think so."
+
+"Were they very sad?"
+
+"Some were--some were quite glad to be taken."
+
+"Did you ever see the Rhine? Isn't it beaudiful? It will be wonderful
+to-night. The moonlight will be the same here as there; in Rooshia too,
+and France, everywhere; and the trees will look the same as here, and
+people will meet under them and make love just as here. Oh! isn't it
+stupid, the war?--as if it was not good to be alive."
+
+He wanted to say: "You can't tell how good it is to be alive, till
+you're facing death, because you don't live till then. And when a whole
+lot of you feel like that--and are ready to give their lives for each
+other, it's worth all the rest of life put together." But he couldn't
+get it out to this girl who believed in nothing.
+
+"How were you wounded, ni-ice boy?"
+
+"Attacking across open ground--four machine-gun bullets got me at one go
+off."
+
+"Weren't you veree frightened when they ordered you to attack?" No, he
+had not been frightened just then! And he shook his head and laughed.
+
+"It was great. We did laugh that morning. They got me much too soon,
+though--a swindle!"
+
+She stared at him.
+
+"You laughed?"
+
+"Yes, and what do you think was the first thing I was conscious of next
+morning--my old Colonel bending over me and giving me a squeeze of
+lemon. If you knew my Colonel you'd still believe in things. There _is_
+something, you know, behind all this evil. After all, you can only die
+once, and if it's for your country all the better."
+
+Her face, with intent eyes just touched with bistre, had in the
+moonlight a most strange, otherworld look. Her lips moved:
+
+"No, I believe in nothing. My heart is dead."
+
+"You think so, but it isn't, you know, or you wouldn't have been crying,
+when I met you."
+
+"If it were not dead, do you think I could live my life--walking the
+streets every night, pretending to like strange men--never hearing a
+kind word--never talking, for fear I will be known for a German. Soon I
+shall take to drinking, then I shall be 'Kaput' very quick. You see, I
+am practical, I see things clear. To-night I am a little emotional; the
+moon is funny, you know. But I live for myself only, now. I don't care
+for anything or anybody."
+
+"All the same, just now you were pitying your people, and prisoners, and
+that."
+
+"Yes, because they suffer. Those who suffer are like me--I pity myself,
+that's all; I am different from your Englishwomen. I see what I am
+doing; I do not let my mind become a turnip just because I am no longer
+moral."
+
+"Nor your heart either."
+
+"Ni-ice boy, you are veree obstinate. But all that about love is 'umbug.
+We love ourselves, nothing more."
+
+Again, at that intense soft bitterness in her voice, he felt stifled,
+and got up, leaning in the window. The air out there was free from the
+smell of dust and stale perfume. He felt her fingers slip between his
+own, and stay unmoving. Since she was so hard, and cynical, why should
+he pity her? Yet he did. The touch of that hand within his own roused
+his protective instinct. She had poured out her heart to him--a perfect
+stranger! He pressed it a little, and felt her fingers crisp in answer.
+Poor girl! This was perhaps a friendlier moment than she had known for
+years! And after all, fellow-feeling was bigger than principalities and
+powers! Fellow-feeling was all-pervading as this moonlight, which she
+had said would be the same in Germany--as this white ghostly glamour
+that wrapped the trees, making the orange lamps so quaint and
+decoratively useless out in the narrow square, where emptiness and
+silence reigned. He looked around into her face--in spite of bistre and
+powder, and the faint rouging on her lips, it had a queer, unholy,
+touching beauty. And he had suddenly the strangest feeling, as if they
+stood there--the two of them--proving that kindness and human fellowship
+were stronger than lust, stronger than hate; proving it against meanness
+and brutality, and the sudden shouting of newspaper boys in some
+neighbouring street. Their cries, passionately vehement, clashed into
+each other, and obscured the words--what was it they were calling? His
+head went up to listen; he felt her hand rigid within his arm--she too
+was listening. The cries came nearer, hoarser, more shrill and
+clamorous; the empty moonlight seemed of a sudden crowded with
+footsteps, voices, and a fierce distant cheering. "Great victory--great
+victory! Official! British! Defeat of the 'Uns! Many thousand
+prisoners!" So it sped by, intoxicating, filling him with a fearful joy;
+and leaning far out, he waved his cap and cheered like a madman; and the
+whole night seemed to him to flutter and vibrate, and answer. Then he
+turned to rush down into the street, struck against something soft, and
+recoiled. The girl! She stood with hands clenched, her face convulsed,
+panting, and even in the madness of his joy he felt for her. To hear
+this--in the midst of enemies! All confused with the desire to do
+something, he stooped to take her hand; and the dusty reek of the
+table-cloth clung to his nostrils. She snatched away her fingers, swept
+up the notes he had put down, and held them out to him.
+
+"Take them--I will not haf your English money--take them." And suddenly
+she tore them across twice, three times, let the bits flutter to the
+floor, and turned her back to him. He stood looking at her leaning
+against the plush-covered table which smelled of dust; her head down, a
+dark figure in a dark room with the moonlight sharpening her
+outline--hardly a moment he stayed, then made for the door....
+
+When he was gone she still stood there, her chin on her breast--she who
+cared for nothing, believed in nothing--with the sound in her ears of
+cheering, of hurrying feet, and voices; stood, in the centre of a
+pattern made by fragments of the torn-up notes, staring out into the
+moonlight, seeing, not this hated room and the hated square outside, but
+a German orchard, and herself, a little girl, plucking apples, a big dog
+beside her; a hundred other pictures, too, such as the drowning see. Her
+heart swelled; she sank down on the floor, laid her forehead on the
+dusty carpet, and pressed her body to it.
+
+She who did not care--who despised all peoples, even her own--began,
+mechanically, to sweep together the scattered fragments of the notes,
+assembling them with the dust into a little pile, as of fallen leaves,
+and dabbling in it with her fingers, while the tears ran down her
+cheeks. For her country she had torn them, her country in defeat! She,
+who had just one shilling in this great town of enemies, who wrung her
+stealthy living out of the embraces of her foes! And suddenly in the
+moonlight she sat up and began to sing with all her might--"_Die Wacht
+am Rhein_."
+
+1916.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+FLOTSAM AND JETSAM
+
+A REMINISCENCE
+
+
+The tides of the war were washing up millions of wrecked lives on all
+the shores; what mattered the flotsam of a conscripted deep-sea Breton
+fisherman, slowly pining away for lack of all he was accustomed to; or
+the jetsam of a tall glass-blower from the 'invaded countries,' drifted
+into the hospital--no one quite knew why--prisoner for twenty months
+with the Boches, released at last because of his half-paralysed
+tongue--What mattered they? What mattered anything, or any one, in days
+like those?
+
+Corporal Mignan, wrinkling a thin, parchmenty face, full of suffering
+and kindly cynicism, used to call them '_mes deux phénomènes_.' Riddled
+to the soul by gastritis, he must have found them trying roommates, with
+the tricks and manners of sick and naughty children towards a
+long-suffering nurse. To understand all is to forgive all, they say;
+but, though he had suffered enough to understand much, Mignan was
+tempted at times to deliver judgment--for example, when Roche, the
+Breton fisherman, rose from his bed more than ten times in the night,
+and wandered out into the little courtyard of the hospital, to look at
+the stars, because he could not keep still within four walls--so
+unreasonable of the '_type_.' Or when Gray, the tall glass-blower--his
+grandfather had been English--refused with all the tenacity of a British
+workman to wear an undervest, with the thermometer below zero,
+Centigrade.
+
+They inhabited the same room, Flotsam and Jetsam, but never spoke to one
+another. And yet in all that hospital of French soldiers they were the
+only two who, in a manner of speaking, had come from England. Fourteen
+hundred years have passed since the Briton ancestors of Roche crossed in
+their shallow boats. Yet he was as hopelessly un-French as a Welshman of
+the hills is to this day un-English. His dark face, shy as a wild
+animal's, his peat-brown eyes, and the rare, strangely-sweet smile which
+once in a way strayed up into them; his creased brown hands always
+trying to tie an imaginary cord; the tobacco pouched in his brown cheek;
+his improperly-buttoned blue trousers; his silence eternal as the stars
+themselves; his habit of climbing trees--all marked him out as no true
+Frenchman. Indeed, that habit of climbing trees caused every soul who
+saw him to wonder if he ought to be at large: monkeys alone pursue this
+pastime. And yet,--surely one might understand that trees were for Roche
+the masts of his far-off fishing barque, each hand-grip on the branch of
+plane or pine-tree solace to his overmastering hunger for the sea. Up
+there he would cling, or stand with hands in pockets, and look out, far
+over the valley and the yellowish-grey-pink of the pan-tiled town-roofs,
+a mile away, far into the mountains where snow melted not, far over this
+foreign land of '_midi trois quarts_,' to an imagined Breton coast and
+the seas that roll from there to Cape Breton where the cod are. Since he
+never spoke unless spoken to--no, not once--it was impossible for his
+landsmen comrades to realise why he got up those trees, and they would
+summon each other to observe this '_phénomène_,' this human
+ourang-outang, who had not their habit of keeping firm earth beneath
+their feet. They understood his other eccentricities better. For
+instance, he could not stay still even at his meals, but must get up and
+slip out, because he chewed tobacco, and, since the hospital regulations
+forbade his spitting on the floor, he must naturally go and spit
+outside. For '_ces types-la_' to chew and drink was--life! To the
+presence of tobacco in the cheek and the absence of drink from the
+stomach they attributed all his un-French ways, save just that one
+mysterious one of climbing trees.
+
+And Gray--though only one-fourth English--how utterly British was that
+'arrogant civilian,' as the '_poilus_' called him. Even his clothes,
+somehow, were British--no one knew who had given them to him; his short
+grey workman's jacket, brown dingy trousers, muffler and checked cap;
+his long, idle walk, his absolute _sans-gêne_, regardless of any one but
+himself; his tall, loose figure, with a sort of grace lurking somewhere
+in its slow, wandering movements, and long, thin fingers. That wambling,
+independent form might surely be seen any day outside a thousand British
+public-houses, in time of peace. His face, with its dust-coloured hair,
+projecting ears, grey eyes with something of the child in them, and
+something of the mule, and something of a soul trying to wander out of
+the forest of misfortune; his little, tip-tilted nose that never grew on
+pure-blooded Frenchman; under a scant moustache his thick lips,
+disfigured by infirmity of speech, whence passed so continually a
+dribble of saliva--sick British workman was stamped on him. Yet he was
+passionately fond of washing himself; his teeth, his head, his clothes.
+Into the frigid winter he would go, and stand at the '_Source_' half an
+hour at a time, washing and washing. It was a cause of constant
+irritation to Mignan that his '_phénomène_' would never come to time, on
+account of this disastrous habit; the hospital corridors resounded
+almost daily with the importuning of those shapeless lips for something
+clean--a shirt, a pair of drawers, a bath, a handkerchief. He had a
+fixity of purpose; not too much purpose, but so fixed.--Yes, he was
+English!
+
+For '_les deux phénomènes_' the soldiers, the servants, and the 'Powers'
+of the hospital--all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the
+point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast,
+wandering each in a dumb world of his own, each in the endless circle of
+one or two hopeless notions. It was irony--or the French system--which
+had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see
+nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish. And God
+knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood,
+for his stumbling speech simply could not make it plain. '_Les
+Boches--ils vont en payer cher--les Boches_,' muttered fifty times a
+day, was the burden of his song. Those Boches had come into his village
+early in the war, torn him from his wife and his '_petite fille_.' Since
+then he had 'had fear,' been hungry, been cold, eaten grass; eyeing some
+fat little dog, he would leer and mutter: '_J'ai mangé cela, c'est
+bon!_' and with fierce triumph add: '_Ils ont faim, les Boches!_' The
+'arrogant civilian' had never done his military service, for his
+infirmity, it seemed, had begun before the war.
+
+Dumb, each in his own way, and differing in every mortal thing except
+the reality of their misfortunes, never were two beings more lonely.
+Their quasi-nurse, Corporal Mignan, was no doubt right in his estimate
+of their characters. For him, so patient in the wintry days, with his
+'_deux phénomènes_,' they were divested of all that halo which
+misfortune sets round the heads of the afflicted. He had too much to do
+with them, and saw them as they would have been if undogged by Fate. Of
+Roche he would say: '_Il n'est pas mon rêve. Je n'aime pas ces types
+taciturnes; quand même, il n'est pas mauvais. Il est marin--les
+marins--!_' and he would shrug his shoulders, as who should say: 'Those
+poor devils--what can you expect?' '_Mais ce Gray_'--it was one bitter
+day when Gray had refused absolutely to wear his great-coat during a
+motor drive--'_c'est un mauvais type! Il est malin--il sait très bien ce
+qu'il veut. C'est un egoiste!_' An egoist! Poor Gray! No doubt he was,
+instinctively conscious that if he did not make the most of what little
+personality was left within his wandering form, it would slip and he
+would be no more. Even a winter fly is mysteriously anxious not to
+become dead. That he was '_malin_'--cunning--became the accepted view
+about Gray; not so '_malin_' that he could 'cut three paws off a duck,'
+as the old grey Territorial, Grandpère Poirot, would put it, but
+'_malin_' enough to know very well what he wanted, and how, by sticking
+to his demand, to get it. Mignan, typically French, did not allow enough
+for the essential Englishman in Gray. Besides, one _must_ be _malin_ if
+one has only the power to say about one-tenth of what one wants, and
+then not be understood once in twenty times. Gray did not like his
+great-coat--a fine old French-blue military thing with brass
+buttons--the arrogant civilian would have none of it! It was easier to
+shift the Boches on the Western front than to shift an idea, once in his
+head. In the poor soil of his soul the following plants of thought alone
+now flourished: Hatred of the Boches; love of English tobacco--'_Il est
+bon--il est bon!_' he would say, tapping his Virginian cigarette; the
+wish to see again his 'petite fille'; to wash himself; to drink a '_café
+natur_' and bottled beer every day after the midday meal, and to go to
+Lyons to see his uncle and work for his living. And who shall say that
+any of these fixed ideas were evil in him?
+
+But back to Flotsam, whose fixed idea was Brittany! Nostalgia is a long
+word, and a malady from which the English do not suffer, for they carry
+their country on their backs, walk the wide world in a cloud of their
+own atmosphere, making that world England. The French have eyes to see,
+and, when not surrounded by houses that have flatness, shutters, and
+subtle colouring--yellowish, French-grey, French-green--by café's, by
+plane-trees, by Frenchwomen, by scents of wood-smoke and coffee roasted
+in the streets; by the wines, and infusions of the herbs of France; by
+the churches of France and the beautiful silly chiming of their
+bells--when not surrounded by all these, they know it, feel it, suffer.
+But even they do not suffer so dumbly and instinctively, so like a wild
+animal caged, as that Breton fisherman, caged up in a world of hill and
+valley--not the world as he had known it. They called his case
+'shell-shock'--for the French system would not send a man to
+convalescence for anything so essentially civilian as home-sickness,
+even when it had taken a claustrophobic turn. A system recognises only
+causes which you can see; holes in the head, hamstrung legs, frostbitten
+feet, with other of the legitimate consequences of war. But it was not
+shell-shock. Roche was really possessed by the feeling that he would
+never get out, never get home, smell fish and the sea, watch the
+bottle-green breakers roll in on his native shore, the sun gleaming
+through wave-crests lifted and flying back in spray, never know the
+accustomed heave and roll under his feet, or carouse in a seaport
+cabaret, or see his old mother--_la veuve_ Roche. And, after all, there
+was a certain foundation for his fear. It was not as if this war could
+be expected to stop some day. There they were, in the trenches, they and
+the enemy set over against each other, 'like china dogs,' in the words
+of Grandpère Poirot; and there they would be, so far as Roche's ungeared
+nerves could grasp, for ever. And, while like china dogs they sat, he
+knew that he would not be released, not allowed to go back to the sea
+and the smells and the sounds thereof; for he had still all his limbs,
+and no bullet-hole to show under his thick dark hair. No wonder he got
+up the trees and looked out for sight of the waves, and fluttered the
+weak nerves of the hospital 'Powers,' till they saw themselves burying
+him with a broken spine, at the expense of the subscribers. Nothing to
+be done for the poor fellow, except to take him motor-drives, and to
+insist that he stayed in the dining-room long enough to eat some food.
+
+Then, one bright day, a 'Power,' watching his hands, conceived the idea
+of giving him two balls of string, one blue, the other buff, and all
+that afternoon he stayed up a single tree, and came down with one of his
+rare sweet smiles and a little net, half blue, half buff, with a handle
+covered with a twist of Turkey-red twill--such a thing as one scoops up
+shrimps with. He was paid for it, and his eyes sparkled. You see, he had
+no money--the '_poilu_' seldom has; and money meant drink, and tobacco
+in his cheek. They gave him more string, and for the next few days it
+rained little nets, beautifully if simply made. They thought that his
+salvation was in sight. It takes an eye to tell salvation from
+damnation, sometimes.... In any case, he no longer roamed from tree to
+tree, but sat across a single branch, netting. The 'Powers' began to
+speak of him as 'rather a dear,' for it is characteristic of human
+nature to take interest only in that which by some sign of progress
+makes you feel that you are doing good.
+
+Next Sunday a distinguished doctor came, and, when he had been fed, some
+one conceived the notion of interesting him, too, in Flotsam. A learned,
+kindly, influential man--well-fed--something might come of it, even that
+'_réforme_,' that sending home, which all agreed was what poor Roche
+needed, to restore his brain. He was brought in, therefore, amongst the
+chattering party, and stood, dark, shy, his head down, like the man in
+Millet's 'Angelus,' his hands folded on his cap, in front of his
+unspeakably buttoned blue baggy trousers, as though in attitude of
+prayer to the doctor, who, uniformed and grey-bearded, like an old
+somnolent goat, beamed on him through spectacles with a sort of shrewd
+benevolence. The catechism began. So he had something to ask, had he? A
+swift, shy lift of the eyes: 'Yes.' 'What then?' 'To go home.' 'To go
+home? What for? To get married?' A swift, shy smile. 'Fair or dark?' No
+answer, only a shift of hands on his cap. 'What! Was there no one--no
+ladies at home?' '_Ce n'est pas ça qui manque!_' At the laughter
+greeting that dim flicker of wit the uplifted face was cast down again.
+That lonely, lost figure must suddenly have struck the doctor, for his
+catechism became a long, embarrassed scrutiny; and with an: '_Eh bien!
+mon vieux, nous verrons!_' ended. Nothing came of it, of course. '_Cas
+de réforme?_' Oh, certainly, if it had depended on the learned, kindly
+doctor. But the system--and all its doors to be unlocked! Why, by the
+time the last door was prepared to open, the first would be closed
+again! So the 'Powers' gave Roche more string--so good, you know, to see
+him interested in something!... It does take an eye to tell salvation
+from damnation! For he began to go down now of an afternoon into the
+little old town--not smelless, but most quaint--all yellowish-grey, with
+rosy-tiled roofs. Once it had been Roman, once a walled city of the
+Middle Ages; never would it be modern. The dogs ran muzzled; from a
+first-floor a goat, munching green fodder, hung his devilish black beard
+above your head; and through the main street the peasant farmers, above
+military age, looking old as sun-dried roots, in their dark _pélerines_,
+drove their wives and produce in little slow carts. Parched oleanders in
+pots one would pass, and old balconies with wilting flowers hanging down
+over the stone, and perhaps an umbrella with a little silver handle, set
+out to dry. Roche would go in by the back way, where the old town
+gossips sat on a bench in the winter sunshine, facing the lonely cross
+shining gold on the high hill-top opposite, placed there in days when
+there was some meaning in such things; past the little '_Place_' with
+the old fountain and the brown plane-trees in front of the Mairie; past
+the church, so ancient that it had fortunately been forgotten, and
+remained unfinished and beautiful. Did Roche, Breton that he was--half
+the love-ladies in Paris, they say--falsely, no doubt--are
+Bretonnes--ever enter the church in passing? Some rascal had tried to
+burn down its beautiful old door from the inside, and the flames had
+left on all that high western wall smears like the fingermarks of hell,
+or the background of a Velasquez Crucifixion. Did he ever enter and
+stand, knotting his knot which never got knotted, in the dark loveliness
+of that grave building, where in the deep silence a dusty-gold little
+angel blows on his horn from the top of the canopied pulpit, and a dim
+carved Christ of touching beauty looks down on His fellow-men from above
+some dry chrysanthemums; and a tall candle burned quiet and lonely here
+and there, and the flags of France hung above the altar, that men might
+know how God--though resting--was with them and their country? Perhaps!
+But, more likely, he passed it, with its great bell riding high and open
+among scrolls of ironwork, and--Breton that he was--entered the nearest
+cabaret, kept by the woman who would tell you that her soldier husband
+had passed 'within two fingers' of death. One cannot spend one's
+earnings in a church, nor appease there the inextinguishable longings of
+a sailor.
+
+And lo!--on Christmas day Roche came back so drunk that his nurse Mignan
+took him to his bedroom and turned the key of the door on him. But you
+must not do this to a Breton fisherman full of drink and
+claustrophobia. It was one of those errors even Frenchmen may make, to
+the after sorrow of their victims. One of the female 'Powers,' standing
+outside, heard a roar, the crash of a foot against the panel of a door,
+and saw Roche, 'like a great cat' come slithering through the hole. He
+flung his arm out, brushed the 'Power' back against the wall, cried out
+fiercely: '_La boîte--je ne veux pas la boîte!_' and rushed for the
+stairs. Here were other female 'Powers'; he dashed them aside and passed
+down. But in the bureau at the foot was a young Corporal of the '_Legion
+Etrangère_'--a Spaniard who had volunteered for France--great France; he
+ran out, took Roche gently by the arm, and offered to drink with him.
+And so they sat, those two, in the little bureau, drinking black coffee,
+while the young Corporal talked like an angel and Roche like a wild
+man--about his mother, about his dead brother who had been sitting on
+his bed, as he said, about '_la boîte_,' and the turning of that key.
+And slowly he became himself--or so they thought--and all went in to
+supper. Ten minutes later one of the 'Powers,' looking for the twentieth
+time to make sure he was eating, saw an empty place: he had slipped out
+like a shadow and was gone again. A big cavalryman and the Corporal
+retrieved him that night from a _café_ near the station; they had to
+use force at times to bring him in. Two days later he was transferred to
+a town hospital, where discipline would not allow him to get drunk or
+climb trees. For the 'Powers' had reasoned thus: To climb trees is bad;
+to get drunk is bad; but to do both puts on us too much responsibility;
+he must go! They had, in fact, been scared. And so he passed away to a
+room under the roof of a hospital in the big town miles away--_la boîte_
+indeed!--where for liberty he must use a courtyard without trees, and
+but little tobacco came to his cheek; and there he eats his heart out to
+this day, perhaps. But some say he had no heart--only the love of drink,
+and climbing. Yet, on that last evening, to one who was paying him for a
+little net, he blurted out: 'Some day I will tell you something--not
+now--in a year's time. _Vous êtes le seul--!_' What did he mean by that,
+if he had no heart to eat?... The night after he had gone, a little
+black dog strayed up, and among the trees barked and barked at some
+portent or phantom. 'Ah! the camel! Ah! the pig! I had him on my back
+all night!' Grandpère Poirot said next morning. That was the very last
+of Flotsam....
+
+And now to Jetsam! It was on the day but one after Roche left that Gray
+was reported missing. For some time past he had been getting stronger,
+clearer in speech. They began to say of him: 'It's wonderful--the
+improvement since he came--wonderful!' His salvation also seemed in
+sight. But from the words 'He's rather a dear!' all recoiled, for as he
+grew stronger he became more stubborn and more irritable--'cunning
+egoist' that he was! According to the men, he was beginning to show
+himself in his true colours. He had threatened to knife any one who
+played a joke on him--the arrogant civilian! On the day that he was
+missing it appears that after the midday meal he had asked for a '_café
+natur_' and for some reason had been refused. Before his absence was
+noted it was night already, clear and dark; all day something as of
+Spring had stirred in the air. The Corporal and a 'Power' set forth down
+the wooded hill into the town, to scour the _cafés_ and hang over the
+swift, shallow river, to see if by any chance Gray had been overtaken by
+another paralytic stroke and was down there on the dark sand. The sleepy
+gendarmes too were warned and given his description. But the only news
+next morning was that he had been seen walking on the main road up the
+valley. Two days later he was found, twenty miles away, wandering
+towards Italy. '_Perdu_' was his only explanation, but it was not
+believed, for now began that continual demand: '_Je voudrais aller à
+Lyon, voir mon oncle--travailler!_' As the big cavalryman put it: 'He is
+bored here!' It was considered unreasonable, by soldiers who found
+themselves better off than in other hospitals; even the 'Powers'
+considered it ungrateful, almost. See what he had been like when he
+came--a mere trembling bag of bones, only too fearful of being sent
+away. And yet, who would not be bored, crouching all day long about the
+stoves, staunching his poor dribbling mouth, rolling his inevitable
+cigarette, or wandering down, lonely, to hang over the bridge parapet,
+having thoughts in his head and for ever unable to express them. His
+state was worse than dumbness, for the dumb have resigned hope of
+conversation. Gray would have liked to talk if it had not taken about
+five minutes to understand each thing he said--except the refrain which
+all knew by heart: '_Les Boches--ils vont en payer cher--les Boches!_'
+The idea that he could work and earn his living was fantastic to those
+who watched him dressing himself, or sweeping the courtyard, pausing
+every few seconds to contemplate some invisible difficulty, or do over
+again what he had just not done. But with that new access of strength,
+or perhaps the open weather--as if Spring had come before its time--his
+fixed idea governed him completely; he began to threaten to kill himself
+if he could not go to work and see his uncle at Lyon; and every five
+days or so he had to be brought back from far up some hill road. The
+situation had become so ridiculous that the 'Powers' said in despair:
+'Very well, my friend! Your uncle says he can't have you, and you can't
+earn your own living yet; but you shall go and see for yourself!' And go
+he did, a little solemn now that it had come to his point--in specially
+bought yellow boots--he refused black--and a specially bought overcoat
+with sleeves--he would have none of a _pélerine_, the arrogant civilian,
+no more than of a military _capote_. For a week the hospital knew him
+not. Deep winter set in two days before he went, and the whole land was
+wrapped in snow. The huge, disconsolate crows seemed all the life left
+in the valley, and poplar-trees against the rare blue sky were dowered
+with miraculous snow-blossoms, beautiful as any blossom of Spring. And
+still in the winter sun the town gossips sat on the bench under the
+wall, and the cross gleamed out, and the church bell, riding high in its
+whitened ironwork, tolled almost every day for the passing of some
+wintered soul, and long processions, very black in the white street,
+followed it, followed it--home. Then came a telegram from Gray's uncle:
+'Impossible to keep Aristide (the name of the arrogant civilian), takes
+the evening train to-morrow. Albert Gray.' So Jetsam was coming back!
+What would he be like now that his fixed idea had failed him? Well! He
+came at midday; thinner, more clay-coloured in the face, with a bad
+cold; but he ate as heartily as ever, and at once asked to go to bed. At
+four o'clock a 'Power,' going up to see, found him sleeping like a
+child. He slept for twenty hours on end. No one liked to question him
+about his time away; all that he said--and bitterly--was: 'They wouldn't
+let me work!' But the second evening after his return there came a knock
+on the door of the little room where the 'Powers' were sitting after
+supper, and there stood Gray, long and shadowy, holding on to the
+screen, smoothing his jaw-bone with the other hand, turning eyes like a
+child's from face to face, while his helpless lips smiled. One of the
+'Powers' said: 'What do you want, my friend?'
+
+'_Je voudrais aller à Paris, voir ma petite fille._'
+
+'Yes, yes; after the war. Your _petite fille_ is not in Paris, you
+know.'
+
+'_Non?_' The smile was gone; it was seen too plainly that Gray was not
+as he had been. The access of vigour, stirring of new strength,
+'improvement' had departed, but the beat of it, while there, must have
+broken him, as the beat of some too-strong engine shatters a frail
+frame. His 'improvement' had driven him to his own undoing. With the
+failure of his pilgrimage he had lost all hope, all 'egoism.'... It
+takes an eye, indeed, to tell salvation from damnation! He was truly
+Jetsam now--terribly thin and ill and sad; and coughing. Yet he kept the
+independence of his spirit. In that bitter cold, nothing could prevent
+him stripping to the waist to wash, nothing could keep him lying in bed,
+or kill his sense of the proprieties. He would not wear his overcoat--it
+was invalidish; he would not wear his new yellow boots and keep his feet
+dry, except on Sundays: '_Ils sont bons!_' he would say. And before he
+would profane their goodness, his old worn-out shoes had to be reft from
+him. He would not admit that he was ill, that he was cold, that he
+was--anything. But at night, a 'Power' would be awakened by groans, and,
+hurrying to his room, find him huddled nose to knees, moaning. And now,
+every evening, as though craving escape from his own company, he would
+come to the little sitting-room, and stand with that deprecating smile,
+smoothing his jaw-bone, until some one said: 'Sit down, my friend, and
+have some coffee.' '_Merci, ma soeur--il est bon, il est bon!_' and
+down he would sit, and roll a cigarette with his long fingers, tapering
+as any artist's, while his eyes fixed themselves intently on anything
+that moved. But soon they would stray off to another world, and he would
+say thickly, sullenly, fiercely: '_Les Boches--ils vont en payer
+cher--les Boches!_' On the walls were some trophies from the war of
+'seventy.' His eyes would gloat over them, and he would get up and
+finger a long pistol, or old _papier-maché_ helmet. Never was a man who
+so lacked _gêne_--at home in any company; it inspired reverence, that
+independence of his, which had survived twenty months of imprisonment
+with those who, it is said, make their victims salute them--to such a
+depth has their civilisation reached. One night he tried to tell about
+the fright he had been given. The Boches--it seemed--had put him and two
+others against a wall, and shot those other two. Holding up two tapering
+fingers, he mumbled: '_Assassins--assassins! Ils vont en payer cher--les
+Boches!_' But sometimes there was something almost beautiful in his
+face, as if his soul had rushed from behind his eyes, to answer some
+little kindness done to him, or greet some memory of the days before he
+was 'done for'--_foutu_, as he called it.
+
+One day he admitted a pain about his heart; and time, too, for at
+moments he would look like death itself. His nurse, Corporal Mignan,
+had long left his _'deux phénomènes!_' having drifted away on the tides
+of the system, till he should break down again and drag through the
+hospitals once more. Gray had a room to himself now; the arrogant
+civilian's groaning at night disturbed the others. Yet, if you asked him
+in the morning if he had slept well, he answered invariably,
+'_Oui--oui--toujours, toujours!_' For, according to him, you see, he was
+still strong; and he would double his arm and tap his very little
+muscle, to show that he could work. But he did not believe it now, for
+one day a 'Power,' dusting the men's writing-room, saw a letter on the
+blotter, and with an ashamed eye read these words:--
+
+     _'Cher Oncle,_
+
+     _J'ai eu la rage contre toi, mais c'est passé maintenant. Je
+     veux seulement me reposer. Je ne peux pas me battre pour la
+     France--j'ai voulu travailler pour elle; mais on ne m'a pas
+     permi._
+
+     _Votre neveu, qui t'embrasse de loin.'_
+
+_Seulement me reposer_--only to rest! Rest he will, soon, if eyes can
+speak. Pass, and leave for ever that ravished France for whom he wished
+to work--pass, without having seen again his _petite fille_. No more in
+the corridor above the stove, no more in the little dining-room or the
+avenue of pines will be seen his long, noiseless, lonely figure, or be
+heard his thick stumbling cry:
+
+_'Les Boches--ils vont en payer cher--les Boches!_'
+
+1917.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE BRIGHT SIDE
+
+
+A little Englishwoman, married to a German, had dwelt with him eighteen
+years in humble happiness and the district of Putney, where her husband
+worked in the finer kinds of leather. He was a harmless, busy little man
+with the gift for turning his hand to anything which is bred into the
+peasants of the Black Forest, who on their upland farms make all the
+necessaries of daily life--their coarse linen from home-grown flax,
+their leather gear from the hides of their beasts, their clothes from
+the wool thereof, their furniture from the pine logs of the Forest,
+their bread from home-grown flour milled in simple fashion and baked in
+the home-made ovens, their cheese from the milk of their own goats. Why
+he had come to England he probably did not remember--it was so long ago;
+but he would still know why he had married Dora, the daughter of the
+Putney carpenter, she being, as it were, salt of the earth: one of those
+Cockney women, deeply sensitive beneath a well-nigh impermeable mask of
+humour and philosophy, who quite unselfconsciously are always doing
+things for others. In their little grey Putney house they had dwelt
+those eighteen years, without perhaps ever having had time to move,
+though they had often had the intention of doing so for the sake of the
+children, of whom they had three, a boy and two girls. Mrs.
+Gerhardt--she shall be called, for her husband had a very German name,
+and there is more in a name than Shakespeare dreamed of--Mrs. Gerhardt
+was a little woman with large hazel eyes and dark crinkled hair in which
+there were already a few threads of grey when the war broke out. Her boy
+David, the eldest, was fourteen at that date, and her girls, Minnie and
+Violet, were eight and five, rather pretty children, especially the
+little one. Gerhardt, perhaps because he was so handy, had never risen.
+His firm regarded him as indispensable and paid him fair wages, but he
+had no "push," having the craftsman's temperament, and employing his
+spare time in little neat jobs for his house and his neighbours, which
+brought him no return. They made their way, therefore, without that
+provision for the future which necessitates the employment of one's time
+for one's own ends. But they were happy, and had no enemies; and each
+year saw some mild improvements in their studiously clean house and tiny
+back garden. Mrs. Gerhardt, who was cook, seamstress, washerwoman,
+besides being wife and mother, was almost notorious in that street of
+semi-detached houses for being at the disposal of any one in sickness or
+trouble. She was not strong in body, for things had gone wrong when she
+bore her first, but her spirit had that peculiar power of seeing things
+as they were, and yet refusing to be dismayed, which so embarrasses
+Fate. She saw her husband's defects clearly, and his good qualities no
+less distinctly--they never quarrelled. She gauged her children's
+characters too, with an admirable precision, which left, however,
+loopholes of wonder as to what they would become.
+
+The outbreak of the war found them on the point of going to Margate for
+Bank Holiday, an almost unparalleled event; so that the importance of
+the world catastrophe was brought home to them with a vividness which
+would otherwise have been absent from folks so simple, domestic, and
+far-removed from that atmosphere in which the egg of war is hatched.
+Over the origin and merits of the struggle, beyond saying to each other
+several times that it was a dreadful thing, Mr. and Mrs. Gerhardt held
+but one little conversation, lying in their iron bed with an immortal
+brown eiderdown patterned with red wriggles over them. They agreed that
+it was a cruel, wicked thing to invade "that little Belgium," and there
+left a matter which seemed to them a mysterious and insane perversion of
+all they had hitherto been accustomed to think of as life. Reading their
+papers--a daily and a weekly, in which they had as much implicit faith
+as a million other readers--they were soon duly horrified by the reports
+therein of "Hun" atrocities; so horrified that they would express their
+condemnation of the Kaiser and his militarism as freely as if they had
+been British subjects. It was therefore with an uneasy surprise that
+they began to find these papers talking of "the Huns at large in our
+midst," of "spies," and the national danger of "nourishing such vipers."
+They were deeply conscious of not being "vipers," and such sayings began
+to awaken in both their breasts a humble sense of injustice as it were.
+This was more acute in the breast of little Mrs. Gerhardt, because, of
+course, the shafts were directed not at her but at her husband. She knew
+her husband so well, knew him incapable of anything but homely, kindly
+busyness, and that he should be lumped into the category of "Huns" and
+"spies" and tarred with the brush of mass hatred amazed and stirred her
+indignation, or would have, if her Cockney temperament had allowed her
+to take it very seriously. As for Gerhardt, he became extremely silent,
+so that it was ever more and more difficult to tell what he was feeling.
+The patriotism of the newspapers took a considerable time to affect the
+charity of the citizens of Putney, and so long as no neighbour showed
+signs of thinking that little Gerhardt was a monster and a spy it was
+fairly easy for Mrs. Gerhardt to sleep at night, and to read her papers
+with the feeling that the remarks in them were not really intended for
+Gerhardt and herself. But she noticed that her man had given up reading
+them, and would push them away from his eyes if, in the tiny
+sitting-room with the heavily-flowered walls, they happened to rest
+beside him. He had perhaps a closer sense of impending Fate than she.
+The boy, David, went to his first work, and the girls to their school,
+and so things dragged on through that first long war winter and spring.
+Mrs. Gerhardt, in the intervals of doing everything, knitted socks for
+"our poor cold boys in the trenches," but Gerhardt no longer sought out
+little jobs to do in the houses of his neighbours. Mrs. Gerhardt thought
+that he "fancied" they would not like it. It was early in that spring
+that she took a deaf aunt to live with them, the wife of her mother's
+brother, no blood-relation, but the poor woman had nowhere else to go;
+so David was put to sleep on the horsehair sofa in the sitting-room
+because she "couldn't refuse the poor thing." And then, of an April
+afternoon, while she was washing the household sheets, her neighbour,
+Mrs. Clirehugh, a little spare woman all eyes, cheekbones, hair, and
+decision, came in breathless and burst out:
+
+"Oh! Mrs. Gerhardt, 'ave you 'eard? They've sunk the _Loositania_! Has I
+said to Will: Isn't it horful?"
+
+Mrs. Gerhardt, with her round arms dripping soap-suds, answered: "What a
+dreadful thing! The poor drowning people! Dear! Oh dear!"
+
+"Oh! Those Huns! I'd shoot the lot, I would!"
+
+"They _are_ wicked!" Mrs. Gerhardt echoed: "That was a dreadful thing to
+do!"
+
+But it was not till Gerhardt came in at five o'clock, white as a sheet,
+that she perceived how this dreadful catastrophe affected them.
+
+"I have been called a German," were the first words he uttered; "Dollee,
+I have been called a German."
+
+"Well, so you are, my dear," said Mrs. Gerhardt.
+
+"You do not see," he answered, with a heat and agitation which surprised
+her. "I tell you this _Lusitania_ will finish our business. They will
+have me. They will take me away from you all. Already the papers have:
+'Intern all the Huns.'" He sat down at the kitchen table and buried his
+face in hands still grimy from his leather work. Mrs. Gerhardt stood
+beside him, her eyes unnaturally big.
+
+"But Max," she said, "what has it to do with you? You couldn't help it.
+Max!"
+
+Gerhardt looked up, his white face, broad in the brow and tapering to a
+thin chin, seemed all distraught.
+
+"What do they care for that? Is my name Max Gerhardt? What do they care
+if I hate the war? I am a German. That's enough. You will see."
+
+"Oh!" murmured Mrs. Gerhardt, "they won't be so unjust."
+
+Gerhardt reached up and caught her chin in his hand, and for a moment
+those two pairs of eyes gazed, straining, into each other. Then he said:
+
+"I don't want to be taken, Dollee. What shall I do away from you and the
+children? I don't want to be taken, Dollee."
+
+Mrs. Gerhardt, with a feeling of terror and a cheerful smile, answered:
+
+"You mustn't go fancyin' things, Max. I'll make you a nice cup of tea.
+Cheer up, old man! Look on the bright side!"
+
+But Gerhardt lapsed into the silence which of late she had begun to
+dread.
+
+That night some shop windows were broken, some German names effaced. The
+Gerhardts had no shop, no name painted up, and they escaped. In Press
+and Parliament the cry against "the Huns in our midst" rose with a fresh
+fury; but for the Gerhardts the face of Fate was withdrawn. Gerhardt
+went to his work as usual, and their laborious and quiet existence
+remained undisturbed; nor could Mrs. Gerhardt tell whether her man's
+ever-deepening silence was due to his "fancying things" or to the
+demeanour of his neighbours and fellow workmen. One would have said that
+he, like the derelict aunt, was deaf, so difficult to converse with had
+he become. His length of sojourn in England and his value to his
+employers, for he had real skill, had saved him for the time being; but,
+behind the screen, Fate twitched her grinning chaps.
+
+Not till the howl which followed some air raids in 1916 did they take
+off Gerhardt, with a variety of other elderly men, whose crime it was to
+have been born in Germany. They did it suddenly, and perhaps it was as
+well, for a prolonged sight of his silent misery must have upset his
+family till they would have been unable to look on that bright side of
+things which Mrs. Gerhardt had, as it were, always up her sleeve. When,
+in charge of a big and sympathetic constable, he was gone, taking all
+she could hurriedly get together for him, she hastened to the police
+station. They were friendly to her there: She must cheer up, Missis,
+'e'd be all right, she needn't worry. Ah! she could go down to the 'Ome
+Office, if she liked, and see what could be done. But they 'eld out no
+'ope! Mrs. Gerhardt waited till the morrow, having the little Violet in
+bed with her, and crying quietly into her pillow; then, putting on her
+Sunday best she went down to a building in Whitehall, larger than any
+she had ever entered. Two hours she waited, sitting unobtrusive, with
+big anxious eyes, and a line between her brows. At intervals of half an
+hour she would get up and ask the messenger cheerfully: "I 'ope they
+haven't forgotten me, sir. Perhaps you'd see to it." And because she was
+cheerful the messenger took her under his protection, and answered: "All
+right, Missis. They're very busy, but _I'll_ wangle you in some'ow."
+
+When at length she was wangled into the presence of a grave gentleman in
+eye-glasses, realisation of the utter importance of this moment overcame
+her so that she could not speak. "Oh! dear"--she thought, while her
+heart fluttered like a bird--"he'll never understand; I'll never be
+able to make him." She saw her husband buried under the leaves of
+despair; she saw her children getting too little food, the deaf aunt,
+now bedridden, neglected in the new pressure of work that must fall on
+the only breadwinner left. And, choking a little, she said:
+
+"I'm sure I'm very sorry to take up your time, sir; but my 'usband's
+been taken to the Palace; and we've been married over twenty years, and
+he's been in England twenty-five; and he's a very good man and a good
+workman; and I thought perhaps they didn't understand that; and we've
+got three children and a relation that's bedridden. And of course, we
+understand that the Germans have been very wicked; Gerhardt always said
+that himself. And it isn't as if he was a spy; so I thought if you could
+do something for us, sir, I being English myself."
+
+The gentleman, looking past her at the wall, answered wearily:
+
+"Gerhardt--I'll look into it. We have to do very hard things, Mrs.
+Gerhardt."
+
+Little Mrs. Gerhardt, with big eyes almost starting out of her head, for
+she was no fool, and perceived that this was the end, said eagerly:
+
+"Of course I know that there's a big outcry, and the papers are askin'
+for it; but the people in our street don't mind 'im, sir. He's always
+done little things for them; so I thought perhaps you might make an
+exception in his case."
+
+She noticed that the gentleman's lips tightened at the word outcry, and
+that he was looking at her now.
+
+"His case was before the Committee no doubt; but I'll inquire.
+Good-morning."
+
+Mrs. Gerhardt, accustomed to not being troublesome, rose; a tear rolled
+down her cheek and was arrested by her smile.
+
+"Thank you, sir, I'm sure. Good-morning, sir."
+
+And she went out. Meeting the messenger in the corridor, and hearing
+his: "Well, Missis?" she answered: "I don't know. I must look on the
+bright side. Good-bye, and thank you for your trouble." And she turned
+away feeling as if she had been beaten all over.
+
+The bright side on which she looked did not include the return to her of
+little Gerhardt, who was duly detained for the safety of the country.
+Obedient to economy, and with a dim sense that her favourite papers were
+in some way responsible for this, she ceased to take them in, and took
+in sewing instead. It had become necessary to do so, for the allowance
+she received from the government was about a quarter of Gerhardt's
+weekly earnings. In spite of its inadequacy it was something, and she
+felt she must be grateful. But, curiously enough, she could not forget
+that she was English, and it seemed strange to her that, in addition to
+the grief caused by separation from her husband from whom she had never
+been parted not even for a night, she should now be compelled to work
+twice as hard and eat half as much because that husband had paid her
+country the compliment of preferring it to his own. But, after all, many
+other people had much worse trouble to grieve over, so she looked on the
+bright side of all this, especially on those days once a week when
+alone, or accompanied by the little Violet, she visited that Palace
+where she had read in her favourite journals to her great comfort that
+her husband was treated like a prince. Since he had no money he was in
+what they called "the battalion," and their meetings were held in the
+bazaar, where things which "the princes" made were exposed for sale.
+Here Mr. and Mrs. Gerhardt would stand in front of some doll, some
+blotting-book, calendar, or walking-stick, which had been fashioned by
+one of "the princes." There they would hold each others' hands and try
+to imagine themselves unsurrounded by other men and wives, while the
+little Violet would stray and return to embrace her father's leg
+spasmodically. Standing there, Mrs. Gerhardt would look on the bright
+side, and explain to Gerhardt how well everything was going, and he
+mustn't fret about them, and how kind the police were, and how auntie
+asked after him, and Minnie would get a prize; and how he oughtn't to
+mope, but eat his food, and look on the bright side. And Gerhardt would
+smile the smile which went into her heart just like a sword, and say:
+
+"All right, Dollee. I'm getting on fine." Then, when the whistle blew
+and he had kissed little Violet, they would be quite silent, looking at
+each other. And she would say in a voice so matter-of-fact that it could
+have deceived no one:
+
+"Well, I must go now. Good-bye, old man!"
+
+And he would say:
+
+"Good-bye, Dollee. Kiss me."
+
+They would kiss, and holding little Violet's hand very hard she would
+hurry away in the crowd, taking care not to look back for fear she might
+suddenly lose sight of the bright side. But as the months went on,
+became a year, eighteen months, two years, and still she went weekly to
+see her "prince" in his Palace, that visit became for her the hardest
+experience of all her hard week's doings. For she was a realist, as well
+as a heroine, and she could see the lines of despair not only in her
+man's heart but in his face. For a long time he had not said: "I'm
+getting on fine, Dollee." His face had a beaten look, his figure had
+wasted, he complained of his head.
+
+"It's so noisy," he would say constantly; "oh! it's so noisy--never a
+quiet moment--never alone--never--never--never--never. And not enough to
+eat; it's all reduced now, Dollee."
+
+She learned to smuggle food into his hands, but it was very little, for
+they had not enough at home either, with the price of living ever going
+up and her depleted income ever stationary. They had--her "man" told
+her--made a fuss in the papers about their being fed like turkeycocks,
+while the "Huns" were sinking the ships. Gerhardt, always a spare little
+man, had lost eighteen pounds. She, naturally well covered, was getting
+thin herself, but that she did not notice, too busy all day long, and
+too occupied in thinking of her "man." To watch him week by week, more
+hopeless, as the months dragged on, was an acute torture, to disguise
+which was torture even more acute. She had long seen that there _was_ no
+bright side, but if she admitted that she knew she would go down; so she
+did not. And she carefully kept from Gerhardt such matters as David's
+overgrowing his strength, because she could not feed him properly; the
+completely bedridden nature of auntie; and worse than these, the
+growing coldness and unkindness of her neighbours. Perhaps they did not
+mean to be unkind, perhaps they did, for it was not in their nature to
+withstand the pressure of mass sentiment, the continual personal
+discomfort of having to stand in queues, the fear of air raids, the
+cumulative indignation caused by stories of atrocities true and untrue.
+In spite of her record of kindliness towards them she became tarred with
+the brush at last, for her nerves had given way once or twice, and she
+had said it was a shame to keep her man like that, gettin' iller and
+iller, who had never done a thing. Even her reasonableness--and she was
+very reasonable--succumbed to the strain of that weekly sight of him,
+till she could no longer allow for the difficulties which Mrs. Clirehugh
+assured her the Government had to deal with. Then one day she used the
+words "fair play," and at once it became current that she had "German
+sympathies." From that time on she was somewhat doomed. Those who had
+received kindnesses from her were foremost in showing her coldness,
+being wounded in their self-esteem. To have received little benefits,
+such as being nursed when they were sick, from one who had "German
+sympathies" was too much for the pride which is in every human being,
+however humble an inhabitant of Putney. Mrs. Gerhardt's Cockney spirit
+could support this for herself, but she could not bear it for her
+children. David came home with a black eye, and would not say why he had
+got it. Minnie missed her prize at school, though she had clearly won
+it. That was just after the last German offensive began; but Mrs.
+Gerhardt refused to see that this was any reason. Little Violet twice
+put the heart-rending question to her: "Aren't I English, Mummy?"
+
+She was answered: "Yes, my dear, of course."
+
+But the child obviously remained unconvinced in her troubled mind.
+
+And then they took David for the British army. It was that which so
+upset the applecart in Mrs. Gerhardt that she broke out to her last
+friend, Mrs. Clirehugh:
+
+"I do think it's hard, Eliza. They take his father and keep him there
+for a dangerous Hun year after year like that; and then they take his
+boy for the army to fight against him. And how I'm to get on without him
+I don't know."
+
+Little Mrs. Clirehugh, who was Scotch, with a Gloucestershire accent,
+replied:
+
+"Well, we've got to beat them. They're such a wicked lot. I daresay it's
+'ard on you, but we've got to beat them."
+
+"But _we_ never did nothing," cried Mrs. Gerhardt; "it isn't us that's
+wicked. We never wanted the war; it's nothing but ruin to him. They did
+ought to let me have my man, or my boy, one or the other."
+
+"You should 'ave some feeling for the Government, Dora; they 'ave to do
+'ard things."
+
+Mrs. Gerhardt, with a quivering face, had looked at her friend.
+
+"I have," she said at last in a tone which implanted in Mrs. Clirehugh's
+heart the feeling that Dora was "bitter."
+
+She could not forget it; and she would flaunt her head at any mention of
+her former friend. It was a blow to Mrs. Gerhardt, who had now no
+friends, except the deaf and bedridden aunt, to whom all things were the
+same, war or no war, Germans or no Germans, so long as she was fed.
+
+About then it was that the tide turned, and the Germans began to know
+defeat. Even Mrs. Gerhardt, who read the papers no longer, learned it
+daily, and her heart relaxed; that bright side began to reappear a
+little. She felt they could not feel so hardly towards her "man" now as
+when they were all in fear; and perhaps the war would be over before her
+boy went out. But Gerhardt puzzled her. He did not brighten up. The iron
+seemed to have entered his soul too deeply. And one day, in the bazaar,
+passing an open doorway, Mrs. Gerhardt had a glimpse of why. There,
+stretching before her astonished eyes, was a great, as it were,
+encampment of brown blankets, slung and looped up anyhow, dividing from
+each other countless sordid beds, which were almost touching, and a
+whiff of huddled humanity came out to her keen nostrils, and a hum of
+sound to her ears. So that was where her man had dwelt these thirty
+months, in that dirty, crowded, noisy place, with dirty-looking men,
+such as those she could see lying on the beds, or crouching by the side
+of them, over their work. He had kept neat somehow, at least on the days
+when she came to see him--but _that_ was where he lived! Alone again
+(for she no longer brought the little Violet to see her German father),
+she grieved all the way home. Whatever happened to him now, even if she
+got him back, she knew he would never quite get over it.
+
+And then came the morning when she came out of her door like the other
+inhabitants of Putney, at sound of the maroons, thinking it was an air
+raid; and, catching the smile on the toothless mouth of one of her old
+neighbours, hearing the cheers of the boys in the school round the
+corner, knew that it was Peace. Her heart overflowed then, and,
+withdrawing hastily, she sat down on a shiny chair in her little empty
+parlour. Her face crumpled suddenly, the tears came welling forth; she
+cried and cried, alone in the little cold room. She cried from relief
+and utter thankfulness. It was over--over at last! The long waiting--the
+long misery--the yearning for her "man"--the grieving for all those poor
+boys in the mud, and the dreadful shell holes, and the fighting, the
+growing terror of anxiety for her own boy--over, all over! Now they
+would let Max out, now David would come back from the army; and people
+would not be unkind and spiteful to her and the children any more!
+
+For all she was a Cockney, hers was a simple soul, associating Peace
+with Good-will. Drying her tears, she stood up, and in the little cheap
+mirror above the empty grate looked at her face. It was lined, and she
+was grey; for more than two years her man had not seen her without her
+hat. What ever would he say? And she rubbed and rubbed her cheeks,
+trying to smooth them out. Then her conscience smote her, and she ran
+upstairs to the back bedroom, where the deaf aunt lay. Taking up the
+little amateur ear trumpet which Gerhardt himself had made for "auntie,"
+before he was taken away, she bawled into it:
+
+"Peace, Auntie; it's Peace! Think of that. It's Peace!"
+
+"What's that?" answered the deaf woman.
+
+"It's Peace, Auntie, Peace."
+
+The deaf lady roused herself a little, and some meaning came into the
+lack-lustre black eyes of her long, leathery face. "You don't say," she
+said in her wooden voice, "I'm so hungry, Dolly, isn't it time for my
+dinner?"
+
+"I was just goin' to get it, dearie," replied Mrs. Gerhardt, and hurried
+back downstairs with her brain teeming, to make the deaf woman's bowl of
+bread, pepper, salt, and onions.
+
+All that day and the next and the next she saw the bright side of things
+with almost dazzling clearness, waiting to visit her "prince" in his
+Palace. She found him in a strange and pitiful state of nerves. The news
+had produced too intense and varied emotions among those crowded
+thousands of men buried away from normal life so long. She spent all her
+hour and a half trying desperately to make him see the bright side, but
+he was too full of fears and doubts, and she went away smiling, but
+utterly exhausted. Slowly in the weeks which followed she learned that
+nothing was changed. In the fond hope that Gerhardt might be home now
+any day, she was taking care that his slippers and some clothes of
+David's were ready for him, and the hip bath handy for him to have a
+lovely hot wash. She had even bought a bottle of beer and some of his
+favourite pickle, saving the price out of her own food, and was taking
+in the paper again, letting bygones be bygones. But he did not come. And
+soon the paper informed her that the English prisoners were
+returning--many in wretched state, poor things, so that her heart bled
+for them, and made her fiercely angry with the cruel men who had treated
+them so; but it informed her too, that if the paper had its way no
+"Huns" would be tolerated in this country for the future. "Send them all
+back!" were the words it used. She did not realise at first that this
+applied to Gerhardt; but when she did, she dropped the journal as if it
+had been a living coal of fire. Not let him come back to his home, and
+family, not let him stay, after all they'd done to him, and he never did
+anything to them! Not let him stay, but send him out to that dreadful
+country, which he had almost forgotten in these thirty years, and he
+with an English wife and children! In this new terror of utter
+dislocation the bright side so slipped from her that she was obliged to
+go out into the back garden in the dark, where a sou'-westerly wind was
+driving the rain. There, lifting her eyes to the evening sky she uttered
+a little moan. It couldn't be true; and yet what they said in her paper
+had always turned out true, like the taking of Gerhardt away, and the
+reduction of his food. And the face of the gentleman in the building at
+Whitehall came before her out of the long past, with his lips
+tightening, and his words: "We have to do very hard things, Mrs.
+Gerhardt." Why had they to do them? Her man had never done no harm to no
+one! A flood, bitter as sea water, surged in her, and seemed to choke
+her very being. Those gentlemen in the papers--why should they go on
+like that? Had they no hearts, no eyes to see the misery they brought to
+humble folk? "I wish them nothing worse than what they've brought to him
+and me," she thought wildly: "nothing worse!"
+
+The rain beat on her face, wetted her grey hair, cooled her eyeballs. "I
+mustn't be spiteful," she thought; and bending down in the dark she
+touched the glass of the tiny conservatory built against the warm
+kitchen wall, and heated by the cunning little hot-water pipe her man
+had put there in his old handy days. Under it were one little monthly
+rose, which still had blossoms, and some straggly small chrysanthemums.
+She had been keeping them for the feast when he came home; but if he
+wasn't to come, what should she do? She raised herself. Above the wet
+roofs sky-rack was passing wild and dark, but in a little cleared space
+one or two stars shone the brighter for the blackness below. "I must
+look on the bright side," she thought, "or I can't bear myself." And she
+went in to cook the porridge for the evening meal.
+
+The winter passed for her in the most dreadful anxiety. "Repatriate the
+Huns!" That cry continued to spurt up in her paper like a terrible face
+seen in some recurrent nightmare; and each week that she went to visit
+Gerhardt brought solid confirmation to her terror. He was taking it
+hard, so that sometimes she was afraid that "something" was happening in
+him. This was the utmost she went towards defining what doctors might
+have diagnosed as incipient softening of the brain. He seemed to dread
+the prospect of being sent to his native country.
+
+"I couldn't stick it, Dollee," he would say. "What should I do--whatever
+should I do? I haven't a friend. I haven't a spot to go to. I should be
+lost. I'm afraid, Dollee. How could you come out there, you and the
+children? I couldn't make a living for you. I couldn't make one for
+myself now."
+
+And she would say: "Cheer up, old man. Look on the bright side. Think of
+the others." For, though those others were not precisely the bright
+side, the mental picture of their sufferings, all those poor "princes"
+and their families, somehow helped her to bear her own. But he shook
+his head:
+
+"No; I should never see you again."
+
+"I'd follow you," she answered. "Never fear, Max, we'd work in the
+fields--me and the children. We'd get on somehow. Bear up, my dearie.
+It'll soon be over now. I'll stick to you, Max, never you fear. But they
+won't send you, they never will."
+
+And then, like a lump of ice pressed on her breast, came the thought:
+"But if they do! Auntie! My boy! My girls! However shall I manage if
+they do!"
+
+Then long lists began to appear, and in great batches men were shovelled
+wholesale back to the country whose speech some of them had well-nigh
+forgotten. Little Gerhardt's name had not appeared yet. The lists were
+hung up the day after Mrs. Gerhardt's weekly visit, but she urged him if
+his name did appear to appeal against repatriation. It was with the
+greatest difficulty that she roused in him the energy to promise. "Look
+on the bright side, Max," she implored him. "You've got a son in the
+British army; they'll never send you. They wouldn't be so cruel. Never
+say die, old man."
+
+His name appeared but was taken out, and the matter hung again in awful
+suspense, while the evil face of the recurrent nightmare confronted
+Mrs. Gerhardt out of her favourite journal. She read that journal again,
+because, so far as in her gentle spirit lay, she hated it. It was slowly
+killing her man, and all her chance of future happiness; she hated it,
+and read it every morning. To the monthly rose and straggly little
+brown-red chrysanthemums in the tiny hothouse there had succeeded spring
+flowers--a few hardy January snowdrops, and one by one blue scillas, and
+the little pale daffodils called "angels' tears."
+
+Peace tarried, but the flowers came up long before their time in their
+tiny hothouse against the kitchen flue. And then one wonderful day there
+came to Mrs. Gerhardt a strange letter, announcing that Gerhardt was
+coming home. He would not be sent to Germany--he was coming home!
+To-day, that very day--any moment he might be with her. When she
+received it, who had long received no letters save the weekly letters of
+her boy still in the army, she was spreading margarine on auntie's bread
+for breakfast, and, moved beyond all control, she spread it thick,
+wickedly, wastefully thick, then dropped the knife, sobbed, laughed,
+clasped her hands on her breast, and without rhyme or reason, began
+singing: "Hark! the herald angels sing." The girls had gone to school
+already, auntie in the room above could not hear her, no one heard her,
+nor saw her drop suddenly into the wooden chair, and, with her bare arms
+stretched out one on either side of the plate of bread and margarine,
+cry her heart out against the clean white table. Coming home, coming
+home, coming home! The bright side! The little white stars!
+
+It was a quarter of an hour before she could trust herself to answer the
+knocking on the floor, which meant that "auntie" was missing her
+breakfast. Hastily she made the tea and went up with it and the bread
+and margarine. The woman's dim long face gleamed greedily when she saw
+how thick the margarine was spread; but little Mrs. Gerhardt said no
+word of the reason for that feast. She just watched her only friend
+eating it, while a little moisture still trickled out from her big eyes
+on to her flushed cheeks, and the words still hummed in her brain:
+
+ "Peace on earth and mercy mild,
+ Jesus Christ a little child."
+
+Then, still speaking no word, she ran out and put clean sheets on her
+and her man's bed. She was on wires, she could not keep still, and all
+the morning she polished, polished. About noon she went out into her
+garden, and from under the glass plucked every flower that grew
+there--snowdrops, scillas, "angels' tears," quite two dozen blossoms.
+She brought them into the little parlour and opened its window wide. The
+sun was shining, and fell on the flowers strewn on the table, ready to
+be made into the nosegay of triumphant happiness. While she stood
+fingering them, delicately breaking half an inch off their stalks so
+that they should last the longer in water, she became conscious of
+someone on the pavement outside the window, and looking up saw Mrs.
+Clirehugh. The past, the sense of having been deserted by her friends,
+left her, and she called out:
+
+"Come in, Eliza; look at my flowers!"
+
+Mrs. Clirehugh came in; she was in black, her cheekbones higher, her
+hair looser, her eyes bigger. Mrs. Gerhardt saw tears starting from
+those eyes, wetting those high cheekbones, and cried out:
+
+"Why, what's the matter, dear?"
+
+Mrs. Clirehugh choked. "My baby!"
+
+Mrs. Gerhardt dropped an "angels' tear," and went up to her.
+
+"Whatever's happened?" she cried.
+
+"Dead!" replied Mrs. Clirehugh. "Dead o' the influenza. 'E's to be
+buried to-day. I can't--I can't--I can't--" Wild choking stopped her
+utterance. Mrs. Gerhardt put an arm round her and drew her head on to
+her shoulder.
+
+"I can't--I can't--" sobbed Mrs. Clirehugh; "I can't find any flowers.
+It's seein' yours made me cry."
+
+"There, there!" cried Mrs. Gerhardt. "Have them. I'm sure you're
+welcome, dearie. Have them--I'm so sorry!"
+
+"I don't know," choked Mrs. Clirehugh, "I 'aven't deserved them." Mrs.
+Gerhardt gathered up the flowers.
+
+"Take them," she said. "I couldn't think of it. Your poor little baby.
+Take them! There, there, he's spared a lot of trouble. You must look on
+the bright side, dearie."
+
+Mrs. Clirehugh tossed up her head.
+
+"You're an angel, that's what you are!" she said, and grasping the
+flowers she hurried out, a little black figure passing the window in the
+sunlight.
+
+Mrs. Gerhardt stood above the emptied table, thinking: "Poor dear--I'm
+glad she had the flowers. It was a mercy I didn't call out that Max was
+coming!" And from the floor she picked up one "angels' tear" she had
+dropped, and set it in a glass of water, where the sunlight fell. She
+was still gazing at it, pale, slender, lonely in that coarse tumbler,
+when she heard a knock on the parlour door, and went to open it. There
+stood her man, with a large brown-paper parcel in his hand. He stood
+quite still, his head a little down, the face very grey. She cried out;
+"Max!" but the thought flashed through her: "He knocked on the door!
+It's _his_ door--he knocked on the door!"
+
+"Dollee?" he said, with a sort of question in his voice.
+
+She threw her arms round him, drew him into the room, and shutting the
+door, looked hard into his face. Yes, it was his face, but in the eyes
+something wandered--lit up, went out, lit up.
+
+"Dollee," he said again, and clutched her hand.
+
+She strained him to her with a sob.
+
+"I'm not well, Dollee," he murmured.
+
+"No, of course not, my dearie man; but you'll soon be all right
+now--home again with me. Cheer up, cheer up!"
+
+"I'm not well," he said again.
+
+She caught the parcel out of his hand, and taking the "angels' tear"
+from the tumbler, fixed it in his coat.
+
+"Here's a spring flower for you, Max; out of your own little hothouse.
+You're home again; home again, my dearie. Auntie's upstairs, and the
+girls'll be coming soon. And we'll have dinner."
+
+"I'm not well, Dollee," he said.
+
+Terrified by that reiteration, she drew him down on the little horsehair
+sofa, and sat on his knee. "You're home, Max, kiss me. There's my man!"
+and she rocked him to and fro against her, yearning yet fearing to look
+into his face and see that "something" wander there--light up, go out,
+light up. "Look, dearie," she said, "I've got some beer for you. You'd
+like a glass of beer?"
+
+He made a motion of his lips, a sound that was like the ghost of a
+smack. It terrified her, so little life was there in it.
+
+He clutched her close, and repeated feebly:
+
+"Yes, all right in a day or two. They let me come--I'm not well,
+Dollee." He touched his head.
+
+Straining him to her, rocking him, she murmured over and over again,
+like a cat purring to its kitten:
+
+"It's all right, my dearie--soon be well--soon be well! We must look on
+the bright side--My man!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"CAFARD"
+
+
+The soldier Jean Liotard lay, face to the earth, by the bank of the
+river Drôme. He lay where the grass and trees ended, and between him and
+the shrivelled green current was much sandy foreshore, for summer was at
+height, and the snows had long finished melting and passing down. The
+burning sun had sucked up all moisture, the earth was parched, but
+to-day a cool breeze blew, willow and aspen leaves were fluttering and
+hissing as if millions of tiny kisses were being given up there; and a
+few swathes of white cloud were drawn, it seemed--not driven--along the
+blue. The soldier Jean Liotard had fixed his eyes on the ground, where
+was nothing to see but a few dry herbs. He had "_cafard_," for he was
+due to leave the hospital to-morrow and go up before the military
+authorities, for "_prolongation_." There he would answer perfunctory
+questions, and be told at once: _Au dépôt_; or have to lie naked before
+them that some "_major_" might prod his ribs, to find out whether his
+heart, displaced by shell-shock, had gone back sufficiently to normal
+position. He had received one "_prolongation_," and so, wherever his
+heart now was, he felt sure he would not get another. "_Au dépôt_" was
+the fate before him, fixed as that river flowing down to its death in
+the sea. He had "_cafard_"--the little black beetle in the brain, which
+gnaws and eats and destroys all hope and heaven in a man. It had been
+working at him all last week, and now he was at a monstrous depth of
+evil and despair. To begin again the cursed barrack-round, the driven
+life, until in a month perhaps, packed like bleating sheep, in the
+troop-train, he made that journey to the fighting line again--"_À la
+hachette--à la hachette!_"
+
+He had stripped off his red flannel jacket, and lay with shirt opened to
+the waist, to get the breeze against his heart. In his brown
+good-looking face the hazel eyes, which in these three God-deserted
+years had acquired a sort of startled gloom, stared out like a dog's,
+rather prominent, seeing only the thoughts within him--thoughts and
+images swirling round and round in a dark whirlpool, drawing his whole
+being deeper and deeper. He was unconscious of all the summer hum and
+rustle--the cooing of the dove up in that willow tree, the winged
+enamelled fairies floating past, the chirr of the cicadas, that little
+brown lizard among the pebbles, almost within reach, seeming to listen
+to the beating of summer's heart so motionless it lay; unconscious, as
+though in verity he were again deep in some stifling trench, with German
+shells whining over him, and the smell of muck and blood making foetid
+the air. He was in the mood which curses God and dies; for he was
+devout--a Catholic, and still went to Mass. And God had betrayed the
+earth, and Jean Liotard. All the enormities he had seen in his two years
+at the front--the mouthless mangled faces, the human ribs whence rats
+would steal; the frenzied tortured horses, with leg or quarter rent
+away, still living; the rotted farms, the dazed and hopeless peasants;
+his innumerable suffering comrades; the desert of no-man's land; and all
+the thunder and moaning of war; and the reek and the freezing of war;
+and the driving--the callous perpetual driving, by some great Force
+which shovelled warm human hearts and bodies, warm human hopes and loves
+by the million into the furnace; and over all, dark sky without a break,
+without a gleam of blue, or lift anywhere--all this enclosed him, lying
+in the golden heat, so that not a glimmer of life or hope could get at
+him. Back into it all again! Back into it, he who had been through forty
+times the hell that the "_majors_" ever endured, five hundred times the
+hell ever glimpsed at by those _députés_, safe with their fat salaries,
+and their gabble about victory and the lost provinces, and the future of
+the world--the _Canaille!_ Let them allow the soldiers, whose lives they
+spent like water--"_les camarades_" on both sides--poor devils who bled,
+and froze, and starved, and sweated--let them suffer these to make the
+peace! Ah! What a peace that would be--its first condition, all the
+sacred politicians and pressmen hanging in rows in every country; the
+mouth fighters, the pen fighters, the fighters with other men's blood!
+Those comfortable citizens would never rest till there was not a young
+man with whole limbs left in France! Had he not killed enough Boches,
+that they might leave him and his tired heart in peace? He thought of
+his first charge; of how queer and soft that Boche body felt when his
+bayonet went through; and another, and another. Ah! he had "_joliment_"
+done his duty that day! And something wrenched at his ribs. They were
+only Boches, but their wives and children, their mothers--faces
+questioning, faces pleading for them--pleading with whom? Ah! Not with
+him! Who was he that had taken those lives, and others since, but a poor
+devil without a life himself, without the right to breathe or move
+except to the orders of a Force which had no mind, which had no heart,
+had nothing but a blind will to go on, it knew not why. If only he
+survived--it was not possible--but if only he survived, and with his
+millions of comrades could come back and hold the reckoning! Some
+scare-the-crows then would waggle in the wind. The butterflies would
+perch on a few mouths empty at last; the flies enjoy a few silent
+tongues! Then slowly his fierce unreasoning rancour vanished into a mere
+awful pity for himself. Was a fellow never again to look at the sky, and
+the good soil, the fruit, the wheat, without this dreadful black cloud
+above him, never again make love among the trees, or saunter down a
+lighted boulevard, or sit before a café, never again attend Mass,
+without this black dog of disgust and dread sitting on his shoulders,
+riding him to death? Angels of pity! Was there never to be an end? One
+was going mad under it--yes, mad! And the face of his mother came before
+him, as he had seen her last, just three years ago, when he left his
+home in the now invaded country, to join his regiment--his mother who,
+with all his family, was in the power of the Boche. He had gone gaily,
+and she had stood like stone, her hand held over her eyes, in the
+sunlight, watching him while the train ran out. Usually the thought of
+the cursed Boches holding in their heavy hands all that was dear to him,
+was enough to sweep his soul to a clear, definite hate, which made all
+this nightmare of war seem natural, and even right; but now it was not
+enough--he had "_cafard_." He turned on his back. The sky above the
+mountains might have been black for all the joy its blue gave him. The
+butterflies, those drifting flakes of joy, passed unseen. He was
+thinking: No rest, no end, except by walking over bodies, dead, mangled
+bodies of poor devils like himself, poor hunted devils, who wanted
+nothing but never to lift a hand in combat again so long as they lived,
+who wanted--as he wanted--nothing but laughter and love and rest!
+_Quelle vie!_ A carnival of leaping demonry! A dream--unutterably bad!
+"And when I go back to it all," he thought, "I shall go all shaven and
+smart, and wave my hand as if I were going to a wedding, as we all do.
+_Vive la France!_ Ah! what mockery! Can't a poor devil have a dreamless
+sleep!" He closed his eyes, but the sun struck hot on them through the
+lids, and he turned over on his face again, and looked longingly at the
+river--they said it was deep in mid-stream; it still ran fast there!
+What was that down by the water? Was he really mad? And he uttered a
+queer laugh. There was his black dog--the black dog off his shoulders,
+the black dog which rode him, yea, which had become his very self, just
+going to wade in! And he called out:
+
+"_Hé! le copain!_" It was not his dog, for it stopped drinking, tucked
+its tail in, and cowered at the sound of his voice. Then it came from
+the water, and sat down on its base among the stones, and looked at him.
+A real dog was it? What a guy! What a thin wretch of a little black dog!
+It sat and stared--a mongrel who might once have been pretty. It stared
+at Jean Liotard with the pathetic gaze of a dog so thin and hungry that
+it earnestly desires to go to men and get fed once more, but has been so
+kicked and beaten that it dare not. It seemed held in suspense by the
+equal overmastering impulses, fear and hunger. And Jean Liotard stared
+back. The lost, as it were despairing look of the dog began to penetrate
+his brain. He held out his hand and said: "_Viens!_" But at the sound
+the little dog only squirmed away a few paces, then again sat down, and
+resumed its stare. Again Jean Liotard uttered that queer laugh. If the
+good God were to hold out his hand and say to him: "_Viens!_" he would
+do exactly as that little beast; he would not come, not he! What was he
+too but a starved and beaten dog--a driven wretch, kicked to hell! And
+again, as if experimenting with himself, he held out his hand and said:
+"Viens!" and again the beast squirmed a little further away, and again
+sat down and stared. Jean Liotard lost patience. His head drooped till
+his forehead touched the ground. He smelt the parched herbs, and a faint
+sensation of comfort stole through his nerves. He lay unmoving, trying
+to fancy himself dead and out of it all. The hum of summer, the smell of
+grasses, the caress of the breeze going over! He pressed the palms of
+his outstretched hands on the warm soil, as one might on a woman's
+breast. If only it were really death, how much better than life in this
+butcher's shop! But death, his death was waiting for him away over
+there, under the moaning shells, under the whining bullets, at the end
+of a steel prong--a mangled, foetid death. Death--his death, had no
+sweet scent, and no caress--save the kisses of rats and crows. Life and
+Death what were they? Nothing but the preying of creatures the one on
+the other--nothing but that; and love, the blind instinct which made
+these birds and beasts of prey. _Bon sang de bon sang!_ The Christ hid
+his head finely nowadays! That cross up there on the mountain top, with
+the sun gleaming on it--they had been right to put it up where no man
+lived, and not even a dog roamed, to be pitied! "Fairy tales, fairy
+tales," he thought; "those who drive and those who are driven, those
+who eat and those who are eaten--we are all poor devils together. There
+is no pity, no God!" And the flies drummed their wings above him. And
+the sun, boring into his spine through his thin shirt, made him reach
+for his jacket. There was the little dog, still, sitting on its base,
+twenty yards away. It cowered and dropped its ears when he moved; and he
+thought "Poor beast! Someone has been doing the devil's work on you, not
+badly!" There were some biscuits in the pocket of his jacket, and he
+held one out. The dog shivered, and its thin pink tongue lolled out,
+panting with desire, and fear. Jean Liotard tossed the biscuit gently
+about half way. The dog cowered back a step or two, crept forward three,
+and again squatted. Then very gradually it crept up to the biscuit,
+bolted it, and regained its distance. The soldier took out another. This
+time he threw it five paces only in front of him. Again the little beast
+cowered, slunk forward, seized the biscuit, devoured it; but this time
+it only recoiled a pace or two, and seemed, with panting mouth and faint
+wagging of the tail, to beg for more. Jean Liotard held a third biscuit
+as far out in front of him as he could, and waited. The creature crept
+forward and squatted just out of reach. There it sat, with saliva
+dripping from its mouth; seemingly it could not make up its mind to
+that awful venture. The soldier sat motionless; his outstretched hand
+began to tire; but he did not budge--he meant to conquer its fear. At
+last it snatched the biscuit. Jean Liotard instantly held out a fourth.
+That too was snatched, but at the fifth he was able to touch the dog. It
+cowered almost into the ground at touch of his fingers, and then lay,
+still trembling violently, while the soldier continued to stroke its
+head and ears. And suddenly his heart gave a twitter, the creature had
+licked his hand. He took out his last biscuit, broke it up, and fed the
+dog slowly with the bits, talking all the time; when the last crumb was
+gone he continued to murmur and crumple its ears softly. He had become
+aware of something happening within the dog--something in the nature of
+conversion, as if it were saying: "O my master, my new master--I
+worship, I love you!" The creature came gradually closer, quite close;
+then put up its sharp black nose and began to lick his face. Its little
+hot rough tongue licked and licked, and with each lick the soldier's
+heart relaxed, just as if the licks were being given there, and
+something licked away. He put his arms round the thin body, and hugged
+it, and still the creature went on feverishly licking at his face, and
+neck, and chest, as if trying to creep inside him. The sun poured down,
+the lizards rustled and whisked among the pebbles; the kissing never
+ceased up there among the willow and aspen leaves, and every kind of
+flying thing went past drumming its wings. There was no change in the
+summer afternoon. God might not be there, but Pity had come back; Jean
+Liotard no longer had "_cafard_." He put the little dog gently off his
+lap, got up, and stretched himself. "_Voyons, mon brave, faut aller voir
+les copains! Tu es à moi._" The little dog stood up on its hind legs,
+scratching with its forepaws at the soldier's thigh, as if trying to get
+at his face again; as if begging not to be left; and its tail waved
+feverishly, half in petition, half in rapture. The soldier caught the
+paws, set them down, and turned his face for home, making the noises
+that a man makes to his dog; and the little dog followed, close as he
+could get to those moving ankles, lifting his snout, and panting with
+anxiety and love.
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+RECORDED
+
+
+Just as the train was going out the compartment was stormed by a figure
+in khaki, with a rifle, a bad cold, a wife, a basket, a small bundle,
+and two babies. Setting his rifle down in the corner, he said:
+
+"Didn't think we shud ever 'a caught it!"
+
+His lean face was streaming with perspiration, and when he took off his
+overcoat there rose the sweetish sourish scent of a hot goatskin
+waistcoat. It reached below his waist, and would have kept cold out from
+a man standing in a blizzard, and he had been carrying a baby, a rifle,
+a bundle, a basket, and running, on a warmish day.
+
+"Grand things, these," he said, and took it off. He also took off his
+cap, and sat down with the elder baby in a howling draught.
+
+"Proper cold I've caught comin' over here," he added.
+
+His wife, quite a girl, broad-faced, fresh-coloured, with small grey
+eyes and a wonderfully placid, comely face, on which a faint shadow
+seemed printed, sat beside him with the younger baby, a real hairless
+one, as could be seen when its white knitted cap slipped. The elder
+baby, perhaps two years old, began whimpering a little. He jigged it
+gently, and said:
+
+"We 'ad a lot o' trouble wi' this one yesterday. The Doctor didn't think
+'er fit to travel; but I got to see the old people down there, before I
+go back out across. Come over Sunday night--only got a week's leave. So
+here we are," and he laughed.
+
+"What is your corps?" I asked.
+
+"Engineers."
+
+"Join since the war?"
+
+He looked at me as if to say: What a question!
+
+"Twelve years' service. Been everywhere--India, South Africa, Egypt.
+Come over to the front from Egypt."
+
+"Where? Ypres?"
+
+"Beg pardon? Wipers? No, Labassy."
+
+"Rough time?"
+
+He winked. "Proper rough time."
+
+He looked straight at me, and his eyes--Celtic-grey, with a good deal of
+light in them--stared, wide and fixed, at things beyond me, as only do
+the eyes of those who have seen much death. There was a sort of
+burnt-gunpowder look about their rims and lashes, and a fixity that
+nothing could have stared down.
+
+"The Kazer he says it'll all be over by April!" He laughed, abandoning
+the whole of him to enjoyment of that joke.
+
+He was thin as a rail; his head with its thick brown hair was narrow,
+his face narrowish too. He had irregular ears, and no feature that could
+be called good, but his expression was utterly genuine and unconscious
+of itself. When he sat quiet his face would be held a little down, his
+eyes would be looking at something--or was it at nothing?--far-off, in a
+kind of frowning dream. But if he glanced at his babies his rather thick
+mouth became all smiles, and he would make a remark to his wife about
+them. Once or twice she looked at him softly, but I could never catch
+him responding to that; his life was rather fuller than hers just now.
+Presently she took from him the elder baby which, whimpering again, was
+quieted at once by her broad placidity. The younger baby she passed to
+him; and, having secured it on his knee, he said:
+
+"This one's a proper little gem; never makes a sound; she's a proper
+little gem. Never cude stand hearin' a baby cry." It certainly was an
+admirable baby, whether her little garments were lifted so that you saw
+portions of her--scarlet from being held too tight, whether the shawl
+was wrapped over her too much or too little, or her little knitted
+trousers seemed about to fall off. For both these babies were elegantly
+dressed, and so was the mother, with a small blue hat and a
+large-checked blouse over her broad bosom, and a blue skirt all crumbs
+and baby. It was pleasant to see that he had ceased to stream with
+perspiration now, and some one at the other end of the carriage having
+closed the window, he and the babies no longer sat in a howling
+draught--not that they had ever noticed it.
+
+"Yes," he said suddenly, "proper rough time we 'ad of it at first.
+Terrible--yu cude 'ardly stick it. We Engineers 'ad the worst of it, tu.
+But must laugh, you know; if yu're goin' to cop it next minute--must
+laugh!" And he did. But his eyes didn't quite lose that stare.
+
+"How did you feel the first day under fire?"
+
+He closed one eye and shook his head.
+
+"Not very grand--not very grand--not for two or three days. Soon get
+used to it, though. Only things I don't care about now are those Jack
+Johnsons. Long Toms out in South Africa--now Jack Johnsons--funny
+names--" and he went into a roar. Then leaning forward and, to make sure
+of one's attention, sawing the air with a hand that held perhaps the
+longest used handkerchief ever seen, "I seen 'em make a hole where you
+could 'ave put two 'underd and fifty horses. Don't think I shall ever
+get to like 'em. Yu don't take no notice o' rifle fire after a
+little--not a bit o' notice. I was out once with a sapper and two o' the
+Devons, fixin' up barbed wire--bullets strikin' everywhere just like
+rain. One o' the Devons, he was sittin' on a biscuit-tin, singin': 'The
+fields were white wi' daisies'--singing. All of a sudden he goes like
+this--" And giving a queer dull "sumph" of a sound, he jerked his body
+limp towards his knees--"Gone! Dig a hole, put 'im in. Your turn
+to-morrow, perhaps. Pals an' all. Yu get so as yu don't take no notice."
+
+On the face of the broad, placid girl with the baby against her breast
+the shadow seemed printed a little deeper, but she did not wince. The
+tiny baby on his knees woke up and crowed faintly. He smiled.
+
+"Since I been out there, I've often wished I was a little 'un again,
+like this. Well, I made up my mind when first I went for a soldier, that
+I'd like to 'ave a medal out of it some day. Now I'll get it, if they
+don't get me!" and he laughed again: "Ah! I've 'ad some good times, an'
+I've 'ad some bad times----"
+
+"But never a time like this?"
+
+"Yes, I reckon this has about put the top hat on it!" and he nodded his
+head above the baby's. "About put the top hat on! Oh! I've seen
+things--enough to make your 'eart bleed. I've seen a lot of them country
+people. Cruel it is! Women, old men, little children, 'armless
+people--enough to make your 'eart bleed. I used to think of the folk
+over 'ere. Don't think English women'd stand what the French and Belgian
+women do. Those poor women over there--wonderful they are. There yu'll
+see 'em sittin' outside their 'omes just a heap o' ruins--clingin' to
+'em. Wonderful brave and patient--make your 'eart bleed to see 'em.
+Things I've seen! There's some proper brutes among the Germans--must be.
+Yu don't feel very kind to 'em when yu've seen what I've seen. We 'ave
+some games with 'em, though"--he laughed again: "Very nervous people,
+the Germans. If we stop firin' in our lines, up they send the star
+shells, rockets and all, to see what's goin' on--think we're goin' to
+attack--regular 'lumination o' fireworks--very nervous people. Then we
+send up some rockets on our side--just to 'ave some fun--proper display
+o' fireworks." He went off into a roar: "Must 'ave a bit o' fun, you
+know."
+
+"Is it true they can't stand the bayonet?"
+
+"Yes, that's right--they'll tell yu so themselves--very sensitive,
+nervous people."
+
+And after that a silence fell. The elder babe was still fretful, and the
+mother's face had on it that most moving phenomenon of this world--the
+strange, selfless, utterly absorbed look, mouth just loosened, eyes off
+where we cannot follow, the whole being wrapped in warmth of her baby
+against her breast. And he, with the tiny placid baby, had gone off into
+another sort of dream, with his slightly frowning, far-away look. What
+was it all about?--nothing perhaps! A great quality, to be able to rest
+in vacancy.
+
+He stirred and I offered him the paper, but he shook his head.
+
+"Thank yu; don't care about lookin' at 'em. They don't know half what we
+do out there--from what I've seen of 'em since I come back, I don't seem
+to 'ave any use for 'em. The pictures, too--" He shrugged and shook his
+head. "We 'ave the real news, y'see. They don't keep nothin' from us.
+But we're not allowed to say. When we advance there'll be some lives
+lost, I tell yu!"
+
+He nodded, thinking for a second perhaps of his own. "Can't be helped!
+Once we get 'em on the run, we shan't give 'em much time." Just then the
+baby on his knee woke up and directed on him the full brunt of its
+wide-open bright grey eyes. Its rosy cheeks were so broad and fat that
+its snub nose seemed but a button; its mouth, too tiny, one would think,
+for use, smiled. Seeing that smile he said:
+
+"Well, what do yu want? Proper little gem, ain't yu!" And suddenly
+looking up at me, he added with a sort of bashful glee: "My old
+people'll go fair mad when they see me--go fair mad they will." He
+seemed to dwell on the thought, and I saw the wife give him a long soft
+smiling look. He added suddenly:
+
+"I'll 'ave to travel back, though, Saturday--catch the six o'clock from
+Victoria, Sunday--to cross over there."
+
+Very soon after that we arrived at where he changed, and putting on his
+goatskin, his cap, and overcoat, he got out behind his wife, carrying
+with the utmost care those queer companions, his baby and his rifle.
+
+Where is he now? Alive, dead? Who knows?
+
+1915.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE RECRUIT
+
+
+Several times since that fateful Fourth of August he had said: "I sh'll
+'ave to go."
+
+And the farmer and his wife would look at him, he with a sort of
+amusement, she with a queer compassion in her heart, and one or the
+other would reply smiling: "That's all right, Tom, there's plenty
+Germans yet. Yu wait a bit."
+
+His mother, too, who came daily from the lonely cottage in the little
+combe on the very edge of the big hill to work in the kitchen and farm
+dairy, would turn her dark taciturn head, with still plentiful black
+hair, towards his face which, for all its tan, was so weirdly
+reminiscent of a withered baby, pinkish and light-lashed, with forelock
+and fair hair thin and rumpled, and small blue eyes, and she would
+mutter:
+
+"Don't yu never fret, boy. They'll come for 'ee fast enough when they
+want 'ee." No one, least of all perhaps his mother, could take quite
+seriously that little square short-footed man, born when she was just
+seventeen. Sure of work because he was first-rate with every kind of
+beast, he was yet not looked on as being quite 'all there.' He could
+neither read nor write, had scarcely ever been outside the parish, and
+then only in a shandrydan on a Club treat, and he knew no more of the
+world than the native of a small South Sea Island. His life from school
+age on had been passed year in, year out, from dawn till dark, with the
+cattle and their calves, the sheep, the horses and the wild moor ponies;
+except when hay or corn harvest, or any exceptionally exacting festival
+absorbed him for the moment. From shyness he never went into the bar of
+the Inn, and so had missed the greater part of village education. He
+could of course read no papers, a map was to him but a mystic mass of
+marks and colours; he had never seen the sea, never a ship; no water
+broader than the parish streams; until the war had never met anything
+more like a soldier than the constable of the neighbouring village. But
+he had once seen a Royal Marine in uniform. What sort of creatures these
+Germans were to him--who knows? They were cruel--he had grasped that.
+Something noxious, perhaps, like the adders whose backs he broke with
+his stick; something dangerous like the chained dog at Shapton Farm; or
+the big bull at Vannacombe. When the war first broke out, and they had
+called the younger blacksmith (a reservist and noted village marksman)
+back to his regiment, the little cowman had smiled and said: "Wait till
+regiment gets to front, Fred'll soon shoot 'em up."
+
+But weeks and months went by, and it was always the Germans, the
+Germans; Fred had clearly not yet shot them up; and now one and now
+another went off from the village, and two from the farm itself; and the
+great Fred returned slightly injured for a few weeks' rest, and, full of
+whisky from morning till night, made the village ring; and finally went
+off again in a mood of manifest reluctance. All this weighed dumbly on
+the mind of the little cowman, the more heavily that because of his
+inarticulate shyness he could never talk that weight away, nor could
+anyone by talk relieve him, no premises of knowledge or vision being
+there. From sheer physical contagion he felt the grizzly menace in the
+air, and a sense of being left behind when others were going to meet
+that menace with their fists, as it were. There was something proud and
+sturdy in the little man, even in the look of him, for all that he was
+'poor old Tom,' who brought a smile to the lips of all. He was
+passionate, too, if rubbed up the wrong way; but it needed the
+malevolence and ingenuity of human beings to annoy him--with his beasts
+he never lost his temper, so that they had perfect confidence in him. He
+resembled indeed herdsmen of the Alps, whom one may see in dumb
+communion with their creatures up in those high solitudes; for he too
+dwelt in a high solitude cut off from real fellowship with men and women
+by lack of knowledge, and by the supercilious pity in them. Living in
+such a remote world his talk--when he did say something--had ever the
+surprising quality attaching to the thoughts of those by whom the normal
+proportions of things are quite unknown. His short square figure,
+hatless and rarely coated in any weather, dotting from foot to foot, a
+bit of stick in one hand, and often a straw in the mouth--he did not
+smoke--was familiar in the yard where he turned the handle of the
+separator, or in the fields and cowsheds, from daybreak to dusk, save
+for the hours of dinner and tea, which he ate in the farm kitchen,
+making sparse and surprising comments. To his peculiar whistles and
+calls the cattle and calves, for all their rumination and stubborn
+shyness, were amazingly responsive. It was a pretty sight to see them
+pushing against each other round him--for, after all, he was as much the
+source of their persistence, especially through the scanty winter
+months, as a mother starling to her unfledged young.
+
+When the Government issued their request to householders to return the
+names of those of military age ready to serve if called on, he heard of
+it, and stopped munching to say in his abrupt fashion: "I'll go--fight
+the Germans." But the farmer did not put him down, saying to his wife:
+
+"Poor old Tom! 'Twidden be 'ardly fair--they'd be makin' game of 'un."
+
+And his wife, her eyes shining with motherliness, answered: "Poor lad,
+he's not fit-like."
+
+The months went on--winter passing to spring--and the slow decking of
+the trees and fields began with leaves and flowers, with butterflies and
+the songs of birds. How far the little cowman would notice such a thing
+as that no one could ever have said, devoid as he was of the vocabulary
+of beauty, but like all the world his heart must have felt warmer and
+lighter under his old waistcoat, and perhaps more than most hearts, for
+he could often be seen standing stock-still in the fields, his browning
+face turned to the sun.
+
+Less and less he heard talk of Germans--dogged acceptance of the state
+of war having settled on that far countryside--the beggars were not
+beaten and killed off yet, but they would be in good time. It was
+unpleasant to think of them more than could be helped. Once in a way a
+youth went off and ''listed,' but though the parish had given more
+perhaps than the average, a good few of military age still clung to life
+as they had known it. Then some bright spirit conceived the notion that
+a county regiment should march through the remoter districts to rouse
+them up.
+
+The cuckoo had been singing five days; the lanes and fields, the woods
+and the village green were as Joseph's coat, so varied and so bright the
+foliage, from golden oak-buds to the brilliant little lime-tree leaves,
+the feathery green shoots of larches, and the already darkening bunches
+of the sycamores. The earth was dry--no rain for a fortnight--when the
+cars containing the brown-clad men and a recruiting band drew up before
+the Inn. Here were clustered the farmers, the innkeeper, the grey-haired
+postman; by the Church gate and before the schoolyard were knots of
+girls and children, schoolmistress, schoolmaster, parson; and down on
+the lower green a group of likely youths, an old labourer or two, and
+apart from human beings as was his wont, the little cowman in brown
+corduroys tied below the knee, and an old waistcoat, the sleeves of his
+blue shirt dotted with pink, rolled up to the elbows of his brown arms.
+So he stood, his brown neck and shaven-looking head quite bare, with
+his bit of stick wedged between his waist and the ground, staring with
+all his light-lashed water-blue eyes from under the thatch of his
+forelock.
+
+The speeches rolled forth glib; the khaki-clad men drank their second
+fill that morning of coffee and cider; the little cowman stood straight
+and still, his head drawn back. Two figures--officers, men who had been
+at the front--detached themselves and came towards the group of likely
+youths. These wavered a little, were silent, sniggered, stood their
+ground--the khaki-clad figures passed among them. Hackneyed words,
+jests, the touch of flattery, changing swiftly to chaff--all the
+customary performance, hollow and pathetic; and then the two figures
+re-emerged, their hands clenched, their eyes shifting here and there,
+their lips drawn back in fixed smiles. They had failed, and were trying
+to hide it. They must not show contempt--the young slackers might yet
+come in, when the band played.
+
+The cars were filled again, the band struck up: 'It's a long long way to
+Tipperary.'
+
+And at the edge of the green within two yards of the car's dusty passage
+the little cowman stood apart and stared. His face was red. Behind him
+they were cheering--the parson and farmers, school children, girls, even
+the group of youths. He alone did not cheer, but his face grew still
+more red. When the dust above the road and the distant blare of
+Tipperary had dispersed and died, he walked back to the farm dotting
+from one to other of his short feet. All that afternoon and evening he
+spoke no word; but the flush seemed to have settled in his face for good
+and all. He milked some cows, but forgot to bring the pails up. Two of
+his precious cows he left unmilked till their distressful lowing caused
+the farmer's wife to go down and see. There he was standing against a
+gate moving his brown neck from side to side like an animal in pain,
+oblivious seemingly of everything. She spoke to him:
+
+"What's matter, Tom?" All he could answer was:
+
+"I'se goin', I'se goin'." She milked the cows herself.
+
+For the next three days he could settle to nothing, leaving his jobs
+half done, speaking to no one save to say:
+
+"I'se goin'; I'se got to go." Even the beasts looked at him surprised.
+
+On the Saturday the farmer having consulted with his wife, said quietly:
+
+"Well, Tom, ef yu want to go, yu shall. I'll drive 'ee down Monday. Us
+won't du nothin' to keep yu back."
+
+The little cowman nodded. But he was restless as ever all through that
+Sunday, eating nothing.
+
+On Monday morning arrayed in his best clothes he got into the dog-cart.
+There, without good-bye to anyone, not even to his beasts, he sat
+staring straight before him, square, and jolting up and down beside the
+farmer, who turned on him now and then a dubious almost anxious eye.
+
+So they drove the eleven miles to the recruiting station. He got down,
+entered, the farmer with him.
+
+"Well, my lad," they asked him, "what d'you want to join?"
+
+"Royal Marines."
+
+It was a shock, coming from the short, square figure of such an obvious
+landsman. The farmer took him by the arm.
+
+"Why, yu'm a Devon man, Tom, better take county regiment. An't they gude
+enough for yu?"
+
+Shaking his head he answered: "Royal Marines."
+
+Was it the glamour of the words or the Royal Marine he had once seen,
+that moved him to wish to join that outlandish corps? Who shall say?
+There was the wish, immovable; they took him to the recruiting station
+for the Royal Marines.
+
+Stretching up his short, square body, and blowing out his cheeks to
+increase his height, he was put before the reading board. His eyes were
+splendid; little that passed in hedgerows or the heaven, in woods or on
+the hillsides, could escape them. They asked him to read the print.
+
+Staring, he answered: "L."
+
+"No, my lad, you're guessing."
+
+"L."
+
+The farmer plucked at the recruiting officer's sleeve, his face was
+twitching, and he whispered hoarsely:
+
+"'E don' know 'is alphabet."
+
+The officer turned and contemplated that short square figure with the
+browned face so reminiscent of a withered baby, and the little blue eyes
+staring out under the dusty forelock. Then he grunted, and going up to
+him, laid a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"_Your_ heart's all right, my lad, but you can't pass."
+
+The little cowman looked at him, turned, and went straight out. An hour
+later he sat again beside the farmer on the way home, staring before him
+and jolting up and down.
+
+"They won't get me," he said suddenly: "I can fight, but I'se not
+goin'." A fire of resentment seemed to have been lit within him. That
+evening he ate his tea, and next day settled down again among his
+beasts. But whenever, now, the war was mentioned, he would look up with
+his puckered smile which seemed to have in it a resentful amusement, and
+say:
+
+"They a'nt got me yet."
+
+His dumb sacrifice passing their comprehension, had been rejected--or so
+it seemed to him He could not understand that they had spared him. Why!
+He was as good as they! His pride was hurt. No! They should not get him
+now!
+
+1916.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE PEACE MEETING
+
+
+Colin Wilderton, coming from the West on his way to the Peace Meeting,
+fell in with John Rudstock, coming from the North, and they walked on
+together. After they had commented on the news from Russia and the
+inflation of money, Rudstock said abruptly:
+
+"We shall have a queer meeting, I expect."
+
+"God knows!" answered Wilderton.
+
+And both smiled, conscious that they were uneasy, but predetermined not
+to show it under any circumstances. Their smiles were different, for
+Rudstock was a black-browed man, with dark beard and strong, thick
+figure, and Wilderton a very light-built, grey-haired man, with kindly
+eyes and no health. He had supported the war an immense time, and had
+only recently changed his attitude. In common with all men of warm
+feelings, he had at first been profoundly moved by the violation of
+Belgium. The horrors of the German advance through that little country
+and through France, to which he was temperamentally attached, had
+stirred in him a vigorous detestation, freely expressed in many ways.
+Extermination, he had felt all those early months, was hardly good
+enough for brutes who could commit such crimes against humanity and
+justice; and his sense of the need for signal defeat of a noxious force
+riding rough-shod over the hard-won decency of human life had survived
+well into the third year of the war. He hardly knew, himself, when his
+feeling had begun--not precisely to change, but to run, as it were, in a
+different channel. A man of generous instincts, artistic tastes, and
+unsteady nerves too thinly coated with that God-given assurance which
+alone fits a man for knowing what is good for the world, he had become
+gradually haunted by the thought that he was not laying down his own
+life, but only the lives of his own and other peoples' sons. And the
+consideration that he was laying them down for the benefit of their own
+future had lost its grip on him. At moments he was still able to see
+that the war he had so long supported had not yet attained sufficient
+defeat of the Prussian military machine to guarantee that future; but
+his pity and distress for all these young lives, cut down without a
+chance to flower, had grown till he had become, as it were, a gambler.
+What good--he would think--to secure the future of the young in a Europe
+which would soon have no young! Every country was suffering
+hideously--the criminal country not least, thank God! Suppose the war
+were to go on for another year, two, three years, and then stop from
+sheer exhaustion of both sides, while all the time these boys were being
+killed and maimed, for nothing more, perhaps, than could be obtained
+to-day. What then? True, the Government promised victory, but they never
+promised it within a year. Governments did not die; what if they were to
+go on promising it a year hence, till everybody else was dead! Did
+history ever show that victory in the present could guarantee the
+future? And even if not so openly defeated as was desirable, this
+damnable Prussianism had got such a knock that it could never again do
+what it had in the past. These last, however, were but side reflections,
+toning down for him the fact that his nerves could no longer stand this
+vicarious butchery of youth. And so he had gradually become that
+"traitor to his country, a weak-kneed Peace by Negotiation man."
+Physically his knees really were weak, and he used to smile a wry smile
+when he read the expression.
+
+John Rudstock, of vigorous physique, had opposed the war, on principle,
+from the start, not because, any more than Wilderton, he approved of
+Prussianism, but because, as an essentially combative personality, he
+opposed everything that was supported by a majority; the greater the
+majority, the more bitterly he opposed it; and no one would have been
+more astonished than he at hearing that this was his principle. He
+preferred to put it that he did not believe in opposing Force by Force.
+In peace-time he was a "stalwart," in war-time a "renegade."
+
+The street leading to the chapel which had been engaged seemed quiet
+enough. Designed to make an impression on public opinion, every care had
+been taken that the meeting should not attract the public eye. God's
+protection had been enlisted, but two policemen also stood at the
+entrance, and half a dozen others were suspiciously near by. A thin
+trickle of persons, mostly women, were passing through the door. Colin
+Wilderton, making his way up the aisle to the platform, wrinkled his
+nose, thinking: "Stuffy in here." It had always been his misfortune to
+love his neighbours individually, but to dislike them in a bunch. On the
+platform some fifteen men and women were already gathered. He seated
+himself modestly in the back row, while John Rudstock, less retiring,
+took his place at the chairman's right hand. The speakers began with a
+precipitancy hardly usual at a public meeting. Wilderton listened, and
+thought: "Dreadfully cliché; why can't someone say straight out that
+boys enough have been killed?" He had become conscious of a muttering
+noise, too, as of the tide coming in on a heavy wind; it broke suddenly
+into component parts--human voices clamouring outside. He heard blows
+raining on the door, saw sticks smashing in the windows. The audience
+had risen to its feet, some rushing to defend the doors, others standing
+irresolute. John Rudstock was holding up the chair he had been sitting
+on. Wilderton had just time to think: "I thought so," when a knot of
+young men in khaki burst into the chapel, followed by a crowd. He knew
+he was not much good in a scrimmage, but he placed himself at once in
+front of the nearest woman. At that moment, however, some soldiers,
+pouring through a side-door, invaded the platform from behind, and threw
+him down the steps. He arrived at the bottom with a bump, and was unable
+to get up because of the crowd around him. Someone fell over him; it was
+Rudstock, swearing horribly. He still had the chair in his hand, for it
+hit Wilderton a nasty blow. The latter saw his friend recover his feet
+and swing the weapon, and with each swing down went some friend or foe,
+until he had cleared quite a space round him. Wilderton, still weak and
+dizzy from his fall, sat watching this Homeric battle. Chairs, books,
+stools, sticks were flying at Rudstock, who parried them, or diverted
+their course so that they carried on and hit Wilderton, or crashed
+against the platform. He heard Rudstock roar like a lion, and saw him
+advance, swinging his chair; down went two young men in khaki, down went
+a third in mufti; a very tall young soldier, also armed with a chair,
+dashed forward, and the two fought in single combat. Wilderton had got
+on his feet by now, and, adjusting his eyeglass, for he could see little
+without, he caught up a hymn-book, and, flinging it at the crowd with
+all his force, shouted: "Hoo-bloodyray!" and followed with his fists
+clenched. One of them encountered what must have been the jaw of an
+Australian, it was so hard against his hand; he received a vicious punch
+in the ribs and was again seated on the ground. He could still hear his
+friend roaring, and the crash of chairs meeting in mid-air. Something
+fell heavily on him. It was Rudstock--he was insensible. There was a
+momentary lull, and peering up as best he could from underneath the
+body, Wilderton saw that the platform had been cleared of all its
+original inhabitants, and was occupied mainly by youths in navy-blue and
+khaki. A voice called out:
+
+"Order! Silence!"
+
+Rubbing Rudstock's temples with brandy from a flask which he had had the
+foresight to slip into his pocket, he listened as best he could, with
+the feet of the crowd jostling his anatomy.
+
+"Here we are, boys," the voice was saying, "and here we'll always be
+when these treacherous blighters try their games on. No peace, no peace
+at any price! We've got to show them that we won't have it. Leave the
+women alone--though they ought to be ashamed of themselves; but for the
+men--the skunks--shooting's too good for them. Let them keep off the
+course or we'll make them. We've broken up this meeting, and we'll break
+up every meeting that tries to talk of peace. Three cheers for the old
+flag!"
+
+During the cheers which followed Wilderton was discovering signs of
+returning consciousness in his friend. Rudstock had begun to breathe
+heavily, and, pouring some brandy into his mouth, he propped him up as
+best he could against a wooden structure, which he suddenly perceived to
+be the chapel's modest pulpit. A thought came to his dazed brain. If he
+could get up into that, as if he had dropped from Heaven, they might
+almost listen to him. He disengaged his legs from under Rudstock, and
+began crawling up the steps on hands and knees. Once in the pulpit he
+sat on the floor below the level of visibility, getting his breath, and
+listening to the cheers. Then, smoothing his hair, he rose, and waited
+for the cheers to stop. He had calculated rightly. His sudden
+appearance, his grey hair, eyeglass, and smile deceived them for a
+moment. There was a hush.
+
+"Boys!" he said, "listen to me a second, I want to ask you something.
+What on earth do you think we came here for? Simply and solely because
+we can't bear to go on seeing you killed day after day, month after
+month, year after year. That's all, and it's Christ's truth. Amen!"
+
+A strange gasp and mutter greeted this little speech; then a dull voice
+called out:
+
+"Pro-German!"
+
+Wilderton flung up his hand.
+
+"The Germans to hell!" he said simply.
+
+The dull voice repeated:
+
+"Pro-German!" And the speaker on the platform called out: "Come out of
+that! When we want you to beg us off we'll let you know."
+
+Wilderton spun round to him.
+
+"You're all wonderful!" he began, but a hymn-book hit him fearfully on
+the forehead, and he sank down into the bottom of the pulpit. This last
+blow, coming on the top of so many others, had deprived him of
+intelligent consciousness; he was but vaguely aware of more speeches,
+cheers, and tramplings, then of a long hush, and presently found
+himself walking out of the chapel door between Rudstock and a policeman.
+It was not the door by which they had entered, and led to an empty
+courtyard.
+
+"Can you walk?" said the policeman.
+
+Wilderton nodded.
+
+"Then walk off!" said the policeman, and withdrew again into the house
+of God.
+
+They walked, holding each other's arms, a little unsteadily at first.
+Rudstock had a black eye and a cut on his ear, the blood from which had
+stained his collar and matted his beard. Wilderton's coat was torn, his
+forehead bruised, his cheek swollen, and he had a pain in his back which
+prevented him from walking very upright. They did not speak, but in an
+archway did what they could with pins and handkerchiefs, and by turning
+up Rudstock's coat collar, to regain something of respectability. When
+they were once more under way Rudstock said coldly:
+
+"I heard you. You should have spoken for yourself. I came, as you know,
+because I don't believe in opposing force by force. At the next peace
+meeting we hold I shall make that plainer."
+
+Wilderton murmured:
+
+"Yes, yes; I saw you--I'm sure you will. I apologise; I was carried
+away."
+
+Rudstock went on in a deep voice:
+
+"As for those young devils, they may die to a man if they like! Take my
+advice and let them alone."
+
+Wilderton smiled on the side which was not swollen.
+
+"Yes," he said sadly, "it does seem difficult to persuade them to go on
+living. Ah, well!"
+
+"Ah, well!" he said again, five minutes later, "they're wonderful--poor
+young beggars! I'm very unhappy, Rudstock!"
+
+"I'm not," said Rudstock, "I've enjoyed it in a way! Good-night!"
+
+They shook hands, screwing up their mouths with pain, for their fists
+were badly bruised, and parted, Rudstock going to the North, Wilderton
+to the West.
+
+1917.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+"THE DOG IT WAS THAT DIED"
+
+
+Until the great war was over I had no idea that some of us who stayed at
+home made the great sacrifice.
+
+My friend Harburn is, or rather was, a Northumbrian, or some kind of
+Northerner, a stocky man of perhaps fifty, with close-clipped grizzled
+hair and moustache, and a deep-coloured face. He was a neighbour of mine
+in the country, and we had the same kind of dogs--Airedales, never less
+than three at a time, so that for breeding purposes we were useful to
+each other. We often, too, went up to Town by the same train. His
+occupation was one which gave him opportunity of prominence in public
+life, but until the war he took little advantage of this, sunk in a kind
+of bluff indifferentism which was almost cynical. I used to look on him
+as a typically good-natured blunt Englishman, rather enjoying his
+cynicism, and appreciating his open-air tendencies--for he was a devotee
+of golf, and fond of shooting when he had the chance; a good companion,
+too, with an open hand to people in distress. He was unmarried, and
+dwelled in a bungalow-like house not far from mine, and next door to a
+German family called Holsteig, who had lived in England nearly twenty
+years. I knew them pretty well also--a very united trio, father, mother,
+and one son. The father, who came from Hanover, was something in the
+City, the mother was Scotch, and the son--the one I knew best and liked
+most--had just left his public school. This youth had a frank, open,
+blue-eyed face, and thick light hair brushed back without a parting--a
+very attractive, slightly Norwegian-looking type. His mother was devoted
+to him; she was a real West Highlander, slight, with dark hair going
+grey, high cheekbones, a sweet but rather ironical smile, and those grey
+eyes which have second sight in them. I several times met Harburn at
+their house, for he would go in to play billiards with Holsteig in the
+evenings, and the whole family were on very friendly terms with him.
+
+The third morning after we had declared war on Germany Harburn,
+Holsteig, and I went up to Town in the same carriage. Harburn and I
+talked freely. But Holsteig, a fair, well-set-up man of about fifty,
+with a pointed beard and blue eyes like his son, sat immersed in his
+paper till Harburn said suddenly:
+
+"I say, Holsteig, is it true that your boy was going off to join the
+German army?"
+
+Holsteig looked up.
+
+"Yes," he said. "He was born in Germany; he's liable to military
+service. But thank heaven, it isn't possible for him to go."
+
+"But his mother?" said Harburn. "She surely wouldn't have let him?"
+
+"She was very miserable, of course, but she thought duty came first."
+
+"Duty! Good God!--my dear man! Half British, and living in this country
+all his life! I never heard of such a thing!" Holsteig shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"In a crisis like this, what can you do except follow the law strictly?
+He is of military age and a German subject. We were thinking of his
+honour; but of course we're most thankful he can't get over to Germany."
+
+"Well, I'm damned!" said Harburn. "You Germans are too bally
+conscientious altogether."
+
+Holsteig did not answer.
+
+I travelled back with Harburn the same evening, and he said to me:
+
+"Once a German, always a German. Didn't that chap Holsteig astonish you
+this morning? In spite of living here so long and marrying a British
+wife, his sympathies are dead German, you see."
+
+"Well," I replied; "put yourself in his place."
+
+"I can't; I could never have lived in Germany. I wonder," he added
+reflectively, "I wonder if the chap's all right, Cumbermere?"
+
+"Of course he's all right." Which was the wrong thing to say to Harburn
+if one wanted to re-establish his confidence in the Holsteigs, as I
+certainly did, for I liked them and was sure of their good faith. If I
+had said: "Of course he's a spy"--I should have rallied all Harburn's
+confidence in Holsteig, for he was naturally contradictious.
+
+I only mention this little passage to show how early Harburn's thoughts
+began to turn to the subject which afterwards completely absorbed and
+inspired him till he died for his country.
+
+I am not sure what paper first took up the question of interning all the
+Huns; but I fancy the point was raised originally rather from the
+instinct, deeply implanted in so many journals, for what would please
+the public, than out of any deep animus. At all events I remember
+meeting a sub-editor, who told me he had been opening letters of
+approval all the morning. "Never," said he, "have we had a stunt catch
+on so quickly. 'Why should that bally German round the corner get my
+custom?' and so forth. Britain for the British!"
+
+"Rather bad luck," I said, "on people who've paid us the compliment of
+finding this the best country to live in!"
+
+"Bad luck, no doubt," he replied, "_mais la guerre c'est la guerre_. You
+know Harburn, don't you? Did you see the article he wrote? By Jove, he
+pitched it strong."
+
+When next I met Harburn himself, he began talking on this subject at
+once.
+
+"Mark my words, Cumbermere, I'll have every German out of this country."
+His grey eyes seemed to glint with the snap and spark as of steel and
+flint and tinder; and I felt I was in the presence of a man who had
+brooded so over the German atrocities in Belgium that he was possessed
+by a sort of abstract hate.
+
+"Of course," I said, "there have been many spies, but----"
+
+"Spies and ruffians," he cried, "the whole lot of them."
+
+"How many Germans do you know personally?" I asked him.
+
+"Thank God! Not a dozen."
+
+"And are they spies and ruffians?"
+
+He looked at me and laughed, but that laugh was uncommonly like a snarl.
+
+"You go in for 'fairness,'" he said; "and all that slop; take 'em by the
+throat--it's the only way."
+
+It trembled on the tip of my tongue to ask him whether he meant to take
+the Holsteigs by the throat, but I swallowed it, for fear of doing them
+an injury. I was feeling much the same general abhorrence myself, and
+had to hold myself in all the time for fear it should gallop over my
+commonsense. But Harburn, I could see, was giving it full rein. His
+whole manner and personality somehow had changed. He had lost geniality,
+and that good-humoured cynicism which had made him an attractive
+companion; he was as if gnawed at inwardly--in a word, he already had a
+fixed idea.
+
+Now, a cartoonist like myself has got to be interested in the psychology
+of men and things, and I brooded over Harburn, for it seemed to me
+remarkable that one whom I had always associated with good humour and
+bluff indifference should be thus obsessed. And I formed this theory
+about him: 'Here'--I said to myself--'is one of Cromwell's Ironsides,
+born out of his age. In the slack times of peace he discovered no outlet
+for the grim within him--his fire could never be lighted by love,
+therefore he drifted in the waters of indifferentism. Now suddenly in
+this grizzly time he has found himself, a new man, girt and armed by
+this new passion of hate; stung and uplifted, as it were, by the sight
+of that which he can smite with a whole heart. It's deeply
+interesting'--I said to myself--'Who could have dreamed of such a
+reincarnation; for what on the surface could possibly be less alike than
+an 'Ironside,' and Harburn as I've known him up to now?' And I used his
+face for the basis of a cartoon which represented a human weather-vane
+continually pointing to the East, no matter from what quarter the wind
+blew. He recognised himself, and laughed when he saw me--rather pleased,
+in fact, but in that laugh there was a sort of truculence, as if the man
+had the salt taste of blood at the back of his mouth.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "you may joke about it, but I've got my teeth into them
+all right. The swine!"
+
+And there was no doubt he had--the man had become a force; unhappy
+Germans, a few of them spies, no doubt, but the great majority as
+certainly innocent, were being wrenched from their trades and families,
+and piled into internment camps all day and every day. And the faster
+they were piled in, the higher grew his stock, as a servant of his
+country. I'm sure he did not do it to gain credit; the thing was a
+crusade to him, something sacred--'his bit'; but I believe he also felt
+for the first time in his life that he was really living, getting out of
+life the full of its juice. Was he not smiting hip and thigh? He
+longed, I am sure, to be in the thick of the actual fighting, but age
+debarred him, and he was not of that more sensitive type which shrinks
+from smiting the defenceless if it cannot smite anything stronger. I
+remember saying to him once:
+
+"Harburn, do you ever think of the women and children of your victims?"
+
+He drew his lips back, and I saw how excellent his teeth were.
+
+"The women are worse than the men, I believe," he said. "I'd put them
+in, too, if I could. As for the children, they're all the better for
+being without fathers of that kidney."
+
+He really was a little mad on the subject; no more so, of course, than
+any other man with a fixed idea, but certainly no less.
+
+In those days I was here, there, and everywhere, and had let my country
+cottage, so I saw nothing of the Holsteigs, and indeed had pretty well
+forgotten their existence. But coming back at the end of 1917 from a
+long spell with the Red Cross I found among my letters one from Mrs.
+Holsteig:
+
+
+     "Dear Mr. Cumbermere,
+
+     You were always so friendly to us that I have summoned up
+     courage to write this letter. You know perhaps that my
+     husband was interned over a year ago, and repatriated last
+     September; he has lost everything, of course; but so far he
+     is well and able to get along in Germany. Harold and I have
+     been jogging on here as best we can on my own little
+     income--'Huns in our midst' as we are, we see practically
+     nobody. What a pity we cannot all look into each other's
+     hearts, isn't it? I used to think we were a 'fair-play'
+     people, but I have learned the bitter truth--that there is no
+     such thing when pressure comes. It's much worse for Harold
+     than for me; he feels his paralysed position intensely, and
+     would, I'm sure, really rather be 'doing his bit' as an
+     interned, than be at large, subject to everyone's suspicion
+     and scorn. But I am terrified all the time that they _will_
+     intern him. You used to be intimate with Mr. Harburn. We have
+     not seen him since the first autumn of the war, but we know
+     that he has been very active in the agitation, and is very
+     powerful in this matter. I have wondered whether he can
+     possibly realise what this indiscriminate internment of the
+     innocent means to the families of the interned. Could you not
+     find a chance to try and make him understand? If he and a few
+     others were to stop hounding on the government, it would
+     cease, for the authorities must know perfectly well that all
+     the dangerous have been disposed of long ago. You have no
+     notion how lonely one feels in one's native land nowadays; if
+     I should lose Harold too I think I might go under, though
+     that has never been my habit.
+
+     Believe me, dear Mr. Cumbermere,
+     Most truly yours
+     HELEN HOLSTEIG."
+
+
+
+On receiving this letter I was moved by compassion, for it required no
+stretch of imagination to picture the life of that lonely British
+mother and her son; and I thought very carefully over the advisability
+of speaking to Harburn, and consulted the proverbs: "Speech is silver,
+but Silence is golden--When in doubt play trumps." "Second thoughts are
+best--He who hesitates is lost." "Look before you leap--Delays are
+dangerous." They balanced so perfectly that I had recourse to
+Commonsense, which told me to abstain. But meeting Harburn at the Club a
+few days later and finding him in a genial mood, I let impulse prevail,
+and said:
+
+"By the way, Harburn, you remember the Holsteigs? I had a letter from
+poor Mrs. Holsteig the other day; she seems terrified that they'll
+intern her son, that particularly nice boy. Don't you think it's time
+you let up on these unhappy people?"
+
+The moment I reached the word Holsteig I saw I had made a mistake, and
+only went on because to have stopped at that would have been worse
+still. The hair had bristled up on his back, as it were, and he said:
+
+"Holsteig? That young pup who was off to join the German army if he
+could? By George, is he at large still? This Government will never
+learn. I'll remember him."
+
+"Harburn," I stammered, "I spoke of this in confidence. The boy is half
+British, and a friend of mine. I thought he was a friend of yours too."
+
+"Of mine?" he said. "No thank you. No mongrels for me. As to confidence,
+Cumbermere, there's no such thing in war time over what concerns the
+country's safety."
+
+"Good God!" I exclaimed. "You really are crazy on this subject. That
+boy--with his bringing-up!"
+
+He grinned. "We're taking no risks," he said, "and making no exceptions.
+The British army or an internment camp. I'll see that he gets the
+alternatives."
+
+"If you do," I said, rising, "we cease to be friends. I won't have my
+confidence abused."
+
+"Oh! Hang it all!" he grumbled; "sit down! We must all do our duty."
+
+"You once complained to Holsteig himself of that German peculiarity."
+
+He laughed. "I did," he said; "I remember--in the train. I've changed
+since then. That pup ought to be in with all the other swine-hounds. But
+let it go."
+
+There the matter rested, for he had said: "Let it go," and he was a man
+of his word. It was, however, a lesson to me not to meddle with men of
+temperament so different from my own. I wrote to young Holsteig and
+asked him to come and lunch with me. He thanked me, but could not, of
+course, being confined to a five-mile radius. Really anxious to see him,
+I motorbiked down to their house. I found a very changed youth; moody
+and introspective, thoroughly forced in upon himself, and growing
+bitter. He had been destined for his father's business, and, marooned as
+he was by his nationality, had nothing to do but raise vegetables in
+their garden and read poetry and philosophy--not occupations to take a
+young man out of himself. Mrs. Holsteig, whose nerves were evidently at
+cracking point, had become extremely bitter, and lost all power of
+seeing the war as a whole. All the ugly human qualities and hard people
+which the drive and pressure of a great struggle inevitably bring to the
+top seemed viewed by her now as if they were the normal character of her
+fellow countrymen, and she made no allowance for the fact that those
+fellow countrymen had not commenced this struggle, nor for the certainty
+that the same ugly qualities and hard people were just as surely to the
+fore in every other of the fighting countries. The certainty she felt
+about her husband's honour had made her regard his internment and
+subsequent repatriation as a personal affront, as well as a wicked
+injustice. Her tall thin figure and high-cheekboned face seemed to have
+been scorched and withered by some inner flame; she could not have been
+a wholesome companion for her boy in that house, empty even of servants.
+I spent a difficult afternoon in muzzling my sense of proportion, and
+journeyed back to Town sore, but very sorry.
+
+I was off again with the Red Cross shortly after, and did not return to
+England till August of 1918. I was unwell, and went down to my cottage,
+now free to me again. The influenza epidemic was raging, and there I
+developed a mild attack; when I was convalescent my first visitor was
+Harburn, who had come down to his bungalow for a summer holiday. He had
+not been in the room five minutes before he was off on his favourite
+topic. My nerves must have been on edge from illness, for I cannot
+express the disgust with which I listened to him on that occasion. He
+seemed to me just like a dog who mumbles and chews a mouldy old bone
+with a sort of fury. There was a kind of triumph about him, too, which
+was unpleasant, though not surprising, for he was more of a 'force' than
+ever. 'God save me from the fixed idea!' I thought, when he was gone.
+That evening I asked my old housekeeper if she had seen young Mr.
+Holsteig lately.
+
+"Oh! no," she said; "he's been put away this five month. Mrs. 'Olsteig
+goes up once a week to see 'im, 'Olsteig. She's nigh out of her mind,
+poor lady--the baker says; that fierce she is about the Gover'ment."
+
+I confess I could not bring myself to go and see her.
+
+About a month after the armistice had been signed I came down to my
+cottage again. Harburn was in the same train, and he gave me a lift from
+the station. He was more like his old good-humoured self, and asked me
+to dinner the next day. It was the first time I had met him since the
+victory. We had a most excellent repast, and drank the health of the
+Future in some of his oldest port. Only when we had drawn up to the
+blazing wood fire in that softly lighted room, with our glasses beside
+us and two Airedales asleep at our feet, did he come round to his hobby.
+
+"What do you think?" he said, suddenly leaning towards the flames, "some
+of these blazing sentimentalists want to release our Huns. But I've put
+my foot on it; they won't get free till they're out of this country and
+back in their precious Germany." And I saw the familiar spark and
+smoulder in his eyes.
+
+"Harburn," I said, moved by an impulse which I couldn't resist, "I
+think you ought to take a pill."
+
+He stared at me.
+
+"This way madness lies," I went on. "Hate is a damned insidious disease;
+men's souls can't stand very much of it without going pop. You want
+purging."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Hate! I thrive on it. The more I hate the brutes, the better I feel.
+Here's to the death of every cursed Hun!"
+
+I looked at him steadily. "I often think," I said, "that there could
+have been no more unhappy men on earth than Cromwell's Ironsides, or the
+red revolutionaries in France, when their work was over and done with."
+
+"What's that to do with me?" he said, amazed.
+
+"They too smote out of sheer hate, and came to an end of their smiting.
+When a man's occupation's gone----"
+
+"You're drivelling!" he said sharply.
+
+"Far from it," I answered, nettled. "Yours is a curious case, Harburn.
+Most of our professional Hun-haters have found it a good stunt, or are
+merely weak sentimentalists; they can drop it easily enough when it
+ceases to be a good stunt, or a parrot's war-cry. You can't; with you
+it's mania, religion. When the tide ebbs and leaves you high and
+dry----"
+
+He struck his fist on the arm of his chair, upsetting his glass and
+awakening the Airedale at his feet.
+
+"I won't let it ebb," he said; "I'm going on with this--Mark me!"
+
+"Remember Canute!" I muttered. "May I have some more port?" I had got up
+to fill my glass when I saw to my astonishment that a woman was standing
+in the long window which opened on to the verandah. She had evidently
+only just come in, for she was still holding the curtain in her hand. It
+was Mrs. Holsteig, with her fine grey hair blown about her face, looking
+strange and almost ghostly in a grey gown. Harburn had not seen her, so
+I went quickly towards her, hoping to get her to go out again as
+silently, and speak to me on the verandah; but she held up her hand with
+a gesture as if she would push me back, and said:
+
+"Forgive my interrupting; I came to speak to that man."
+
+Startled by the sound of her voice, Harburn jumped up and spun round
+towards it.
+
+"Yes," she repeated quite quietly; "I came to speak to you; I came to
+put my curse on you. Many have put their curses on you silently; I do
+so to your face. My son lies between life and death in your prison--your
+prison. Whether he lives or dies I curse you for what you have done to
+poor wives and mothers--to British wives and mothers. Be for ever
+accursed! Good-night!"
+
+She let the curtain fall, and had vanished before Harburn had time to
+reach the window. She vanished so swiftly and silently, she had spoken
+so quietly, that both he and I stood rubbing our eyes and ears.
+
+"A bit theatrical!" he said at last.
+
+"Perhaps," I answered slowly; "but you have been cursed by a live
+Scotswoman. Look at those dogs!"
+
+The two Airedales were standing stock-still with the hair bristling on
+their backs.
+
+Harburn suddenly laughed, and it jarred the whole room.
+
+"By George!" he said, "I believe that's actionable."
+
+But I was not in that mood, and said tartly:
+
+"If it is, we are all food for judges."
+
+He laughed again, this time uneasily, slammed the window to, bolted it,
+and sat down again in his chair.
+
+"He's got the 'flue,' I suppose," he said. "She must think me a prize
+sort of idiot to have come here with such tomfoolery."
+
+But our evening was spoiled, and I took my leave almost at once. I went
+out into the roupy raw December night pondering deeply. Harburn had made
+light of it, and though I suppose no man likes being cursed to his face
+in the presence of a friend, I felt his skin was quite thick enough to
+stand it. Besides, it was too cheap and crude a way of carrying on.
+Anybody can go into his neighbour's house and curse him--and no bones
+broken. And yet--what she had said was no doubt true; hundreds of
+women--of his fellow countrywomen--must silently have put their curse on
+one who had been the chief compeller of their misery. Still, he had put
+_his_ curse on the Huns and their belongings, and I felt he was man
+enough to take what he had given. 'No,' I thought, 'she has only fanned
+the flame of his hate. But, by Jove! that's just it! Her curse has
+fortified my prophecy!' It was of his own state of mind that he would
+perish; and she had whipped and deepened that state of mind. And, odd as
+it may seem, I felt quite sorry for him, as one is for a poor dog that
+goes mad, does what harm he can, and dies. I lay awake that night a long
+time thinking of him, and of that unhappy, half-crazed mother, whose son
+lay between life and death.
+
+Next day I went to see her, but she was up in London, hovering round
+the cage of her son, no doubt. I heard from her, however, some days
+later, thanking me for coming, and saying he was out of danger. But she
+made no allusion to that evening visit. Perhaps she was ashamed of it.
+Perhaps she was demented when she came, and had no remembrance thereof.
+
+Soon after this I went to Belgium to illustrate a book on
+Reconstruction, and found such subjects that I was not back in Town till
+the late summer of 1919. Going into my Club one day I came on Harburn in
+the smoking-room. The curse had not done him much harm, it seemed, for
+he looked the picture of health.
+
+"Well, how are you?" I said. "You look at the top of your form."
+
+"Never better," he replied.
+
+"Do you remember our last evening together?"
+
+He uttered a sort of gusty grunt, and did not answer.
+
+"That boy recovered," I said. "What's happened to him and his mother,
+since?"
+
+"The ironical young brute! I've just had this from him." And he handed
+me a letter with the Hanover post mark.
+
+
+     "Dear Mr. Harburn,
+
+     It was only on meeting my mother here yesterday that I
+     learned of her visit to you one evening last December. I
+     wish to apologise for it, since it was my illness which
+     caused her to so forget herself. I owe you a deep debt of
+     gratitude for having been at least part means of giving me
+     the most wonderful experience of my life. In that camp of
+     sorrow--where there was sickness of mind and body such as I
+     am sure you have never seen or realised, such endless
+     hopeless mental anguish of poor huddled creatures turning and
+     turning on themselves year after year--I learned to forget
+     myself, and to do my little best for them. And I learned, and
+     I hope I shall never forget it, that feeling for one's fellow
+     creatures is all that stands between man and death; I was
+     going fast the other way before I was sent there. I thank you
+     from my heart, and beg to remain,
+
+     Very faithfully yours
+     HAROLD HOLSTEIG."
+
+
+
+I put it down, and said:
+
+"That's not ironical. He means it."
+
+"Bosh!" said Harburn, with the old spark and smoulder in his eyes. "He's
+pulling my leg--the swinelet Hun!"
+
+"He is not, Harburn; I assure you."
+
+Harburn got up. "He _is_; I tell you he _is_. Ah! Those brutes! Well! I
+haven't done with them yet."
+
+And I heard the snap of his jaw, and saw his eyes fixed fiercely on some
+imaginary object. I changed the subject hurriedly, and soon took my
+departure. But going down the steps, an old jingle came into my head,
+and has hardly left it since:
+
+ "The man recovered from the bite,
+ The dog it was that died."
+
+1919.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+IN HEAVEN AND EARTH
+
+
+We were yarning after dinner, and, whether because three of us were
+fishermen, or simply that we were all English, our yarns were taking a
+competitive turn. The queerest thing seen during the War was the subject
+of our tongues, and it was not till after several tit-bits had been
+digested that Mallinson, the painter, ill and ironical, blue-eyed, and
+with a fair pointed beard, took his pipe out of his mouth, and said:
+
+"Well, you chaps, what I saw last week down in Kent takes some beating.
+I'd been sketching in a hay-field, and was just making back along the
+top hedge to the lane when I heard a sound from the other side like a
+man's crying. I put my eye to a gap, and there, about three yards in,
+was a grey-haired bloke in a Norfolk jacket and flannel trousers,
+digging like a fiend, and crying like a baby--blowing, and gasping and
+sobbing, tears and sweat rolling down into his beard like rivers. He'd
+plunge his pick in, scratch, and shovel, and hack at the roots as if for
+dear life--he was making the hole too close to the hedge, of
+course--and all the time carrying on like that. I thought he must be
+digging his own grave at least. Suddenly he put his pick down, and there
+just under the hedge I saw a dead brown dog, lying on its side, all
+limp. I never see a dead animal myself, you know, without a bit of a
+choke; they're so soft, and lissom; the peace, and the pity--a sort of
+look of: "Why--why--when I was so alive?" Well, this elderly Johnny took
+a good squint at it, to see if the hole was big enough, then off he went
+again, sobbing and digging like a fiend. It was really a bit too weird,
+and I mouched off. But when I'd gone about half a mile, I got an attack
+of the want-to-knows, came back, and sneaked along the hedge. There he
+was still, but he had finished, and was having a mop round, and putting
+the last touches to a heap of stones. I strolled up, and said:
+
+'Hot work, Sir, digging, this weather!'
+
+He was a good-looking old grey-beard, with an intellectual face, high
+forehead and all that.
+
+'I'm not used to it,' he said, looking at his blisters.
+
+'Been burying a dog? Horrid job that!--favourite, I'm afraid.'
+
+He seemed in two minds whether to shut me up and move off, but he
+didn't.
+
+'Yes,' he said; 'it's cut me up horribly. I never condemned a creature
+to death before. And dogs seem to know.'
+
+'Ah! They're pretty uncanny,' I said, for I wasn't going to let on, of
+course, that I had seen him.
+
+'I wouldn't have done it but for the War,' he muttered; 'but she stole
+eggs, poor thing; you couldn't break her of it. She ate three times as
+much as any other dog, too, and in spite of it was always a perfect
+skeleton--something wrong inside. The sort of dog, you know, no one
+would take, or treat decently if they did. Bad habits of every kind,
+poor dear. I bought her because she was being starved. But she trusted
+me, that's why I feel so like a murderer. When the Vet and I were in the
+yard discussing her, she knew there was something wrong--she kept
+looking at my face. I very nearly went back on it; only, having got him
+out on purpose, I was ashamed to. We brought her down here, and on the
+way she found the remains of a rabbit about a week old--that was one of
+her accomplishments--bringing me the most fearful offal. She brought it
+up wagging her tail--as much as to say: 'See--I _am_ some use!' The Vet
+tied her up here and took his gun; she wagged her tail at that, too; and
+I ran away. When the shot came, my own little spaniel fawned on
+me--they _are_ uncanny--licked me all over, never was so gushing,
+seemed saying: 'What awful power you have! I do love you! You wouldn't
+do that to me, would you? We've got rid of that other one, though!' When
+I came back here to bury the poor thing, and saw her lying on her side
+so still, I made a real fool of myself. I was patting her an hour ago,
+talking to her as if she were a human being. Judas!'"
+
+Mallinson put his pipe back into his mouth. "Just think of it!" he said:
+"The same creatures who are blowing each other to little bits all the
+time, bombing babies, roasting fellow creatures in the air and cheering
+while they roast, working day and night to inflict every imaginable kind
+of horror on other men exactly like themselves--these same chaps are
+capable of feeling like that about shooting a wretched ill cur of a dog,
+no good to anybody. There are more things in Heaven and Earth--!" And he
+relit his pipe, which had gone out.
+
+His yarn took the prize.
+
+1917.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE MOTHER STONE
+
+
+It was after dinner, and five elderly Englishmen were discussing the
+causes of the war.
+
+"Well," said Travers, a big, fresh-coloured grey-beard, with little
+twinkling eyes and very slow speech, "you gentlemen know more about it
+than I do, but I bet you I can lay my finger on the cause of the war at
+any minute."
+
+There was an instant clamour of jeering. But a man called Askew, who
+knew Travers well, laughed and said: "Come, let's have it!" Travers
+turned those twinkling little eyes of his slowly round the circle, and
+with heavy, hesitating modesty began:
+
+"Well, Mr. Askew, it was in '67 or '68 that this happened to a great big
+feller of my acquaintance named Ray--one of those fellers, you know,
+that are always on the look-out to make their fortunes and never do.
+This Ray was coming back south one day after a huntin' trip he'd been in
+what's now called Bechuanaland, and he was in a pretty bad way when he
+walked one evenin' into the camp of one of those wanderin' Boers. That
+class of Boer has disappeared now. They had no farms of their own, but
+just moved on with their stock and their boys; and when they came to
+good pasture they'd outspan and stay there till they'd cleared it
+out--and then trek on again. Well, this old Boer told Ray to come right
+in, and take a meal; and heaven knows what it was made of, for those old
+Boers, they'd eat the devil himself without onion sauce, and relish him.
+After the meal the old Boer and Ray sat smokin' and yarnin' in the door
+of the tent, because in those days these wanderin' Boers used tents.
+Right close by in the front, the children were playin' in the dust, a
+game like marbles, with three or four round stones, and they'd pitch 'em
+up to another stone they called the Moer-Klip, or Mother-stone--one,
+two, and pick up--two, three, and pick up--you know the game of marbles.
+Well, the sun was settin' and presently Ray noticed this Moer-Klip that
+they were pitchin' 'em up to, shinin'; and he looked at it, and he said
+to the old Boer: 'What's that stone the children are playin' with?' And
+the old Boer looked at him and looked at the stone, and said: 'It's just
+a stone,' and went on smokin'.
+
+"Well, Ray went down on his knees and picked up the stone, and weighed
+it in his hand. About the size of a hazel-nut it was, and looked--well,
+it looked like a piece of alum; but the more he looked at it, the more
+he thought: 'By Jove, I believe it's a diamond!'
+
+"So he said to the old Boer: 'Where did the children get this stone?'
+And the old Boer said: 'Oh! the shepherd picked it up somewhere.' And
+Ray said: '_Where_ did he pick it up?' And the old Boer waved his hand,
+and said: 'Over the Kopje, there, beyond the river. How should I know,
+brother?--a stone is a stone!' So Ray said: 'You let me take this stone
+away with me!' And the old Boer went on smokin', and he said: 'One
+stone's the same as another. Take it, brother!' And Ray said: 'If it's
+what I think, I'll give you half the price I get for it.'
+
+"The old Boer smiled, and said: 'That's all right, brother; take it,
+take it!'
+
+"The next morning Ray left this old Boer, and, when he was going, he
+said to him: 'Well,' he said, 'I believe this is a valuable stone!' and
+the old Boer smiled because he knew one stone was the same as another.
+
+"The first place Ray came to was C--, and he went to the hotel; and in
+the evenin' he began talkin' about the stone, and they all laughed at
+him, because in those days nobody had heard of diamonds in South Africa.
+So presently he lost his temper, and pulled out the stone and showed it
+round; but nobody thought it was a diamond, and they all laughed at him
+the more. Then one of the fellers said: 'If it's a diamond, it ought to
+cut glass.'
+
+"Ray took the stone, and, by Jove, he cut his name on the window, and
+there it is--I've seen it--on the bar window of that hotel. Well, next
+day, you bet, he travelled straight back to where the old Boer told him
+the shepherd had picked up the stone, and he went to a native chief
+called Jointje, and said to him: 'Jointje,' he said, 'I go a journey.
+While I go, you go about and send all your "boys" about, and look for
+all the stones that shine like this one; and when I come back, if you
+find me plenty, I give you gun.' And Jointje said: 'That all right,
+Boss.'
+
+"And Ray went down to Cape Town, and took the stone to a jeweller, and
+the jeweller told him it was a diamond of about 30 or 40 carats, and
+gave him five hundred pound for it. So he bought a waggon and a span of
+oxen to give to the old Boer, and went back to Jointje. The niggers had
+collected skinfuls of stones of all kinds, and out of all the skinfuls
+Ray found three or four diamonds. So he went to work and got another
+feller to back him, and between them they made the Government move. The
+rush began, and they found that place near Kimberley; and after that
+they found De Beers, and after that Kimberley itself."
+
+Travers stopped, and looked around him.
+
+"Ray made his fortune, I suppose?"
+
+"No, Mr. Askew; the unfortunate feller made next to nothin'. He was one
+of those fellers that never do any good for themselves."
+
+"But what has all this to do with the war?"
+
+Again Travers looked round, and more slowly than ever, said:
+
+"Without that game of marbles, would there have been a
+Moer-Klip--without the Moer-Klip, would there have been a
+Kimberley--without Kimberley, would there have been a Rhodes--without a
+Rhodes, would there have been a Raid--without a Raid, would the Boers
+have started armin'--if the Boers hadn't armed, would there have been a
+Transvaal War? And if there hadn't been the Transvaal War, would there
+have been the incident of those two German ships we held up; and all the
+general feelin' in Germany that gave the Kaiser the chance to start his
+Navy programme in 1900? And if the Germans hadn't built their Navy,
+would their heads have swelled till they challenged the world, and
+should we have had this war?"
+
+He slowly drew a hand from his pocket, and put it on the table. On the
+little finger was blazing an enormous diamond.
+
+"My father," he said, "bought it of the jeweller."
+
+The mother-stone glittered and glowed, and the five Englishmen fixed
+their eyes on it in silence. Some of them had been in the Boer War, and
+three of them had sons in this. At last one of them said:
+
+"Well, that's seeing God in a dew-drop with a vengeance. What about the
+old Boer?"
+
+Travers's little eyes twinkled.
+
+"Well," he said, "Ray told me the old feller just looked at him as if he
+thought he'd done a damn silly thing to give him a waggon; and he nodded
+his old head, and said, laughin' in his beard: 'Wish you good luck,
+brother, with your stone.' You couldn't humbug that old Boer; he knew
+one stone was the same as another."
+
+1914.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+POIROT AND BIDAN
+
+A RECOLLECTION
+
+
+Coming one dark December evening out of the hospital courtyard into the
+corridor which led to my little workroom, I was conscious of two new
+arrivals. There were several men round the stove, but these two were
+sitting apart on a bench close to my door. We used to get men in all
+stages of decrepitude, but I had never seen two who looked so completely
+under the weather. They were the extremes--in age, in colouring, in
+figure, in everything; and they sat there, not speaking, with every
+appearance of apathy and exhaustion. The one was a boy, perhaps
+nineteen, with a sunken, hairless, grey-white face under his peaked
+cap--never surely was face so grey! He sat with his long grey-blue
+overcoat open at the knees, and his long emaciated hands nervously
+rubbing each other between them. Intensely forlorn he looked, and I
+remember thinking: "That boy's dying!" This was Bidan.
+
+The other's face, in just the glimpse I had of it, was as if carved out
+of wood, except for that something you see behind the masks of driven
+bullocks, deeply resentful. His cap was off, and one saw he was
+grey-haired; his cheeks, stretched over cheekbones solid as
+door-handles, were a purplish-red, his grey moustache was damp, his
+light blue eyes stared like a codfish's. He reminded me queerly of those
+Parisian _cochers_ one still sees under their shining hats, wearing an
+expression of being your enemy. His short stocky figure was dumped
+stolidly as if he meant never to move again; on his thick legs and feet
+he wore mufflings of cloth boot, into which his patched and stained
+grey-blue trousers were tucked. One of his gloved hands was stretched
+out stiff on his knee. This was Poirot.
+
+Two more dissimilar creatures were never blown together into our haven.
+So far as I remember, they had both been in hospital about six months,
+and their ailments were, roughly speaking, Youth and Age. Bidan had not
+finished his training when his weak constitution gave way under it;
+Poirot was a Territorial who had dug behind the Front till rheumatism
+claimed him for its own. Bidan, who had fair hair and rather beautiful
+brown eyes over which the lids could hardly keep up, came from
+Aix-en-Provence, in the very south; Poirot from Nancy, in the
+northeast. I made their acquaintance the next morning.
+
+The cleaning of old Poirot took, literally speaking, days to accomplish.
+Such an encrusted case we had never seen; nor was it possible to go,
+otherwise than slowly, against his prejudices. One who, unless taken
+exactly the right way, considered everyone leagued with Nature to get
+the better of him, he had reached that state when the soul sticks its
+toes in and refuses to budge. A coachman--in civil life--a socialist, a
+freethinker, a wit, he was the apex of--shall we say?--determination.
+His moral being was encrusted with perversity, as his poor hands and
+feet with dirt. Oil was the only thing for him, and I, for one, used oil
+on him morally and physically, for months. He was a "character!" His
+left hand--which he was never tired of saying the "_majors_" had ruined
+("_Ah! les cochons!_") by leaving it alone--was stiff in all its joints,
+so that the fingers would not bend; and the little finger of the right
+hand, "_le petit_," "_le coquin_," "_l'empereur_," as he would severally
+call it, was embellished by chalky excrescences. The old fellow had that
+peculiar artfulness which comes from life-long dealing with horses, and
+he knew exactly how far and how quickly it was advisable for him to mend
+in health. About the third day he made up his mind that he wished to
+remain with us at least until the warm weather came. For that it would
+be necessary--he concluded--to make a cheering amount of progress, but
+not too much. And this he set himself to do. He was convinced, one could
+see, that after Peace had been declared and compensation assured him, he
+would recover the use of his hand, even if "_l'empereur_" remained stiff
+and chalky. As a matter of fact, I think he was mistaken, and will never
+have a supple left hand again. But his arms were so brawny, his
+constitution so vigorous, and his legs improved so rapidly under the
+necessity of taking him down into the little town for his glass, of an
+afternoon, that one felt he might possibly be digging again sooner than
+he intended.
+
+"_Ah, les cochons!_" he would say; "while one finger does not move, they
+shall pay me!" He was very bitter against all "_majors_" save one, who
+it seemed had actually sympathised with him, and all _députés_, who for
+him constituted the powers of darkness, drawing their salaries, and
+sitting in their chairs. ("_Ah! les chameaux!_")
+
+Though he was several years younger than oneself, one always thought of
+him as "Old Poirot" indeed, he was soon called "_le grand-père_," though
+no more confirmed bachelor ever inhabited the world. He was a regular
+"Miller of Dee," caring for nobody; and yet he was likeable, that
+humorous old stoic, who suffered from gall-stones, and bore horrible
+bouts of pain like a hero. In spite of all his disabilities his health
+and appearance soon became robust in our easy-going hospital, where no
+one was harried, the food excellent, and the air good. He would tell you
+that his father lived to eighty, and his grandfather to a hundred, both
+"strong men" though not so strong as his old master, the squire, of
+whose feats in the hunting-field he would give most staggering accounts
+in an argot which could only be followed by instinct. A great narrator,
+he would describe at length life in the town of Nancy, where, when the
+War broke out, he was driving a market cart, and distributing
+vegetables, which had made him an authority on municipal reform. Though
+an incorrigible joker, his stockfish countenance would remain perfectly
+grave, except for an occasional hoarse chuckle. You would have thought
+he had no more power of compassion than a cat, no more sensibility than
+a Chinese idol; but this was not so. In his wooden, shrewd, distrustful
+way he responded to sympathy, and was even sorry for others. I used to
+like very much his attitude to the young "stable-companion" who had
+arrived with him; he had no contempt, such as he might easily have felt
+for so weakly a creature, but rather a real indulgence towards his
+feebleness. "Ah!" he would say at first; "he won't make old bones--that
+one!" But he seemed extremely pleased when, in a fortnight or so, he had
+to modify that view, for Bidan (Prosper) prospered more rapidly even
+than himself. That grey look was out of the boy's face within three
+weeks. It was wonderful to watch him come back to life, till at last he
+could say, with his dreadful Provençal twang, that he felt "_très
+biang_." A most amiable youth, he had been a cook, and his chief
+ambition was to travel till he had attained the summit of mortal hopes,
+and was cooking at the Ritz in London. When he came to us his limbs
+seemed almost to have lost their joints, they wambled so. He had no
+muscle at all. Utter anæmia had hold of all his body, and all but a
+corner of his French spirit. Round that unquenchable gleam of gaiety the
+rest of him slowly rallied. With proper food and air and freedom, he
+began to have a faint pink flush in his china-white cheeks; his lids no
+longer drooped, his limbs seemed to regain their joints, his hands
+ceased to swell, he complained less and less of the pains about his
+heart. When, of a morning, he was finished with, and "_le grand-père_"
+was having his hands done, they would engage in lively repartee--oblivious
+of one's presence. We began to feel that this grey ghost of a youth had
+been well named, after all, when they called him Prosper, so lyrical
+would he wax over the constitution and cooking of "_bouillabaisse_,"
+over the South, and the buildings of his native Aix-en-Provence. In all
+France you could not have found a greater contrast than those two who had
+come to us so under the weather; nor in all France two better instances of
+the way men can regain health of body and spirit in the right surroundings.
+
+We had a tremendous fall of snow that winter, and had to dig ourselves
+out of it. Poirot and Bidan were of those who dug. It was amusing to
+watch them. Bidan dug easily, without afterthought. "_Le grand-père_"
+dug, with half an eye at least on his future; in spite of those stiff
+fingers he shifted a lot of snow, but he rested on his shovel whenever
+he thought you could see him--for he was full of human nature.
+
+To see him and Bidan set off for town together! Bidan pale, and wambling
+a little still, but gay, with a kind of birdlike detachment; "_le
+grand-père_" stocky, wooden, planting his huge feet rather wide apart
+and regarding his companion, the frosted trees, and the whole wide
+world, with his humorous stare.
+
+Once, I regret to say, when spring was beginning to come, Bidan-Prosper
+returned on "_le grand-père's_" arm with the utmost difficulty, owing to
+the presence within him of a liquid called Clairette de Die, no amount
+of which could subdue "_le grand-père's_" power of planting one foot
+before the other. Bidan-Prosper arrived hilarious, revealing to the
+world unsuspected passions; he awoke next morning sad, pale, penitent.
+Poirot, _au contraire_, was morose the whole evening, and awoke next
+morning exactly the same as usual. In such different ways does the gift
+of the gods affect us.
+
+They had their habits, so diverse, their constitutions, and their
+dreams--alas! not yet realised. I know not where they may be now;
+Bidan-Prosper cannot yet be cooking at the Ritz in London town; but
+"_grand-père_" Poirot may perchance be distributing again his vegetables
+in the streets of Nancy, driving his two good little horses--_des
+gaillards_--with the reins hooked round "_l'empereur_." Good
+friends--good luck!
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE MUFFLED SHIP
+
+
+It was cold and grey, but the band on shore was playing, and the flags
+on shore were fluttering, and the long double-tiered wharf crowded with
+welcomers in each of its open gaps, when our great ship slowly drew
+alongside, packed with cheering, chattering crowds of khaki figures,
+letting go all the pent-up excitement of getting home from the war. The
+air was full of songs and laughter, of cheers, and shouted questions,
+the hooting of the launches' sirens, the fluttering flags and hands and
+handkerchiefs; and there were faces of old women, and of girls, intent,
+expectant, and the white gulls were floating against the grey sky, when
+our ship, listed slightly by those thousands of figures straining
+towards the land which had bred them, gently slurred up against the high
+wharf, and was made fast.
+
+The landing went on till night had long fallen, and the band was gone.
+At last the chatter, the words of command, the snatches of song, and
+that most favourite chorus: "Me! and my girl!" died away, and the wharf
+was silent and the ship silent, and a wonderful clear dark beauty
+usurped the spaces of the sky. By the light of the stars and a half moon
+the far harbour shores were just visible, the huddled buildings on the
+near shore, the spiring masts and feathery appanage of ropes on the
+moored ship, and one blood-red light above the black water. The night
+had all that breathless beauty which steeps the soul in a quivering,
+quiet rapture....
+
+Then it was that clearly, as if I had been a welcomer standing on land
+in one of the wharf gaps, I saw her come--slow, slow, creeping up the
+narrow channel, in beside the wharf, a great grey silent ship. At first
+I thought her utterly empty, deserted, possessed only by the thick
+coiled cables forward, the huge rusty anchors, the piled-up machinery of
+structure and funnel and mast, weird in the blue darkness. A lantern on
+the wharf cast a bobbing golden gleam deep into the oily water at her
+side. Gun-grey, perfectly mute, she ceased to move, coming to rest
+against the wharf. And then, with a shiver, I saw that something clung
+round her, a grey film or emanation, which shifted and hovered, like the
+invisible wings of birds in a thick mist. Gradually to my straining eyes
+that filmy emanation granulated, and became faces attached to grey filmy
+forms, thousands on thousands, and every face bent towards the shore,
+staring, as it seemed, through me, at all that was behind me. Slowly,
+very slowly, I made them out--faces of helmeted soldiers, bulky with the
+gear of battle, their arms outstretched, and the lips of every one
+opened, so that I expected to hear the sound of cheering; but no sound
+came. Now I could see their eyes. They seemed to beseech--like the eyes
+of a little eager boy who asks his mother something she cannot tell him;
+and their outstretched hands seemed trying to reach her, lovingly,
+desperately trying to reach her! And those opened lips, how terribly
+they seemed trying to speak! "Mother! Mother Canada!" As if I had heard,
+I knew they were saying--those opened lips which could speak no more!
+"Mother! Mother Canada! Home! Home!..."
+
+And then away down the wharf some one chanted: "Me and my girl!" And,
+silent as she had come, the muffled ship vanished in all her length,
+with those grey forms and those mute faces; and I was standing again in
+the bows beside a huge hawser; below me the golden gleam bobbing deep in
+the oily water, and above me the cold start in beauty shining.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+HERITAGE
+
+(AN IMPRESSION)
+
+
+From that garden seat one could see the old low house of pinkish brick,
+with a path of queer-shaped flagstones running its length, and the tall
+grey chapel from which came the humming and chanting and organ drone of
+the Confirmation Service. But for that, and the voices of two gardeners
+working below us among the fruits and flowers, the July hush was
+complete. And suddenly one became aware of being watched.
+
+That thin white windmill on the hill!
+
+Away past the house, perhaps six hundred yards, it stood, ghostly, with
+a face like that of a dark-eyed white owl, made by the crossing of its
+narrow sails. With a black companion--a yew-tree cut to pyramid form, on
+the central point of Sussex--it was watching us, for though one must
+presume it built of old time by man, it looked up there against the sky,
+with its owl's face and its cross, like a Christo-Pagan presence.
+
+What exactly Paganism was we shall never know; what exactly Christianism
+is, we are as little likely to discover; but here and there the two
+principles seem to dwell together in amity. For Paganism believed in the
+healthy and joyful body; and Christianism in the soul superior thereto.
+And, where we were sitting that summer day, was the home of bodies
+wrecked yet learning to be joyful, and of souls not above the process.
+
+We moved from the grey-wood seat, and came on tiptoe to where house and
+chapel formed a courtyard. The doors were open, and we stood unseen,
+listening. From the centre of a square stone fountain a little bubble of
+water came up, and niched along one high wall a number of white pigeons
+were preening their feathers, silent, and almost motionless, as though
+attending to the Service.
+
+The sheer emotion of church sounds will now and then steal away reason
+from the unbeliever, and take him drugged and dreaming. "Defend, O Lord,
+this Thy child!...." So it came out to us in the dream and drowse of
+summer, which the little bubble of water cooled.
+
+In his robes--cardinal, and white, and violet--the good Bishop stood in
+full sunlight, speaking to the crippled and the air-raid children in
+their drilled rows under the shade of the doves' wall; and one felt far
+from this age, as if one had strayed back into that time when the
+builders of the old house laid slow brick on brick, wetting their
+whistles on mead, and knowing not tobacco.
+
+And then, out by the chapel porch moved three forms in blue, with red
+neckties, and we were again in this new age, watching the faces of those
+listening children. The good Bishop was making them feel that he was
+happy in their presence, and that made them happy in his. For the great
+thing about life is the going-out of friendliness from being to being.
+And if a place be beautiful, and friendliness ever on the peace-path
+there, what more can we desire? And yet--how ironical this place of
+healing, this beautiful "Heritage!" Verily a heritage of our modern
+civilisation which makes all this healing necessary! If life were the
+offspring of friendliness and beauty's long companionship, there would
+be no crippled children, no air-raid children, none of those good
+fellows in blue with red ties and maimed limbs; and the colony to which
+the Bishop spoke, standing grey-headed in the sun, would be dissolved.
+Friendliness seems so natural, beauty so appropriate to this earth! But
+in this torn world they are as fugitives who nest together here and
+there. Yet stumbling by chance on their dove-cotes and fluttering
+happiness, one makes a little golden note, which does not fade off the
+tablet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How entrancing it is to look at a number of faces never seen before--and
+how exasperating!--stamped coins of lives quite separate, quite
+different from every other; masks pallid, sunburned, smooth, or
+crumpled, to peep behind which one longs, as a lover looking for his
+lady at carnival, or a man aching at summer beauty which he cannot quite
+fathom and possess. If one had a thousand lives, and time to know and
+sympathy to understand the heart of every creature met with, one would
+want--a million! May life make us all intuitive, strip away
+self-consciousness, and give us sunshine and unknown faces!
+
+What were they all feeling and thinking--those little cripples doing
+their drill on crutches; those air-raid waifs swelling their Cockney
+chests, rising on their toes, puffing their cheeks out in anxiety to do
+their best; those soldiers in their blue "slops," with a hand gone there
+and a leg gone here, and this and that grievous disability, all carrying
+on so cheerfully?
+
+Values are queer in this world. We are accustomed to exalt those who can
+say "bo" to a goose; but that gift of expression which twines a halo
+round a lofty brow is no guarantee of goodness in the wearer. The
+really good are those plucky folk who plod their silent, often
+suffering, generally exploited ways, from birth to death, out of reach
+of the music of man's praise.
+
+The first thing each child cripple makes here is a little symbolic
+ladder. In making it he climbs a rung on the way to his sky of
+self-support; and when at last he leaves this home, he steps off the top
+of it into the blue, and--so they say--walks there upright and
+undismayed, as if he had never suffered at Fate's hands. But what do he
+and she--for many are of the pleasant sex--think of the sky when they
+get there; that dusty and smoke-laden sky of the industrialism which
+begat them? How can they breathe in it, coming from this place of
+flowers and fresh air, of clean bright workshops and elegant huts, which
+they on crutches built for themselves?
+
+Masters of British industry, and leaders of the men and women who slave
+to make its wheels go round, make a pilgrimage to this spot, and learn
+what foul disfigurement you have brought on the land of England these
+last five generations! The natural loveliness in this Heritage is no
+greater than the loveliness that used to be in a thousand places which
+you have blotted out of the book of beauty, with your smuts and wheels,
+your wires and welter. And to what end? To manufacture crippled
+children, and pale, peaky little Cockneys whose nerves are gone; (and,
+to be sure, the railways and motor cars which will bring you here to see
+them coming to life once more in sane and natural surroundings!) Blind
+and deaf and dumb industrialism is the accursed thing in this land and
+in all others.
+
+If only we could send all our crippled soldiers to relearn life, in
+places such as this; if, instead of some forty or fifty, forty or fifty
+thousand could begin again, under the gaze of that white windmill! If
+they could slough off here not only those last horrors, but the dinge
+and drang of their upbringing in towns, where wheels go round, lights
+flare, streets reek, and no larks sing, save some little blinded victim
+in a cage. Poor William Blake:
+
+ "I will not cease from fighting, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
+ Till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land!"
+
+A long vigil his sword is keeping, while the clock strikes every hour of
+the twenty-four. We have not yet even laid Jerusalem's foundation stone.
+Ask one of those maimed soldier boys. "I like it here. Oh, yes, it's
+very pleasant for a change." But he hastens to tell you that he goes in
+to Brighton every day to his training school, as if that saved the
+situation; almost surprised he seems that beauty and peace and good air
+are not intolerable to his town-bred soul. The towns have got us--nearly
+all. Not until we let beauty and the quiet voice of the fields, and the
+scent of clover creep again into our nerves, shall we begin to build
+Jerusalem and learn peacefulness once more. The countryman hates strife;
+it breaks his dream. And life should have its covering of dream--bird's
+flight, bird's song, wind in the ash-trees and the corn, tall lilies
+glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of
+waters. There is no other genuine dream; without it to sweeten all, life
+is harsh and shrill and east-wind dry, and evil overruns her more
+quickly than blight be-gums the rose-tree or frost blackens fern of a
+cold June night. We elders are past re-making England, but our children,
+even these crippled children here, may yet take a hand....
+
+We left the tinies to the last--all Montessorians, and some of them
+little cripples, too, but with cheeks so red that they looked as if the
+colour must come off. They lived in a house past the white mill, across
+the common; and they led us by the hand down spotless corridors into
+white dormitories. The smile of the prettiest little maid of them all
+was the last thing one saw, leaving that "Heritage" of print frocks and
+children's faces, of flowers and nightingales, under the lee of a group
+of pines, the only dark beauty in the long sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+'A GREEN HILL FAR AWAY'
+
+
+Was it indeed only last March, or in another life, that I climbed this
+green hill on that day of dolour, the Sunday after the last great German
+offensive began? A beautiful sun-warmed day it was, when the wild thyme
+on the southern slope smelled sweet, and the distant sea was a glitter
+of gold. Lying on the grass, pressing my cheek to its warmth, I tried to
+get solace for that new dread which seemed so cruelly unnatural after
+four years of war-misery.
+
+'If only it were all over!' I said to myself; 'and I could come here,
+and to all the lovely places I know, without this awful contraction of
+the heart, and this knowledge that at every tick of my watch some human
+body is being mangled or destroyed. Ah, if only I could! Will there
+never be an end?'
+
+And now there is an end, and I am up on this green hill once more, in
+December sunlight, with the distant sea a glitter of gold. And there is
+no cramp in my heart, no miasma clinging to my senses. Peace! It is
+still incredible. No more to hear with the ears of the nerves the
+ceaseless roll of gunfire, or see with the eyes of the nerves drowning
+men, gaping wounds, and death. Peace, actually Peace! The war has gone
+on so long that many of us have forgotten the sense of outrage and
+amazement we had, those first days of August, 1914, when it all began.
+But I have not forgotten, nor ever shall.
+
+In some of us--I think in many who could not voice it--the war has left
+chiefly this feeling: 'If only I could find a country where men cared
+less for all that they seem to care for, where they cared more for
+beauty, for nature, for being kindly to each other. If only I could find
+that green hill far away!' Of the songs of Theocritus, of the life of
+St. Francis, there is no more among the nations than there is of dew on
+grass in an east wind. If we ever thought otherwise, we are
+disillusioned now. Yet there is Peace again, and the souls of men
+fresh-murdered are not flying into our lungs with every breath we draw.
+
+Each day this thought of Peace becomes more real and blessed. I can lie
+on this green hill and praise Creation that I am alive in a world of
+beauty. I can go to sleep up here with the coverlet of sunlight warm on
+my body, and not wake to that old dull misery. I can even dream with a
+light heart, for my fair dreams will not be spoiled by waking, and my
+bad dreams will be cured the moment I open my eyes. I can look up at
+that blue sky without seeing trailed across it a mirage of the long
+horror, a film picture of all the things that have been done by men to
+men. At last I can gaze up at it, limpid and blue, without a dogging
+melancholy; and I can gaze down at that far gleam of sea, knowing that
+there is no murk of murder on it any more.
+
+And the flight of birds, the gulls and rooks and little brown wavering
+things which flit out and along the edge of the chalk-pits, is once more
+refreshment to me, utterly untempered. A merle is singing in a bramble
+thicket; the dew has not yet dried off the bramble leaves. A feather of
+a moon floats across the sky; the distance sends forth homely murmurs;
+the sun warms my cheeks. And all of this is pure joy. No hawk of dread
+and horror keeps swooping down and bearing off the little birds of
+happiness. No accusing conscience starts forth and beckons me away from
+pleasure. Everywhere is supreme and flawless beauty. Whether one looks
+at this tiny snail shell, marvellously chased and marked, a very elf's
+horn whose open mouth is coloured rose; or gazes down at the flat land
+between here and the sea, wandering under the smile of the afternoon
+sunlight, seeming almost to be alive, hedgeless, with its many watching
+trees, and silver gulls hovering above the mushroom-coloured 'ploughs,'
+and fields green in manifold hues; whether one muses on this little pink
+daisy born so out of time, or watches that valley of brown-rose-grey
+woods, under the drifting shadows of low-hanging chalky clouds--all is
+perfect, as only Nature can be perfect on a lovely day, when the mind of
+him who looks on her is at rest.
+
+On this green hill I am nearer than I have been yet to realisation of
+the difference between war and peace. In our civilian lives hardly
+anything has been changed--we do not get more butter or more petrol, the
+garb and machinery of war still shroud us, journals still drip hate; but
+in our spirits there is all the difference between gradual dying and
+gradual recovery from sickness.
+
+At the beginning of the war a certain artist, so one heard, shut himself
+away in his house and garden, taking in no newspaper, receiving no
+visitors, listening to no breath of the war, seeing no sight of it. So
+he lived, buried in his work and his flowers--I know not for how long.
+Was he wise, or did he suffer even more than the rest of us who shut
+nothing away? Can man, indeed, shut out the very quality of his
+firmament, or bar himself away from the general misery of his species?
+
+This gradual recovery of the world--this slow reopening of the great
+flower, Life--is beautiful to feel and see. I press my hand flat and
+hard down on those blades of grass, then take it away, and watch them
+very slowly raise themselves and shake off the bruise. So it is, and
+will be, with us for a long time to come. The cramp of war was deep in
+us, as an iron frost in the earth. Of all the countless millions who
+have fought and nursed and written and spoken and dug and sewn and
+worked in a thousand other ways to help on the business of killing,
+hardly any have laboured in real love of war. Ironical, indeed, that
+perhaps the most beautiful poem written these four years, Julian
+Grenfell's 'Into Battle!' was in heartfelt praise of fighting! But if
+one could gather the deep curses breathed by man and woman upon war
+since the first bugle was blown, the dirge of them could not be
+contained in the air which wraps this earth.
+
+And yet the 'green hill,' where dwell beauty and kindliness, is still
+far away. Will it ever be nearer? Men have fought even on this green
+hill where I am lying. By the rampart markings on its chalk and grass,
+it has surely served for an encampment. The beauty of day and night, the
+lark's song, the sweet-scented growing things, the rapture of health,
+and of pure air, the majesty of the stars, and the gladness of
+sunlight, of song and dance and simple friendliness, have never been
+enough for men. We crave our turbulent fate. Can wars, then, ever cease?
+Look in men's faces, read their writings, and beneath masks and
+hypocrisies note the restless creeping of the tiger spirit! There has
+never been anything to prevent the millennium except the nature of the
+human being. There are not enough lovers of beauty among men. It all
+comes back to that. Not enough who want the green hill far away--who
+naturally hate disharmony, and the greed, ugliness, restlessness,
+cruelty, which are its parents and its children.
+
+Will there ever be more lovers of beauty in proportion to those who are
+indifferent to beauty? Who shall answer that question? Yet on the answer
+depends peace. Men may have a mint of sterling qualities--be vigorous,
+adventurous, brave, upright, and self-sacrificing; be preachers and
+teachers; keen, cool-headed, just, industrious--if they have not the
+love of beauty, they will still be making wars. Man is a fighting
+animal, with sense of the ridiculous enough to know that he is a fool to
+fight, but not sense of the sublime enough to stop him. Ah, well! we
+have peace!
+
+It is happiness greater than I have known for four years and four
+months, to lie here and let that thought go on its wings, quiet and free
+as the wind stealing soft from the sea, and blessed as the sunlight on
+this green hill.
+
+1918.
+
+
+
+
+ _PART II_
+
+ OF PEACE-TIME
+
+
+
+
+ I
+
+ SPINDLEBERRIES
+
+
+The celebrated painter Scudamore--whose studies of Nature had been hung
+on the line for so many years that he had forgotten the days when, not
+yet in the Scudamore manner, they depended from the sky--stood where his
+cousin had left him so abruptly. His lips, between comely grey moustache
+and comely pointed beard, wore a mortified smile, and he gazed rather
+dazedly at the spindleberries fallen on to the flagged courtyard from
+the branch she had brought to show him. Why had she thrown up her head
+as if he had struck her, and whisked round so that those dull-pink
+berries quivered and lost their rain-drops, and four had fallen? He had
+but said: "Charming! I'd like to use them!" And she had answered: "God!"
+and rushed away. Alicia really was crazed; who would have thought that
+once she had been so adorable! He stooped and picked up the four
+berries--a beautiful colour, that dull pink! And from below the coatings
+of success and the Scudamore manner a little thrill came up; the stir of
+emotional vision. Paint! What good! How express? He went across to the
+low wall which divided the courtyard of his expensively restored and
+beautiful old house from the first flood of the River Arun wandering
+silvery in pale winter sunlight. Yes, indeed! How express Nature, its
+translucence and mysterious unities, its mood never the same from hour
+to hour! Those brown-tufted rushes over there against the gold grey of
+light and water--those restless hovering white gulls! A kind of disgust
+at his own celebrated manner welled up within him--the disgust akin to
+Alicia's "God!" Beauty! What use--how express it! Had she been thinking
+the same thing?
+
+He looked at the four pink berries glistening on the grey stone of the
+wall, and memory stirred. What a lovely girl she had been with her
+grey-green eyes, shining under long lashes, the rose-petal colour in her
+cheeks and the too-fine dark hair--now so very grey--always blowing a
+little wild. An enchanting, enthusiastic creature! He remembered, as if
+it had been but last week, that day when they started from Arundel
+station by the road to Burpham, when he was twenty-nine and she
+twenty-five, both of them painters and neither of them famed--a day of
+showers and sunlight in the middle of March, and Nature preparing for
+full Spring! How they had chattered at first; and when their arms
+touched, how he had thrilled, and the colour had deepened in her wet
+cheeks; and then, gradually, they had grown silent; a wonderful walk,
+which seemed leading so surely to a more wonderful end. They had
+wandered round through the village and down, past the chalk-pit and
+Jacob's ladder, onto the field path and so to the river-bank. And he had
+taken her ever so gently round the waist, still silent, waiting for that
+moment when his heart would leap out of him in words and hers--he was
+sure--would leap to meet it. The path entered a thicket of blackthorn,
+with a few primroses close to the little river running full and gentle.
+The last drops of a shower were falling, but the sun had burst through,
+and the sky above the thicket was cleared to the blue of speedwell
+flowers. Suddenly she had stopped and cried: "Look, Dick! Oh, look! It's
+heaven!" A high bush of blackthorn was lifted there, starry white
+against the blue and that bright cloud. It seemed to sing, it was so
+lovely; the whole of Spring was in it. But the sight of her ecstatic
+face had broken down all his restraint; and tightening his arm round
+her, he had kissed her lips. He remembered still the expression of her
+face, like a child's startled out of sleep. She had gone rigid, gasped,
+started away from him; quivered and gulped, and broken suddenly into
+sobs. Then, slipping from his arm, she had fled. He had stood at first,
+amazed and hurt, utterly bewildered; then, recovering a little, had
+hunted for her full half an hour before at last he found her sitting on
+wet grass, with a stony look on her face. He had said nothing, and she
+nothing, except to murmur: "Let's go on; we shall miss our train!" And
+all the rest of that day and the day after, until they parted, he had
+suffered from the feeling of having tumbled down off some high perch in
+her estimation. He had not liked it at all; it had made him very angry.
+Never from that day to this had he thought of it as anything but a piece
+of wanton prudery. Had it--had it been something else?
+
+He looked at the four pink berries, and, as if they had uncanny power to
+turn the wheel of memory, he saw another vision of his cousin five years
+later. He was married by then, and already hung on the line. With his
+wife he had gone down to Alicia's country cottage. A summer night, just
+dark and very warm. After many exhortations she had brought into the
+little drawing-room her last finished picture. He could see her now
+placing it where the light fell, her tall slight form already rather
+sharp and meagre, as the figures of some women grow at thirty, if they
+are not married; the nervous, fluttering look on her charming face, as
+though she could hardly bear this inspection; the way she raised her
+shoulder just a little as if to ward off an expected blow of
+condemnation. No need! It had been a beautiful thing, a quite
+surprisingly beautiful study of night. He remembered with what a really
+jealous ache he had gazed at it--a better thing than he had ever done
+himself. And, frankly, he had said so. Her eyes had shone with pleasure.
+
+"Do you really like it? I tried so hard!"
+
+"The day you show that, my dear," he had said, "your name's made!" She
+had clasped her hands and simply sighed: "Oh, Dick!" He had felt quite
+happy in her happiness, and presently the three of them had taken their
+chairs out, beyond the curtains, on to the dark verandah, had talked a
+little, then somehow fallen silent. A wonderful warm, black, grape-bloom
+night, exquisitely gracious and inviting; the stars very high and white,
+the flowers glimmering in the garden-beds, and against the deep, dark
+blue, roses hanging, unearthly, stained with beauty. There was a scent
+of honeysuckle, he remembered, and many moths came fluttering by towards
+the tall narrow chink of light between the curtains. Alicia had sat
+leaning forward, elbows on knees, ears buried in her hands. Probably
+they were silent because she sat like that. Once he heard her whisper to
+herself: "Lovely, lovely! Oh, God! How lovely!" His wife, feeling the
+dew, had gone in, and he had followed; Alicia had not seemed to notice.
+But when she too came in, her eyes were glistening with tears. She said
+something about bed in a queer voice; they had taken candles and gone
+up. Next morning, going to her little studio to give her advice about
+that picture, he had been literally horrified to see it streaked with
+lines of Chinese white--Alicia, standing before it, was dashing her
+brush in broad smears across and across. She heard him and turned round.
+There was a hard red spot in either cheek, and she said in a quivering
+voice: "It was blasphemy. That's all!" And turning her back on him, she
+had gone on smearing it with Chinese white. Without a word, he had
+turned tail in simple disgust. Indeed, so deep had been his vexation at
+that wanton destruction of the best thing she had ever done, or was ever
+likely to do, that he had avoided her for years. He had always had a
+horror of eccentricity. To have planted her foot firmly on the ladder of
+fame and then deliberately kicked it away; to have wantonly foregone
+this chance of making money--for she had but a mere pittance! It had
+seemed to him really too exasperating, a thing only to be explained by
+tapping one's forehead. Every now and then he still heard of her, living
+down there, spending her days out in the woods and fields, and sometimes
+even her nights, they said, and steadily growing poorer and thinner and
+more eccentric; becoming, in short, impossibly difficult, as only
+Englishwomen can. People would speak of her as "such a dear," and talk
+of her charm, but always with that shrug which is hard to bear when
+applied to one's relations. What she did with the productions of her
+brush he never inquired, too disillusioned by that experience. Poor
+Alicia!
+
+The pink berries glowed on the grey stone, and he had yet another
+memory. A family occasion when Uncle Martin Scudamore departed this
+life, and they all went up to bury him and hear his Will. The old chap,
+whom they had looked on as a bit of a disgrace, money-grubbing up in the
+little grey Yorkshire town which owed its rise to his factory, was
+expected to make amends by his death, for he had never married--too sunk
+in Industry, apparently, to have the time. By tacit agreement, his
+nephews and nieces had selected the Inn at Bolton Abbey, nearest beauty
+spot, for their stay. They had driven six miles to the funeral in three
+carriages. Alicia had gone with him and his brother, the solicitor. In
+her plain black clothes she looked quite charming, in spite of the
+silver threads already thick in her fine dark hair, loosened by the moor
+wind. She had talked of painting to him with all her old enthusiasm, and
+her eyes had seemed to linger on his face as if she still had a little
+weakness for him. He had quite enjoyed that drive. They had come rather
+abruptly on the small grimy town clinging to the river-banks, with old
+Martin's long yellow-brick house dominating it, about two hundred yards
+above the mills. Suddenly under the rug he felt Alicia's hand seize his
+with a sort of desperation, for all the world as if she were clinging to
+something to support her. Indeed, he was sure she did not know it was
+his hand she squeezed. The cobbled streets, the muddy-looking water, the
+dingy, staring factories, the yellow staring house, the little
+dark-clothed, dreadfully plain work-people, all turned out to do a last
+honour to their creator; the hideous new grey church, the dismal
+service, the brand-new tombstones--and all of a glorious autumn day! It
+was inexpressibly sordid--too ugly for words! Afterwards the Will was
+read to them, seated decorously on bright mahogany chairs in the yellow
+mansion; a very satisfactory Will, distributing in perfectly adjusted
+portions, to his own kinsfolk and nobody else, a very considerable
+wealth. Scudamore had listened to it dreamily, with his eyes fixed on an
+oily picture, thinking: "My God! What a thing!" and longing to be back
+in the carriage smoking a cigar to take the reek of black clothes, and
+sherry--sherry!--out of his nostrils. He happened to look at Alicia. Her
+eyes were closed; her lips, always sweet-looking, quivered amusedly. And
+at that very moment the Will came to her name. He saw those eyes open
+wide, and marked a beautiful pink flush, quite like that of old days,
+come into her thin cheeks. "Splendid!" he had thought; "it's really
+jolly for her. I _am_ glad. Now she won't have to pinch. Splendid!" He
+shared with her to the full the surprised relief showing in her still
+beautiful face.
+
+All the way home in the carriage he felt at least as happy over her good
+fortune as over his own, which had been substantial. He took her hand
+under the rug and squeezed it, and she answered with a long, gentle
+pressure, quite unlike the clutch when they were driving in. That same
+evening he strolled out to where the river curved below the Abbey. The
+sun had not quite set, and its last smoky radiance slanted into the
+burnished autumn woods. Some white-faced Herefords were grazing in lush
+grass, the river rippled and gleamed, all over golden scales. About
+that scene was the magic which has so often startled the hearts of
+painters, the wistful gold--the enchantment of a dream. For some minutes
+he had gazed with delight which had in it a sort of despair. A little
+crisp rustle ran along the bushes; the leaves fluttered, then hung quite
+still. And he heard a voice--Alicia's--speaking. "My lovely, lovely
+world!" And moving forward a step, he saw her standing on the
+river-bank, braced against the trunk of a birch-tree, her head thrown
+back, and her arms stretched wide apart as though to clasp the lovely
+world she had apostrophised. To have gone up to her would have been like
+breaking up a lovers' interview, and he turned round instead and went
+away.
+
+A week later he heard from his brother that Alicia had refused her
+legacy. "I don't want it," her letter had said simply, "I couldn't bear
+to take it. Give it to those poor people who live in that awful place."
+Really eccentricity could go no further! They decided to go down and see
+her. Such mad neglect of her own good must not be permitted without some
+effort to prevent it. They found her very thin, and charming; humble,
+but quite obstinate in her refusal. "Oh! I couldn't, really! I should be
+so unhappy. Those poor little stunted people who made it all for him!
+That little, awful town! I simply couldn't be reminded. Don't talk about
+it, please. I'm quite all right as I am." They had threatened her with
+lurid pictures of the workhouse and a destitute old age. To no purpose,
+she would not take the money. She had been forty when she refused that
+aid from heaven--forty, and already past any hope of marriage. For
+though Scudamore had never known for certain that she had ever wished or
+hoped for marriage, he had his theory--that all her eccentricity came
+from wasted sexual instinct. This last folly had seemed to him monstrous
+enough to be pathetic, and he no longer avoided her. Indeed, he would
+often walk over to tea in her little hermitage. With Uncle Martin's
+money he had bought and restored the beautiful old house over the River
+Arun, and was now only five miles from Alicia's across country. She too
+would come tramping over at all hours, floating in with wild flowers or
+ferns, which she would put into water the moment she arrived. She had
+ceased to wear hats, and had by now a very doubtful reputation for
+sanity about the countryside. This was the period when Watts was on
+every painter's tongue, and he seldom saw Alicia without a disputation
+concerning that famous symbolist. Personally, he had no use for Watts,
+resenting his faulty drawing and crude allegories, but Alicia always
+maintained with her extravagant fervour that he was great because he
+tried to paint the soul of things. She especially loved a painting
+called "Iris"--a female symbol of the rainbow, which indeed in its
+floating eccentricity had a certain resemblance to herself. "Of course
+he failed," she would say; "he tried for the impossible and went on
+trying all his life. Oh! I can't bear your rules, and catchwords, Dick;
+what's the good of them! Beauty's too big, too deep!" Poor Alicia! She
+was sometimes very wearing.
+
+He never knew quite how it came about that she went abroad with them to
+Dauphiné in the autumn of 1904--a rather disastrous business--never
+again would he take anyone travelling who did not know how to come in
+out of the cold. It was a painter's country, and he had hired a little
+_chateau_ in front of the Glandaz mountain--himself, his wife, their
+eldest girl, and Alicia. The adaptation of his famous manner to that
+strange scenery, its browns and French greys and filmy blues, so
+preoccupied him that he had scant time for becoming intimate with these
+hills and valleys. From the little gravelled terrace in front of the
+annex, out of which he had made a studio, there was an absorbing view
+over the pan-tiled old town of Die. It glistened below in the early or
+late sunlight, flat-roofed and of pinkish-yellow, with the dim, blue
+River Drôme circling one side, and cut, dark cypress-trees dotting the
+vineyarded slopes. And he painted it continually. What Alicia did with
+herself they none of them very much knew, except that she would come in
+and talk ecstatically of things and beasts and people she had seen. One
+favourite haunt of hers they did visit, a ruined monastery high up in
+the amphitheatre of the Glandaz mountain. They had their lunch up there,
+a very charming and remote spot, where the watercourses and ponds and
+chapel of the old monks were still visible, though converted by the
+farmer to his use. Alicia left them abruptly in the middle of their
+praises, and they had not seen her again till they found her at home
+when they got back. It was almost as if she had resented laudation of
+her favourite haunt. She had brought in with her a great bunch of golden
+berries, of which none of them knew the name; berries almost as
+beautiful as these spindleberries glowing on the stone of the wall. And
+a fourth memory of Alicia came.
+
+Christmas Eve, a sparkling frost, and every tree round the little
+_chateau_ rimed so that they shone in the starlight, as though dowered
+with cherry blossoms. Never were more stars in clear black sky above
+the whitened earth. Down in the little town a few faint points of yellow
+light twinkled in the mountain wind, keen as a razor's edge. A
+fantastically lovely night--quite "Japanese," but cruelly cold. Five
+minutes on the terrace had been enough for all of them except Alicia.
+She--unaccountable, crazy creature--would not come in. Twice he had gone
+out to her, with commands, entreaties, and extra wraps; the third time
+he could not find her, she had deliberately avoided his onslaught and
+slid off somewhere to keep this mad vigil by frozen starlight. When at
+last she did come in she reeled as if drunk. They tried to make her
+really drunk, to put warmth back into her. No good! In two days she was
+down with double pneumonia; it was two months before she was up again--a
+very shadow of herself. There had never been much health in her since
+then. She floated like a ghost through life, a crazy ghost, who still
+would steal away, goodness knew where, and come in with a flush in her
+withered cheeks, and her grey hair wild blown, carrying her spoil--some
+flower, some leaf, some tiny bird, or little soft rabbit. She never
+painted now, never even talked of it. They had made her give up her
+cottage and come to live with them, literally afraid that she would
+starve herself to death in her forgetfulness of everything. These
+spindleberries even! Why, probably she had been right up this morning to
+that sunny chalk-pit in the lew of the Downs to get them, seven miles
+there and back, when you wouldn't think she could walk seven hundred
+yards, and as likely as not had lain there on the dewy grass, looking up
+at the sky, as he had come on her sometimes. Poor Alicia! And once he
+had been within an ace of marrying her! A life spoiled! By what, if not
+by love of beauty! But who would have ever thought that the intangible
+could wreck a woman, deprive her of love, marriage, motherhood, of fame,
+of wealth, of health! And yet--by George!--it had!
+
+Scudamore flipped the four pink berries off the wall. The radiance and
+the meandering milky waters; that swan against the brown tufted rushes;
+those far, filmy Downs--there was beauty! _Beauty!_ But, damn it
+all--moderation! Moderation! And, turning his back on that prospect,
+which he had painted so many times, in his celebrated manner, he went
+in, and up the expensively restored staircase to his studio. It had
+great windows on three sides, and perfect means for regulating light.
+Unfinished studies melted into walls so subdued that they looked like
+atmosphere. There were no completed pictures--they sold too fast. As he
+walked over to his easel, his eye was caught by a spray of colour--the
+branch of spindleberries set in water, ready for him to use, just where
+the pale sunlight fell, so that their delicate colour might glow and the
+few tiny drops of moisture still clinging to them shine. For a second he
+saw Alicia herself as she must have looked, setting them there, her
+transparent hands hovering, her eyes shining, that grey hair of hers all
+fine and loose. The vision vanished! But what had made her bring them
+after that horrified "God!" when he spoke of using them? Was it her way
+of saying: "Forgive me for being rude!" Really she was pathetic, that
+poor devotee! The spindleberries glowed in their silver-lustre jug,
+sprayed up against the sunlight. They looked triumphant--as well they
+might, who stood for that which had ruined--or, was it, saved?--a life!
+Alicia! She had made a pretty mess of it, and yet who knew what secret
+raptures she had felt with her subtle lover, Beauty, by starlight and
+sunlight and moonlight, in the fields and woods, on the hilltops, and by
+riverside! Flowers, and the flight of birds, and the ripple of the wind,
+and all the shifting play of light and colour which made a man despair
+when he wanted to use them; she had taken them, hugged them to her with
+no afterthought, and been happy! Who could say that she had missed the
+prize of life? Who could say it?... Spindleberries! A bunch of
+spindleberries to set such doubts astir in him! Why, what was beauty but
+just the extra value which certain forms and colours, blended, gave to
+things--just the extra value in the human market! Nothing else on earth,
+nothing! And the spindleberries glowed against the sunlight, delicate,
+remote!
+
+Taking his palette, he mixed crimson lake, white, and ultramarine. What
+was that? Who sighed, away out there behind him? Nothing!
+
+"Damn it all!" he thought; "this is childish. This is as bad as Alicia!"
+And he set to work to paint in his celebrated manner--spindleberries.
+
+1918.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+EXPECTATIONS
+
+
+Not many years ago a couple were living in the South of England whose
+name was Wotchett--Ralph and Eileen Wotchett; a curious name, derived,
+Ralph asserted, from a Saxon Thegn called Otchar mentioned in Domesday,
+or at all events--when search of the book had proved vain--on the edge
+of that substantial record.
+
+He--possibly the thirtieth descendant of the Thegn--was close on six
+feet in height and thin, with thirsty eyes, and a smile which had fixed
+itself in his cheeks, so on the verge of appearing was it. His hair
+waved, and was of a dusty shade bordering on grey. His wife, of the same
+age and nearly the same height as himself, was of sanguine colouring and
+a Cornish family, which had held land in such a manner that it had
+nearly melted in their grasp. All that had come to Eileen was a
+reversion, on the mortgageable value of which she and Ralph had been
+living for some time. Ralph Wotchett also had expectations. By
+profession he was an architect, but perhaps because of his expectations,
+he had always had bad luck. The involutions of the reasons why his
+clients died, became insolvent, abandoned their projects, or otherwise
+failed to come up to the scratch were followed by him alone in the full
+of their maze-like windings. The house they inhabited, indeed, was one
+of those he had designed for a client, but the 'fat chough' had refused
+to go into it for some unaccountable reason; he and Eileen were only
+perching there, however, on the edge of settling down in some more
+permanent house when they came into their expectations.
+
+Considering the vicissitudes and disappointments of their life together,
+it was remarkable how certain they remained that they would at last
+cross the bar and reach the harbour of comfortable circumstance. They
+had, one may suppose, expectations in their blood. The germ of getting
+'something for nothing' had infected their systems, so that, though they
+were not selfish or greedy people, and well knew how to rough it, they
+dreamed so of what they had not, that they continually got rid of what
+they had in order to obtain more of it. If for example Ralph received an
+order, he felt so strongly that this was the chance of his life if
+properly grasped, that he would almost as a matter of course increase
+and complicate the project till it became unworkable, or in his zeal
+omit some vital calculation such as a rise in the price of bricks; nor
+would anyone be more surprised than he at this, or more certain that all
+connected with the matter had been 'fat choughs' except--himself. On
+such occasions Eileen would get angry, but if anyone suggested that
+Ralph had overreached himself, she would get still angrier. She was very
+loyal, and fortunately rather flyaway both in mind and body; before long
+she always joined him in his feeling that the whole transaction had been
+just the usual 'skin-game' on the part of Providence to keep them out of
+their expectations. It was the same in domestic life. If Ralph had to
+eat a breakfast, which would be almost every morning, he had so many and
+such imaginative ways of getting from it a better breakfast than was in
+it, that he often remained on the edge of it, as it were. He had special
+methods of cooking, so as to extract from everything a more than
+ordinary flavour, and these took all the time that he would have to eat
+the results in. Coffee he would make with a whole egg, shell and all,
+stirred in; it had to be left on the hob for an incomparable time, and
+he would start to catch his train with his first cup in his hand; Eileen
+would have to run after him and take it away. They were, in fact, rather
+like a kitten which knows it has a tail, and will fly round and round
+all day with the expectation of catching that desirable appendage.
+Sometimes indeed, by sheer perseverance, of which he had a great deal in
+a roundabout way, Ralph would achieve something, but, when this
+happened, something else, not foreseen by him, had always happened
+first, which rendered that accomplishment nugatory and left it expensive
+on his hands. Nevertheless they retained their faith that some day they
+would get ahead of Providence and come into their own.
+
+In view of not yet having come into their expectations they had waited
+to have children; but two had rather unexpectedly been born. The babes
+had succumbed, however, one to preparation for betterment too ingenious
+to be fulfilled, the other to fulfilment, itself, a special kind of food
+having been treated so ingeniously that it had undoubtedly engendered
+poison. And they remained childless.
+
+They were about fifty when Ralph received one morning a solicitor's
+letter announcing the death of his godmother, Aunt Lispeth. When he read
+out the news they looked at their plates a full minute without speaking.
+Their expectations had matured. At last they were to come into something
+in return for nothing. Aunt Lispeth, who had latterly lived at Ipswich
+in a house which he had just not built for her, was an old maid. They
+had often discussed what she would leave them--though in no mean or
+grasping spirit, for they did not grudge the 'poor old girl' her few
+remaining years, however they might feel that she was long past enjoying
+herself. The chance would come to them some time, and when it did of
+course must be made the best of. Then Eileen said:
+
+"You must go down at once, Ralph!"
+
+Donning black, Ralph set off hurriedly, and just missed his train; he
+caught one, however, in the afternoon, and arrived that evening in
+Ipswich. It was October, drizzling and dark; the last cab moved out as
+he tried to enter it, for he had been detained by his ticket which he
+had put for extra readiness in his glove, and forgotten--as if the
+ticket collector couldn't have seen it there, the 'fat chough!' He
+walked up to his Aunt's house, and was admitted to a mansion where a
+dinner-party was going on. It was impossible to persuade the servant
+that this was his Aunt's, so he was obliged to retire to a hotel and
+wire to Eileen to send him the right address--the 'fat choughs' in the
+street did not seem to know it. He got her answer the following midday,
+and going to the proper number, found the darkened house. The two
+servants who admitted him described the manner of their mistress's
+death, and showed him up into her room. Aunt Lispeth had been laid out
+daintily. Ralph contemplated her with the smile which never moved from
+his cheeks, and with a sort of awe in his thirsty eyes. The poor old
+girl! How thin, how white! It had been time she went! A little stiffened
+twist in her neck, where her lean head had fallen to one side at the
+last, had not been set quite straight; and there seemed the ghost of an
+expression on her face, almost cynical; by looking closer he saw that it
+came from a gap in the white lashes of one eye, giving it an air of not
+being quite closed, as though she were trying to wink at him. He went
+out rather hastily, and ascertaining that the funeral was fixed for noon
+next day, paid a visit to the solicitor.
+
+There he was told that the lawyer himself was sole executor, and
+he--Ralph--residuary legatee. He could not help a feeling of exultation,
+for he and Eileen were at that time particularly hard pressed. He
+restrained it, however, and went to his hotel to write to her. He
+received a telegram in answer next morning at ten o'clock: 'For
+goodness' sake leave all details to lawyer, Eileen,' which he thought
+very peculiar. He lunched with the lawyer after the funeral, and they
+opened his Aunt's will. It was quite short and simple, made certain
+specific bequests of lace and jewellery, left a hundred pounds to her
+executor the lawyer, and the rest of her property to her nephew Ralph
+Wotchett. The lawyer proposed to advertise for debts in the usual way,
+and Ralph with considerable control confined himself to urging all speed
+in the application for Probate, and disposal of the estate. He caught a
+late train back to Eileen. She received his account distrustfully; she
+was sure he had put his finger in the pie, and if he had it would all go
+wrong. Well, if he hadn't, he soon would! It was really as if loyalty
+had given way in her now that their expectations were on the point of
+being realised.
+
+They had often discussed his Aunt's income, but they went into it again
+that night, to see whether it could not by fresh investment be
+increased. It was derived from Norwich and Birmingham Corporation
+Stocks, and Ralph proved that by going into industrial concerns the four
+hundred a year could quite safely be made into six. Eileen agreed that
+this would be a good thing to do, but nothing definite was decided. Now
+that they had come into money they did not feel so inclined to move
+their residence, though both felt that they might increase their scale
+of living, which had lately been at a distressingly low ebb. They spoke,
+too, about the advisability of a small car. Ralph knew of one--a
+second-hand Ford--to be had for a song. They ought not--he thought--to
+miss the chance. He would take occasion to meet the owner casually and
+throw out a feeler. It would not do to let the fellow know that there
+was any money coming to them, or he would put the price up for a
+certainty. In fact it would be better to secure the car before the news
+got about. He secured it a few days later for eighty pounds, including
+repairs, which would take about a month. A letter from the lawyer next
+day informed them that he was attending to matters with all speed; and
+the next five weeks passed in slowly realising that at last they had
+turned the corner of their lives, and were in smooth water. They ordered
+among other things the materials for a fowl-house long desired, which
+Ralph helped to put up; and a considerable number of fowls, for feeding
+which he had a design which would enable them to lay a great many more
+eggs in the future than could reasonably be expected from the amount of
+food put into the fowls. He also caused an old stable to be converted
+into a garage. He still went to London two or three times a week, to
+attend to business, which was not, as a rule, there. On his way from
+St. Pancras to Red Lion Square, where his office was, he had long been
+attracted by an emerald pendant with pearl clasp, in a jeweller's shop
+window. He went in now to ask its price. Fifty-eight pounds--emeralds
+were a rising market. The expression rankled in him, and going to Hatton
+Garden to enquire into its truth, he found the statement confirmed. 'The
+chief advantage of having money,' he thought, 'is to be able to buy at
+the right moment.' He had not given Eileen anything for a long time, and
+this was an occasion which could hardly be passed over. He bought the
+pendant on his way back to St. Pancras, the draft in payment absorbing
+practically all his balance. Eileen was delighted with it. They spent
+that evening in the nearest approach to festivity that they had known
+for several years. It was, as it were, the crown of the long waiting for
+something out of nothing. All those little acerbities which creep into
+the manner of two married people who are always trying to round the
+corner fell away, and they sat together in one large chair, talking and
+laughing over the countless tricks which Providence--that 'fat
+chough'--had played them. They carried their light-heartedness to bed.
+
+They were awakened next morning by the sound of a car. The Ford was
+being delivered with a request for payment. Ralph did not pay; it would
+be 'all right' he said. He stabled the car, and wrote to the lawyer that
+he would be glad to have news, and an advance of £100. On his return
+from town in the evening two days later he found Eileen in the
+dining-room with her hair wild and an opened letter before her. She
+looked up with the word: "Here!" and Ralph took the letter:
+
+
+     Lodgers & Wayburn, Solicitors, Ipswich
+
+     Dear Mr. Wotchett,
+
+     In answer to yours of the fifteenth, I have obtained Probate,
+     paid all debts, and distributed the various legacies. The
+     sale of furniture took place last Monday. I now have pleasure
+     in enclosing you a complete and I think final account, by
+     which you will see that there is a sum in hand of £43 due to
+     you as residuary legatee. I am afraid this will seem a
+     disappointing result, but as you were doubtless aware (though
+     I was not when I had the pleasure of seeing you), the greater
+     part of your Aunt's property passed under a Deed of
+     Settlement, and it seems she had been dipping heavily into
+     the capital of the remainder for some years past.
+
+     Believe me,
+     Faithfully yours,
+     EDWARD LODGERS.
+
+
+
+For a minute the only sounds were the snapping of Ralph's jaws, and
+Eileen's rapid breathing. Then she said:
+
+"You never said a word about a Settlement. I suppose you got it muddled
+as usual!"
+
+Ralph did not answer, too deep in his anger with the old woman who had
+left that 'fat chough' a hundred pounds to provide him--Ralph--with
+forty-three.
+
+"You always believe what you want to believe!" cried Eileen; "I never
+saw such a man."
+
+Ralph went to Ipswich on the morrow. After going into everything with
+the lawyer, he succeeded in varying the account by fifteen shillings,
+considerably more than which was absorbed by the fee for this interview,
+his fare, and hotel bill. The conduct of his Aunt, in having caused him
+to get it into his head that there was no Settlement, and in living on
+her capital, gave him pain quite beyond the power of expression; and
+more than once he recalled with a shudder that slightly quizzical look
+on her dead face. He returned to Eileen the following day, with his
+brain racing round and round. Getting up next morning, he said:
+
+"I believe I can get a hundred for that car; I'll go up and see about
+it."
+
+"Take this too," said Eileen, handing him the emerald pendant. Ralph
+took it with a grunt.
+
+"Lucky," he muttered, "emeralds are a rising market. I bought it on
+purpose."
+
+He came back that night more cheerful. He had sold the car for £65, and
+the pendant for £42--a good price, for emeralds were now on the fall!
+With the cheque for £43, which represented his expectations, he proved
+that they would only be £14 out on the whole business when the fowls and
+fowl-house had been paid for; and they would have the fowls--the price
+of eggs was going up. Eileen agreed that it was the moment to develop
+poultry-keeping. They might expect good returns. And holding up her
+face, she said:
+
+"Give me a kiss, dear Ralph?"
+
+Ralph gave it, with his thirsty eyes fixed, expectant, on something
+round the corner of her head, and the smile, which never moved, on his
+cheeks.
+
+After all there was her reversion! They would come into it some day.
+
+1919.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MANNA
+
+
+I
+
+The Petty Sessions court at Linstowe was crowded. Miracles do not happen
+every day, nor are rectors frequently charged with larceny. The interest
+roused would have relieved all those who doubt the vitality of our
+ancient Church. People who never went outside their farms or plots of
+garden, had walked as much as three miles to see the show. Mrs. Gloyn,
+the sandy-haired little keeper of the shop where soap and herrings,
+cheese, matches, boot-laces, bulls'-eyes, and the other luxuries of a
+countryside could be procured, remarked to Mrs. Redland, the farmer's
+wife, ''Tis quite a gatherin' like.' To which Mrs. Redland replied,
+''Most like Church of a Sunday.'
+
+More women, it is true, than men, were present, because of their greater
+piety, and because most of them had parted with pounds of butter,
+chickens, ducks, potatoes, or some such offertory in kind during the
+past two years, at the instance of the rector. They had a vested
+interest in this matter, and were present, accompanied by their grief at
+value unreceived. From Trover, their little village on the top of the
+hill two miles from Linstowe, with the squat church-tower, beautifully
+untouched, and ruined by the perfect restoration of the body of the
+building, they had trooped in; some even coming from the shore of the
+Atlantic, a mile beyond, across the downs, whence other upland square
+church-towers could be viewed on the sky-line against the grey January
+heavens. The occasion was in a sense unique, and its piquancy
+strengthened by that rivalry which is the essence of religion.
+
+For there was no love lost between Church and Chapel in Trover, and the
+rector's flock had long been fortified in their power of 'parting' by
+fear lest 'Chapel' (also present that day in court) should mock at his
+impecuniousness. Not that his flock approved of his poverty. It had
+seemed 'silly-like' ever since the news had spread that his difficulties
+had been caused by a faith in shares. To improve a secure if moderate
+position by speculation, would not have seemed wrong, if he had not
+failed instead, and made himself dependent on their butter, their
+potatoes, their eggs and chickens. In that parish, as in others, the
+saying 'Nothing succeeds like success' was true, nor had the villagers
+any abnormal disposition to question the title-deeds of affluence.
+
+But it is equally true that nothing irritates so much as finding that
+one of whom you have the right to beg is begging of you. This was why
+the rector's tall, thin, black figure, down which a ramrod surely had
+been passed at birth; his narrow, hairless, white and wasted face, with
+red eyebrows over eyes that seemed now burning and now melting; his
+grizzled red hair under a hat almost green with age; his abrupt and
+dictatorial voice; his abrupt and mirthless laugh--all were on their
+nerves. His barked-out utterances, 'I want a pound of butter--pay you
+Monday!' 'I want some potatoes--pay you soon!' had sounded too often in
+the ears of those who had found his repayments so far purely spiritual.
+Now and then one of the more cynical would remark, 'Ah! I told un _my_
+butter was all to market.' Or, 'The man can't 'ave no principles--he
+didn't get no chicken out o' me.' And yet it was impossible to let him
+and his old mother die on them--it would give too much pleasure 'over
+the way.' And they never dreamed of losing him in any other manner,
+because they knew his living had been purchased. Money had passed in
+that transaction; the whole fabric of the Church and of Society was
+involved. His professional conduct, too, was flawless; his sermons long
+and fiery; he was always ready to perform those supernumerary
+duties--weddings, baptisms, and burials--which yielded him what revenue
+he had, now that his income from the living was mortgaged up to the
+hilt. Their loyalty held as the loyalty of people will when some great
+institution of which they are members is endangered.
+
+Gossip said that things were in a dreadful way at the Rectory; the
+external prosperity of that red-brick building surrounded by laurels
+which did not flower, heightened ironically the conditions within. The
+old lady, his mother, eighty years of age, was reported never to leave
+her bed this winter, because they had no coal. She lay there, with her
+three birds flying about dirtying the room, for neither she nor her son
+would ever let a cage-door be shut--deplorable state of things! The one
+servant was supposed never to be paid. The tradesmen would no longer
+leave goods because they could not get their money. Most of the
+furniture had been sold; and the dust made you sneeze 'fit to bust
+yourself like.'
+
+With a little basket on his arm, the rector collected for his household
+three times a week, pursuing a kind of method, always in the apparent
+belief that he would pay on Monday, and observing the Sabbath as a day
+of rest. His mind seemed ever to cherish the faith that his shares were
+on the point of recovery; his spirit never to lose belief in his divine
+right to be supported. It was extremely difficult to refuse him; the
+postman had twice seen him standing on the railway line that ran past
+just below the village, 'with 'is 'at off, as if he was in two
+minds-like.' This vision of him close to the shining metals had
+powerfully impressed many good souls who loved to make flesh creep. They
+would say, 'I wouldn' never be surprised if something 'appened to 'im
+one of these days!' Others, less romantic, shook their heads, insisting
+that 'he wouldn' never do nothin' while his old mother lived.' Others
+again, more devout, maintained that 'he wouldn' never go against the
+Scriptures, settin' an example like that!'
+
+
+II
+
+The Petty Sessions court that morning resembled Church on the occasion
+of a wedding; for the villagers of Trover had put on their black clothes
+and grouped themselves according to their religious faiths--'Church' in
+the right, 'Chapel' in the left-hand aisle. They presented all that rich
+variety of type and monotony of costume which the remoter country still
+affords to the observer; their mouths were almost all a little open,
+and their eyes fixed with intensity on the Bench. The three
+magistrates--Squire Pleydell in the chair, Dr. Becket on his left, and
+'the Honble' Calmady on his right--were by most seen for the first time
+in their judicial capacity; and curiosity was divided between their
+proceedings and observation of the rector's prosecutor, a small baker
+from the town whence the village of Trover derived its necessaries. The
+face of this fellow, like that of a white walrus, and the back of his
+bald head were of interest to everyone until the case was called, and
+the rector himself entered. In his thin black overcoat he advanced and
+stood as if a little dazed. Then, turning his ravaged face to the Bench,
+he jerked out:
+
+'Good morning! Lot of people!'
+
+A constable behind him murmured:
+
+'Into the dock, sir, please.'
+
+Moving across, he entered the wooden edifice.
+
+'Quite like a pulpit,' he said, and uttered his barking laugh.
+
+Through the court ran a stir and shuffle, as it might be of sympathy
+with his lost divinity, and every eye was fixed on that tall, lean
+figure, with the shaven face, and red, grey-streaked hair.
+
+Entering the witness-box, the prosecutor deposed as follows:
+
+'Last Tuesday afternoon, your Honours, I 'appened to be drivin' my cart
+meself up through Trover on to the cottages just above the dip, and I'd
+gone in to Mrs. 'Oney's, the laundress, leavin' my cart standin' same as
+I always do. I 'ad a bit o' gossip, an' when I come out, I see this
+gentleman walkin' away in front towards the village street. It so
+'appens I 'appened to look in the back o' my cart, and I thinks to
+meself, That's funny! There's only two flat rounds--'ave I left two 'ere
+by mistake? I calls to Mrs. 'Oney, an' I says, "I 'aven't been absent,
+'ave I, an' left ye two?" "No," she says, "only one--'ere 'tis! Why?"
+she says. "Well," I says, "I 'ad four when I come in to you, there's
+only two now. 'Tis funny!" I says. "'Ave you dropped one?" she says.
+"No," I says, "I counted 'em." "That's funny," she says; "perhaps a
+dog's 'ad it." "'E may 'ave," I says, "but the only thing I see on the
+road is that there." An' I pointed to this gentleman. "Oh!" she says,
+"that's the rector." "Yes," I says, "I ought to know that, seein' 'e's
+owed me money a matter of eighteen months. I think I'll drive on," I
+says. Well, I drove on, and come up to this gentleman. 'E turns 'is
+'ead, and looks at me. "Good afternoon!" he says--like that. "Good
+afternoon, sir," I says. "You 'aven't seen a loaf, 'ave you?" 'E pulls
+the loaf out of 'is pocket. "On the ground," 'e says; "dirty," 'e says.
+"Do for my birds! Ha! ha!" like that. "Oh!" I says, "indeed! Now I
+know," I says. I kept my 'ead, but I thinks: "That's a bit too
+light-'earted. You owes me one pound, eight and tuppence; I've whistled
+for it gettin' on for two years, but you ain't content with that, it
+seems! Very well," I thinks; "we'll see. An' I don't give a darn whether
+you're a parson or not!" I charge 'im with takin' my bread.'
+
+Passing a dirty handkerchief over his white face and huge gingery
+moustache, the baker was silent. Suddenly from the dock the rector
+called out: 'Bit of dirty bread--feed my birds. Ha, ha!'
+
+There was a deathly little silence. Then the baker said slowly:
+
+'What's more, I say he ate it 'imself. I call two witnesses to that.'
+
+The Chairman, passing his hand over his hard, alert face, that of a
+master of hounds, asked:
+
+'Did you see any dirt on the loaf? Be careful!'
+
+The baker answered stolidly:
+
+'Not a speck.'
+
+Dr. Becket, a slight man with a short grey beard, and eyes restive from
+having to notice painful things, spoke.
+
+'Had your horse moved?'
+
+''E never moves.'
+
+'Ha, ha!' came the rector's laugh.
+
+The Chairman said sharply:
+
+'Well, stand down; call the next witness.--Charles Stodder, carpenter.
+Very well! Go on, and tell us what you know.'
+
+But before he could speak the rector called out in a loud voice:
+'Chapel!'
+
+'Hsssh! Sir!' But through the body of the court had passed a murmur, of
+challenge, as it were, from one aisle to the other.
+
+The witness, a square man with a red face, grey hair, whiskers, and
+moustache, and lively excitable dark eyes, watering with anxiety, spoke
+in a fast soft voice:
+
+'Tuesday afternoon, your Worships, it might be about four o'clock, I was
+passin' up the village, an' I saw the rector at his gate, with a loaf in
+'is 'and.'
+
+'Show us how.'
+
+The witness held his black hat to his side, with the rounded top
+outwards.
+
+'Was the loaf clean or dirty?'
+
+Sweetening his little eyes, the witness answered:
+
+'I should say 'twas clean.'
+
+'Lie!'
+
+The Chairman said sternly:
+
+'You mustn't interrupt, sir.--You didn't see the bottom of the loaf?'
+
+The witness's little eyes snapped.
+
+'Not eggzactly.'
+
+'Did the rector speak to you?'
+
+The witness smiled. 'The rector wouldn' never stop me if I was passin'.
+I collects the rates.'
+
+The rector's laugh, so like a desolate dog's bark, killed the bubble of
+gaiety rising in the court; and again that deathly little silence
+followed.
+
+Then the Chairman said:
+
+'Do you want to ask him anything?'
+
+The rector turned. 'Why d' you tell lies?'
+
+The witness screwing up his eyes, said excitedly:
+
+'What lies 'ave I told, please?'
+
+'You said the loaf was clean.'
+
+'So 'twas clean, so far as I see.'
+
+'Come to Church, and you won't tell lies.'
+
+'Reckon I can learn truth faster in Chapel.'
+
+The Chairman rapped his desk.
+
+'That'll do, that'll do! Stand down! Next witness.--Emily Bleaker. Yes?
+What are you? Cook at the rectory? Very well. What do you know about the
+affair of this loaf last Tuesday afternoon?'
+
+The witness, a broad-faced, brown-eyed girl, answered stolidly:
+'Nothin', zurr.'
+
+'Ha, ha!'
+
+'Hssh! Did you see the loaf?'
+
+'Noa.'
+
+'What are you here for, then?'
+
+'Master asked for a plate and a knaife. He an' old missus ate et for
+dinner. I see the plate after; there wasn't on'y crumbs on et.'
+
+'If you never saw the loaf, how do you know they ate it?'
+
+'Because ther' warn't nothin' else in the 'ouse.'
+
+The rector's voice barked out:
+
+'Quite right!'
+
+The Chairman looked at him fixedly.
+
+'Do you want to ask her anything?'
+
+The rector nodded.
+
+'You been paid your wages?'
+
+'Noa, I 'asn't.'
+
+'D'you know why?'
+
+'Noa.'
+
+'Very sorry--no money to pay you. That's all.'
+
+This closed the prosecutor's case; and there followed a pause, during
+which the Bench consulted together, and the rector eyed the
+congregation, nodding to one here and there. Then the Chairman, turning
+to him, said:
+
+'Now, sir, do you call any witnesses?'
+
+'Yes. My bell-ringer. He's a good man. You can believe him.'
+
+The bell-ringer, Samuel Bevis, who took his place in the witness-box,
+was a kind of elderly Bacchus, with permanently trembling hands. He
+deposed as follows:
+
+'When I passed rector Tuesday arternoon, he calls after me: "See this!"
+'e says, and up 'e held it. "Bit o' dirrty bread," 'e says; "do for my
+burrds." Then on he goes walkin'.'
+
+'Did you see whether the loaf was dirty?'
+
+'Yaas, I think 'twas dirrty.'
+
+'Don't _think_! Do you _know_?'
+
+'Yaas; 'twas dirrty.'
+
+'Which side?'
+
+'Which saide? I think 'twas dirrty on the bottom.'
+
+'Are you sure?'
+
+'Yaas; 'twas dirrty on the bottom, for zartain.'
+
+'Very well. Stand down. Now, sir, will you give us your version of this
+matter?'
+
+The rector, pointing at the prosecutor and the left-hand aisle, jerked
+out the words:
+
+'All Chapel--want to see me down.'
+
+The Chairman said stonily:
+
+'Never mind that. Come to the facts, please.'
+
+'Certainly! Out for a walk--passed the baker's cart--saw a loaf fallen
+in the mud--picked it up--do for my birds.'
+
+'What birds?'
+
+'Magpie and two starlings; quite free--never shut the cage-door; well
+fed.'
+
+'The baker charges you with taking it from his cart.'
+
+'Lie! Underneath the cart in a puddle.'
+
+'You heard what your cook said about your eating it. Did you?'
+
+'Yes, birds couldn't eat all--nothing in the house--Mother and
+I--hungry.'
+
+'Hungry?'
+
+'No money. Hard up--very! Often hungry. Ha, ha!'
+
+Again through the court that queer rustle passed. The three magistrates
+gazed at the accused. Then 'the Honble' Calmady said:
+
+'You say you found the loaf under the cart. Didn't it occur to you to
+put it back? You could see it had fallen. How else could it have come
+there?'
+
+The rector's burning eyes seemed to melt.
+
+'From the sky. Manna.' Staring round the court, he added: 'Hungry--God's
+elect--to the manna born!' And, throwing back his head, he laughed. It
+was the only sound in a silence as of the grave.
+
+The magistrates spoke together in low tones. The rector stood
+motionless, gazing at them fixedly. The people in the court sat as if at
+a play. Then the Chairman said:
+
+'Case dismissed.'
+
+'Thank you.'
+
+Jerking out that short thanksgiving, the rector descended from the dock,
+and passed down the centre aisle, followed by every eye.
+
+
+III
+
+From the Petty Sessions court the congregation wended its way back to
+Trover, by the muddy lane, 'Church' and 'Chapel,' arguing the case. To
+dim the triumph of the 'Church' the fact remained that the baker had
+lost his loaf and had not been compensated. The loaf was worth money; no
+money had passed. It was hard to be victorious and yet reduced to
+silence and dark looks at girding adversaries. The nearer they came to
+home, the more angry with 'Chapel' did they grow. Then the bell-ringer
+had his inspiration. Assembling his three assistants, he hurried to the
+belfry, and in two minutes the little old tower was belching forth the
+merriest and maddest peal those bells had ever furnished. Out it swung
+in the still air of the grey winter day, away to the very sea.
+
+A stranger, issuing from the inn, hearing that triumphant sound, and
+seeing so many black-clothed people about, said to his driver:
+
+'What is it--a wedding?'
+
+'No, zurr, they say 'tis for the rector, like; he've a just been
+acquitted for larceny.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the Tuesday following, the rector's ravaged face and red-grey hair
+appeared in Mrs. Gloyn's doorway, and his voice, creaking like a saw,
+said:
+
+'Can you let me have a pound of butter? Pay you soon.'
+
+What else could he do? Not even to God's elect does the sky always send
+down manna.
+
+1916.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A STRANGE THING
+
+
+Not very long ago, during a sojourn in a part of the West country never
+yet visited by me, I went out one fine but rather cold March morning for
+a long ramble. I was in one of those disillusioned moods that come to
+writers, bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of confidence, a prey to that
+recurrent despair, the struggle with which makes the profession of the
+pen--as a friend once said to me--"a manly one." "Yes"--I was thinking,
+for all that the air was so brisk, and the sun so bright--"nothing comes
+to me nowadays, no flashes of light, none of those suddenly shaped
+visions that bring cheer and warmth to a poor devil's heart, and set his
+brain and pen to driving on. A bad, bad business!" And my eyes,
+wandering over the dip and rise, the woods, the moor, the rocks of that
+fine countryside, took in the loveliness thereof with the profound
+discontent of one who, seeing beauty, feels that he cannot render it.
+The high lane-banks had just been pollarded, one could see right down
+over the fields and gorse and bare woods tinged with that rosy brown of
+beech and birch twigs, and the dusty saffron of the larches. And
+suddenly my glance was arrested by something vivid, a sort of black and
+white excitement in the air. "Aha!" I thought, "a magpie. Two! Three!
+Good! Is it an omen?" The birds had risen at the bottom of a field,
+their twining, fluttering voyage--most decorative of all bird
+flights--was soon lost in the wood beyond, but something it had left
+behind in my heart; I felt more hopeful, less inclined to think about
+the failure of my spirit, better able to give myself up to this new
+country I was passing through. Over the next rise in the very winding
+lane I heard the sound of brisk church bells, and not three hundred
+yards beyond came to a village green, where knots of men dressed in the
+dark clothes, light ties, and bowler hats of village festivity, and of
+women smartened up beyond belief, were gathered, chattering, round the
+yard of an old, grey, square-towered church.
+
+"What's going on?" I thought. "It's not Sunday, not the birthday of a
+Potentate, and surely they don't keep Saint days in this manner. It must
+be a wedding. Yes--there's a favour! Let's go in and see!" And, passing
+the expectant groups, I entered the church and made my way up the aisle.
+There was already a fair sprinkling of folk all turned round towards
+the door, and the usual licensed buzz and whisper of a wedding
+congregation. The church, as seems usual in remote parishes, had been
+built all those centuries ago to hold a population in accordance with
+the expectations of its tenet, "Be fruitful and multiply." But the whole
+population could have been seated in a quarter of its space. It was
+lofty and unwarmed save by excitement, and the smell of bear's-grease.
+There was certainly more animation than I had ever seen or savoured in a
+truly rural district.
+
+The bells which had been ringing with a sort of languid joviality, fell
+now into the hurried crashing which marks the approach of a bride, and
+the people I had passed outside came thronging in. I perceived a young
+man--little more than a boy, who by his semi-detachment, the fumbling of
+his gloved hands, and the sheepishness of the smile on his good-looking,
+open face, was obviously the bridegroom. I liked the looks of him--a cut
+above the usual village bumpkin--something free and kind about his face.
+But no one was paying him the least attention. It was for the bride they
+were waiting; and I myself began to be excited. What would this young
+thing be like? Just the ordinary village maiden with tight cheeks, and
+dress; coarse veil, high colour, and eyes like a rabbit's; or
+something--something like that little Welsh girl on the hills whom I
+once passed and whose peer I have never since seen? Bending forward, I
+accosted an apple-faced woman in the next pew. "Can you tell me who the
+bride is?"
+
+Regarding me with the grey, round, defensive glance that one bestows on
+strangers, she replied:
+
+"Aw, don't 'ee know? 'Tes Gwenny Mara--prettiest, brightest maid in
+these parts." And, jerking her thumb towards the neglected bridegroom,
+she added: "He's a lucky young chap. She'm a sunny maid, for sure, and a
+gude maid tu."
+
+Somehow the description did not reassure me, and I prepared for the
+worst.
+
+A bubble, a stir, a rustle!
+
+Like everyone else, I turned frankly round. She was coming up the aisle
+on the arm of a hard-faced, rather gipsy-looking man, dressed in a
+farmer's very best.
+
+I can only tell you that to see her coming down the centre of that grey
+church amongst all those dark-clothed people, was like watching the
+dance of a sunbeam. Never had I seen a face so happy, sweet, and
+radiant. Smiling, eager, just lost enough to her surroundings, her hair
+unconquerably golden through the coarse veil; her dancing eyes clear
+and dark as a peat pool--she was the prettiest sight. One could only
+think of a young apple-tree with the spring sun on its blossom. She had
+that kind of infectious brightness which comes from very simple
+goodness. It was quite a relief to have taken a fancy to the young man's
+face, and to feel that she was passing into good hands.
+
+The only flowers in the church were early daffodils, but those first
+children of the sun were somehow extraordinarily appropriate to the
+wedding of this girl. When she came out she was pelted with them, and
+with that miserable confetti without which not even the simplest souls
+can pass to bliss, it seems. There are things in life which make one
+feel good--sunshine, most music, all flowers, many children, some
+animals, clouds, mountains, bird-songs, blue sky, dancing, and here and
+there a young girl's face. And I had the feeling that all of us there
+felt good for the mere seeing of her.
+
+When she had driven away, I found myself beside a lame old man, with
+whiskers, and delightful eyes, who continued to smile after the carriage
+had quite vanished. Noticing, perhaps, that I, too, was smiling, he
+said: "'Tes a funny thing, tu, when a maid like that gets married--makes
+you go all of a tremble--so it du." And to my nod he added: "Brave bit
+o' sunshine--we'll miss her hereabout; not a doubt of it. We ain't got
+another one like that."
+
+"Was that her father?" I asked, for the want of something to say. With a
+sharpish look at my face, he shook his head.
+
+"No, she an't got no parents, Mr. Mara bein' her uncle, as you may say.
+No, she an't got no parents," he repeated, and there was something ill
+at ease, yet juicy, about his voice, as though he knew things that he
+would not tell.
+
+Since there was nothing more to wait for, I went up to the little inn,
+and ordered bread and cheese. The male congregation was whetting its
+whistle noisily within, but, as a stranger, I had the verandah to
+myself, and, finishing my simple lunch in the March sunlight, I paid and
+started on. Taking at random one of the three lanes that debouched from
+the bottom of the green, I meandered on between high banks, happy in the
+consciousness of not knowing at all where it would lead me--that
+essential of a country ramble. Except one cottage in a bottom and one
+farm on a rise, I passed nothing, nobody. The spring was late in these
+parts, the buds had hardly formed as yet on any trees, and now and then
+between the bursts of sunlight a few fine specks of snow would come
+drifting past me on the wind. Close to a group of pines at a high
+corner, the lane dipped sharply down to a long farm-house standing back
+in its yard, where three carts were drawn up, and an empty waggonette
+with its shafts in the air. And suddenly, by some broken daffodils on
+the seats and confetti on the ground, I perceived that I had stumbled on
+the bride's home, where the wedding feast was, no doubt, in progress.
+
+Gratifying but by no means satisfying my curiosity by gazing at the
+lichened stone and thatch of the old house, at the pigeons, pigs, and
+hens at large between it and the barns, I passed on down the lane, which
+turned up steeply to the right beside a little stream. To my left was a
+long larch wood, to my right rough fields with many trees. The lane
+finished at a gate below the steep moorside crowned by a rocky tor. I
+stood there leaning on the top bar, debating whether I should ascend or
+no. The bracken had, most of it, been cut in the autumn, and not a
+hundred yards away the furze was being swaled; the little blood-red
+flames and the blue smoke, the yellow blossoms of the gorse, the
+sunlight, and some flecks of drifting snow were mingled in an amazing
+tangle of colour.
+
+I had made up my mind to ascend the tor, and was pushing through the
+gate, when suddenly I saw a woman sitting on a stone under the wall
+bordering the larch wood. She was holding her head in her hands, rocking
+her body to and fro; and her eyes were evidently shut, for she had not
+noticed me. She wore a blue serge dress; her hat reposed beside her, and
+her dark hair was straggling about her face. That face, all blowsy and
+flushed, was at once wild and stupefied. A face which has been
+beautiful, coarsened and swollen by life and strong emotion, is a
+pitiful enough sight. Her dress, hat, and the way her hair had been done
+were redolent of the town, and of that unnameable something which clings
+to women whose business it is to attract men. And yet there was a
+gipsyish look about her, as though she had not always been of the town.
+
+The sight of a woman's unrestrained distress in the very heart of
+untouched nature is so rare that one must be peculiar to remain unmoved.
+And there I stood, not knowing what on earth to do. She went on rocking
+herself to and fro, her stays creaking, and a faint moaning sound coming
+from her lips; and suddenly she drooped over her lap, her hands fallen
+to her sides, as though she had gone into a kind of coma. How go on and
+leave her thus; yet how intrude on what did not seem to me mere physical
+suffering?
+
+In that quandary I stood and watched. This corner was quite sheltered
+from the wind, the sun almost hot, and the breath of the swaling reached
+one in the momentary calms. For three full minutes she had not moved a
+finger; till, beginning to think she had really fainted, I went up to
+her. From her drooped body came a scent of heat, and of stale violet
+powder, and I could see, though the east wind had outraddled them,
+traces of rouge on her cheeks and lips; their surface had a sort of
+swollen defiance, but underneath, as it were, a wasted look. Her
+breathing sounded faint and broken.
+
+Mustering courage, I touched her on the arm. She raised her head and
+looked up. Her eyes were the best things she had left; they must have
+once been very beautiful. Bloodshot now from the wind, their wild,
+stupefied look passed after a moment into the peculiar, half-bold,
+half-furtive stare of women of a certain sort. She did not speak, and in
+my embarrassment I drew out the flask of port I always take with me on
+my rambles, and stammered:
+
+"I beg your pardon--are you feeling faint? Would you care--?" And,
+unscrewing the top, I held out the flask. She stared at it a moment
+blankly, then taking it, said:
+
+"That's kind of you. I feel to want it, tu." And, putting it to her
+lips, she drank, tilting back her head. Perhaps it was the tell-tale
+softness of her u's, perhaps the naturally strong lines of her figure
+thus bent back, but somehow the plumage of the town bird seemed to drop
+off her suddenly.
+
+She handed back the flask, as empty as it had ever been, and said, with
+a hard smile:
+
+"I dare say you thought me funny sittin' 'ere like that."
+
+"I thought you were ill."
+
+She laughed without the faintest mirth, and muttered:
+
+"I did go on, didn't I?" Then, almost fiercely, added: "I got some
+reason, too. Seein' the old place again after all these years." Her dark
+eyes, which the wine seemed to have cleared and boldened, swept me up
+and down, taking me in, making sure perhaps whether or no she had ever
+seen me, and what sort of a brute I might be. Then she said: "I was born
+here. Are you from these parts?" I shook my head--"No, from the other
+side of the county."
+
+She laughed. Then, after a moment's silence, said abruptly:
+
+"I been to a weddin'--first I've seen since I was a girl."
+
+Some instinct kept me silent.
+
+"My own daughter's weddin', but nobody didn't know me--not likely."
+
+I had dropped down under the shelter of the wall on to a stone opposite,
+and at those words looked at her with interest indeed. She--this
+coarsened, wasted, suspiciously scented woman of the town--the mother of
+that sweet, sunny child I had just seen married. And again instinctively
+silent about my own presence at the wedding, I murmured:
+
+"I thought I saw some confetti in that farmyard as I came up the lane."
+
+She laughed again.
+
+"Confetti--that's the little pink and white and blue things--plenty o'
+that," and she added fiercely: "My own brother didn' know me--let alone
+my girl. How should she?--I haven't seen her since she was a baby--she
+was a laughin' little thing," and she gazed past me with that look in
+the eyes as of people who are staring back into the bygone. "I guess we
+was laughin' when we got her. 'Twas just here--summer-time. I 'ad the
+moon in my blood that night, right enough." Then, turning her eyes on my
+face, she added: "That's what a girl _will_ 'ave, you know, once in a
+while, and like as not it'll du for her. Only thirty-five now, I am, an'
+pretty nigh the end o' my tether. What can you expect?--I'm a gay woman.
+Did for me right enough. Her father's dead, tu."
+
+"Do you mean," I said, "because of your child?"
+
+She nodded. "I suppose you can say that. They made me bring an order
+against him. He wouldn't pay up, so he went and enlisted, an' in tu
+years 'e was dead in the Boer War--so it killed him right enough. But
+there she is, a sweet sprig if ever there was one. That's a strange
+thing, isn't it?" And she stared straight before her in a sudden
+silence. Nor could _I_ find anything to say, slowly taking in the
+strangeness of this thing. That girl, so like a sunbeam, of whom the
+people talked as though she were a blessing in their lives--her coming
+into life to have been the ruin of the two who gave her being!
+
+The woman went on dully: "Funny how I knew she was goin' to be
+married--'twas a farmer told me--comes to me regular when he goes to
+Exeter market. I always knew he came from near my old home. 'There's a
+weddin' on Tuesday,' 'e says, 'I'd like to be the bridegroom at.
+Prettiest, sunniest maid you ever saw'; an' he told me where she come
+from, so I knew. He found me a bit funny that afternoon. But he don't
+know who I am, though he used to go to school with me; I'd never tell,
+not for worlds." She shook her head vehemently. "I don't know why I told
+you; I'm not meself to-day, and that's a fact." At her half-suspicious,
+half-appealing look, I said quickly:
+
+"I don't know a soul about here. It's all right."
+
+She sighed. "It was kind of you; and I feel to want to talk sometimes.
+Well, after he was gone, I said to myself: 'I'll take a holiday and go
+an' see my daughter married.'" She laughed--"I never had no pink and
+white and blue little things myself. That was all done up for me that
+night I had the moon in me blood. Ah! my father was a proper hard man.
+'Twas bad enough before I had my baby; but after, when I couldn't get
+the father to marry me, an' he cut an' run, proper life they led me, him
+and stepmother. Cry! Didn' I cry--I was a soft-hearted thing--never went
+to sleep with me eyes dry--never. 'Tis a cruel thing to make a young
+girl cry."
+
+I said quietly: "Did you run away, then?"
+
+She nodded. "Bravest thing I ever did. Nearly broke my 'eart to leave my
+baby; but 'twas that or drownin' myself. I was soft then. I went off
+with a young fellow--bookmaker that used to come over to the sports
+meetin', wild about me--but he never married me"--again she uttered her
+hard laugh--"knew a thing worth tu o' that." Lifting her hand towards
+the burning furze, she added: "I used to come up here an' help 'em
+light that when I was a little girl." And suddenly she began to cry. It
+was not so painful and alarming as her first distress, for it seemed
+natural now.
+
+At the side of the cart-track by the gate was an old boot thrown away,
+and it served me for something to keep my eyes engaged. The dilapidated
+black object among the stones and wild plants on that day of strange
+mixed beauty was as incongruous as this unhappy woman herself revisiting
+her youth. And there shot into my mind a vision of this spot as it might
+have been that summer night when she had "the moon in her blood"--queer
+phrase--and those two young creatures in the tall soft fern, in the
+warmth and the darkened loneliness, had yielded to the impulse in their
+blood. A brisk fluttering of snowflakes began falling from the sky still
+blue, drifting away over our heads towards the blood-red flames and
+smoke. They powdered the woman's hair and shoulders, and with a sob and
+a laugh she held up her hand and began catching them as a child might.
+
+"'Tis a funny day for my girl's weddin'," she said. Then with a sort of
+fierceness added: "She'll never know her mother--she's in luck there,
+tu!" And, grabbing her feathered hat from the ground, she got up. "I
+must be gettin' back for my train, else I'll be late for an
+appointment."
+
+When she had put her hat on, rubbed her face, dusted and smoothed her
+dress, she stood looking at the burning furze. Restored to her town
+plumage, to her wonted bravado, she was more than ever like that old
+discarded boot, incongruous.
+
+"I'm a fool ever to have come," she said; "only upset me--and you don't
+want no more upsettin' than you get, that's certain. Good-bye, and thank
+you for the drink--it lusened my tongue praaper, didn't it?" She gave me
+a look--not as a professional--but a human, puzzled look. "I told you my
+baby was a laughin' little thing. I'm glad she's still like that. I'm
+glad I've seen her." Her lips quivered for a second; then, with a faked
+jauntiness, she nodded. "So long!" and passed through the gate down into
+the lane.
+
+I sat there in the snow and sunlight some minutes after she was gone.
+Then, getting up, I went and stood by the burning furze. The blowing
+flames and the blue smoke were alive and beautiful; but behind them they
+were leaving blackened skeleton twigs.
+
+"Yes," I thought, "but in a week or two the little green grass-shoots
+will be pushing up underneath into the sun. So the world goes! Out of
+destruction! It's a strange thing!"
+
+1916.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+TWO LOOKS
+
+
+The old Director of the 'Yew Trees' Cemetery walked slowly across from
+his house, to see that all was ready.
+
+He had seen pass into the square of earth committed to his charge so
+many to whom he had been in the habit of nodding, so many whose faces
+even he had not known. To him it was the everyday event; yet this
+funeral, one more in the countless tale, disturbed him--a sharp reminder
+of the passage of time.
+
+For twenty years had gone by since the death of Septimus Godwin, the
+cynical, romantic doctor who had been his greatest friend; by whose
+cleverness all had sworn, of whose powers of fascination all had
+gossiped! And now they were burying his son!
+
+He had not seen the widow since, for she had left the town at once; but
+he recollected her distinctly, a tall, dark woman with bright brown
+eyes, much younger than her husband, and only married to him eighteen
+months before he died. He remembered her slim figure standing by the
+grave, at that long-past funeral, and the look on her face which had
+puzzled him so terribly--a look of--a most peculiar look!
+
+He thought of it even now, walking along the narrow path towards his old
+friend's grave--the handsomest in the cemetery, commanding from the
+topmost point the whitened slope and river that lay beyond. He came to
+its little private garden. Spring flowers were blossoming; the railings
+had been freshly painted; and by the door of the grave wreaths awaited
+the new arrival. All was in order.
+
+The old Director opened the mausoleum with his key. Below, seen through
+a thick glass floor, lay the shining coffin of the father; beneath, on
+the lower tier, would rest the coffin of the son.
+
+A gentle voice, close behind him, said:
+
+"Can you tell me, sir, what they are doing to my old doctor's grave?"
+
+The old Director turned, and saw before him a lady well past middle age.
+He did not know her face, but it was pleasant, with faded rose-leaf
+cheeks, and silvered hair under a shady hat.
+
+"Madam, there is a funeral here this afternoon."
+
+"Ah! Can it be his wife?"
+
+"Madam, his son; a young man of only twenty."
+
+"His son! At what time did you say?"
+
+"At two o'clock."
+
+"Thank you; you are very kind."
+
+With uplifted hat, he watched her walk away. It worried him to see a
+face he did not know.
+
+All went off beautifully; but, dining that same evening with his friend,
+a certain doctor, the old Director asked:
+
+"Did you see a lady with grey hair hovering about this afternoon?"
+
+The doctor, a tall man, with a beard still yellow, drew his guest's
+chair nearer to the fire.
+
+"I did."
+
+"Did you remark her face? A very odd expression--a sort of--what shall I
+call it?--Very odd indeed! Who is she? I saw her at the grave this
+morning."
+
+The doctor shook his head.
+
+"Not so very odd, I think."
+
+"Come! What do you mean by that?"
+
+The doctor hesitated. Then, taking the decanter, he filled his old
+friend's glass, and answered:
+
+"Well, sir, you were Godwin's greatest chum--I will tell you, if you
+like, the story of his death. You were away at the time, if you
+remember."
+
+"It is safe with me," said the old Director.
+
+"Septimus Godwin," began the doctor slowly, "died on a Thursday about
+three o'clock, and I was only called in to see him at two. I found him
+far gone, but conscious now and then. It was a case of--but you know the
+details, so I needn't go into that. His wife was in the room, and on the
+bed at his feet lay his pet dog--a terrier; you may recollect, perhaps,
+he had a special breed. I hadn't been there ten minutes, when a maid
+came in and whispered something to her mistress. Mrs. Godwin answered
+angrily, 'See him? Go down and say she ought to know better than to come
+here at such a time!' The maid went, but soon came back. Could the lady
+see Mrs. Godwin for just a moment? Mrs. Godwin answered that she could
+not leave her husband. The maid looked frightened, and went away again.
+She came back for the third time. The lady had said she must see Dr.
+Godwin; it was a matter of life and death! 'Death--indeed!' exclaimed
+Mrs. Godwin: 'Shameful! Go down and tell her, if she doesn't go
+immediately, I will send for the police!'
+
+"The poor maid looked at me. I offered to go down and see the visitor
+myself. I found her in the dining room, and knew her at once. Never mind
+her name, but she belongs to a county family not a hundred miles from
+here. A beautiful woman she was then; but her face that day was quite
+distorted.
+
+"'For God's sake, Doctor,' she said, 'is there any hope?'
+
+"I was obliged to tell her there was none.
+
+"'Then I must see him,' she said.
+
+"I begged her to consider what she was asking. But she held me out a
+signet ring. Just like Godwin--wasn't it--that sort of Byronism, eh?
+
+"'He sent me this,' she said, 'an hour ago. It was agreed between us
+that if ever he sent that, I must come. If it were only myself I could
+bear it--a woman can bear anything; but he'll die thinking I wouldn't
+come, thinking I didn't care--and I would give my life for him this
+minute!'
+
+"Now, a dying man's request is sacred. I told her she should see him. I
+made her follow me upstairs, and wait outside his room. I promised to
+let her know if he recovered consciousness. I have never been thanked
+like that, before or since.
+
+"I went back into the bedroom. He was still unconscious, and the terrier
+whining. In the next room a child was crying--the very same young man we
+buried to-day. Mrs. Godwin was still standing by the bed.
+
+"'Have you sent her away?'
+
+"I had to say that Godwin really wished to see her. At that she broke
+out:
+
+"'I won't have her here--the wretch!'
+
+"I begged her to control herself, and remember that her husband was a
+dying man.
+
+"'But I'm his wife,' she said, and flew out of the room."
+
+The doctor paused, staring at the fire. He shrugged his shoulders, and
+went on: "I'd have stopped her fury if I could! A dying man is not the
+same as the live animal, that he must needs be wrangled over! And
+suffering's sacred, even to us doctors. I could hear their voices
+outside. Heaven knows what they said to each other. And there lay Godwin
+with his white face and his black hair--deathly still--fine-looking
+fellow he always was! Then I saw that he was coming to! The women had
+begun again outside--first, the wife, sharp and scornful; then the
+other, hushed and slow. I saw Godwin lift his finger and point it at the
+door. I went out, and said to the woman, 'Dr. Godwin wishes to see you;
+please control yourself.'
+
+"We went back into the room. The wife followed. But Godwin had lost
+consciousness again. They sat down, those two, and hid their faces. I
+can see them now, one on each side of the bed, their eyes covered with
+their hands, each with her claim on him, all murdered by the other's
+presence; each with her torn love. H'm! What they must have suffered,
+then! And all the time the child crying--the child of one of them, that
+might have been the other's!"
+
+The doctor was silent, and the old Director turned towards him his
+white-bearded, ruddy face, with a look as if he were groping in the
+dark.
+
+"Just then, I remember," the doctor went on suddenly, "the bells of St.
+Jude's close by began to peal out for the finish of a wedding. That
+brought Godwin back to life. He just looked from one woman to the other
+with a queer, miserable sort of smile, enough to make your heart break.
+And they both looked at him. The face of the wife--poor thing!--was as
+bitter hard as a cut stone, but she sat there, without ever stirring a
+finger. As for the other woman--I couldn't look at her. He beckoned to
+me; but I couldn't catch his words, the bells drowned them. A minute
+later he was dead.
+
+"Life's a funny thing! You wake in the morning with your foot firm on
+the ladder--One touch, and down you go! You snuff out like a candle. And
+it's lucky when your flame goes out, if only one woman's flame goes out
+too.
+
+"Neither of those women cried. The wife stayed there by the bed. I got
+the other one away to her carriage, down the street.--And so she was
+there to-day! That explains, I think, the look you saw."
+
+The doctor ceased, and in the silence the old Director nodded. Yes! That
+explained the look he had seen on the face of that unknown woman, the
+deep, unseizable, weird look. That explained the look he had seen on the
+wife's face at the funeral twenty years ago!
+
+And peering wistfully, he said:
+
+"They looked--they looked--almost triumphant!"
+
+Then, slowly, he rubbed his hands over his knees, with the secret
+craving of the old for warmth.
+
+1914.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FAIRYLAND
+
+
+It was about three o'clock, this November afternoon, when I rode down
+into "Fairyland," as it is called about here. The birch-trees there are
+more beautiful than any in the world; and when the clouds are streaming
+over in rain-grey, and the sky soaring above in higher blue, just-seen,
+those gold and silver creatures have such magical loveliness as makes
+the hearts of mortals ache. The fairies, who have been driven off the
+moor, alone watch them with equanimity, if they be not indeed the
+birch-trees themselves--especially those little very golden ones which
+have strayed out into the heather, on the far side of the glen.
+"Revenge!" the fairies cried when a century ago those, whom they do not
+exist just to amuse, made the new road over the moor, cutting right
+through the home of twilight, that wood above the "Falls," where till
+then they had always enjoyed inviolable enchantment. They trooped
+forthwith in their multitudinous secrecy down into the glen, to swarm
+about the old road. In half a century or so they had it almost
+abandoned, save for occasional horsemen and harmless persons seeking
+beauty, for whom the fairies have never had much feeling of aversion.
+And now, after a hundred years, it is all theirs; the ground so golden
+with leaves and bracken that the old track is nothing but a vague
+hardness beneath a horse's feet, nothing but a runnel for the rains to
+gather in. There is everywhere that glen scent of mouldering leaves, so
+sweet when the wind comes down and stirs it, and the sun frees and
+livens it. Not very many birds, perhaps because hawks are fond of
+hovering here. This was once the only road up to the village, the only
+communication with all that lies to the south and east! Now the fairies
+have got it indeed, they have witched to skeletons all the little
+bridges across the glen stream; they have mossed and thinned the gates
+to wraiths. With their dapple-gold revelry in sunlight, and their dance
+of pied beauty under the moon, they have made all their own.
+
+I have ridden many times down into this glen; and slowly up among the
+beeches and oaks into the lanes again, hoping and believing that, some
+day, I should see a fairy take shape to my thick mortal vision; and
+to-day, at last, I have seen.
+
+I heard it first about half-way up the wood, a silvery voice piping out
+very true what seemed like mortal words, not quite to be caught.
+Resolved not to miss it this time, I got off quietly and tied my mare
+to a tree. Then, tiptoeing in the damp leaves which did not rustle, I
+stole up till I caught sight of it, from behind an oak.
+
+It was sitting in yellow bracken as high as its head, under a birch-tree
+that had a few branches still gold-feathered. It seemed to be clothed in
+blue, and to be swaying as it sang. There was something in its arms, as
+it might be a creature being nursed. Cautiously I slipped from that tree
+to the next, till I could see its face, just like a child's,
+fascinating, very, very delicate, the little open mouth poised and
+shaped ever so neatly to the words it was singing; the eyes wide apart
+and ever so wide open, fixed on nothing mortal. The song, and the little
+body, and the spirit in the eyes, all seemed to sway--sway together,
+like a soft wind that goes sough-sough, swinging, in the tops of the
+ferns. And now it stretched out one arm, and now the other, beckoning in
+to it those to which it was singing; so that one seemed to feel the
+invisible ones stealing up closer and closer.
+
+These were the words which came so silvery and slow through that little
+mouth: "Chil-dren, chil-dren! Hussh!"
+
+It seemed as if the very rabbits must come and sit-up there, the jays
+and pigeons settle above; everything in all the wood gather. Even one's
+own heart seemed to be drawn in by those beckoning arms, and the slow
+enchantment of that tinkling voice, and the look in those eyes, which,
+lost in the unknown, were seeing no mortal glen, but only that mazed
+wood, where friendly wild things come, who have no sound to their
+padding, no whirr to the movement of their wings; whose gay whisperings
+have no noise, whose eager shapes no colour--the fairy dream-wood of the
+unimaginable.
+
+"Chil-dren, chil-dren! Hus-s-h!"
+
+For just a moment I could see that spirit company, ghosts of the ferns
+and leaves, of butterflies and bees and birds, and four-footed things
+innumerable, ghosts of the wind, the sun-beams, and the rain-drops, and
+tiny flickering ghosts of moon-rays. For just a moment I saw what the
+fairy's eyes were seeing, without knowing what they saw.
+
+And then my mare trod on a dead branch, and all vanished. My fairy was
+gone; and there was only little "Connemara," as we called her, nursing
+her doll, and smiling up at me from the fern, where she had come to
+practise her new school-song.
+
+1911.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE NIGHTMARE CHILD
+
+
+I set down here not precisely the words of my friend, the country
+doctor, but the spirit of them:
+
+"You know there are certain creatures in this world whom one simply dare
+not take notice of, however sorry one may be for them. That has often
+been borne in on me. I realised it, I think, before I met that little
+girl. I used to attend her mother for varicose veins--one of those women
+who really ought not to have children, since they haven't the very least
+notion of how to bring them up. The wife of a Sussex agricultural
+labourer called Alliner, she was a stout person, with most peculiar
+prominent epileptic eyes, such eyes as one usually associates with men
+of letters or criminals. And yet there was nothing in her. She was just
+a lazy, slatternly, easy-going body, rather given to drink. Her husband
+was a thin, dirty, light-hearted fellow, who did his work and offended
+nobody. Her eldest daughter, a pretty and capable girl, was wild, got
+into various kinds of trouble, and had to migrate, leaving two
+illegitimate children behind her with their grandparents. The younger
+girl, the child of this story, who was called Emmeline, of all
+names--pronounced Em'leen, of course--was just fifteen at the time of my
+visits to her mother. She had eyes like a hare's, a mouth which readily
+fell open, and brown locks caught back from her scared and knobby
+forehead. She was thin, and walked with her head poked a little forward,
+and she so manoeuvred her legs and long feet, of which one turned in
+rather and seemed trying to get in front of the other, that there was
+something clodhopperish in her gait. Once in a way you would see her in
+curl-papers, and then indeed she was plain, poor child! She seemed to
+have grown up without ever having had the least attention paid to her. I
+don't think she was ill-treated--she was simply not treated at all. At
+school they had been kind enough, but had regarded her as almost
+deficient. Seeing that her father was paid about fifteen shillings a
+week, that her mother had no conception of housekeeping, and that there
+were two babies to be fed, they were, of course, villainously poor, and
+Em'leen was always draggle-tailed and badly shod. One side of her
+too-short dress seemed ever to hang lower than the other, her stockings
+always had one hole at least, and her hat--such queer hats--would seem
+about to fly away. I have known her type in the upper classes pass
+muster as "eccentric" or "full of character." And even in Em'leen there
+was a sort of smothered natural comeliness, trying pathetically to push
+through, and never getting a chance. She always had a lost-dog air, and
+when her big hare's eyes clung on your face, it seemed as if she only
+wanted a sign to make her come trailing at your heels, looking up for a
+pat or a bit of biscuit.
+
+"She went to work, of course, the moment she left school. Her first
+place was in a small farm where they took lodgers, and her duties were
+to do everything, without, of course, knowing how to do anything. She
+had to leave because she used to take soap and hairpins, and food that
+was left over, and was once seen licking a dish. It was just about then
+that I attended her mother for those veins in her unwieldy legs, and the
+child was at home, waiting to secure some other fate. It was impossible
+not to look at that little creature kindly, and to speak to her now and
+then; she would not exactly light up, because her face was not made that
+way, but she would hang towards you as if you were a magnet, and you had
+at once the uncomfortable sensation that you might find her clinging,
+impossible to shake off. If one passed her in the village, too, or
+coming down from her blackberrying in the thickets on the Downs--their
+cottage lay just below the South Downs--one knew that she would be
+lingering along, looking back till you were out of sight. Somehow one
+hardly thought of her as a girl at all, she seemed so far from all human
+hearts, so wandering in a queer lost world of her own, and to imagine
+what she could be thinking was as impossible as it is with animals. Once
+I passed her and her mother dawdling slowly in a lane, then heard the
+dot-and-go-one footsteps pattering after me, and the childish voice,
+rather soft and timid, say behind my shoulder: "Would you please buy
+some blackberries, sir?" She was almost pretty at that moment, flushed
+and breathless at having actually spoken to me, but her eyes hanging on
+my face brought a sort of nightmare feeling at once of being unable to
+get rid of her.
+
+"Isn't it a cruel thing when you come to think of it, that there should
+be born into the world poor creatures--children, dogs, cats, horses--who
+want badly to love and be loved, and yet whom no one can quite put up
+with, much less feel affection for!
+
+"Well, what happened to her is what will always happen to such as those,
+one way or another, in a world where the callous abound; for, however
+unlovable a woman or girl, she has her use to a man, just as a dog or a
+horse has to a master who cares nothing for it.
+
+"Soon after I bought those blackberries I went out to France on military
+duty. I got my leave a year later, and went home. It was late September,
+very lovely weather, and I took a real holiday walking or lying about up
+on the Downs, and only coming down at sunset. On one of those days when
+you really enter heaven, so pure are the lines of the hills, so cool the
+blue, the green, the chalk-white colouring under the smile of the
+afternoon sun--I was returning down that same lane, when I came on
+Em'leen sitting in a gap of the bank, with her dishevelled hat beside
+her, and her chin sunk on her hands. My appearance seemed to drag her
+out of a heavy dream--her eyes awoke, became startled, rolled furtively;
+she scrambled up, dropped her little, old school curtsey, then all
+confused, faced the bank as if she were going to climb it. She was
+taller, her dress longer, her hair gathered up, and it was very clear
+what was soon going to happen to her. I walked on in a rage. At her
+age--barely sixteen even yet! I am a doctor, and accustomed to most
+things, but this particular crime against children of that helpless sort
+does make my blood boil. Nothing, not even passion to excuse it--who
+could feel passion for that poor child?--nothing but the cold, clumsy
+lust of some young ruffian. Yes, I walked on in a rage, and went
+straight to her mother's cottage. That wretched woman was incapable of
+moral indignation, or else the adventures of her elder daughter had
+exhausted her powers of expression. 'Yes,' she admitted, 'Em'leen had
+got herself into trouble too, but she would not tell, she wouldn't say
+nothin' against nobody. It was a bad business, surely, an' now there
+would be three o' them, an' Alliner was properly upset, that he was!'
+That was all there was to be had out of _her_. One felt that she knew or
+suspected more, but her fingers had been so burned over the elder girl
+that anything to her was better than a fuss.
+
+"I saw Alliner; he was a decent fellow, though dirty, distressed in his
+simple, shallow-pated way, and more obviously ignorant than his wife. I
+spoke to the schoolmistress, a shrewd and kindly married woman.
+
+"Poor Emmeline! Yes, she had noticed. It was very sad and wicked! She
+hinted, but would not do more than hint, at the son of the miller, but
+he was back again, fighting in France now, and, after all, her evidence
+amounted to no more than his reputation with girls. Besides, one is very
+careful what one says in a country village. I, however, was so angry
+that I should not have been careful if I could have got hold of
+anything at all definite.
+
+"I did not see the child again before my leave was up. The very next
+thing I heard of her, was in a newspaper--Emmeline Alliner, sixteen, had
+been committed for trial for causing the death of her illegitimate child
+by exposure. I was on the sick list in January, and went home to rest. I
+had not been there two days before I received a visit from a solicitor
+of our assize town, who came to ask me if I would give evidence at the
+girl's trial as to the nature of her home surroundings. I learned from
+him the details of the lugubrious business. It seems that she had
+slipped out one bitter afternoon in December, barely a fortnight after
+her confinement, carrying her baby. There was snow on the ground, and it
+was freezing hard, but the sun was bright, and it was that perhaps which
+tempted her. She must have gone up towards the Downs by the lane where I
+had twice met her; gone up, and stopped at the very gap in the bank
+where she had been sitting lost in that heavy dream when I saw her last.
+She appears to have subsided there in the snow, for there she was found
+by the postman just as it was getting dark, leaning over her knees as if
+stupefied, with her chin buried in her hands--and the baby stiff and
+dead in the snow beside her. When I told the lawyer how I had seen her
+there ten weeks before, and of the curious dazed state she had been in,
+he said at once: 'Ah! the exact spot. That's very important; it looks
+uncommonly as if it were there that she came by her misfortune. What do
+you think? It's almost evident that she'd lost sense of her
+surroundings, baby and all. I shall ask you to tell us about that at the
+trial. She's a most peculiar child; I can't get anything out of her. I
+keep asking her for the name of the man, or some indication of how it
+came about, but all she says is: "Nobody--nobody!" Another case of
+immaculate conception! Poor little creature, she's very pathetic, and
+that's her best chance. Who could condemn a child like that?'
+
+"And so indeed it turned out. I spared no feelings in my evidence. The
+mother and father were in court, and I hope Mrs. Alliner liked my
+diagnosis of her maternal qualities. My description of how Em'leen was
+sitting when I met her in September tallied so exactly with the
+postman's account of how he met her, that I could see the jury were
+impressed. And then there was the figure of the child herself, lonely
+there in the dock. The French have a word, _Hébétée_. Surely there never
+was a human object to which it applied better. She stood like a little
+tired pony, whose head hangs down, half-sleeping after exertion; and
+those hare eyes of hers were glued to the judge's face, for all the
+world as if she were worshipping him. It must have made him
+extraordinarily uncomfortable. He summed up very humanely, dwelling on
+the necessity of finding intention in her conduct towards the baby; and
+he used some good strong language against the unknown man. The jury
+found her not guilty, and she was discharged. The schoolmistress and I,
+anticipating this, had found her a refuge with some Sisters of Mercy,
+who ran a sort of home not far away, and to that we took her, without a
+'by your leave' to the mother.
+
+"When I came home the following summer, I found an opportunity of going
+to look her up. She was amazingly improved in face and dress, but she
+had attached herself to one of the Sisters--a broad, fine-looking
+woman--to such a pitch that she seemed hardly alive when out of her
+sight. The Sister spoke of it to me with real concern.
+
+"'I really don't know what to do with her,' she said; 'she seems
+incapable of anything unless I tell her; she only feels things through
+me. It's really quite trying, and sometimes very funny, poor little
+soul! but it's tragic for her. If I told her to jump out of her bedroom
+window, or lie down in that pond and drown, she'd do it without a
+moment's hesitation. She can't go through life like this; she must learn
+to stand on her own feet. We must try and get her a good place, where
+she can learn what responsibility means, and get a will of her own.'
+
+"I looked at the Sister, so broad, so capable, so handsome, and so
+puzzled, and I thought, 'Yes, I know exactly. She's on your nerves; and
+where in the world will you find a place for her where she won't become
+a sort of nightmare to some one, with her devotion, or else get it taken
+advantage of again?' And I urged them to keep her a little longer. They
+did; for when I went home for good, six months later, I found that she
+had only just gone into a place with an old lady-patient of mine, in a
+small villa on the outskirts of our village. She used to open the door
+to me when I called there on my rounds once a week. She retained
+vestiges of the neatness which had been grafted on her by the Sister,
+but her frock was already beginning to sag down on one side, and her
+hair to look ill-treated. The old lady spoke to her with a sort of
+indulgent impatience, and it was clear that the girl's devotion was not
+concentrated upon her. I caught myself wondering what would be its next
+object, never able to help the feeling that if I gave a sign it would be
+myself. You may be sure I gave no sign. What's the good? I hold the
+belief that people should not force themselves to human contacts or
+relationships which they cannot naturally and without irritation
+preserve. I've seen these heroic attempts come to grief so often; in
+fact, I don't think I've ever seen one succeed, not even between blood
+relations. In the long run they merely pervert and spoil the fibre of
+the attempter, without really benefiting the attemptee. Behind healthy
+relationships between human beings, or even between human beings and
+animals, there must be at least some rudimentary affinity. That's the
+tragedy of poor little souls like Em'leen. Where on earth can they find
+the affinity which makes life good? The very fact that they must worship
+is their destruction. It was a soldier--or so they said--who had brought
+her to her first grief; I had seen her adoring the judge at the trial,
+then the handsome uniformed Sister. And I, as the village doctor, was a
+sort of tin-pot deity in those parts, so I was very careful to keep my
+manner to her robust and almost brusque.
+
+"And then one day I passed her coming from the post office; she was
+looking back, her cheeks were flushed, and she was almost pretty. There
+by the inn a butcher's cart was drawn up. The young butcher, new to our
+village (he had a stiff knee, and had been discharged from the Army),
+was taking out a leg of mutton. He had a daredevil face; and eyes that
+had seen much death. He had evidently been chatting with her, for he was
+still smiling, and even as I passed him he threw her a jerk of the head.
+
+"Two Sundays after that I was coming down past Wiley's copse at dusk,
+and heard a man's coarse laugh. There, through a tiny gap in the
+nut-bushes, I saw a couple seated. He had his leg stiffly stretched out,
+and his arm round the girl, who was leaning towards him; her lips were
+parted, and those hare's eyes of hers were looking up into his face.
+Adoration!
+
+"I don't know what it was my duty to have done, I only know that I did
+nothing, but slunk on with a lump in my throat.
+
+"Adoration! There it was again! Hopeless! Incurable devotions to those
+who cared no more for her than for a slice of suet-pudding to be eaten
+hot, gulped down, forgotten, or loathed in the recollection. And there
+they are, these girls, one to almost every village of this country--a
+nightmare to us all. The look on her face was with me all that evening
+and in my dreams.
+
+"I know no more, for two days later I was summoned North to take up work
+in a military hospital."
+
+1917.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+BUTTERCUP-NIGHT
+
+
+Why is it that in some places one has such a feeling of life being, not
+merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but a single breathing,
+glowing, growing thing, of which we are no more important a part than
+the swallows and magpies, the foals and sheep in the meadows, the
+sycamores and ash-trees and flowers in the fields, the rocks and little
+bright streams, or even than the long fleecy clouds and their
+soft-shouting drivers, the winds?
+
+True, we register these parts of being, and they--so far as we know--do
+not register us; yet it is impossible to feel, in such places as I speak
+of, the busy, dry, complacent sense of being all that matters, which in
+general we humans have so strongly.
+
+In these rare spots, which are always in the remote country, untouched
+by the advantages of civilisation, one is conscious of an enwrapping web
+or mist of spirit--is it, perhaps the glamourous and wistful wraith of
+all the vanished shapes once dwelling there in such close comradeship?
+
+It was Sunday of an early June when I first came on one such, far down
+in the West country. I had walked with my knapsack twenty miles; and,
+there being no room at the tiny inn of the very little village, they
+directed me to a wicket gate, through which, by a path leading down a
+field, I would come to a farm-house, where I might find lodging. The
+moment I got into that field I felt within me a peculiar contentment,
+and sat down on a rock to let the feeling grow. In an old holly-tree
+rooted to the bank about fifty yards away, two magpies evidently had a
+nest, for they were coming and going, avoiding my view as much as
+possible, yet with a certain stealthy confidence which made one feel
+that they had long prescriptive right to that dwelling-place. Around,
+far as one could see, was hardly a yard of level ground; all hill and
+hollow, long ago reclaimed from the moor; and against the distant folds
+of the hills the farm-house and its thatched barns were just visible,
+embowered amongst beeches and some dark trees, with a soft bright crown
+of sunlight over the whole. A gentle wind brought a faint rustling up
+from those beeches, and from a large lime-tree which stood by itself; on
+this wind some little snowy clouds, very high and fugitive in that blue
+heaven, were always moving over. But I was most struck by the
+buttercups. Never was field so lighted up by those tiny lamps, those
+little bright pieces of flower china out of the Great Pottery. They
+covered the whole ground, as if the sunlight had fallen bodily from the
+sky, in millions of gold patines; and the fields below as well, down to
+what was evidently a stream, were just as thick with the extraordinary
+warmth and glory of them.
+
+Leaving the rock at last, I went towards the house. It was long and low,
+and rather sad, standing in a garden all mossy grass and buttercups,
+with a few rhododendrons and flowery shrubs, below a row of fine old
+Irish yews. On the stone verandah a grey sheep-dog and a very small
+golden-haired child were sitting close together, absorbed in each other.
+A woman came in answer to my knock, and told me, in a pleasant soft,
+slurring voice, that I might stay the night; and dropping my knapsack, I
+went out again. Through an old gate under a stone arch I came on the
+farmyard, quite deserted save for a couple of ducks moving slowly down a
+gutter in the sunlight; and noticing the upper half of a stable-door
+open, I went across, in search of something living. There, in a rough
+loose-box, on thick straw, lay a chestnut, long-tailed mare, with the
+skin and head of a thoroughbred. She was swathed in blankets, and her
+face, all cut about the cheeks and over the eyes, rested on an ordinary
+human's pillow, held by a bearded man in shirt-sleeves; while, leaning
+against the white-washed walls, sat fully a dozen other men, perfectly
+silent, very gravely and intently gazing. The mare's eyes were
+half-closed, and what could be seen of them was dull and blueish, as
+though she had been through a long time of pain. Save for her rapid
+breathing, she lay quite still, but her neck and ears were streaked with
+sweat, and every now and then her hind-legs quivered. Seeing me at the
+door, she raised her head, uttering a queer, half-human noise; but the
+bearded man at once put his hand on her forehead, and with a "Woa, my
+dear, woa, my pretty!" pressed it down again, while with the other hand
+he plumped up the pillow for her cheek. And, as the mare obediently let
+fall her head, one of the men said in a low voice: "I never see anything
+so like a Christian!" and the others echoed him, in chorus, "Like a
+Christian--like a Christian!" It went to one's heart to watch her, and I
+moved off down the farm lane into an old orchard, where the apple-trees
+were still in bloom, with bees--very small ones--busy on the blossoms,
+whose petals were dropping on to the dock leaves and buttercups in the
+long grass. Climbing over the bank at the far end, I found myself in a
+meadow the like of which--so wild and yet so lush--I think I have never
+seen. Along one hedge of its meandering length were masses of pink
+mayflower; and between two little running streams quantities of yellow
+water iris--"daggers," as they call them--were growing; the
+"print-frock" orchis, too, was all over the grass, and everywhere the
+buttercups. Great stones coated with yellowish moss were strewn among
+the ash-trees and dark hollies; and through a grove of beeches on the
+far side, such as Corot might have painted, a girl was running with a
+youth after her, who jumped down over the bank and vanished. Thrushes,
+blackbirds, yaffles, cuckoos, and one other very monotonous little bird
+were in full song; and this, with the sound of the streams, and the
+wind, and the shapes of the rocks and trees, the colours of the flowers,
+and the warmth of the sun, gave one a feeling of being lost in a very
+wilderness of Nature. Some ponies came slowly from the far end, tangled,
+gipsy-headed little creatures, stared, and went off again at speed. It
+was just one of those places where any day the Spirit of all Nature
+might start up in one of those white gaps which separate the trees and
+rocks. But though I sat a long time waiting, hoping--Pan did not come.
+
+They were all gone from the stable, when I went back to the farm, except
+the bearded nurse, and one tall fellow, who might have been the "Dying
+Gaul," as he crouched there in the straw; and the mare was sleeping--her
+head between her nurse's knees.
+
+That night I woke at two o'clock, to find it bright as day, almost, with
+moonlight coming in through the flimsy curtains. And, smitten with the
+feeling which comes to us creatures of routine so rarely--of what beauty
+and strangeness we let slip by without ever stretching out hand to grasp
+it--I got up, dressed, stole downstairs, and out.
+
+Never was such a night of frozen beauty, never such dream-tranquillity.
+The wind had dropped, and the silence was such that one hardly liked to
+tread even on the grass. From the lawn and fields there seemed to be a
+mist rising--in truth, the moonlight caught on the dewy buttercups; and
+across this ghostly radiance the shadows of the yew-trees fell in dense
+black bars. Suddenly, I bethought me of the mare. How was she faring,
+this marvellous night? Very softly opening the door into the yard, I
+tiptoed across. A light was burning in her box. And I could hear her
+making the same half-human noise she had made in the afternoon, as if
+wondering at her feelings; and instantly the voice of the bearded man
+talking to her as one might talk to a child: "Oover, me darlin'; yu've
+a-been long enough o' that side. Wa-ay, my swate--yu let old Jack turn
+'u, then!" Then came a scuffling in the straw, a thud, again that
+half-human sigh, and his voice: "Putt your 'ead to piller, that's my
+dandy gel. Old Jack wouldn' 'urt 'u; no more'n ef 'u was the queen!"
+Then only her quick breathing could be heard, and his cough and mutter,
+as he settled down once more to his long vigil. I crept very softly up
+to the window, but she heard me at once; and at the movement of her head
+the old fellow sat up, blinking his eyes out of the bush of his grizzled
+hair and beard. Opening the door, I said:
+
+"May I come in?"
+
+"Oo, ay! Come in, Zurr, if 'u'm a mind to."
+
+I sat down beside him on a sack, and for some time we did not speak,
+taking each other in. One of his legs was lame, so that he had to keep
+it stretched out all the time; and awfully tired he looked, grey-tired.
+
+"You're a great nurse!" I said at last. "It must be hard work, watching
+out here all night."
+
+His eyes twinkled; they were of that bright grey kind through which the
+soul looks out.
+
+"Aw, no!" he said. "Ah don't grudge it vur a dumb animal. Poor
+things--they can't 'elp theirzelves. Many's the naight ah've zat up with
+'orses and beasts tu. 'Tes en me--can't bear to zee dumb creatures
+zuffer!" And, laying his hand on the mare's ears: "They zay 'orses
+'aven't no souls. 'Tes my belief they'm gotten souls, zame as us. Many's
+the Christian ah've seen ain't got the soul of an 'orse. Zame with the
+beasts--an' the sheep; 'tes only they can't spake their minds."
+
+"And where," I said, "do you think they go to when they die?" He looked
+at me a little queerly, fancying, perhaps, that I was leading him into
+some trap; making sure, too, that I was a real stranger, without power
+over him, body or soul--for humble folk in the country must be careful;
+then, reassured, and nodding in his bushy beard, he answered knowingly:
+
+"Ah don't think they goes zo very far!"
+
+"Why? Do you ever see their spirits?"
+
+"Naw, naw; I never zeen none; but, for all they zay, ah don't think none
+of us goes such a brave way off. There's room for all, dead or alive.
+An' there's Christians ah've zeen--well, ef they'm not dead for gude,
+then neither aren't dumb animals, for sure."
+
+"And rabbits, squirrels, birds, even insects? How about them?"
+
+He was silent, as if I had carried him a little beyond the confines of
+his philosophy, then shook his head:
+
+"'Tes all a bit dimsy-like. But yu watch dumb animals, Zurr, even the
+laste littlest one, and yu'll zee they knows a lot more'n what us
+thenks; an' they du's things, tu, that putts shame on a man's often as
+not. They've a got that in 'em as passes show." And not noticing my
+stare at that unconscious plagiarism, he added: "Ah'd zuuner zet up of a
+naight with an 'orse than with an 'uman; they've more zense, and
+patience." And, stroking the mare's forehead, he added: "Now, my dear,
+time for yu t' 'ave yure bottle."
+
+I waited to see her take her draught, and lay her head down once more on
+the pillow. Then, hoping he would get a sleep, I rose to go.
+
+"Aw, 'tes nothin' much," he said, "this time o' year; not like in
+winter. 'Twill come day before yu know, these buttercup-nights"; and
+twinkling up at me out of his kindly bearded face, he settled himself
+again into the straw. I stole a look back at his rough figure propped
+against the sack, with the mare's head down beside his knee, at her
+swathed chestnut body, and the gold of the straw, the white walls, and
+dusky nooks and shadows of that old stable, illumined by the "dimsy"
+light of the old lantern. And with the sense of having seen something
+holy, I crept away up into the field where I had lingered the day
+before, and sat down on the same half-way rock. Close on dawn it was,
+the moon still sailing wide over the moor, and the flowers of this
+"buttercup-night" fast closed, not taken in at all by her cold glory!
+
+Most silent hour of all the twenty-four--when the soul slips half out of
+sheath, and hovers in the cool; when the spirit is most in tune with
+what, soon or late, happens to all spirits; hour when a man cares least
+whether or no he be alive, as we understand the word.... "None of us
+goes such a brave way off--there's room for all, dead or alive." Though
+it was almost unbearably colourless, and quiet, there was warmth in
+thinking of those words of his; in the thought, too, of the millions of
+living things snugly asleep all round; warmth in realising that
+unanimity of sleep. Insects and flowers, birds, men, beasts, the very
+leaves on the trees--away in slumber-land. Waiting for the first bird to
+chirrup, one had, perhaps, even a stronger feeling than in daytime of
+the unity and communion of all life, of the subtle brotherhood of living
+things that fall all together into oblivion, and, all together, wake.
+
+When dawn comes, while moonlight is still powdering the world's face,
+quite a long time passes before one realises how the quality of the
+light has changed; and so, it was day before I knew it. Then the sun
+came up above the hills; dew began to sparkle, and colour to stain the
+sky. That first praise of the sun from every bird and leaf and blade of
+grass, the tremulous flush and chime of dawn! One has strayed far from
+the heart of things that it should come as something strange and
+wonderful! Indeed, I noticed that the beasts and birds gazed at me as if
+I simply could not be there at this hour which so belonged to them. And
+to me, too, they seemed strange and new--with that in them "which
+passeth show," and as of a world where man did not exist, or existed
+only as just another sort of beast or bird.
+
+But just then began the crowning glory of that dawn--the opening and
+lighting of the buttercups. Not one did I actually see unclose, yet, of
+a sudden, they were awake, and the fields once more a blaze of gold.
+
+
+
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