PART THREE

I

ON the date that the Archduke was assassinated, we were dining at Campden Hill Square. Guy and Hugo were there, and George and Mollie, and Ralph Freeman, who was back from Vienna now, in the Foreign Office again.

It was a party like old times, and I liked it. I was so happy to be about again and to have my baby; for Eleanor was incredibly precious to me at that time.

I was glad to see them all again, and I felt somehow that I had come back to life; that I wanted to do so much that I had not been able to do during the last months.

There was a new pleasure in moving, and in eating, and in being alive.

‘They will all be there,’ I said to Walter, as we were getting ready to go. ‘We have not been all together like that since we were married, for Hugo went away so soon.’

Walter smiled, but I knew he was not pleased. He was tying his black tie, and he always tied his ties badly. He disliked dressing for dinner, and never did so, if he could avoid it.

‘You must like them,’ I said. ‘Please try to like them. You see I do so much.’

And he looked suddenly sorry, and stopped pulling at his tie.

‘Yes, you do. I know that, and I ought not to mind,’ he said, ‘but I can’t help it. They make me feel a fool, those friends of yours, and I am _not_ a fool, and I am always afraid that you will think of me as they do, when they are there. I suppose I am jealous of them.’

And he gave a laugh.

I said:

‘You need not be; it is different, and I want them to like you too; they will, if you are nicer to them.’

He said:

‘You are mine now, not theirs. I need not be afraid of them now.’

I laughed, but I said:

‘You old goose, you will be late, if you don’t get dressed; Grandmother does not like people to be late.’

And I tied his tie for him; I nearly always did in the end.

II

George and Hugo were in the drawing-room with Grandmother when we arrived. They were talking about Dostoievski. Grandmother did not like the Russian novelists.

‘My dear, a lunatic asylum,’ she said once. ‘It may be very true to life, of a sort, as you say, but I do not enjoy the society of lunatics.’

Hugo was saying:

‘We are all like that really, Aunt Gerry, only we don’t realize it, incredibly weak, and uncertain, and yet sometimes a bit heroic, only we don’t like to think we are like that, so we don’t think it.’

‘I certainly do not think it, Hugo. I hope that you are not like that, and I know that I am not.’

She laughed, and turning to us, held out her hands.

‘Here she is!’ she said, as though they had been speaking about me. I realized that evening how much she cared for me, and felt grateful to her. I bent down and kissed her, and shook hands with George and Hugo. I did not feel shy of Hugo now; it seemed, here in this room, just as it used to be.

George gave me his chair, and we all sat down.

‘How is my great-granddaughter?’ asked Grandmother, and I said she was very well.

George said:

‘I can’t imagine you with a daughter.’

Then Guy and Mollie came in together. They looked happy, and I thought:

‘They will be married soon,’ and I was glad.

Mollie said:

‘We have run all the way from Notting Hill Gate, we thought we should be late.’

Guy said:

‘Ralph is later. A diplomat should know better.’

‘Does Ralph count as a diplomat now?’ asked Mollie.

Guy said:

‘Yes, of the fifteenth class, I believe.’

And every one laughed, for it was a joke against Ralph Freeman that he was very punctilious.

Then he came in.

He apologized to Grandmother. He said he had been kept at the Office; there was anxiety over the murder of Franz Ferdinand.

‘Franz Ferdinand,’ repeated Hugo, ‘who on earth is he?’

‘The Austrian Archduke. Francis Joseph’s heir, you know. Haven’t you seen the paper?’

Guy said:

‘I saw something about it. Herzegovina, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, and Austria is sure to suspect Serbian influence.’

George said:

‘Trouble in the Balkans. Do you remember Old Moore’s prediction?’

Mollie said:

‘That was last year.’

George said:

‘Every year.’

Grandmother said:

‘I read about it this morning. The young man and his wife were both shot in their carriage—a very horrid affair.’

Ralph said:

‘My chief takes an exceedingly grave view of the situation.’

The dinner was ready and we went into the dining-room. When we had all sat down, Ralph began again.

‘You see,’ he said to Grandmother, ‘the tension between Vienna and Belgrade has been growing more acute every year. It was amazing to hear the Austrians talk, when I was out there. They would believe anything of the Serbs.’

‘No doubt the crime was political,’ Grandmother observed. ‘It is something to be truly thankful for that we have outgrown political crimes in this country; they are always futile.’

‘This may be worse than futile,’ said Ralph. He was looking serious and excited, and we felt amused; Ralph was always proud of his inside information.

‘Well, yes, worse than futile for the dozen poor devils who are put to death because of it,’ said George. ‘They have not got the man who threw the bomb, I see. There will have to be a demonstration.’

‘They are saying at the Office that it may mean War.’

‘War? between Austria—Hungary and Serbia?’

‘That would be short and decisive. I should think.’

Guy wrinkled his forehead.

‘You forget Serbia’s relation to Russia,’ Ralph put in; ‘we might very easily have war between Russia and Austria over this.’

Mollie said:

‘It all seems very remote.’

Grandmother said:

‘In Eastern Europe they are always fighting. I remember so many wars—Russo-Turkish, Bulgaro-Turkish, Russo-Japanese, Græco-Turkish and the Balkan Wars. One cannot feel as distressed, as no doubt one ought. If the Russians are all like Hugo’s friends they should not prove very formidable to Austrian troops. I used to know a good many Austrian officers—very charming people.’

We all had an impulse to rag Ralph Freeman. He took himself and his news so seriously, it made us want to take it lightly.

Hugo said:

‘Russian Ballet versus Hungarian Band. Much more “life force” in the Ballet.’

‘It is all very well to joke,’ protested Ralph, ‘but this may be the beginning of a European War.’

‘How often have we heard that, Ralph?’ asked Guy. ‘Everything may be the beginning of a European War—Dogger Bank, Agadir, Morocco—but fortunately, it does not begin.’

‘Sophia belongs to a society which shows European War to be impossible,’ said Mollie. ‘Economically impossible, in a modern world like ours, because of international trade, credit, and so on, and international banking. I went to some of the meetings with her once.’

‘I wish it were impossible,’ said Ralph portentously, and we all felt sure that he was very glad it was not impossible.

‘Russia and France,’ said George abruptly, ‘Austria and Germany—My God!’ Then he laughed. ‘It is fantastic,’ he said. ‘Why, _we_ have an entente with France and Russia!’

‘Exactly,’ said Ralph.

I said:

‘You are talking like the Navy League, George.’

‘I know,’ said George. ‘I suddenly thought, Supposing the damned fools were right.’

Walter said:

‘It is quite inconceivable, I think, that Great Britain should be involved in a European War.’

He spoke with a note of exasperation in his voice, as though every one were being silly. I thought they could not all be silly, for they were saying different things.

‘It is inconceivable we could keep out,’ said Guy, ‘if France and Germany were at War.’

‘Come, come,’ said Grandmother, ‘don’t try to make my flesh creep, young people. I think we can trust the Austrians to settle up their own affair; it was all in their own country after all.’

She turned to Walter, who was on her other side, and asked him how his book was getting on; and after that we talked about plays, the Vedrenne Barker Season at the Savoy and Rheinhardt’s production of Œdipus. I had seen none of them, nor Walter of course, for we seldom went to plays, but all the others had, and I liked to hear about them.

After dinner we had coffee in the drawing-room; then Grandmother went to her memoirs, in her sitting-room upstairs, and we played Demon Pounce with two card tables joined together and five packs of cards. We called it Prawn Eye, and we often used to play it.

Guy generally won, and sometimes George; Hugo and Walter were the worst. Hugo laughed and looked across at Walter.

‘You and I are competing for the Donkey prize,’ he said.

Walter tried to laugh too, but he looked worried; I could see that he thought it a silly game, and that spoilt the fun for me.

I had to go home early to feed Eleanor. The others stayed on to play longer. I ran upstairs to Grandmother to say ‘good night.’ She was sitting by the fire, for she always had a fire in her room, with her book on her knee and her spectacles on the table by her side. She was not reading, and she looked very tired. I realized, with a sudden shock, that she was old.

She started when I came in, and then smiled.

‘I have come to say “good night,” Grandmother,’ I said.

She put both her hands on my shoulders, as I stooped down.

She said:

‘Dear child, bless you. I am happy about you.’

I said:

‘I am happy too, Grandmother.’

I waited; I wanted to say more, but I did not know what to say. I felt then that she was old, and perhaps lonely. It had not occurred to me before that my marriage had left her all alone. I wondered what it would be like to be old.

I thought:

‘We shall all be old some day, Guy and Hugo, and George, and Mollie and Walter, and I; how strange that is; quite certainly some day we shall be old.’

But it was not real to me even then.

‘Can I do anything for you, Grandmother?’ I asked. ‘Can I get you another book?’

‘No, dear, no; I shall go to bed soon. Are the other young people still there?’

I said, yes, they were going on with their game.

‘Say “good night” to them for me,’ she said; ‘they need not come up’; and she kissed me ‘Good night.’

I went downstairs slowly.

Walter was waiting in the hall.

There was a taxi at the door to take us home; Grandmother had arranged that. She would pay for it, she had said.

I ran back to the drawing-room to say ‘Good-bye.’

Hugo came with me into the hall, and George came out on to the steps.

‘When shall we meet again?’ he said. ‘Are you going away soon?’

I said:

‘Next week we are going, up to the Wall again. We shall be back in September.’

George said:

‘Good-bye, then, till September.’

He was smiling his wide, delightful smile.

I said:

‘What a nice evening it has been.’

George said:

‘Yes. Hasn’t it been jolly?’

Yet something in his face made me wonder.

I thought:

‘Is George not happy? Can something be worrying George?’

I never saw him again.

III

Walter was annoyed about the taxi; he felt it a waste of money, when we might have gone in the tube, and he did not like Grandmother to pay it, for he liked to pay everything himself. I knew very well by now when Walter was annoyed; I could tell by the way he sat, by the way he fidgeted with his hands, even when he said nothing at all.

He said nothing this time, and I said nothing. I felt very tired now, and then, I was frightened. It was as though I had been asleep, and dreaming, and contented, and now suddenly I had woken up; as though everything had become intense, and alive, and somehow emotional. I felt as though tremendous things were happening, all round us, everywhere; as though we were a tiny island in a great space.

I put out my hand and touched Walter’s arm; it was dark in the taxi and I could hardly see him.

‘Walter,’ I said, ‘do you feel as if something dreadful were going to happen?’

He turned sharply.

‘No,’ he said. ‘What do you mean? What should happen?’

I said:

‘Oh, I don’t know exactly; I suppose it is silly; I feel as though this couldn’t last, as though something were going to break.’

‘It is that silly talk about a war that has upset you,’ he said. ‘People ought not to talk like that.’

I said:

‘No; I wasn’t thinking about a war; I had forgotten that; but I feel afraid of something, I don’t know what. I believe George felt it too.’

He said:

‘Nonsense, you are tired, that is all; it is awfully tiring going out in the evening; I am tired too.’

He put his arm round me and drew me close to him. I wanted to feel near to him, but I did not; I felt a long way off.

Two days later, we went up to Northumberland, to the farm-house on the Roman Wall, where we had stayed before.

We had a great deal of luggage, a cot and a pram, and a baby’s bath. I felt very proud of travelling with those things, but Walter did not like it.

‘It is awful,’ he said, ‘this family luggage. I suppose it will be like this now—for years!’

I minded that. It seemed to me sometimes that he resented Eleanor, that he would almost rather she were not there; I had hoped he would be pleased with her, as I was.

At the farm it was better; Walter liked being there; he went for long walks again, as we had done on our honeymoon. I could not go with him now, when he went a very long way, but I was happy at home with my baby.

IV

It seems like a dream now, that beginning of war; like something remembered very long ago, much longer ago than it really is. I cannot even remember, at what moment we realized, Walter and I, that war was coming, a war that would involve our country, I mean; that it would involve us personally, as individuals, we did not realize at that time at all; that came much later, gradually and painfully, step by step.

We were, of course, far away in the physical sense; six miles away from the nearest village of any size, with a post only three times a week. We saw nobody who understood what was happening better than ourselves, and we read the newspaper when it came so little. Walter had always an aversion for newspapers, I never quite knew why, and I was so absorbed in Eleanor, and the new life with her, that the outer world seemed to have slipped right away, when we got into the train at Euston.

The stages in these weeks that one now knows were turning points in the catastrophe escaped us then with a completeness that seems amazing.

The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia, when it came, meant nothing at all. I remember Walter reading it aloud at breakfast, in the farm parlour; even now the smell of hot coffee and bacon brings that morning back to me, which is odd, considering how little we realized its importance.

The paper had come the evening before, but we had not opened it. Walter liked a paper at breakfast, not at other times. He opened it and read it carelessly, not caring much what he found there. He said:

‘There seems to be a dustup in the Balkans after all, over that man being killed. Here is an Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia,’ and he read a few lines of it aloud.

‘Extraordinary,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? going on like that at this time of day. It seems to belong to the eighteenth century or perhaps the seventeenth.’

And I said:

‘I suppose they are a century or two behind us over there.’

And we did not bother about it any more. We went a long walk that day and came back rather tired, and hungry; and in the afternoon it rained, and we could not read our Gibbon out of doors, as we had meant to. I remember that we followed what happened in the newspaper with a certain interest; it gave one something to look for among the rather dull collection of Parliamentary Debates and Home affairs, but it was an impersonal interest.

I remember one day thinking about it, and being shocked with myself for minding it so little. That must have been some days later, when Russia and Germany seemed to be coming in. I went up on the hill behind the house, by myself, and sat down on the grass, and tried to realize what was happening. I remember trying to picture the Russian soldiers, and the Austrian soldiers, and to think what it meant; those hundreds and thousands of people leaving their homes, and going to fight.

‘Hundreds of them will be killed,’ I thought, ‘perhaps thousands, and yet I don’t really mind; it doesn’t really affect me, just because I don’t know them, and they live in countries that I don’t know’; and it seemed to me dreadful that one’s sympathy should be so limited.

And then another time, I did realize it for a bit; that was after the German mobilization, when the French reservists were called up; we had read the paper when it came that day, in the evening after dinner, and somehow by that time, it had begun to seem terrible; we had begun, I think, though very dimly, to feel the trouble closing in all round.

We lay a long time awake that night, Walter and I, not speaking to each other. The night was hot and oppressive, the darkness seemed to press upon us like a weight.

I thought of the French and German homes where people were lying in bed, awake too, and thinking about the next day, when the men must go out to the army; and it became suddenly real to me; perhaps because I had been in France and Germany, and knew some French and German people, and understood that they were just people like us.

And that made the others seem more real too, and I felt the immensity of what was happening; I realized, dimly, the masses of people in Austria and in Russia too.

And then a sense of unreality came over me. I felt myself a long way off; looking on, as though I were disembodied; I seemed to hear a great throbbing, very far away, a strange pulsating sound, as though it were the heart of all the world; I suppose it was really my own heart. I thought of birds in a storm, of clouds gathering, of the lines in ‘In Memoriam’ about the rooks, of the Dynasts and the Pities and Powers; and an acute, quite impersonal sense of loss and desolation came over me.

Walter said suddenly:

‘This may be the end of Europe, of European civilization.’

I said:

‘I was thinking about the people saying Good-bye; sleeping together like us, only for the last time, people just like us, and I thought, “Supposing it was you and me?”’

Walter said:

‘I know.’.

He held me tight, and I pressed close up to him. The beating of his heart throbbed through me again, like the pulse of the world. And all I had, seemed dearer than ever before, as I realized that it could be lost.

I said:

‘Oh, Walter, do they love as we do? Do you think, many of them do?’

And he answered very softly:

‘Yes. Hundreds of thousands of them do.’

V

The next morning Walter walked over to Alston for more news. He brought back more papers, but nothing definite besides. The people in the town were talking about war, he said, telegrams were put up outside the Town Hall. Two days later he went over to Alston again. The exact moments at which it became credible, probable, inevitable, that England would fight too, I cannot remember at all.

The postman, who brought the post on Monday, stopped me at the gate with news of the Advance into Belgium.

‘Two million Germans on the march,’ he said. He smiled a twisted sort of smile, and added, ‘And I’m in the front line.’

It took me several moments to realize that he meant that he was a reservist.

I never saw him again.

When the British Declaration of War came, it made hardly a sensation. We had known it must come for so many hours, and hours during these days were like months.

VI

We went back to London at the end of August. We had talked of going for over a week before, but there seemed to be no trains. The reservists were called up everywhere; the shepherd from the farm was called up, and the cowman. They were in what was called ‘The Wagon Reserve.’

Walter said at first that we must go back to London at once, then that we had no right to crowd up trains, when all space was needed for troops.

In London, the excitement of war was everywhere; marching men, army wagons, lorries, bugle calls, persistent, repeated, practised over and over again. There was an open space not far from our house; it had been a playing field for a school, and recruits were drilling there all the day long; sharp loud sounds of the sergeants’ orders, more bugle calls, marching men, and more marching men; the pathetic sentimental marching songs, the dark blue uniforms and convict-like caps of Kitchener’s Army; everything passed through the untraceable stages from strangeness to familiarity, and the war news mingled in a confused, disjointed way with the daily sights and sounds.

The Belgian resistance; Liège; the fall of Liège; the first accounts of German atrocities; the occupation of Brussels; the burning of Louvain; fighting in the streets of Charleroi, where the dead bodies pressed each other too closely to fall down, and the ranks of the dead stood upright; that in particular brought the horror of it home to me, I know.

Stories of crucifixion, of bayoneted women, of children with their hands cut off; and the first inrush of Belgian refugees. How the days passed, merged into one another, obliterated one another, I do not know; the incredible changed somehow imperceptibly into the accepted, the taken for granted, state of existence. I was caught for a time by the general excitement, and so was Walter. He bought war maps and pinned them to the doors, marking the progress of the armies each morning and evening with little coloured flags on pins.

Mr. Harland, a colleague of Walter’s who lived in Hampstead too, used to come in and talk to Walter. He kept a chart with coloured maps as well.

Then came dismay at the retreat from Mons; suddenly one day as he was tracing out the line of ‘position in the rear,’ Walter stood still, and they stared at each other.

‘By Jove!’ said Mr. Harland.

And Walter said, ‘Good Lord!’

‘Will they get to Paris?’

‘Will they break through?’

I sat and watched them, and the new consternation was as unreal to me as the War itself had been at first.

Life went on for me, in a way, unbroken by the catastrophic events all round. My own life seemed to reassert itself from the general earthquake; my baby was as adorable, as absorbing as ever, and I enjoyed being back in my own home.

I remembered the South African War; it had been very sad, very terrible; my uncle Everard had been killed in it, he had been a soldier, but it was always remote; I could not believe Walter and Mr. Harland when they talked of an invasion of England, bombardment by air, cutting off of the food supplies.

I wondered often during those first weeks what Guy and Hugo were thinking of it all. They were at Yearsly, I believed, and George and Mollie; they had been going down there too. Ralph had been right, after all, that evening at Grandmother’s, and we had all laughed at him. It seemed odd already, that we had not understood what that Archduke’s murder would bring.

Guy had paid some attention, and George; George most, I thought. I wondered very much what George would be thinking now.

My grandmother had been at Bath; she had gone to see a cousin who lived at Bath. She did not come back till late in September. I went to see her then and she told me that Guy and Hugo had volunteered.

VII

I was bewildered at first; I could not understand at all. I had seen the posters calling for recruits; I had seen the recruits drilling; but that too had seemed in its way remote; it had not occurred to me somehow that people of my own might go. I remember being glad, in the first days of all, that I had no one in the army. It had once been thought of for Guy, and I thought, ‘what a good thing Guy is not a soldier’; and then I felt ashamed at my own selfishness, for other people were soldiers, who mattered really as much.

And now I thought, it seems dreadful to say it, but I thought,

‘How silly of Guy and Hugo!’

And I thought:

‘That is just the side of them that Walter doesn’t like—fantastic—out of touch with reality.’

And I thought:

‘It is play acting, a little bit, and I always denied they did that. It would be much better if Hugo got a sensible job at last, and if Guy stuck to his law; he was getting on very well.’

I was not anxious about them. I did not believe they would ever be sent out to fight. They were only in training now; they were in camp somewhere, Grandmother had said, Hugo in Essex, and Guy on Salisbury plain. I knew it took months to train soldiers, and they were officers; that took several years; the War would be over before they were ready to go out; that made it so silly. But I was disturbed and unhappy all the same.

When I got home I told Walter. I expected him to say too that it was foolish but he didn’t.

He was sitting at his writing-table in the study. He gave a sort of groan and buried his face in his hands.

‘We shall all have to go before it is done,’ he said, and then abruptly:

‘I don’t suppose I shall finish my book now—that is all wasted.’

My heart seemed to stand still. I felt as though I was in a nightmare suddenly trying to wake up; or as though I had woken up, very early, in the dark, and thought of death; a helpless desperate feeling, as though the earth were slipping away, as though one were going to fall into infinite space . . . and then I recovered; normality came back, and I was sure that Walter too was hysterical and unhinged.

I tried to laugh.

‘You are an old goose, Walter,’ I said, and I put my arm round him and kissed the top of his head.

He did not look up. He was looking straight in front of him.

He said:

‘I was thinking before you came in of the Germans who will be killed; of the German scholars. They are doing work which no one else has ever done. If German scholarship is stamped out, scholarship throughout Europe will die. My work is useless, if the Germans are killed.’

I said:

‘But the Germans are conscripts——’

It answered my own thought, not his, and I knew that, as soon as I had said it.

‘We may all be conscripts too, before we are done,’ he answered. ‘It will not matter much by then.’

I asked:

‘Do you think Guy and Hugo were quite right to go?’

And he nodded.

The next day I heard from Mollie that George had got a Commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and about a week later Freddy Furze joined a Welsh Regiment.

VIII

I wrote to Cousin Delia, and to Hugo, and to Guy. I meant to write to George too, but there was an interruption, I forget now what it was, and I put it off, and put it off again, and did not write at all in the end.

Cousin Delia answered me first.

‘Yes, they are both gone,’ she said, ‘they had to go; there was, of course, no choice. Guy will find something he has wanted, I believe. I am more afraid for Hugo,’ and then she gave me their addresses (though I had got them already from Grandmother) and said she would like to see me soon; nothing about the War, or what she felt about it all; that was like Cousin Delia too.

‘We have offered the house as a hospital, if they want it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if they will . . .’

Guy’s letter, too, was like himself.

‘DEAR HELEN,’ he wrote,—

‘Many thanks for yours. Yes, here we are really in for it at last, or so it seems. I am having no end of a time at present. My men are simply topping; makes one proud of one’s country, and all that sort of thing, to see what its “men in the street” are like. Funny too, to be doing the thing in earnest now, after playing at it so often. We ought to get out fairly soon, as our battalion was nominally on a war footing before, but you never know. The beastly show may be over before we actually get there; I should be sorry to miss it all now I’ve got so far.’

‘Poor old Hugo doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself much, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he got out before us all the same. The best chance is to be drafted out into the regular battalions, I believe. You know George is down at Aldershot. I haven’t heard from him since he got there . . .’

Hugo did not write for ten days; then it was a long letter.

‘DEAR HELEN,—

‘I was glad to get your letter. I have wondered how the War took you. I am glad that you have stayed sane, and that you prefer your baby to the world. That is as it ought to be after all.

‘We have most of us lost our heads, and what will come of it all I don’t know. I feel a fraud drilling my wretched platoon, inspecting their kit, seeing if they have tooth-brushes, that they have polished their buttons, and mine too. I wonder what it is all for, what it will all lead to. We say “for King and Country”; we tell the poor beggars that, and they are as keen as mustard, most of them, like children playing at a game; only it is more than that, for they feel elated somehow, and raised out of themselves, at least some of them do—I did at first too, thought about being killed, and felt heroic. I don’t now; danger seems very remote and discomfort very present, and I can’t believe we shall ever get beyond this.

‘It is muddy here; all mud and flat dull fields, and when it rains, as it did last week, the wet comes through the roof, and we are uncomfortable and cross. It is an odd life. I don’t know what to talk about; the Colonel is a regular, and so is one Lieutenant; all the other officers are either recruits like me or Territorial Reserve. They seem keen about everything, and the battalion in particular, and they are most of them pleasant fellows enough, but they make one feel a fool, and I don’t like the way they talk; their values are so odd.

‘Guy is enjoying himself on Salisbury Plain. I haven’t heard from George lately.’

I could picture Hugo better after reading it. He was still alone, detached, half way between my attitude and Guy’s. I felt sorry for him in his wet tent, inspecting tooth-brushes.

IX

Mrs. Sebright knitted a great deal. She belonged to a ‘Work Centre’; ladies who met together three afternoons a week, and made shirts and bandages and socks.

She was patriotic, and talked about ‘our brave boys,’ and said that the British Army had never been beaten, and that the British Navy was something that the world had never seen before. She said, and seemed to believe, that English people were quite different from the people of other nations; much braver, and more high minded, less likely to do anything wrong or make mistakes.

I was puzzled by this attitude at first. I thought she was trying to encourage herself by saying these things; but I found she really did think they were true, and soon I got quite accustomed to hear them said by other people, all round, every day. I thought that there were good and bad people in our Army, and in other Armies; brave soldiers and cowardly ones; I did not find it a help to me at all to say more than that.

‘If we were all good, and the Germans all bad, the War would matter less,’ I said, one day, but Mrs. Sebright thought it unpatriotic to say anything like that.

‘When our own boys are fighting in the trenches,’ she said. ‘You surprise me, Helen.’

Maud was much worse. She was not content with praising our own Army and Navy, she kept on abusing the others. She came to stay with us in the Christmas holidays, and told a great many stories of German atrocities. In every case she would begin:

‘I know for a fact,’ or, ‘I have it on excellent authority’; but when I asked her how she knew, or on whose authority, she would get angry and did not explain.

She would say that the Germans must be taught a lesson. . . .

No civilized nation had ever behaved as they did . . . They were ‘unique in history.’

‘This policy of frightfulness is unparalleled,’ she said, ‘absolutely unparalleled. They have forfeited their right to existence as an independent nation.’

She had dismissed the German teacher in her school, and two little German girls were excluded also. ‘Feeling runs too high,’ she said. ‘I could not, in the circumstances, countenance their remaining. I hope that German will be a dead language before long.’

X

Autumn passed into winter. The fall of Antwerp; escape of the _Goeben_ and _Breslau_; Declaration of War with Turkey; the bombardment of Scarborough and West Hartlepool these were landmarks in the sea of events.

People had begun to accept the War as a natural state, to cease expecting a sudden dramatic finish.

Mollie finished her three months’ training, and was drafted to a War Hospital in Wales. She came to see me before she went. She was serious and intent.

‘I wish I could do more,’ she said. ‘I hate to be safe, when the others are in danger, don’t you feel that, Helen? I do hope they will send me to the front.’

I said:

‘You are doing much more than I am. You are in it, not outside, like me.’

Mollie said:

‘Yes. I am sorry for you, Helen. It must be terrible for you to be outside, and not able to help. Of course you can’t,’ she added quickly, ‘your work is just as important really, more perhaps,’ and she smiled her delightful smile that was like George’s.

‘I feel,’ she went on earnestly, ‘that I can never do enough, if I worked myself to the bone, when I think what the men out there are going through already; what is waiting for George, and Guy, and Hugo, when they go out. It seems horrible to me to sit safe at home when they go, just nursing in a hospital.’

I said:

‘It will be pretty ghastly in a hospital if the War goes on,’ and I was surprised at myself; I had not thought consciously about the wounded men before.

Mollie shuddered.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I have seen some of it already. There were some my first month—blinded—it seemed so soon.’

And I thought:

‘Could Hugo be blinded?’

I was glad to have seen Mollie. She brought the War home to me more clearly than anything else had done. She understood what it meant, how dreadful it was, and yet she was sane. I wondered if I could help in a Hospital too; but I was nursing Eleanor still, and very much tied.

I went for a time with Mrs. Sebright and sewed shirts; then I did bandages myself, at home, instead.

In January, Guy crossed to France; George Addington sailed for Gallipoli in April; Hugo’s battalion went out as a reinforcement in the second battle of Ypres.

I did not see any of them before they went.

XI

That Easter we went away for a week. Walter was so tired, I was anxious about him. He had extra work at the University, for several of the lecturers had gone to the War, the young unmarried ones, and he was working at his book on inscriptions as well, in the evenings chiefly. He would go straight upstairs to the study after dinner and work till late.

‘I may not have time to finish it,’ was all he said when I urged him not to. ‘I must work while I can.’

We went up to the Wall. The weather was bad, and Walter could not leave the War behind him; he seemed obsessed by it; he could talk of nothing else all the time.

I tried to cheer him up, to tease him a little, and make fun and play as we used to at first; he had liked me to before, but he did not care for it now. He smiled rather absently, and turned back to his book; when he spoke it was only of the advance in Gallipoli.

I felt that it was my fault that I could not cheer him up. I could not feel gay myself; I could not make spontaneous fun, and so it was no good, and I worried about my baby, left for the first time. I kept imagining disasters that were not probable at all. One night I woke up in a fright, and thought that the nurse might have left the tap of the gas fire half on, and the gas be escaping; and another time, I thought that a cat might have jumped into the cot, and the nurse not noticed it. I was jumpy and nervy, I knew it, and so no use to Walter. I thought about Hugo and Guy in France, and George in Gallipoli; and that made it worse.

We sat one day on the hill-side beyond the Wall, where we had often sat before, and looked out to the North. We could see the place when we had walked together, that first day when we had met at the camp and I had gone down with Walter, into the barbarians’ country. It seemed a long time ago. I remembered how exciting it had been, and how I had felt that I had begun to know Walter, and understand him. I knew him much better now, but did I understand him? I slipped my hand through his arm and laid my cheek against his.

‘Dear,’ I said, ‘what has happened to us both? Why are we so dull and sad?’

Walter looked round at me slowly.

‘We are tired, I think,’ he said. ‘That is all and we can’t rest; nobody can rest just now.’

I stroked his hand, I remember; I felt very sorry for Walter; I felt that, perhaps, I had not thought of him enough, in thinking of Eleanor so much. He looked so tired and unhappy now.

‘It would be easier for you if you could fight,’ I said.

He flushed and looked away.

‘I know,’ he said shortly, ‘it would, but I can’t.’

I was astonished at the sharpness of his tone.

I said:

‘Of course not, Walter, nobody thought of it.’

He said:

‘I have.’

And I felt a cold shiver run through me. I had not thought of it, and yet, somewhere at the back of my mind, this terror had been there. I held my breath and waited. I could hear the sheep cropping the rough grass a hundred yards away.

Then I said:

‘Yes? Do you really want to go?’

And Walter nodded his head.

‘I would give anything to go,’ he said intensely. ‘When Harland was coming home last week a girl gave him a white feather.’

I tried to laugh:

‘But that is absurd,’ I said. ‘Surely he didn’t mind?’

‘He did mind,’ said Walter.

He kept his eyes to the ground; he was tearing up the grass into little tufts and throwing it away.

‘I don’t suppose I should be any use even if I wasn’t married,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose they would pass me at the Medical Board, but I hate to stay behind! It makes me ashamed of myself, and I am not used to feeling ashamed.’

I tried to think clearly and dispassionately, but I couldn’t. My impulse was to plead with him, to implore him not to leave me, not to go to the War, but I checked it. I felt that he would go, that it was inevitable, that I had known all the time that he would, and that I could do nothing.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘it seems to me almost braver not to go; just to go on doing dull essential work, that somebody must do. All the sentiment and enthusiasm goes to soldiers, but “they also serve”. . .?’ I felt sobs in my throat. I stopped short.

Walter said:

‘Yes, I know that too; I know I ought to stay; that my duty is with you, and my mother; I am not free to choose, but even my students are going, and those friends of yours have gone.’

I said:

‘That was different; they were not married,’ and then I thought of Cousin Delia, and Mollie.

‘Dear, I won’t keep you if you want to go,’ I said, and I suddenly cried.

He put his arms round me and kissed me, again and again.

‘I know you wouldn’t, my darling,’ he said, ‘but I can’t go.’

And I felt him nearer and more precious than before, and I thought he felt me so.

‘My poor, poor dear,’ he said, ‘if only the War would end soon.’

And I said:

‘It must end soon. I am sure it will.’

XII

Walter said we must cut down expenses, and put all possible money into War Loan. It was the least we could do, he said. So Eleanor’s nurse was dismissed. I would look after Eleanor myself; I was glad to do something definite, and enjoyed looking after my baby for a time.

It was a wet summer; from all sides came complaints of the floods; crops ruined, cattle drowned, people suffering already from the strain and anxiety of war longed in vain for sunshine and kindly weather.

‘It is the guns,’ they said, ‘the big guns cause the rain.’

Rachel was coming now. I tried to look forward to her as I had to Eleanor, but I could not. I thought again and again:

‘How shall I manage two children, who am so pressed with one?’

Eleanor would wake up early in the morning; she would talk and jump and keep us both awake, and she was getting very heavy to push in her perambulator. By the end of the day I was very tired. When she was in bed I could not think or read; I would drop down on the sofa and wait for Walter to come home.

I thought:

‘It cannot go on much longer now; it is bound to end very soon.’

XIII

In October Walter volunteered under the Derby scheme. He told me before he went out that he should not be taken.

‘I know they will not pass me,’ he said. ‘I know I am a crock’; but his voice was excited, and his eyes very bright. I knew that he hoped, in spite of what he said, that he might be taken.

All that afternoon while he was out at the Recruiting Office I sat indoors with Eleanor and tried to sew. It was a wet afternoon, and I could not face the heavy perambulator walk, pushing up hill to the Heath through the mud and rain.

I sat in the nursery with her, and she played on the floor. She had a cart on wheels that she pushed up and down, the wheels squeaked; I remembered that I had meant to oil them, but the oilcan was downstairs in the kitchen. I was too tired to go down and fetch it, and come back up all the stairs.

Eleanor made a great deal of noise; she upset chairs, and banged on the floor with bricks; she unwound reels of cotton, with which I was trying to sew; then she upset a bowl of flowers, and I had to go down to the bathroom and fetch a towel; and she screamed and screamed, though I had not scolded her at all. Her shrill, piping little voice pierced through my head like needles. I felt that I must scream or hit her, if she would not be quiet.

Then I thought:

‘How horrible that I should feel like this about my baby! I should not have believed, a year ago, that I could feel like this.’

At six o’clock, Walter came in.

I stood up and waited. I heard the front door slam, and then I heard him moving about in the hall. He opened the drawing-room door and looked in, and then I heard him coming up the stairs.

He opened the nursery door and stood still in the door way; and I stood still too, and looked at him.

There was an odd confused expression on his face that I could not make out. I did not know if he was glad or sorry; relieved or disappointed. He came in and threw a bunch of papers on the table in front of me.

‘C3!’ he said, with a laugh. ‘We need not have bothered!’ and it seemed to me as though my heart had stopped beating, and now suddenly it began with a rush.

And I said:

‘Oh, Walter, are you sorry?’

He sat down in the chair beside him, and faced me across the table.

He said:

‘Sorry? I don’t know; nobody likes to be C3, I suppose. Thank you for nothing—that is about all——’

I said:

‘I can’t be sorry. I can only be glad,’ and I put out both my hands to him, across the table.

‘It isn’t your fault,’ I said, ‘you have done your best. I think I may be glad.’

His eyes were fixed on the table, and he did not answer me; then he pulled his hands away, and buried his face.

‘I am not sorry either,’ he said huskily, ‘that is what is so awful. I thought I wanted to go. I thought I wanted to prove, to myself and every one else, that I could fight, and be a fine fellow. I made myself believe it, but it wasn’t true. I know now that I was afraid all the time!’

I went round beside him and kneeled on the floor and I leaned my cheek against his arm. I felt as though he were a child, as though he were much younger than me, and weaker, as I used sometimes to feel with Hugo, when we were children.

I said:

‘Dearest, does that matter? Isn’t every one afraid? It is the people who are afraid and go, that are the bravest; and you tried to go.’

He said:

‘Yes; but I haven’t gone. I don’t suppose now that I shall.’

Eleanor pushed herself against his knees.

She called:

‘Dadda, Dadda,’ and beat him with her brick.

At last he noticed her and picked her up on to his knee.

‘Well, Baby,’ he said, ‘are you glad that Dadda is not going to the War?’

‘Dadda dee-ar,’ Eleanor repeated; she laughed and grabbed at his glasses.

Walter put her down again and she began to scream.

Walter put his hands to his head and stood up.

‘Do make her be quiet, Helen,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand the noise.’

I tried to quiet Eleanor, but she went on crying. Walter made for the door, distractedly, and went out.

When at last I had pacified Eleanor, I sat down again in my chair and tried to think; but I could not. It seemed to me then, that I was too tired even to realize my own relief. I felt numb and stupid.

Then Eleanor stumbled over a footstool, and fell, and again she began to scream. I looked at the clock on the chimney-piece; it was bedtime, past bedtime. I picked Eleanor up, but she was angry; she kicked me, and went quite stiff. I struggled with her and carried her off to bed.

XIV

Walter got work at the Admiralty. He deciphered telegrams. He went there immediately after breakfast, and did not come home till eight or half-past eight. He made a point of arriving sooner than the other people in his room, and of leaving after they did. He was paid much less than his University salary, and that he would not take.

His College offered to pay him some proportion of his salary while he was at Government work, but he refused it.

‘It is the least I can do,’ he said. ‘Other men have to leave their work, whatever it is, and lose everything. We must manage to live more cheaply.’

We decided to do without the gardener who came one day a week; I said that I would keep the garden tidy.

Walter said he would dig on Sundays.

XV

Just after Christmas Guy was wounded, and came home for six weeks. He was shot in the shoulder; it was not dangerous. He was sent to a hospital at Southampton. Cousin John applied for leave to have him at Yearsly, a private hospital now, but that was against the regulations.

Cousin Delia went down to Southampton and stayed in an hotel. I went down to see him one day, before he went back.

He was sitting with Cousin Delia, and his arm was in a sling. They were in a little room with a balcony looking out on to the sea. Guy was laughing when I came in I saw his face sideways against the light, and I thought:

‘How dear he is, and how just the same as before.’ I don’t know why exactly, but I had been afraid of his seeming different.

We had tea together, Cousin Delia and Guy and I, and we were very happy. The War seemed a long way off; we did not talk about it. Guy had another month ahead of him before he need go back. He went to Yearsly at the end of his leave; he had a fortnight there, but I did not see him again that time.

XVI

Maud was running a Canteen at the Station at Lessingham.

Troop trains came through there every day, and very often at night. She took the night shifts as a rule, and did her school work by day. That was like Walter.

‘One likes to do one’s bit, you know,’ she said.

She talked a great deal about the ‘Tommies.’ What fine fellows they were; what splendid single-hearted fellows. It was true no doubt, and any way, even if they were not, it was a good thing to give them cakes and hot coffee; they were unfortunate enough, poor things, and I admired Maud for her work for them, and yet somehow, when she praised them, I wanted to run them down. I felt so sure that she did not understand in the least what they were like; difficult, intricate creatures, part noble, part ignoble, just as we all are; some brave, some cowardly, some understanding what they were doing, others not understanding at all; and Maud lumped them all together as ‘fine fellows,’ just because they were English soldiers, and we were at War; and I knew she would have called them that, whatever they were like.

Miss Mix used to visit the wounded soldiers in the London Hospital; she read to them, and wrote letters for them, and she took blinded soldiers out for walks. Good old Miss Mix; she too thought them all splendid, but it was quite different with her.

She said to me one day:

‘They have all done what I could not do. They have been through things I know I could not stand; and it is partly for my sake, for lots of old women like me, who seem not much use in the world, that they have done it; and it makes me very grateful to them, that is all I know.’

I went with Miss Mix several times, and wrote letters and read to them too, but I could not leave Eleanor much, now I had no nurse. Louise took her out for me then, but after Christmas Louise left us, and went into a Munition factory, and for several weeks I could get no one in her place. When I got another maid, she was very incompetent, and Sarah, the cook, did not like her at all. They quarrelled, and complained about each other a great deal; and then Sarah gave notice. She too went to work at Munitions; it was natural, I suppose, for they earned much higher wages. Mrs. Simms, the charwoman, cooked for us for a time, and at last I got a cook who was very old and deaf, and could not cook very much; but I was glad to get her, and she stayed for some time.

There was no time to do anything else while this was going on. I did part of the housework even then, for the old cook couldn’t, and the young maid was very slow. I did it badly, and it took me, too, a long time. I hated the housework; I hated the brooms and dusters; dreamed about them at night; and about the kitchen sink, where I had helped to wash up, while we had no cook. The brooms were kept in the bathroom, for we had no other place to keep them. There were pegs for them there to hang on, and a shelf I for polishes and dusters. I began to hate the bathroom too. It was a squalid bathroom, with a painted bath, that was painted green, and was chipped.

We had meant to put in a new bath, later on; but now of course we could not. The green bath worried me, and the paint wearing off; it seemed to get worse week by week, and the wall where the brushes hung was dirty.

Walter worked always in the evenings now. It was the only time he got for working at his book.

‘If I leave that altogether,’ he said, ‘I can’t live. It is the only thing that takes me away from the War.’

While he worked in his study, I sat downstairs and sewed. There was always mending to be done, and I mended. I did not mend well either; it seemed to me, at this time, that I could do nothing well.

And then, at the end of March, George Addington was killed.

XVII

I heard the news from Mollie, in a letter. The letter came at midday, by an unusual post, and I thought:

‘A letter from Mollie. How nice to hear from her!’

And I took it upstairs with me to read. Eleanor was asleep in her pram.

I sat down on my bed, and opened the letter. I thought of Mollie and how much I should like to see her.

‘George was killed on Wednesday,’ she wrote. ‘Shot through the head, leading an attack. He was killed instantaneously, and probably did not know that he was hit. I have had a telegram, that is all, from the War Office. It will be a long time before I can hear any more; three weeks at least, the letters take from there.

‘I can’t believe he is dead. It seems so strange, that one knew nothing about it on Wednesday, that one had no dream, no premonition nor anything. Oh, Helen, I wrote to him yesterday, and he was dead already——I should be glad, I know, that he was killed at once. It would be worse, much worse, if he were wounded and missing, as it might well have been; I keep telling myself that. I have written to Hugo at Ypres, to tell him of it. He will be badly cut up, I am afraid. He loved George very dearly; but he is bound to know soon; and to Guy too. I wish for Hugo’s sake, they were together.’

I sat a long time with the letter in my hand. I had not expected this, I had not somehow envisaged it at all. It seemed to me impossible, and not to be borne.

‘George dead! George killed!’ I repeated the words over and over to myself, and they had no meaning; and then I thought:

‘I shall never see George any more; never as long as I live; no one will see him any more.’

And then I thought:

‘I was unkind to George.’

I thought of George as I had last seen him, on the doorstep at Campden Hill Square. How he had come out with us, to say good-bye, and how he had smiled, that wide delightful smile, and yet he had looked sad; and how I had wondered what was the matter, and whether he had known the War would come.

And then I had not written to him when he joined the Army. I had written to Hugo, and to Guy, but not to him. I had meant to, of course. I had kept on meaning to, and putting it off, and then it had been too late.

I had written since, of course; I had written twice, and sent him a parcel of food; but that was not enough in a year and a half, I had meant to write oftener; he had said he enjoyed getting letters; I had meant to write regularly, but I was always bad at writing letters, and little things had got in the way.

Eleanor was asleep in the garden in her perambulator. I left her and went out; up the road, towards the Heath.

The road seemed full of soldiers, blue wounded soldiers. All roads were full of them at this time and when I came nearer I saw that they were blind. I dreaded the blinded soldiers; I hated to see them, for I had an idea, somehow, I don’t know why, that Hugo might be blinded. I passed the blinded soldiers, and got beyond them to the Heath. The trees were coming out; light green buds on the branches; and there were crocuses in the grass.

The sun came down through the branches, and shone on the crocuses. It was a fine day, and warm for March. I sat on a seat, and thought about George, and I thought:

‘It is all very well for the flowers, and for the buds on the trees; they come again after the winter; they are born again. There will be other boys growing up, and other men, but never George again. If the world goes on for millions of years, there will never be anyone who is what he was.’

And a sense of wild anger and indignation possessed me. I felt:

‘This is wrong and wicked and a horrible mistake, this War that has killed George. What is it worth? What is it for? What can it ever achieve that will make up for him?’

And I felt:

‘It must be stopped. I have been asleep and woken up. I can’t let this War go on that has killed George.’

‘George killed! George _dead_!’ I repeated the words again. I felt as though the world had begun to reel, as though the foundations of my life had begun to crumble.

‘What next?

Guy too and Hugo . . . .’ The encroaching reality of the War struck through my last defences. I felt that I understood what it was, for the first time.

A clock in a church struck one, and I went home again. Eleanor would be waking up; she would be crying for me. I must hurry; I would be late, and all the way home I was thinking:

‘What can I do? I must do something to stop this War.’

Eleanor was awake and screaming. I went to her and got her up from her perambulator, and washed her, and gave her her dinner; and after dinner, I dressed her to go out, and put her back in the perambulator, and pushed her out on to the Heath. I had no time to think any more, for she kept talking to me in her insistent baby way, that in my heart I loved, but to-day, I wanted to be quiet. I wanted to get away somewhere and think. I felt excited, elated, somehow, as though I had discovered a truth of immense importance; something that was the key to all our trouble.

‘The War must be stopped. We must stop it now.’

The words kept repeating themselves through my head all the afternoon, and I felt that in a moment, if only I could get away by myself and be quiet, I should know how this could be done.

When Eleanor was in bed I could be quiet, and think about it. It would not be long now till she was in bed.

And then when I got her into bed, Walter came home.

He was unusually early, more than an hour before his time. He had such a headache, he said, he could not work any longer, and so he had come home. I was up in our bedroom when he came in, tucking Eleanor up. I sang to her always when she was in bed. She did not understand very much what I sang, so I sang all sorts of songs, and to-night I was singing the Agnus Dei that Guy and Cousin Delia used to sing. It seemed to fit in with what I felt to-night; the sins of the world; our sins; and the hope that help was at hand.

Walter came in heavily, and sat down on the bed.

‘Daddy came,’ said Eleanor, and popped up her head.

I looked round at Walter, surprised to see him there so soon. And then he told me about his headache. I could not take in what he said; it seemed unimportant and trivial; little things about some one a long way off.

I said:

‘George is killed,’ and stood looking at him, across Eleanor’s little cot.

He drew in his breath sharply, and put his hands up to his head. That was a gesture of his, familiar to me now.

I gave him Mollie’s letter, and he read it in silence.

‘For you’—he said at last, ‘and for me——’

And he dropped his hands limply on his knee.

I was astonished at the expression of acute personal sorrow on his face; he had not seemed to care much for George when he was alive. I went across to him, and sat beside him on the bed. I stroked his shoulder, I know, and tried to console him. I don’t know what I said. It happened like this so often now; these fits of despondency, almost of remorse, and my attempts to encourage him. It had become in a sense automatic. It seemed to me, at times, that I had no more to give; that I was drawing water from a well that was dry; but to-night it was different; I felt somehow beyond all that. I did not speak to him of my conviction, of what I felt myself about George, and George’s death. It was no use speaking to Walter of things like that, I knew.

We went to bed early on account of Walter’s headache. I, too, was glad to go.

‘Now I can be quiet and think,’ I said to myself.

And I lay awake a long time after Walter was asleep and looked up into the darkness.

And I thought:

‘What is it I must do? What is it I am just going to understand?’

It was very quiet in our road. There was no sound of traffic; only a dog in a garden not far off barked for a little while, and a cat called somewhere from a roof. A taxi hooted turning a corner at the end of the road, then it changed gear for going up the hill; there was a grating, grinding noise as it changed gear, and then that passed out of hearing. Some one walked past on the pavement, a man it seemed to be, walking very fast. Then again there were cats, and again a taxi horn, and after that for a long time, it was quite quiet.

And as I lay still and listened to the noises in the night, all my excitement seemed to ebb away, and I understood that I had discovered nothing, and that there was nothing I could do.

I could not stop the War, and nobody could. We were caught in it all of us, all nations, all people in the nations; it would go on, and more and more people would be killed; hundreds and thousands of people would be killed every day, and I could do nothing at all, and I understood too that George was dead, and that I had loved him dearly, and that he who was so full of promise, such a fine, splendid nature, would do nothing with his life; he was just at the beginning, and there would be no more.

XVIII

The next day, Walter had influenza. He was in bed for a week, and after that the cook got it, and then the housemaid. They were a long time getting better.

News came of a Republic in Ireland; fighting in the Dublin streets, repression, retaliation; then the fall of Kut. Then the Conscription Bill was passed.

In June, Claude Pincent was killed in Mesopotamia. A week after he was killed, they gave him a V.C. We had not seen him for a long time; people said that he had taken to drink or drugs or something, but I don’t suppose it was true.

Then Anthony Cowper was killed. He was a dear, merry fellow and enjoyed his life.

‘Guy will miss him very much,’ I thought.

Freddy Furze came home on leave in July. We saw him several times. I felt since George’s death, the precariousness of life and was grateful for people still alive.

In August, Rachel was born. I had hoped again for a son, but I minded less this time; perhaps because I had expected less, and had felt less about it altogether. I had been afraid that the baby must be affected by the War, and by my own state of mind all through the winter, but she was a fine child, even larger and stronger than the first.

Mrs. Sebright came to stay and look after Eleanor while I was in bed. She was very competent and managed Eleanor very well. She looked after the house too, and ordered the meals, and I had nothing to do; and I thought:

‘If only I could lie here for ever, and never get up and never have to go out into the world again.’

I did not want to read or even talk very much, only lie still and do nothing; and sometimes for nothing at all, I would lie and cry.

And then Hugo came home on leave, and I did not see him.

I did not know he was coming, and he came to see me.

I was resting in the afternoon. They had drawn the curtains and put me to sleep, but I was not asleep. I heard the front door bell, and heard the door open, but I did not know it was Hugo, and they sent him away.

They did not know him, of course, they did not know who he was; and they told him I was resting and could not be disturbed; it was too soon too to see visitors, the nurse said, he must come again in a few days.

And Hugo went away.

‘Tell her that I came,’ he said. ‘Give her my love.’

He did not come again in a few days, for he was down at Yearsly all that week and half the next, and then he was sent for to go back to France; his leave was cut short by four days, and he could not come again.

XIX

I must have been in a foolish state those first weeks after Rachel was born. I don’t believe I was ill really, but I felt very ill; and things worried me that should not have worried me at all.

I got bothered again about the bathroom; about the paint coming off the bath, and the wall that was dirty where the cedar mop hung up. I kept thinking about that bathroom over and over again; I could not get away from it. I thought how nice it would be to have another bathroom; all white tiles with nickel taps and glass shelves, like bathrooms I had seen in shops. I had never lived with a bathroom like that, for at Yearsly the bath was a big old-fashioned one in a wooden casing, and at Campden Hill Square it was the same. I don’t know why this got into my head, or why it stayed there, but it became an obsession. I kept planning how it would be, and where the glass shelf would be, and how many white tiles would be needed, though I knew, of course, that it could not be done; even if we had the money to spend, our bathroom was not big enough to be like the one I planned; but it kept me from thinking of the War, and about Hugo, and Guy, and George; it kept me also from thinking about getting up again with two babies to look after instead of one, and Mrs. Sebright gone away.

Walter found me crying one day when he came in to see me, and he asked me what was the matter, and I said that I did not like the bathroom, and the paint peeling off the bottom of the bath. That sounded so silly, that it made me cry more.

‘And the wall is all grey behind the mop,’ I said.

Walter put his hand to his head in his tired, bewildered way.

‘But, Helen dear,’ he said, ‘you can’t be crying about _that_?’

And I nodded my head.

‘I do so want a bathroom, all white, with tiles and glass shelves and shining taps,’ I said.

‘But, Helen, you know we can’t afford that sort of thing,’ he said, ‘even if it were reasonable to do it. Tiles are very expensive.’

I said:

‘I know; I know they are expensive; I know I shall never have a bathroom like that; that is why I am crying.’

Walter was trying to be kind.

‘You know, Helen,’ he said, ‘I sometimes think you don’t quite understand; quite apart from the question of whether we could afford it, do you think it would be right to spend a lot of money on white tiles and shelves when the War is going on? Do you quite realize what the War means? Hundreds and thousands of people being killed every day and maimed and blinded.’

I put out my hand to stop him:

‘No, no,’ I said, and my voice sounded unnatural and shaky and I could not control it. ‘I know all that; I know it would be wrong. Please don’t let us talk about it any more.’

Walter looked hurt and puzzled with me, and I could not explain.

That night I could not go to sleep for a long time, and when I did, I dreamt of Hugo being blinded.

Mrs. Sebright was very kind to me. She seemed to like me much better when I was ill and silly; some people are like that; they do like anyone better who is ill; and the Doctor was kind, the Doctor Chilcote whom I had had before. She said I must go away for change when I got up, and I said I couldn’t, I could not leave Walter and the house, I said; but she arranged it all.

I was to go with the children to Cousin Delia, to Yearsly, where I had not been for over a year; and Mrs. Sebright would stay with Walter, and the nurse would go with me for a week.

I was glad to have it arranged; I tried to look forward to it, but it did not seem real to me somehow; and when the nurse went away after that first week?

What would I do then, I wondered.

XX

Yearsly was now a hospital. Less serious cases were sent on from the big General Hospital, or convalescents. The garden was full of bright blue suits, as the streets in London had been. There were ten wounded soldiers there at this time. One of the Lacey girls was there with Cousin Delia to nurse them. How she made room for us I do not know, but there was room, and I had my own bedroom, and my old bed that I had had always when I was a girl.

It was quiet at Yearsly, and the War seemed further off; even the soldiers did not bring it close, for they were getting better, and they were happy to be there.

It was like a dream somehow being there with the babies and the soldiers; the same and yet not the same; and the men were gone away from the garden and the farm.

I went down to the village with Cousin Delia, and saw the same people that I used to know, but they too were different. Old Joseph’s son had been killed, and John Elliot from the farm was missing, and all the young men were away.

It seemed more changed in a way at Yearsly than in London, or I realized the changes more distinctly.

The horses were gone too, commandeered by the Government, except Guy’s hunter, which he had got with him; and the flower garden was partly growing vegetables and partly run to grass, for old Joseph was alone now, with no young man to help him.

The roses were still the same, and the High Wood, and Cousin Delia was the same herself, as always.

It was like stopping still awhile to be with her. I did not think ahead; I tried not to think of going home.

Cousin Delia kept the nurse for a fortnight longer. She said I was not fit to look after the children myself.

I thought:

‘It is wrong; I ought to do it’; but I blessed her for the decision and was glad.

She spoke to me of Hugo’s visit. ‘You must see him on his next leave,’ she said.

She said he was well, but unhappy, how could one expect otherwise. She spoke of George too, and Mollie.

She said:

‘I wish I could have seen Mollie, but she cannot get away from her hospital. She is going to Salonika soon, that is better for her I think.’

XXI

When the time came for me to go home, I found it very hard.

I thought:

‘Supposing I were a soldier going back to the War.’

And I felt ashamed, but I did not dread it less. Cousin Delia too did not want to let me go. She said that I ought to have more help at home, a better maid, who would help me with the children; I said I would try to get one.

I dismissed the little girl I had, and got a good maid, who took the children out in the afternoons for me. It was much better while she stayed, and she stayed for about a year. Then the Air Raids began, and made her nervous, and then she went away.

Walter had been for his ten days’ holiday while I was at Yearsly. He went to the Roman Wall again, and walked about it by himself. He came back refreshed, and more cheerful for a time.

The battle of the Somme was in progress at this time. Guy got a D.S.O., and Freddy Furze was killed.

In September, two Zeppelins were brought down on the East Coast.

Prices were rising fast; food, and clothes, and wages. Coal was expensive too; it became more and more difficult to manage with the money we had. I tried to manage; I kept accounts of all I spent; I tried having herrings for lunch, and tea instead of coffee for breakfast I tried jam instead of butter; but it seemed to make no difference.

I had no new clothes this autumn, and Walter had none. He didn’t mind about it, but I did. I darned and mended, and it took me a long time; but Eleanor needed new clothes, and I had no time to make them when the mending was all done; it never was done.

I had to help Ada with the housework, as she helped me with the children. I was tired all the time, and that upset Rachel. I had not milk enough, and she began to flag. She slept badly at night, waking and screaming at four, at three, at two o’clock. Then I weaned her, and the interminable business of prepared foods began. It seemed to me that I spent hours in the day measuring and mixing milk, and cream, and water. No food suited Rachel. She lost weight, she was cross, she was sick. I grew anxious about her, and then frightened. I began to think she would die.

At last the food was right, and she recovered; but she was always a more restless child than Eleanor had been. She would not lie still in her cot when she was awake, but cried to be picked up.

Since the gardener left off coming, the garden had got untidy. I tried to cope with it, but there was so little time. The grass grew long and ragged, and we had no mowing machine. Walter said we could not buy one, till after the War.

I tried to cut the lawn with shears, but it was not a success. They would not cut it properly, and the stooping made my back ache. It ached very often now, and my feet ached and my head.

I thought:

‘It can’t go on much longer. It must end soon now.’

XXII

In December, our balance at the Bank was overdrawn.

Walter came in with his face all white and tense. He threw the pass-book on the table in front of me.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Overdrawn at last. I have been expecting this.’

I felt as though he had hit me, his voice was hostile; he looked as though he hated me.

I said:

‘Walter, I am sorry; I have done my best.’

‘I can’t understand it. Other women manage, why can’t you? Other women on smaller incomes than ours; my mother did.’

I said:

‘I know they do.’

He said:

‘I must earn more, I suppose. I must do examining or something of that sort in the evenings; I must give up my book—that was the last thing that kept me alive!’

I said:

‘Don’t do that, Walter. I will try again; perhaps we could manage better without a cook.’

He said:

‘You couldn’t cook; you can’t manage as it is; and your grandmother keeps telling me you are overworked.’

I did not know that Grandmother had said so. I did not know that she had noticed it at all.

I said:

‘I could learn to cook. I would rather do that than housework.’

He said:

‘Don’t talk nonsense!’

He clasped his head in his hands, and leaned across the table.

‘It has never happened before,’ he said, ‘to be overdrawn. It is a disgrace.’

I said:

Cousin John was overdrawn quite often; I don’t think it mattered much.’

He said:

‘Damn your Cousin John! _They_ have capital behind them. We have not.’

I said:

‘I have a little, Walter; couldn’t we use that?’

He said:

‘I won’t use your capital, and I won’t be helped by your relations. Do you know,’ he asked suddenly, ‘your grandmother offered to pay for a nurse for the children?’

I said:

‘I did not know.’

‘Yes,’ he said very bitterly. ‘She did, and I refused. I told her that you could manage without, as my mother had managed. I think I was rude to her. She was displeased with me.’

I wondered vaguely when all this had happened.

I thought:

‘How dear of Grandmother.’

We had stopped having lunch with her on Sundays. I had not seen her often since Rachel was born.

He got up again, abruptly, and left the room. I stayed alone and cried, and wished that I were dead.

Afterwards Walter was sorry.

He said he was sorry; he said he hardly knew what he had said.

He said:

‘I had such a headache, and the pass-book was the last straw. I was awfully upset. I was a beast.’

‘Dear, dear Helen,’ he said suddenly, ‘you must forgive me. You don’t know what you are to me.’

I said, of course, that it did not matter. I said again that I was sorry; but I felt him still unkind.

I thought:

‘He does not love me for what I am. He wants me different all the time. What I have and could give him is of no use to him.’

That winter wore through somehow, as the last had done, and on January 31st came the announcement of ‘Unrestricted Submarine Warfare.’

Walter looked grim.

He said:

‘We shall begin to feel it in earnest now.’

Prices were rising still, but gradually. There was no visible difference after this for some time.

Then the Russian Revolution came. That made me think of Sophia Lane Watson. I wondered where she was. I remembered her old enthusiasm for Russian Revolutionists. Would she be pleased at this, I wondered?

And then America came into the War.

XXIII

In June Guy came home on leave. He was at Yearsly first, and then three days in London. He stayed with Grandmother in Campden Hill Square. I went to see him there and he came up to me. He wanted to dance, he said, it was so good to be at home. ‘Let us be jolly,’ he said, ‘I have only two days more.’

So I went with him to a club, somewhere near Bond Street it was. We had dinner first in Soho, and then we went and danced. I had no dancing clothes now, except very old ones, but Guy did not mind.

‘That is the dress you used to wear,’ he said, and he was pleased.

It was like being born again to dance with Guy. The years between, and the War, seemed to fall away; it was as though all that had happened was wiped away, and we were back again in 1912 before the War, before even I was married.

We danced till two o’clock; then Guy saw me home. We would do it again the next night, we said.

Walter was in the study working, when I got home.

He said:

‘You are very late, you will be tired to-morrow.’

I said:

‘I think that I shall not be tired any more. I have come alive again.’

And I laughed, and kissed him.

Rachel woke up at half-past five, but I did not mind.

I thought:

‘We shall dance again to-night.’

And we did. We went to the same restaurant, and the same club, and we danced till nearly three.

‘This has been good,’ Guy said. ‘Thank you, Helen.’

And I said:

‘Thank you, Guy.’

He went back the next day, at a quarter to twelve. Mollie was in Salonika now; he had not seen her; I was sorry about that.

Cousin John and Cousin Delia came up to see him off. I saw them at the station. Then I went back to Walter, and the house, and the children, but for a long time it was better after that.

I wished that Walter could dance; he had promised me once that he would learn.

I asked him now; it was foolish of me.

He said:

‘I have no time to dance, and I don’t want to. I don’t understand, Helen, how you can bear to dance at a time like this.’

I said:

‘If Guy can bear to——’

He said:

‘Oh, Guy!’ and stopped short.

‘I think it is abominable,’ he said.

Afterwards he was sorry. Walter was always sorry afterwards, when he had been cross, but I could not forget the things he said. He broke his glasses soon after this, the rimless ones that he had bought to please me. He would not buy any more. He went back to the old spectacles with the black steel frames. I could not bear him in those spectacles.

XXIV

The children had whooping cough that summer. When it was better we went to the seaside. We took lodgings on the Norfolk coast; it was cheap to go there because of the War; people were afraid of the German Navy, and bombardments from the sea, and Zeppelins.

There was no bombardment, nothing while we were there, but it was very dreary. There were soldiers there as everywhere, and barbed wire along the cliffs. It was cold too and rainy.

Walter came down for a fortnight. The children still coughed a great deal, they coughed especially at night. Maud came for a bit too, and helped me with the children.

I thought:

‘That is kind of Maud—I have been horrid about Maud’—but even so, I was glad when she went away.

I was glad to leave that place. London was much better than that. We came home in September.

I went to see Grandmother at Campden Hill Square. She was away and there was a new maid who did not know me.

Mrs. Woodruffe was in the country, she said. She was expected back next month.

I knew she had been at Yearsly. I had hoped that she was back. The maid did not offer me tea, and I did not ask her for it. I felt disappointed to an absurd degree. I walked across Campden Hill to Kensington Church, and thought of my wedding there four years before. I took a bus from there down to Chelsea and walked past Mollie’s flat. The blinds were down and there were no flowers in the window-boxes. That was natural, of course, with Mollie far away. I turned back again towards the bridge. I went into the little tea shop where we used to have meals very often. Here too the waitress was new, everything was changed; different and strange. It seemed as though I had been away for years and years.

And then as I sat and waited for some tea, I caught sight of my own face in a looking-glass that was hanging on the wall; and I realized suddenly with a shock that my own face was changed. I looked so shabby, so provincial, somehow, and dull. I had not realized before that I looked like that now. I had hardly thought of my own appearance for so long.

I stared at myself in that looking-glass, and felt ready to cry.

How was it that I had not seen myself like this before?

I looked at myself every morning, of course, when I did my hair, but I had not really looked for months, even when I dressed to go out with Guy. Was I getting old? I was nearly thirty now, was that really old?

I had seen myself so often in the same looking-glass before, an oval looking-glass it was, in a dark lacquered frame. I had sat so often at this same table with Mollie, and George, and Guy, and Hugo. Would they all be changed when I saw them again? If I did see any of them—George I would never see.

I tried to remember his face as he had last sat there, in that little restaurant, at that same table; but I could not remember any particular time as the last.

He at least had not faded nor tarnished:

‘They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,

The Lads who will die in their glory and never be old.’

I repeated the lines to myself, and they made me happy, with their familiar beauty. I remembered the first time that I had read them, lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, at Campden Hill Square. A big, deep sofa with a green Morris chintz.

I had had a bad cold; it was winter and the fire was burning in the grate. I had watched the light flickering on the ceiling as I lay on my back, and repeated the lines with wonder and delight to myself. All this came back to me.

I had thought them so true, so full of meaning; and how little I had really understood.

Now I was oppressed and overpowered by the dread of old age, of deterioration, and change, and loss. It was gone already, the wonder of youth, and light, and life; it was slipping through my fingers before I had had time to realize and enjoy it. This was not life, this daily drudgery, this struggle to keep going, to get through, to exist. I was marking time, we were all marking time, waiting and waiting for the strain to relax, for the War to end; and meantime our youth was going.

Before in the old days we had been waiting, too, but that had been different. We had been waiting then for something to begin, to happen, this was waiting for something to end, to stop happening.

The waitress brought my tea. The toast was spread with a very rank margarine. The cake tasted of cocoa butter, and I remembered what delicious bread and butter they used to give us here.

I sat still for a long time after my tea, looking out at the familiar view; the trees, the wide road, and the river. Then I paid my bill and walked up the street to my bus.

XXV

A few days after this the Air Raids began.

We had heard, of course, that they would come. There had been the Zeppelin raids; people had talked of bombardment from the air; of London being destroyed; of German plans for more and larger aeroplanes than anyone had seen; but it had not seemed very real. And now, when the first raid came, I did not realize what it was.

I was undressing in my bedroom; it was about half-past ten, and I heard the warning whistles. Then came the shouts through a megaphone, ‘Take cover; take cover,’ a rhythmical, rather melancholy shout, like a sort of refrain. I stood still with my hairbrush in my hand; I remember that I was brushing my hair. The gas was turned low for fear of waking the baby, Rachel was the baby, in her cot at the end of the room; and it flickered a little in the draught from the open window, though the blinds were tightly drawn. I was thinking, I don’t know why, of a summer holiday when I was a child, with Guy and Hugo, at Yearsly. I was thinking of the high trees, and the swishing sound of the branches against the house; and I remembered how at first, when I was very little, I had been almost frightened of that sound, and afterwards I had got to love it.

It was a quiet place, unshaken, unshakeable, so it seemed to me; even being a hospital had not changed it really.

And Cousin Delia too, she was always the same. I thought of her calm face with the mass of grey hair swept upwards from the forehead, and those great grey eyes of hers, that were like Guy’s, but quieter. I could picture her face older, sadder, with more shadowed eyes, but I could not picture it harassed or worried or upset, nor marked with the fear or strain of the War.

And a great longing for Cousin Delia came over me, a longing for the quiet security of Yearsly, for the old high trees and the swishing branches, the sun-dried brick of the walled garden, the pear trees outspread against the wall, and the jasmine gate, and the droning of the bees. Inside that garden it was always sheltered and warm, outside the wind rocked through the beech trees, the clouds trailed rolling shadows across the wide green lawns, the high grass swayed and bent, like waves at sea, but the peace and quiet remained unbroken.

I thought of Guy and Hugo as boys, as they had been in those early summers when first I was there, boys in the branches of the beech trees in the High Wood, calling to each other among the calling of the rooks; and regret came over me, poignant, impersonal regret, at the inevitable pathos of existence; the relentlessness of time, and change, and the haunting dearness of the past.

I thought:

‘It will never be so again. Never in millions of years.’

I heard the shrill prolonged whistling in the street, and the hurrying rush of feet, the sing-song, almost musical cadence of the ‘Take cover,’ as it drew nearer and louder, and then passed further on and away down another street, but I did not give my mind to it; it did not recall my thoughts; and then the guns began; first one, then another, then a third, at intervals of a few minutes first, then closer together, then in bursts. One big anti-Aircraft Station was close behind us on Parliament Hill. The report of its gun boomed out, with an almost deafening roar; the windows rattled and the doors shook.

And then I realized that an Air Raid had begun, and I felt excited, and wondered if I should be afraid.

I crossed to the window and looked out. It was a brilliant moonlight night, searchlights still swung across the sky, crossing, intersecting, passing each other, but the moonlight dimmed their brightness, and I thought:

‘How beautiful it is.’

I looked up in the sky for Zeppelins or aeroplanes, but I could see nothing; only the tiny fleecy clouds, high up, incredibly high up, luminous and unearthly in the moonlight.

The street outside was empty, but further down in the bigger thoroughfares I could still hear the whistles and the warning cries and the shuffle of feet.

I felt my heart beating, but I was not afraid. I wondered:

‘What next? What will happen now?’

Then there was a stir inside the house; feet on the stairs, the opening and shutting of doors.

Walter came in from the study. I had forgotten Walter; and Maud came downstairs from her bedroom; I had forgotten that Maud was staying with us just then.

They pulled me back from the window.

Maud said:

‘Quick, we must get the children downstairs.’

She went to the cot and picked Rachel up.

She said:

‘Ada has taken Eleanor down already.’

Walter said:

‘That’s right, Maud: that’s right. Hurry up, Helen, why are you waiting?’

He took me by the shoulder and pushed me in front of him across the room, turning out the gas as he passed, and I went where he pushed me. I felt quite passive, and as though I were a long way off, and looking on We sat downstairs in the dining-room; the servants were there already with Eleanor. She was pink with sleep and rather puzzled. They had wrapped her up in a rug, and she sat on Walter’s knee. I took Rachel on mine; she was still fast asleep.

We could hear the shrapnel like hailstones on the roof, and in the street, and the long wail of the shells, and then between, came the sound of engines, a droning sinister sound.

And I thought:

‘A bomb might fall and kill us any moment; it might fall now, while I think.’

But it had no meaning for me at all, and I thought:

‘How funny we look sitting here in our dressing-gowns.’

For only Walter was still dressed, and I thought how funny the old cook looked with her hair down her back, and I thought Maud looked much nicer than she did in her ordinary clothes.

Maud was trying to talk to the maids, to distract their attention from the noise, and I noticed the tremor in her voice.

And I thought:

‘How funny that is; Maud is quite frightened.’

Now came a dropping of bombs, louder, more reverberating explosions, one after another. I counted seven in quick succession, then there was a lull. Again we could hear the whizzing of the engines, louder and louder, and then less loud, and again the barrage and the wailing of the shells and again the pattering like hailstones in the street.

Ada and the cook shuddered and shut their eyes.

Eleanor asked:

‘Why is there such a noise?’

Maud said:

‘Gun practice, my dear child. They are practising with guns.’

And she seemed satisfied, she was still half asleep.

And I thought:

‘Those bombs have fallen somewhere; they have fallen on something; people must have been killed.’

But it did not mean much to me even so.

Maud said violently:

‘And they call this War. I don’t.’

I said:

‘But what else is it?’

Maud said:

‘Murder. Massacre.’

And the cook and Ada nodded their heads.

The funny old cook with her grey plait of hair sat up very straight in her chair.

She said:

‘I could find it in my heart to be a second Charlotte Corday.’

I was surprised at her, and I could not remember what Charlotte Corday had done.

She shook her fist and said:

‘That Emperor William.’

And I thought again:

‘How funny it all is.’

And then I thought:

‘It is wrong to think it funny.’

And we sat there till the firing died away.

There was silence for a while and then ‘All Clear’ sirens were sounded.

Maud drew a deep breath and stood up.

Walter passed his hands across his forehead.

He said:

‘At last. Now we can go to bed.’

And I thought:

‘It is over now. That was an air raid.’

And then I thought:

‘George is dead; and Guy and Hugo are out there, where it goes on all the time.’

And I shivered and felt cold.

Walter said:

‘I wonder how Mother stood it.’

And Maud said:

‘She ought not to be alone.’

XXVI

The next night there was another raid, and every night that week. Walter was all on edge.

The children became fretful with their nights disturbed. I thought it would be better to stay in our beds, quietly, as though nothing was happening, but Walter said that was silly.

He said we must take the reasonable precautions. So we sat downstairs, night after night, Walter and I, and the servants, with the children half asleep.

Maud had gone to Mrs. Sebright, and taken her down to the school. ‘People should leave London, who could,’ she said, ‘it was foolish to stay behind.’

And then the raids stopped for a bit, and the nights were quiet, and we slept again and were glad.

Afterwards, when they came, we stayed in bed.

Food was now difficult to get. There were voluntary rations. I spent hours every week weighing and measuring them out. People who kept to the rations put cards up in their windows. We kept to the rations, but we did not put up a card. The taste of beans and lentils became sickening to us all.

Ada gave notice, on account of the air raids, and it was a long time before I got another maid.

The long months of the winter passed on slowly, harder and more difficult than the last. No sugar, no fat, no fuel, and the weary hours of waiting in a queue for the horrid food we got.

I got to loathe the shops where I had to market; the butcher’s shop in the High Street, where I waited every Tuesday and Saturday, the grocer’s where I waited hours, to be told in the end that the margarine had given out, that there were no beans, that tea had risen again in price; I had to take the children very often, and Rachel was heavy now to hold. I watched the other women in the queue, working women mostly, more tired and draggled than me, with children more fretful than mine, and wondered at their patience; and sometimes I wondered if they really minded it all as much as I did.

It was so cold that Winter. I had never known such cold; perhaps it was the lack of fats that made one cold, Maud said so anyway; and there was so little coal. We shut the drawing-room up, and the study too, and lived in the dining-room downstairs. There we could have a fire; and Walter at his office was warm; but I was always cold; and I thought of Guy and Hugo in the trenches; Hugo had always felt the cold so much, and then I thought:

‘George will not feel cold any more, at all.’

Walter and I saw each other very little. He worked almost always in the evenings after dinner; examination papers now, to make more money, not his proto-Hittite Script; and on Saturdays and Sundays as a rule. He was not happy, I knew; how could he be? but we were like people in a fog; we could not see light, nor each other, we could only struggle for breath, to keep alive; and again we said:

‘It cannot last much longer. It is bound to end very soon.’

My grandmother was still at Yearsly. Cousin Delia had kept her there.

XXVII

In February, Hugo came home on leave, and I saw him. He wrote to me that time and said he was coming. He would be in London for a few days first, and then at Yearsly.

His letter came at breakfast time amid the clatter of plates and feeding the children. I opened it, and could think of nothing else.

Three days later, Hugo himself came. I was coming back from my afternoon walk with the children, pushing the heavy perambulator up the hill, thinking, wondering if he would come to-day. Suddenly I saw him at the end of the road, coming to meet me; a long way off still, but unmistakably Hugo.

I had not seen him in khaki before, and the silhouette was strange, and although I had expected it, it was a shock; but I knew his walk, and I knew the poise of his head. I stopped the perambulator and stood still.

My heart leaped up and throbbed. I had a wild impulse to turn round and run away. I had been counting the hours until this moment, but now that it had come, I was afraid. I dreaded this meeting with Hugo in a way that surprised myself. I felt it to be charged with emotion, painful, stirring emotion, as of all the past revoked; of lost youth, and lost joy, and that terrifying sense of regret for the passage of time and of life. As I hesitated, he saw me. He took off his cap and waved it and I had no choice, I waved back and went on to meet him.

We seemed a long time reaching each other. Then we shook hands, and stood still. I looked into Hugo’s face, and he looked into mine; it seemed at first, as though we had nothing to say.

Hugo’s face frightened me; he was smiling now, the faint half hesitating smile I knew so well, but there was something new in the very smile, in his mouth, above all in his eyes, a desperate, haunted expression, that I had not seen before.

I said:

‘I am glad to see you, Hugo, it is good of you to come up here.’

He said:

‘Why, of course I came.’

He turned to the children, and looked at them with an amused, half puzzled expression, and then back to me.

‘I can’t get used to the idea of you with children, you know,’ he said; and then he added abruptly: ‘they are neither of them like you.’

I said:

‘No; they are like Walter’s family, both of them.’

I had not admitted this before, to anyone, nor yet that I minded about it, but I did.

‘I wish I had a child,’ said Hugo suddenly, staring away across the street. ‘A son—you must have a son, Helen.’

And he turned back to me.

I said:

‘Yes, I hope I shall, next time.’

We walked on slowly, towards the house. The children were unusually quiet, staring with round eyes at Hugo.

We talked of Guy; Hugo had seen him at Amiens, and of Mollie, still nursing in Salonika. We did not talk of George. Then we reached the door of the garden and went in.

I pushed the door open and we went inside. The garden with its uncut grass looked sordid and forlorn. I was sorry Hugo should come to it like that.

I opened the door of the house with my latchkey, and lifted the children out. Eleanor ran tumbling up the steps and across the hall, Rachel I had to carry. I set her on a chair in the hall and came back for the perambulator.

Hugo helped me to lift it up the steps, and past the umbrella stand.

He hung up his hat and coat, and shut the door. I watched him as though it was a dream. It seemed so strange to see him there. I took him downstairs to the dining-room where tea was being laid.

‘We have shut the drawing-room up,’ I said, ‘because of the coal,’ and I wished I need not have him in that room where the ugly sideboard was. It looked so dull that room, and so crowded up now we used it altogether, and I wanted to have Hugo in a beautiful room.

I left him there while I went upstairs with the children. Their undressing and preparing for tea seemed to take longer than usual that day.

When I came downstairs, Mrs. Sebright was there. I had quite forgotten that she was coming to tea.

Mrs. Sebright asked Hugo about his journey, about the length of his leave, about his billets in France. Hugo answered her questions quietly, smiling very faintly his hesitating smile. Mrs. Sebright talked about submarine warfare; she asked him if he knew what the latest inventions for catching submarines were; Hugo did not know.

Mrs. Sebright seemed to find no difficulty in talking to Hugo. She asked him things that I could not have asked.

I could not talk to him at all while she was there. I sat and watched him while he talked to her. I felt the precious moments slipping away, precious, irrevocable moments, and wondered what it was that had happened to him.

‘Is it just the War?’ I wondered. ‘Is that what it is?’

I felt a passionate longing to talk to him of the War, of my soul and his, to help him and be helped.

Tea was over, and cleared away. We drew our chairs up to the fire. Nobody spoke much. Eleanor and Rachel played with wooden bricks on the floor behind us. Hugo helped them to build a little while, then he stood up to go. I went with him up the stairs into the hall.

I said:

‘Hugo, I must see you again.’

He stood looking up at me from the lower step.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When? Let us go and see some pictures.’

I said:

‘Yes; to-morrow, after lunch I will come.’

‘I will meet you at the station; at Charing Cross, at the Tube.’

I said:

‘I will be there at half-past two.’

‘Right. Good-bye till then.’

‘Good-bye.’

I stood, and looked after him; his figure was lost quickly in the shadow of the darkened street.

And I thought:

‘He has come and is gone; but I shall see him again.’

I thought:

‘To-morrow; at half-past two.’

Then I thought:

‘Hugo.’

I asked Mrs. Sebright if she would look after the children for me the next afternoon. She had done so sometimes before, when there was no maid I could trust, and she said she would.

‘I want to see Hugo again, down in London,’ I said. ‘He will only be here for two days, just now.’

‘Poor young man,’ Mrs. Sebright said, ‘he looks very ill. Has he had shell shock, do you think, at any time?’

I said I didn’t think so, but I felt a rush of gratitude to Mrs. Sebright for her kindly tone. I bent down suddenly and kissed her, and she looked surprised.

‘Poor boys,’ she said, ‘poor boys, I pity them indeed.’

And it struck me as very strange that she should class Hugo in any group—as one among others like him—he who to me had always seemed unique; so wholly different from all other people.

XXVIII

Hugo was waiting for me on the platform. We made our way through the hurrying crowds of people, and out of the station, hardly speaking a word.

It was a grey day, a heavy overcast sky threatened rain. We crossed Trafalgar Square, to the Admiralty Arch; then we went through it, and turned to the left, across the open space of the Horse Guards Parade. We walked along where the water used to be, by the War Trades Intelligence Department, those strange piles of Government buildings that usurped the bright coolness of the water. In one small remaining corner the pelicans still lived, crowding with ruffled feathers on their little clumps of rock.

We walked along to the end, to Buckingham Palace, then we turned back, to the right, along the Mall.

I felt a new excitement and delight at Hugo’s presence; at being with him again after so many years, and so many changes. The sympathy and understanding that had been so much a part of our relation before seemed there as strong as ever, now we were together again. We spoke very little; there seemed no need for speech. From time to time we looked at each other and, as our eyes met, a sense of assurance and security seemed to pass from one to the other.

It seemed to me as we walked as though we two were alone in a world of desolation and ruin. I felt my thoughts and my emotions of the last three years rising up, formulating themselves, seeking expression. I was possessed by a sense of experience, of our separate experiences, to be shared now, to be unified, and made whole.

We crossed Piccadilly and turned into Bond Street.

Hugo had chosen an exhibition of Raemakers’ cartoons as the pictures we were to see. We took our tickets at the door, gave up our umbrellas, and were inside.

We walked round the two small rooms for a long time. Hugo looked at the pictures, dumbly, intensely, and I watched Hugo.

We stopped before a picture of a wood in autumn; the leaves falling from the trees, and a dead soldier, a German, lying on the ground.

‘When the leaves fall, you shall have peace.’

The words from a speech of the Kaiser’s were below it. I felt a cold grip at my heart, at my throat, and the picture swam before me . . .

‘When the leaves fall, you shall have peace.’ The words echoed through my brain, emptily, metallically. I saw the dead soldier, huddled, hunched up in the wet ditch, and the leaves falling over him, and I felt suddenly that I must cry out, scream, that it was more than could be borne.

I turned to Hugo: his eyes were fixed on the picture, and again I saw that haunted, terrified expression that had struck me when I saw him first, but it was more now. I felt suddenly, that my own emotion was somehow a reflection of his emotion, that my own despair was an echo of his despair.

‘You shall have peace . . . You shall have peace . . .’

I felt at that moment that I was seeing with his eyes and feeling with his mind. I was fascinated, horrified, paralysed; then I broke the spell:

‘No, Hugo,’ I said, and my voice sounded rough and unnatural to myself, ‘come away, come away quickly!’

I seized hold of his arm and pulled him after me, through the swinging glass doors, and down the steps.

Outside, the rain had begun to fall, a thin, drizzling rain . . . we paused here and drew breath: I felt as though I had woken up from a very ghastly dream.

I laughed, nervously, I knew, and shivered——

I said:

‘Those are terrible pictures—they make one remember and think——’

Hugo stared at me, with sombre, unseeing eyes.

‘Yes, they make one think,’ he repeated.

We walked out into the street; I kept my hand on his arm: I felt dizzy, and still frightened at my own thoughts and feelings, and almost frightened of him.

As we turned into Piccadilly the rain came on more heavily, beating and pattering against our faces; we remembered suddenly that we had left our umbrellas in the gallery; we turned and hurried back again.

When we came out for the second time, we were calmer, and more established.

We turned into the nearest tea shop, Stewart’s, at the corner of Bond Street, and went upstairs. There was an empty table by the window; we went to it and sat down.

Hugo leaned his chin on his hands, and looked across at me.

He said:

‘That is a wicked picture, Helen,——do you know what it is to want peace?’

I said:

‘I think I begin to know.’

‘I won’t give up,’ he went on, as though he were talking to himself, ‘I won’t; I am not going to be killed; I am going right through to the end. Nothing can be worse now.’

He buried his face, and shivered.

I asked:

‘Do you want very much to be killed?’

And he bent his head.

‘I am frightened sometimes,’ he said, ‘I think I am going mad in the night; even here; I see things, and hear them, over and over again; I am afraid of doing it on purpose; of letting it happen. . . . George would never have got like this. . . .’

‘No, George was different. I think, perhaps, it was easier for him.’

‘Yes, George was braver than me, and now, you see, he has finished. He has not got to go on afterwards as I must. I must go on, partly because of George, and can you think what it will be like, Helen, afterwards, when we are sane again, and realize what we have been doing?’

I said:

‘I can’t think about afterwards at all, Hugo. I can’t look ahead at all beyond next week.’

We were silent then, looking out of the window at the rain in the street. It pattered on the tops of omnibuses, on umbrellas, on mackintoshes, on the grey paving stones. The humming noise of the traffic rose up to us, muffled, through the double glass, and all those people, and the hurry, and the busyness, seemed very far away.

The waitress came to take our order; we asked for tea, and turned back to the window.

I said:

‘Yes; we must go on; it is all we can do now; just wait and hold out . . . on and on and on. . . .’

And he repeated:

‘Yes; that is all; somebody must go on; that is the only way to look at it, I think.’

I said:

‘Oh, Hugo, is it possible that all this is only three years?’

Hugo looked up with his hesitating smile.

‘Three years has not much meaning now,’ he said, ‘has it? We didn’t know anything then; we hadn’t begun. We don’t know much now; afterwards, if we can go through with it till the end, we may know something, perhaps.’

He added abruptly:

‘I am sorry for you, Helen.’

‘And I, for you,’ I said.

‘It is the same for us both, in a way; for everybody, I suppose.’

‘No, not quite everybody, I think; but for you and me. I am glad we have met again, Hugo, so glad.’

He put out his hand across the table and took mine.

‘I wondered if you would come to-day,’ he said.

The waitress had brought our tea and put it down, but we had not noticed her.

There was to us both, I think, great consolation in this clasping of hands: strength and companionship in a world of destruction.

After tea we went out in the rain, and walked in the Green Park.

We walked up and down, backwards and forwards, talking a little, not very much, of casual, trivial things; comforted and upheld by each other’s nearness.

At last we went back to the station, and Hugo saw me into the train.

I said:

‘Let me know when you come back,’

He said:

‘I shall come back in ten days.’

‘In ten days?’

‘Yes, in ten days.’

XXIX

The next days passed, unreal and dreamlike to me. I was happy, elated, filled with a renewal of youth. Hugo was there, Hugo was alive, I had found him anew after this long time, and I would see him again in a few days.

It seemed to me during those ten days that everything was easier and pleasanter than before. Nothing worried or irritated me; I lived in a world of my own.

Even Walter noticed a change. Something had come back, I think, that he had missed.

He said to me, one day:

‘You are happier than you were, Helen . . . .’

And I was pleased and laughed.

‘Yes, Walter,’ I said, ‘I am so happy at seeing Hugo again.’

Walter looked at me queerly, and sighed.

‘You ought to see more of your friends,’ he said, ‘I know that. It is natural you should miss them.’

I stroked his cheek.

‘I shall see them again, after the war,’ I said. ‘We shall all meet together then, except George . . .’

‘Poor George,’ said Walter, and he sighed again.

At last the day came, and a note from Hugo, at Yearsly. He would be in London that morning, by twelve o’clock; crossing that night to France.

I took the next train. I left the children in the care of Mrs. Simms.

Hugo was there to meet me; he had come straight from Waterloo. We lunched together, and then we walked in the Park.

This day it was fine. A clear, cold winter’s day, with tiny transparent clouds, high up in a pale sky. We walked quickly, rejoicing in the cold air and the warmth of walking.

Then we went to the National Gallery. Most of the pictures were hidden away in bomb-proof cellars; that was a disappointment; but we were happy to-day.

We went to tea with Grandmother, at Campden Hill Square; we enjoyed the familiarity of the room, of the atmosphere, and the china, and the cat.

The hours passed; how we did not know. It was evening already, and we stood on the steps of the ‘Coliseum,’ going in to the Russian Ballet. It was the Scarlatti Ballet, ‘The Good Humoured Ladies,’ that we saw. The music and the dancing excited us; it was perfect. All was perfect, on this most wonderful of days.

We left the lighted theatre, and went out . . . out into the dark night and the shaded streets.

We made our way across Trafalgar Square, bare and empty in the shadow, through the Admiralty Arch again, and across the Green Park.

Hugo’s train was to leave at midnight.

We were silent in the darkness of the trees. The bitterness of ending was over our joy now.

We walked close together, bumping against each other as we walked. Hugo took my hand and held it, and we walked like children, holding hands. We passed out of the Park, and down the road, into the hurry and rush of Victoria Street, past the Underground Station, and under the vaulted roof of Victoria Station.

Smoke from the waiting trains swirled in white eddies under the shadowy roof. Whistles sounded: calling voices and heavy footsteps: the churning noise of engines, getting up steam, and the clanging of luggage barrows on the platforms.

There were soldiers everywhere; waiting groups, sitting and lounging about, loaded with their service kit; bags, rifles and helmets slung about them in a shapeless mass; tired, anxious faces, and joking voices; one was telling a story to a listening group; it seemed to be a funny story, for bursts of laughter interrupted him.

Hugo inquired about his train. No one seemed to know. We wandered from one official to another; there was no train to leave at midnight, they said.

At last some one came who knew about it; the leave train was postponed till the morning, at 7 a.m.

I felt an immense, disproportionate relief; I glanced at Hugo; he was looking at me with his whimsical, questioning expression.

‘Seven hours more,’ he said.

‘Seven hours,’ I repeated.

What should we do for seven hours?

‘I told them not to expect me back till they saw me,’ I said. ‘I must wait and see you off.’

‘Helen? I should like it.’

‘Will you, Helen?’

We turned back to the Hotel, where Hugo had a room reserved till the next day. I would stay there too. He engaged another room.

We walked up the stairs like people in a dream. The stuffy hotel smell, the thick, shabby carpet, the dull glare of the electric light, stamped themselves on my mind, but dazedly, as fantastic, unreal things.

In the long, deserted passage we stood still. Rows of shut doors stretched on either side of us. Boots stood outside some of them, military boots, and empty water cans. One bulb of electric light shone at the further end.

We read the numbers on the doors. 247 was my room. We reached the door, and then stood still again. It seemed a waste of precious time to sleep, but we were very tired, suddenly, unbearably tired.

‘Good night, Helen.’

‘Good night.’

We paused, and waited again.

Dumbly, instinctively, I raised my arms to Hugo’s neck. He grasped me, and we kissed. It flashed through my mind, as something very strange, that we had not kissed each other since that time we did not kiss on the evening of Guy’s birthday, beside the Jasmine Gate. We had before that always, without thinking about it.

‘My dear, dear Helen . . .’ Hugo murmured; and I said nothing at all. My hands clasped each other, hard, behind his neck; I felt just then that I could never let him go . . . and then it seemed suddenly that something snapped . . .

‘Good night, Hugo,’ I said, and my arms dropped to my sides.

‘My dear, good night.’

I waited a moment longer with my hand on the handle of the door; it seemed to us both, I think, that there was something more we must say; but we could not; no words came.

I opened my bedroom door, and pulled it to behind me. I dropped into a chair by the window, and sat there, quite still, for a time. Then I roused myself, took off my hat and shoes, and lay down on the bed.

I lay still and listened to the stir of the traffic outside. The rumble of trains, the perpetual hoots of taxi cabs turning round the corner, in and out of the station. From the open window, came the acrid smell of train smoke, drifting in with the night fog. I felt cold, and shivered; then I got up and threw my coat over the quilt of the bed.

It seemed to me that I must have lain awake all night, but at last I fell asleep.

A maid woke me at a quarter to six, with a can of hot water. I woke with a start of terror, and plunged myself awake properly in the hot water.

A few minutes later I met Hugo in the ‘Breakfast Room’ of the hotel. There were other people there; about a dozen other officers, two or three women with them. We smiled faintly at each other, and sat down. Outside it was still dark, and an early morning fog obscured what lights there were. We drank hot coffee and ate fried bacon, and then again we went into the station.

The train was there this time. Hugo found a place and put his luggage in. Then we walked up and down on the platform till it was time to start. The morning was raw and chilly. The cold fog got into our throats and eyes. It seemed to enclose us in a deadened solitude; to shut out the world beyond; to muffle even the footsteps of the other waiting people.

‘It must not be so long till you come again, Hugo.’

And he looked at me with his odd little questioning smile.

‘Remember,’ I said suddenly, ‘you are going through with it. We have got to go through to the end.’

‘Yes,’ he replied quietly, ‘we have got to go on. I will, and you will too,’ and he turned abruptly to me.

I bent my head.

‘Yes, I will too, of course.’

‘Guy will be having leave soon,’ said Hugo.

‘Yes, and Mollie is coming home this summer.’

‘It would be good if we could all be here together.’

‘After the war, anyhow.’

‘Yes . . . after the war. . . .’

The train was going to start. The guard waved to all the waiting passengers to get in. Hugo jumped in quickly. He leaned out of the window and took both my hands.

‘Good-bye, Helen.’

‘Good-bye, Hugo . . . till next time. . . .’

The train jerked and puffed. A porter hurried along, slamming the doors. Hugo drew back his head, the train jerked again, and moved slowly forward.

I stood where I was, looking after the train. Hugo did not look out of it again, and I did not wave my hand.

I watched it drawing past me; carriage after carriage reaching the bend of the line where a station lamp threw a glittering light upon the windows; then out into the fog and darkness; and the smoke drifted back, chilly, mockingly, along the empty lines.

There were other women on the platform, walking back towards the barrier now, and I walked with them, dazed, hardly sensible, not knowing where I went.

And I never saw Hugo again.

XXX

In March, peace between Germany and Bolshevik Russia was signed at Brest Litovsk.

Maud said the Russians were traitors. She said she would be ashamed to be a Russian.

I thought:

‘Some Russians will live, now, who would have died . . . that is some good in a world gone wrong. . . .’

But then the great offensive began in France. The tension and anxiety grew acuter, day by day. More news of the German advance, more Americans arriving in France, and we wondered which would come the fastest. Even in the streets, when one went out, one could feel the general anxiety, and see it in the people’s faces as they passed.

In April, came the famous Army Order of Lord Haig, when he said:

‘Our back is to the wall.’

Walter came in with the _Sunday Evening Telegram_, and threw it on the table, and a sense of dread and insecurity came with him into the room.

He said:

‘This is the end of everything!’

And I thought of Guy and Hugo, out there in France, with the Germans pressing them back, step by step. There seemed so many Germans, and so few with them.

I said:

‘There is still a chance.’

And Walter answered wearily:

‘I suppose there is!’

So the spring wore on. Every week I wrote to Hugo, and every week he wrote to me, and from those letters I drew strength and courage and happiness.

Walter said that he could not understand it; now, when the news was at its worst, I seemed so cheerful and serene, he said. I could only smile and admit that it was true.

It seemed to me that I was bound by my compact with Hugo. I had pledged myself to carry on with my job; I would make a success of my marriage with Walter, for Hugo’s sake, and the determination to do so gave a new purpose to life.

I did not look far ahead, I did not make plans for the future, the present was enough in itself, with Hugo’s letters as points of light to look for, and mine to him, as the expression of a week’s fighting.

I could give much more to Walter now, and I gave it, and I felt him turn more and more to me for strength.

When I was in bed at night, I could see Hugo so clearly sometimes, that I could hardly believe it was not true. It was as if the war was between us, noise and confusion, and horror . . . and I could get through that, and somewhere behind it, I found Hugo . . . and there were shell holes, and barbed wire, and all that sort of thing about, but it didn’t matter . . . Hugo was there, and it was all happy, and wonderful, and I knew that he was alive.

My son was born on the 15th of July, the same day that the German advance was held. In the strange serenity and confidence of these last months, I had felt sure that it would be a son this time. He was called John, after Walter’s father, but I counted it partly for Cousin John as well.

It seemed to me that this son was a symbol of victory . . . not of Foch over Ludendorf, nor the Entente over Germany; these things were again remote to me, and unreal, but of peace over war, strength over weakness, light over darkness. I was filled with a sense of fulfilment and triumph, and of peace.

I thought:

‘This is what they mean by the “Peace of God.”’ And I wrote all I felt to Hugo, and I told him about my son.

XXXI

In August, Guy was wounded and sent home. He was badly wounded this time. Cousin Delia wrote to me; he was sent to a hospital for officers in Park Lane. Cousin Delia came up to be near him; she stayed with Grandmother, in Campden Hill Square.

They would not let me see Guy at first; they said he was too ill. I saw Cousin Delia, and I saw in her face that she did not think he would live.

I said:

‘Is Guy any better?’

She said:

‘Not yet; he may get better.’

Guy did get better, very slowly indeed. He would live, they said, he would walk again, but he would be lame always. I could not imagine Guy lame, walking about with a stick.

Cousin Delia said only:

‘I am so glad that he will live.’

There was, it seemed, something unconquerable in Guy.

I saw him in September. He looked ill, and almost old. Guy on his back, not moving, seemed all wrong; and his hair was turning grey.

He smiled at me.

He began, at once, to joke.

It was bad luck, he said, to be laid out like this, just at the very end.

‘I might have been in at the death,’ he said, ‘when I had kept going so long! Hugo has beaten me, good old Hugo!’

I talked about Hugo, and the letters I had had from him lately, and of the war ending, and how every one was saying that it must end very soon.

Then Diana came in. She was a V.A.D. Her eyes danced and sparkled under her white coif; she was so tall and strong and full of life, and she moved as though all movement were delight. She came to bring Guy tea, in a feeding cup, on a tray.

Guy introduced her to me, and she smiled at me, and at him. She put her arm under his head to raise him up; she gave him his tea to drink like a little child. She arranged his pillows deftly, with her strong white hands, and I watched Guy’s eyes as they followed her about the room, and I thought:

‘Guy is going to marry that girl . . .’

And I thought of Mollie, at Salonika, with George dead.

And I thought:

‘What chance has Mollie, against that joy and youth?’

And I thought:

‘Guy has forgotten Mollie . . .’

And I thought, as I watched her walk:

‘I know what she feels like. . . . I felt like that, once. . . . I can remember it. . . .’

And then I thought:

‘That is why Walter wanted me . . . do they always want that in us?’

And then I thought:

‘Guy is like Walter, now, in that way, and he wants her . . .’

Guy smiled at her as one might at a loved child.

‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘I have good care; I ought to get well very soon, oughtn’t I?’

She said:

‘You are getting well; we are very pleased with you!’

He said:

‘She loves the war; she thinks it is a splendid war, don’t you, Dinah?’

And she laughed, and her eyes danced.

‘Oh, top hole,’ she said, ‘simply topping!’

Guy said:

‘That is so refreshing. “_A quelqu’un le malheur est bon!_”’

And I thought:

‘She is not horrid; she doesn’t understand.’

I thought:

‘She is very lovely, and very young.’

She said:

‘There’s a dance to-night, at Bengy’s . . . you know . . . jazz of course . . . simply divine! simply divine! Old 31 is coming . . . his leg’s nearly all right. . . . It’s rotten,’ she said, ‘that you can’t come!’

And Guy said:

‘Awfully rotten!’

I thought:

‘How can she talk like that to Guy? Doesn’t she know that he will not dance any more?’

It was time for me to go, and Diana came with me to the top of the stairs.

‘Awfully good of you to come,’ she said, ‘he wanted to see you. . . . Come again when you can; he gets awfully blue, you know, at times. . . I buck him up a bit, chaff him, you know, and that sort of thing, but it’s jolly rotten really . . . bucked him up no end seeing you. . . .’

She was kind to me, she meant to be kind. She was explaining Guy to me; he was hers now, but she would not shut us out.

I wondered if she was kind to Cousin Delia too, and what Cousin Delia thought of her.

About a fortnight later they were engaged. Her name was Diana Sotheby; her father was the captain of a battleship; she was very ‘well connected,’ people told us, and twenty years old.

Cousin Delia said:

‘She is lovely, and I think she is fond of Guy. They will be married when Guy is better; when he is out of hospital.’

She wrote to Mollie in Salonika, and so did I. I don’t know at all if Guy wrote too.

Cousin Delia went back to Yearsly, and still the war went on.

We invited Diana to tea. Walter did not like her.

‘A dreadful young woman,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what Guy is about!’

I said:

‘You see, she is not lame, at all, in any way.’

Walter said:

‘Don’t be silly, Helen! There are plenty of young women who are not lame. I suppose Guy thinks her pretty.’

I said:

‘She is pretty.’

XXXII

News of the war kept coming; better and better news. The Germans were falling back now, all along the line. The German Front was breaking, the Allied troops were pressing forward everywhere. Bulgaria made peace, then Austria. President Wilson and the German Government were exchanging notes on peace.

‘It will end now very soon . . . any week . . . any day. . . Germany is beaten. . . . The war is won now. . .’ people said.

And then, on October 11th, Hugo was ‘wounded and missing.’

I read his name in the Casualty List, in the morning, at breakfast:

‘Hugo John Laurier, Second Rifle Brigade.’

Wounded and missing . . . wounded and missing . . . wounded and missing . . .

I thought:

‘It is not true . . . it is quite impossible . . .’

I thought:

‘It is quite certain that there must be a mistake . . .’

I thought:

‘. . . But the war is over now . . . so nearly over . . . that could not happen now . . .’

I stared at the words till my eyes ached. They seemed to grow larger and darker than the other words on the page.

I had not expected it.

Walter said:

‘Is there any news?’

And I said:

‘Yes . . . there is something . . . about the Americans . . . they have been fighting somewhere, I think.’

Walter said:

‘That is not important, what about the German retreat??’

I turned over the pages of the newspaper, and began to read aloud. My voice sounded to myself very odd, and remote, and unnatural, but Walter did not notice it.

I read that the German Front was breaking, that Allied troops were pressing forward at all points. I could not tell if the words I read made sense, but he seemed satisfied.

I could not tell him about Hugo. He did not care for Hugo enough.

After breakfast, I bathed the baby, and took the little girls for their walk. The morning passed so uneventfully, in so ordinary a way, that I thought again:

‘That could not have been true!’

When they were in bed for their midday rest I took the paper up again and looked, and it was there:

‘Hugo John Laurier, Second Rifle Brigade . . .’

And I turned all cold . . . cold like a stone . . . and I thought:

‘I must see Guy . . . I must see Guy at once . . .’

I could not go out yet, not till the afternoon; then I went upstairs and put on my hat and coat; then I went out and along to the tube station, and got into the tube. I changed at Leicester Square, and got into another tube, and that went very fast, and I got to Dover Street. Then I got out and walked into Park Lane, and along Park Lane to the hospital where Guy was. It was not the time for visitors, not for another hour, the nurse told me so at the door, but I said it was important, I said it was bad news. She looked at me hard, oddly I thought too, and then she told me to wait. She went away and came back, and then she told me to go upstairs. I knew my way to Guy well enough by this time, and I walked up the stairs, wondering what to do.

Diana met me at the top of the stairs. She smiled her flashing smile.

‘Hulloa,’ she said, ‘what a funny time to come!’

I said:

‘Has Guy seen the paper yet, this morning’s paper I mean?’

And she said:

‘I don’t know; I don’t think he has yet to-day.’

I said:

‘His brother is missing . . . it is in the paper to-day. . .’

She said:

‘I say! . . . how rotten! . . . how absolutely rotten!’

The smile died from her face.

‘Poor old chap,’ she said, ‘he’ll be awfully cut up! He thought no end of his brother . . . must have been jolly decent,’ she said, and then: ‘I suppose you knew him too?’

I said:

‘Yes, I did know him.’

She said:

‘Was he like Guy?’

I said:

‘No, different from Guy.’

And then I sat down on the stairs . . . and the whole place seemed to swim . . . the stairs and the banisters . . . and the doors of the rooms in the passage . . . bright mahogany doors with panels that shone like glass . . . and she said:

‘I say, what’s up? I say, you do look rotten!’

And she stared at me, perplexed.

Then she said:

‘I’ll get you some tea . . . that’ll buck you up no end!’

She said:

‘Come on to my room, I’ve got a decent chair.’

I said:

‘I’d rather stay here, thank you. I’m going away in a minute.’

She said:

‘Aren’t you going to see Guy?’

I said:

‘You had better tell him. I don’t think I can.’

I said:

‘His mother will be coming. She is sure to come and see Guy.’

Diana gave a whistle.

‘Lord! There will be an upset! . . . Our wedding’ll be put off . . . if Guy’s brother’s killed . . . sure to be, don’t you think?’

I said good-bye to Diana.

She gave me a cup of tea.

I thought:

‘I must go to Yearsly, to Cousin Delia now. . . .’

I got into a bus in Piccadilly, and off it at Waterloo. I walked up the long sloping entrance, under the bridge.

The station was very big and full of people. The wide arch of the roof seemed bigger than usual, higher, and further off. It seemed very full of smoke and noise.

I went to the booking-office where we always went for our tickets, but it was shut.

I thought:

‘There is no train . . . I cannot go to Yearsly . . .’

I came out again from the booking-office, to the open space of the station.

There were lights in the station, and people shouting; a porter was shouting at me; then he knocked me with a barrow, and hurt my knee.

I thought:

‘It is no use going . . . why should I go to her? She has Cousin John . . . and the people . . . and the garden . . . and the trees . . . everything there will be sorry . . . everything there loved Hugo . . . what use could I be to her . . . or she to me?’

I thought:

‘It is beyond that . . . beyond being good at all. . . .’

And I turned and went out of the station, and down the long sloping road, and under the bridge again. And there was the noise of the traffic, of trams, and buses, and cars, and people thick all round me, and shops, and the smell of fish . . . and there was mud in the street, and the pavement too was muddy. . . . The shops gleamed darkly through the chinks of the shutters, and the people jostled and bustled round me, about the shops.

I thought:

‘I must get away . . . I cannot bear these people . . .’

It was beginning to rain now. I turned down a side street, away from the crowd and the noise. The rain beat against my face, cold, steady October rain. I thought of the open country, in France, as I had seen it in pictures. Shell holes half full of water, distorted piles of wire, stunted remnants of trees . . . and the cold rain beating down. . . .

I walked on, faster and faster; I was almost running now. I knocked into some one . . . a policeman . . . I begged his pardon and hurried on. I felt that I must get away, by myself, alone, and the longing for this, superseded everything else. But there was nowhere to go . . . only houses, and streets, and people . . . and at home, there was no room where I could be alone.

I began to be out of breath. I stood still. My skirt was all wet now, it clung about my knees. I leaned with my hand against a lamp post. There was a seat beside it, and I sat down. I bent down in the shadow, and covered my eyes; and still I could not think. The rain beat down on the nape of my neck. It trickled down my back under the collar of my coat . . . and then, I was calling Hugo. . . . I called to him through the rain and the darkness, across the expanse of sea and land. . . . I stretched out my hands to him, and called again, and I felt that he must hear me, if he was anywhere. Was he somewhere lying alone, deserted, and wounded? I pressed my hands against my eyes, trying to see in the dark, to force myself to see, to hear his voice, answering me through the emptiness of the night. But I saw and heard nothing. Only whirligigs of light, as my fingers pressed against my eyeballs, and the splashing sound of rain on the pavement and in the puddles, and it was very cold.

I got up again from the seat, and turned to go home. I had come much farther than I knew, and it took a long time to find the way.

When I got home, Walter opened the door. There was light behind him in the hall, and I saw him black against the light.

He said:

‘Where in the world have you been? I waited an hour for dinner!’

The rain dripped off from my clothes, in a pool, on the step where I stood. I saw it dark, like a blot, growing bigger, in the light from the door.

I said:

‘Hugo is missing. You didn’t know, I think.’

Walter stood very still; then he pulled me into the hall.

‘When did you hear?’ he asked. ‘How do you know?’

I said:

‘This morning, at breakfast. It was in _The Times_, you know.’

He said:

‘You never told me! Why didn’t you tell me then?’

I said:

‘I couldn’t tell you. It was too bad for that.’

We stood and looked at each other.

I thought:

‘He doesn’t care . . .’

He put out his hands towards me and drew me close to him.

‘My poor dear Helen,’ he said. ‘Oh, my poor dear!’

XXXIII

The next day, came a letter from Cousin Delia, a short, quiet note, that was like her.

‘You will have seen yesterday that Hugo is missing. We have no further news of him,’ she wrote. ‘His father has been to the War Office, but they can tell him nothing more. Hugo was missing on the ninth after the taking of Cambrai. They could not collect all the wounded on that day, and when they did so, he was not among them. There was very heavy shelling on both days, and it is probable that he was killed. I am making inquiries at the hospitals for men of his battalion who were in that fighting, and I will let you know if I have any news.’

I read and reread her letter, and I wondered, as I had often wondered, at the calm of Cousin Delia, and I thought that she would die if she lost Hugo. Quietly, calmly, as she had lived, she would die.

And I thought all day of Yearsly, of the old brick walls, and the apple blossom, and Guy and Hugo, calling from the trees; and I thought of Cousin Delia in the garden as she had been when we were little, with her long yellow gloves, and her shady garden hat.

And I thought:

‘That is all over. The world has gone on since then.’

And my own grief became part of the world’s grief, and my own loss, part of the world’s loss.

And then, when Sunday came, I wrote to Hugo. I had written to him every Sunday since February, when he came home.

‘Hugo, my darling . . . they say that you are dead . . . killed . . . blown to pieces . . . not there anywhere any more. . . . I can’t believe it, for the world is going on . . . it looks just the same now, as it always did . . . and I can’t believe in a world without you in it . . . anywhere at all, for I think, Hugo, that you were the world to me. . .

‘They said: “When the leaves fall, you shall have peace.” Do you remember that? . . . they are falling now. . . .I can see them . . . from the poplar tree at the gate, yellow, dirty leaves that fall in the street . . . but you said that it must not be like that . . . we came away from that picture. . . . Have you got peace Hugo, now? . . . silence and peace, after tremendous noise? . . . I try to think of it like that, but it is difficult. . . . I can only think that you are gone away . . . out of everything . . . that I shall never see you again . . . and then it seems as though some one was laughing at me . . . .some horrible devil, and it can’t be true. . . .’

I addressed the letter and posted it. I don’t know where it went, or what happened to it.

Two days later, a letter came from Hugo. I saw it on the hall floor, where it had fallen through the letter-box.

And I thought:

‘He has answered me. He is not dead at all!’

I broke the envelope open, and I tried to read it, and I could not read it at first . . . the letters swam together, it seemed all blurred and indistinct, and I had to stand still and wait. And then, I tried again, and I read the date: October 8th, 1918. October 8th. That was more than a week ago. That was before he was killed. . . .

I looked at the address, and it told me nothing; illusive, non-committal as the addresses always were, but the writing was Hugo’s:

‘Helen dear,’ it ran, ‘I must write to you to-night, for I think we shall be busy to-morrow. Here it is quiet for the moment, and I have had a happy day. I saw cows and an old woman in a village . . . a piece of a village still . . . and I saw an old orchard that had been destroyed last year . . . and the stumps of the trees had flowered, the broken stumps of the trees . . . they had apples growing on them, round red apples, and there was grass over the stones already, and moss. I was glad to see it. And there were dahlias flowering at one end of the orchard, where there had been a garden, and there was a little tree, the sprout of a tree, where a clump of trees must have been. It was a birch, very tiny, by the edge of a pond, and its leaves were falling, tiny, golden leaves, and floating on the water.

‘There was a robin and a mouse, a wild mouse. It has made me very happy. It was like Faith and Hope and Charity . . . do you know what I mean? I wish I could see you to-night, Helen . . . but I believe I shall soon. Somehow, I don’t mind the thought of to-morrow as much as I generally do. It is nearly the end now.

‘The mouse was sitting up, looking at me in the shadow of the birch tree, and then it scuttled away under the leaves. Do you remember the mouse at Yearsly, in the Frog Pond? on the stones? It made me think of that. And now, good-night, my dear. . . .’

And that was all.

I thought:

‘Hugo was happy.’

It seemed to me at the moment, that what happened afterwards, could hardly count, and I felt his letter, after all, an answer to mine.

October wore to a close. The certainty of peace grew clearer day by day, but no news came of Hugo. No news ever came.

Cousin Delia came to see me once, and I saw Guy. He spoke of Hugo a little but not much; Diana was there.

He was to leave the hospital soon, in two or three weeks, they said. He was to go to Yearsly. They would be married later, after the New Year.

XXXIV

And then, on Armistice Day, something seemed to snap inside my head. I was out with the children at eleven o’clock, when the guns were fired and the bells began to ring. And it was then, at that moment, that it snapped, and it seemed as though I was mad for a time, and I did not understand what I was doing.

I thought:

‘It is too late . . . it is a month too late! . . . I do not want it now. . . .’

I thought:

‘If Hugo is killed, why should not all be killed? . . . it is silly to stop the fighting now . . .’

I took the children home and put them to rest. Then I took John, who was tiny, with me, and went out into the street. I walked to the Tube station, and got into a train. I got out at Charing Cross and walked across St. James’s Park, towards Victoria. It seemed to me that the world had gone mad. People were shouting, and yelling, and waving their hats; the bells were ringing still, there was a hubbub of noise; lorries crowded with munition workers whirled past me, one after the other, with shouting and singing and the raucous whirr of rattles. The king had been addressing the crowd at Buckingham Palace, and I found myself caught in the rush of people coming away. Taxi-cabs dashed past me, crammed to overflowing; officers hung out of the windows or sprawled across the roofs, blowing whistles and cheering. The crowd seethed and pressed along Victoria Street; people on the tops of omnibuses stood up and waved their arms.

And I thought:

‘Why do they do it? What do they understand?’

I thought:

‘They did not mind the war . . . they could have stopped it, these hundreds and hundreds of people, waving their arms. . . .’

I thought:

‘They did not mind it or they would not shout like this . . . they would make war again, these people that shout. . . .’

And I felt that I could not bear it, that I must get away.

I wondered why I had come, and where I was going. I did not know. I had no plan. I think I had come to Victoria because of Hugo, because I last saw him there. But now, I did not go into the station. I turned aside, and went along outside it, by the high, blind wall in Buckingham Palace Road, and then I turned over a bridge, the railway bridge that is there. I walked on and on, and I got away from the crowd, but the noise was everywhere.

John seemed very heavy, much heavier than I had thought. He began to cry and I rocked him, and still we went on through the grey, drizzling streets. We came to the Embankment, not far from Chelsea Bridge, and there was a seat. I sat down on the seat. I fed John there, and rocked him to sleep. I felt suddenly, now, quite weak and exhausted, as though I could not go on, and it seemed to me that I understood now, for the first time, that Hugo was dead.

I do not know how long I sat there. I know I was very cold, and so was John. He woke, and cried again, and I walked on. I came to Albert Bridge, and passed it, towards the chimneys. When I reached Mollie’s flat, I looked up, and the windows were open. I was not surprised at all.

I went up the stairs, with John, and knocked on Mollie’s door, and the knocking sounded loud, in a pause of the noise outside.

Mollie opened the door.

She cried out, as though she were startled, and stood back.

I walked past her into the room, and dropped down on the sofa. It was a low sofa, and I felt as though I were falling a long way, down and down and down.

Mollie was kneeling on the floor beside me. She took John from me, and laid him on a cushion. She made up the fire and put the kettle on to boil. Then she rubbed my hands, and asked me questions, in her low, quiet voice, that I had not heard for so long. And I lay back and watched her, as she moved about the room, and I felt in a strange dream, as though the past had come back.

I said:

‘Hugo is dead.’

She said:

‘I know. I heard from his mother.’ Her clear eyes darkened: ‘And you?’

I said:

‘Oh, that is all . . .’

Mollie was looking at me, and I looked at the fire.

‘I see,’ she said at last. ‘Poor Helen!’

I said:

‘Yes, that is all . . . I can’t bear it any longer. . . .’

Mollie asked:

‘Did you know you would find me here?’

I said:

‘No. How should I know? I just came away.’

Outside, along the Embankment, the shouting lorries passed, and the crowds, and the rattles, and the noise rose and fell, in irregular, intermittent waves. Bursts of singing floated in at the window, drunken, vulgar singing, of loud voices, cat calls, and shrill, unnatural laughter.

And I shivered, and buried my face, and Mollie comforted me.

She gave me tea to drink, and I felt better, and I realized then, for the first time, that it was strange to find her here.

I said:

‘So you are back!’

She said:

‘I came yesterday.’

And then I looked at Mollie, and I saw that she too was unhappy, and then I thought of George, and I put out my hand to her:

‘Mollie,’ I said, ‘George too. . . . I had not forgotten George . . .’

She said:

‘You should not forget him. He cared for you most of all.’

I said:

‘He never told me . . .’

She said:

‘What was the use?’

I said:

‘Guy is going to be married. You know that too, I expect??’

Mollie bent her head.

‘Yes, I know that too,’ she said.

I said:

‘Mollie, how can you bear it? What have you left at all?’

Mollie looked away. She was kneeling still on the floor, and the firelight danced on her cheek, turned so, away from me, and up the lines of her hair. And I saw that she too looked older, and I saw grey streaks in her hair; and I thought of Guy and Diana, and I felt that I hated Guy.

She said:

‘I don’t know yet. I shall find something soon. Life will go on again. I know in my mind that it must.’

She said:

‘Is Guy very happy? What is Diana like?’

I said:

‘She is very young, lovely, and hard as steel.’

She said:

‘We can’t choose for Guy. Perhaps that is right for him.’

I said:

‘It is not right! I think Guy’s soul has died!’

Mollie smiled at me:

‘You are not changed so much, really,’ she said, and touched my hand. And then John stirred and cried, and I picked him up again, and laid my cheek against his, and I felt that I had John, and that he was life for me.

Mollie said:

‘You are lucky, Helen, to have that baby!’

I said:

‘Yes, and I have two others . . . but they are not like this.’

And then I talked to Mollie, about everything that had happened; about Walter, and Maud, and his mother, and how I was beaten by it all, and how little use I had been.

And then about Hugo’s coming, and all that we did together.

I said:

‘We saw pictures, and heard music, and then we walked about and talked. We went to the station, and there was no train, but there was one in the morning, and I saw him off in a fog . . . it was all foggy’ . . . and I seemed to see it again, as I talked about it, the station filled with smoke, and the lights, and the thin, sharp fog . . . and Hugo’s train going out, away, round the bend of the line . . .

And she said:

‘Is that all, Helen?’

I said:

‘What more could there be? Only everything was different for me after he came and went. You see, we had made a promise, both to go on to the end. It seemed to me, at first, that he had broken his promise; but he hadn’t really, of course; I see that clearly now. It was the end for him, for the war was really ended; but I must go on longer. . . . We had to do different things. . . .’

She said:

‘Is that Hugo’s baby?’

And I said:

‘How I wish it were! But not all my wishing can make it . . . and he had no child of his own!’

She said:

‘Forgive me, Helen!’

I said:

‘It’s no case of forgiving. These things don’t happen really . . . not with people like us.’

‘No, not with you and Hugo. . . . I should have known,’ she said.

We sat and talked together till very late that night. The lamps were lit outside, those cheerless, darkened lamps, and the noise in the streets went on.

We bathed John by the fire, in George’s big blue basin and we put him to sleep on the sofa, and then we made our supper.

And Mollie talked of Salonika and what she had done there, and we talked of little things, little everyday things, and I stayed there that night, and in the morning, it was better.

The next day I went home. I told Walter where I had been. I told him that I got caught in the crowd, and that Mollie had come back, and he did not ask me questions.

I wondered sometimes, with Walter, how much he understood.

And that was the first day after the Armistice. The beginning of the time that has been, since the War.

They came and went and are not, And come no more anew, And all the years and seasons That ever can ensue Must now be worse and few.