The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (27 page)

He was very mysterious about the actual crossing. I gather that there had been some ‘clumsy' work with sentries. It was at that time that Ernie got a bullet through his arm. When he got to Holland he was very ill. It was not that the wound was a serious one, but, as he explained:

‘Me blood was in a bad state. I was nearly down and out.'

He was very kindly treated by some Dutch Sisters in a convent hospital. But he was delirious for a long time, and when he became more normal they wanted to communicate with his people in England, but this didn't appeal to the dramatic sense of Ernie.

‘I thought I'd spring a surprise packet on you,' he said, grinning.

We asked about Martin, but Ernie said he never saw him again. He went away while Ernie was delirious, and they said he had gone to Rotterdam to take ship somewhere. He thought Holland was a dull place.

During the relation of this narrative my attention was divided between watching the face of Ernie and the face of Ernie's mother.

I am quite convinced that she did not listen to the story at all. She never took her eyes from his face, and although her tongue was following the flow of his remarks, her mind was occupied with the vision of Ernie when he was a little boy, and when he ordered five tons of coal to be sent to the girls' school.

When he had finished, she said:

‘Did you meet either of them young Stellings?'

And Ernie laughed rather uproariously and said no, he didn't have the pleasure of renewing their acquaintance.

On his way home, it appeared, he had reported himself at Headquarters, and his discharge was inevitable.

‘So now you'll be able to finish the rabbit-hutch,' said Lily's husband, and we all laughed again, with the exception of Mrs Ward.

‘Well, this is splendid news, Mrs Ward,' I said.

She started a little, and coughed, and pulled the shawl closer round her.

She said, ‘Yes, sir,' very faintly.

I don't think she was very conscious of me. She still appeared immersed in the contemplation of her inner visions. Her eyes settled upon the empty house next door, and I thought I detected the trail of a tear glistening on her cheeks. I lighted my pipe. We could hear Ernie, and Lily, and Lily's husband still laughing and talking inside.

‘She used to make a very good puddin',' Mrs Ward said suddenly, at random. ‘Dried fruit inside, and that. My Ernie liked it very much…'

Somewhere away in the distance – probably outside the Unicorn – someone was playing a cornet. A train crashed by and disappeared, leaving a trail of foul smoke which obscured the sky. The smoke cleared slowly away. I struck another match to light my pipe.

It was quite true. On either side of her cheek a tear had trickled. She was trembling a little, worn out by the emotions of the evening.

There was a moment of silence, unusual for Dalston.

‘It's all very… perplexin' and that,' she said quietly.

And then I knew for certain that in that great hour of her happiness her mind was assailed by strange and tremulous doubts. She was thinking of ‘them others' a little wistfully. She was doubting whether one could rejoice – when the thing became clear and actual to one – without sending out one's thoughts into the dark garden to ‘them others' who were suffering too. And she had come out into this little meagre yard at Dalston, and had gazed through the mist and smoke upwards to the stars, because she wanted peace intensely, and so she sought it within herself, because she knew that real peace is a thing which concerns the heart alone.

And so I left her standing there, and I went my way, for I knew that she was wiser than I.

One of those evenings, towards the end of August, when the news of Mons was coming through, I left my house at the end of the village street and walked up towards the downs. I have never known anything more entrancing than the beauty of that night. All was still and coloured like the bloom of dark grapes; so warm, so tremulous. A rush of stars was yielding to the moon fast riding up, and from the corn-stooks of that early harvest the shadows were stealing out. We had no daylight-saving then, and it was perhaps half past nine when I passed two of my former scholars, a boy and a girl, standing silently at the edge of an old gravel pit opposite a beech clump. They looked up and gave me good evening. Passing on over the crest, I could see the unhedged fields to either hand; the corn stooked and the corn standing, just gilded under the moon; the swelling
downs of a blue-grey; and the beech clump I had passed dark-cut against the brightening sky. The moon itself was almost golden, as if it would be warm to the touch, and from it came a rain of glamour over sky and fields, woods, downs, farmhouses and the river down below. All seemed in a conspiracy of unreality to one obsessed, like me, by visions of the stark and trampling carnage going on out there. Refuging from that grim comparison, I remember thinking that Jim Beckett and Betty Roofe were absurdly young to be sweethearting, if indeed they were, for they hadn't altogether looked like it. They could hardly be sixteen yet, for they had only left school last year. Betty Roofe had been head of the girls; an interesting child, alert, self-contained, with a well-shaped, dark-eyed little face and a head set on very straight. She was the daughter of the village laundress, and I used to think too good for washing clothes, but she was already at it and, as things went in that village, would probably go on doing it till she married. Jim Beckett was working on Carver's farm down there below me and the gravel pit was about half-way between their homes. A good boy, Jim, freckled, reddish in the hair and rather too small in the head; with blue eyes that looked at you very straight, and a short nose; a well-grown boy, very big for his age, and impulsive in spite of the careful stodginess of all young rustics; a curious vein of the sensitive in him, but a great deal of obstinacy, too – altogether an interesting blend!

I was still standing there when up he came on his way to Carver's and I look back to that next moment with as much regret as to any in my life.

He held out his hand.

‘Good-bye, sir, in case I don't see you again.'

‘Why, where are you off to, Jim?'

‘Joinin' up.'

‘Joining up? But, my dear boy, you're two years under age, at least.'

He grinned. ‘I'm sixteen this month, but I bet I can make out to be eighteen. They ain't particular, I'm told.'

I looked him up and down. It was true, he could pass for eighteen well enough, with military needs what they were. And
possessed, as everyone was just then, by patriotism and anxiety at the news, all I said was:

‘I don't think you ought, Jim; but I admire your spirit.'

He stood there silent, sheepish at my words. Then:

‘Well, good-bye, sir. I'm goin' to —ford to-morrow.'

I gave his hand a good hard squeeze. He grinned again, and without looking back, ran off down the hill towards Carver's farm, leaving me alone once more with the unearthly glamour of that night. God! what a crime was war! From this hushed moonlit peace boys were hurrying off to that business of man-made death as if there were not Nature's deaths galore to fight against. And we – we could only admire them for it! Well! I have never ceased to curse the sentiment which stopped me from informing the recruiting authorities of that boy's real age.

Crossing back over the crest of the hill towards home I came on the child Betty, at the edge of the gravel pit where I had left her.

‘Well, Betty, was Jim telling you?'

‘Yes, sir; he's going to join up.'

‘What did you say to him?'

‘I said he was a fool, but he's so headstrong, Jim!' Her voice was even enough, but she was quivering all over.

‘It's very plucky of him, Betty.'

‘M'm! Jim just gets things into his head. I don't see that he has any call to go and – and leave me.'

I couldn't help a smile. She saw it, and said sullenly:

‘Yes, I'm young, and so's Jim; but he's my boy, for all that!'

And then, ashamed or startled at such expansiveness, she tossed her head, swerved into the beech clump like a shying foal, and ran off among the trees. I stood a few minutes, listening to the owls, then went home and read myself into forgetfulness on Scott's first Polar book.
¹

So Jim went and we knew him no more for a whole year. And Betty continued with her mother washing for the village.

‘How d'you do, sir?'

‘And you, Jim?'

‘Oh, I'm fine! I thought I'd like to see you. Just got our marching orders. Off to France tomorrow; been havin' my leave.'

I felt the catch at my throat that we all felt when youngsters whom we knew were going out for the first time.

‘Was that Betty with you out there?'

‘Yes – fact is, I've got something to tell you, sir. She and I were spliced last week at —mouth. We been stayin' there since, and I brought her home to-day, as I got to go to-night.'

I was staring hard, and he went on hurriedly:

‘She just went off there and I joined her for my leave. We didn't want any fuss, you see, because of our bein' too young.'

‘Young!'

The blankness of my tone took the grin off his face.

‘Well, I was seventeen a week ago and she'll be seventeen next month.'

‘Married? Honest Injun, Jim?'

He went to the door and whistled. In came Betty, dressed in dark blue, very neat and self-contained; only the flush on her round young face marked any disturbance.

‘Show him your lines, Betty, and your ring.'

The girl held out the official slip and from it I read that a registrar had married them at —mouth, under right names and wrong ages.

Then she slipped a glove off and held up her left hand – there was the magic hoop! Well! the folly was committed; no use in crabbing it!

‘Very good of you to tell me, Jim,' I said at last. ‘Am I the first to know?'

‘Yes, sir. You see, I've got to go at once, and like as not her mother won't want it to get about till she's a bit older. I thought I'd like to tell
you
, in case they said it wasn't all straight and proper.'

‘Nothing I say will alter the fact that you've falsified your ages.'

Jim grinned again.

‘That's all right,' he said. ‘I got it from a lawyer's clerk in my platoon. It's a marriage all the same.'

‘Yes; I believe that's so.'

‘Well, sir, there she is till I come back.' Suddenly his face changed; he looked for all the world as if he were going to cry; and they stood gazing at each other exactly as if they were alone.

The lodger at the carpenter's, three doors down the street, was performing her usual afternoon solo on the piano, ‘
Connais-tu le pays?
' from
Mignon
.
³
And whenever I hear it now, seldom enough in days contemptuous of harmony, it brings Jim and Betty back through a broad sunbeam full of dancing motes of dust; it epitomizes for me all the
Drang
–
⁴
as the Germans call it – of those horrible years, when marriage, birth, death and every human activity were speeded up to their limit, and we did from year's end to year's end all that an enlightened humanity should not be doing, and left undone most of what it should have done.

‘What time is it, sir?' Jim asked me suddenly.

‘Five o'clock.'

‘Lord! I must run for it. My kit's at the station. Could I leave her here, sir?'

I nodded and walked into the little room beyond. When I came back she was sitting where she used to sit in school, bowed over her arms spread out on the inky desk. Her dark bobbed hair was all I could see, and the quivering jerky movement of her young shoulders. Jim had gone. Well! That was the normal state of Europe, then! I went back into the little room to give her time, but when I returned once more she, too, had gone.