III
The cottage lay before them, just as they had left it. It was barricaded still, and curiously dark.
"Ha!" muttered the Parson. "I don't like the look of this. Left incline,
Kit. Make for cover."
The old soldier, wary as a fox, sheered off for the sycamore knoll.
There was a touch of death and of autumn in the air. Already the leaves on the sycamores were shrivelled; and a rusting chestnut was hung with nuts prickly as sea-urchins. As they passed among the trees a robin lifted its winter-sweet song.
The Parson peered out.
The cottage faced them, grey and grinning. There was no sign or stir of life about it; but manifold evidence of death. On the greensward, all about dead men lay crumpled, faces downwards, killed clearly in flight.
Kit's heart turned white.
Dead men as dung upon the grass here in the holiness of evening, and a robin singing in the sycamores overhead.
Song and slaughter! God's work and man's! O, would the day never come when men would understand?
"Pretty work," said the Parson, with the zeal of a professional, as he stepped off the knoll. "Cavalry! See here!—a beautiful stroke. A big man on a big horse, I should say, and putting lots o beef into it Yes, yes, yes," with the gusto of an expert. "They've used the edge—see! Got em on the run, then cut em in collops—and all over my bowling-green, tool" treading at the offending horse-hooves.
Kit gave a little cough.
He had seen the lower deck of the Tremendous awash with blood; he had dirked men, and shot them. But this was different. That was death in battle: this was death in life.
The Parson looked up and saw the lad white as a woman in such circumstance. He remembered himself.
"I forgot," he muttered. "You're not used to it. War ain't beautiful as seen in the after-glow."
"It's the quiet," whispered Kit, ghastly. "Like a churchyard—the dead unburied."
"Shut your eyes," said the Parson in steadying voice. "Take my arm. Don't think. Repeat a hymn to yourself."
He walked delicately among the dead, Kit stumbling on his arm.
At the garden-gate they stayed.
The Parson hailed, and Kit started dreadfully.
A wood-pigeon with loud wings splashed out of the sycamores. The kitchen clock within ticked. Other answer there was none.
"I must try the door," whispered the Parson. "Will you come?—or stop here?"
"Come."
The Parson walked down the tiny path between trampled beds, Kit shivering on his arm, and Polly leading him.
The cottage was blind; the windows shuttered; the glass in them shattered.
It seemed more like a mortuary than a human habitation.
The Parson tried the door—in vain.
He laid his ear to it, and listened.
"There's some one there, I'll swear," he whispered, and knocked.
A chair rolled and rolled.
"Piper!"
"No," muttered Kit, with his truer instincts.
Somebody groaned. Broken feet dragged to the door.
The Parson edged off along the wall, hugging it with his shoulder.
"This'll do," he whispered. "Keep behind me. If it's a trick we shall do very well here—flank covered, play for Polly, and the attack with us."
"I don't want any more fighting," whimpered Kit. "I—I want mother."
Bolts groaned, somebody groaning with them.
"Who's there?" husked a ghostly voice.
"Friend," called the Parson.