VIII
Jinny liked to wear silks and velvets when she was quite a little girl. Her taste for pretty clothes was something more than childish vanity. I used often to find her in the room lined with cupboards where my dresses were kept, sitting on the floor amid a heap of soft shining garments, that she had dragged from their hooks, stroking the fabrics lovingly, and purring to herself like a blissful kitten. She couldn’t bear the touch of wool or starched cambric, and screamed herself into hysterics when in obedience to the doctor’s orders, I tried one winter to put her into woollen combinations. Her father humoured her in this. I think it rather pleased him that she should be so delicately fastidious. He found in it a proof of an exquisite sensibility and likened her to the fairy-tale princess of the crumpled rose leaf. Unfortunately he told Jinny the story and she immediately accepted it as illustrative of herself, acted it out literally in her nursery, obliging her nursemaid to make and remake her little bed, to smooth and stroke and smooth again until every imaginary wrinkle in the soft sheets was gone, before she would consent to get into it. This habit lasted for some weeks until she read one day in her “histoire sainte” of a saint who had acquired great spiritual blessing by sleeping on the floor of her cell, whereupon she took no more interest in the way her bed was made. The nurse was delighted until she discovered that as soon as she had turned down the light and left the room, Jinny hopped out of bed and lay down on the floor, choosing fortunately a spot near the radiator. The harassed women, governess, nurse and nursemaid said nothing to me the first time, nor the second that they found her asleep on the floor, but finally came to me explaining that Mademoiselle was very determined to die of pneumonia.
Jinny looked at me with grave shining eyes when I asked her what such naughtiness meant.
“It is not naughtiness at all, Mamma, you misunderstand, it is the saintly life, ‘la sainte vie.’”
Fortunately I was sufficiently aware of her romantic absorption in the lives of the saints, and of her habit of applying everything that she read or heard to herself, to guess what influence was working on her. The “saintly life” had come up before. She had already had periods of fasting that had given way before her great liking for bonbons, and periods of prayer, that had given way to sleepiness, and had even attempted at one time to beat her little shoulders with a strap off a trunk, all of which things had worried me considerably, but none of which had been immediately dangerous to her health, so I entered straight upon the subject in as sympathetic a tone, that is on as high a moral ground as I could find, using all my wits to adapt my conversation and my thought to her mind, as if, as indeed may have been the case, her idea was more lucid than my own.
“Darling,” I said in a tone as grave as the one she had used to me, but with a certain timidity that she in her exaltation of the young devotee had certainly not felt at all, “the saintly life is a beautiful thing when rightly understood; it is too beautiful to be entered upon easily and capriciously. If you have a true wish to model your life on that of the saints who gave up every comfort for the salvation of their souls, then I will help you. I will do it with you. We will change everything. We will take away all the pretty things, and empty these rooms, yours and mine, of the pictures, and the rugs, keeping only the strict necessaries. We will sleep on hard beds, floor, we will eat bread and water every day, nothing more; we will wear no more nice clothes, we will each have a serge dress and very plain underwear, of some strong cotton stuff, we will—”
But poor Jinny had grown quite pale. “Oh, Mummy, Mummy, you are cruel. Don’t you see I can’t do all that? Don’t you want me to want to be good.”
That you see ended well. She cried a little in my arms, and listened quietly as I explained that being good was quite another thing to the saintly life as she had understood it, and that this latter was not vouchsafed to children, and we arranged between us that it would be much more truly good, to take a great many baskets of toys to the little poor crippled children in the big hospitals than to jump out of bed when no one was looking, but I was not immeasurably reassured by my victory. With Jinny it was always a case of its being all right till the next time, and the next time was never slow in coming.
I take it that my own feeling for Jinny needs no explanation. I am a simple woman, and I was her mother; she was all that I had. But Philibert loving her so much was curious, don’t you think? It seemed so inconsistent of him! I don’t even now understand it. Perhaps the most obvious explanation is the real one. Perhaps it was just because she was so very attractive. Had she been ugly I believe that he would have disliked her. She was never ugly, she had never had an awkward age. At fourteen she had already that look of costliness, of something luxurious, sumptuous and precious that she has today. She was slender and fragile and smooth. At times she suggested a child Venus by Botticelli. Her mouth had the delicate drooping curve of some of his Madonnas, her hands were full and soft and dimpled with delicate tapering fingers. Sensuous idle hands, they were to her instruments of pleasure. Touching things conveyed to her some special delight; with her finger tips she enjoyed. I know for I have watched those hands for years, moving softly and deftly over lovely surfaces, and following the contours of flowers, of porcelain vases, but she never did anything practical with them. Even embroidery, she disliked. But jigsaw puzzles amused her—she and Philibert always had one somewhere spread out on a table. They spent hours together fitting in the innumerable tiny bits, their heads close together, excitedly comparing, fitting, exclaiming. Philibert liked the idea of his daughter’s distaste for doing anything useful. He encouraged her laziness and her absurd little air of languid hauteur. When she dropped a glove or handkerchief and waited for a servant to pick it up for her, he laughed.
Sometimes I tried to reason with him.
“You are spoiling her,” I said on more than one occasion, but he only shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t you see, Philibert?” I would insist, “that it is bad for her to live in this atmosphere?”
“What atmosphere?”
“The atmosphere of this house, of Paris, of the world we live in.”
“Well, my dear, it is her house, her Paris, her world—she’s born to it, and belongs to it, so she may as well grow up in it. What would you have for her—something more like your own home over there, eh?—the place that turned you out, so admirably fitted for our European life—you want her to be as you were, is that it?”
“God forbid.”
“Well then—”
I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t tell him what I really felt and feared, or explain to him how I hated for Jinny, all the things that I now accepted for myself, for he was one of those things, the principle one; I had accepted him. I had even grown to understand him, and if it hadn’t been for Jinny, I felt that we might become friends. His extravagances, his cynicism, his fondness for women were things that I now took for granted. They no longer bothered me. For me, he would do now, I no longer asked anything of him, but for Jinny he wasn’t half good enough. As a father to my child, I found him impossible.
One often hears of estranged couples being brought together by their love for a child. With Philibert and myself, it was the contrary. We were both jealous of Jinny. We were afraid, each one, that she loved the other best, and our nervousness on this point acted to keep us in each other’s company while it made friendship impossible. Neither of us liked to leave the other alone with her for any length of time. I had stayed with Fan for three months and had come back to find Jinny hanging on her father’s every word, and to find what I imagined was a coldness between her and myself. This may have been my imagination, or it may have been true; I don’t know, but I suspected Philibert of working to alienate her from me, and he suspected me of the same thing. If I suggested taking Jinny to Ste. Clothilde for a fortnight, he either found a way of keeping us in Paris or accompanied us, and if Philibert wanted for some reason to go away, to London or Berlin or Biarritz, he was haunted by the idea that in his absence I might steal a march on him with Jinny, so really bothered I mean, that nine times out of ten, he would give up going unless I went with him. The result was that we were more constantly together than we had been since the first year of our marriage.
Looking back now to that winter of 1913-14 I see it as a season of delirium, of fever, of madness. Paris glows there, at the eve of war, in a lurid blaze of brilliance, its people giddy, intoxicated, dancing over the quaking surface of a civilization that was cracking under them. A period in the history of the human race was drawing to a close. The old earth was rushing towards the greatest calamity of our time, carrying with it swarming continents that in a few months were to seethe and smoke like beds of boiling lava—and the people of the earth as if aware that the days of pleasure were numbered, were possessed by a frenzy. I say the people of the earth, but I mean of course, the rich, the idle, the foolish, the so-called fortunate who make up society and of whom Philibert and I were the most idle, the most foolish, as we were perhaps the richest.
That winter marked the height of our folly and of our worldly brilliance, and for me it marked at the same time the deepest depth of futility and cowardice.
Philibert and I were like two runaway horses harnessed together, and running blindly, with the smart showy vehicle of our empty life rattling and lurching behind us, and poor little Jinny inside it.
His extravagance that winter was colossal. I did not try to restrain it. He felt the inertia of old age coming on him, and was having a last desperate fling: I felt sorry for him. His parties were fantastic. He bought the servants’ under-linen at Doucet’s; I only laughed when he told me. Money? Why not spend it! The more he spent, the less would be left for Jinny, and that, I argued, was all to the good. If only he could manage to run through the whole lot, then Jinny and I would be free. Dinner succeeded dinner, dance followed dance. We received half Europe and were entertained in a dozen capitals. London, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, we took them all in. It was very different from my picnic trips with you and Clémentine when we travelled second-class, carried paper bags of sandwiches and had literary adventures in old book shops with ancient scholars in skull-caps and spectacles. Philibert and I travelled in Rolls Royces or in private trains. We had maids and valets and couriers to smooth away every discomfort and every bit of unexpectedness. Philibert never missed his morning bath and massage, his Swede, too, travelled with us.
It was not very interesting. One glass of champagne is like another. Royal palaces are as alike as cabbages. Everywhere we met the same people and did the same things. We danced, we gambled, we gossiped, we ate and drank and changed our clothes, and I was often bored, and often gloomy. Too much brilliance has the effect of darkness.
In my dismal moods I told myself that I hated it, but probably I didn’t. No doubt it had become necessary to me to be surrounded by a crowd of flatterers. We are all fools—And I had no precise idea of myself. Even at night, when I was alone, and when I should have been stripped naked to my soul in the dark, I was still wrapped about to my own eyes, in the flattering disguises of the world’s adulation.
In Jinny’s eyes alone did I seem to see myself as I really was. I trembled as I looked into them.
I wonder if all women are afraid of their children? Perhaps not, the woman who has the love of her husband and a clear conscience and a sure hope of heaven. I had none of these things, and I was afraid. I had staked everything on Jinny, but my conscience was not clear about her. Instead of a hope of heaven, I had the hope of her happiness and yet I knew that I was not doing what was necessary to realize it. What I was doing was, when one thought it out, futile and ridiculous. I was wasting my life to save hers; because of her, I had been involved in this endless round of futility and I was behaving as if I believed that if I were wretched enough, she would be happy.
What I wanted most of all was to save her from an experience like my own. For her, there were to be no wretched sordid compromises with life, no unclean pleasures, no subterfuges, no lying, no fear. She was to remain good and brave and lovely and I was to find a true man for her who would love her as I longed to have her loved, reverently.
And in the meantime, she was growing up surrounded by slavish servants, by doting relatives, by luxury and dissipation and all that I did to protect her, was to shut her up as much as possible in the schoolroom.
I had always been in the habit of talking to her of Patience Forbes, her great aunt in America. It had seemed to me important for Jinny to understand and value my people. I wanted her to love the woman who had so loved me. To secure for that distant lonely admirable character the respect and affection of my child was, it seemed to me, my duty. And as a little girl Jinny had been interested in hearing about the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains, the waggon slide down the cellar door, the attic full of old trunks, crammed with faded panniered dresses and poke-bonnets, and the back garden full of hollyhocks and bachelor buttons, and larkspur. She liked to hear of the great river that one glimpsed between the houses at the bottom of the street behind the garden, and of the ships that came smiling down laden with lumber from the great forests, and she would climb into my lap and say—“Now tell me more about when you were a little girl”—but as she grew older she lost interest in these stories, and was more and more unwilling to write to her great aunt and one day, when I finished reading to her a letter from Patience, she gave a sigh and said petulantly,
“What a boring life—‘Quelle vie ennuyeuse.’”
“Jinny!” I exclaimed sharply.
“But it is, Mummy. It must be. I see her there. Ah, Mon Dieu, so dismal. ‘Une vieille—vieille.’ An old old one—in dusty black clothes, in a horrid little room. All her stuffed birds round her in glass cases—so funny! But the atmosphere is cold. It sets the teeth on edge, and she is ugly, like a man, with big feet and hands. There—look!” She took up poor Aunt Patty’s photograph from the table. “Look—what has that old woman to do with me? Why does she write to me ‘My darling little Geneviève’—I’m not her darling, I don’t love her at all. I don’t want to think of her.”
I was very angry. “Jinny, you make me ashamed.”
“I can’t help it,” she almost screamed at me. “I can’t help it. C’est plus fort que moi—she’s strange—she’s ugly.” And she flung the photograph on the floor and stamped her feet—her face was white, her eyes blazing—“I don’t want to think she belongs to us. I don’t want you to love her,” and she flung herself into a chair in a paroxysm of angry tears.
I sent her to bed; it was five o’clock in the afternoon, and gave orders that she was to have bread and milk for her supper but when I went to her later in the evening, though she was quiet, she stuck to her idea.
“What did you mean by your terrible behaviour, Jinny?”
She eyed me gravely from her pillow.
“I don’t know, except that it is all dismal and strange in America, and I can’t like Great Aunt, and if I can’t—why then I can’t—Cela ne se commande pas.”
I sat beside her, strangely depressed. Her little white bed with its rosy hangings, her curly blond head on the lace pillow, the white fur rug, the shaded lamp, the flickering fire, swam before me, blurred; I half closed my eyes, and saw another child, an ugly child with a long pigtail, in a cotton nightgown and flannel wrapper, kneeling by an old wooden bed in a bare little room, and a tall grizzled woman standing with a candle while the child said her prayers. “God bless my mother in Paris and take me to her soon, and make me keep my temper and be like my Aunt Patty—”
I had failed—I had failed.
But Jinny’s voice roused me. “Papa says it is an ugly country, America—miles and miles of empty fields, just grass and grass stretching all round.”
“Your father has never been there.”
“I know, but he knows about it. He says he would never go there, not for anything, and that I needn’t—so if I’m never to see Great Aunt—why bother?”
Why indeed? They were too much for me, those two, my husband and my child.
In my depressed moods I used to go to see Clémentine. She listened patiently, lying on a couch in purple pyjamas, smoking a cigarette through a holder a foot long, and watching me intently while I explained that I was no longer in control of my own life, that I was as impotent as a paralytic, and that I hadn’t even the feeling of being a part of anything that made up existence.
“It is all unreal—I have lost touch. I can’t grasp anything. There’s a space,—‘infranchissable,’ between me and it. At times I feel that the only reality is the past, the remote past. My childhood is real to me, nothing much else. I remember my home in America, now this minute sitting in your room, more vividly than the house I left half an hour ago. Pleasure is a narcotic—I drug myself with it, but I don’t really understand joy—I understand sorrow. Joy is a perfume that evaporates—suffering is a poison that remains.”
Clémentine broke in abruptly.
“Ma chère amie—take my advice, I know what you need—take a lover.”
I burst out laughing, but she eyed me gravely.
“You laugh, but I know what I am saying. Your life is abnormal, don't go against nature.” She rolled over on an elbow and laid a hand on my knee. “You must love—it will wash away all your sick fancies. You’ll see. Any one you’ve a liking for will do; surely you like some one? Don’t be romantic, be practical. Face facts. Take things as they are, and you will find beauty, mystery, rapture and sanity. Beyond the little prosaic door of compromise you will find the world of dreams. Believe me, materialism is the only road to happy illusion, and to remain sane, we must have illusions.”
Well, that was her point of view, and she may have been right. I never found out. I didn’t take her advice. Perhaps had I done so, I would be in Paris now content with the illusion she promised me. Who knows?
That sort of thing is the solution of most lives. A growing lassitude, a growing fear, the feeling that one has missed life, that it will soon be too late, and at last we give in and take in the place of what we wanted, what we can get.
I couldn’t. There was no one about who in the slightest degree resembled a lover—my lover. And I was sick of the subject of love. For years and years and years it had been served up to me, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. Every theatre, every music hall, every novel one opened, every comic paper was full of it. Travestied, caricatured, perverted or idealized, but always the same old thing—sex—sex—sex in all its ramifications—always monotonously the same; it bored me to extinction.
Philibert, fastening on this woman then that one, all my friends falling in and out of love, like ducks round a muddy pond; it put me in a rage with the world.
The War came—and with it the end of a world.
I sometimes think that God’s final day of judgment will not be so very different. The Edict will go out from Heaven. Life will stop. Humanity suddenly arrested on the edge of time will look over the precipice of Eternity—will pause—will shudder—then, why should it not act? Why not revolt as it did in 1914 against the menace of universal destruction? Was it not just like that?
Death was let loose on the earth. And men refusing to die, gave their lives so that man might live.
The obliteration of life! Something else took its place. All the usual things of life disappeared, human relationships, amusements, ambitions, business, hope, comfort. The people vanished. No familiar faces anywhere. Armies took their place. Men were changed into soldiers, all alike. Women were turned into nurses. Their personalities fell from them, they appeared again, a mass of workers, colourless, uniform, with white set faces in professional clothes.
Our world, Philibert’s and mine suddenly fell to pieces; all the men servants left, most of the women, called to their houses to send their men to the war. Philibert found himself one morning a private in an auxiliary service of the army; he too disappeared. The enemy was marching on Paris; Ludovic telephoned me to say that I had best leave for Bordeaux. I packed off Jinny to Nice with her grandmother. A woman whose work in the slums I had been interested in for some years, was taking an équipe of nurses to the front. I went with her. Philibert’s secretary had orders to pack up all the valuables in the house. I forgot them. I forgot everything.
We went as you know to Alsace—were taken prisoners—sent back again.
On regaining Paris, I turned the house that I had hated into a hospital. Most of its treasures had already been packed up and sent away to a place of safety. The empty salons were turned into wards, my boudoir into an operating room. I enjoyed filling the place with rows of white iron beds and glass topped tables and basins and pails and bottles and bandages. It had been a hateful house, it made a good hospital. When it was in running order, I left again for the front.
I enjoyed the War. It set me free. I reverted to type, became a savage, enjoyed myself. In a wooden hut, on a sea of quaking mud under a cracking sky, I lived an immense life. I was a giant—I was colossal—I dwelt in chaos and was calm. With death let loose on the earth, I felt life pouring through me, beating in me; I exulted. Danger, a roaring noise, cold, fatigue, hunger, these my rations, agreed with me. I was a giantess with chilblains, and a chronic backache; I was a link in an immense machine, an atom, a speck in an innumerable host of atoms like myself, automatons, humble ugly minute things doomed to die, immortal spirits, human beings, my brothers.
I observed that my little tin trunk contained everything needful for life; soap, warm clothes, rubber boots, a brush and comb. I wanted nothing; I was content to go for days without a bath. The beef and white beans of the soldier was sufficient. I ate it ravenously.
I worked and was happy. I lifted battered men in my arms, soothed their pain, washed their bodies, scrubbed their feet; poor ugly swollen feet tramping to death in grotesque boots, socks rotting away in them. I enjoyed scrubbing them. I had, for the business, pails of hot water, scrubbing brushes, the kind one uses for floors, and slabs of yellow soap. For some months, it was my job to wash the wounded who came in from the trenches. Many of them were peasants, old bearded men who talked patois, in soft guttural voices and called me sister. Their great coats were covered with mud and blood, they crawled with vermin. I loved them. They had given their lives, they had given up their homes, their deep ploughed fields, their children, their cattle. They did not complain. Their stubborn souls looked out at me kindly from weary eyes, sunk under shaggy brows, and loving them, my brothers, I loved France, the France I had not, before, known.
We were sent from one part of the front to another. Our équipe had a good reputation. Passing through Paris from time to time, I found opportunities for using money. I gave, gratefully. Supply depots were organized. Every one was in need, every one was doing something. The de Joigny family were pleased with me. They made a great fuss over me when I came to Paris. They spoke of my generosity, my devotion, my courage. I loved them too, bulking them together with my comrades, my poilus, the men of France.
I had lost track of Philibert during the first months of the war. Then I heard that he had been put to guard one of the Paris gates. He stayed there for three months, standing in the road, with a gun, stopping the motors of officers, looking at passes. Poor Philibert! And there was no one to take any interest now in what became of him. His world was finished, his friends could do nothing for him. The France that was at war with Germany did not know him. The men who were leading the nation had never heard of him, or if they had, remembered him with a sneer.
Ludovic had entered one of the ministries. I went to him. Philibert, I pointed out, was being wasted. He was a linguist. A month later he was given the rank of interpreter and attached to the General Staff. Occasionally he accompanied Ludovic to London, or Rome, or Boulogne. Poor Philibert! He would have gone to the trenches if he could. He was too old. I scarcely saw him, for four years.
When I had leave I spent it with Jinny. He did the same, but our leave didn’t often coincide.
Jinny came back to Paris and lived with her grandmother. There was a room kept ready for me in the flat.
Sometimes I motored down from the front, along the thundering roads where armies moved in the dark, and with the gigantic rumble of motor convoys, and the pounding of the guns in my ears, I would step into the little still bright sitting room with its glinting miniatures and silk hangings to find the two of them rolling bandages or knitting socks.
Jinny seemed to me quite safe there.
And in a way I was glad that the years of her girlhood should be passed in a seclusion and quiet that would have been impossible in peace time. There was no one left to spoil her now, no army of servants for her to order about, no pageant of pleasure to dazzle her eyes. The problem of her life seemed like everything else to be simplified out of recognition.
I did not know that Bianca had come back to Paris. I had forgotten her. Jinny was very sweet to me when I came. She would turn on my bath and help me take off my things, and wail over my dreadful hands, stained with disinfectants and swollen with chilblains.
“Oh, darling,” she would say, “how brave you are to do it,” and then she would shudder and add—“I couldn’t—the sight of blood makes me sick. How you can bear the ugliness—”
And I would assure her that she was much too young to do nursing.
Your mother was very kind to me. The war had aroused her from the lassitude of old age. She had risen to meet it. Lifting her gentle head proudly, she had seemed to look out beyond the confines of her narrow seclusion, across the years, and to see her country rise before her in its old beauty, its one-time grandeur.
“France will have her revenge now,” she had said, with a flash lighting her weary eyes.
And her mind appeared more vigorous. She read all the newspapers or asked Jinny to read them aloud to her. She took a great interest in my work, and seemed to regard me as some admirable but inexplicable puzzle.
“You are too brave, mon enfant, and too exalted. When the war is over and you come back to your old habits, to take up your old life—you will see—”
“Maybe I shall never come back to it, dear—never take up again the old life as you say.”
And again she smiled, thinking that I was joking, but I was not joking, my brain was clear, I believe I knew even then, that I would never run Philibert’s house again.
“You look happy, my child,” she said to me one day.
“I am, belle-mère.”
“Ah—but how curious!”
“But dear—it is not as if any one very near or dear were in danger. Philibert is safe, Blaise too, driving his ambulances.”
“But the horror, the pain, the suffering all round one—look—already in our family five young men killed—your Aunt Marianne bereft of her sons—your Uncle Jacques crippled—”
“I know—I know—I do feel for them, and I do feel for France. When I say that I am happy, I only mean, that for me the equation of life is so simple, that I am content as never before.”
“I see—you are happy because of the sacrifice you have made—because of all you have given up in the cause for our country. Cela est très beau.”
“No, dear.” I felt bound to try and explain. “It is not that. It is not fine at all. I haven’t given up anything that I cared about. I have only got what I wanted. I have found my place, my right place—the place of a worker.”
She looked puzzled, then turned it off with a smile.
Jinny was growing up and the war was slipping by over her little blond head like a monstrous shadow. She seemed in that greyness, to become unreal. I did not know what was going on in her mind.
One night in March 1918 I staggered in on her. I must have been more tired than I realized. My head was burning. The little soft still room, your mother with her hair in stiff regular waves, a lace shawl round her shoulders, and Jinny, smiling over a story book; it was like a dream.
And Jinny was like a little creature in a dream. Her idle delicate hands, her plaintive voice were strange. She had on a rose coloured frock, and was eating sweets. Some one had sent her a box of chocolates.
“Look, Mummy, chocolates—we never have them any more, do we, petite mère?”
I had seen the world rushing to destruction; the powers of darkness triumphant. Just beyond those walls, along the road, one came to the edge of the abyss.
“Mummy, I hate the war, c’est si bête—when will it end?” she pouted.
Suddenly I was angry; I felt that it was wrong for my daughter to be like that, wrong and stupid.
“Jinny,” I cried—“are you asleep? Don’t you understand that the world is coming to an end?”
But she looked at me with curious defiant eyes and asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say. Come with me tomorrow. Come and see. Come and help—you’re no longer a child. Come!” But she drew away from me with a shiver.
“I couldn’t,” she said in a fine hard little voice.
And your mother broke in,
“Jane, you must be mad to suggest such a thing.”
“But I want her to know—to understand—to share—”
“That is wrong. What is there for her to understand? She is a child. Her life is not involved in the war. It lies beyond. She should be protected from this nightmare.”
“I want her with me.”
Your mother shook her head sadly. “If you want her with you, you should stay at home and look after her. You have been admirable, you have devoted yourself, but when the war is over, you will perhaps find that you have made a mistake.”
“Mistake! Would you have me stay at home while men are dying by thousands!”
She sighed gently. “Ah—well—dear—you know best, but I wonder sometimes, if you are not deluded—”
Jinny had disappeared. I found her in her bedroom, her head buried in her pillow.
“I’m a coward,” she sobbed, “a coward. I would be afraid to go.”
I took her in my arms. “My poor little lonely Jinny.” I held her a long time—a long time—comforting her, conscience-smitten, troubled, but the next day I left again for the front, following my monstrous illusion, answering the terrible call of the greatest imposture in creation. For I was wrong and your mother was right. The war was not a fine thing. It did not save the world or renew it. It left nothing fine or noble behind. It was an obscene monster. It called up from the soil of a dozen continents all the fine strong men, and devoured them, it summoned out of the heart of humanity, heroism, and it devoured that. Courage, faith, hope, self-sacrifice, all the dreams of men were poured into its jaws and disappeared. Nothing was left but broken men, and a ruined earth.
I ought to have stayed with Jinny. That was my job.
Her nineteenth birthday was a week after the armistice. She had changed from a child to a woman while I was away, helping men to die uselessly and suddenly I saw that she was wise as I had hoped never to see her. She said to me that day,
“I know Mummy about you and Papa—you needn’t pretend any more.”
It was time, the family said, that she should be married.