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.