CHAPTER XIII.
‘I am the Fact,’ said War, ‘and I stand astride the path of Life.... There can be nothing else and nothing more in human life until you have reckoned with me.’—H. G. Wells.
That same evening, a good deal later on, Lady Forsyth sat at her dressing-table, brushing out her hair, recalling, with pride, Mark’s vivid speech, the cheers, the record ‘bag’ of recruits, and wondering if he would forget to come for his usual good-night.
His room opened out of hers; and the door between stood chronically ajar—a companionable habit begun in her first days of loneliness after his father’s death. He rarely missed the little ceremony of early tea, when he would establish himself at the foot of the bed and argue, or read aloud, or simply ‘rag’ her, as the spirit moved him. Then he would wander in and out, in the later stages of dressing, hindering and delighting her in about equal measure. Or they would carry on a violent argument through the open door, a pair of disembodied voices, till some climax would bring one or other gesticulating to the threshold. These morning and evening hours were the times of their most formidable encounters, their wildest nonsense, their utmost joy in each other’s society, exhibited in a manner peculiar to themselves. At night the ‘hair-brush interview’ had become a regular institution. It might be over in ten minutes or last till midnight, according to their mood. This was the time for graver matters, for the give and take of advice; and although there might be little outward show of sentiment, those hours of comradeship were among the most sacred treasures of the mother’s heart.
To-night she brushed till her arm ached, listening for his footstep; and the moment she put the hated thing down, he came, bringing with him the whiff of cigarette smoke she loved.
Standing behind her, he took her head between his hands, lightly passed his fingers through her hair and smiled at her in the glass. She was responsive as a cat when her hair was caressed; and he knew it.
‘Poor deserted little Mums!’ he said. ‘Had you given me up in despair?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And how long would you have hung on past despair point?’ he asked with a twinkle.
‘Probably half an hour.... What have you done with your lady-love?’
‘Ordered her to bed.’
‘So early? All for my benefit? I scent an ulterior motive.’
He laughed and pulled her hair. ‘Your instinct’s infallible! It’s this marrying business. I know I promised to wait; but the whole face of the world has changed since then.’
He detected the faint compression of her lips.
‘Mums, you’re incorrigible. She’s a delicious thing.’
‘Who says otherwise?’
‘You do—internally! Not a mite of use throwing dust in my eyes. When you’re converted I shall know it, to the tick of a minute. Meantime’—he moved over to the window and stood there facing her—‘the question is, in a war like this, oughtn’t one to marry, if possible, before going out? She got on to war weddings this evening, and I was tongue-tied. That mustn’t happen again. What’s your notion? D’you still think—wait?’
A pause. She dreaded, as he did, the possibility of Wynchcombe Friars passing into the hands of Everard Forsyth and his son, whose views were not their views, except in matters political. Had the wife in question been Sheila, her answer would have been unhesitating. As it was, she parried his awkward question with another.
‘What do you think yourself, Mark?’
He laughed.
‘Oh, you clever woman! I have my answer. And in this case ... I believe you’re right. Personally, I’m game to marry her at once. But ... there are other considerations. Seems her precious Harry’s been rubbing into her that these war marriages aren’t fair on women—that it’s a bigger shadow on their lives losing a husband than a lover. It’s a tragic sort of start, I admit; and once we’re married the wrench of separation would surely be harder for both. Then, as regards myself, you know how this coming struggle has obsessed my mind; how we’ve doubted, both of us, the spirit of modern England—the selfish, commercial spirit of the red-necktie brand. And now that I see the old country shaming our doubts, I simply want to fling myself into this business—heart and brain and body. And, frankly, I’ve a feeling I could give myself to things with a freer mind ... as a bachelor. That’s the truth—for your very private ear. Thirdly and lastly, if we married, she ought to be here with you. And I’m doubtful if you’d either of you relish that arrangement, lacking me to do buffer state. See?’
‘I do see, very clearly,’ she answered, smiling at him with grave tenderness, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands.
‘Thought you would. There’s only one thing worries me. As my wife—if the worst happened, she’d at least be well provided for. Seems she has literally no money, and a very fair gift for spending it.’
Helen’s quick brain—lightened by her relief—sprang to instant decision. ‘You could settle that by adding a codicil to your will. Those investments of father’s that are not tied up with the place would give her quite a comfortable income.’
‘Capital! Fool I was not to think of it. Simply forestall my instructions about her marriage settlement. We’ll fix it up at once and I’ll talk things over with her to-morrow. See how she feels about it herself.’
They discussed details for another half-hour; then, in his peremptory fashion, he ordered her to bed.
‘God bless you,’ she whispered as he shed a kiss on her hair. ‘This afternoon I was the proudest mother in England.’
‘O fool woman—just because I’ve caught the gift of the gab! With practice I might even degenerate into a politician. Just as well I’m in for a few years of the silent service. Go to sleep quick, and don’t let yourself be bogey-ridden by German devilments.’
But though wisdom endorsed his command, she disobeyed it flatly. There was no sleep in her brain; and instead of going to bed, she sat down in the window-seat, leaned against the woodwork and looked out upon the still serenity of garden, terrace and pinewood, softly illumined by an unclouded moon. The very peace and beauty of those moonlit August nights had an uncanny power of intensifying the inner visions that daylight and ceaseless occupation kept partially in check. She could not now look upon the moon without seeing the sacked villages, the human wreckage of battle that the same impartial goddess illumined, over there, on the shell-battered fields of Belgium and France.
Earlier in the day her spirit had been uplifted by Miss Sorabji’s beautiful letter ‘England in Earnest’; by her exhortation, from the Gita, ‘Think of this not as a war, but as a sacrifice of arms demanded of the gods.’ But now, in the peace and silence of night, it was the anguish of the flight from Tirlemont that lived before her eyes and chilled her blood. Too vividly, she pictured the flaming town; the rush of panic-stricken people; women and children, shot, bayonetted, ruthlessly ridden down. And already there were whispers of things infinitely worse than killing—things unnamable, at thought of which imagination blenched⸺
From that great, confused mass of misery there emerged the pathetic figure of one fugitive peasant woman and five children who stood bewildered in the Place de la Gare, crying all of them as if their hearts would break. That morning the German soldiery had killed the woman’s husband and trampled two of her children to death before her face—a minor item in an orgy of horrors. But it is the poignant personal detail that pierces the heart: and the acute realisation of one mother’s anguish brought sudden tears to Helen’s eyes.
So blurred was the moonlit garden, when she looked down into it, that a shadow moving at the end of the terrace set her heart fluttering in her throat.
Spy hunting and spy mania were in the air. Almost every day brought its crop of tales, credible and incredible: horses poisoned wholesale at Aldershot, mysterious gun-emplacements, hidden arms and ammunition in the least expected places. Even allowing for exaggeration, these tales were sufficiently disturbing. They gave a creepy, yet rather thrilling sense of insecurity to things as perennially and unshakably secure as the Bank of England or Westminster Abbey. Nor could even those symbols of stability be reckoned immune, with the financial world in convulsions and a mysterious fleet of Zeppelins threatening to bombard London!
In the over-civilised and over-legislated world that came by a violent end in July 1914, the uncertainty of life had been little more than a pious phrase, spasmodically justified by events. Now it was an impious fact, vaguely or acutely felt almost every hour of the day—by none more acutely than by Helen Forsyth with her quick sensibilities and vivid brain. Even Mark admitted that she was keeping her head creditably on the whole; but in certain moods she was capable of demanding a drastic search for gun-emplacements in her own grounds or suspecting a secret store of ammunition among the ruins of Wynchcombe Abbey, all on the strength of a semi-German gardener dismissed years ago. Only last week a suspicious, Teutonic-looking individual had come to the back door and put the cook ‘all in a tremor’ by asking superfluous questions about the neighbourhood. And now this mysterious wanderer in the garden—at such an hour⸺!
She was on her feet, brushing aside the tears that obscured her vision. But the shadow had vanished behind a bush and did not seem disposed to reappear. For a second she stood hesitating. If she called Mark, he would either laugh at her or scold her for not being in bed. The creature was probably harmless. She would creep downstairs quietly and explore. For all her nerves and fanciful fears, she was no coward in the grain. Hastily twisting up her hair, she slipped on a long opera coat and crept noiselessly down into the drawing-room. There she found that the French window leading on to the terrace had been left unlocked.
‘How careless of Mark!’ she murmured; and, with fluttering pulse, stepped out into the moonlight.
There he was again! Summoning all her courage she went forward, uncertain even now what she meant to say.
The shadowy figure had turned. It was coming towards her. Then—with a start of recognition she stopped dead.
‘Keith!’ she exclaimed softly, and could have laughed aloud in her relief.
‘Helen—what are you doing out here?’ he asked, an odd thrill in his low voice.
‘What are you doing?’ she retorted. ‘Frightening me out of my life! I saw a suspicious-looking shadow; and—don’t laugh at me—I thought it might be a spy.’
‘And you came down to tackle him alone! Just like you. Supposing it had been?’
‘Oh—thank goodness it’s not! But don’t you ever give me away.’ Helen’s laugh ended in an involuntary shiver.
‘Cold?’ he asked quickly.
‘No—no. Let’s walk a little and feel normal.’
He moved on beside her, anxious, yet deeply content. Then: ‘Helen,’ he said suddenly, ‘if you’re going to let things get on your nerves like this, you’ll be done for. Your best chance is to take up some absorbing war-work; the harder the better.’
‘What work? And where?’ He caught a note of desperation in her tone. ‘Scrubbing hospital floors? Or playing about with Belgians and invalids here, while Sheila is at Boulogne, you scouring France in our car, and Mark in the thick of it all? He wants me to stay here, I know. But, Keith, I simply can’t. What else, though, can a useless woman of fifty do?’
‘To start with, she can refrain from calling herself useless, which is a libel! To go on with⸺’ He paused, regarding her. The supposed spy was meditating a bold suggestion. ‘Helen—could you ... would you ... come out with me as my orderly? If so, I could confine my activities to the Base. I verily believe you’d find the real thing less nerve-racking than the nightmares of an imagination like yours. But, could you stand it, physically? And ... would the conventions permit?’
Her low laugh answered him straight away. ‘My dear Keith, talk of inspiration! It would just save my soul alive. I can act infinitely better than I can endure. I should feel nearer to Mark. And as for the conventions, I hanged them all years ago. What harm, if the poor dead things are drawn and quartered?’ She checked herself and looked up at him. ‘Will you take your Bible oath that I shouldn’t simply be in the way?’
‘I’ll take it on as many Bibles as you like to produce,’ he answered, with becoming gravity. ‘But I’m thinking ... for your sake ... another woman.... How about Sheila?’
‘Sheila! Lovely.’
‘Would she give up her precious massage?’
‘If I wanted her, she’d give up anything. But—the massage wouldn’t bring her up against the worst horrors. Your work would. And she’s full young—barely three and twenty.’
‘She is that. Though, if I’m any good at observation, I should say the stature of her spirit is far in advance of her years. She gives me the impression of great reserve power, that girl. She never seems to put out her full strength, or to waste it in kicking against the pricks.’
‘One for me!’ Lady Forsyth murmured meekly.
‘Yes, one for you! And I make bold to prophesy she would be worth five of you in a painful emergency.’
He made that unflattering statement in a tone of such extraordinary tenderness that she beamed as at a compliment.
‘Let the righteous smite me friendly—when I deserve it! You seem to have made a close study of my Sheila. It only remains to secure her services and Mark’s consent⸺’
‘Mother!’ His deep voice called suddenly from the window. ‘I’m ashamed of you. Come in at once!’
‘Coming!’ she called back, adding under her breath: ‘Keith, remember I only came down for a book. And you found me locking you out.’
Then she hurried away, obedient always to the voice of her son.
Nightmares had been effectually dispelled.
Bel’s hope that the War Office would be merciful was not fulfilled. The Great Man, who worked day and night, creating new armies, had need of every promising semblance of an officer he could lay hands on; and Mark’s name was a recommendation in itself.
Bel was given little more than a week in which to be ‘heavenly good’; and it must be admitted that she made the most of it. She took kindly, on the whole, to Mark’s solution of the marriage problem. How far her acquiescence was due to his exceeding thoughtfulness in the matter of money it might be invidious to inquire. There remained the fact that Harry O’Neill—scenting a possible war wedding—had skilfully put forward her own pronounced views on the subject; while, incidentally, spoiling her idol more egregiously than ever. And the girl herself leaned towards a more auspicious beginning of her married life. Mark found her oddly superstitious on the subject; and, with her gift for evading unpleasant facts, she had risen readily to the optimistic conviction that the war would be over by Christmas or the New Year. Apparently it did not occur to her, or to others of her persuasion, that a short war could only mean victory for Germany. But there seemed little use in dispelling an illusion that kept her happy; and, in her case, could do no harm.
So she clung unchallenged to her comforting belief; and, the great question being settled, Mark was free to consider other matters.
To start with, there was Keith’s amazing proposition to enlist Mums—a project that did not square with Mark’s private plan for keeping her safely wrapped in cotton wool and harmless war-activities at Wynchcombe Friars. Son-like, he had scarce realised how infinitely dear she was to him, till her eagerness to cross the Channel had driven him to consider the possibility in all its bearings. And the inclusion of Sheila in the programme brought to light his hidden tenderness for her that seemed in no way diminished by his passion for Bel. Why the deuce couldn’t the women be reasonable, and stay in England where there would be work enough for all? And what business had Keith to go encouraging them? But so plainly were the three enamoured of their idea that in the end he had not the heart to damp them.
In the privacy of his thoughts, he thanked goodness that Bel could be trusted not to emulate them; though her attitude towards the war was now less hostile than it had been. The very air she breathed was impregnated with war-fever, war-talk and war-realities. It was increasingly evident that new activities were going to become the fashion; and she was of those who unquestioningly follow a fashion, lead it where it may. Having no taste for the menial work of hospitals or for tending the sick and wounded, she had elected to help in some sort of women’s work engineered by Harry, ‘the Cause’ being temporarily extinct. So far as possible she turned away her eyes from beholding and her heart from feeling the full measure of the invisible horror, which, to more imaginative minds, became too acutely visible and audible during that critical last week of August 1914.
For by now, across the Channel, the Great Retreat had begun. Days that, at Wynchcombe Friars, slipped by all too fast, seemed over there, to have neither beginning nor end. Common standards of time were lost in that ceaseless, sleepless nightmare of dogged marching and still more dogged fighting, whenever Prussian hordes gave the broken remnant of an army a chance to turn and smite, as the British soldier can smite even in retreat.
It was from Le Cateau that an officer friend sent a pencil scrawl to Mark.
‘It is quite evident that we have taken the knock badly. With any other army one would say we’re beaten. But Tommy doesn’t understand the word. You can only beat him by knocking the life out of him. And even when you think he’s dead, chances are he’ll get up and kick you. People at home simply haven’t begun to know what heroes these chaps are. Makes me sick even to think of certain supercilious folk, I seem to remember, who thought the worst of any man in uniform on principle. Great Scott, they’re not fit to lick Tommy’s boots.’
Mark handed that letter to Bel.
‘There’s one in the eye for your precious Maitland,’ he remarked coolly. ‘Copy it out verbatim, please, and send it to him with my compliments!’
And Bel obeyed with exemplary meekness. She had rather objected to the tone of Maitland’s last letter; and, in her own fashion, she was very much impressed. Heroism, a long way off and entirely unconnected with one’s self, was an admirable thing in man.
It was near the end of August, when the Channel ports were being evacuated and the fall of Paris seemed merely a matter of days, that Mark at last found his name in the Gazette coupled with that of a distinguished Highland regiment; and in record time he was ready—uniform, equipment, parting presents and all.
Like most of his race and kind, he would have preferred an informal departure—casual ‘good-byes,’ as though he were going off on business for a week or so. But he had won the hearts of his people by justice, understanding, and the personal touch that was a tradition at Wynchcombe Friars: he had inspired them, by precept and exhortation, to give of their best ungrudgingly; and he could not deny them the legitimate thrill of speeding his departure with congratulations and cheers.
Only on Sunday, his last day, he evaded one ordeal by limiting his attendance at church to early service with his mother. Bel had little taste for early rising, and Mark did not press the point.
In the afternoon he delighted his humbler friends—wives of the gamekeeper, the coachman and the manager of his industrial colony—by calling on them in full uniform. Though he occasionally wore the kilt and glengarry at Inveraig, his Hampshire folk had never seen him thus attired; and their open admiration was so embarrassing that, after several hours of it, he returned limp and exhausted, clamouring for whisky and soda and the society of Bel, who could always be trusted to keep her admiration within bounds.
To her he devoted the evening; and early on Monday the more personal farewells must be said; the cheerful, casual note vigorously maintained. It was not ‘the real thing’ yet; and the women, in their hearts, prayed that ‘the real thing’ might be deferred for many months to come. Meantime, unless England was favoured with an invasion, he would be safe enough on the south-east coast of Scotland; and later on, if rooms were available, he would permit his mother and Bel to intrude upon his violent industry for a week.
Keith drove them all to the station, and behold, outside the gray stone gateway, an impromptu guard of honour lined the road to Westover: villagers and farm hands, weavers and metal-workers, women, children and ineligible men. At sight of the motor, they broke into shouts and ragged cheers that would have moved a heart many degrees less responsive than the heart of Mark Forsyth.
‘Drive slower, man,’ he said to Keith; and, standing up in the car, he waved his glengarry—giving them shout for shout—till he could no more.
That vision of him, so standing, with the morning light in his eyes, the sun upon his chestnut-red hair and his kilt blown back by the wind, remained stamped indelibly upon his mother’s brain....