But I got them after a bit, got them in the hollow of my hand—playing on their hearts with memories of home, though all the time I knew the kind of homes they had left, and how hard most of them had made it there for the women they had vowed to love, honour and cherish.
When the talk was over they crowded round and one particularly unattractive person with a scowling eye inquired whether he could have a word with me privately. We managed it later on in a remote corner, hard by one of the evil-smelling lamps.
"'Ere, missus," he began. "Do yer 'appen to know the Barkin' Road?"
I eagerly asserted my complete familiarity with the Barking Road, the Kings' Highway to Dockland! I was even ready to proclaim it the finest thoroughfare in the world.
"See here, then, Lidy, thet was good talk, but it don't go far enough. Maybe I weren't all I should a bin w'en I was back there, but my missus she ain't played the game, she's played it low down on me since I've been in this 'ere war. I ain't had no letters from 'er for over four months, and I carnt 'ear nuthink about the four kids nah, but a bloke wot lives dahn our street sends me word that she's sold up the whole bloomin' shoot and nobody knows where she is, and the kids is in the Union. An' I carnt git out of this blarsted 'ole to see to the kids and give 'er wot for. Wot are ye goin' to do about it, Lidy?" That was what people call a tough proposition, Cornelia, the whole tragedy of one-half of the war in a nutshell.
I did what I could. I tried to comfort him and took down all the particulars in the note book already bulging with behests, which it will probably take me the rest of my natural life to fulfil.
When I got back to England I made the inquiries, put the Salvation Army angel on the track, and found it all just as he described. His missus has never been found—she has gone down in the underworld, urged there by the very same temptations which made Dan's wife say she had no more use for Dan. Tasting independence of action and of purse for the first time, she lost her sense of proportion. With the well-to-do, it is the sweets of independence that is testing them—with the other sort, the lure of the separation allowances, which means more money in hand than they had ever dreamed of before in their poor, narrow, sordid lives.
There's something all wrong with life, Cornelia. It will have to be straightened out and evened up, and the poor and the oppressed will have to taste a little of the glory and the beauty and the dignity of life.
Perhaps that is what the war is for.
Meanwhile the poor bond!