Two white heads bent over the tombstones in the cemetery at Truckleford and talked genealogy; two white heads strolled on the lawn and had tilts in theology, or sat in the library and discussed English and American viewpoints. The vicar of Truckleford believed in a State church, while Dr. Sanford held that this meant mixing religion and politics, which was a bad business. Sanford of England, who had cheeks ruddy from the moist climate, brought his sentences to a close with a rising inflection; and Sanford of New England had a dry complexion, with sharp little wrinkles around his eyes, and brought his sentences to a close with a falling inflection. They seemed a trifle strange to each other at times, though they were speaking the same language; and either would have been highly complimented if you had told him that you recognised him for the Englishman or the American he was at once? They rambled from philosophy to politics, from scientific versus classical education to the future of humanity generally, rich in words and ideas if not in money.
Then, two other white heads pottered about the flower and kitchen gardens, both clicking their knitting needles industriously for soldiers the while. In England, roses were not often frost-killed or burned by the hot sun of summer, which brightened the sunflower and the goldenrod fringeing the roadsides with yellow in autumn at home. Two white heads discussed the servant problem in both countries; and England thought it pretty bad at home until she heard of the state of affairs in America. It was the particular care of the two English heads, plotting together in their nightly conferences, that the American cousins should feel at home when English facility in this respect, however insular and offish the islanders may seem abroad, requires no calculation.
The visit at last come true had the aspect of romance under the circumstances. It required a certain amount of courage for Dr. and Mrs. Sanford to cross the Atlantic in the midst of submarine activity quite in keeping with ancestral Pilgrim daring in crossing in the seventeenth century. From Jane came an occasional letter on the state of affairs in Longfield. "Things can't be right personally with you away," she wrote. "I am getting too fat and lazy for words. But things exteriorly, as Phil would say when he got hifalutin, are just the same. Garden doing fine except the cauliflowers, which look peaked; but they will pick up, Patrick says, as cauliflowers have a way of looking peaked and ragged before they get a start. No hyphenates and few potato bugs in Longfield this year. I put up thirty jars of currant jelly and it looks licking good. That is more than you can eat; but sure, unless you change your habits, it isn't more than you can give away. I expect you're putting your shoes outside your door every morning to be blacked, like the lords do. Well, when you come home you will find the blacking-brush in the same old place and that Jane has not changed. I am writing a letter to Phil himself. With best regards,
"Your truly, JANE."
There was one subject which knit the cousinship of the four ever closer—Phil. The local postmaster was convinced that there was no danger of one officer starving, if soldiers could live on cake, judging by the number of packages which went through the parcels post to Second Lieutenant Philip Sanford. Their thoughts were those of hundreds of thousands of other households in England. The pride of it for the vicar and his wife was that they, too, had a son at the front. They would not waive the claim that he was partly theirs and their guests did not ask it. Every day they wrote to Phil, and his cheerful letters in answer, always making sport of the mud and minimising the dangers—long letters when the battery was in billets—brought the four heads into communion of spirit whenever the envelopes arrived. Always there was the fear—the fear over hundreds of thousands of households, no less poignant in each because of the hundreds of thousands of others—the fear which they never mentioned and never forgot.
The postman brought Helen's letter, the only one in the post that trip, to Dr. Sanford when he was alone on the lawn, thinking that a point had occurred to him which would give him the better of the argument with the vicar the next time they resumed a certain discussion. After he had opened the envelope and read the first sentence, he folded the sheet and walked away into the garden to be undisturbed. He must think how to break the news to his wife.
"This time Cousin Phil is not writing to you himself, but I am writing for him," Helen wrote. "Though I have never seen you, it seems as if I knew you and I think, as Phil's father and mother, you are the kind who might suffer more in the end if some of the truth were held back by clever phrases than if it were all told at first. He loves you so much and you love him so much that it is the only honest way.
"He is as whole as ever in body, his mind quite clear, despite the wound in his jaw from a shell-fragment; but he must remain here at the hospital for many months, while a miracle man of a surgeon will make his jaw as good as ever. As the result of shell-shock he is also, for the moment, both blind and deaf; but other miracle men will bring back his sight and hearing. All the great ones are prepared to spoil him with attention, he is so brave.
"As he cannot write himself, I shall write for him every day. But you must not be impatient; as these modern miracle men, unlike the Biblical ones, must take time to perform their wonders. Write him as many letters as you can and I'll spell out every word of them to him. Yes, go on writing just as if he were making a fight at the front and that will help him in the new fight he is making in the dark against pain and for you. When he returns he will be the same as when he left you, only dearer to you as you will be to him. He will recover completely. Depend on this."
"Brave little liar!" as Bricktop had said. Yet Helen believed every word.