The Undefeated

by J. C. Snaith

She shivered, not at his words, but at the gray look on his face.

“Stanning said the night before he went he thought that taking it altogether it would have been better if there had never been a human race at all. I’ll never forget that last talk with him, not if I live to be a hundred—which I shall not.” The Corporal had begun to think his thoughts aloud. “You see, he knew then that his number was up. I can see him settin’ there, Mother, just as you are now, lookin’ at that old sunset, his back to that old canal—the Yser, I think they call it—an’ stinkin’ it was, fair cruel. ‘Auntie,’ he said suddenlike, ‘tell me what brought you into this?’ I said, ‘No, boy’—just like a child he was as he set there—‘it’s for me to ask you that question. You’re a big gun, you know, a shining light; I’m a never-was-er.’ That seemed to make him laugh; he was one that could always raise a laugh, even when he felt most solemn. ‘I come of a long stock of high-nosed old Methodists,’ he said. ‘Always made a thing they call Conscience their watchword and fetish. There was a Stanning went to the stake for it in the time of Bloody Mary; there was another helped Oliver Cromwell to cut the head off King Charles. A poisonous, uncomfortable crowd, and all my life they’ve seemed to come back and worry me just at the times I should have been most pleased to do without them. People talk about free will—but there isn’t such a thing, my dear.’

“I allowed that there wasn’t in my case. Then I told him about Troop Sergeant Major Hollis, who fought at Waterloo. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yours is an old name in the city, older than mine, I dare say.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘according to Bazeley’s Annals there was a William Hollis who was mayor of the borough in the year of the Spanish Armada.’ ‘Good for you, Auntie,’ he said, chaffing-like; he was a rare one for chaff. ‘One up to you. Then,’ he said, ‘there was William Hollis who was “some” poet in the eighteenth century, who wrote the famous romantic poem, “The Love Lorn Lady of Corfield.” Still,’ he said, ‘these things don’t explain you dragging your old bones to rot out here.’ ‘They do in a way, though,’ I said. ‘When we come up against a big thing it isn’t us that really matters, it’s what’s at the back of us. I used to set in my old garden on The Rise,’ I said, ‘in those early days when those dirty dogs opposite was just beginning to wipe their feet on Europe. And I said to myself, Bill Hollis, how would you like it if they broke through the fence into your garden, trampling your young seeds and goose-stepping all over your roses and your tulips. And I tell you, Jim—we got to be very familiar those last few weeks—it used to make me fair mad to read in the Tribune what they’d done ... Louvain one time ... Termondy another ... et cetera.... And I kept on settin’ there day after day, in my old garden on the top o’ The Rise, saying to myself, Hollis, it’s no use, me lad, you’re going into this. You’ve failed in every bloody thing so far, and if you take on this you’ll not be man enough to stick it out. War isn’t thinking, it’s doing, and you’ve never been a doer, you’ve not. Then I read in the Tribune one morning that they’d got Antwerp and I said to myself, I can’t stand this no more. And I went right away to the Duke of Wellington and had a liquor up—but only a mild one, you know—and then round the corner to the Recruiting Office and gave my age as thirty-six and here I am admiring this bleeding sunset with the eye of an artist.’

“That made him laugh some more. ‘Well, Auntie,’ he said, ‘I’m very proud to have known you and I hope you’ll do me the honor of accepting this as a keepsake.’ He unbuttoned his greatcoat and took this old watch out of his tunic.”

The Corporal paused an instant in his story to follow the example of his friend. He produced an old-fashioned gold hunting watch, with J. T. in monogram at the back, and handed it to Melia.

“It’s a rare good one, Mother,” the Corporal’s voice was very low, “solid gold.” He opened the lid and showed her the inscription:

To John Torrington, Esquire, from a Humble Admirer of His Genius, 1859.

“Stanning said, ‘I had the luck to buy that in a pawnshop in Blackhampton long after he was dead, and if I had had a boy of my own I should like him to have kept it as an heirloom, but as I have not I want you to take it, Auntie, because I know you’ll appreciate it.’ Somehow, I could tell from the way he spoke that he was done. I hadn’t the heart to refuse it, although I hadn’t a boy or a girl of my own neither.” A huskiness in the Corporal’s throat made it hard to go on for a moment. “‘I’m only thirty-nine,’ he said, ‘and all the best is in me. I don’t fancy having my light put out like this in a wet bog, but it’s got to come, my dear. I hate to think that sometime to-morrow I shall be as if I had never been.’ ‘Not you,’ I said. ‘You’re sickening for the fever.‘ But I couldn’t move him. He’d got the hoo-doo. ‘No use talking about it,’ he said, ‘but you and I’ll never have that day’s fishing in Corfield Weir. I should like you to have seen my cottage up at Dibley. It’s got the ghost of that old boy.’ He put his hand on the watch, Mother, just like this. ‘If there is a heaven for dead painters, and I doubt it, I’d like to sit in John Torrington’s corner on his right hand. You see, I’ve learned all sorts of things, living in his house. I was getting to know the lights on the Sharrow and the feel of the clouds—in all the great Torringtons the clouds feel like velvet—and he was going to show me the way to handle sunlight—I’ve already been twice across to New York to see “An Afternoon in July in the Valley of the Sharrow,” the most wonderful thing of its kind in existence. You get the view from my cottage—his cottage—at Dibley. I should like you to have seen it, Auntie. And then I should like to have taken you across to New York to show you what old John made of it. Fancy having to go all the way to New York to look at it. So like us to be caught on the hop, in the things that really matter.’ I give you my word, Mother, he raised a laugh even then, but of a sudden his voice went all queer-like. ‘However,’ he said, ‘there’s a Mind in this that knows more than we do.’ Then the lad began to shiver just as if he had the ague. And the next day, about the same time, or mayhap the perishin’ old sun had gone a bit more west, I had to go out across No Man’s Land to bring him in ... what there was left of him.”

The Corporal ended his strange story as if after all it didn’t much matter. He was quite impersonal, but Melia sat beside him shivering at the look in his eyes. Never before had the veil been torn aside in this way. She was a dull soul, fettered heavily by her limitations, but sitting there in the growing dusk it came on her almost with horror that in all those long years it was the first peep she had had behind the scenes of his mind. She hadn’t realized the kind of man he was. More than once she had cast it in his face that he was an idle shack-about. Somehow, there had been nothing to give her the key to him; and now, miraculously as it seemed, it had come to her, it was too late.