The Four Roads

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Mus’ Beatup sat crouched over the fire, the tears every now and then welling up in his eyes, and sometimes overflowing on his cheeks, whence he wiped them away with the back of his hand. “’Tis enough to maake a man taake to drink,” he muttered to himself—“this is wot drives men to drink, surelye.” Every now and then he looked up at the clock.

The clock struck twelve, and the Rifle Volunteer called over the fields:

“Come, farmer, and have a pot with me. You’ve lost a son in your War—there were no sons lost in mine, but pots of beer are good for joy or sorrow. Come and forget that boy for five minutes, how he looked and what he said to you, forget this War through which good yeomen die out of their beds, and drink with the Volunteer, who drilled and marched and camped and did every other warlike thing save fighting, and died between his sheets.”

Mus’ Beatup groped for his stick. Then he shook his head rather sadly. “The boy’s scarce cold in his grave. Reckon I mun wait a day or two before I disremember his last words to me.”

Mrs. Beatup did not come home till after supper, and went to bed almost at once. She felt fagged and tottery, and there was a shrivelled, fallen look about her face. When she was in bed, she could not sleep, but lay watching the moon travel across the room, lighting first the mirror, then the wall, then her own head, then maaster’s, then climbing away up the chimney like a ghost. Every now and then she fell into a little, light dose, so thridden with dreams that it was scarcely sleeping.

In these dreams Tom was always a child, in her arms, or at her feet, or spannelling about after the manner of small boys with tops and string. She did not dream of him as grown, and this was the basis of her new agreement with Thyrza. Thyrza could never think of him as a child, for she had never seen him younger than eighteen; all her memories were concentrated in his few short years of manhood, and his childhood belonged to his mother. So his mother and his wife divided his memory up between them, and each thought she had the better part.

Mrs. Beatup wondered if anyone—Bill Putland or Mus’ Archie—would write and tell her about Tom’s end. So far she had no idea how he had died, and her imagination crept tearfully round him, asking little piteous questions of the darkness—Had he suffered much? Had he asked for her? Had he wanted her?—Oh, reckon he had wanted her, and she had not been there, she had not known that he was dying, she had been pottering round after her household, cooking and washing up and sweeping and dusting, and thinking of him as alive and well, while all the time he was perhaps crying out for her in the mud of No Man’s Land....

The tears rolled down her cheeks in the darkness that followed the setting of the moon. Was it for this that she had borne him in hope and anguish?—that he should die alone, away from her, like a dog, in the mud?... She saw the mud, he had so often told her of it, she saw it sucking and oozing round him like the mud outside the cowhouse door; she saw the milky puddles ... she saw them grow dark and streaked with blood. Then, just as her heart was breaking, she pictured him in the bare clean ward of a hospital, as she had seen him at Eastbourne, with a kind nurse to relieve his last pain and take down his last little messages. Oh, someone was sure to write to Tom’s mother and tell her how he had died, and perhaps send her a message from him.

The daylight crept into the room, stabbing like a finger under the blind, and with it her restlessness increased. Then a pool of sunshine gleamed at the side of the bed. She felt that she could not lie any longer, so climbed out slowly from under the blankets. She tried not to disturb her husband, but she was too unwieldy for a noiseless rising, and she heard him turn over and mutter, asking her what she meant by “waaking a man to his trouble”—then falling asleep again.