To fall fighting for England in the full tide of life, to fall, shot through the heart, without a pang and in a moment of supreme exaltation is to finish gloriously, enviably. We all know this and we all say it, though some of us perhaps may feel that our own hearts are none the less broken for that. However, it was not to be expected that Mildred Haseldine should be broken-hearted when the news came to Culme House. She was much distressed; still she could not but recognise that there were compensating circumstances, and she went over at once to Bratton Farm to impart some of these to the poor lad’s parents. If her condolences were not received in quite as grateful a spirit as they might have been, she could and did make allowances for the grief-stricken farmer and his wife. Old Issel scarcely listened to what she was saying, and cut her short by calling out in a loud, harsh voice:
‘What did ’a want to go and get hisself killed vur? Darn they foul Germans! Yes, Miss, I don’t doubt but you’m sorry, but it bain’t your sorrow as’ll bring my boy back.’
With that he stumped out of the kitchen, leaving Mildred to do what she could with Mrs. Issel, which was an even more difficult matter. For Mrs. Issel, dry-eyed and despairing, had some rather unkind and irrational things to say. When, for instance, she was gently told that her visitor had strong personal reasons for sympathising with all to whom the war was bringing anxiety or loss, it was not very generous to rejoin that the young lady need not fret. ‘They staff officers don’t niver take no hurt, so I’ve heerd tell.’ But what was really too unjust to be endured without protest was the assertion that it was Miss Mildred more than anybody who had driven Jan away to distant battlefields by ‘putting a passel of foolish notions into his head.’ In self-defence, Mildred had to remind the old woman that, so far from having encouraged Jan to enlist, she had tried, by providing him with other interests, to deter him from so doing. As for his actual enlistment, she had only heard of it after it had become an accomplished fact. This being undeniably true, Mrs. Issel made no reply and remained silent while it was represented to her that we can never be sure whether an early death is a misfortune or not. No living being can hope to escape sorrow and suffering, and Mildred, for her part, did not think that poor Jan’s temperament was of the kind that tends towards happiness.
Probably that also was true. It would hardly have made Jan happy to discover—as he might have done—that he had mistaken an entirely commonplace young woman for a divinity nor to realise—as he must have done—that he was too heavily weighted in life’s handicap to emerge from the ruck where he was so ill at ease. Judith Combe, while brushing her mistress’s hair that evening, said of him with unexpected sagacity that maybe Providence had ‘served him kind’ by taking him out of this world, seeing that he would always have been set upon what was beyond his reach.
Judith herself was so set upon obtaining something for which she was more than a little afraid to ask that she decided to take the risk of making her desire known. Could Miss Mildred spare one of Jan’s letters? He had not written to her at all, and she would like very much, if she might, to have a page or two from his own hand. ‘Because we was in a manner friends, you see, Miss.’
Mildred looked inquiringly at her sedate handmaid and smiled. ‘I am not sure that it would be quite fair to the poor boy,’ she answered. ‘He says some things which many people would think rather comic, and perhaps I oughtn’t.... However, you wouldn’t understand. Oh, well, yes, Judith—take them all, if you care to have them. I think I can find the whole collection.’
So the whole collection became the property of Judith, who spent many an hour over it and stained some of its leaves with her tears. It is by no means certain that she did not understand Jan’s flights of fancy and diction. It may even have constituted one of the unnumbered ironies of human experience that Jan himself should have been more nearly understood by the illiterate Judith than by Mildred Haseldine or by anybody else.
W. E. Norris.