It was three weeks after Desmond's death. Pamela was sitting in the
'den' writing a letter to Arthur Chicksands at Versailles. The first
onslaught on Amiens was over. The struggle between Bethune and Ypres
was in full swing.
'DEAREST--This house is so strange--the world is so strange!
Oh, if I hadn't my work to do!--how could one bear it? It seems
wrong and hateful even, to let one's mind dwell on the
wonderful, wonderful thing, that you love me! The British Army
retreating--_retreating_--after these glorious years--that is
what burns into me hour after hour! Thank God Desmond didn't
know! And if I feel like this, who am just an ignorant,
inexperienced girl, what must it be for you who are working
there, at the very centre, the news streaming in on you all the
time?--you who know how much there is to fear--but also how
much there is to be certain of--to be confident of--that we
can't know. Our splendid, _splendid_ men! Every day I watch for
the names I know in the death list--and some of them seem to be
always there. The boy--the other sub-lieutenant--who was with
Desmond when he was wounded, was in the list yesterday.
Forest's boy is badly wounded. The old gardener has lost
another son. Perley's boy is "missing," and so is the poor
Pennington boy. They are heroic--the Penningtons--but whenever
I see them I want to cry.... Oh, I can't write this any more.
I have been writing letters of sympathy all day.
'Dearest, you would be astonished if you could see me at this
moment. I am to-day a full blown group leader. Do you know what
that means? I have had a long round among some of our farms
to-day--bargaining with the farmers for the land-girls in my
group, and looking after their billets. Yesterday I spent half
the day in "docking" with six or eight village women to give
them a "send off." I don't believe you know what docking means.
It is pretty hard work, and at night I have a nightmare--of
roots that never come to an end, and won't pull out!
'You were quite right--it _is_ my work. I was born in the
country. I know and love it. The farmers are very nice to
me. They see I don't try to boss them as the Squire's
daughter--that I'm just working as they are. And I can say a
good deal to them about the war, because of Desmond. They all
knew him and loved him. Some of them tell me stories about his
pluck out hunting as a little chap, and though he had been such
a short time out in France he had written to two or three of
them about their sons in the Brookshires. He had a heavenly
disposition--oh, I wish I had!
'At the present moment I am in knee-breeches, gaiters, and
tunic, and I have just come in. Six o'clock to five, please
sir, with half-an-hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner (I
eat it out of a red handkerchief under a hedge). It was wet and
nasty, and I am pretty tired. But one does not want to
stop--because when one stops one begins to think. And my
thoughts, except for that shining centre where you are, are so
dark and full of sorrow. I miss Desmond every hour, and some
great monstrous demon seems to be clutching at me--at you--at
England--everything one loves and would die for--all day long.
But don't imagine that I ever _doubt_ for one moment. Not
I--
For right is right, since God is God,
And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty,
To falter would be sin.
I know that's not good poetry. But I just love it--because it's
plain and commonplace, and expresses just what ordinary people
feel and think.
'Oh, why was I such a fool about Elizabeth! Now that you are at
a safe distance--and of course on the understanding that you
never, never say a word to me about it--I positively will and
must confess that I was jealous of her about you--yes, about
you, Arthur--because you talked to her about Greek--and about
ash for aeroplanes--and I couldn't talk about them. There's a
nice nature for you! Hadn't you better get rid of me while you
can? But the thing that torments me is that I can never have it
quite out with Desmond. I told him lies, simply. I didn't know
they were lies, I suppose; but I was too angry and too unjust
to care whether they were or not. On the journey from France I
said a few little words to him--just enough, thank Heaven! He
was so sweet to her in those last days--and she to him. You
know one side of her _is_ the managing woman--and the other
(I've only found it out since Desmond's death)--well, she seems
to be just asking you to creep under her wings and be mothered!
She mothered him, and she has mothered me since he shut his
dear eyes for ever. Oh, why won't she mother us all--for good
and all!--father first and foremost.
'I told you something about him last time I wrote, but there is
a great deal more to tell. The horrible thing is that he seems
not to care any more for any of his old hobbies. He sits there
in the library day after day, or walks about it for hours and
hours, without ever opening a book or looking at a thing. Or
else he walks about the woods--sometimes quite late at night.
Forest believes he sleeps very little. I told you he never came
to Desmond's funeral. All business he hands over to Elizabeth,
and what she asks him he generally does. But we all have vague,
black fears about him. I know Elizabeth has. Yet she is quite
clear she can't stay here much longer. Dear Arthur, I don't
know exactly what happened, but I _think_ father asked her to
marry him, and she said no. And I am tolerably sure that I
counted for a good deal in it--horrid wretch that I am!--that
she thought it would make me unhappy.
'Well, I am properly punished. For if or when she goes
away--and you and I are married--if there is to be any marrying
any more in this awful world!--what will become of my father?
He has been a terrifying mystery to me all my life. Now it is
not that any longer. I know at least that he worshipped
Desmond. But I know also that I mean nothing to him. I don't
honestly think it was much my fault--and it can't be helped.
And nobody else in the family matters. The only person who does
matter is Elizabeth. And I quite see that she can't stay here
indefinitely. She told me she promised Desmond she would stay
as long as she could. Just at present, of course, she is the
mainspring of everything on the estate. And they have actually
made her this last week Vice-Chairman of the County War
Agricultural Committee. She refused, but they _made_ her. Think
of that--a woman--with all those wise men! She asked father's
leave. He just looked at her, and I saw the tears come into her
eyes.
'As to Beryl and Aubrey, he was here last Sunday, and she spent
the day with us. He seems to lean upon her in a new way--and
she looks different somehow--happier, I think. He told me, the
day after Desmond died, that Dezzy had said something to him
that had given him courage--"courage to go on," I think he
said. I didn't ask him what he meant, and he didn't tell me.
But I am sure he has told Beryl, and either that--or something
else--has made her more confident in herself--and about him.
They are to be married quite soon. Last week father sent him,
without a word, a copy of his will. Aubrey says it is very
fair. Mannering goes to him, of course. You know that Elizabeth
refused to witness the codicil father wrote last October
disinheriting Aubrey, when he was so mad with Sir Henry? It was
the first thing that made father take real notice of her. She
had only been six weeks here!
'Good-night, my dearest, dearest Arthur! Don't be too much
disappointed in me. I shall grow up some day.'
A few days later the Squire came back from Fallerton to find nobody
in the house, apparently, but himself. He went through the empty
hall and the library, and shut himself up there. He carried an
evening paper crumpled in his hand. It contained a detailed report
of the breaking of the Portuguese centre near Richebourg St. Vaast
on April 10, and the consequent retreat, over some seven miles,
since that day of the British line, together with the more recent
news of the capture of Armentières and Merville. Sitting down at his
own table he read the telegrams again, and then in the stop-press
Sir Douglas Haig's Order of the Day--
'_There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every
position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement.
With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our
cause, each one of us must fight to the end. The safety of our homes
and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the conduct of each one
of us at this critical moment._'
The Squire read and re-read the words. He was sitting close to the
tall French window where through some fine spring days Desmond had
lain, his half-veiled eyes wandering over the woods and green spaces
which had been his childhood's companions. There--submissive for
himself, but, for England's sake, and so that his mind might receive
as long as possible the impress of her fate, an ardent wrestler with
Death through each disputed hour--he had waited; and there, with the
word _England_ on his lips, he had died. The Squire could still see
the marks made on the polished floor by the rolling backward of the
bed at night. And on the wall near there was a brown mark on the
wall-paper. He remembered that it had been made by a splash from a
bowl of disinfectant, and that he had stared at it one morning in a
dumb torment which seemed endless, because Desmond had woke in pain
and the morphia was slow to act.
_England_! His boy was dead--and his country had its back to the
wall. And he--what had he done for England, all these years of her
struggle? His carelessness, his indifference returned upon him--his
mad and selfish refusal, day by day, to give his mind, or his body,
or his goods, to the motherland that bore him.
'_Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?_'
No--it had been nothing to him. But Desmond, his boy, had given
everything. And the death-struggle was still going on. '_Each one of
us must fight on to the end._' Before his eyes there passed the
spectacle of the Army, as he had actually seen it--a division, for
instance, on the march near the Salient, rank after rank of young
faces, the brown cheeks and smiling eyes, the swing of the lithe
bodies. And while he sat there in the quiet of the April evening,
thousands of boys like Desmond were offering those same lithe bodies
to the Kaiser's guns without murmur or revolt because England asked
it. Now he knew what it meant--_now he knew_!
There was a knock at the door, and the sound of something heavy
descending. The Squire gave a dull 'Come in.' Forest entered,
dragging a large bale behind him. He looked nervously at his master.
'These things have just come from France, sir.'
The Squire started. He walked over in silence to look while Forest
opened the case. Desmond's kit, his clothes, his few books, a
stained uniform, a writing-case, with a number of other
miscellaneous things.
Forest spread them out on the floor, his lips trembling. On several
nights before the end Desmond had asked for him, and he had shared
the Squire's watch.
'That'll do,' said the Squire presently; 'I'll look over them
myself!'
Forest went away. After shutting the door he saw Elizabeth coming
along the library passage, and stopped to speak to her.
'The things have just come from France, Miss,' he said in a low
voice.
Elizabeth hesitated, and was turning back, when the library door
opened and the Squire called her.
'Yes, Mr. Mannering.'
'Will you come here, please, a moment?'
She entered the room, and the Squire closed the door behind her,
pointing mutely to the things on the floor.
The tears sprang to her eyes. She knelt down to look at them.
'Do you remember anything about this?' he said, holding out a little
book. It was the pocket Anthology she had found for Desmond on the
day of his going into camp. As she looked through it she saw a
turned-down leaf, and seemed still to hear the boy's voice, as he
hung over her shoulder translating the epigram--
'_Shame on you, mountains and seas!_'
With a swelling throat she told the story. The Squire listened, and
when afterwards she offered the book to him again, he put it back
into her hand, with some muttered words which she interpreted as
bidding her keep it.
She put it away in the drawer of her writing-table, which had been
brought back to its old place only that morning. The Squire himself
went to his own desk.
'Will you sit there?' He pointed to her chair. 'I want to speak to
you.'
Then after a pause he added slowly, 'Will you tell me--what you
think I can now do with my time?'
His voice had a curious monotony--unlike its usual tone. But
Elizabeth divined a coming crisis. She went very white.
'Dear Mr. Mannering--I don't know what to say--except that the
country seems to want everything that each one of us can do.'
'Have you read Haig's Order of the Day?'
'Yes, I have just read it.'
The Squire's eyes, fixed upon her, had a strange intensity.
'You and I have never known--never dreamt--of anything like this.'
'No--never. But England has had her back to the wall before!'
She sat proudly erect, her hands quietly crossed. But he seemed to
hear the beating of her heart.
'You mean when Pitt said, "Roll up the map of Europe"? Yes--that too
was vital. But the people at home scarcely knew it--and it was not a
war of machines.'
'No matter! England will never yield.'
'Till Germany is on her knees?' His long bony face, more lined, more
emaciated than ever, seemed to catch a sombre glow from hers.
'Yes--though it last ten years! But the Americans are hurrying.'
'Are all women like you?'
Her mouth trembled into scorn.
'Oh, think of the women whose shoe-strings I am not worthy to
unloose!--the nurses, the French peasant-women, the women who have
given their husbands--their sons.'
His look showed his agitation.
'So we are to be saved--by boys like Desmond--and women like you?'
'Oh, I am a cypher--a nothing!' There was a passionate humiliation
in her voice. 'I should be nursing in France--'
'If it weren't for your mother and your sister?'
She nodded. There was a pause. Then the Squire said, in a different
tone,
'But you have not answered my question. I should be obliged if you
would answer it. How am I, being I--how is a man of my kind to fill
his time--and live his life? If the country is in deadly peril--if
the ground is shaking beneath our feet--if we are to go on fighting
for years, with "our backs to the wall," even I can't go on
cataloguing Greek vases. I acknowledge that now. So much I grant
you. But what else am I good for?'
The colour flushed in her fair skin, and her eyes filled again with
tears.
'Come and help!' she said simply. 'There is so much to do. And for
you--a large landowner--there is everything to do.'
His face darkened.
'Yes, if I had the courage for it. But morally I am a weakling--you
know it. Do you remember that I once said to you if Desmond fell, I
should go with him--or after him?'
She waited a moment before replying, and then said with energy,
'That would be just desertion!--_he_ would tell you so.'
Their eyes met, and the passion in hers subdued him. It was a
strange dialogue, as though between two souls bared and stripped of
everything but the realities of feeling.
'Would it be? That might be argued. But anyway I should have done
it--the very night Desmond died--but for you!'
'For me?' she said, shading her eyes with a hand that trembled. 'No,
Mr. Mannering, you could not have done such a thing!--for your
honour's sake--for your children's sake.'
'Neither would have restrained me. I was held to life by one
thread--one hope only--'
She was silent.
'--the hope that if I was to put my whole life to school again--to
burn what I had adored, and adore what I had burned--the one human
being in the world who could teach me such a lesson--who had begun
to teach it me--would stand by me--would put her hand in mine--and
lead me.'
His voice broke down. Elizabeth, shaken from head to foot, could
only hide her face and wait. Even the strength to protest--'Not
now!--not yet!' seemed to have gone from her. He went on vehemently:
'Oh, don't imagine that I am making you an ordinary proposal--or
that I am going to repeat to you the things I said to you--like a
fool--in Cross Wood. Then I offered you a bargain--and I see now
that you despised me as a huckster! You were to help my hobby; I was
to help yours. That was all I could find to say. I didn't know how
to tell you that all the happiness of my life depended on your
staying at Mannering. I was unwilling to acknowledge it even to
myself. I have been accustomed to put sentiment aside--to try and
ignore it. To _feel_ as I did was itself so strange a thing to me,
that I struggled to express it as prosaically as possible. Well,
then, you were astonished--and repelled. That I saw--I realized it
indeed more and more. I saw that I had perhaps done a fatal thing,
and I spent much time brooding and thinking. I felt an acute
distress, such as I had never felt in my life before--so much so
that I began even to avoid you, because I used to say to
myself--"She will go away some day--perhaps soon--and I must
accustom myself to it." And yet--'
He lifted the hand that shaded his eyes, and gave her a long
touching look.
'Yet I felt sometimes that you knew what was happening in me--and
were sorry for me. Then came the news of Desmond. Of those days
while he lay here--of the days since--I seem to know now hardly
anything in detail. One of the officers at the front said to me that
on the Somme he often lost all count of time, of the days of the
week, of the sequence of things. It seemed to be all one
present--one awful and torturing _now_. So it is with me. Desmond is
always here'--he pointed to the vacant space by the window--'and you
are always sitting by him. And I know that if you go away--and I am
left alone with my poor boy--though I shall never cease to hear the
things he said to me--the things he asked me to do--I shall have no
strength to do them. I cannot rise and walk--unless you help me.'
Elizabeth could hardly speak. She was in presence of that tremendous
thing in human experience--the emergence of a man's inmost self.
That the Squire could speak so--could feel so--that the man whose
pupil and bond-slave she had been in those early weeks should be
making this piteous claim upon her, throwing upon her the weight of
his whole future life, of his sorrow, of his reaction against
himself, overwhelmed her. It appealed to that instinctive, that
boundless tenderness which lies so deep in the true woman.
But her will seemed paralysed. She did not know how to act--she
could find no words that pleased her. The Squire saw it, and began
to speak again in the same low measured voice, as though he groped
his way along, from point to point. He sat with his eyes on the
floor, his hands loosely clasped before him.
'I don't, of course, dare to ask you to say--at once--if you will be
my wife. I dread to ask it--for I am tolerably certain that you
would still say no. But if only now you would say, "I will go on
with my work here--I will help a man who is weak where I am
strong--I will show him new points of view--give him new reasons for
living--"'
Elizabeth could only just check the sobs in her throat. The sad
humility of the words pierced her heart.
The Squire raised himself a little, and spoke more firmly.
'Why should there be any change yet awhile? Only stay with us. Use
my land--use me and all I possess--for the country--for what Desmond
would have helped in--and done. Show me what to do. I shall do it
ill. But what matter? Every little helps. "We have our backs to the
wall." I have the power to give _you_ power. Teach me.'
Then reaching out, he took her hand in his. His voice deepened and
strengthened.
'Elizabeth!--be my friend--my children's friend. Bring your poor
mother here--and your sister--till Pamela goes. Then tell me--what
you decide. You shall give me no pledge--no promise. You shall be
absolutely free. But together let us do a bit of work, a bit of
service.'
She looked up. The emotion, the sweetness in her face dazzled him.
'Yes,' she said gravely--'I will stay.'
He drew a long breath, and stooping over the hands she had given
him, he kissed them.
Then he released her and, rising, walked away. The portrait of
Desmond had been brought back, but it stood with its face to the
wall. He went to it and turned it. It shone out into the room, under
the westering sun. He looked at it a little--while Elizabeth with
trembling fingers began to re-arrange her table in the old way.
Then he returned to her, speaking in the dry, slightly peremptory
voice she knew well.
'I hear the new buildings at the Holme Hill Farm are nearly ready.
Come and look at them to-morrow. And there are some woods over there
that would be worth examining. The Air Board is still clamouring for
more ash.'
Elizabeth agreed. Her smile was a gleam through the mist.
'And, on the way back, Pamela and I must go and talk to the
village--about pigs and potatoes!'
'Do you really know anything about either?' he asked, incredulously.
'Come and hear us!'
There was silence. The Squire threw the window open to the April
sunset. The low light was shining through the woods, and on the
reddening tops of the beeches. There was a sparkle of leaf here and
there, and already a 'livelier emerald' showed in the grass.
Suddenly a low booming sound--repeated--and repeated.
'Guns?' said the Squire, listening.
Elizabeth reminded him of the new artillery camp beyond Fallerton.
But the sounds had transformed the April evening. The woods, the
grass, the wood-pigeons in the park had disappeared. The thoughts of
both the on-lookers had gone across the sea to that hell of smoke
and fire, in which their race--in which England!--stood at bay. A
few days--or weeks--or months, would decide.
The vastness of the issue, as it came flooding in upon the soul of
Elizabeth, seemed to strain her very life--to make suspense
unbearable.
An anguish seized her, and unconsciously her lips framed the
passionate words of an older patriotism--
'Oh! pray--_pray for the peace of Jerusalem! They shall prosper that
love thee!_'