The clouds of a thunderstorm were looming slowly up as Ruth motored
home, and soon after she got back a sudden deluge swept over Thorpe. In
ten minutes the garden paths were running with water unable to get into
the sun-baked ground and every hand on the farm was busy getting young
things into shelter.
“I said we should have rain soon,” announced Miss McCox, after the
triumphant manner of weather prophets, as she brought in Bertram
Aurelius, busy trying to catch the falling silver flood with both hands.
“He has never seen rain before to remember. Think of it!” said Ruth.
“And he isn’t a bit frightened. Where are the other children?”
“A little wet, more or less, will do _them_ no harm,” replied Miss
McCox. “They’re more in the river than out of it, I’m thinking, bringing
in mess and what not.” She handed Bertram Aurelius, protesting for once
vigorously, through the kitchen window to his mother. “It’s the young
chicken up in the top field I’m after,” she added.
Ruth laughed as she picked up Selina’s shivering little body which was
cowering round her feet, and ran for the river. She liked the rush of
the rain against her face, the eager thirst of the earth as it drank
after the long drought, the scent of the wet grass. It was all very
good. And if it only lasted long enough, it would make just all the
difference in the world to the hay crop. The thunder was muttering along
the hill-tops while she rescued the children from the shelter of a big
tree, helped Miss McCox with the young chicken, and hurriedly staked
some carnations which should have been done days ago; then she fled for
the house, barely in time to escape the full fury of the storm.
“The carnations could have been left,” said Miss McCox, as she met her
at the front door. “There’s no sense in getting your feet soaked at your
age. I have a hot bath turned on for you and if you don’t go at once it
will be cold.”
Bathed, dressed, and glowing with content of mind and body, Ruth watched
the end of the storm from the parlour window. The big clouds were
drifting heavily, muttering as they went, down towards the east, the
rain still fell, but softly now, each silver streak shining separately
in the blaze of sunlight from the west and presently, as Ruth watched, a
great rainbow, perfect and complete, arched in jewelled glory the sullen
blackness of the retreating storm.
After her dinner she took the packet Roger North had given her, and sat
holding it between her hands in the big armchair by the window. The
beautiful gracious old room was filling with the evening shadows, but
here the light was still clear and full. The sunset lingered, although
already the evening star was shining brightly. Ruth sat there, as Dick
Carey must often have sat after his day’s work, looking across his
pleasant fields, dreaming dreams, thinking long thoughts, loving the
beauty of it all.
Here he must have thought and planned for the good and welfare of the
farm. The crops and flowers and fruit, the birds and beasts. And in
those last days, of the children who should come, calling him father, to
own the farm one day, and love it as he had loved it.
Masefield’s beautiful lines passed through Ruth’s mind:
“If there be any life beyond the grave,
It must be near the men and things we love,
Some power of quick suggestion how to save,
Touching the living soul as from above.”
She sat very still; the lamp, symbol of the Life Eternal, gleamed more
brightly as the shadows deepened. The glow in the west died away, and
the great stars shone with kindly eyes, just as it must have shone on
Dick Carey, sitting there dreaming too, loving the beauty of it all.
And presently Ruth became conscious of other things. Curious and
poignantly there grew around her, out of the very heart of the
stillness, the sense of a great movement of men and things, the clash of
warring instincts, an atmosphere of fierce passions, of hatred and
terror, of tense anxiety, like an overstrained rod that must surely
break, and yet holds. A terrible tension of waiting for
something—something that was coming—coming—something that fell. She knew
where she was now; for, through all the drenched sweetness of the fields
and gardens, sickening, suffocating, deadly, came the smell of the Great
Battlefields of the world. All of it was there—the sweat of men, the
sour atmosphere of bivouac and dug-out, rotten sacking and wood, the
fumes of explosives, the clinging horror of gas, the smell of the
unattended death. It was all there, in one hideous whole. Shuddering,
clutching the letters tightly with clenched hands in her lap, Ruth was
back there again; again she was an atom in some awful scheme, again she
knew the dread approach. The wait.... Great roaring echoes rolled up and
filled all space. Sounds crashed and shattered, rent and destroyed.
And then, through it all, Ruth felt—held it as it were between the hands
of her heart—something so wonderful it took her breath away, and she
knew it for what it was, through all the tumult, the horror, and the
evil, the strong determined purpose of a man for a certain end. It grew
and grew, in wonder and in glory, until her heart could no longer hold
it, could no longer bear it, for it became the strong determined purpose
of many men for a certain end. It joined and unified into a current of
living light and fire, and sang as it flowed, sang so that the sounds of
horror passed and fled and the melody of its flowing filled all space,
the sound of the great Song of the Return.
She was no longer a lonely atom in a scheme she could not understand, no
longer a stranger and a pilgrim in a weary land, but part of an amazing
and stupendous whole, working in unison, making for an end glorious
beyond conception. Limits of time and space were wiped out, but when the
strange and wonderful happening had passed over, never then, or at any
later time, had she any doubt as to the reality of the experience. She
knew and understood, though, with the Apostle of old, she could have
said, “Whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell.”
But suddenly the body claimed her again, and Ruth Seer did what was a
very unusual thing with her—she put her face between her hands and cried
and cried till they were wet with tears, her whole being shaken as by
the passing of a great wind.
When, some time later, she opened the packet she found the few pages of
diary much what she had somehow expected. Just the short notes of a man
pressed for every minute of his time, because every minute not given to
definite duty was spent with, or for, his men. His love and care for
them were in every line of those hasty scraps of writing, kept
principally, it seemed to Ruth, so that nothing for each one might be
forgotten. It was that personal touch that struck her most forcibly. Not
one of his men had a private trouble but he knew it and took steps to
help, not one was missing but he headed the search party if prior duties
did not prevent, not one died without him if it were in any way possible
for him to be there. That lean brown hand which she knew—had seen—what a
sure thing it had been to hold. From the little hastily scribbled scraps
it could be pieced together. That wonderful life which he, and many
another, had led in the midst of hell. The light was fading when she
took the letter out of its thin unstamped envelope, but Dick Carey’s
writing was very clear, each word somewhat unusually far apart.
“DEAR OLD ROGER (it ran),—
“We have been badly knocked about, and are here to refit. Seven of
our officers killed and four wounded; 348 out of 726 men killed and
wounded—some horribly maimed—my poor fellows. This is butchery, not
war. The Colonel was wounded early in the day and I was in command.
Kelsey is gone, and Marriott, and little Kennedy, of those you knew.
Writing to mothers and wives is hard work. You might go and see Mrs.
Kelsey. She would like it. I have not a scratch and am well, but the
damnable horror of this war is past belief. I have told Vi as little
as possible, and nothing of the following. Poor von Schäde was
brought into our lines, strangely enough, last evening, terribly
mutilated. They had to amputate both legs and right arm at the
clearing station. I managed to get down after things were over to
see him. But he was still unconscious. We are in a ruined château on
the right of —— Forest. There is a lake in which we can bathe—a
godsend.
“Just midnight; and while I write a nightingale is singing. It goes
on though the roar of the guns is echoing through the forest like a
great sigh, and even the crash of an occasional shell does not
disturb it. I suppose born and bred to it. My God, what wouldn’t I
give to wake up and hear the nightingales singing to the river at
Thorpe and find this was only an evil dream!
“_20th._ Von Schäde is gone. I was with him at the end, but it was
terrible. I could not leave him and yet perhaps it would have been
better. He seemed mad with hatred. Poor fellow, one can hardly
wonder. It was not only himself, so mutilated, but he seemed
convinced, certain, that they were beaten. He cursed England and the
English. Me and mine and Thorpe. Even Vi. It was indescribably
horrible. The evil of this war incarnate as it were——”
The letter broke off, and ended with the scrawled initials
“Yrs., R. C.”
and an undecipherable postscript:
“Don’t tell Vi.”
Had he been called away hurriedly by the falling shell which had buried
his men? The envelope was addressed in another writing. She felt it must
have been so. Very swiftly he had followed the man who had died cursing
him and his, out into the world where thought and emotion, unclogged by
this physical matter, are so much the more powerful and uncontrolled.
Had they met, these two strong spirits, moving on different lines of
force, working for different ends? What had been let loose when Karl von
Schäde had died in that British clearing station, cursing “England and
the English, me and mine and Thorpe. Even Vi.” The great emotional
forces, so much greater than the physical body which imprisons them,
what power was there when freed; this hatred in a man of great and
cultivated intellect, whose aim had been no mean or contemptible thing,
whose aim had been power, what was that force on the other side of
death? How much could it accomplish if, with added knowledge, it so
willed?
Ruth shivered in the warm June night. A sense of danger to the farm
stole over her. A warning of something sinister, impending, brooding, as
the great thunder-cloud had loomed up before it burst. She stepped out
over the low window-ledge on to the terrace, looked across the sleeping
beauty before her. Still she held the papers in her hand. A glimmering
moon was rising behind the trees, a little faint wind whispered among
the leaves. They made black patterns on the silvered grass as it moved
them very gently. The wind fell, and with it a great stillness. And out
of the stillness came to Ruth Seer a Word.
She went back into the sitting-room, dark now except for the light of
the little lamp, and knelt before it, and prayed.
And her prayer was just all the love and the pity she could gather into
her heart for the strong spirit that had gone out black, and bitter, and
tortured, and filled with hate. The spirit that had been Karl von
Schäde.