PART VII: MR. SUMPTION_The Four Roads

It was early in April. A soft fleck of clouds lay over the sky, so

thin, so rifted, that the sinking lights of afternoon bloomed their

hollows with cowslip. A misty warmth hung over the fields, drawing up

the perfume of violets and harrowed earth, of the soft clay-mud of

the lanes, not yet dry after a shower and with puddles lying in the

ruts like yellow milk.

Sunday Street was in stillness, like a village in a dream. Thin

spines of wood-smoke rose from its chimneys, blue against the grey

dapple of the clouds. The chink of a hammer came from the Forge,

but so muffled, so rhythmic that it seemed part of the silence. The

watery atmosphere intensified that effect of dream and illusion which

the village had that evening. Through it the cottages and farms

showed with a watery clearness and at the same time a strange air of

distance and unreality. There was flooding light, yet no sunshine,

distinctness of every line in eaves and tiling, of every daffodil

and primrose in garden-borders, and yet that peculiar sense as of

something far away, intangible, a mirage painted on a cloud. It was

thus that the vision of his home might rise before the stretched,

abnormal sight of a dying man, a simulacrum, a fetch....

Thyrza Beatup sat beside the willow pond at the corner of the Street,

on the trunk of a fallen tree. In her arms she held her baby, asleep

in a shawl. She felt warm and content and rather sleepy. In her

pocket was Tom’s last letter from France, but she did not read it,

for she knew it by heart.... “I think of you always, you dear little

creature, you and baby—even when my mind is full of the things out

here, and this great battle which is seemingly the biggest there’s

ever been.” ... “How I wonder when I’ll get another leave. I reckon

baby ull have grown a bit and you’ll be just the same.” ... “I shut

my eyes and I can see your face; reckon I love you more every time I

think of you and I think of you day and night, so you can guess all

the love that makes.” ... Tender phrases floated in and out of her

mind, and then she smiled as she remembered a funny story Tom had

told her about a chap in the A.S.C....

She drew the baby closer into her arms, looking down at his little

sleeping face, which she thought was growing more and more like

Tom’s. She drooped her eye-lids and in the mist of her lashes half

seemed to see Tom’s face there in the crook of her elbow, where it

had so often been, turning towards her breast. Poor Tom! his head was

not so softly pillowed these nights ... and as suddenly she pictured

him lying on the bare, foul ground, his head on his haversack, his

cheeks unshaved, his body verminous, his limbs all aching with cold

and stiffness—he, her man, her darling, whom she would have had rest

so sweetly and so cleanly, with nothing but sweetness and comfort for

the body that she loved—then a sudden flame of rebellion blazed up in

her heart, and its simplicity was scarred with questions—Why was this

terrible War allowed to be? How was it that women could let their men

go to endure its horrors? Did anyone in England ever yet know what it

was these boys had to suffer? Oh, stop it, stop it! for the sake of

the boys out there, and for the boys who have still to go ... save at

least a few straight limbs, a few unbroken hearts.

She clenched her hands, and little Will moaned against her

breast, and as she felt his little fists beating against her, the

hard mood softened, and she bent over him with soothing words and

caresses—words of comfort for herself as well as for her child.

“Don’t cry, liddle Will—daddy ull come back—daddy’s thinking of us.

He’s out there so that you ull never have to go; he bears all that so

that you may never have to bear it.”

A thick grape red had trickled into the west like a spill of wine.

The afternoon had suddenly crimsoned into the evening, and ruddy

lights came slanting over the fields, deepening, reddening, so that

the willows were like flames, and the willow pond was like a lake of

blood.... The night wind rose, and Thyrza shivered.

“We mun be gitting hoame, surelye,” and she stood up, pulling the

shawl over the baby’s face.

At the same time her heart was full of peace. The questioning mood

had passed, and had given place to one single deep assurance of her

husband’s love. Tom’s love seemed to go with her into the house, to

be with her as she bathed Will and put him to bed, to drive away her

brooding thoughts when, later on, she sat alone in the lamplight at

her supper. She sang to herself as she put away the supper, a silly

old song of Tom’s when he first joined up:

“The bells of hell go ring-aling-aling

For you, but not for me;

For me the angels sing-aling-aling,

They’ve got the goods for me.

O Death, where is thy sting-aling-aling?

Where, grave, thy victory?

The bells of hell go ring-aling-aling

For you, but not for me.”

Now that darkness had fallen, the clouds had rolled away from the big

stars blinking in the far-off peace. A soft, sweet-smelling cold was

in the house, the emanation of the damp mould of the garden, where

hyacinths bathed their purples and yellows in the white flood of

the moon—of the twinkling night air, cold and clear as water—of the

fields with their brown moist ribs and clumps of violets.

Thyrza’s room was full of light, for the westering moon hung over

Starnash like a sickle, and the fields showed grey against their

hedges and the huddled woods. She undressed without a candle, so

bright was the moon-dazzle on her window, and after saying her

prayers climbed into bed, where little Will now lay in his father’s

place. Once more she tried to picture that his head was Tom’s, and

that her husband lay beside her, while Will slept in his cradle, as

he had slept when Tom was at home. But the illusion faltered—Will was

so small, and Tom was so big in spite of his stockiness, and took up

so much more room, making the mattress cant under him, whereas Will

lay on it as lightly as a kitten. However, she did not badly need the

comfort of make-believe, for her sense of Tom’s love was so real, so

intense, and so sweet, that it filled all the empty corners of her

heart, making her forget the empty corners of her bed. She lay with

one arm flung out towards the baby, the other curved against her

side, while her hair spread over the pillow like a bed of celandines,

and the moonlight drew in soft gleams and shadows the outlines of her

breast.

She lay very still—nearly as still as Tom was lying in the light of

the same moon.... But not quite so still, for the stillness of the

living is never so perfect, so untroubled as the stillness of the

dead.

Worge knew nearly as soon as the Shop, for Nell, running down after

breakfast to buy tobacco for her father, found the blinds still

drawn. The door was unlocked, however, so she went in and called her

sister-in-law. There was no answer, and, vaguely alarmed, she went

upstairs, to find Thyrza sitting on the unmade bed, still wearing the

print wrapper she had slipped on when the shop-bell rang during her

dressing.

“I must go and tell his mother,” she kept repeating, when Nell had

read the telegram, and had set about, with true female instinct, to

make her a cup of tea.

“Don’t you worry over that, dear—I’ll tell her.”

“Reckon he’d sooner I did.”

“No—no; it would be such a strain for you. I’ll go when I’ve made

your tea.”

At that moment little Will woke up, and cried for his breakfast—his

mother had forgotten him for the first time since he was born. Nell

welcomed the distraction, though her heart tightened as she saw

Thyrza’s arms sweep to the child, and quiver while she held him with

his little cool tear-dabbled cheek against her own so tearless and so

dry. Nell left her with the boy at her breast, a big yellow hank of

hair adrift upon her shoulder, and her eyes staring from under the

tangle, fixed, strangely dark, strangely bright, as if their grief

were both a shadow and an illumination.

She herself ran back on her self-inflicted errand, all her being

merged into the one pain of knowing that in ten minutes she would

have turned a jogging peace to bitterness, and bankrupted her

mother’s life of its chief treasure. She saw herself as a flame

leaping from one burning house to set another light.

Mrs. Beatup’s reception of the news held both the expected and the

unexpected.

“I knew it,” she said stonily—“I felt it—I felt it in my boans. And

I toald him, too—I told him, poor soul, as he’d never come back, and

now he’ll never come, surelye.” Then she said suddenly—“I mun go to

her.”

“Go to whom, mother dear?”

“Thyrza. He’d want it ... and reckon she feels it even wuss than me.”

Nothing could dissuade her, and off she went, to comfort the woman

with whom she had so long played tug-of-war for her son.

Nell stayed behind in the dreary house, where it seemed as if things

slunk and crept. It was holiday-time, so Zacky was at home, sobbing

in a corner of the haystack, crying on and on monotonously till he

scarcely knew what he cried for, then suddenly charmed out of his

grief by a big rat that popped out of the straw and ran across his

legs. Elphick and Juglery mumbled and grumbled together in the barn,

and talked of the shame of a yeoman dying out of his bed, and cast

deprecating eyes on the indecency of Harry, dark against the sky on

the ribbed swell of the Street field, making his late sowings with

the new boy at his heels. Up and down the furrows went Harry, with

his head hung low, in his ears the mutter of the guns, so faint on

the windless April noon that he sometimes thought they were just the

sorrowful beating of his own heart—up and down, scattering seed into

the earth, leaving his token of life in the fields he loved before

he was himself taken up and cast, vital and insignificant as a seed,

into the furrows of Aceldama or the Field of Blood....

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.

She went down to the kitchen, to find Harry, his eyes big and blurred

with sleep, just going to set about his business in the yard. Moved

by a quake of tenderness for this surviving son, she made him a cup

of cocoa, and insisted on his drinking it before he went out to work.

Then she did her own scrubbing with more care than usual—“Reckon we

must kip the farm up, now he’s agone.” Urged by the same thought she

went out to the Dutch barn and mixed the chicken food, then opened

the hen-houses, feeling in the warm nests for eggs.

By now the sun was high, a big blazing pan slopping fire over the

roofs and into the ponds. The air was full of sounds—crowings,

cacklings, cluckings, the scurry of fowls, the stamping of horses,

and then the whining hiss of milk into zinc pails. Hoofs thudded

in the lane, the call of a girl came from a distant field, all the

country of the Four Roads was waking to life and work, faltering no

more than light and darkness because one of its sons had died for

the fields he used to plough. Wheels crunched in the drive, and then

came the postman’s knock. Mrs. Beatup put down her trug of meal, and

waddled off towards the house ... perhaps a letter had come about

Tom; it was rather early yet, still, perhaps it had come.

But Harry had already been to the door, and shook his head when she

asked if there was anything for her.

“Thur’s naun.”

“Naun fur none of us?”

“Only fur me.”

She saw that he was carrying a long, official-looking envelope, and

that his hand was clenched round it, as if he held a knife.

“Wot’s that?”

“My calling-up paapers.”

Tom was not the only local casualty that week. Bourner heard of the

death of his eldest son, a youth who had somehow squeezed himself

out to the front at the age of seventeen; the baker at Bodle Street

lost his lad, Stacey Collbran of Satanstown had died of wounds, and

the late postman at Brownbread Street was reported missing. All these

had been struck down together on the ravaged hills round Wytschaete,

where the Eighteenth Sussex had for long hours held a trench which

the German guns had pounded to a furrow. In this furrow the body of

Tom Beatup lay with the bodies of other Sussex chaps, hostages to

shattered Flanders earth for the inviolate Sussex fields.

Mrs. Beatup heard about it from Mus’ Archie, who wrote, as she

had expected, while Bill Putland wrote to Thyrza. Tom had been

shot through the head. His death must have been painless and

instantaneous, the Lieutenant told his mother. Then he went on to say

how much they had all liked Tom in the platoon, how popular he had

been with the men and how the officers had appreciated his unfailing

good-humour and reliableness. “All soldiers grumble, as you probably

know, but I never met one who grumbled less than Beatup; and you

could always depend on him to do what was wanted. We shall all miss

him more than I can say, but he died bravely in open battle, and we

all feel very proud of him.”

“Proud”—that was the word they were all throwing at her now: Mus’

Archie, the curate, even the minister. They said, “You must be very

proud of Tom,” just as if all the age-old instincts of her breed did

not generate a feeling of shame for one who died out of his bed. Good

yeomen died between their sheets, and her son had died out in the

mud, like a sheep or a dog—and yet she must be proud of him!

Thyrza was proud—she said as much between her tears. She said that

Tom had died like a hero, fighting for his wife and his child.

“He died for England,” said Mr. Poullett-Smith.

“He died for Sunday Street,” said the Rev. Mr. Sumption. “I reckon

that as his eyestrings cracked he saw the corner by the Forge and the

oasts of Egypt Farm.”

It appeared that Tom had died for a great many things, but in her

heart Mrs. Beatup guessed that it was really a very little thing that

he had died for—

“Reckon all he saw then wur our faaces,” she said to herself.

As there had been so many local deaths, both now and during the

winter, it struck the curate to hold a memorial service in the church

at Brownbread Street. He knew how the absence of a funeral, of any

possibility of paying mortuary honour to the loved ones, would add to

the grief of those left behind. So he hastily summoned a protesting

and bewildered choir to practise _Æterna Christi Munera_, and

announced a requiem for the following Friday.

Mr. Sumption saw in this one more attempt of the church to “get the

pull over him,” and resolved to contest the advantage. He too would

have a memorial service, conducted on godly Calvinistic lines; there

should be no Popish prayers for the dead or vain confidence in their

eternal welfare, just a sober recollection before God and preparation

for judgment.

It was perhaps a tacit confession of weakness that Mr. Sumption

did not offer this attraction as a rival to the Church service,

but planned to have it later in the same day, so that those with a

funeral appetite could attend both. Experience had taught him that

what he had to depend on was not so much his flock’s conviction as

their lack of conviction. The Particular Baptists in Sunday Street,

those, that is to say, who for conscience’ sake would never worship

outside the Bethel, would not fill two pews. He depended for the rest

of his congregation on the straying sheep of Ecclesia Anglicana, of

the Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, Ebenezers, Bible Christians,

Congregationalists, and other sects that stuck tin roofs about the

parish fields.

It occurred to him that perhaps now was his great chance to scatter

the rival shepherds, so made his preparations with elaborate care,

boldly facing the handicaps his conscience imposed by forbidding him

to use decorations, anthems, or instrumental music. He even had a

few handbills printed at his own expense, and canvassed a hopeful

popularity by rightly diagnosing the complaint of some sick ewes

belonging to Mus’ Putland.

On Thursday evening he sat in his room at the Horselunges, preparing

his sermon. Of course his sermons were not written, but he took

great pains with their preparation under heads and points. He felt

that this occasion demanded a special effort, and it was unfortunate

that he felt all muddled and crooked, his thoughts continually

springing away from their discipline of heads and racing off on queer

adventures, scarcely agreeable to Calvinistic theology.

He thought of those dead boys, some of whom he knew well and others

whom he knew but slightly, and he pictured them made perfect by

suffering, buying themselves the Kingdom of Heaven by their blood.

He knew that his creed gave him no right to do so—Christ died for

the elect, and no man can squeeze his way into salvation by wounds

and blood. And yet these boys were crucified with Christ.... He saw

all the crosses of Flanders, a million graves.... Perhaps there was

a back way to the Kingdom, a path of pain and sacrifice by which

sinners won the gate....

He rebuked himself, and bent again to his work. The setting sun

poured in from the west, making the little room, with its faded,

peeling walls, and mangy furniture, a tub of swimming light. Mr.

Sumption had got down to his Fourthly when his thoughts went off

again, and this time after a boy who was not dead. It was a couple

of months since he had heard from Jerry, and the letter had been

unsatisfactory, though by this time he should have learned not to

expect so much from Jerry’s letters. He lifted his head from the

paper with a sigh, and, chin propped on hand, gazed out of the window

to where bars of heavy crimson cloud reefed the blue bay of light. He

remembered an evening nearly a year ago, when he and Jerry had sat by

the window of a poor lodging-house room in Kemp Town, and felt nearer

to each other than before in their lives....

“Reckon he can’t help it—reckon he’s just a vessel of wrath.”

He bit his tongue as a cure for weakness, and for another ten minutes

bobbed and fumed over his notes. The sermon was not going well. He

had taken for his text: “Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble:

for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand; a day of

darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness,

as the morning spread upon the mountains.” He told the congregation

that their grief for the death of these young men was but part of the

universal woe, a spark of that furnace which should devour the world.

Melting together in Doomsday fires the Book of Revelation and the

Minor Prophets, he pointed out how the Scriptures had been fulfilled

... the Beast, the False Prophet, the Army from the North, the Star

called Wormwood, the Woman on Seven Hills, the Vision of Four Horns,

the Crowns of Joshua, the Flying Roll, all these were in the world

to-day, Signs in the rolling clouds of smoke that poured from the

burning fiery furnace, where only the Children of God could walk

unharmed. “And the Sign of the Son of Man shall be in the heavens....”

Here it was that again his thoughts became treacherous to his theme.

Instead of the Sign of the Son of Man appearing in the heavens, he

seemed to see it rising out of the earth, the crosses on the million

graves of Flanders. Could it be that Christ was already come? ...

come in the brave and patient sufferings of boys, who died that the

world might live?... “It is expedient that one man should die for the

people.” He drove away the thought as a blasphemy, and stooped once

more to his paper, while his finger rubbed under the lines of his big

Bible beside him.

“Sixthly: The Crowns of Joshua. Satan at his right hand. ‘The Lord

rebuke thee, O Satan.’ The promise of the Branch. The promise of the

Temple. But all must first be utterly destroyed. ‘I will utterly

consume all things, saith the Lord.’ Don’t think the War will end

before everything is destroyed. ‘That day is a day of wrath, a day

of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of

darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness.’ The

hope of the Elect. ‘I will bring the third part through fire.’ ...”

There was the rattle and jar of crockery outside the door, and the

next minute Mrs. Hubble kicked it open, and brought in the minister’s

supper of bread and cocoa. She set it down, ruthlessly sweeping aside

his books and paper, and then took a telegram out of her apron pocket.

“This has just come, and the girl’s waiting for an answer.”

Telegrams came only on one errand in the country of the Four Roads,

and Mrs. Hubble felt sure that this was to announce either the

wounds or death of Jerry. It is true that he might be coming home on

leave, but in that case she reckoned he would never trouble to send

a telegram—he would just turn up, and give her his room to sweep and

his bed to make all on the minute.

She narrowly watched the minister as he read it—if it brought bad

news she would like to be able to give the village a detailed account

of his reception of it. But he made no sign—only struck her for the

first time as looking rather stupid. It was queer that she had never

noticed before what a heavy, blunted kind of face he had.

“Any answer?”

He shook his head, and put the telegram face downwards on the tray.

Mrs. Hubble flounced out and banged the door.

For some minutes after she had gone Mr. Sumption sat motionless,

his arm dangling at his sides, his eyes fixed rather vacantly on

the steam rising from the cocoa-jug. The sun had dipped behind the

meadow-hills of Bird-in-Eye, and only a few red, fiery rays glowed on

the ceiling. Mr. Sumption picked up the telegram and read it again.

“Deeply regret to inform you that Private J. M. Sumption has died at

the front.”

He felt weak, boneless, as if his joints had been smitten asunder.

Something hot and heavy seemed to press down his skull. He could not

think, and yet the inhibition was not a respite, but a torment. His

ears sang. Every now and then he tried pitifully to collect himself,

but failed. Jerry dead ... Jerry dead ... then suddenly his head

fell forward on his hands, and he began to cry, first weakly, then

stormily, noisily, his whole body shaking.

The sobs stopped as suddenly as they had begun, but the

brain-pressure had been relieved, and he could now think a little.

He saw, as from a great way off, himself before the telegram came—he

saw that as he planned that memorial service, prepared that elegiac

sermon, there had run in his veins a fiery, subtle pride that he, at

least, was father of a living man. He had not seen it at the time,

but he saw it now—now that his pride had been trampled and he himself

was in the same abyss with the souls he was to comfort. He too was

father of the dead; Jerry was dead—at last and for ever beyond the

reach of his help, his efforts, even his prayers ... the son of the

woman from Ihornden.

The room was almost in darkness now; fiery lights moved and shifted,

and by their glow he read the telegram over again, for at the bottom

of his heart was always a sick, insane thought that he must be

mistaken, that this blow could not have fallen, that Jerry must still

be somewhere alive and up to no good. But the message was there, and

now on this third reading, he noticed something peculiar about the

phrasing of it—“Private Sumption has died at the front.” Surely this

was not the usual form of announcement. He had seen several such

messages of woe, and they had read “killed in action” or “died of

wounds.” He had never seen one put exactly like this.

However, it was not of any real importance. Jerry was dead; that was

the only vital, necessary fact. But he would write to Mus’ Archie for

particulars.... The lamp was on the table, and he lit it, pushing

aside the unused supper-tray and the littered sermon-paper.

He wrote on into the night. He found a certain crookedness in his

ideas which made him tear up several efforts—he once even found

himself writing to Jerry, a proceeding which struck him with peculiar

horror. The hours ticked on; the big constellations swung solemnly

across the uncurtained window (luckily Policeman was in bed, and

did not see the lozenge of gold lamplight that lay in Mrs. Hubble’s

backyard). Inside the room the cat prowled to and fro, miaowling to

be let out for a scamper on the barn-roofs—at last, he jumped on

the table and, upsetting the cocoa, lapped his fill and retired to

dignified repose. The mice tapped on the glass front of their cage

with little pink hands like anemones.... Mr. Sumption for once did

not notice his animals; he sat brooding over the table long after he

had finished writing. Then, as the sky was fading into light, and big

greyish-white clouds like mushrooms were banking towards the east, he

dropped asleep, his head fallen over the back of his chair, with the

mouth a little open, his arms hanging at his sides.

The daylight fought with the lamplight, and as with a sudden crimson

rift it won the victory, Mr. Sumption woke—from dreams full of the

roaring of a forge and his own arm swung above his head, as in the

old days at Bethersden. He sat for a few moments rubbing his eyes,

feeling very stiff and cold. Then he realised that he was hungry.

The supper-tray was still before him, swimming in cocoa. He ate the

bread—dry, because the minister was one of those greedy souls who

devour their week’s ration of butter in the first three days, and

neither jam nor cheese was to be had in Sunday Street, even if he

could have afforded them. When he had eaten all the bread, he began

to feel thirsty. He longed for a cup of tea. Overhead in the attic

there was a trampling, which told him that Mrs. Hubble would soon

be down to boil the kettle. He hung about the stairhead till she

appeared—shouting back at her father-in-law, who would not get up,

and generally in a bad mood for her lodger’s service.

However, to his surprise, she was quite obliging—he did not know what

his night had made of him. She hurried down to the kitchen to light

the fire, and bade him come too and warm himself. Mr. Sumption would

have preferred to be alone, but he was beginning to feel very cold,

and a kind of weakness was upon him, so he came and sat by her fire,

and drank gratefully the big, strong cup of tea she gave him.

“You’ve had bad news of Mus’ Jerry, I reckon,” said Mrs. Hubble.

Mr. Sumption nodded, and warmed his hands round the cup. He could not

bring himself to say that Jerry was dead.

“This is a tar’ble war,” continued Mrs. Hubble, “and I reckon those

are best off wot are put out of it”—this was to find out what really

had happened to Jerry. “I often think,” she added piously, “of

the happy lot of the dead—no more trouble, no more pain, no more

worriting after absent friends, no more standing in queues. I often

think, minister, as it’s a pity we aun’t all dead.”

“Maybe, maybe,” said Mr. Sumption.

He rose and walked restlessly out of the kitchen. He both wanted

companionship and yet could not bear it. When would the day end—the

day that streamed and blew and shone over Jerry’s grave?... He was

going upstairs, when he heard a shuffle of paper behind him, and saw

that a letter had been pushed under the door. The post came early to

Sunday Street, and Mr. Sumption ran down again, full of an eager,

futile hope. The letter bore the familiar field postmark, and at

first he thought it was from Jerry, and that he was going to suffer

that rending, ecstatic agony of reading letters from the dead. But

as he picked it up he saw that the writing was not Jerry’s, but in a

hand he did not know. Whose could it be?—whosoever it was must be

writing about his son. He tore it open as he went up to his room,

and at the bottom of the folded paper saw, “Yours, with sincerest

sympathy, Archibald Lamb.”

Of course, it was Mr. Archie—writing to Jerry’s father as he had

written to Tom’s mother. The minister had had very little to do

with the Squire, except on one occasion, when he had met him riding

home from a day’s hunting, on a badly-lamed horse, and had applied

a fomentation which Mr. Archie said had worked a wonderful cure.

Now there were two pages covered with his big, firm handwriting.

Mr. Sumption pulled them out of the envelope, and from between them

a grimy piece of paper fell to the ground, scrawled over with the

familiar smudge of indelible pencil.

Mr. Sumption grabbed it, letting Mr. Archie’s letter fall in its

stead. As he began to read it, he wondered if it had been found on

Jerry’s body—it was certainly more smeary and stained than usual.

After he had read a little, he sat down in his chair. His hand shook,

and he stooped his head nearer and nearer to the writing as if his

sight were failing him.

“DEAR FATHER,

“By the time you get this I will be out of the way of troubling

you any more. I am in great trouble. Mr. Archie said perhaps not

tell you, but I said I would rather you knew. It is like this. I

kept away in —— last time we went up to the trenches, with a lady

friend, you may have heard of. Beatup says he told you. Well, I

am to be shot for it. I was court-martialled, and they said to be

shot. Dear Father, this will make you very sorry, but it cannot

be helped, and I am not worth it. I have been a very bad son to

you, and done many wicked things besides. Things always were

against me. Mr. Archie has been very kind, and so has the pardry

here. Mr. Archie is sitting with me to-night, and he says he will

stay all night, as I am feeling very much upset at this great

trouble. I am leaving you my ring made out of a piece of Zep

and my purse, only I am afraid there is no money in it. Please

remember me to Ivy Beatup, and say if it had not been for her I

should not be here now. I think that is all.

“Ever your loving son,

“JEREMIAH MERIDIAN SUMPTION.

“P.S.—The pardry says Jesus will forgive my sins. Thank you very

much, dear father, for those fags you sent. I am smoking one now.”

It was nearly half an hour later that Mr. Sumption picked up Archie

Lamb’s letter. It caught his eye at last as he stared at the floor,

and he picked it up and unfolded it. Perhaps it would give him a

grain of comfort.

The lieutenant afterwards described it as the most sickening job

he had ever had in his life. The usual letter of condolence and

explanation, such as he had over and over again written to parents

and wives, became an easy task compared with this. Here he had to

deal not only with sorrow, but with disgrace. He could not write, as

he had so often written, “We are proud of him.” He could not refer

back with congratulations to a good record—Jerry had died as he had

lived, a bad soldier, a disgrace to the uniform he wore, and there

seemed very little that could be decently said about him.

However, the innate kind-heartedness and good feeling of the young

officer pulled him successfully through an ordeal that would have

staggered many better wits. He began by explaining his reluctance,

and that he was writing only because Jerry wished it—though, perhaps,

it was better, after all, that his father should know the truth.

“As a matter of fact, it is not so dreadful as it sounds. Your son

is not to die so much as a punishment as a warning. The shooting of

deserters is chiefly a deterrent—and your son is dying so that other

men may be warned by his fate to stick to the ranks and do their duty

as soldiers; therefore you may say that, indirectly, he is dying for

his country. Moreover, his disappearance was not due to cowardice,

but to other reasons which you probably know of. I don’t know if

this mitigates it to you, it certainly does to me. Sumption is not a

coward. I have seen him in action, and I repeat that he is as plucky

as any one.

“I am sitting with him now, and I want to make your mind easy about

the end. When I have finished writing this he will be given his

supper, food and a hot drink. Then he will go to sleep. He will be

roused just ten minutes before the time, and hurried off, still

half-asleep—he will never be quite awake. There will be no awful

apprehension and agony, such as I expect you imagine—please don’t

worry about that.

“I have not been able to get him a padre of his own church, but a

very good Congregational man has been with him, and has, of course,

respected your convictions in every way.

“Now before I end up, I want to say again that it isn’t really as bad

as it looks—the disgrace, I mean. Think of your son as having died so

that other men should take warning by him and not desert the ranks,

and therefore, in that sense he has died for his country.”

Then Archie Lamb asked Mr. Sumption to write to him if there was

anything more he wanted to know, and said that he would forward

Jerry’s purse and ring at the first opportunity. After the signature

was added: “It is all over now, and happened as I told you. He was

still half asleep, and suffered practically nothing.”

For some minutes Mr. Sumption sat with his head buried in his hands.

Before his closed eyes he saw pass the last pitiful act of Jerry’s

tragedy. He saw him standing defiant and furtive—he would always

look defiant and furtive, even if half awake—with his back to the

wall ... then—cr-r-rack!—and he would fall down at the foot of it in

a crumpled heap, that perhaps still moved a little.... But he had

suffered nothing ... practically nothing....

Then he saw Jerry standing all his life with his back to a wall,

every man armed against him. He had but died as he had lived. Even

his own father had been against him, had misused and misunderstood

him. There had never been anyone to understand that mysterious,

troubled heart, anyone who could have understood it—except, perhaps,

Meridian Hearn, his mother—and that queer people of defiant furtive

ways, whose dark blood had run in his veins and been his ruin.

Meridian Hearn should not have married the _gaujo_ preacher from

Bethersden—she should have married one of her own race, and then her

child would have lived among those of like passions as he, and not

among strangers, who had mobbed him and pecked his eyes out, like

sparrows attacking a foreign bird.

“Oh, Meridian, Meridian!—our boy’s dead....”

There was the familiar clatter and kick outside the door, and Mrs.

Hubble came in with the breakfast tray. Her face was crimson and very

much excited, though she tried to work it into lines of woe; for

she had at last heard the news about Jerry, from Gwen Bourner, who

had heard it from Mrs. Bill Putland, who had had a letter from her

husband that morning. All Sunday Street now knew that Jerry Sumption

had been shot as a deserter, having given the 18th Sussex the slip on

the eve of the action in which Tom Beatup and Fred Bourner and Stacey

Collbran and other local boys had given up their limbs and lives—he

had gone to a French woman, and been found in a blouse and wooden

shoes. The platoon would not miss him much, Bill Putland said; but he

was unaccountable sorry for his father.

So, to do her justice, was Mrs. Hubble. She had put an extra spoonful

of tea in his tea-pot, and had boiled him an egg, a luxury which was

not included in his boarding fees. Moreover, she gave him a pitying

glance, as she swept the litter of sermon-paper to one side.

“Will you want me to tell people?” she asked him.

“Tell people what?” His voice came throatily, like an old man’s.

“Well, I reckon you woan’t be preaching to-night?”

Something in her voice made him start up, and pull himself together.

He saw her squinting compassionately at him, with the corner of her

apron in readiness.

“Preach!—Why do you ask that?”

“I’ve heard about your loss. I reckon you woan’t be feeling in heart

for preaching.”

He did not reply.

“I cud easy stick up a notice on the chapel door,” she continued,

“and all the folkses hereabouts ud understand. They’d never expect

you to spik after wot’s happened.”

“Woman!—what has happened?”

He spoke so suddenly and so loudly, that Mrs. Hubble started, and

dropped the corner of her apron.

“I—I ... well, we’ve all of us heard, Mus’ Sumption....”

“Heard what?”

“I—I.... Doan’t look at me like that, minister, for the Lord’s sake.”

“Speak then. What have you all heard?”

Mrs. Hubble was recovering from her alarm and beginning to resent his

manner.

“Well, reckon we’ve heard wot you’ve heard—as your boy’s bin shot fur

deserting his regiment; and no one expects you to come and preach in

chapel after that.”

A wave of burning crimson went over Mr. Sumption’s face, so that Mrs.

Hubble said afterwards she thought as he’d go off in a stroke. Then

he was suddenly white again, and speaking quietly, but in a voice

that somehow frightened her more than his shouting.

“I shall certainly preach to-night. I will not have the service

cancelled. Tell everyone who asks you that I shall certainly preach.”

“Very good, sir.”

She edged towards the door.

“Mrs. Hubble! Stop a moment. Say this, too. I am not ashamed of my

son. I reckon you all think I am ashamed of him, and you are putting

your heads together and clacking, and pitying me for it. But I am not

ashamed. He died for England. Mr. Archie himself says it. These are

his very words: Wait!”—for Mrs. Hubble was going to bolt.

“I’m waiting, Mus’ Sumption.”

“He says, ‘Think of your son as having died so that other men should

take warning by him and not desert the ranks, and, therefore, in that

sense he has died for his country.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you can go.”

Mrs. Hubble fled.

All that morning heavy pacings over her head convinced Mrs. Hubble

that the minister was preparing a wonderful sermon. She generally

guessed the temper of his discourse by the weight and width of the

stumpings which preceded it. To-day she could hear him, as she

expressed it, all over the room ... he was kicking the fire-irons

... he had overturned his chair ... he had flung up the window and

banged it down again. Obviously something great was in process, and

at the same time she felt that Mr. Sumption was rather mad. It was

nothing short of indecent for him to preach to-night, after what had

happened—and the queer way he had spoken about Jerry, too....

By this time the whole of Sunday Street knew about Jerry. He

was discussed at breakfast-tables, in barns, on doorsteps, on

milking-stools. No one was surprised; indeed, most people seemed to

have foretold his bad end. “I said as he’d come to no good, that

gipsy’s brat.” “A valiant minister wot can’t breed up his own son.”

“Howsumdever, I’m middling sorry fur the poor chap; I’ll never

disremember how he saaved that cow of mine wot wur dying of garget.”

“And I’m hemmed, maaster, if he wurn’t better wud my lambing ewes

than my own looker, surelye.”

On the whole, the news improved his chances of a congregation. It was

a better advertisement than the notice on the church door, or even

than his veterinary achievement at Egypt Farm. Some “wanted to see

how he took it,” others openly admired his pluck; all were stirred by

curiosity and also by compassion. During the years he had lived among

them he had grown dear to them and rather contemptible. They looked

down on him for his shabbiness, his poverty, his pastoral blundering,

his lack of education; but they liked him for his willingness, his

simplicity, his sturdy good looks, his strong muscles, his knowledge

of cattle and horses.

All that morning people wavered up the street towards the

Horselunges, and looked at it, and at the Bethel. Sometimes they

gathered together in little groups, but always some way off. The

Bethel stared blindly over the roof of the Horselunges, as if it

ignored the misery huddled at its doors. No matter what might be the

private sorrows of its servant, he must come to-night and preach

within its walls those iron doctrines of Doomsday and Damnation in

whose honour it had been built and had stood staring over the fields

with the blind eyes of a corpse for a hundred years.

Towards noon Thyrza Beatup came up the street, walking briskly, with

her weeds flapping behind her. It was the first time she had been out

since her widowing, and people stared at her from their doors as she

walked boldly up to Horselunges and knocked.

“How is poor Mus’ Sumption?” she asked Mrs. Hubble.

“Lamentaable, lamentaable,” said Mrs. Hubble, with eye and apron in

conjunction.

“Well, please tell him as Mrs. Tom Beatup sends her kind remembrances

and sympathy, and she reckons she knows wot he feels, feeling the

saum herself.”

“Very good, Mrs. Beatup.”

“And you’ll be sure and give it all wot I said—about feeling the saum

myself?”

“Oh, sartain.”

Thyrza walked off. Her face was very white and wooden. Mrs. Hubble

stared after her.

“Middling pretty as golden-haired women look in them weeds.... Feels

the saum as Mus’ Sumption, does she? That’s queer, seeing as Tom died

lik Onward Christian Soldiers, and Jerry lik a dog. Howsumdever, I

mun give her words ... maybe he’ll be fool enough to believe them.”

The day was warm and misty, without much sun. The sky above the woods

was yellowish, like milk, and the air smelt of rain. But the rain did

not come till evening. Mr. Poullett-Smith’s congregation assembled

dry, and nobody’s black was spoiled on the way home. In spite of

this, the service was not thickly attended. The advertisement which

Jerry Sumption’s death had given the Bethel made those who had time

or inclination for only one church-going decide to put it off until

the evening. Only a few assembled to hear the curate pray that the

souls they commemorated—among which he was not afraid to include

Jerry—might be brought by Saint Michael, the standard-bearer, into

the holy light.

On the other hand, the Bethel was crowded, and by this time it was

raining hard. The air was thick with the steaming of damp clothes.

The lamps shuddered and smoked in the draught of the rising wind, and

the big, blinded windows were running down with rain, as if they wept

for the destruction of the chapel weed....

Never had the Rev. Mr. Sumption such a congregation. Nearly the whole

of Sunday Street jostled in the pews. Instead of the meagre peppering

of heads, there were tight rows of them, like peas in pods. All the

Beatups were there, except Nell, who had stayed at home to look

after the house; even Mus’ Beatup had hobbled over on his stick. The

Putlands were there, and Mrs. Bill Putland, and the Sindens and the

Bourners and the Hubbles. Thyrza had come, with little Will asleep

in her arms—she sat near the back, in case she should have to take

him out. The Hollowbones had come from the Foul Mile and the Kadwells

from Stilliands Tower; there were Collbrans from Satanstown, Viners

from Puddledock, Ades from Bodle Street, and even stragglers from

Brownbread Street and Dallington. Most of them had never been in

the Bethel before, and it struck them as unaccountable mean, with

its smoking lamps and windows flapping with dingy blinds, its pews

that smelled of wood-rot, and its walls all peeled and scarred with

moisture and decay.

There was a rustle and scrape as Mr. Sumption came in, through the

little door behind the pulpit. Then there was silence as he stood

looking down, apparently unmoved, on what must have been to him an

extraordinary sight—his church crowded, full to the doors, as he had

so often dreamed, but never seen. He looked pale and languid, and his

eyes were like smoky lanterns. His voice also seemed to have lost its

ring as he gave out the number of the psalm, and then in the prayer

which followed it. Moreover, though the congregation, being mostly

new, shuffled and kicked its heels disgracefully, he thumped at no

one.

“Pore soul, he shudn’t ought to have tried it,” thought Thyrza to

herself in her corner. “He’ll never get through.”

After the prayer, which was astonishingly nerveless for a prayer of

Mr. Sumption’s, came a hymn, during which the minister sat in the

pulpit, his hand over his face. Those in the front rows saw his jaws

work as if he was praying. People whispered behind their Bibles—“He’s

different, surelye—just lik a Church parson to-night.” “Reckon it’s

changed him—knocked all the beans out of him, as you might say.”

“Pore chap, he looks middling tired—reckon he finds this a tar’ble

job.”

Then the singing stopped, and Mr. Sumption stood up, wearily turning

over the leaves of his big Bible.

“Brethren, you will find my text in the Eleventh of John, the

fiftieth verse: ‘It is expedient that one man should die for the

people.’”

The sermon began with the unaccustomed flatness of the rest of the

service. Mr. Sumption’s voice had lost its resonance, his arms no

longer waved like windmill-sails, nor did his joints crack like

dried osiers. He made his points languidly on his fingers, instead

of thumping them out on the pulpit with his fist. The congregation

would have been disappointed if they had not known the reason for

this slackness; as things were, it was part of the spectacle. They

noticed, too, a certain bitterness that crept into his speech now and

then, as when he described the Chief Priests and Scribes plotting

together to take refuge behind the sacrifice of Christ. “It is

expedient for us ... that the whole nation perish not.”

“Brethren, I see them nodding their ugly beards together, and saying:

‘Let this young man go and die for us. One man must die for the

people, and it shan’t be one of us, I reckon—we’re too important,

we can’t be spared. Let us send this young man to his death. It is

expedient that he should die for the nation.’”

Then suddenly he stiffened his back, bringing his open Bible together

with a thud, while his voice rang out with the old clearness:

“Reckon that was what you said among yourselves when you saw the

young men we’re thinking of to-night go up before the Tribunal, or

volunteer at the Recruiting Office. You said to yourselves, ‘That’s

right, that’s proper. It is expedient that these young men should go

and die for the people. I like to see a young man go to fight for his

country. I’m too old.... I’ve got a bad leg ... but I like to see the

young men go.’”

For a moment he stood and glared at them, as in the old days, his

eyes like coals, his big teeth bared like a fighting dog’s. Then

once again his weariness dropped over him, his head hung, and his

sentences ran together, husky and indistinct.

The congregation shuffled and coughed. The service required

peppermint-sucking to help it through, and owing to war conditions

no peppermints were forthcoming. Zacky Beatup made a rabbit out of

his handkerchief and slid it over the back of the pew at Lily Sinden.

Mus’ Beatup began to calculate the odds against the Bethel closing

before the Rifle Volunteer. Old Mus’ Hollowbone from the Foul Mile

crossed his legs and went to sleep, just as if he was sitting with

the Wesleyans. Then Maudie Sinden pulled a screw of paper out of

her pocket and extracted a piece of black gum—the very piece she

had taken out of her mouth on entering the chapel, knowing that no

sweet had ever been sucked there since Tommy Bourner was bidden “spue

forth that apple of Sodom” two years ago. Thyrza had never seen a

congregation so demoralised, but then she had never seen a minister

so dull, so drony, so lack-lustre, so lifeless. “He shudn’t ought to

have tried it, poor chap,” she murmured into the baby’s shawl.

Then suddenly Mr. Sumption’s fist came down on his Bible. The pulpit

lamps shuddered, and rattled their glass shades, and the congregation

started into postures of attention, as the minister glared up and

down the rows of heads in the pod-like pews.

“Reckon you’ve no heart for the Gospel to-day,” he said severely.

“Pray the Lord to change your hearts, as He changed my sermon. This

is not the sermon I had meant to preach to you, and if you don’t

like it, it is the Lord’s doing. I had for my text: ‘The day of the

Lord is at hand, as the morning spread upon the mountains.’ That was

my text, and I had meant to warn you all of the coming of that day,

as I have so often warned you. It is a day which shall burn like an

oven, and the strong man shall cry therein mightily; it is a day of

darkness and gloominess, of clouds and thick darkness. Then I was

going forward to show you how the Sign of the Son of Man shall be in

the heavens, and how He shall appear in clouds with great glory....

But the Lord came then and smote me, and I lay as dead before Him,

like Moses in the Mount. And when I came to myself, I knew that the

Sign of the Son of Man is already with us here—not in heaven, but on

earth—rising up out of the earth ... over there in France—the crosses

of the million Christs you have crucified.”

They were all listening now. He could see their craning, attentive

faces, and their kicks and coughs had died down into a rather

scandalised silence.

“The million Christs you have crucified, all those boys you sent out

to die for the people. You sent them in millions to die for you and

for your little children, and their blood shall be on you and on your

children. Oh, you stiff-necked and uncircumcised—talking of Judgment

as if it was a great way off, and behold it is at your doors; and

the Christ Whom you look for has come suddenly to His temple—in the

suffering youth of this country—all countries—in these boys who

go out and suffer and die and bleed, cheerfully, patiently, like

sheep—that the whole nation perish not.

“Think of the boys you have sent, the boys we’re specially

remembering here to-day. There was Tom Beatup—a good honest lad,

simple and clean as a little child. He went out to fight for you, but

I reckon you never woke up in your comfortable bed and said: ‘There’s

poor Tom Beatup, up to the loins in mud, and freezing with cold, and

maybe as empty as a rusty pail.’ The thought of him never spoiled

your night’s rest, and you never felt, ‘I’ve got to struggle tooth

and nail to be worth his sacrificing himself like that for an old

useless trug like me, and I’ll do my best to help my country at home

in any way as it can be done, so as the War ull be shortened and Tom

ull have a few nights less in the mud.’ That’s what you ought to have

said, but I reckon you didn’t say it.

“There’s Stacey Collbran, too, who left a young sweetheart, and ull

never know the love of wedded life because you had to be died for.

Do you ever think of him when your Wife lies in your bosom, and say,

‘Reckon I’ll be good to my wife, since for my sake a poor chap never

had his’?

“And there’s Fred Bourner, and Sid Viner, and Joe Kadwell, and Leslie

Ades—they all went out to die for you, and they died, and you come

here to remember them to-night; but in your hearts, which ought to

be breaking with reverence and gratitude, you’re just saying, ‘It’s

proper, it’s expedient that these men should die for the people, that

the whole nation perish not.’

“And there’s my boy....”

The minister’s voice hung paused for a minute. He leaned over the

pulpit, his hands gripping the wood till their knuckles stood out

white from the coarse brown. His eyes travelled up and down the

pew-pods of staring heads, as if he expected to see contradiction or

mockery or surprise. But the Sunday Street face is not expressive,

and except for the utter stillness, Mr. Sumption might have been

reading the chapel accounts.

“There’s my boy, Jerry Sumption; Maybe you thought I wouldn’t talk of

him to-night, that I’d be ashamed, that I’d never dare mention his

name along of your gallant boys. Besides, you say, What’s he got to

do with it? He never died for the people. But you thought wrong. I’m

not ashamed to speak his name along of Tom and Stace and Fred and

Sid and Joe, and he hasn’t got nothing to do with it, either. For I

tell you—_my boy died for_ _your boys_. He died as an example and

warning to them, to save them from a like fate, and if that isn’t

dying for them.... These are Mr. Archie Lamb’s very words: ‘Your son

is dying so that other men may be warned by his fate and stick to the

ranks and do their duty as soldiers; therefore, in that sense he has

died for his country.’ I reckon it seems a big thing to shoot a boy

just for going off to see his girl when the company’s marching; but

if it weren’t done then other boys ud stop away and the regiment go

to pieces. Mr. Archie and the other officers said, ‘It is expedient

that one man should die for the regiment, that the whole army perish

not.’...

“No! I am not ashamed of my boy! If he was led astray at the last

moment by his evil, human passions, who shall judge him?—Not I, and

not you. He did not desert because he was a coward, because he funked

the battle before him. Listen again to Mr. Archie Lamb; he says,

‘Sumption is not a coward—I have seen him in action, and I repeat

that he is as plucky as any one.’ And he joined up as a volunteer,

too—he didn’t have to be fetched, he didn’t go before the Tribunal

and say he’d got a bad leg, or a bad arm, and his father couldn’t

run the business without him. He joined up out of free-will and love

of his country. The Army was no place for him, for his blood was the

blood of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns, which knows not obedience.

When he joined he risked his life not only at the hands of the enemy

but at the hands of his own countrymen, and it is his own countrymen

that have put him to death, ‘that the whole nation perish not.’

“I tell you, my boy died for your boys; my boy died for you, and you

shall not look down on his sacrifice. Over his grave is the Sign

of the Son of Man, Who gave His life as a ransom for many. To save

your boys from the possibility of a disgrace such as his my boy died

in shame. When they see the grave of Jerry Sumption they will say:

‘That is the grave of a man who died because he could not obey laws

or control passions, because he was not master of his own blood.

Therefore let us take heed by him and walk warily, and do our duty as

soldiers; and if we must die, not die as he died....’ So my son died

for your sons, and my son and your sons died for you; and I ask you:

‘Are you worth dying for?’”

Again the minister was silent, staring down at the rows of wooden,

expressionless faces, now faintly a-sweat in the steam and heat of

the Bethel. Then suddenly he burst out at them, loudly, impatiently:

“I’ll tell you the truth about yourselves; I’ll tell you if you’re

worth dying for. What has this War meant to you? What have you done

for this War? There’s just one answer to both questions. Nothing.

While men were fighting for their own and your existence, while

they were suffering horrors out there in France which you can’t

think of, and if you could think of could not speak of, you were

just muddling about there in your little ways, thinking of nothing

but crops and prices and the little silly inconveniences you had to

put up with. Ho! I reckon you never thought of the War, except when

you got some cheery letter from your boy, telling you he was having

the time of his life out there, or when the price of bread went up,

or you had to eat margarine instead of butter, or you couldn’t get

your Sunday joint. All that war meant to you was new orders about

lights, and tribunals taking your farm-hands, and prices going up

and food getting scarce, and the War Agricultural Committee leaving

Cultivation orders. And all the time you grumbled and groused, and

wrote out to your boys that you were dying of want, weakening their

hearts—they who wrote you kind and cheery letters out of the gates

of hell. You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You

little, little souls, that only bother about the little concerns of

your little parish in the middle of this great woe. The end of the

world is come, and you know it not; Christ is dying for you and you

heed Him not. Are you worth dying for? Are you worth living for?

No—you’re scarce worth preaching at.”

By this time there were signs of animation among the pea-pods. The

peas rolled from side to side, and a faint rustle of indignation came

from them.

“I know why you’re here to-night,” continued Mr. Sumption. “You’ve

come to gaze on me, to watch me in my trouble, to see how I take it.

You haven’t come to hear the Gospel—you yawned and wriggled all the

time I was preaching it. You haven’t come just to think of the dead

boys—you did that in church this morning. You’re here to gaze at me,

to see how I take it. Well, now you see how I take it. You see I’m

not ashamed. Why should I be ashamed of my son? He’s worth a bundle

of you—he’s died a better death than anyone in this church is likely

to die; and if he lived a vessel of wrath, at all events he was a

full vessel, not just a jug of emptiness. He lived like the wild man

he was born, and he died like a poor wild animal shot down. But I

am not ashamed of him. And though he died without baptism, without

conversion, without assurance, I cannot and I will not believe that

he is lost. Somewhere the love of God is holding him. The Lord tells

me that my fatherhood is only a poor mess of His; well, in that case,

I reckon He won’t cast out my lad. Willingly I’d bear his sins for

him, and so I reckon Christ will bear them even for the child of

wrath. Where I can love, He can love more, and since He died as a

felon, reckon He feels for my poor boy. He knows what it is to stand

with His back to the wall and see every man’s hand raised against

Him, and every man’s tongue stuck out. And because He knows, He

understands, and because He understands, He forgives. Amen.”

The windows of the Bethel shook mournfully in the wind, and the rain

hissed down them, as if it shuddered and wept to hear such doctrine

within its walls. But the sounds were lost in the shuffle of the

rising congregation, standing up to sing the psalm.

That night the minister did not stand at the door to shake hands with

the departing congregation. Beatups, Putlands, Sindens, Hubbles,

Bourners, jostled their way unsaluted into the darkness, groping with

umbrellas, fumbling into cloaks. But even the rain could not prevent

an exchange of indignation. People formed themselves into clumps and

scurried together over the wet road. From every clump voices rose in

expostulation and resentment.

“To think as I’d live to be insulted in church!”

“Reckon he’d never dare say half that in a plaace whur folkses’

tongues wurn’t tied to answer him.”

“Maade out as we thought only of our insides,” said Mrs. Sinden.

“Seemingly he never thinks of his, when all the village knows he wur

trying the other day to make Mrs. Tom give him a tin of salmon fur

ninepence instead of one-and-three.”

“And she did it, too,” said Mrs. Putland.

“It’s twice,” said Mrs. Beatup, “as he called me stiff-necked and

uncircumcised, and I reckon I aun’t neither.”

“And he said I wur lik an empty jug,” said Mus’ Beatup.

“And his Jerry’s worth a bundle of us,” laughed Mus’ Sinden.

“Wot vrothers me,” wheezed old Father-in-law Hubble, “is that to the

best of my hearing I heard him maake out as Christ died fur all.”

“And why shudn’t he?” asked Mus’ Putland.

“Because Mus’ Sumption’s paid seventy pound a year to teach as Christ

died for the Elect, and so he always has done till to-night.”

“Well, seemingly thur wurn’t much Elect in gipsy Jerry, so he had

to change his mind about that. Reckon he had to git Jerry saaved

somehow.”

“But he’d no call to chaange the Divine council—I’ve half a mind to

write to the Assembly about it.”

“Wot sticks in my gizzard,” said Mus’ Bourner, “is that to hear him

you’d think as we’re all to blame for Jerry’s going wrong, while I

tell you it’s naun but his own mismanaging and bad breeding-up of the

boy. ‘Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he

will not depart from it.’ That’s Bible, but it’s sense too. It’s all

very praaper for Minister to stick by the young boy now and say he

aun’t ashaumed of him, but if only he’d brought him up Christian and

not spoiled him, reckon he’d never have bin called upon to stand thur

and say it.”

There were murmurs and assenting “Surelyes.”

“He spoiled that boy summat tar’ble,” continued the smith. “Cudn’t

say No to him, and let him have his head justabout shocking. Then

maybe he’d git angry when the young chap had disgraced him, and hit

him about a bit. But thur aun’t no sense in that, nuther. Wot Jerry

wanted wur a firm, light hand and no whip—and Mus’ Sumption ud have

been the fust to see it if Jerry had bin a horse.”

“Well, he’s got his punishment now,” said Mrs. Putland. “Poor soul,

my heart bleeds for him.”

“Howsumdever, he’d no call to insult us,” said Mrs. Sinden, “and I

fur one ull never set foot agaun in that Bethel as long as I live.”

Thyrza Beatup did not walk with the others. Her grief was still

too raw, and Mr. Sumption’s words about Tom had made her cry. She

carried Will under her cloak, walking quickly over the wet ruts,

home to the fire before which she would undress him and put him to

bed. Mr. Sumption’s sermon had not had the same effect on her as on

the others—for one thing, she thought of Tom more than of Jerry; for

another, her feeling towards the minister was of pure compassion.

Poor chap! how he must have suffered, how he must have hated all

those Who mourned honourably, who grieved for heroes and saints, such

as her Tom. What would she have felt, she wondered, if Tom had died

like Jerry?...

She wished she could have seen Mr. Sumption after the service, and

asked him in to a bit of supper. Poor soul! one could always comfort

him through his inside. She was glad Tom had been to see him on his

last leave ... he had spoken very nicely of Tom.

She came to the little house, all blurred into the darkness, with the

rain scudding before it. A pale, blue light hung under the clouds

from the hidden moon, and was faintly reflected in the gleaming wet

of the roadway. Thyrza fumbled for her key, and let herself into the

shop. The firelight leaped to meet her. As she turned to shut the

door, she saw a man go quickly past, head sloped, shoulders hunched

against the Wind.

Mr. Sumption felt he could not stay indoors—he could not bear the

thought of sitting long hours, harassed and lonely, in that shabby,

wind-thridden study of his, with the peeled wall-paper flapping in

the draught and the rain cracking on the windows. Besides, he would

have to face a personal encounter with Mrs. Hubble, and weather the

storm of her wrath at being “preached at”; more than once she had

thought fit to give him a piece of her mind when the sermon had

affronted her. The tongue of a scolding woman was an anti-climax he

dared not face, so he let himself out of the little door at the back

of the chapel, and, turning up his collar, marched away against the

rain.

He had no exact idea where he was going. All he knew was that he

wanted to get away from Sunday Street, from the people who had come

to stare at him in his trouble. A lump of rage rose in his throat

and choked him, and tears of rage burned at the back of his eyes. He

saw the rows of stolid faces, the greased heads, the stupid bonnets.

There they had sat and wagged in judgment on him and his boy. There

they had sat, the people who were content to be suffered and died

for by the boys in Flanders, while they stayed at home and grumbled.

Well, thank the Lord he had told them what they were! Ho! he had

given it to them straight—he had made their ears burn!

He walked on and on, cracking his joints with fury. He had turned

into the East Road at Pont’s Green, and was now hurrying southward,

head down, to meet the gale. There was something in the flogging and

whirling of the wind which stimulated him; he found relief in pushing

against the storm, in swallowing the rain that beat upon his lips

and trickled down his face. He would walk till he was tired, and

then he would find some sheltered place to go to sleep. Only through

exhaustion could he hope to find sleep to-night. It would be horrible

to lie and toss in stuffy sheets, while the darkness pressed down his

eyeballs and at last the dawn crept mocking round the window....

It did not matter if he stopped out all night; he did not care what

people thought of him—he had burned his boats.

The moon was still pale under the clouds, and the wet road gleamed

like pewter. The hedges roared, as the wind moved in them, and every

now and then he could hear the swish of a great tree, or the cracking

and crying of a wood. In the midst of all this tumult he felt very

lonely—if he passed a farm, with slats of lamplight under its blinds,

he felt more lonely still. But it was better than the loneliness of a

room, of the room to which someone he loved would never come again.

He had a sudden memory of Jerry as he had seen him, the morning after

the boy’s own night out of doors, sitting like a monkey in the big

wash-tub in front of the fire....

It must have been between two and three o’clock in the morning when

Mr. Sumption found the road leading past the gape of a big barn. By

this time his legs were aching with cold and wet, and his face felt

all raw with the sting of the rain. It would be good to take shelter

for a little while. Then he would go home, and brave Mrs. Hubble.

He would be back in his study when she brought in his breakfast.

Breakfast ... he rubbed his big hands together, he was already

beginning to feel hungry. But before he went home he must rest.

That weariness which had muffled him like a cloak in the chapel,

fumbling his movements and veiling his eyes, was dropping over him

now. He felt the weight of it in his limbs, and, worse still, in his

heart and brain. When he shut his eyes he saw nothing but rows of

heads, staring and wagging.... He went into the barn, and the sudden

stopping of the wind and rain made him feel dazed. Then a queer thing

happened—he pitched forward on his face into a pile of straw, not

giddy, not fainting, merely fast asleep.

For some hours he slept heavily in his pitched, huddled attitude, but

as the cloud of sleep lightened before waking, he had another dream

of the old forge at Bethersden, and of himself working there, in the

days before the “voices” came. He saw the great red glow of the forge

spread out over the cross-roads, fanning up the road to Horsmonden

and the road to Witsunden and the road to Castweasel. He saw the

smithy full of it, and himself and his father working in it, with

arms swung over the glowing iron—he heard the roar of the furnace

and the thump of the hammers; and a great fulness of peace was in

his heart. Dimly conscious in his dream of all that had passed since

those happy days, he felt a wonderful relief at being back in them,

and the sweetest doubt as to the reality of his later experiences....

So it had been a dream, all his ministerial trouble and travail, his

brief snatch at love, his son’s birth in sorrow and life in defiance

and death in shame.... The hammers swung, and the forge roared, and

the light fanned up to the stars....

Then he woke, with the roar and thump still in his ears, for his head

hung down over the straw below the level of his body. All his limbs

were cramped, and he found it difficult to rise. The first despair of

waking was upon him, and he wished he could have died in his dream.

Bright sunshine was streaming into the barn, lighting up its dark old

corners where the cobwebs hung like lace. Framed in the big doorway

was a green hill freckled with primroses and cuckoo flowers, with

broom bushes budding against a thick blue sky that seemed to drip

with sunshine.

He stumbled out into the stroke of the wind, now scarcely enough to

ripple the big rain puddles that lay blue and glimmering in the

road. He was in a part of the country he did not know, doubtless

beyond the frontiers of the Four Roads, in some by-lane behind

Rushlake Green.

Though it was too late, he felt that even now he could not go back to

Sunday Street. He shrank from meeting human beings, especially those

who had sat before him in rows like pea-pods last night. Oh, those

heads! he would never forget them, how they had stared and rolled....

He turned away from the road, and went up the rising ground behind

the barn. It was a spread of wild land, some common now in its spring

bloom of gorse and violets. He threw himself down upon the turf, and

for a few minutes lay motionless, with the sun gently steaming his

damp crumpled clothes.

He longed to be back in his dream, back in the red glow of the

furnace, back at the old cross-roads in Kent. A sense of great

cruelty and injustice was upon him. Why had the Lord called him from

the work he loved, away to unknown cares and sorrows, to a life for

which he was not fitted? It even seemed to him that if only he had

been left a blacksmith this tragedy of Jerry would not have happened

... if Jerry had never been in the impossible, grotesque situation

of “a clergyman’s son.”... Why had the Lord sent voices, which never

came now, which, indeed, had not come since his marriage? Why had the

Lord raised up the minister at Tenterden, to send him to a training

college and try to make him what he never could be, a gentleman? He

was no minister—only a poor image of one, which everybody laughed

at. He had had qualms of doubts before this, but he had put them

from him; now he was too exhausted, too badly bruised and beaten,

to deceive himself any further. He was no minister of God—he

could hardly, after a twelve years’ pastorate, scrape together a

congregation; people went anywhere but to the Particular Baptists.

They never asked for his ministrations at sick-beds, they hardly ever

came to him to be married or buried, as if they doubted the efficacy

of these rites at his hands; he had not performed one baptism in the

last five years, and the only time his church has been full was when

they had all come to gaze on him, to see how he bore his trouble. On

the other hand, if a man had a sick sheep or an ailing cow, or if his

horse went lame or spoiled his knees, he called him in at once. That

ought to have shown him. He was not a minister but a farrier, and the

people of Sunday Street knew it, and treated him accordingly.

He lay with his face hidden against the grass. It seemed as if his

life had stopped like a watch, leaving him, like a stopped watch,

still in being. Jerry, the centre and spring of his existence for

twenty years, was gone; his ministry was gone—he could not go back

after what had happened, and no brethren would call him elsewhere.

He could not stay on at Sunday Street or return to the forge at

Bethersden. Here he was, past middle age, without friends, without

kin, without livelihood, without resources of any kind. He saw

himself alone in a world burning and crashing to ruin, a world that

bristled with the crosses of martyred boys and was black with the

dead hopes of their fathers.

A sob broke from him, but without tears. His being seemed dried up.

The horror of thick darkness was upon him, of this blasted world

rocking and staggering to the pit, of the flame which devoured all,

good and bad, elect and damned, wheat and weeds. Who could endure

to the end of this Judgment? Who hoped to be saved? All was burnt

up, dried, and blasted. The day of the Lord had come indeed and had

consumed him like a dry stick.

“My soul is full of troubles and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.

“I am counted with them that go down into the pit.

“Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom Thou

rememberest no more.

“Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.

“Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast vexed me with thy waves.

“Thy fierce wrath goeth over me; thy terrors have cut me off.

“Lover and friend hast thou put from me, and mine acquaintance into

darkness.”

His hands clenched on the young grass, slowly dragging out bunches

of tender, growing things. He began to smell the sweetness of their

roots, of the soil that clung to them—moist, full of sap and growth,

of inevitable rebirth. These budding, springing things, growing out

of deadness into life and warmth, suddenly gave him a little piteous

thrill of joy, which broke into his despair like a trickle of rain

into dry sods. The earth seemed to hold a steadfast hope in her

stillness and strength, in her scent and moisture and green life

struggling out of death.... Those boys who had cast themselves down

on the earth to die, perhaps they had found this hope ... perhaps

disgraced Jerry slept with it. No man, no blood-lusty power, could

cheat them of it, for even bodies blown into a thousand pieces the

earth takes into her kind stillness and makes them whole in union

with herself.

Even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the earth had not failed

him. No one could separate him from her or cheat him of his reward in

her. From her he had come and to her he would return, and in her he

would be one with those whom he had lost, his dead wife and his dead

son. There should be no disgrace there, nor torment, nor tears, nor

sighing; no parting, when all are united in the one element and the

children are asleep together on the mother’s breast....

An hour later Mr. Sumption had left the green hill and was walking

towards a little hamlet that showed its gables at the bend of the

lane. Now that his grief was spent, drunk up by the earth like

a storm, he remembered that he was hungry, and set out to hunt

for food. There was an inn at the beginning of the street, a low

house slopped with yellow paint and swinging the sign of the Star

across the road. Mr. Sumption walked in and asked the landlady for

breakfast; then, upon her stare, changed his demand to dinner,

whereat she told him that the Star did not give dinners, and that

there was a war on. However, he managed at last to persuade her to

let him have some dry bread and tea, and a quarter of an hour later

he was making the best of them in a little green, sunless parlour,

rather pleasantly stuffy with the ghosts of bygone pipes and pots.

The room was in the front of the house, and the shadow of the inn

lay across the road, licking the bottom of the walls of the houses

opposite. Above it they rose into a yellow glare of sunshine, and

their roofs were bitten against a heavy blue sky. From quite near

came the pleasant chink of iron, and craning his head he saw the

daubed colours of a smith and wheelwright on a door a little further

down the street. It comforted him to think that there should be a

smith so near him, and all through his meal he listened to the clink

and thud, with sometimes the clatter of new-shod hoofs in the road.

When he had finished his dinner and paid his shilling he went out and

up beyond the shadow of the inn to the smith’s door. The name of the

hamlet was Lion’s Green, and he gathered he was some ten miles from

home, beyond Horeham and Mystole. It would not take him more than a

couple of hours to get back with his great stride, so there was time

for him to linger and put off the evil hour when he must confront

Mrs. Hubble and explain why he had been out all night. Meantime he

would go and watch the smith.

There was no house opposite the forge, and the doorway was full of

sunshine, which streamed into the red glare of the furnace. Mr.

Sumption stood in the mixing light, a tall black figure, leaning

against the doorpost. He had smoothed his creased and grass-stained

clothes a little, and taken out the straws that had stuck in his

hair, but he always looked ill-shaved at the best of times, and

to-day his face was nearly swallowed up in his beard. The smith was

working single-hand, and had no time to stare at his visitor. He

wondered a little who he was, for though he wore black clothes like a

minister, he was in other respects more like a tramp.

“Good afternoon,” said Mr. Sumption suddenly.

“Good afternoon,” said the smith, hesitating whether he should add

“sir,” but deciding not to.

“You seem pretty busy.”

“Reckon I am—unaccountable busy. I’m aloan now—my man went last week.

Thought I wur saafe wud a man of forty-eight, but now they raise the

age limit to fifty, and off he goes into the Veterinary Corps.”

“Shall I give you a hand?”

The smith stared.

“I’ve done a lot of smith’s work,” continued Mr. Sumption eagerly.

“There’s nothing I can’t do with hoof and iron.”

The smith hesitated; then he saw the visitor’s arms as he took off

his coat and began to roll up his sleeves.

“Well, maybe ... if you know aught ... there’s the liddle cob thur

wants a shoe.”

A few men and boys were in the smithy, and they looked at each other

and whispered a little. They had never seen such swingeing, hairy

arms as Mr. Sumption’s.

A smile was fighting its way across the stubble on the minister’s

face. He cracked his joints with satisfaction, and soon the little

cob was shod by as quick, as merciful, and as sure a hand as had ever

touched him. His owner looked surprised.

“I’d never taake you fur a smith,” he remarked; “leastways, not wud

your coat on.”

“I’m not a smith. I’m a Minister of the Gospel.”

The men winked at each other and hid their mouths. Then one of them

asked suddenly:

“Are you the Rev. Mr. Sumption from Sunday Street?”

“Reckon I am. Do you know me?”

“I doan’t know you, surelye; but we’ve all heard as the minister

of Sunday Street can shoe a horse wud any smith, and postwoman wur

saying this marnun as he’d gone off nobody knows whur, after telling

all his folk in a sermon as they’d started the War.”

Mr. Sumption looked uncomfortable.

“I only went for a bit of a tramp, and lost my way ... I’ve no call

to be home before sundown—so, if you’ve any use for me, master, I can

stop and give you a hand this afternoon.”

The smith was willing enough, for he was hard-pressed, and the fame

of the Reverend Mr. Sumption had spread far beyond the country of

the Four Roads. The strength of his great arms, his resource, his

knowledge, his experience of all smithwork, made him an even more

valuable assistant than the man who had gone. There was a market

that day at Chiddingly, which meant more work than usual, including

several wheelwright’s jobs, which the smith performed himself,

leaving the horses to Mr. Sumption. The furnace roared as the bellows

gasped, and lit up all the sag-roofed forge, with the dark shapes

of men and horses standing round, and the minister holding down the

red-hot iron among the coals or beating it on the anvil, while his

sweating skin was shiny and crimson in the glow.

It was like his dream of the forge at Bethersden—and he felt almost

happy. The glow of his body seemed to reach his heart and warm it,

and his head was no longer full of doubts like stones. He had found a

refuge here, as he had found it in old days in Mus’ Bourner’s forge

at Sunday Street—the heat, the roar, the flying sparks, the shaking

crimson light, the smell of sweat and hoofs and horse-hide, the

pleasant ache of labour in his limbs, were all part of the healing

which had begun when he rubbed his cheek against the wet soil on

the common. His religion had always taught him to look on his big

friendly body as his enemy, to subdue and thwart and ignore it. He

had not known till then how much it was his friend, and that there is

such a thing as the Redemption of the Body, the mystic act through

which the body saves and redeems the soul.

He worked on till the sun grew pale, and a tremulous primrose light

crept over the fields of Lion’s Green, swamping the trees and hedges

and grazing cows. The afternoon was passing into the evening, and Mr.

Sumption knew he must start at once if he was to be home that day.

“Well, I’m middling sorry to lose you,” said the smith. “A man lik

you’s wasted preaching the Gospel.”

“Reckon I shan’t do much more of that,” said Mr. Sumption wryly. “I

can’t go back to my Bethel, after what’s happened.”

“Well, if ever you feel you’d lik to turn blacksmith fur a change——”

the smith remarked, with a grin.

“I shall go into the Army Veterinary Corps,” said Mr. Sumption.

“Wot! Lik my man?”

“Like the man I was meant to be. I agree with you, master—I’m wasted

preaching the Gospel. I’d be better as a veterinary ... I’ve been

thinking....”

There was a farmer driving as far as Adam’s Hole on the Hailsham

Road, and he offered Mr. Sumption a lift in his trap. The minister

had shod his little sorrel mare, and with her hoofs ringing on the

clinkered road they drove from Lion’s Green, away towards the east.

The dipping sun poured upon their backs, flooding the lane and

washing along their shadows ahead of them into the swale. The east

was still bright, and out of it crept the moon, frail and papery,

like the petal of a March flower.

The little mare spanked quickly over the way on her new-shod hoofs.

Through Soul Street and Horeham Flat, by Badbrooks and Coarse Horn on

the lip of the Marsh rolled the trap, with the minister nearly silent

and the farmer talking about the War—till the oasts of Adam’s Hole

showed their red turrets against a wood, and, declining an invitation

to step in and hear half a dozen more good reasons why the Germans

would never get the Channel Ports, Mr. Sumption tramped off to where

the East Road swung into the flats.

The sun was now low, and the sunk light touched the moon, so that

her smudged arc kindled and shone out of the cold dimness. Red and

yellow gleams wavered over the country of the Four Roads, sweeping

up the meadows towards Three Cups Corner, and lighting the woods

that blotched the chimneys of Brownbread Street. He saw Sunday

Street slitting the hill with a red gape, and the sheen of the ponds

by Puddledock, and the flare of gorse and broom on Magham Down.

There was a great clearness and cleanness in the watery air, so that

he could see the roofs of farmsteads far away and little cottages

standing alone like toadstools in the fields. Sounds came clearly,

too—there was a great clucking on all the farms, and the lowing of

cows; now and then the bark of a dog came sharply from a great way

off, sheep called their lambs in the meadows by Harebeating, and a

boy was singing reedily at Cowlease Farm....

It was all very still, very lovely, steeped through with the spirit

of peace—not even the beat of the guns could be heard to-night. These

were the fields for which the boys in France had died, the farms and

lanes they had sealed in the possession of their ancient peace by a

covenant signed in blood. As Mr. Sumption looked round him at the

country slowly sinking into the twilight, a little of its quiet crept

into his heart. These were the fields for which the boys had died.

They had not died for England—what did they know of England and the

British Empire? They had died for a little corner of ground which was

England to them, and the sprinkling of poor common folk who lived in

it. Before their dying eyes had risen not the vision of England’s

glory, but just these fields he looked on now, with the ponds, and

the woods, and the red roofs ... and the women and children and old

people who lived among them—the very same whom last night he had

scolded and cursed, told they were scarce worth preaching at. For the

first time he felt ashamed of that affair. He might not think them

worth preaching at, but other men, and better men, had found them

worth dying for.

Then, as he walked on towards Pont’s Green, he saw these fields

as the eternal possession of the boys who had died—bought by their

blood. The country of the Four Roads was theirs for ever—they had

won it; and this was true not only of the honoured Tom but of the

dishonoured Jerry. For the first time he felt at rest about his son.

“Somewhere the love of God is holding him....” He could not picture

him in heaven, and he would not picture him in hell; but now he could

see him as part of the fields that he, in his indirect shameful way,

had died for. Surely his gipsy soul could find rest in their dawns

and twilights, in the infinite calm of their noons.... Jerry would be

near him at the pond side, in the meadow, in the smoke of the forge,

in the murmur and shade of the wood ... and the cool winds blowing

from the sea would wipe off his dishonour.

The lanes were empty for it was supper-time on the farms. A pale

green was washing the rim of the sky, and the starlight shook among

the ash-trees that trembled beside the road. Faint scents of hidden

primroses stole up from the banks with the vital sweetness of the

new-sown ploughlands. It was growing cold, and Mr. Sumption walked

briskly. When he came to Pont’s Green he thought he saw the back of

old Hubble tottering on ahead, so he slackened his pace a little, for

he hoped to get home without meeting any of his congregation. The

feeling of shame was growing, he felt as if he had despised Christ’s

little ones ... after all, who shall be found big enough to fit the

times? What man is built to the stature of Doomsday?

He heard himself called as he entered the village, and turning his

head, saw Thyrza standing in the shop door, the last light gleaming

on her apron.

“Mus’ Sumption!—is that you?”

He thought of going on, pretending not to hear; but there was a

gentleness in Thyrza’s voice which touched him. He remembered the

message she had sent him yesterday morning. “She’s a kind soul,” he

thought, and stopped.

“Oh, Mus’ Sumption—whur have you bin?”

Her hand closed warmly on his, and her eyes travelled over him in

eagerness and pity.

“I’ve been over to Lion’s Green,” said Mr. Sumption. “I couldn’t lie

quiet at the Horselunges last night. I reckon tongues are wagging a

bit.”

“Reckon they are—but we’ll all be justabout glad to see you back. I

went up only this afternoon and asked Policeman if he cud do aught.

Come in to the fire—you look middling tired.”

“I’ve been working at the smith’s over at Lion’s Green all the

afternoon,” said the minister proudly.

“Surelye! Everyone knows wot a valiant smith you maake; but come

in and have a bite of supper. The fire’s bright and the kettle’s

boiling, and thur’s a bit of bacon in the pan.”

Mr. Sumption’s mouth watered. He had had nothing that day except the

bread and tea provided at the inn, and it was not likely that Mrs.

Hubble would have much of a meal awaiting him. True, it was doubtful

morality to encroach on Thyrza’s bacon ration, but Thyrza herself

encouraged the lapse, pulling at his hand, and opening the shop door

behind her, so that his temptations might be reinforced by the smell

of cooking.

“Come in, and you shall have the best rasher you ever ate in your

life—and eggs and hot tea and a bit of pudden and a fire to your

feet.”

She led him through the shop, whence the bottles of sweets had

vanished long ago, and the empty spaces were filled with large

cardboard posters, displaying Thyrza’s licence to sell margarine,

and the Government list of prices—through into the little back room,

where the firelight covered the walls with nodding spindles, and

little Will lay in his cradle fast asleep.

“I have him in here fur company like,” said Thyrza. “Reckon he sleeps

as well as in the bed, and it aun’t so lonesome fur me.”

For the first time he heard her sorrow drag at her voice, and

noticed, as, manlike, he had not done before, her widow’s dress with

its white collar and cuffs.

“God bless you, Mrs. Tom,” he said, and she turned quickly away from

him to the fire.

For some minutes there was silence, broken only by the humming of

the kettle and the hiss of fat in the pan. Mr. Sumption lay back

in an armchair, more tired than he would care to own. The window

was uncurtained, and in the square of it he saw the big stars of

the Wain ... according to the lore both of the country of the Four

Roads and of his old home in Kent, this was the waggon in which the

souls of the dead rode over the sky, and that night he, in spite of

his theological training, and Thyrza, in spite of her Board School

education, both felt an echo of the old superstition in their hearts.

Did Tom and Jerry ride there past the window, aloft and at rest in

the great spaces, while those who loved them struggled on in the old

fret and the new loneliness?

“I always kip the blind up till the last minnut,” said Thyrza at

the fire. “It aun’t so lonesome fur me. Howsumdever, I’ve company

to-night, and I mun git the lamp.”

So the lamp was set on the table, and the blind came down and shut

out Tom and Jerry on their heavenly ride. Mr. Sumption pulled his

chair up to a big plate of eggs and bacon, with a cup of tea beside

it, and fell to after the shortest grace Thyrza had ever heard from

him.

“Reckon I’m hungry, reckon I’m tired—and you, Mrs. Tom, are as the

widow of Zarephath, who ministered to Elijah in the dearth. May you

be rewarded and find your bacon ration as the widow’s cruse this

week.”

He was beginning definitely to enjoy her company. Thyrza’s charm was

of the comfortable, pervasive kind that attracted all sorts of men in

every station. He found that he liked to listen to her soft, drawly

voice, to watch her slow, heavy movements, to gaze at her tranquil

face with the hair like flowering grass. She at once soothed and

stimulated him. She encouraged him to talk, and when the edge was off

his appetite, he did so, telling her a little of what had happened to

him the last night and day.

“And what do you think I’ve learned by it all, Mrs. Tom? What do you

think my trouble’s taught me?”

Thyrza shook her head. In her simple life trouble came and went

without any lesson but its patient bearing.

“It’s taught me I’m a blacksmith, and no minister.”

“Reckon you’re both,” said Thyrza.

“No—I’m not—I’m just the smith. And to prove it to you, from this day

forward I shall not teach or preach another word.”

“Wot! give up the Bethel!—not be minister here any more?”

“Not here nor anywhere. I’m no minister—I’ve never been a minister.”

“But——”

“There’s no good arguing. My mind’s made up. I shall write to the

Assembly this very night.”

“Oh——”

“How shall I dare to teach and guide others, who could not even teach

and guide my own son? No, don’t interrupt me—the Lord has opened my

eyes, and I see myself as just a poor, plain, ignorant man. Reckon

I’m only the common blacksmith I was born and bred, and trying to

make myself different has led to nothing but pain and trouble, both

for me and for others. I ask you what good has my ministry ever done

a human soul?”

“Oh, Mus’ Sumption, doan’t spik lik that,” said Thyrza, with the

tears in her eyes. “Reckon I’ll never disremember how beautiful you

talked of Tom last night ... and oh, the comfort it guv me to hear

you talk so!”

“You’re a good soul, Missus—reckon there’s none I could speak to as

I’m speaking to you now. But you mustn’t think high of me—I spoke

ill last night; I was like Peter before the Lord let down the sheet

on him—calling His creatures common and unclean. I’ve failed as a

minister, and I’ve failed as a father—the only thing I haven’t failed

as is a blacksmith; thank the Lord I’ve still some credit left at

that.”

He hid his face for a moment. Thyrza felt confused ... she scarcely

understood.

“Then wot ull you do, Mus’ Sumption, if you mean to be minister no

more?”

“Join the A.V.C.—Army Veterinary Corps. I see as plain as daylight

that’s my job.”

“Wot! Go and fight?”

“Reckon there won’t be much fighting for a chap of my age. But I’ll

be useful in my way. I hear they’re short of farriers and smiths.

Besides, they’re calling up all fit men under fifty, and I can’t

claim exemption as a minister, seeing I ain’t one; and reckon Mr.

Smith ull go now Randall Cantuar and Charles John Chichester have

said he may.... So I’m off to Lewes to-morrow, Mrs. Tom.”

“We shall miss you unaccountable. Besides, it aun’t the life fur a

man lik you.”

He laughed. “That’s just where you’re wrong—it’s the very proper

life for a man like me, it’s the life I should have been leading the

last thirty years. Howsoever, it’s not too late to mend, and reckon

I’ll be glad to have my part in the big job at last. Here’s thirty

years that I’ve been preaching the Day of the Lord, and now’s my

chance of helping that day through a bit.”

He stood up and pushed back his chair.

“Oh, doan’t be going yit, Mus’ Sumption.”

“Reckon I must—I’ve all sorts of things to do. Don’t be sorry for

me—I’m doing the happiest thing I ever did as well as the best. I’ll

be doing the work I was born for, and I’ll be helping the world

through judgment, and I’ll be doing what I owe my boy—your boy—all

the boys that are dead.”

Thyrza’s eyes filled with tears when he spoke of Tom. For a moment he

seemed to forget his surroundings, and to fancy himself back in the

pulpit he had renounced, for he held up his hand and his voice came

throatily:

“Behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud,

yea, and all that do wickedly shall be as stubble. But unto you that

fear My name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His

wings. And He shall turn the heart of the fathers to their children,

and the heart of the children to their fathers.... Oh, Thyrza, the

world is sown over with young, brave lives, and it’s our job to see

that they are not as the seed scattered by the wayside, sown in vain.

Reckon we must water them with our tears and manure them with our

works, and so we shall quicken the harvest of Aceldama, when our

beloved shall rise again....”

His voice strangled a little; then he continued in his ordinary

tones:

“That’s why I’m joining up. I owe it to Jerry—to finish what he

began. By working hard, and submitting to orders, as he could never

do, poor soul, maybe I’ll be able to clear off the debt he owed. He

shall rise again in his father’s effort....”

Thyrza was crying now. “And Tom?” she asked in her tears—“I want to

do summat for him, too, Mus’ Sumption. How shall Tom rise up agaun?”

He pointed to the cradle at her feet:

“There’s your Tom—risen again both for you and for his country. Take

him and be comforted.”

She sank down on her knees beside the cradle, hiding her face under

the hood, and he turned and left her, stalking out through the shop

into the darkness.

Crouching there in the firelight, with her baby held warm and heavy

against her breast, she heard his tread grow fainter and fainter,

till at last only an occasional throb of wind brought her the

footsteps of the lonely man upon the road.

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

● Simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors have been silently

corrected.

● Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.