Mrs. Ward’s placidity but with nothing of her strong individual poise.
He had some job in a gas-works. There was also a daughter named Lily,
a brilliant person who served in a tea-shop, and sometimes went to
theaters with young men. To both husband and daughter Mrs. Ward adopted
an affectionate, mothering, almost pitying attitude. But with “my Ernie”
it was quite a different thing. I can see her stooping figure, and
her silver-white hair gleaming in the sun as we come to the unfinished
rabbit-hutch, and the curious wistful tones of her voice as she touches
it and says:
“When my Ernie comes home....”
The war to her was some unimaginable but disconcerting affair centered
round Ernie. People seemed to have got into some desperate trouble, and
Ernie was the only one capable of getting them out of it. I could not
at that time gauge how much Mrs. Ward realized the dangers the boy was
experiencing. She always spoke with conviction that he would return
safely. Nearly every other sentence contained some reference to things
that were to happen “when my Ernie comes home.” What doubts and fears she
had were only recognizable by the subtlest shades in her voice.
When we looked over the wall into the deserted garden next door, she said:
“O dear! I’m afraid they’ll never let that place. It’s been empty since
the Stellings went away. Oh, years ago, before this old war.”
II
It was on the occasion of my second visit that Mrs. Ward told me more
about the Stellings. It appeared that they were a German family, of all
things! There was a Mr. Stelling, and a Mrs. Frow Stelling, and two boys.
Mr. Stelling was a watchmaker, and he came from a place called Bremen.
It was a very sad story Mrs. Ward told me. They had only been over here
for ten months when Mr. Stelling died, and Mrs. Frow Stelling and the
boys went back to Germany.
During the time of the Stellings’ sojourn in the Sheldrake Road it
appeared that the Wards had seen quite a good deal of them, and though it
would be an exaggeration to say that they ever became great friends, they
certainly got through that period without any unpleasantness, and even
developed a certain degree of intimacy.
“Allowing for their being foreigners,” Mrs. Ward explained, “they were
quite pleasant people.”
On one or two occasions they invited each other to supper, and I wish my
visions were sufficiently clear to envisage those two families indulging
this social habit.
According to Mrs. Ward, Mr. Stelling was a kind little man with a round
fat face. He spoke English fluently, but Mrs. Ward objected to his table
manners.
“When my Tom eats,” she said, “you don’t hear a sound—I look after
that!—But that Mr. Stelling.... O dear!”
The trouble with Mrs. Stelling was that she could only speak a few words
of English, but Mrs. Ward said “she was a pleasant enough little body,”
and she established herself quite definitely in Mrs. Ward’s affections
for the reason that she was so obviously and so passionately devoted to
her two sons.
“Oh, my word, though, they do have funny ways—these foreigners,” she
continued. “The things they used to eat! most peculiar! I’ve known them
eat stewed prunes with hot meat!”
Mrs. Ward repeated, “Stewed prunes with hot meat!” several times, and
shook her head, as though this exotic mixture was a thing to be sternly
discouraged. But she acknowledged that Mrs. Frow Stelling was in some
ways a very good cook, in fact, her cakes were really wonderful, “the
sort of thing you can’t even buy in a shop.”
About the boys there seemed to be a little divergence of opinion. They
were both also fat-faced, and their heads were “almost shaved like
convicts.” The elder one wore spectacles and was rather noisy, but:
“My Ernie liked the younger one. Oh, yes, my Ernie said that young
Hans was quite a nice boy. It was funny the way they spoke, funny and
difficult to understand.”
It was very patent that between the elder boy and Ernie, who were of
about the same age, there was an element of rivalry which was perhaps
more accentuated in the attitude of the mothers than in the boys
themselves. Mrs. Ward could find little virtue in this elder boy. Most
of her criticism of the family was leveled against him. The rest she
found only a little peculiar. She said she had never heard such a funny
Christian name as Frow. Florrie she had heard of, and even Flora, but not
_Frow_. I suggested that perhaps Frow might be some sort of title, but
she shook her head and said that that was what she was always known as
in the Sheldrake Road, “Mrs. Frow Stelling.”
In spite of Mrs. Ward’s lack of opportunity for greater intimacy on
account of the language problem, her own fine imaginative qualities
helped her a great deal. And in one particular she seemed curiously
vivid. She gathered an account from one of them—I’m not sure whether
it was Mr. or Mrs. Frow Stelling or one of the boys—of a place they
described near their home in Bremen. There was a narrow street of
high buildings by a canal, and a little bridge that led over into a
gentleman’s park. At a point where the canal turned sharply eastwards
there was a clump of linden-trees, where one could go in the summer-time,
and under their shade one might sit and drink light beer, and listen to a
band that played in the early part of the evening.
Mrs. Ward was curiously clear about that. She said she often thought
about Mr. Stelling sitting there after his day’s work. It must have been
very pleasant for him, and he seemed to miss this luxury in Dalston more
than anything. Once Ernie, in a friendly mood, had taken him into the
four-ale bar of “The Unicorn” at the corner of the Sheldrake Road, but
Mr. Stelling did not seem happy. Ernie acknowledged afterwards that it
had been an unfortunate evening. The bar had been rather crowded, and
there was a man and two women who had all been drinking too much. In any
case, Mr. Stelling had been obviously restless there, and he had said
afterwards:
“It is not that one wishes to drink only....”
And he had shaken his fat little head, and had never been known to visit
“The Unicorn” again.
Mr. Stelling died quite suddenly of some heart trouble, and Mrs. Ward
could not get it out of her head that his last illness was brought about
by his disappointment and grief in not being able to go and sit quietly
under the linden-trees after his day’s work and listen to a band.
“You know, my dear,” she said, “when you get accustomed to a thing, it’s
_bad_ for you to leave it off.”
When poor Mr. Stelling died, Mrs. Frow Stelling was heart-broken, and I
have reason to believe that Mrs. Ward went in and wept with her, and in
their dumb way they forged the chains of some desperate understanding.
When Mrs. Frow Stelling went back to Germany they promised to write to
each other. But they never did, and for a very good reason. As Mrs. Ward
said, she was “no scholard,” and as for Mrs. Frow Stelling, her English
was such a doubtful quantity, she probably never got beyond addressing
the envelope.
“That was three years ago,” said Mrs. Ward. “Them boys must be eighteen
and nineteen now.”
III
If I have intruded too greatly into the intimacy of Mrs. Ward’s life,
one of my excuses must be—not that I am “a scholard” but that I am in
any case able to read a simple English letter. I was in fact on several
occasions “requisitioned.” When Lily was not at home, some one had to
read Ernie’s letters out loud. The arrival of Ernie’s letters was always
an inspiring experience. I should perhaps be in the garden with Mrs.
Ward, when Tom would come hurrying out to the back, and call out:
“Mother! a letter from Ernie!”
And then there would be such excitement and commotion. The first thing
was always the hunt for Mrs. Ward’s spectacles. They were never where she
had put them. Tom would keep on turning the letter over in his hands, and
examining the postmark, and he would reiterate:
“Well, what did you do with them, mother?”
At length they would be found in some unlikely place, and she would take
the letter tremblingly to the light. I never knew quite how much Mrs.
Ward could read. She could certainly read a certain amount. I saw her old
eyes sparkling and her tongue moving jerkily between her parted lips, as
though she were formulating the words she read, and she would keep on
repeating:
“T’ch! T’ch! O dear, O dear, the _things_ he says!”
And Tom impatiently by the door would say:
“Well, what _does_ he say?”
She never attempted to read the letter out loud, but at last she would
wipe her spectacles and say:
“Oh, you read it, sir. The _things_ he says!”
They were indeed very good letters of Ernie’s, written apparently in
the highest spirits. There was never a grumble, not a word. One might
gather that he was away with a lot of young bloods on some sporting
expedition, in which football, rags, sing-songs, and strange feeds played
a conspicuous part. I read a good many of Ernie’s letters, and I do not
remember that he ever made a single reference to the horrors of war, or
said anything about his own personal discomforts. The boy must have had
something of his mother in him in spite of the photograph.
And between the kitchen and the yard Mrs. Ward would spend her day
placidly content, for Ernie never failed to write. There was sometimes a
lapse of a few days, but the letter seldom failed to come every fortnight.
It would be difficult to know what Mrs. Ward’s actual conception of the
war was. She never read the newspapers, for the reason, as she explained,
that “there was nothing in them these days except about this old war.”
She occasionally dived into Reynold’s newspaper on Sundays to see if
there were any interesting law cases or any news of a romantic character.
There was nothing romantic in the war news. It was all preposterous. She
did indeed read the papers for the first few weeks, but this was for the
reason that she had some vague idea that they might contain some account
of Ernie’s doings. But as they did not, she dismissed them with contempt.
But I found her one night in a peculiarly preoccupied mood. She was out
in the garden, and she kept staring abstractedly over the fence into the
unoccupied ground next door. It appeared that it had dawned upon her that
the war was to do with “these Germans,” that in fact we were fighting the
Germans, and then she thought of the Stellings. Those boys would now be
about eighteen and nineteen. They would be fighting too. They would be
fighting against Ernie. This seemed very peculiar.
“Of course,” she said, “I never took to that elder boy—a greedy rough
sort of boy he was. But I’m sure my Ernie wouldn’t hurt young Hans.”
She meditated for a moment as though she were contemplating what
particular action Ernie would take in the matter. She knew he didn’t like
the elder boy but she doubted whether he would want to do anything very
violent to him.
“They went out to a music-hall one night together,” she explained, as
though a friendship cemented in this luxurious fashion could hardly be
broken by an unreasonable display of passion.
IV
It was a few weeks later that the terror suddenly crept into Mrs. Ward’s
life. Ernie’s letters ceased abruptly. The fortnight passed, then three
weeks, four weeks, five weeks, and not a word. I don’t think that Mrs.
Ward’s character at any time stood out so vividly as during those weeks
of stress. It is true she appeared a little feebler, and she trembled
in her movements, whilst her eyes seemed abstracted as though all the
power in them were concentrated in her ears, alert for the bell or the
knock. She started visibly at odd moments, and her imagination was always
carrying her tempestuously to the front door only to answer—a milkman or
a casual hawker. But she never expressed her fear in words. When Tom came
home—he seemed to have aged rapidly—he would come bustling out into the
garden, and cry tremblingly:
“There ain’t been no letter to-day, mother?”
And she would say quite placidly:
“No, not to-day, Tom. It’ll come to-morrow, I expect.”
And she would rally him and talk of little things, and get busy with his
supper. And in the garden I would try and talk to her about her clump
of pansies, and the latest yarn about the neighbors, and I tried to get
between her and the rabbit-hutch with its dumb appeal of incompletion.
And I would notice her staring curiously over into the empty garden next
door, as though she were being assailed by some disturbing apprehensions.
Ernie would not hurt that eldest boy ... but suppose ... if things were
reversed ... there was something inexplicable and terrible lurking in
this passive silence.
During this period the old man was suddenly taken very ill. He came home
one night with a high temperature and developed pneumonia. He was laid
up for many weeks, and she kept back the telegram that came while he was
almost unconscious, and she tended him night and day, nursing her own
anguish with a calm face.
For the telegram told her that her Ernie was “missing, believed wounded.”
I do not know at what period she told the father this news, but it was
certainly not till he was convalescent. And the old man seemed to sink
into a kind of apathy. He sat feebly in front of the kitchen fire,
coughing and making no effort to control his grief.
Outside the great trains went rushing by, night and day. Things were
“going on,” but they were all meaningless, cruel.
We made enquiries at the War Office, but they could not amplify the
laconic telegram.
And then the winter came on, and the gardens were bleak in the Sheldrake
Road. And Lily ran away and married a young tobacconist, who was earning
twenty-five shillings a week. And old Tom was dismissed from the
gas-works. His work was not proving satisfactory. And he sat about at
home and moped. And in the meantime the price of foodstuffs was going up,
and coals were a luxury. And so in the early morning Mrs. Ward would go
off and work for Mrs. Abbot at the wash-tub, and she would earn eight or
twelve shillings a week.
It is difficult to know how they managed during those days, but one could
see that Mrs. Ward was buoyed up by some poignant hope. She would not
give way. Eventually old Tom did get some work to do at a stationer’s.
The work was comparatively light, and the pay equally so, so Mrs. Ward
still continued to work for Mrs. Abbot.
My next vision of Mrs. Ward concerns a certain winter evening. I could
not see inside the kitchen, but the old man could be heard complaining.
His querulous voice was rambling on, and Mrs. Ward was standing by the
door leading into the garden. She had returned from her day’s work and
was scraping a pan out into a bin near the door. A train shrieked by, and
the wind was blowing a fine rain against the house. Suddenly she stood up
and looked up at the sky; then she pushed back her hair from her brow,
and frowned at the dark house next door. Then she turned and said:
“Oh, I don’t know, Tom, if we’ve got to do it, we _must_ do it. If them
others can stand it, we can stand it. Whatever them others can do, we can
do.”
And then my visions jump rather wildly. And the war becomes to me
epitomized in two women. One in this dim doorway in our obscure suburb
of Dalston, scraping out a pan, and the other perhaps in some dark high
house near a canal on the outskirts of Bremen. Them others! These two
women silently enduring. And the trains rushing by, and all the dark,
mysterious forces of the night operating on them equivocally.
Poor Mrs. Frow Stelling! Perhaps those boys of hers are “missing,
believed killed.” Perhaps they are killed for certain. She is as much
outside “the things going on” as Mrs. Ward. Perhaps she is equally as
patient, as brave.
And Mrs. Ward enters the kitchen, and her eyes are blazing with a strange
light as she says:
“We’ll hear to-morrow, Tom. And if we don’t hear to-morrow, we’ll hear
the next day. And if we don’t hear the next day, we’ll hear the day
after. And if we don’t ... if we don’t never hear ... again ... if them
others can stand it, we can stand it, I say.”
And then her voice breaks, and she cries a little, for endurance has its
limitations, and—the work is hard at Mrs. Abbot’s.
And the months go by, and she stoops a little more as she walks, and—some
one has thrown a cloth over the rabbit-hutch with its unfinished roof.
And Mrs. Ward is curiously retrospective. It is useless to tell her of
the things of the active world. She listens politely but she does not
hear. She is full of reminiscences of Ernie’s and Lily’s childhood. She
recounts again and again the story of how Ernie when he was a little boy
ordered five tons of coal from a coal merchant to be sent to a girls’
school in Dalston High Road. She describes the coal carts arriving in the
morning, and the consternation of the head-mistress.
“O dear, O dear,” she says; “the things he did!”
She does not talk much of the Stellings, but one day she says
meditatively:
“Mrs. Frow Stelling thought a lot of that boy Hans. So she did of the
other, as far as that goes. It’s only natural like, I suppose.”
V
As time went on Tom Ward lost all hope. He said he was convinced that the
boy was killed. Having arrived at this conclusion he seemed to become
more composed. He gradually began to accustom himself to the new point of
view. But with Mrs. Ward the exact opposite was the case.
She was convinced that the boy was alive, but she suffered terribly.
There came a time—it was in early April—when one felt that the strain
could not last. She seemed to lose all interest in the passing world and
lived entirely within herself. Even the arrival of Lily’s baby did not
rouse her. She looked at the child queerly, as though she doubted whether
any useful or happy purpose was served by its appearance.
It was a boy.
In spite of her averred optimism she lost her tremulous sense of
apprehension when the bell went or the front door was tapped. She let the
milkman—and even the postman—wait.
When she spoke it was invariably of things that happened years ago.
Sometimes she talked about the Stellings, and on one Sunday she made a
strange pilgrimage out to Finchley and visited Mr. Stelling’s grave. I
don’t know what she did there, but she returned looking very exhausted
and unwell. As a matter of fact, she was unwell for some days after this
visit, and she suffered violent twinges of rheumatism in her legs.
I now come to my most unforgettable vision of Mrs. Ward.
It was a day at the end of April, and warm for the time of year. I was
standing in the garden with her and it was nearly dark. A goods train had
been shunting, and making a great deal of noise in front of the house,
and at last had disappeared. I had not been able to help noticing that
Mrs. Ward’s garden was curiously neglected for her for the time of year.
The grass was growing on the paths, and the snails had left their silver
trail over all the fences.
I was telling her a rumor I had heard about the railway porter and his
wife at number twenty-three, and she seemed fairly interested, for she
had known John Hemsley, the porter, fifteen years ago when Ernie was a
baby. There were two old broken Windsor chairs out in the garden, and on
one was a zinc basin in which were some potatoes. She was peeling them,
as Lily and her husband were coming to supper. By the kitchen door was a
small sink. When she had finished the potatoes, she stood up and began to
pour the water down the sink, taking care not to let the skins go too.
I was noticing her old bent back, and her long bony hands gripping the
sides of the basin, when suddenly a figure came limping round the bend
of the house from the side passage, and two arms were thrown round her
waist, and a voice said:
“Mind them skins don’t go down the sink, mother. They’ll stop it up!”
VI
As I explained to Ernie afterwards, it was an extremely foolish thing to
do. If his mother had had anything wrong with her heart, it might have
been very serious. There have been many cases of people dying from the
shock of such an experience.
As it was, she merely dropped the basin and stood there trembling like a
leaf, and Ernie laughed loud and uproariously. It must have been three or
four minutes before she could regain her speech, and then all she could
manage to say was:
“Ernie!... My Ernie!”
And the boy laughed, and ragged his mother, and pulled her into the
house, and Tom appeared and stared at his son, and said feebly:
“Well, I never!”
I don’t know how it was that I found myself intruding upon the sanctity
of the inner life of the Ward family that evening. I had never had a meal
there before, but I felt that I was holding a sort of watching brief over
the soul and body of Mrs. Ward. I had a little medical training in my
early youth, and this may have been one of the reasons which prompted me
to stay.
When Lily and her husband appeared we sat down to a meal of mashed
potatoes and onions stewed in milk, with bread and cheese, and very
excellent it was.
Lily and her husband took the whole thing in a boisterous, high comedy
manner that fitted in with the mood of Ernie. Old Tom sat there staring
at his son, and repeating at intervals:
“Well, I never!”
And Mrs. Ward hovered round the boy’s plate. Her eyes divided their time
between his plate and his face, and she hardly spoke all the evening.
Ernie’s story was remarkable enough. He told it disconnectedly and rather
incoherently. There were moments when he rambled in a rather peculiar
way, and sometimes he stammered, and seemed unable to frame a sentence.
Lily’s husband went out to fetch some beer to celebrate the joyful
occasion, and Ernie drank his in little sips, and spluttered. The boy
must have suffered considerably, and he had a wound in the abdomen, and
another in the right forearm which for a time had paralyzed him.
As far as I could gather, his story was this:
He and a platoon of men had been ambushed and had had to surrender. When
being sent back to a base, three of them tried to escape from the train,
which had been held up at night. He did not know what had happened to the
other two men, but it was on this occasion that he received his abdominal
wound at the hands of a guard.
He had then been sent to some infirmary where he was fairly well treated,
but as soon as his wound had healed a little, he had been suddenly
sent to some fortress prison, presumably as a punishment. He hadn’t
the faintest idea how long he had been confined there. He said it
seemed like fifteen years. It was probably nine months. He had solitary
confinement in a cell, which was like a small lavatory. He had fifteen
minutes’ exercise every day in a yard with some other prisoners, who
were Russians he thought. He spoke to no one. He used to sing and recite
in his cell, and there were times when he was quite convinced that he
was “off his chump.” He said he had lost “all sense of everything” when
he was suddenly transferred to another prison. Here the conditions were
somewhat better and he was made to work. He said he wrote six or seven
letters home from there, but received no reply. The letters certainly
never reached Dalston. The food was execrable, but a big improvement on
the dungeon. He was only there a few weeks when he and some thirty other
prisoners were sent suddenly to work on the land at a kind of settlement.
He said that the life there would have been tolerable if it hadn’t been
for the fact that the Commandant was an absolute brute. The food was
worse than in the prison, and they were punished severely for the most
trivial offenses.
It was here, however, that he met a sailor named Martin, a Royal Naval
reservist, an elderly thickset man with a black heard and only one eye.
Ernie said that this Martin “was an artist. He wangled everything. He had
a genius for getting what he wanted. He would get a beef-steak out of
stone.” In fact, it was obvious that the whole of Ernie’s narrative was
colored by his vision of Martin. He said he’d never met such a chap in
his life. He admired him enormously, and he was also a little afraid of
him.
By some miraculous means peculiar to sailors, Martin acquired a compass.
Ernie hardly knew what a compass was, but the sailor explained to him
that it was all that was necessary to take you straight to England. Ernie
said he “had had enough escaping. It didn’t agree with his health,” but
so strong was his faith and belief in Martin that he ultimately agreed to
try with him.