To Mary Throgmorton, tending and milking Mr. Peverell's cows at
Yarningdale Farm, those first few weeks of the Great War were as the
resultant dream that shadows the apprehensive mind.
Every morning after her work was done, she would retire to her room with
her newspapers, therein to read the countless conflicting reports which
they contained. The feverish desire to give active help or be amongst
the first of those personally to contribute to the cause found her calm
and self-possessed. She had her work to do. So long as the cows were
there in Mr. Peverell's meadows, they had to be milked. Her duty it had
been for the last eighteen years to milk them. Her duty it seemed to
her to continue.
From all the villages round about them, the young men were going up to
join the colors. Little processions of them accompanied by their
mothers and sweethearts passed along the roads to the station, going to
the nearest recruiting office. Most of them had flowers in their caps
and went singing on their way, lifting their voices to a cheer at sight
of any whom they passed.
Whenever she met them, Mary cheered in fervent response; but looking
back over her shoulder when they had gone by, there were tears, hot and
stinging in her eyes, so that always their departure to her was through
a mist. They vanished, nebulous, like spirits, out of her sight. She
looked till she could see no longer. The vision of them trembled as the
air trembles over the scorching earth on a summer's day. She felt it
was the last vision she would ever have of them.
Only their mothers and their sweethearts came back, little weeping
groups of them, along the same road. Whenever she saw these approaching
her, she would break her way into the fields or the woods rather than
pass them by. For more than the boys themselves with the high light of
a strange laughter in their eyes, it was the faces of the mothers as
they all went by together, that had dragged, like the warning pains of
child-birth, at her heart.
Pale beneath the wind-burnt ruddy skins they were. It was pallor of
anger; anger of soul at the senseless waste. The cry of England for her
sons was loud indeed. In countless hearts the note of it was shrilling
without need of proclamation. These boys had heard it and heard no
more. Their mothers had heard it too. No less had it rung its cry in
Mary's ears. But deeper and further-reaching was the hearing of the
women in those early days of war.
Later, doubtless, their senses became almost numb to the true meaning of
that voice flung far across the land. Even the vitality of despair grew
still in their breasts. The horrors of war sickened, choked,
asphyxiated them. They gave their sons like animals going to the
slaughter house with eyes that were staring and wide, and in whose
nostrils the heavy smell of blood had acted as a soporific on the brain.
But at first, Mary had little doubt of the look she saw in those
mothers' eyes. They were giving up, not what they had got, but what
they had made. The created thing they were sacrificing; the thing which
in love and pain and energy of soul they had offered out of themselves
to give life to. There was little of the fervor of patriotism about
them. To those country railway stations they marched with their pale
faces, their set lips, the aching pain in their eyes. Each for her
son's sake smiled as he looked at her; each for her son's sake smiled as
she waved farewell. But on the hollow mask she wore, that smile was but
a painted thing. He looked to his sweetheart or he laughed to his
companions and it died away.
Somewhere in their buried and inarticulate consciousness, those mothers
knew that wrong was being done to them. Vaguely they knew it was man
with his laws of force and his passion of possession who had done that
wrong; vaguely they knew it, but had no clear vision in their hearts to
give them voice to revile.
Such an one Mary came upon, a day when rain had driven her to take
shelter and she came back by a foot-path across the fields. On the
smooth rail of a well-worn stile the woman was seated, her feet resting
for support on the step below, her body faintly swinging to and fro, not
for comfort but as though she rocked sorrow like a suffering babe in her
arms.
At sound, then sight of Mary who must cross the stile if she passed that
way, the woman sat erect and took her feet down from their
resting-place.
Once having seen her, she looked no more at Mary as she approached, but
set her face outwards with a steady gaze in her eyes. In an impetus of
memory, Mary recognized her as one of a little band she had seen
marching to the station earlier in the day. She had been alone with her
son. No sweetheart was there to share their parting. Alone she had bid
farewell to him. Alone she returned.
Had there been others with her, Mary might have turned back; at least
she would have hurried by. Now, coming to the stile, she stopped.
"Have you lost your way?" she inquired.
"No, thank you, Miss."
"It was only I saw you coming by the road this morning and this footpath
doesn't lead to Lonesome Ford."
"We came by the road because all the boys were going that way. They
take it easier when they go all together. Seems they laugh in a crowd.
What we have acomin' back seems best alone."
Mary made gentle inquiries, what recruiting office her son had gone
to--what regiment he hoped to join--his age--his trade--what other sons
she had.
"He's my only--" she replied steadily.
Had she broken into weeping, Mary would have comforted and left her.
Tears are their own solace and need no company. But there were no tears
here. She sat upon the top rail of the stile, her head high above Mary,
her features sharp and almost hard against the sky, her eyes set fast
across the rolling fields that dipped and lifted, with elm-treed hollows
and uplands all spread gold with corn.
"I have one only," said Mary quietly. "He's in training now."
That made them one, but the calm voice of her who had spoken made the
other lean towards that unity for dependence. Impulsively she stretched
out her hand and straight and firmly Mary took it.
"I don't know who you are, Ma'am," she said with words her emotion
quickened on her lips. "I'm more or less of a stranger to these parts.
You may be a grand lady for all I know and judging by your voice, but
the way you spoke and all that's happening these days, seems to me we're
all just women now."
"All just women," said Mary softly.
She responded eagerly to the gentle encouragement and went swiftly on as
though no interruption had been made.
"What I mean," she said, "we've both just parted from what's dearest to
us in life--that makes us one. You might be a lord's lady and I just one
of common folk--no less, we're one. Something's happened to us that's
made us look up like and see each other--it's made you put out your hand
to me and what I want to know is what it is that's happened, because
with all these talks of England in danger and hatred of those beasts of
Germans, there seems something else and I can't get it right. I know,
now it's come to it, my son's got to go out and fight. I wouldn't stop
him. But I don't think I'd have brought him into the world if I'd known.
There are some as like fighting. He doesn't. He cried in my lap last
night, but not because he couldn't make up his mind to go. He knew he
was going this morning, but he cried in my lap and I heard him say, 'I
know I shall fight and hate and go mad with the rest of them when it
comes to the time.' I don't rightly know what he meant by that. I hope
he does hate but it seemed to me as if it was that he feared most."
"Perhaps he saw himself mad and drunk with blood," said Mary. "Can't
you imagine he'd loathe the sight of that? Have you ever seen a woman
intoxicated with drink?"
"Once I did--no--twice I did."
"Would you like to think of yourself like that?"
She bent her head.
"You've made that plain," she muttered. "I didn't care asking him at
the time. Seemed he just wanted to go talking on with no questions.
There'll be hundreds like him, I suppose, thousands perhaps and some as
like fighting. 'Twill be an adventure to them, but hell it'll be to
him. P'r'aps that's as it must be. The world's all sorts. But I can't
help thinking the world's wrong for us women. Be they the fighting kind
or not, we didn't bring 'em into the world for this wasting. They say
that thousands of our boys were lost during that first retreat from
'Mons' I think they call it. If you saw the thousands of mothers they
belong to all come together in a crowd like the boys marching and they
had some one to lead 'em, what would they do to them as have made this
war? They'd tear them limb from limb. That's what they'd do. I used
to think the world was a fair and sweet enough place once. They told us
there, those people up in London in the Government there could be no
war. The papers said it. Up to the last they said it. Every man said
it to you, too. There can't be no war, they said, not a big European
war, they said, the world 'd stop still in a month, they said, there'd
be no trade. Seems to me men go sweating in labor and toiling with work
and half the time they don't know what they're making."
Mary let her talk on. So plain it was to be seen that it gave her ease;
so plain that this was the accumulation of her thoughts, flowing over
from the full vessel of her heart that could hold no more.
"What's all this," she continued, "all this they've been saying about
treaties and what they call International Law? Seems to me we've let
men make the world long enough. They've made hell of it. How could
there be peace with them making all those guns and ships and weapons
which was only invented to destroy peace? I don't believe nothing's
made to waste in this world. If you make a thing it'll get itself used
somehow and if it don't and goes to rust, then something's wrong in the
minds of them as wasted their time on it. If my man had told me before
we married I'd got to give him a son as one day would be crying in my
lap because he found life horrible, do you think I'd have married him?
No--he told me the little home we was going to have and all the things
he'd give me to put in it and how when I was going to have a child he'd
work so hard as we could afford to get a girl in to help. That's what
he told me those evenings we walked up and down the lanes courting, and
that's what it seems to me men in high places who make the Government
have been telling those thousands of mothers that have their hearts
broken now this very hour. Men want to get hold of things in this world.
Grasping always they are. And nations are like men, because men have
had the making of them. And the nation that has the most men has the
most power to grasp, and the more they grasp, the more will others get
jealous of them, and the more they get jealous, the more they'll need to
fight. But who gives them the power they have? Who gives them the sons
they ask for? And what I want to know is why do we go on giving for
them to spoil?"
Mary watched her as the last rush of her words lit up her eyes to a
sullen anger.
"Countless women will think like you," she said quietly, "when this
war's over. They won't listen any more when men tell them there's honor
in their slavery or pride in the service that they give. We shall bring
children into the world on our own conditions, not on theirs. To our
own ideals we shall train them; not to the ideals of men. You're not
the first who's thought these things. I've thought them too and
hundreds of others are thinking them and we shan't be the last."
She stretched out her hand.
"There's a new world to be made," she said with a thrill in her voice.
"Men have had their vision. We can't deny they've had that. Without
their vision would they ever have been able to persuade us as they have?
They've had their vision while we've had none. They've had their vision
and it's brought us so far. When women find a vision of their own; when
once they see in a clear picture the thoughts that are aching in their
hearts now, nothing will stop them. You see and I see, but we are
powerless by ourselves. I know just how powerless we are, even to have
faith in our own sight. I thought I had faith once--enough faith to
carry me right through--but I hadn't. At the crucial moment that faith
failed me. I had trained my son so far in the light of the vision I had
and then they came and with all the threats they made of the good things
he was losing in life, my courage failed me. I let them have him for
their own and little by little I've watched him drift away from me."
"Do you know," she added, coming to a swift realization as she spoke,
"do you know I'm almost glad of this War. He volunteered at once,
though he's only eighteen. He volunteered against his father's wishes.
This war's going to stop him drifting. It's going to stop thousands
from drifting as they were. They'll see there's something wrong with
the civilization they have built up, that it's an earthquake, a volcano,
a state of being which any moment may tumble or burst into flame about
their heads. For that, I'm not sorry for the War. We couldn't have
shown men how wrong they were without it. It'll be to their mothers
they'll go--these boys--when they come back."
She took her hand away and climbed over the stile.
"You'll have him back," she said. "One of these days you'll have his
head in your lap again."
For one moment they looked in each other's eyes. There was a compact in
that look. In purpose they had found sympathy. Out of the deep
bitterness of life they had found a meaning.
Once, as she walked away, Mary looked over her shoulder. The woman
still sat there on the stile, still with her features cut sharp in
profile against the sky, still gazing across the elm-treed hollows and
the uplands all spread with gold of corn.
* * * * *
On Sunday night, October the fourth, in a little force of naval
reserves, John marched from Ostend to his battle position on the Nethe.
Mary did not know where he had gone. He had not known himself. In the
midst of his training, the order had come for his departure. Two hours
he had had with her at Yarningdale; no more. All that time he had
laughed and talked in the highest spirits. Constrained to laugh with
him, her eyes had been bright, her courage wonderful.
It was not until she drove back alone in the spring cart from the
station, that she knew the brightness in her eyes had sunk as in those
other women's eyes to the sullen light of anger.
"Oh--the waste--the senseless waste of it!" she had muttered that night
as she lay waiting for the relief of sleep.
The next five days had passed in silence. She went about her duties as
usual, but none seeing her dared speak about the War. It was whispered
only in that parlor kitchen; whispers that fell with sibilant noises
into silence whenever she came into the room.
Each morning, as always, she took her papers away to her room to read.
Nothing of that which she yearned to know could they tell her. On the
ninth of October Antwerp had fallen. Amongst all the strongholds that
were crumbling beneath the weight of the German guns, this meant nothing
to her. She laid the paper down and went out into the fields.
It was the evening of three days later when she was milking the cows in
their stalls, that Mrs. Peverell came, bringing her a telegram into the
shed. Her hands were wet with milk as they took it. They slipped on
the shiny envelope as, without hesitation, she broke it open.
When she had read it, she looked up, handing it in silence to Mrs.
Peverell, then turned with the sense of habit alone remaining in her
fingers and continued with her milking.