“I knew he was bound to be one of the first,” said Mrs. Bunce
triumphantly. “Why, he’ve a-been out there ever since the war broke
out. Two year and seven month he’ve a-been there--and the hardships
he’s been through, and the fightin’ he’s done! There, I can’t think how
ever the Government had the heart to keep en out so long.”
“There’s others what have been out jist same as he have,” returned
her neighbour plaintively. “My Jan now--such a good boy as he be,
too!--well, he’ve a-been out there months and months, and he’ve a-been
in hospital!”
“As for fightin’,” put in the shrewd-faced little man who formed the
third party to the discussion, and whose opinion carried weight in the
neighbourhood, for his vocation of carrier enabled him to pick up many
items of news during his daily round, “as for fightin’, Mrs. Bunce, I
don’t mean to make little o’ your husband, but there bain’t nothin’
wonderful about him doin’ a lot o’ fightin’. They all done that--’twas
what they were sent out for, and not a bit more credit to any of ’em
nor for me to go joggin’ along behind the wold horse here.”
Both women reddened, and turned upon him angrily.
“If ye do think such things, ye did ought to be ashamed to say ’em,”
cried Mrs. Andrews. “’Eroes--’tis what they be every man of ’em, Mr.
Bright; and you did ought to know it, seein’ as ’twas wrote up plain
over the very Corn Exchange the day as peace was declared. ‘All Honour
to Our ’Eroes,’ it said, in them little coloured lamps so ’andsome as
it could be; and bain’t there a song about ‘they’re ’eroes every one’?”
“And I’m sure ye can’t say,” chimed in little Mrs. Bunce, nodding her
curly head emphatically, “as it be the same thing for a man to sit snug
in his cart behind the quietest old harse in Darset as it is to leave
your wife and your home and--and everything, and to go riskin’ your
life among Boers and Blacks in them wild parts out abroad.”
“E-es,” agreed her neighbour, making common cause with her against the
enemy, “e-es, indeed, Mrs. Bunce. And your little boy wasn’t so much
as born when his dada was took away, was he? Many a time, I dare say,
you did think to yourself as he’d never see the face of his child. I d’
’low he thought the same hisself goin’ off, poor fellow! Ye’ll agree
that was a bit hard on the man, Mr. Bright, so little credit as ye be
willin’ to allow our soldiers. Ye’ll agree ’twas hard on the man to go
off, leavin’ his missus to get through her trouble alone, and the child
the first child, too, mind ye.”
“If it had been the tenth you wouldn’t pity him so much,” said the
carrier, with a dry chuckle. “There’s some as don’t think so much o’
them things. Jim Marshall, now--says I to Jim t’other day, ‘Jim,’ I
says, ‘I hear you’ve got an increase to your family’; and poor Jim, he
looks at me and says, ‘E-es,’ he says, ‘more hardship’.”
Chuckling sardonically, he gathered up his reins and jogged on again,
the women looking after him with indignant faces.
As the green “shed” of his van disappeared round the corner, their
eyes by mutual accord reverted to each other, and Mrs. Andrews laughed
disdainfully.
“’Tis a queer cranky sort of body,” she remarked; “a bachelor man. What
can you expect?”
Mrs. Bunce’s face was still pink with wrath, but she smiled upon the
other woman.
“I should think your Jan did ought to come home soon now,” she said
handsomely; gratitude for Mrs. Andrews’ timely sympathy causing her
to be for the moment almost willing to admit there might be another
soldier of some merit in the British Army besides Private William Bunce.
“I’m sure I hope so,” responded her neighbour rather dismally. “You are
safe to get your husband back next week, anyhow.”
“Next week,” echoed Nellie Bunce joyfully. “Yes, he says in his last
letter they was to start in a week, and I’ve a-counted up the time, and
he did ought to land at Southampton Saturday week.”
“I d’ ’low ye’ll be busy gettin’ all ready for him,” said the older
woman, falling into an easy attitude with her hands on her hips, the
better to contemplate her pretty neighbour.
“I d’ ’low I be,” responded Nellie, enthusiastically. “I be goin’ to
give en the best welcome I can, ye mid be sure. I be cleanin’ up the
house fro’ top to bottom, and I be goin’ to paper the kitchen. I’ve
bought paper already; I reckon I could easy do it myself; the wall
aint so very high and the room bain’t too big neither.”
“’Tis a stiffish job for a woman though,” returned Mrs. Andrews,
dubiously. “If Andrews wasn’t so bad with the lumbagey, I’d get en to
lend ye a hand; but he’s that stiff, poor man, he can scarcely so much
as turn hisself in bed.”
“Oh, I’ll manage,” returned Mrs. Bunce, nodding brightly. “I’m a great
one for contrivin’, and ’t’ull be summat to tell Bill as I’ve a-done it
myself.”
“It’ll take you all your time,” protested Mrs. Andrews, and they parted.
During the ensuing days Nellie was indeed up to her eyes in work,
carrying out vigorously her plan of cleaning and polishing the house
from top to bottom. Baby Billy, who had hitherto considered himself
a person of very great importance, found himself hustled hither and
thither as he had never been in the whole of his existence, a period
extending over about thirty months.
On one particular afternoon, when every washable article in the house
was in Nellie’s tub, he was bidden to play out of doors, and finding
the maternal eye less on the alert than usual, surreptitiously opened
the garden gate and wandered to the forbidden precincts of the lane.
He trotted along for nearly a quarter of a mile, until he reached a
particularly delectable corner graced by a large rubbish-heap, which he
proceeded to investigate with huge satisfaction, carrying one treasure
after another over the way, sitting down to examine it, and immediately
rolling on to his legs again to procure some yet more coveted object.
At last, however, he secured two prizes, than which nothing more
desirable could be imagined, and with a sigh of satisfaction toddled
for the last time across the lane and sat down to enjoy them at his
leisure. The broken jam-pot was immediately filled with sand, while
the rusty knife, grasped by its fragmentary handle, could be used in
a variety of ways--so Billy discovered--as a spade, as a saw, as a
chopper.
He was engaged in mincing a dock leaf very small on a flat stone, his
mouth opening and shutting in accompaniment to his labours, when he was
suddenly hailed by somebody who had abruptly turned the corner of the
lane, somebody who was probably on his way from the town.
“Hello!” cried this somebody.
“Hello!” responded Billy, pausing with his knife poised in mid-air and
looking up with a pair of very big and very blue eyes. He had to tilt
his head quite a long way back to do so, for the newcomer was tall.
Billy was a little startled; to begin with the newcomer was a man, and
he was not sure that he liked men--they cracked whips sometimes, and
spoke loud and gruff, particularly when, as occasionally happened,
Billy chanced to run across the road immediately in front of their
horses; then he had funny brown clothes--nobody that Billy had ever
seen wore clothes like that; and he had a brown face too, a face so
very, very brown that it gave his blue eyes a strange look. Billy was
secretly a good deal frightened, but being a soldier’s son he only
clutched his knife the harder and said, “Hello!” again, as the stranger
continued to look at him without speaking.
“I rather think I ought to know you, my lad,” said the man at last, in
a queer quavering voice. “I’d swear by that little cocked nose. What’s
your name, eh?”
“Billy,” responded the child promptly.
“Right you are!” cried the man, and he caught him up in his arms, knife
and jam-pot and all. “Let’s hear the rest of it, though. Billy what?”
“I want to get down,” asserted the urchin, vigorously struggling. “I
want to get down and make a pudden for my dada.”
The man grimaced, and instantly set the child upon his legs.
“Perhaps we’ve made a mistake after all,” he said; “perhaps you are
some other chap’s Billy. Where does your dada live, young ’un?--tell us
that.”
Billy had by this time squatted on the ground again, and was once more
chopping at his dock leaf. He did not answer until the man had twice
repeated his question, then he explained.
“My dada’s tummin’ home. He’s tummin’ in a ship--and a puff-puff,” he
added, as an after-thought.
“Right you are,” cried the brown-faced man again, and he caught him up
in his arms once more and kissed him. “I thought I’d know my little
woman’s nose among a thousand, and yours is so like it as one pea is
like another. Come, let’s go and look for mammy.”
Billy was at first disposed to protest, but something at once merry and
tender in the man’s blue eyes disarmed suspicion; and when he presently
found himself hoisted on a broad shoulder, and was thus carried at
galloping speed down the lane and through the village; when, moreover,
this self-constituted steed actually vaulted the garden gate, and
covered the tiny path that intervened between it and the cottage door
with two strides, he was not only reassured but jubilant.
They could see “mammy” bending over the wash-tub through the open
kitchen door, very red in the face, very wet and draggled as to dress,
and with one end of her hair straggling down; and the queer thing
was that at sight of her the man suddenly came to a standstill and
uttered a kind of choking cry. And then mammy turned round and dropped
the shirt she had been wringing out, and fairly screamed as she came
rushing across the kitchen. Then laughing and crying together she flung
her arms round the brown man’s neck, heedless of the danger to which
she was exposing herself from the broken jam-pot and the rusty knife
which Billy was still brandishing; and kissed him, and rocked backwards
and forwards with him, and seemed altogether to have taken leave of her
senses.
After a moment’s breathless pause of astonishment, Billy thought it
time to assert himself. He dropped his two treasures on the floor
and burst into a loud wail. Then clutching hold of the newcomer’s
close-cropped fair head, he endeavoured with all his might to pull it
away from the curly one that was pressed so close to it. And then mammy
looked up, and her eyes were all wet, but her mouth was laughing.
“You mustn’t do that, sonny,” she said. “This is dada! Dada’s come
home.”
Billy was dumb with dismay and disappointment, partly at the discovery
that the much-talked-of and hitherto unimagined dada was a man, partly
because he was such a very brown man, but chiefly because he had
arrived shorn of the glories of the ship and the puff-puff which he
had understood were to accompany him. So he sat still and rather sulky
on the khaki shoulder while Private Bunce explained how he had caught
sight of the little chap, and how he at once “spotted” him by that
little nose of his, and how disappointed he had been when for a moment
he had thought it was not his Billy after all, but some other quite
uninteresting Billy belonging to another fellow.
“But I found him all right,” he summed up triumphantly, “and I found
you, little woman--lookin’ tip-top you are, just about! Lard, it do
seem a mortal time since I left you, my girl.”
“Oh, Bill, I meant to have everything so nice for ’ee,” cried Nellie.
“Dear, to think there’s nothin’ ready! I’m sure I’m not fit to be seen
myself.”
She glanced regretfully towards the wash-tub. Her pink blouse was in
there--the blouse Bill had always said he liked--and her lace collar
and the little ruffles for her wrists. The old blue cotton gown which
she wore was not only faded and patched, but soiled and almost wet
through.
“You’re lookin’ just splendid though,” cried her husband. “Why, that
there’s the very gown you used to wear when we went a-coortin’--I mind
it well--that little wavy stripe. I used to think it the prettiest
thing I ever did see. And here’s the little curl comin’ down what I
used to kiss when we was a-walkin’ down by the river.”
“Oh, Bill, is it comin’ down? I wanted to be so tidy and nice. I
reckoned ye was comin’ next week, ye know.”
“I come over wi’ the colonel. He come across a bit sooner nor we
expected, bein’ knocked up wi’ one thing and another. ‘The sooner the
better,’ thinks I.”
“Of course,” cried Nellie fervently; “the sooner the better indeed. But
we be all in a caddle here. There, the window curtains and the best
table-cloth and the very bed-quilt is in the tub, and I haven’t got any
meat in the house! I thought Billy and me ud go a bit short this week,
so’s to have a reg’lar feast when you did come home. And--and----”
“Now, don’t you fret, old girl; we hadn’t no table-cloth nor yet
bed-quilts out on the veldt. And as for meat--blowed if I do care so
very much for meat. But I tell ye what I would like.”
“What?” cried Nellie breathlessly.
“What I would like more nor any earthly thing,” said Bill emphatically,
but with a twinkle in his eye, “is just ’taters--’taters done wi’ a bit
o’ drippin’, hot and tasty, the way you did often do ’em.”
Nellie drew a long breath of relief.
“Them’s easy got,” she said jubilantly, but almost immediately her face
fell again. “It do seem a poor kind o’ welcome,” she murmured, “and
I----”
Private Bunce deposited his son and heir upon the floor, the better to
bestow a really satisfactory embrace upon the little sunburnt woman.
She was exceedingly damp and smelt very strongly of soap, but he did
not seem to mind.
“Now, look here,” he said, “you couldn’t give I a better welcome nor
what you’ve a-done. This here’s home--home as I did so often think
of and long for; and here you be, my wold ’ooman, lookin’ just same
as ever--just same as I so often seed ye in my mind, and I used to
dream about ye many a time, and wake up and find mysel’ lyin’ on the
sand. This here’s home and this here’s my little ’ooman--and I don’t
want nothin’ else, wi’out it’s this young shaver,” he added as an
after-thought.
And so, while the wash-tub steamed away unheeded in the back premises,
a very merry party sat down to an impromptu meal. The ’taters were duly
set forth, and Nellie, cleaned up and tidy, poured out tea, and Private
Bunce cut huge slices from the crusty loaf, and declared he hadn’t had
such a blow-out, no, not since he sailed from Southampton.
“To my mind, Nellie,” he cried presently, “the room do seem to look
more cheerful-like wi’out the winder curtains. A body notices the paper
more--the dear old paper what I did stick up for ’ee myself.”
Nellie opened her mouth as though to speak, but changed her mind and
closed it again.
“I tell you what it is,” cried Private Bunce enthusiastically, “the
place wouldn’t look itself wi’out that wall-paper. I wouldn’t have it
changed for anything.”
Then Nellie burst out laughing and clapped her hands.