One grave to me was given,
One watch till Judgment Day;
And God looked down from Heaven
And rolled the stone away.
_One day in all the years,
One hour in that one day,
His Angel saw my tears,
And rolled the stone away!_
Every one in the village knew that Helen Turrell did her duty by all
her world, and by none more honourably than by her only brother’s
unfortunate child. The village knew, too, that George Turrell had
tried his family severely since early youth, and were not surprised to
be told that, after many fresh starts given and thrown away, he, an
Inspector of Indian Police, had entangled himself with the daughter of
a retired non-commissioned officer, and had died of a fall from a horse
a few weeks before his child was born. Mercifully, George’s father and
mother were both dead, and though Helen, thirty-five and independent,
might well have washed her hands of the whole disgraceful affair, she
most nobly took charge, though she was, at the time, under threat of
lung trouble which had driven her to the South of France. She arranged
for the passage of the child and a nurse from Bombay, met them at
Marseilles, nursed the baby through an attack of infantile dysentery
due to the carelessness of the nurse, whom she had had to dismiss, and
at last, thin and worn but triumphant, brought the boy late in the
autumn, wholly restored, to her Hampshire home.
All these details were public property, for Helen was as open as the
day, and held that scandals are only increased by hushing them up. She
admitted that George had always been rather a black sheep, but things
might have been much worse if the mother had insisted on her right to
keep the boy. Luckily, it seemed that people of that class would do
almost anything for money, and, as George had always turned to her
in his scrapes, she felt herself justified--her friends agreed with
her--in cutting the whole non-commissioned officer connection, and
giving the child every advantage. A christening, by the Rector, under
the name of Michael, was the first step. So far as she knew herself,
she was not, she said, a child-lover, but, for all his faults, she had
been very fond of George, and she pointed out that little Michael had
his father’s mouth to a line; which made something to build upon.
As a matter of fact, it was the Turrell forehead, broad, low, and
well-shaped, with the widely-spaced eyes beneath it, that Michael had
most faithfully reproduced. His mouth was somewhat better cut than the
family type. But Helen, who would concede nothing good to his mother’s
side, vowed he was a Turrell all over, and, there being no one to
contradict, the likeness was established.
In a few years Michael took his place, as accepted as Helen had always
been--fearless, philosophical, and fairly good-looking. At six, he
wished to know why he could not call her “Mummy,” as other boys called
their mothers. She explained that she was only his auntie, and that
aunties were not quite the same as mummies, but that, if it gave him
pleasure, he might call her “Mummy” at bedtime, for a pet-name between
themselves.
Michael kept his secret most loyally, but Helen, as usual, explained
the fact to her friends; which when Michael heard, he raged.
“Why did you tell? _Why_ did you tell?” came at the end of the storm.
“Because it’s always best to tell the truth,” Helen answered, her arm
round him as he shook in his cot.
“All right, but when the troof’s ugly I don’t think it’s nice.”
“Don’t you, dear?”
“No, I don’t, and”--she felt the small body stiffen--“now you’ve told,
I won’t call you ‘Mummy’ any more--not even at bedtimes.”
“But isn’t that rather unkind?” said Helen, softly.
“I don’t care! I don’t care! You’ve hurted me in my insides and I’ll
hurt you back. I’ll hurt you as long as I live!”
“Don’t, oh, don’t talk like that, dear! You don’t know what----”
“I will! And when I’m dead I’ll hurt you worse!”
“Thank goodness, I shall be dead long before you, darling.”
“Huh! Emma says, ‘’Never know your luck.’” (Michael had been talking to
Helen’s elderly, flat-faced maid.) “Lots of little boys die quite soon.
So’ll I. _Then_ you’ll see!”
Helen caught her breath and moved towards the door, but the wail of
“Mummy! Mummy!” drew her back again, and the two wept together.
* * * * *
At ten years old, after two terms at a prep. school, something or
somebody gave him the idea that his civil status was not quite regular.
He attacked Helen on the subject, breaking down her stammered defences
with the family directness.
“’Don’t believe a word of it,” he said, cheerily, at the end. “People
wouldn’t have talked like they did if my people had been married. But
don’t you bother, Auntie. I’ve found out all about my sort in English
Hist’ry and the Shakespeare bits. There was William the Conqueror
to begin with, and--oh, heaps more, and they all got on first-rate.
’Twon’t make any difference to you, my being _that_--will it?”
“As if anything could----” she began.
“All right. We won’t talk about it any more if it makes you cry.” He
never mentioned the thing again of his own will, but when, two years
later, he skilfully managed to have measles in the holidays, as his
temperature went up to the appointed one hundred and four he muttered
of nothing else, till Helen’s voice, piercing at last his delirium,
reached him with assurance that nothing on earth or beyond could make
any difference between them.
The terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter,
and Summer holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as
jewels on a string; and as jewels Helen treasured them. In due time
Michael developed his own interests, which ran their courses and gave
way to others; but his interest in Helen was constant and increasing
throughout. She repaid it with all that she had of affection or could
command of counsel and money; and since Michael was no fool, the War
took him just before what was like to have been a most promising
career.
He was to have gone up to Oxford, with a scholarship, in October. At
the end of August he was on the edge of joining the first holocaust of
public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line; but the captain
of his O.T.C., where he had been sergeant for nearly a year, headed him
off and steered him directly to a commission in a battalion so new that
half of it still wore the old Army red, and the other half was breeding
meningitis through living over-crowdedly in damp tents. Helen had been
shocked at the idea of direct enlistment.
“But it’s in the family,” Michael laughed.
“You don’t mean to tell me that you believed that old story all this
time?” said Helen. (Emma, her maid, had been dead now several years.)
“I gave you my word of honour--and I give it again--that--that it’s all
right. It is indeed.”
“Oh, _that_ doesn’t worry me. It never did,” he replied valiantly.
“What I meant was, I should have got into the show earlier if I’d
enlisted--like my grandfather.”
“Don’t talk like that! Are you afraid of it’s ending so soon, then?”
“No such luck. You know what K. says.”
“Yes. But my banker told me last Monday it couldn’t _possibly_ last
beyond Christmas--for financial reasons.”
“’Hope he’s right, but our Colonel--and he’s a Regular--says it’s going
to be a long job.”
Michael’s battalion was fortunate in that, by some chance which meant
several “leaves,” it was used for coast-defence among shallow trenches
on the Norfolk coast; thence sent north to watch the mouth of a Scotch
estuary, and, lastly, held for weeks on a baseless rumour of distant
service. But, the very day that Michael was to have met Helen for four
whole hours at a railway-junction up the line, it was hurled out, to
help make good the wastage of Loos, and he had only just time to send
her a wire of farewell.
In France luck again helped the battalion. It was put down near the
Salient, where it led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the
Somme was being manufactured; and enjoyed the peace of the Armentières
and Laventie sectors when that battle began. Finding that it had sound
views on protecting its own flanks and could dig, a prudent Commander
stole it out of its own Division, under pretence of helping to lay
telegraphs, and used it round Ypres at large.
A month later, and just after Michael had written Helen that there was
nothing special doing and therefore no need to worry, a shell-splinter
dropping out of a wet dawn killed him at once. The next shell uprooted
and laid down over the body what had been the foundation of a barn
wall, so neatly that none but an expert would have guessed that
anything unpleasant had happened.
* * * * *
By this time the village was old in experience of war, and, English
fashion, had evolved a ritual to meet it. When the postmistress handed
her seven-year-old daughter the official telegram to take to Miss
Turrell, she observed to the Rector’s gardener: “It’s Miss Helen’s turn
now.” He replied, thinking of his own son: “Well, he’s lasted longer
than some.” The child herself came to the front-door weeping aloud,
because Master Michael had often given her sweets. Helen, presently,
found herself pulling down the house-blinds one after one with great
care, and saying earnestly to each: “Missing _always_ means dead.”
Then she took her place in the dreary procession that was impelled to
go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions. The Rector,
of course, preached hope and prophesied word, very soon, from a prison
camp. Several friends, too, told her perfectly truthful tales, but
always about other women, to whom, after months and months of silence,
their missing had been miraculously restored. Other people urged her
to communicate with infallible Secretaries of organisations who could
communicate with benevolent neutrals, who could extract accurate
information from the most secretive of Hun prison commandants. Helen
did and wrote and signed everything that was suggested or put before
her.
Once, on one of Michael’s leaves, he had taken her over a munition
factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to
the all but finished article. It struck her at the time that the
wretched thing was never left alone for a single second; and “I’m being
manufactured into a bereaved next-of-kin,” she told herself, as she
prepared her documents.
In due course, when all the organisations had deeply or sincerely
regretted their inability to trace, etc., something gave way within her
and all sensation--save of thankfulness for the release--came to an end
in blessed passivity. Michael had died and her world had stood still
and she had been one with the full shock of that arrest. Now she was
standing still and the world was going forward, but it did not concern
her--in no way or relation did it touch her. She knew this by the ease
with which she could slip Michael’s name into talk and incline her head
to the proper angle, at the proper murmur of sympathy.
In the blessed realisation of that relief, the Armistice with all its
bells broke over her and passed unheeded. At the end of another year
she had overcome her physical loathing of the living and returned
young, so that she could take them by the hand and almost sincerely
wish them well. She had no interest in any aftermath, national or
personal, of the War, but, moving at an immense distance, she sat on
various relief committees and held strong views--she heard herself
delivering them--about the site of the proposed village War Memorial.
Then there came to her, as next of kin, an official intimation,
backed by a page of a letter to her in indelible pencil, a silver
identity-disc, and a watch, to the effect that the body of Lieutenant
Michael Turrell had been found, identified, and re-interred in
Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery--the letter of the row and the
grave’s number in that row duly given.
So Helen found herself moved on to another process of the
manufacture--to a world full of exultant or broken relatives, now
strong in the certainty that there was an altar upon earth where they
might lay their love. These soon told her, and by means of time-tables
made clear, how easy it was and how little it interfered with life’s
affairs to go and see one’s grave.
“_So_ different,” as the Rector’s wife said, “if he’d been killed in
Mesopotamia, or even Gallipoli.”
The agony of being waked up to some sort of second life drove Helen
across the Channel, where, in a new world of abbreviated titles,
she learnt that Hagenzeele Third could be comfortably reached by an
afternoon train which fitted in with the morning boat, and that there
was a comfortable little hotel not three kilometres from Hagenzeele
itself, where one could spend quite a comfortable night and see one’s
grave next morning. All this she had from a Central Authority who lived
in a board and tar-paper shed on the skirts of a razed city full of
whirling lime-dust and blown papers.
“By the way,” said he, “you know your grave, of course?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Helen, and showed its row and number typed on
Michael’s own little typewriter. The officer would have checked it, out
of one of his many books; but a large Lancashire woman thrust between
them and bade him tell her where she might find her son, who had been
corporal in the A.S.C. His proper name, she sobbed, was Anderson, but,
coming of respectable folk, he had of course enlisted under the name of
Smith; and had been killed at Dickiebush, in early ’Fifteen. She had
not his number nor did she know which of his two Christian names he
might have used with his alias; but her Cook’s tourist ticket expired
at the end of Easter week, and if by then she could not find her child
she should go mad. Whereupon she fell forward on Helen’s breast; but
the officer’s wife came out quickly from a little bedroom behind the
office, and the three of them lifted the woman on to the cot.
“They are often like this,” said the officer’s wife, loosening the
tight bonnet-strings. “Yesterday she said he’d been killed at Hooge.
Are you sure you know your grave? It makes such a difference.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Helen, and hurried out before the woman on the
bed should begin to lament again.
* * * * *
Tea in a crowded mauve and blue striped wooden structure, with a false
front, carried her still further into the nightmare. She paid her bill
beside a stolid, plain-featured Englishwoman, who, hearing her inquire
about the train to Hagenzeele, volunteered to come with her.
“I’m going to Hagenzeele myself,” she explained. “Not to Hagenzeele
Third; mine is Sugar Factory, but they call it La Rosière now. It’s
just south of Hagenzeele Three. Have you got your room at the hotel
there?”
“Oh yes, thank you. I’ve wired.”
“That’s better. Sometimes the place is quite full, and at others
there’s hardly a soul. But they’ve put bathrooms into the old Lion
d’Or--that’s the hotel on the west side of Sugar Factory--and it draws
off a lot of people, luckily.”
“It’s all new to me. This is the first time I’ve been over.”
“Indeed! This is my ninth time since the Armistice. Not on my own
account. _I_ haven’t lost any one, thank God--but, like every one else,
I’ve a lot of friends at home who have. Coming over as often as I do,
I find it helps them to have some one just look at the--the place and
tell them about it afterwards. And one can take photos for them, too.
I get quite a list of commissions to execute.” She laughed nervously
and tapped her slung Kodak. “There are two or three to see at Sugar
Factory this time, and plenty of others in the cemeteries all about. My
system is to save them up, and arrange them, you know. And when I’ve
got enough commissions for one area to make it worth while, I pop over
and execute them. It _does_ comfort people.”
“I suppose so,” Helen answered, shivering as they entered the little
train.
“Of course it does. (Isn’t it lucky we’ve got window-seats?) It must
do or they wouldn’t ask one to do it, would they? I’ve a list of quite
twelve or fifteen commissions here”--she tapped the Kodak again--“I
must sort them out to-night. Oh, I forgot to ask you. What’s yours?”
“My nephew,” said Helen. “But I was very fond of him.”
“Ah yes! I sometimes wonder whether _they_ know after death? What do
you think?”
“Oh, I don’t--I haven’t dared to think much about that sort of thing,”
said Helen, almost lifting her hands to keep her off.
“Perhaps that’s better,” the woman answered. “The sense of loss must be
enough, I expect. Well, I won’t worry you any more.”
Helen was grateful, but when they reached the hotel Mrs. Scarsworth
(they had exchanged names) insisted on dining at the same table
with her, and after the meal, in the little, hideous salon full of
low-voiced relatives, took Helen through her “commissions” with
biographies of the dead, where she happened to know them, and sketches
of their next of kin. Helen endured till nearly half-past nine, ere she
fled to her room.
Almost at once there was a knock at her door and Mrs. Scarsworth
entered; her hands, holding the dreadful list, clasped before her.
“Yes--yes--_I_ know,” she began. “You’re sick of me, but I want to
tell you something. You--you aren’t married are you? Then perhaps you
won’t.... But it doesn’t matter. I’ve _got_ to tell some one. I can’t
go on any longer like this.”
“But please----” Mrs. Scarsworth had backed against the shut door, and
her mouth worked dryly.
“In a minute,” she said. “You--you know about these graves of mine
I was telling you about downstairs, just now? They really _are_
commissions. At least several of them are.” Her eye wandered round the
room. “What extraordinary wall-papers they have in Belgium, don’t you
think?... Yes. I swear they are commissions. But there’s _one_, d’you
see, and--and he was more to me than anything else in the world. Do
you understand?”
Helen nodded.
“More than any one else. And, of course, he oughtn’t to have been. He
ought to have been nothing to me. But he _was_. He _is_. That’s why I
do the commissions, you see. That’s all.”
“But why do you tell me?” Helen asked desperately.
“Because I’m _so_ tired of lying. Tired of lying--always lying--year
in and year out. When I don’t tell lies I’ve got to act ’em and I’ve
got to think ’em, always. _You_ don’t know what that means. He was
everything to me that he oughtn’t to have been--the one real thing--the
only thing that ever happened to me in all my life; and I’ve had to
pretend he wasn’t. I’ve had to watch every word I said, and think out
what lie I’d tell next, for years and years!”
“How many years?” Helen asked.
“Six years and four months before, and two and three-quarters after.
I’ve gone to him eight times, since. To-morrow’ll make the ninth,
and--and I can’t--I _can’t_ go to him again with nobody in the world
knowing. I want to be honest with some one before I go. Do you
understand? It doesn’t matter about _me_. I was never truthful, even as
a girl. But it isn’t worthy of _him_. So--so I--I had to tell you. I
can’t keep it up any longer. Oh, I can’t!”
She lifted her joined hands almost to the level of her mouth, and
brought them down sharply, still joined, to full arms’ length below her
waist. Helen reached forward, caught them, bowed her head over them,
and murmured: “Oh, my dear! My dear!” Mrs. Scarsworth stepped back, her
face all mottled.
“My God!” said she. “Is _that_ how you take it?”
Helen could not speak, the woman went out; but it was a long while
before Helen was able to sleep.
* * * * *
Next morning Mrs. Scarsworth left early on her round of commissions,
and Helen walked alone to Hagenzeele Third. The place was still in
the making, and stood some five or six feet above the metalled road,
which it flanked for hundreds of yards. Culverts across a deep ditch
served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed
a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level
of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele
Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a
merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin
at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or
arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of
weeds stricken dead, rushing at her. She went forward, moved to the
left and the right hopelessly, wondering by what guidance she should
ever come to her own. A great distance away there was a line of
whiteness. It proved to be a block of some two or three hundred graves
whose headstones had already been set, whose flowers were planted out,
and whose new-sown grass showed green. Here she could see clear-cut
letters at the ends of the rows, and, referring to her slip, realised
that it was not here she must look.
A man knelt behind a line of headstones--evidently a gardener, for he
was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him,
her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or
salutation asked: “Who are you looking for?”
“Lieutenant Michael Turrell--my nephew,” said Helen slowly and word for
word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.
The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion
before he turned from the fresh-sown grass towards the naked black
crosses.
“Come with me,” he said, “and I will show you where your son lies.”
* * * * *
When Helen left the Cemetery she turned for a last look. In the
distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went
away, supposing him to be the gardener.