I
Other people's sons were coming home for the three or four days' leave.
The first gigantic struggle--furious onslaught and grim resistance--was
over. Paris, pale, and slightly shuddering still, stood safe. Calais was
not taken, and, dug into their trenches, it was evident that the
opposing armies would lie face to face, with no decisive encounter
possible until the spring.
There was, with all their beauty and terror, an element of the facetious
in these unexpected holidays, of the matter-of-factness, the freedom
from strain or sentiment that was the English oddity and the English
strength. Men who had known the horrors of the retreat from Mons or the
carnage of Ypres, who had not taken off their clothes for ten days at a
stretch or slept for four nights, came home from trenches knee-deep in
mud, from battlefields heaped with unburied dead, and appeared
immaculate and cheerful at breakfast; a little sober and preoccupied,
perhaps; touched, perhaps, with strangeness; but ready for the valorous
family jest, and alluding to the war as if, while something too solemn
for adequate comment, it were yet something that lent itself to
laughter. One did such funny things, and saw them; of the other things
one did not speak; and there was the huge standing joke of an enemy who
actually hated one. These grave and cheerful young men hated nobody; but
they were very eager to go back again; and they were all ready, not only
to die but to die good-humoredly. From the demeanor of mothers and
wives and sisters it was evident that nothing would be said or done to
make this readiness difficult; but Mrs. Bradley, who showed serenity to
the world and did not, even when alone, allow herself to cry, suspected
that the others, beneath their smiles, carried hearts as heavy with
dread as her own.
It had been heavy, with hope now as well as with dread, for the past
week. It was a week since she had last heard from Jack. Mrs. Crawley,
over the hill, had had her wire, and her husband was now with her; and
Lady Wrexham expected her boy to-morrow. There was no certainty at all
as regarded herself; yet at any moment she might have a wire; and
feeling to-day the stress of waiting too great to be borne in passivity,
she left her books and letters, and put on her gardening shoes and
gloves, and went out to her borders.
For weeks now the incessant rain had made the relief and solace of
gardening almost an impossibility; but to-day was mild and clear. There
was no radiance in the air; curtains of pearly mist shut out the sky;
yet here and there a soft opening in the white showed a pale, far blue,
gentle and remote as the gaze of a wandering goddess, and the hills
seemed to smile quietly up at the unseen sun. Mrs. Bradley, as she went
along the river-path, could look across at the hills; the river-path and
the hills were the great feature of Dorrington--the placid, comely red
brick house to which she and Jack had come fifteen years ago, after the
death of her husband in India. Enclosed by woods, and almost catching
sight of the road,--from its upper windows and over its old brick
wall,--the house could have seemed to her too commonplace and almost
suburban, in spite of the indubitably old oak-paneling of the
drawing-room, had it not been for the river and the hills. Stepping out
on to the lawn from the windows of the drawing-room, she and Jack, on
that April day, had found themselves confronting both--the limpid, rapid
little stream, spanned near the house by its mossy bridge, and the
hills, beyond the meadows, streaked with purple woodlands and rising,
above the woods, to slopes russet, fawn, and azure. Jack, holding her by
the hand, had pointed at once with an eager 'Isn't it pretty,
mummy!'--even at eight he had cared almost as much as she, and
extraordinarily in the same way, for the sights of the country; and if
the hills had not settled the question, it was settled, quite finally,
ten minutes later, by the white hepaticas.
They had come upon them suddenly, after their tour of the walled kitchen
garden and their survey of the lawn with its ugly shrubberies,--now long
forgotten,--penetrating a thicket of hazels and finding themselves in an
opening under trees where neighboring woods looked at them over an old
stone wall, and where, from an old stone bench, one could see the river.
The ground was soft with the fallen leaves of many an autumn; a narrow
path ran, half obliterated, down to the river; and among the faded
brown, everywhere, rose the thick clusters, the dark leaves, and the
snowy flowers--poignant, amazing in their beauty.
She and Jack had stopped short to gaze. She had never seen such white
hepaticas, or so many, or so placed. And Jack, presently, lifting his
dear nut-brown head and nut-brown eyes, had said, gazing up at her as he
had gazed at the flowers, 'They are just like you, mummy.'
She had felt at once that they were like her; more like than the little
boy's instinct could grasp. He had thought of the darkness and
whiteness; her widow's weeds and pale face had suggested that; but he
could not know the sorrow, the longing, the earthly sense of irreparable
loss, the heavenly sense of a possession unalterably hers, that the
dark, melancholy leaves and celestial whiteness of the flowers
expressed to her. Tears had risen to her eyes and she had stooped and
kissed her child,--how like her husband's that little face!--and had
said, after a moment, 'We must never leave them, Jack.'
They had never left them. Dorrington had been their home for fifteen
years, and the hepaticas the heart of it, it had always seemed to them
both; the loveliest ritual of the year that early spring one when, in
the hazel copse, they would find the white hepaticas again in flower.
And of all the autumnal labors none were sweeter than those which
cherished and divided and protected the beloved flowers.
Mrs. Bradley, to-day, worked in her long border, weeding, troweling,
placing belated labels. She was dressed in black, her straw hat bound
beneath her chin by a ribbon and her soft gardening gloves rolling back
from her firm, white wrists. Her gestures expressed a calm energy, an
accurate grace. She was tall, and when she raised herself to look over
the meadows at the hills, she showed small, decisive features, all
marked, in the pallor of her face, as if with the delicate, neutral
emphasis of an etching: the gray, scrutinizing eyes, the charming yet
ugly nose, the tranquil mouth which had, at the corners, a little drop,
half sweet, half bitter, as if with tears repressed or a summoned smile.
Squared at brow and chin, it would, but for the mildness of the gaze,
have been an imperious face; and her head, its whitened hair drawn back
and looped in wide braids behind, had an air at once majestic and
unworldly.
She had worked for over an hour and the last label was set beside a
precious clump of iris. The hazel copse lay near by; and gathering up
her tools, drawing off her wet gloves, she followed the path under the
leafless branches and among the hepaticas to the stone bench, where,
sinking down, she knew that she was very tired. She could see, below the
bank, the dark, quick stream; a pale, diffused light in the sky showed
where the sun was dropping toward the hills.
Where was Jack at this moment, this quiet moment of a monotonous English
winter day?--so like the days of all the other years that it was
impossible to think of what was happening a few hours' journey away
across the Channel. Impossible to think of it; yet the thick throb of
her heart spoke to the full of its significance. She had told herself
from the beginning,--passionate, rebellious creature as, at bottom, she
knew herself to be, always in need of discipline and only in these later
years schooled to a control and submission that, in her youth, she would
have believed impossible to her,--she had told herself, when he had gone
from her, that, as a soldier's widow, she must see her soldier son go to
death. She must give him to that; be ready for it; and if he came back
to her it would be as if he were born again--a gift, a grace, unexpected
and unclaimed. She must feel, for herself as well as for her country,
that these days of dread were also days of a splendor and beauty
unmatched by any in England's history, and that a soldier's widow must
ask for no more glorious fate for her son than death in such a cause.
She had told herself all this many times; yet, as she sat there, her
hands folded on her lap, her eyes on the stream below, she felt that she
was now merely motherhood, tense, huddled, throbbing and longing,
longing for its child.
Then, suddenly, she heard Jack's footsteps. They came, quick and light,
along the garden path; they entered the wood; they were near, but
softened by the fallen leaves. And, half rising, afraid of her own joy,
she hardly knew that she saw him before she was in his arms; and it was
better to meet thus, in the blindness and darkness of their embrace, her
cheek pressed against his hair, his head buried close between her neck
and shoulder.
'Jack!--Jack!' she heard herself say.
He said nothing, holding her tightly to him, with quick breaths; and
even after she had opened her eyes and could look down at him,--her own,
her dear, beautiful Jack,--could see the nut-brown head, the smooth
brown cheek, the firm brown hand which grasped her, he did not for a
long time raise his head and look at her. When, at last, he did look up,
she could not tell, through her tears, whether, like herself, he was
trying to smile.
They sat down together on the bench. She did not ask him why he had not
wired. That question pressed too sharply on her heart; to ask might seem
to reproach.
'Darling, you are so thin,--so much older,--but you look--strong and
well.'
'We're all of us extraordinarily fit, mummy. It's wholesome, living in
mud.'
'And wholesome living among bursting shells? I had your last letter
telling of that miraculous escape.'
'There have been a lot more since then. Every day seems a miracle--that
one's alive at the end of it.'
'But you get used to it?'
'All except the noise. That always seems to daze me still. Some of our
fellows are deaf from it.--You heard of Toppie, mother?' Jack asked.
Toppie was Alan Thorpe, Jack's nearest friend. He had been killed ten
days ago.
'I heard it, Jack. Were you with him?'
'Yes. It was in a bayonet charge. He didn't suffer. A bullet went right
through him. He just gave a little cry and fell.' Jack's voice had the
mildness of a sorrow which has passed beyond the capacity for emotion.
'We found him afterwards. He is buried out there.'
'You must tell Frances about it, Jack. I went to her at once.' Frances
was Toppie's sister. 'She is bearing it so bravely.'
'I must write to her. She would be sure to be plucky.'
He answered all her questions, sitting closely against her, his arm
around her; looking down, while he spoke, and twisting, as had always
been his boyish way, a button on her coat. He was at that enchanting
moment of young manhood when the child is still apparent in the man. His
glance was shy, yet candid; his small, firm lips had a child's gravity.
With his splendid shoulders, long legs, and noble little head, he was
yet as endearing as he was impressive. His mother's heart ached with
love and pride and fear as she gazed at him.