was more wakeful; for hours he sat with his eyes wide and his chin
propped on his hands. After nightfall had come silence from the guns
and at first the only sounds were forest sounds--night-bird talk and the
lapping of unseen water at his feet. Later Griselda was restless and
became conversational, talking rapidly and brokenly in a delirium of
pain and fever and paying no heed to his efforts to answer and calm her.
Her mind, uncontrolled, had returned to a familiar channel; she was back
in the world that had crumbled but yesterday, waging war as she
understood it till she saw the hostages die. The Great Civil War that
you fought with martyrdoms, with protests at meetings and hammers on
plate-glass windows--he could hear she was back in the thick of it
incoherently addressing an audience. Snatches of old-time
denunciation--Asquith, McKenna, the sins of the Labour Party--and,
emerging from a torrent of incomprehensibility, the names of the Leaders
of the Movement. He listened, crouched in the darkness, a starving
fugitive--who had seen men dismembered and done to death in a war that
was not civil; and suddenly, crouched and starving in the darkness, he
began to laugh out loud. He remembered--quite plainly he remembered--a
letter written to the daily Press to point out with indignation that one
of the Leaders of the Movement had been hurt in the ankle in the course
of the Great Civil War.... He only laughed briefly; the echo of his own
voice frightened him, and its cackle died swiftly away. In the grave
black silence it sounded like a blasphemy, and he told himself
excusingly that he had not been able to help it.
With rest and cessation of movement his brain worked more easily; and
with the passing of his first savage hunger he was no longer preoccupied
with the needs of his empty stomach. He considered the situation,
dispassionately and curiously detached from it; deciding, with an odd
lack of emotion, that to-morrow could not be as to-day. Whatever the
need, Griselda could walk no further; he, for his part, was incapable of
dragging her; when the light came they must just sit and wait. His mind
refused to trouble itself with details of what would happen if they sat
and waited too long. Looking back at that night it seemed to him that he
was not able to feel very much; his capacity for emotion was exhausted,
even as his body. When Griselda stirred or groaned he tried to shift
her more comfortably, when she gasped for water he helped her to bend
down and drink; but the power of imaginative terror had left him for the
time being, and he no longer trembled and sickened at her suffering as
he had done when she was first struck down.
He fell into a doze in the last hours of night, and when his eyes opened
the sky was a pearly grey. He could see a wide stretch of it over the
tree-tops; for at the spot to which they had wandered in the uncertainty
of darkness the grouping of the trees was less close than it had been,
and there was a suggestion of open space beyond them. Griselda lay
sleeping or unconscious, with her knotted hair straying on her face; he
smoothed it away as he knelt beside her, took her hand and called her by
name. She gave no answer, and did not even stir when he kissed her.
The power of imaginative terror had returned to him, and he asked
himself whether she were dying? ... He knelt beside her for a few
minutes, fondling her hand and whispering, imploring her to speak--and
then, in a mingled curse and appeal, stretched his arms above his head
towards heaven. The effort and emotion exhausted him; he collapsed both
bodily and mentally, slipped back to the grass beside his wife and lay
with his face to the ground.
What roused him was the sound of a man's voice near him; not words, but
a grunt of surprise unmistakably human. He lifted his head and saw
gazing at him from the opposite bank of the brook the man who had
uttered the grunt. A man carrying a pail, very filthy and many days
unshorn; with a peaked cap flattened on the back of his head, a dark
muddied coat and loose trousers that had once been red. His face, for
all its grime and its black sprouts of beard, was reassuring in its
interest; what he said was gibberish to William's ears, but the sound of
it kindly and inquiring, and, when William shook his head and pointed to
his wife, he set down his unfilled pail on the grass and waded across
the shallow stream. He looked at Griselda, touched her torpid hand
gently and muttered more friendly gibberish; finishing by a pat on
William's shoulder before he waded back to the further bank, filled his
pail to the brim and walked away with it. He turned to fling back a last
gesture of promise before he vanished among the trees, leaving William
to stare after him, motionless and dumb, and waiting for something, he
knew not what, to happen.
What happened, after an interval, was the reappearance of the
pail-bearer, this time minus his pail, but accompanied, in its stead, by
a comrade. The comrade was scarcely less filthy and similarly clad; the
twain emerged from between the trees, splashed across the brook and
exchanged rapid gibberish while they stood and looked down at Griselda.
Finally, one of them, addressing himself to William, pointed to
somewhere on the opposite bank and nodded with intent to encourage;
whereupon the pair of them lifted Griselda, made a seat of their arms
and carried her. William followed them, lurching from weakness as he
walked; and after they had gone about a couple of hundred yards the
little procession came out on to a highway where a hooded car, as dirty
as its guardians, was drawn up at the side of the road.
On the floor of the car the two men placed Griselda, laying her down
gently and arranging, with kind, dirty hands, some empty sacks as a
makeshift couch and a coat as a makeshift pillow. That done, they
signed to William to climb in beside his wife, and one of them, noticing
his feebleness, lent a hand to him over the tailboard, while the other
provided him with a hunk of bread and a large tin mug of red wine. His
hunger returned with the taste of food, and he ate with a ravenous
enjoyment, gulping down bread and wine together; before he had finished
gulping the car had started and was rattling over the road, he knew not
whither. Woods went by them and open spaces; they spanned rivers,
climbed hills and descended again into valleys. Sometimes the roads were
rough, and at the jolting of the car Griselda would whimper and cry
out--whereat William would try to soothe her with assurance that the
worst was over, they were safe and would soon be in comfort. He did not
know if she understood; she never spoke coherently and hardly ever
opened her eyes.
For the first wooded mile or two they had the road to themselves; after
that they came across other traffic, the greater part of it heading in
the same, mostly southerly, direction. It was varied traffic,
mechanical, horse and foot: guns and other cars, some signed with the
Geneva cross; now a cavalry patrol, now a dusty detachment of infantry;
and, intermingled with soldier stragglers, little groups of non-military
wayfarers, in carts and tramping afoot. All these grew more frequent as
the miles went under them; so frequent as to hinder their progress, and
finally, when they neared their destination, bring the pace of the car
to a crawl.
Their destination--William never knew its name--was a white-walled
village, whereof the one long street was crowded with the traffic of
humanity; the same kind of traffic they had passed on the road, but
thickened and impeded by much that was stationary in horses, in men and
in vehicles. The car jolted half-way along the stone-paved street and
came to a standstill in the company of three or four others; its
guardians descended and one of them--the pail-bearer--looked over the
tail and nodded in friendly-wise to William before he hurried away.
There was a few minutes' wait, during which nothing personal
happened--only the confused sound of voices, the confused sound of
movement flowing incessantly, movement of feet, wheels and engines; and
then the man who had nodded from the tail of the car came back, others
with him--dirty soldiers like unto himself. One of these spoke to
William, choosing his words with precision; and when he shook his head
and answered, "I am English," there was talk and much gesticulation.
(It struck him later that they took him for a Flemish-speaking Belgian
and perhaps had tried him with a word or two of the language.) To the
accompaniment of talk and gesticulation the tailboard of the car was let
down and William, by sign, was invited to set foot on the ground;
whereafter Griselda was also lifted out and laid by the roadside on a
truss of hay which some one had procured for the purpose. There she lay
for another ten minutes or so, unaware of her surroundings while the
stream of humanity flowed by her--William, hunched beside her on the
hay, wondering dumbly what would happen to them next. He knew himself
among friends and was no longer afraid; but all initiative had left him,
all power of action and idea. He had a dull hope that some one was
bringing a doctor ... meanwhile he could do nothing but wait and obey,
and when his good Samaritan, the filthy little soldier, came back and
tapped him on the shoulder, he rose, passively responsive.
The man signed to him that they should lift Griselda between them; he
obeyed with infinite difficulty, panting at the effort, and together
they carried her some yards down the street to a cart that stood pulled
up and waiting--a long, most un-English-looking country cart with a man
perched in front and inside two women, many bundles, some ducks and a
goat. One of the women was shrivelled and helpless with years; her head
in a handkerchief and her gnarled fingers holding to her knees, she sat
huddled against the protesting goat, a lump of bent, blear-eyed old age.
Her companion in discomfort--possibly her daughter--was a stout, elderly
peasant woman, the counterpart in petticoats of the grizzled-haired man
who guided a solid grey farmhorse. She made room for Griselda, talking
rapidly the while, in the straw at the bottom of the cart--thrusting
ducks and bundles to one side of the vehicle with her knotted and
energetic hands; perhaps she was striving to explain to William that it
was impossible to accommodate another passenger and that he must follow
on foot. She may have been friend or acquaintance of the dirty
Samaritan, for, as the cart moved off at a foot's pace, she waved to him
in friendly guise; the dirty Samaritan, for his part, clapping William
on the back, pointing after the cart and showing his teeth in a final
grin of encouragement. In the days that followed William often
regretted that he had not known how to thank him for the bounty of his
overflowing charity.
He walked after the cart as it lumbered through the village and out of
it. Nourishment and the sense of relief had given back some of his
strength; thus he was able, if with difficulty, to keep up with the
plodding of the solid grey farmhorse--often brought to a standstill,
moreover, by the traffic that cumbered the road. Sometimes the
standstill was a long one, accompanied by confusion and shouting; there
was a point where a stream of fugitives flowing southward met
reinforcements hurrying north--and a flock of panic-stricken sheep,
caught between the two, charged backwards and forwards, to the yells of
their sweating drivers and the anger of a captain of cavalry. At almost
every cross-roads the stream was swollen by a fresh rivulet of
fugitives--refugees human and animal; thus at such junctions the pace
was slower and a halt frequently called for. When it came William
dropped down with thankfulness; sometimes lying torpid till the cart
moved on, sometimes satisfying hunger and quenching thirst with fruit
from the regiments of orchard trees that lined the sides of the road.
The stout peasant woman was more kindly than a hard face promised. She
was careful and troubled about many things--the old wreck of humanity,
her live-stock, the safety of herself and her bundles--and she had lost
her home and her livelihood; but she found time to think of Griselda and
do what she could for her. She arranged her straw pillow, wiped the
dust from her face, and from time to time raised her that she might hold
a cup to her lips. Somewhere about midday she attended to the general
needs; the cart was halted and she doled out a ration all round--hunks
of bread chopped from a yard of loaf and portions of a half-liquid
cheese. William was not forgotten, and shared with the rest of the
party; they ate with the cart drawn up in a field a little way from the
road; the horse grazing, the goat tethered to one of the wheels, the
peasants and William sitting on the ground and Griselda lying in her
straw. William climbed up beside her and coaxed a little wine between
her lips; she had swallowed hardly a mouthful when she turned her head
aside and pushed the mug feebly away. He was not sure if she responded
when he spoke to her and stroked her hand; she muttered once or twice
but it was only a sound to his ears. For a moment--perhaps it was the
raw, red wine that had mounted to his head--there came over him a sort
of irritation at her long and persistent silence. She must know what it
meant to see her suffer and have no word; he felt she might have tried
to rouse herself to the extent of one little smile of comfort.
The afternoon was as the morning--a weary journeying whereof he knew not
the goal. The grey horse plodded, the women sat hunched amid their
bundles, and William tramped on his blistered feet at the tail of the
creaking cart; when he looked ahead the road, as far as his eye could
reach, was dotted with fugitive tramps and fugitive vehicles--and when
he looked back there were others following in their tracks. For the
most part, however, he looked neither back nor forward but trudged with
his eyes on the ground through the whitened grass at the roadside. No
rain had fallen for many days and the road was deep in dust; it hung
heavy in the air and when a car went by it rose in clouds like smoke.
The trees were thick with it, and every man's garments were powdered by
its uniform grey.
More than once their way led them through a village--which might have
been always the same village, so alike was its aspect and its doings.
Always some of the houses would be closed and some in the act of
emptying; in each and all was the same scene of miserable haste, of
loading carts, of families, scared and burdened, setting out on their
flight to the southward. It was a scene that grew so familiar to
William that, staggering with the weight of his own weariness, he hardly
turned his head to watch it; it affected him only by the halts it
caused, by the need of manoeuvring through a crowd. Cut off from his
fellows by the lack of intelligible speech, he trudged on like an animal
at the tail of the cart, ignorant as an animal of what the next hours
might bring him.
There were moments when it seemed to him that he was asleep and would
surely waken; when he put out his hand to touch something and feel that
it resisted and was real--a dusty axle, a gate, a wall, the dusty bark
of a fruit-tree. And there were other moments when the _now_ was real,
and he seemed to have newly wakened from the dream of a world
impossible--of streets and stations and meals that came regularly, of
life that was decent and reasonable and orderly, with men like unto
himself.... Late in the afternoon he started and lifted his head in
sudden trembling recognition of a sound reminiscent, and because
reminiscent beloved--the near-by whistle of a passing engine, the
near-by clank of a train. The note of the whistle, the sight of a long
line of trucks--but a field's-breadth away behind a fence--brought a
rush of hope to his heart and a rush of tears to his eyes. His soul
thrilled with the promise of them; after the vagabond horror of the last
few days they stood for decency, for civilization, for a means of escape
from hell. His eyes followed the train with longing as it snorted over
a level meadow and wound out of sight behind a hill--followed it with
longing, with something that was almost love.
A mile or two further they passed a level crossing and soon after came
again on a village. It was larger than any they had so far traversed,
and in ordinary times must have been of a prosperous importance; now
many of its windows were bolted and shuttered, denoting the flight of
inhabitants whom others were preparing to follow. The sun was red in
the west when they reached its outskirts.
It was when they were about halfway along the wide paved street that
there came a loud cry from the cart--so loud and so sudden that the
driver pulled at his horse.
The cry had come from the hard-faced peasant woman who was leaning over
Griselda. The life in William stood still as he saw her face, and she
had to beckon to him twice before he moved to climb into the cart; she
gave him a hand as he climbed and half jerked him over the bundles....
Griselda had died very quietly in the straw at the bottom of the cart.
*CHAPTER XII*
Some one, he thought, kept him back from the body while they lifted it
down from the cart; there was a stir and bustle and three or four people
gathered round, hiding it for a moment from his sight. One, he
remembered, had the goat by the horns and was trying to drag it aside;
the goat was refractory, kicked and bleated and made itself the centre
of a scuffle. Afterwards he pushed through them all and stood looking
down at his wife.
As he looked at her--limp, with glazed eyes and fallen jaw--there swam
before his memory a pitiful vision of the dear Griselda he had married.
He saw her--this huddle of rags and dirt--in her wedding garments,
fussed and dainty, with her bouquet tied with suffragette ribbons. He
remembered the expression, self-conscious and flushing, wherewith she
had given her hand that he might place the ring on her finger; and how,
when they were first alone as man and wife, he had taken the hand that
wore the ring and kissed it till she drew it away. The crowd in the
little house at Balham, the handshakes, the well-wishing faces--they
were all so close and so present that they gave the lie to this dead
woman dropped by the roadside. He looked down stupidly while the
bystanders whispered and stared.
He did not know how long he sat beside her, nursing a dead hand in his
own; but he knew he hated and shrank from the people around him--a group
that kept forming and moving away and whispering as it gazed at himself
and the body of his wife. It was a changing little crowd, never more
than a dozen or so; men and women who stopped in their passing by,
muttered questions, heard low answers, looked curious or pitying and
moved on. He hated its inquisitiveness, he shrank from its pity,
desiring to be alone with his dead. That he might not see its curious
and pitying faces he pressed a hand over his eyes.
After some time--either minutes or hours--came a hand on his shoulder
that stayed till he moved and looked up. He who had touched him wore
the garb of a priest; was stout, not over-well washed or brushed, but
kindly of manner and countenance. He spoke while the crowd stared and
listened; William moved his head irritably, muttered, "I can't
understand what you say," and would have covered his eyes again if he
had not heard an English voice beside him. It was a woman who had
caught his words and now pushed through the bystanders: a tall young
woman in tweed coat and skirt, who had stayed to look over the shoulders
of the shifting group.
"You are English?" she said. "What has happened?" He stared up at her
for a moment, amazed at the sound of his own tongue.
"My wife is dead," he told her; and, hearing himself say the words
aloud, he burst into a passion of sobbing. Through it he choked
incoherent appeals to "take them away--for God's sake to let him be
alone." He turned his face to the wall and wept, long and brokenly, as
one who has nothing more to hope; and for a time they left him till the
paroxysm should wear itself out.
When he turned his head at last the crowd that he hated had scattered;
perhaps the priest and the Englishwoman had persuaded it away, for they
were the only two near him. The Englishwoman, with her hands thrust
deep into the pockets of her tweed coat, was standing at his shoulder,
waiting till he was ready to listen.
"Will you come with me?" she asked. "It will be better." Her tone,
though very gentle, was authoritative and brought him instinctively to
his feet; but once there he hesitated to follow her and stammered that
he could not leave----
"It will only be for a moment. The priest--he will see--he will bring
her."
She put a hand on his arm and led him unresisting down the street--a
hundred yards or so, past the church and into a house standing back from
the road in a garden. He knew afterwards that it was the village
presbytery and that the little woman who moved aside from the garden
gate to let them pass in was the priest's elderly housekeeper. His
companion spoke to her in French, no doubt to explain their arrival; and
the old woman trotted ahead to the house, opened a door to the right and
ushered them into a sitting-room that smelt of unopened window. It was
a ceremonious as well as a stuffy little room; there were good books
lying on a table in the centre and stiff chairs ranged against the
walls. Having offered them a couple of the stiff-backed chairs the
housekeeper withdrew to her vigil at the garden gate; William sat where
she had placed him, but the Englishwoman walked to the window.
"I wish I could help you," she said with her back towards him. "I know
nothing seems any good at such a time, but if there is anything you
want----"
She was giving him more than she knew by her presence, by speaking in
their common tongue; the sound of the familiar, comprehensible English
was as the breaking of an iron barrier between him and the rest of
mankind. She was talking to him--talking, not mouthing and making
strange noises. He was back in the world where you spoke and your
fellows understood you, where you were human--intelligent,
intelligible--not an animal guided by nod and beck or driven to labour
by blows. Comprehensible speech meant not only sympathy, but the
long-denied power of complaint--and the pent and swollen misery of his
last few days was relieved by a torrent of words. She stood and
listened while he sobbed and talked incoherently. There was small plan
or sequence about his tale--he went backwards and forwards in it,
started afresh and left gaps; but she realized that he was telling it
not for her benefit, but for his own relief, let him pour himself out
and refrained from interruption even when his talk was most entangled.
She took it as a good sign when at last he paused and looked up to ask
of her what it all meant, what had happened, and where he was now?
She told him, as briefly as might be, what Heinz had told him--of a
world in upheaval and nations at grips with each other; the same story
if not from the same point of view. She added that he was now on French
soil (which he had not guessed) some miles from the Belgian frontier,
and that it would be possible, she hoped, to make the journey onward by
rail. The French were falling back and the district had been warned of
the likelihood of enemy occupation; she supposed that the needs of the
army had absorbed the local rolling-stock, for there had been no
passenger train on their small branch line that day. The authorities,
however, had promised one to Paris in the morning and she, herself, was
waiting in the hope of obtaining a seat. She hesitated and broke off at
the sound of shuffling feet in the passage outside--slow feet and
uncertain, as of men who carried a burden. William heard the sound
likewise and, guessing its meaning, would have risen and gone to the
door; but she kept him to his seat with a hand on his shoulder and he
obeyed the touch because, at the moment, it was easier to obey than to
resist. He sat and trembled, twisting his fingers, while the shuffling
died away into momentary silence, followed by trampling and the closing
of a door as the burden-bearers went out.... Then silence again, a much
longer silence, till the stout priest entered the room, moving quietly,
as men are accustomed to move in the neighbourhood of those whom no
sound can arouse or disturb. He spoke softly at some length to the
Englishwoman, who, having listened and nodded, turned to William and
told him that if he would like to go to her----
He followed the priest down the passage to a room at the back of the
house; wherein, on a table, and covered by a sheet, they had laid the
body of his wife. There were long candles burning around the table and
on either side of her a little metal vase filled with roses. The priest
stood aside in the doorway for William to enter, bowed his head in a
prayer and went out; when he had gone William crept to the table, turned
the sheet from her face and looked down--on Griselda dowered with a
grave dignity that had never been hers while she lived.... Some one had
washed away the stains of the road and arranged the disordered rags that
had once been a dress; the hair was smoothed out of its three-day tangle
and her poor hands crossed on her breast.