first leave from the front, and how my party arrived at Victoria
Station and were guided in a clattering throng to a sort of transport
drain called the Underground Railway by elderly volunteers wearing
brassards. I was still muddy from the trenches; there had been no
time for a wash and a brush-up, and I was carrying my rifle and other
gear; we crowded into a brightly lit first-class carriage in which
were a number of people in evening dress who were going out to dinner
and to the theatre. There could not have been a more vivid contrast
if I had seen Firefly there in all her loveliness. There was one
young man not much older than myself between two gorgeously dressed
women. He had a little white bow under his pink chin and a silk
neck-wrap, he had a black cloak with a cape and an opera hat. I
suppose he was an invalid but he looked as fit as I. I felt a
momentary impulse to say something humiliating to him. I don't think
I did. I do not remember that I did. But I looked at him and then
at the brown stain on my sleeve and the wonder of life possessed me.
"No--I said nothing. I was in a state of intense exhilaration. The
other fellows were gay and inclined to be noisy, one or two were a
little drunk, but I was quietly exalted. I seemed to be hearing and
seeing and perceiving with such an acuteness as I had never known
before. Fanny I should see on the morrow, but that evening I hoped
to see Hetty Marcus with whom I was in love. I was in love with her
with an intensity that only soldier-boys who had been living in the
mud of Flanders for half a year could understand."
§ 2
"How," asked Sarnac, "can I make you see Hetty Marcus, dark-eyed,
warm-skinned, wayward and fragile, who brought me to love and death
two thousand years ago?
"In a way, she was like Sunray here. She was of her type. She had
the same darkness in her eyes, the same still bearing. She was like
Sunray's hungry sister. With a touch of fire in her blood.
"Yes--and she had those same stumpy little fingers.... _Look_ at
them!
"I met her on those very Downs I used to walk over with my father
when I was a boy, to steal the produce from Lord Bramble's gardens.
I had a short leave before I was drafted to France and I did not
spend it in London with Matilda Good and Fanny as you may think I
should have done, but I went with three other youngsters who had
enough money to do so, to Cliffstone. I don't know whether I can
make it clear to you why I went to Cliffstone. I was excited at the
thought of going into the actual warfare, I meant to do brave and
wonderful things over there, but also I was terribly overshadowed by
the thought that I might be killed. I did not think of wounds or
suffering, I do not think I feared those things at all, but I had a
profound dread and hatred of extinction before ever I had fully
lived, before I had ever tasted many of the most alluring things in
life. I had always promised myself love and great adventures with
women, and I was passionately distressed at the possibility of being
cheated of those intensities. All of us young innocents were in the
same case. It was I who had thought of Cliffstone, near to our
training camp, with its band and promenade and its flitting glancing
girls. There if anywhere, it seemed to me, we must snatch something
from life before the great shells splashed us to pieces and the clay
of Flanders devoured us. We sneaked off from our families with those
fires of protesting romance in our brains and veins.
"You cannot imagine how many millions of lads there were in Europe
then, pitifully eager not to miss altogether the secret and magic
experiences of love before they died. I cannot tell you of the
pothouses and prostitutes that lay in wait for us or of the gaunt
moonlight on the beach. I cannot tell you of temptation and
ignorance and disease. It is too ugly to tell you; such things are
passed and done with, and men suffer them no more. We groped in
darkness where now men walk in the light. One of my mates had an
ugly misadventure; all had ugly experiences and I escaped by chance
rather than any merit of my own from those slovenly snares. I was
for a moment fastidious and I recoiled. And I had not drunken as the
others had, because some streak of pride in me had made me habitually
wary with drink.
"But I was in a storm of excitements and distresses. I was slipping
into the pit though I hated it, and to escape it I set myself to
revive my memories of the days when I was a boy. I went to Cherry
Gardens to see the old home and then to my father's grave--it was
neat and pretty with Fanny's money--and then I determined to walk
over the Downs to recall, if I could, something of the wonder that I
had felt when first I went over them to Chessing Hanger. And also,
if you understand me, I felt love and romance would be there. I
hadn't abandoned the quest that had brought me to Cliffstone; I had
only jumped a foul ditch on my way. When I was a child I had
supposed Heaven was over the Downs, and certainly the golden summer
sunsets were. It seemed natural to turn my back on Cliffstone and go
up into the only really lovely country I had ever known, if I wanted
to find romance.
"And I found it.
"I was thrilled but not a bit surprised when I saw Hetty appear over
the sky-line of the hill and come right over the brow and stand with
her hands behind her back and the sun shining on her hair, looking
out across the woods and cornfields to Blythe and the distant marches
and the sea. She had taken her hat off and was holding it behind
her. She wore an ivory-coloured silk blouse very open at the neck
and it was just as though you could see her body through the flimsy
stuff.
"She dropped into a sitting position, now looking at her world and
now plucking at the little dwarfish flowers in the Downland turf.
"I stood for a time agape at her. Then my whole being was filled
with a tremulous resolve to talk to her. My path curved up the slope
and carried me over the shoulder of the hill not very far from her.
I followed it, stopping ever and again as if to look at the land and
sea below, until it brought me as near to her as it could, and then I
left it and with a clumsy affectation of carelessness strolled up to
the summit until I stood beside her and about six yards away. I
pretended not to observe her. I clenched my hands to keep my
self-control. She had become aware of me and she was quite
motionless now, sitting up and looking at me, but she did not seem in
the least dismayed. Your fine face she had, Sunray, and your dark
eyes, and I have never known anyone, not even you, who could keep a
face so still. Not rigid or hard or staring it was, but quietly,
profoundly, still, like a face in some beautiful picture.
"I was all a-tremble, my heart was beating fast but I kept my wits
about me.
"'Was there ever a lovelier view?' I said. 'I suppose that bit of
blue there that looks like a raft where the water shines, I suppose
that is Denge Ness?'
"She did not answer for what seemed a long time. She surveyed me
with an unfathomable expression. Then she spoke and as she spoke she
smiled. 'You know that is Denge Ness as well as I do.'
"I smiled at her smile. Shy pretences were not for her. I came a
step or so nearer with a conversational air. 'I have known this
view,' I said, 'since I was a boy of ten. But I did not know anyone
else set any value upon it.'
"'Nor I,' she said. 'I came to look at it perhaps for the last
time,' she vouchsafed. 'I'm going away.'
"'I'm going away too.'
"'Over there?' she asked, and nodded her head to where the land of
France hung like a cloud in the sky.
"'In a week or so.'
"'I'll get to France too. But not so soon as a week or two. But I
am going into the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps and I know I shall get
over there at last. I join up to-morrow. How can one stay at home
with all you boys out there, getting----'
"She was going to say getting '_killed_.' But she caught the word
back and finished it with, 'Getting into all sorts of danger and
trouble.'
"'One has to go,' I said.
"She looked at me with her head a little on one side. 'Tell me,' she
said. 'Do you _want_ to go?'
"'Not a bit. I hate the whole monstrous business. But there's no
way out. The Germans have put it on us and we have to go through
with it.'
"That was how we all saw it in England during the War. But I won't
stop now to argue what really caused a war that ended two thousand
years ago. 'The Germans put it on us. I hate going. I wanted to go
on with the work I was doing. Now everything is upset.'
"'Everything,' she said and thought for some moments. 'I hate going
too,' she said.
"'It drags on week after week, month after month,' I complained.
'The boredom of it! The drills, the salutes, the silly little
officers! If only they would take us and raffle us and kill us and
have done with it so that we could either die or go home and do
something sensible! My life is being wasted. I have been in the
machine a year--and I've only got thus far on my way to France! When
I see a German soldier at last I shall want to kiss him I shall be so
glad. But either I shall kill him or he will kill me--and that will
be the end of the story.'
"'And yet one can't keep out of it,' she said.
"'And there is something tremendous about it,' she went on. 'Once or
twice I have been up here when there were air-raids. I live quite
close here. These air-raids get more and more frequent nowadays. I
don't know what they are coming to. You see the searchlights now,
every night, waving about like the arms of a drunken man. All over
the sky. But before that you hear the pheasants in the woods,
clucking and crying. They always hear it first. Other birds take it
up. They cry and twitter. And then far away the guns begin
rumbling. At first a little sound--"_pud-pud_," then like the whoof
of a hoarse dog. And then one gun after another picks it up as the
raid comes nearer. Sometimes you can catch the whirr of the engines
of the Gothas. There's a great gun behind the farm-house away there
and you wait for that and when it fires it hits you on the chest.
Hardly anything is to be seen except the searchlights. There's a
little flicker in the sky--and star shells. But the guns--riot.
It's mad but it's immense. It takes you. Either you are wild with
fright or you are wild with excitement. I can't sleep. I walk about
my room and long to be out. Twice I've gone out into the night, into
the moonlight--with everything a-quiver. Gone for long walks. Once
shrapnel fell in our orchard with a hiss like rain. It ripped the
bark of the apple trees and tore off twigs and branches and killed a
hedge-hog. I found the little wretch in the morning, nearly cut in
two. Death hap-hazard! I don't mind the death and the danger so
much. But it's the quiver in the world I can't endure. Even in the
daytime sometimes, you can't quite hear them, but you can _feel_ the
guns, over beyond there....
"'Our old servant,' she said, 'believes it is the end of the world.'
"'For us it may be,' I said.
"She made no answer.
"I looked at her face and my imagination rioted.
"I began to talk with a bare simplicity such as we rarely attained in
that shy and entangled age. But my heart was beating fast. 'For
years,' I said, 'I have dreamt of the love of a girl. It was to have
been the crown of life. I have saved myself up for it. I have had a
friend or so, but it wasn't love. And now I am near to going. Out
there. It is only a few days before I go over there--to whatever is
waiting for me. And when it seems beyond hope I come upon
someone.... Don't think me mad, please. Don't think I'm lying. I
am in love with you. Indeed I am. You seem altogether beautiful to
me. Your voice, your eyes--everything. I could worship you....'
"I couldn't say a word more for a moment or so. I rolled over on the
turf and looked her in the face. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm a silly
young Tommy suddenly in love--oh! desperately in love.'
"Her grave face regarded me. She did not look frightened or
disconcerted. Perhaps her heart beat faster than I thought. But her
voice when she spoke was constrained.
"'Why are you talking like that? You've just met me.... How can you
love me? It isn't possible people should love like this.'
"'I've seen you long enough----'
"I could not talk. I met her eyes. Hers dropped before mine. The
warm colour mounted to her cheeks. She bit her lips.
"'You,' she said in a low voice, 'are just in love with love.'
"'Anyhow, I am in love,' I said.
"She plucked a spray of minute flowers and forgot it in her hand.
"'This is your last day?' she asked, and made my heart beat faster.
"'It may be my last altogether for this sort of thing. Who can tell?
... For a long time anyhow. Why should it hurt you to let me love
you to-day? Why shouldn't you be kind to me? Civil to me--anyhow.
I don't ask for so very much. If--suppose--we went for a walk
together? Just a long walk. If we spent most of the day together?
Somewhere we might get something to eat....'
"She sat considering me gravely.
"'Suppose I did,' she said as if to herself. 'Suppose I did.'
"'What harm could it do you?'
"'What harm could it do?' she repeated with her eyes on mine.
"If I had been older and more experienced I might have known from her
warm flushed face and her dark eyes that she too was in love with
love that day, and that our encounter was as exciting for her as for
me. Suddenly she smiled; she showed herself for an instant as ready
as myself. Her constraint had vanished.
"'I'll come,' she decided, and rose with an effortless ease to her
feet, and then at my eager movement as I sprang up before her: 'But
you'll have to be good, you know. It's just a walk--and a talk....
Why shouldn't we? ... If we keep away from the village.'"
§ 3
"It would seem the queerest story in the world if I told you how we
two youngsters spent that day, we who were such strangers that we did
not know each other's names and yet who were already drawn so closely
together. It was a day of kindly beauty and warmth and we rambled
westward until we came to a ridge that dropped steeply to a silvery,
tree-bordered canal, and along that ridge we went until we reached a
village and a friendly inn, where there were biscuits and cheese and
some apples to make a lunch upon. For a time a mood of shyness
followed our first avowals, then Hetty talked of her home and of her
place in the world. It was only after we had eaten together that we
became easy and familiar with each other. It was only as the sun was
sinking in the west and our day drew to its golden end that we
embraced suddenly as we sat together on a felled tree in a wood, and
that I learnt from her what a sweet and wonderful delight the kiss of
love may be."
§ 4
Sarnac paused.
"It happened two thousand years ago but it seems to me that it
happened just six years from now. Once more I am back in that wood
among the long warm shadows of the evening and all my dreams and
imaginations awake to reality with Hetty's body in my arms and her
lips to mine. I have been able to tell you my story hitherto with a
sort of wonder and detachment, as though I showed it you through a
telescope. But I have been telling you overmuch perhaps of Fanny and
Matilda Good because I have had a sort of reluctance about Hetty.
She is still so fresh in my mind that she seems as I name her to come
even here and to be living still, a perplexity between Sunray, who is
so like her and so unlike her, and myself. I love her again and hate
her again as though I was still that assistant editor, that writer of
rubbish, in lost and forgotten Thunderstone House in dead old
London....
"And I can't describe things now," said Sarnac, "as I have described
them up to this. I seem no longer to look back into past things. My
memories are living and suffering; they inflame and hurt. I loved
Hetty; she was all the delight of love to me. I married her, I
divorced her, I repented of the divorce and I was killed for her sake.
"And it seems as if I was killed not a day ago....
"I married while I was in England before I was passed for active
service again after my wound. I was wounded in the arm----"
Sarnac stopped and felt his arm. Sunray looked sharply at it and ran
her hand down it from shoulder to elbow as if to reassure herself.
The others burst into laughter at her manifest anxiety and her
expression of relief, the guest-master being particularly delighted.
"I was wounded nevertheless. I was a sitting-up case in the
ambulance. I could tell you stories about the nurses and the
hospital and how we had a panic about a submarine as we crossed to
England.... I married Hetty before I went back because we were now
altogether lovers and it was just possible she might have a child.
And moreover there was a business about allowances if I got killed
that was an added inducement to marry. In those days of haphazard
death for the young there was a world-wide fever of love-making and
countless such snatched marriages.
"She had never got to France as she had said she hoped to do. For
most of the time she was driving a car for the Ministry of Supplies
in London. We spent two days of wild endearment, the only honeymoon
we could get, at her mother's farm at Payton Links, a little hamlet
near Chessing Hanger. (I do not think I have told you that she was
the only daughter of a farmer and that Mrs. Marcus, her mother, was a
widow.) Hetty had been a clever girl, an elementary school teacher
and bookish and enterprising for a country place. She had never
mentioned me to her mother until she had written to tell of her
approaching marriage.
"When her mother had driven us from the station to the farm and I had
helped her to put away the pony, the old lady's non-committal manner
relaxed and she said, 'Well, it might have been worse. You've looks
and fairish shoulders for one who's town-bred. You can kiss me, my
boy, though Smith is a poor exchange for Marcus, and I can't see how
anyone can ever expect to get a living for man and wife at a fancy
trade like publishing. I'd hoped at first she meant a publican. But
publishing she says it is. Whether you're properly old enough for
Hetty, Time will show.'
"Time did show very rapidly that I was not properly old enough for
Hetty, though I resisted the demonstration with passionate vigour.
"In this world of ours we are by comparison very simple and direct.
In that old world we should have seemed shockingly simple and direct.
It's not only that they wrapped up and hid their bodies in all sorts
of queer garments and wrappings but also that they wrapped up and
distorted and hid their minds. And while we to-day have the same
simple and clean ideas all over the world about sexual restraints and
sexual freedoms, people in those days had the most various and
complicated codes, half-hidden and half-confessed. And not merely
half-hidden but imperfectly realised, subconscious rather than
thought out and settled. Few of these codes respected the freedom of
other people or set any bounds to the most extravagant developments
of jealousy. And while Hetty's thoughts about love and marriage had
been nourished on a diet of country-side folk and then of novels and
poetry devoured with avidity and had had tremendous releases in the
lax atmosphere of war-time London, I, in spite of my love for and
faith in Fanny, had almost unwittingly adopted the rigid standards of
my mother. As we used to say in those days, Hetty's was a much more
artistic temperament than mine. For my part I did not so much think
as assume that the worship of a man for a woman gave place to mastery
as soon as her love was won, that the problem of absolute fidelity
for both lovers was to be facilitated on his side by an absolute
submissiveness on hers. And about her, wherever she went, invisible
but real, there had to be a sort of cloistered quality. It was
implicit, moreover, that she had never thought of love before she met
her predestined and triumphant lover. Ridiculous and impossible you
will say! But Sunray here has read the old novels and she can
witness that that was the code."
Sunray nodded. "That is the spirit of them," she said.
"Well, in fact, Hetty was not only half a year older than I but ages
beyond me in the business of love. She was my teacher. While I had
been reading about atoms and Darwin and exploration and socialism,
she had been sucking the honey of sensuous passion from hints and
half-hints in old romances and poems from Shakespeare and the old
playwrights. And not only, I realise now, from books. She took me
as one captures and tames an animal and made my senses and my
imagination hers. Our honeymoon was magical and wonderful. She
delighted in me and made me drunken with delights. And then we
parted wonderfully with the taste of her salt tears on my lips, and I
went off to the last five months of the War.
"I can see her now, slender as a tall boy in her khaki breeches and
driver's uniform, waving to my train as it drew out of Chessing
Hanger station.
"She wrote adorable and whimsical love-letters that made me ache to
be with her again, and just when we were forcing the great German
barrier of the Hindenberg line, came one to tell me we were to have a
child. She had not told me of it before, she said, because she had
not been quite sure of it. Now she was sure. Would I love her
still, now that she would be no longer slim and gracious? Love her
still! I was filled with monstrous pride.
"I wrote back to tell her how my job at Thunderstone House was being
saved for me, how we would certainly get a little house, a 'dear
little house,' in some London suburb, how I would worship and cherish
her. Her answer was at once tender and unusual. She said I was too
good to her, far too good; she repeated with extraordinary passion
that she loved me, had never loved and could never love anyone but
me, that she hated my absence more than she could tell, and that I
was to do everything I could, move heaven and earth to get my
discharge and come home to her and be with her and never, never,
never leave her again. She had never wanted my arms about her as she
wanted them now. I read nothing between the lines of that outbreak.
It seemed just a new mood amidst the variety of her moods.
"Thunderstone House wanted me back as soon as possible, and the War
had done much to increase the power and influence of all magazine
publishers and newspaper proprietors. I got out of the army within
three months of the Armistice and came back to a very soft and tender
and submissive Hetty, a new Hetty more wonderful even than the old.
She was evidently more passionately in love with me than ever. We
took some furnished rooms in a part of London called Richmond, near
the Thames and a great park, and we sought vainly for that bright
little house in which our child was to be born. But there were no
bright little houses available.
"And slowly a dark shadow fell across the first brightness of our
reunion. The seasonable days passed but Hetty's child was not born.
It was not born indeed until it was nearly two months too late for it
to be my child."
§ 5
"We are trained from earliest childhood in the world to be tolerant
and understanding of others and to be wary and disciplined with our
own wayward impulses, we are given from the first a clear knowledge
of our entangled nature. It will be hard for you to understand how
harsh and how disingenuous the old world was. You live in a world
that is as we used to say 'better bred.' You will find it difficult
to imagine the sudden storm of temptation and excitement and
forgetfulness in Hetty's newly aroused being that had betrayed her
into disloyalty, and still more difficult will you find the tangle of
fear and desperate dishonesty that held her silent from any plain
speech with me after my return. But had she spoken instead of
leaving it to me to suspect, discover and accuse, I doubt if she
would have found any more mercy in me for her pitiful and abominable
lapse.
"I see now that from the day I returned to Hetty she was trying to
tell me of her disaster and failing to find a possible way of doing
so. But the vague intimations in her words and manner dropped like
seeds into my mind and germinated there. She was passionately
excited and made happy by my coming back; our first week together was
the happiest week of my old-world life. Fanny came to see us once
and we went and had a dinner at her flat, and something had happened
to her too, I knew not what, to make her very happy. Fanny liked
Hetty. When she kissed me good night after her dinner, she held me
and whispered: 'She's a dear. I thought I'd be jealous of your wife,
Harry, but I love her.'
"Yes, we were very happy for that week. We walked along together
back to our rooms instead of taking a taxi, for it was better for
Hetty to walk. A happy week it was that stretched almost to a happy
fortnight. And then the shadows of suspicion gathered and deepened.
"It was in bed in the darkness of the night that I was at last moved
to speak plainly to Hetty. I woke up and lay awake for a long time,
very still and staring at my bleak realisation of what had happened
to us. Then I turned over, sat up in bed and said, 'Hetty. This
child is not mine.'