Margaret kept her promise to Freddy. During the three days which she
spent with the Iretons nothing transpired to make it possible for her
to break it. No word, either by letter or by native word of mouth, had
arrived from Michael.
Even to Hadassah's generous mind, Michael Amory's conduct seemed
strange and inexplicable. His silence, in a manner, condemned him as
casual, even if he was not guilty. She began to wonder if he had been
carried off his feet by Millicent, if he had been weak and forgetful of
Margaret for a little time. Millicent would certainly have done her
best to deprive him of his higher instincts and ideals. If he had been
faithless to Margaret, he was the type of man who would exaggerate the
sin.
When she reviewed the situation calmly, she found that there was much
to be said from Freddy Lampton's standpoint, and Margaret herself was
growing more and more wounded by her lover's conduct--not so much by
the fact that Millicent had been in the desert with him, for she knew
the woman's persistence, but by the lack of effort which he had made to
explain the situation to her. Even if he had allowed himself to be
carried away by Millicent's wiles, she would have forgiven him, for
Margaret was very human, and she was no fool. Never had she imagined
that her lover was a saint. What she felt it harder and harder every
day to forgive was his silence, his want of courage, his lack of trust.
During those three days Margaret's beautiful world and life seemed to
have crumbled into dust, just as she had seen the unearthed objects in
Egyptian tombs crumble into atoms when the first breath of air from the
desert reached them. Her contact with the world of to-day had melted
her romance of the desert into thin air. It was a beautiful vision
which her strange life had created; it had flourished during her short
stay in the Valley. It was not suited for the practical everyday world.
While she was with the Iretons, she tried to interest herself in
Hadassah's work as much as possible. She contrived very bravely to put
aside her wretchedness and at least appear interested and eager.
Her dignity and self-control added greatly to Michael Ireton's
admiration for her. He, too, had been struck by her resemblance to
Hadassah, so her beauty appealed to him very strongly.
Hadassah and her husband allowed her to go home to England without
protest. Cairo was becoming very hot for an English girl, and they
both agreed that it might do Michael Amory good to learn, when he did
turn up, that his conduct had hurt Margaret's pride, that she was
seriously wounded. As Millicent had spoken to Margaret of Michael as
being in robust health, they had banished the idea that his silence was
due to illness.
Outwardly Margaret behaved as though the whole episode of her
love-affair with Michael Amory was at an end. A woman's life is
dog-eared by her love-affairs; this was the first in Margaret's book of
life. To the Iretons she was always very insistent that there had been
no formal engagement between them, that Michael had not allowed her to
think of herself as bound to him in any way--for only one reason he had
not considered himself justified in asking her to become his wife or to
wait for him. This to the Iretons meant nothing. He had made Margaret
love him--that was the essential point--and his sensibilities must have
told him that with such a girl love was no light thing. He must have
realized that Margaret had given him the one perfect gift in her
possession, an unselfish love.
Margaret was very loyal to her lover. It was easy to be that, for in
her super-senses she was convinced of his great love for her, as a
thing apart from anything else. She found it wise to discuss the
mystery of his silence less and less; for she knew that no one but God
knows what is in our hearts, or what He has put there for our
consolation, and that to all outward appearances things looked very
black for Michael.
And so it came to pass that she sailed for England in the same boat as
Freddy. He had hurried through his business and had managed to secure
a passage, so as to look after her and be a companion to her on her
disconsolate voyage.
On the journey to Marseilles, Margaret discovered qualities in Freddy's
character which, even with all her love for him, she had never
imagined. For her sake he contrived to hide his anger at Michael for
his treatment of her, and thus express a sympathetic understanding of
the temptations which had beset him. If Margaret had not suffered, he
would have ignored the affair altogether, as a matter which did not
concern him. Freddy was very far-seeing. Margaret had kept her
promise; she had shown that in spite of her romantic love for Michael
her womanly pride had not been wanting. Any opposition or harsh
denouncement of her lover would have brought out the obstinacy in her
Lampton character. Persecution inflames the ardour of both love and
religion. Margaret had confided to Freddy the true state of her
feelings--her love was perhaps even greater than ever for the tardy
Michael; jealousy had invigorated and reinforced it: but her pride and
her love were wounded, and until Michael wrote to her or came to her,
with a full and absolute apology and a good reason for his silence, she
was determined not to play the part of a woman whose love would submit
to any sort of casual treatment.
Freddy was well content. Time would settle things; Margaret was very
young; she was scarcely aware yet of the possibilities that were in her
own nature, of the things which can make life worth living, as apart
from love and its passions. Love had buried her under an avalanche of
its mystery and revelations.
Their journey home was as uneventful as it was surprising, for summer
on the Mediterranean, where there is no spring, opened Margaret's eyes
to a new phase of Nature's beauty. There was so much to see, and
Freddy was such an excellent companion, that the time passed far more
quickly and happily than Margaret could have believed possible. Did
she know that it was the guarded light, which dispersed her brooding
thoughts, thoughts which tried to spoil the beauty of the fairest
scenes she had ever seen?
It was a voyage of solace and healing. As they sat together, the
brother and sister, idly watching the spell of light resting on an
archipelago of dreaming islands, or sailed out of the Bay of Naples on
a morning of tender unreality, they little dreamed that in her womb the
world was breeding a hellish massacre of God's highest creatures, a
wholesale slaughter of His children; that that same summer's sun was to
fall on fields of crimson, dyed with the blood of civilized nations,
precious blood drawn from the veins of patriots and heroes by the lies
and lust of a war-mad king.
Ischia, lost in its ancient sleep, cradled in the beauty of the world's
fairest waters, was to be waked with the bugles of war. From her
mountain heights and her seagirt fields she was to send forth her sons,
to fight until they became drunk with the smell of blood.
How little did either Margaret or Freddy dream that they were gazing
for the last time together upon a land of dreams, upon a world of
peace! As they sat and marvelled at a world which under a summer sun
seemed as fair as heaven and as pure as an angel's dream, they little
realized that Europe nursed and flattered a people more steeped in
iniquity and eager for licentious cruelty than any nation recorded in
the world's darkest story. The primitive barbarities of uncivilized
races, and the war-atrocities of ancient Egypt and Assyria, which were
familiar to Margaret, and against which Akhnaton had come to preach his
mission of peace, were as nothing compared to the acts which were to be
committed by a nation which had preached the mission of Jesus for a
thousand years, and had carried His doctrines into the farthest corners
of the earth.
In the years to come that journey from Alexandria to Marseilles was to
be one of the greatest consolations of Margaret's life.
In the days to come, when Margaret, knowing all things and enduring all
things, looked back upon the journey, it comforted her to think of how
much Freddy had enjoyed his well-earned rest and how eagerly he had
looked forward to his holiday in Scotland.
* * * * * *
The war, which has set a date in England from which every event of
importance counts and will be counted by her people for generations to
come, had not been whispered or dreamed of by ordinary people. Like
Ischia, England was still dreaming and trusting. Her ideals of honour
forbade that she should doubt the honour of a sister-nation, bound to
her by the closest ties of blood and sympathy.
When Freddy and Margaret landed in England they went their separate
ways.
Margaret, at the outbreak of the war, at once offered her services as a
V.A.D. Three months later she was working as a pantry-maid in a
private hospital. Her work was very hard and deadly dull, but she had
been promised that after working for a time as pantry-maid, she should
be allowed to help in the wards. When Freddy left for the Front she
was able to say good-bye during her "two hours off."
Fresh air and sunshine, after the dark basement-pantry in which she
worked, seemed to her sufficient enjoyment and all the pleasure she
wanted. She seldom did anything in these hours but sit on a bench in
the garden-square near her hospital and rest her tired feet. For the
first month they were so swollen that she could not get on her walking
shoes. By four o'clock she was back in her pantry again, setting out
cups and saucers on little trays and laying the tea for the staff. Her
work was lonely and unrecognized.
After she had washed up and put away the cups which had been used for
afternoon tea and also the cups which had been used for the last meal
of the day, which was served at seven o'clock in the wards, she went
home to her quiet room, in a house on the other side of the square. It
was an old house, which had known better days. The locality always
carried Margaret's mind back to the gay world into whose society Becky
Sharp so persistently pushed her way.
If Margaret was not happy, she was far too busy to be unhappy. She
had, except for those two afternoon hours of rest, no time to think;
and as thoughts make our heaven or our hell, Margaret lived in an
intermediate state, for she had none. Her physical tiredness dominated
all other sensations.
The war dominated her life; it drilled her, and drove her, and exacted
the last fraction of her endurance and courage. It chased personal
things away into the dim background of her life. When she thought of
the Valley and her experiences there, it was as if she was visualizing,
not her own past life, but some story which she had read and remembered
with the sharp, clear memory, which never leaves us, of our childhood's
days.
With Margaret, as with most people, the war opened up a completely new
phase of mental as well as physical experiences. Nor could her
thoughts ever be the same again. Margaret's phase resembled the state
of a patient gradually recovering from a serious illness, an illness in
which she has faced the true proportions of the things belonging to
this life, and the triviality of human tragedies as they had existed
before the war. Her life had begun all over again. The war was
remaking it. After a serious illness or a shattered love-affair no
woman can take up life at exactly the same standpoint as before.
Margaret found it impossible to imagine personal ambitions and personal
amusements ever forming a part of her life again. Happiness brought
scorn with the very mention of it. The excitement and the
daily-accumulating list of horrors which shocked the unsuspecting
people of England during the first few months of the war, must be
vividly in the reader's thoughts while he pictures Margaret in her life
as a pantry-maid, a physically-weary pantry-maid, in a vast house in
London which had been converted into a hospital. She was only one of
the many girls in London in the various homes and hospitals who were
drudging with aching limbs and loyal hearts from morning until night.
She preferred being pantry-maid to lift-maid, which was the only other
post in the house which she had been offered. Taking visitors up and
down in a lift all day long seemed to her more monotonous than washing
up cups and saucers which the wounded drank out of, and scrubbing
boards and washing out cupboards. Margaret was only doing her humble
bit, a bit which required few brains and little education; a bit which
necessitated a good deal of sturdy grit and devotion. Not a soul in
the house knew nor cared anything about the life which she had led
before the war, and her college record was of less account than the
fact that she looked practical and strong. She had been given the post
on the strength of her physical perfection rather than her proficiency
as a V.A.D.
During the first three months she heard fairly often from Freddy, who
was cheerfully enduring what thousands of young Englishmen endured
during the early days of training.
If this is a war of second-lieutenants, Freddy was an excellent
specimen of the men who have won renown. His physique laughed at
hardship; his practical mind adored the order and method which is
essentially a part of military efficiency. His work in Egypt, far as
it seems removed from modern warfare, served a good purpose when
trench-digging and planning became a part of his training.
October had come and still no news had reached him of Michael, nor had
Margaret had any word of her lover through the Iretons. Freddy was
comforting himself with the assurance that the war had satisfactorily
driven him out of Margaret's mind. She seldom mentioned his name in
her letters, which were as brief and matter-of-fact as his own.
Sometimes in the busy London streets, and in crowded omnibuses, a
vision of the Valley and the smiling Theban hills would rise before her
eyes, but it would fade away and become as unreal as the Bible story of
the world's creation.
Physical exhaustion made it possible for her to see these visions of
the Valley, and the stars in the Southern heavens, with no throbbing in
her veins or sense of Michael's lips pressed on her own. Physical
labour leaves little expression for fine sentiment and imagination.
* * * * * *
On the morning of the day when Margaret was to see Freddy off to the
Front, she experienced a curious re-birth of personal existence; she
was a partner in the world's agony. Since her work had begun she had
lived like a machine; she was outside the great multitude of the elect;
she had no one belonging to her in immediate danger. She had almost
envied the personal anxiety of those who had their dearest at the Front.
Having no right to indulge in personal troubles which were entirely
outside the subject of the war and the world's welfare, she had ceased
to have any existence at all outside her dull duties as pantry-maid.
But on the day of Freddy's departure she had a curious fluttering in
her pulses, and a breathless excitement was in the background of all
that she did. She found her hands trembling when she placed the cups
in their saucers, or poured milk into the jugs.
Freddy's going was to link her to the great brotherhood. The
consciousness of his danger would be like the weight of an unborn child
under her heart. He was husband and father and lover to her now; he
seemed to be taking with him to France the last remnant of her girlhood.
At Charing Cross she found the khaki-clad figure. He was waiting for
her below the clock. His men, and hundreds of others, were sitting
about at rest, on the few seats which had been provided for soldiers
going to the Front, or on the floor. Most of the men were accompanied
by proud and tearful relatives or lovers. It was an affecting and
typical scene--a peaceful country suddenly torn and driven by the
throes and novelty of war.
Margaret had already witnessed such scenes several times. It always
left her wondering how any order or method came out of such a
bewildering mass of hastily-organized effort.
Freddy looked so handsome in his uniform that Margaret's heart felt
bursting with tragic pride. Nothing was too good to die for England,
but surely, surely Freddy was too beautiful to be blinded or disfigured
by all the hellish contrivances which the brutalized enemy had proved
themselves past masters in devising? Even in Egypt he had not been
more sunburned, and never had his hair looked so adorably bright and
youthful. Margaret could think of nothing but his beauty; it seemed to
burst upon her suddenly and unexpectedly.
Freddy was conscious of her pride and admiration, but being true
Lamptons, their greeting of one another was characteristically brief.
It was the first time that Freddy had seen his sister in her V.A.D.
uniform; his eyes took in all her points with one quick glance. She
looked clean and slight and attractive, and conspicuously well-bred.
Her abundant hair showed to advantage under her blue hat, while her
teeth and her eyes seemed to Freddy remarkably beautiful. A V.A.D.
uniform is not becoming, but if a girl is striking-looking, it
accentuates her good points; frumps and mediocrities it extinguishes
altogether.
"Come and have some tea," Freddy said. "I'm frightfully thirsty."
Margaret walked off with him proudly. He was her own brother, the
Freddy she had worked with so long and so intimately in the little hut
in Egypt, this alert, dignified soldier. The war was in its infancy;
women were still thrilled by khaki, and extraordinarily proud of their
men who wore it. Margaret felt so proud of Freddy that she was a
little awed by him. In her heart she was kneeling at his feet, while
in her subconscious mind there was a prayer, that his beauty and youth
might not be spoilt, that his splendid manhood might be given back to
England--it had other work to do.
Her tea, which Freddy had ordered in the large tea-room at Charing
Cross Station, proved very difficult to swallow. Something filled her
throat; it almost choked her, something which was a strange mixture of
pride and tears and happiness. She had no desire to eat or drink; she
was quite content to sit still. All she wanted to do was just to be
near Freddy and look at him.
In this last half-hour, perhaps the last she would ever spend with him,
there seemed to be nothing important enough to say. She certainly
could not speak of the things which were in her heart. When people
realize that they are together for perhaps the last time on earth, is
there anything which is more eloquent than silence?
It was Freddy who came to the rescue; he talked to save Margaret's
dignity. With his keen eye and appreciation of her character, he knew
the fight she was making for self-control. His talk was of his men and
of his life as an officer in the Army, and of the politics of the day.
When he spoke of Ireland and of the satisfactory way in which she was
behaving, their eyes met.
The question in Margaret's eyes was answered by a shake of his head and
an immediate change of topic.
"Are you liking your work?" he said quickly.
"It's not thrilling, but it's doing my bit."
"Splendid!" he said, and Margaret knew that he understood.
A little silence followed, and then Freddy said, in rather a shamed
voice, "Look here, Meg, we'd better be practical. I've left all my
things in order--if I don't come back, you won't have any difficulty.
Of course, all I've got will be yours. There are a few things I know
you'll always look after, things I specially value."
Meg's throat was bursting and her lips began to quiver, but she choked
back her emotions and regained her self-control. It came to her quite
suddenly, just after speech had seemed hopeless.
"I understand--the Egyptian things. You can trust them to me."
"I know I can," he said. "And do take care of yourself. . . . We'd
better be making a move, I suppose."
They both got up and shook their uniforms free of crumbs.
"I'm jolly thankful I managed to get the work in the Valley pretty well
settled before this happened."
"It was a bit of luck," Margaret said. "Doesn't it seem a shame that
all that wonderful work and all intellectual life must come to a
standstill, everything must be put aside for the one job that
counts--the killing of human beings? That is now the one and only
thing that matters; the most effectual way of killing masses of men is
the problem which scientific minds have set before them!"
Freddy looked keenly at her for a moment. Was Meg still imbued with
Michael's anti-war views? England was at that moment tuned to such a
pitch of war-enthusiasm that there was but one popular feeling and
belief--that this war was sent to cleanse and purify the world, that it
was a blessing in disguise, that but for this war England would have
gone to the dogs. Anyone who dared to express an opinion contrary to
this myth was condemned as pro-German or unpatriotic.
Meg felt her brother's eyes questioning her. "Never fear," she said.
"If I don't think that the war was necessary as the chosen means of
arresting England in her downward course, I know that it has got to be
fought to the finish, I know that the Allies have to prove that they
will not submit to Prussian militarism dominating Europe. I never
believed in the rottenness of England, and surely the spirits of our
young men who are fighting ought to prove that it isn't? England
decadent, indeed!"
"You're right," Freddy said. "England wasn't a bit rotten--or, at
least, no rottener than she ever was, only the rottenness was all
dragged into the limelight. Things are discussed in papers and from
pulpits to-day which were never even spoken of between fathers and sons
or husbands and wives in days gone by. If the war will stop all the
absurd talk about England going to the dickens, it won't be fought for
nothing. We've decried our country long enough."
They had only four minutes before they had to part. Margaret was
beginning to feel numb and speechless. Were these four minutes to be
the last she would ever spend with Freddy, and were they to go on
talking as if he was only going back to Oxford after the long vacation?
Two more minutes passed and they had said nothing that mattered. Truly
words were given to hide our thoughts!
As Margaret looked up at the clock, Freddy put his arms round her and
held her closely to him. This was Meg's first tender embrace since her
farewell with Michael. It was very nearly her undoing.
"Good-bye, old girl," was all that Freddy said; it was all he could say.
Meg clung to him and kissed him silently. Freddy felt her agony. It
was greater than his own, for he had many responsibilities on his mind,
and the excitement of actually going to take part in the "real thing."
He kissed her with a tenderness which was almost a lover's.
Meg was still silent. She dared not attempt to speak; she knew that
Freddy would hate tears. The next moment, after a closer hug, he put
her decisively from him.
"Time's up, old girl! I must look after my men. We are very much
alone, we two. I wish I could have left you in someone's care."
"I'm so glad," Meg said, a little brokenly, "so glad it's just we two.
I've never had to share you with anyone--you've always been my very
own."
Margaret knew that Freddy had made a covert allusion to the fact that
if Michael had not failed her, she would, in the event of his death,
have had a lover to comfort her. She chose to ignore his meaning, to
speak as if Michael had no place in her thoughts. Freddy was not to be
worried by things which were past and over. The war had made her
independent.
Freddy understood perfectly. They had reached the barrier; his men
were filing through the open gateway to the platform.
"Good-bye," he said again, hurriedly. "Don't wait in this awful
crowd--I shan't be able to speak to you any more." His eyes looked
into hers tenderly. "God bless you, Meg! I hate leaving you all
alone."
"Good-bye, Freddy."
Margaret's lips said the words bravely. In her heart they expressed
their old and grander meaning.
She had turned her back on the khaki-clad men who were filing on to the
departure-platform. Her silent prayer mingled with hundreds of others,
travelling from proud, torn hearts, to the listening ear of the Master
of that which is ordained.