there has been great commotion in the officers’ quarters. The telephone
with Government Office has been going constantly since early morning,
and there has been much hurrying to and fro.
An internment camp is like a desert in one thing--rumour passes over
it on the wings of the wind. Before midday every prisoner knows
everything. The Kaiser has been hurled from his throne by his own
people; the German command have asked for an armistice, and the Allied
Commander-in-Chief has given them until nine o’clock to-morrow to sign
the terms of peace he has prepared for them.
If they do not sign within that time the war will go on to
extermination. If they do, the news will be flashed over the world
immediately. At eleven o’clock they will have it at Knockaloe. The
guns will be fired in the fort at Douglas, the sirens will be sounded
from the steamers in the bay, and the church bells will be rung all
over the island.
Mona is in raptures. The war is near to an end, and all she has prayed
for is about to come to pass. Yet even at that moment she is conscious
of conflicting feelings. When she thinks of Robbie, she wants to shout
with joy that the war has come to a right ending, and the cruel enemy
who made it, with all its barbarities and horrors, is humbled to the
dust. But when she thinks of Oskar, she feels ... she does not know
what she feels.
Where _is_ Oskar?
She awakes next morning before the day has dawned and while the
arc-lamps are still burning. The first thing she is aware of is a deep
murmur, like that of the sea on a quiet but sullen day, which seems to
come from all parts of the camp. It was the last thing she had been
conscious of when she fell asleep the night before. The prisoners were
then walking to and fro in their compounds, in and out of the sinister
shadows, and talking, talking, talking. Could it be possible that they
had walked and talked all night long?
What wonder? The day that was about to dawn might be the day of doom
for them. When night came again their Fatherland might have fallen;
they might be men without a country--mere outcasts thrown on to an
overburdened world.
When the day breaks and the arc-lamps are put out, Mona sees the men
moving about like wraiths in the grey light. But silence has now fallen
on them. The ordinary regulations of the camp have been relaxed for the
day, and they are not required to go to their workshops. When the bell
rings for breakfast some of them forget they are hungry and remain in
the open.
It is a November day like many another, fine and clear and cold
and with occasional gleams of sunshine on the sea. The cows in the
cow-house are lowing, the sheep on the hill are bleating. Nature is
going on as usual.
Mona goes to her work in the dairy. When the men come for the milk,
she can hardly bear to look into their drawn faces. The prisoners in
the First Compound are standing in groups, and if they are talking at
all it can only be in whispers. The sailors in the Second Compound are
standing together in crowds, but the old riotous spirit is gone; there
is no more shouting or swearing.
The hours drag on. Looking beyond the barbed wire boundary of the
encampment, Mona sees country carts rattling down the high road at a
fast trot as if going to a fair. Somebody is on the church tower of
Kirk Patrick doing something with the flagstaff.
At half-past ten the world seems to be standing still. The camp is on
tiptoe. All over it men are looking towards Douglas. Their faces are
grim, almost ghastly. They seem to be rooted to the ground. Sometimes
one of them digs his foot into the earth like a restless horse tired of
waiting, but that is the only movement.
Where is Oskar? What is he doing?
At length, at long length, there is a certain activity in the officers’
quarters. Mona distinctly hears the ringing of the telephone bell in
the Commandant’s tent, which is not far from the farm-house. In the
quiet air and the dead silence she believes she hears the Commandant’s
voice.
“Hello! Who’s there? Government office?... Well?... Signed, is it?
Good!”
At the same moment she hears the striking of the clock at Peel. And
before the clock has finished striking there comes the deep boom of a
gun.
There can be no mistaking that. It rolls down the valley from the
direction of Douglas, strikes the hills on either side, and then sweeps
over the black camp towards the sea.
A moment later comes the screaming of sirens, deadened by distance,
then the ringing of church bells, now far, now near, and then the dull
sound of wild cheering at Peel, where the people, who have been waiting
from early morning in the market place, are going frantic in their joy,
clasping each other’s hands and kissing.
The twenty-five thousand prisoners in the camp stand silent and
breathless for a moment. The worst has happened to them--their
Fatherland has fallen.
The strain is broken by a ridiculous incident. A terrier bitch
belonging to a German baron in the “millionaires’” quarters leaps up to
the roof of his tent and begins to bark furiously at the tumult in the
air. The little creature’s anger becomes amusing. The men look at the
dog and then burst into peals of laughter.
A few minutes afterwards the prisoners of the First Compound have
recovered themselves and are shaking hands and congratulating each
other. After all the war is over and they will soon be free! Free to
leave this place and go back home--home to their houses and their wives
and children.
The sailors in the Second Compound are going crazy with delight, and
behaving like demented creatures. They are laughing and singing at the
top of their lungs, punching each other and boxing, playing leap-frog
and turning cart-wheels. What does it matter about country? Who cares
about the Fatherland, anyway? All the world is their country--all the
world and the sea.
Mona is standing at the door of her dairy, quivering with emotion. She
is like a woman possessed. What she has hoped for and prayed for has
come to pass at last. Peace! Peace! Peace over all the earth! Never has
the world had such a chance before. Never will it have such a chance
again. The cruelties and barbarities of war will be no more heard of,
and the senseless jealousies and hatreds of races will be wiped out for
ever. And then ... and then....
All at once she becomes aware of somebody behind her. She knows who
it is, but she does not turn. There is a moment of silence between
them, and then, in a voice which she can scarcely control, she says,
half-crying, half laughing:
“You, too, will be free to go home soon, Oskar. Aren’t you glad?”
There is another moment of silence between them, and then in a low,
tremulous voice Oskar answers:
“No, you know I’m not, Mona.”
Mona drops her hand to her side, partly behind her, and at the next
moment she feels it tightened in a quivering grasp.
_ELEVENTH CHAPTER_
A month has passed, yet the camp looks much the same as before. Mona
had expected that the prisoners would be liberated by this time, but
they are here still. The Commandant is said to be waiting for orders.
Meantime regulations have been relaxed. The men are no longer
restricted to the various compounds. There is no limit to their liberty
of moving about, except the big gates, guarded by soldiers, and the
three lines of barbed wire by which the camp is surrounded. Why not?
Nobody is likely to attempt to escape. Within a few weeks everybody
will be free.
Mona has all the help she can do with now. The prisoners are constantly
about the farm-house, doing anything they can for her. They show her
photographs of their wives and children and get her to count up the
savings that are coming to them.
At length comes word that the Peace Congress has begun and that the
Commandant has received his orders. Two hundred and fifty of the
prisoners are to be sent over the water every day until the camp is
empty.
But there is a condition attaching to the liberation. Mona hears of
it first from three prisoners belonging to distant compounds, who are
talking outside the house. To her surprise they are speaking not only
in English, but in British dialects.
“They ca’ me a Jarmin,” says one, “but what am I? I were browt to
Owdham when I were five year owd and now ’am fifty, so ’am five year
Jarmin and forty-five English. Yet they’re sending me back to Jarmany.”
“I’m no so sure but my case isna war’ nor that, though,” says the
other. “I came to Glasgie when I was a bairn in my mither’s arms,
and I’ve lived there all my life. I married there and my two sons
were born there. And now that I’ve lost both of them fighting in the
British army, and my wife’s dead of a broken heart and I’ve nobody left
belonging to me, they’re for sending me back to a foreign country.”
“Aw well,” says the third man, speaking with a snatch of the
Anglo-Manx, “I wouldn’t trust but my case is worse nor either of yours.
I’m German born, that’s truth enough, but I’ve lived in this very
island since I was a lump of a lad, and maybe I’m as Manx myself as
some ones they make magistrates and judges of. More than that, my only
son was born here, and when he grew up to be a fine young fellow, and
they said his King and country needed him, he was one of the first to
join up and go off to the war. Well, what d’ye think? Twelve month ago
he was wounded and invalided home, and then, being no use for foreign
service, they sent him to Knockaloe as one of the guard--to guard,
among others, his own father. Think of that now! My son outside the
barbed wire and me inside! And one of these days he’ll have to march me
down to Douglas and ship me off to Germany, where I’ve neither chick
nor child, no kith nor kin.... Yes, _my_ lad, that I used to carry on
my back and rock in his cradle!”
Mona is aghast. Something seems to creep between her skin and flesh.
Never before, in all the long agony of the war, with its blood and
tears and terror, has she heard of anything so cruel. What a mockery
of the Almighty! Race, race, race! Mother and author of half the wars
of the world--when, oh when would the Father of all living wipe the
blasphemous word out of the mouths of Christian men?
But the conversation Mona has overheard cuts deeper and closer than
that even. If all German-born prisoners are to be sent back to Germany,
Oskar will have to go, and what _then?_
That night a knock comes to her door. It is Oskar himself. His eyes are
wild and his lips are trembling.
“You’ve heard of the new order?” he asks.
“Yes. Will you have to go back also?”
“I must. I suppose I must.”
The first batch to go are from the “millionaires’” quarters. Being rich
they have reconciled themselves to the conditions. Park Lane or the
Thiergarten--what matter which? In their black clothes, their spats
and fur-lined coats, and with their suit-cases packed in a truck, they
march off merrily.
The next to go are from the Second Compound, and they make a different
picture--ill-clad, ill-shod, without an overcoat among them, with
nothing in their pockets except the little money they have drawn at the
last moment from the camp bank, and nothing in their hands except the
canvas bags which contain all their belongings.
It is a miserable January morning, with drizzling rain and a thick mist
over the mountains. At a sharp word of command the men go tramping
towards the gate, a silent and melancholy lot, totally unlike the
singing and swaggering gang who came up the avenue four years ago.
Later in the day the captain of the guard (the new captain) who has
seen the men off by the steamer tells Mona a wretched story. The
prisoners had passed through Douglas with heads down like men going to
execution; they had been drawn up like sheep on the pier, while the
ordinary passengers went aboard to their cabins, and then they had
been hurried down the gangway to the steerage quarters. And as the
steamer moved away they had looked back with longing eyes at the island
they were leaving behind them.
“Poor devils! They used to talk about the camp as a hell, but inside
six months they’ll be ready to crawl on their stomachs to get back to
it.”
“But why ... why are they all to be sent to Germany?” asks Mona.
“It’s the order of the congress, miss. No country wants to harbour its
enemies--not a second time--unless they have something to make them
friends.”
“But if they have?”
“Well, if a German has an English wife and an English business....”
“They let him remain--do they?”
“I believe they do, miss.”
Mona’s heart leaps, and a new thought comes to her. If Oskar does
not wish to go back to Germany, why shouldn’t he stay here and farm
Knockaloe?
Next morning, after the third gang has gone, she is on her way to her
landlord’s. Her last half-year’s rent is due, and then there’s the
question of the lease, which runs out in November.
It is a beautiful morning with blue sky and bright sunshine. The
snowdrops are beginning to peep and the yellow eyes of the gorse are
showing. As she goes down the road with a high step she is thinking of
her landlord’s answer to her father when, four years ago, he asked what
was to happen to the farm after the war was over: “Don’t trouble about
that. You are here for life, Robert--you and your children.”
She meets her landlord at the gate of his house. He is in his
church-going clothes, having just returned from Peel, where he has been
sitting on the bench as a magistrate.
“The rent, I suppose?” he says, and he leads her into the sitting-room.
She counts it out to him in Treasury notes, and he gives her a receipt
for it. Then he rises and makes for the door, as if wishing to be rid
of her. She keeps her seat and says:
“What about the lease, sir?”
“We’ll not talk about that to-day,” says the landlord.
“I’m afraid we must. I have to make important arrangements.”
The landlord looks embarrassed.
“But if you say it will be all right when the time comes, we can leave
it for the present, sir,” says Mona.
The landlord, who has reached the door and is holding it open, puts on
a bold front and says:
“Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve had to make other arrangements.”
Mona is thunderstruck, and she rises rigidly.
“You don’t mean to say, sir, that you are ... letting the farm over my
head?”
“And if I am, why shouldn’t I? It’s mine, I suppose, and I can do what
I like with it.”
“But you promised my father--faithfully promised him when the farm was
turned into a camp....”
“Circumstances alter cases. Your father is dead and so is his son....”
“But his daughter is alive, and what has she done....”
“Don’t ask me what she’s done, miss.”
“But I do, sir, I do.”
“Then if you must have it, you must. I want a good man of my own race
to farm my land, not an enemy alien.”
Mona is speechless for one moment, choking with anger; at the next she
is back on the road, weeping bitterly.
Oskar is in the avenue when she returns to it, and seeing she is in
trouble he speaks to her.
She tells him what has happened, omitting what was said about himself.
“Your family have lived in Knockaloe for generations, haven’t they?” he
says.
“Four generations.”
“And you were born there, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a shame--a damned shame.”
Mona is crushed. Knockaloe is lost to her. And this is the peace she
has prayed and prayed for!
One day passes, then another. Every morning Mona sees a fresh batch of
prisoners leaving the camp, and her heart sinks at the sight of them.
Oskar’s turn will come some day. It tears her to pieces to think of
it--Oskar going off at that melancholy pace, down the avenue and round
by Kirk Patrick.
At length a spirit of defiance takes possession of her. Knockaloe is
dear to her by a thousand memories, but it is not the only place on
the island. She has heard of a farm in the north that is to be let in
November. It is large, therefore it is not everybody who can stock
it, but _she_ can, because she has always thought it her duty to put
everything she has earned during the war into cattle to meet the
requirements of the camp.
She is upstairs in her bedroom, making ready for a visit to the
northern landlord, when she hears the loud clatter of hoofs in the
avenue. Long John Corlett, who used to come courting her for the sake
of the stock, is riding a heavy cart-horse up to the house. He sees
her and, without troubling to dismount, he calls to her to come down.
Resenting his impudence, she makes him wait, but at length she goes out
to him.
“Well, what is it, John Corlett?”
“You’ll have heard, my girl, that I’m the new tenant of Knockaloe?”
“I haven’t; but if you are, what of it?”
“I’ve come to ask you how long you want to stay.”
“Until the lease runs out--what else do you expect, sir?”
“But why should you? The camp will be empty before that time comes, and
what can you do with your milk when the men are gone?”
“I can do what I did before they came, if you want to know.”
“Oh, no, you can’t. You’ve lost your milk run, and you can never get it
back again.”
“Who says I can’t?”
“I say so. Everybody says so. Ask anybody you like, woman--any of your
old customers.”
Mona is colouring up to the eyes.
“Then tell them I don’t care if I never can,” she says, and turns back
to the house.
“Wait! There’s something else, though. What about the dilapidations?”
“Dilapidations?”
“According to the agreement with the Government the landlord has to
make good the damage to the houses and the tenant the injury to the
land.”
It is true--she had forgotten all about it.
“Twenty-five thousand men here for four years--it will take something
to put the land into cultivation.”
In a halting voice she asks Corlett what he thinks it will cost, and he
mentions a monstrous figure.
“Three years’ rent of the farm--that’s the best I can make it.”
Mona gasps and her face becomes white.
“But that would leave me without a shilling,” she says.
“Tut, woman! With the big rent you’ve had from the Government you must
have a nice little nest-egg somewhere.”
“But I haven’t. I’ve put everything into stock.”
The hulking fellow slaps his leg with his riding whip and makes a long
whistle.
“Well, so much the better if it’s all on the land.”
Then he drops from his saddle to the ground, and comes close to Mona as
if to coax her.
“Look here, Mona woman, no one shall say John Corlett is a hard man.
Leave everything on the farm as it stands, and we’ll cry quits this
very minute.”
Mona looks at him in silence for a moment. Then she says, breathing
rapidly:
“John Corlett, do you want to turn me out of my father’s farm a beggar
and a pauper?”
“Chut, girl, what’s the odds? There’s somebody will be wanting you to
follow him to foreign parts when he goes himself--though you might have
done better at home, I’m thinking.”
Mona’s breath comes hot and fast and her face grows crimson. Then she
falls on the man like a fury.
“Out of this, you robber, you thief, you dirt!”
The big bully leaps back into his saddle. Snatching at his reins, he
shouts that if she won’t listen to reason he will “put the law on her,”
and not a beast shall she take off the land until his dues as incoming
tenant are paid to him.
“Out of it!” cries Mona, and she lifts up a stick that lies near to her.
Seeing it swinging in the air and likely to fall on him, the man tugs
at his reins to swirl out of reach of the blow, and the stick falls on
his horse’s flank. The horse throws up her hind legs, leaps forward,
and goes down the avenue at a gallop.
The rider has as much as he can do to keep his seat, and the last that
is seen of him (shouting something about “you and your Boche”) is of
his hindmost parts bobbing up and down as his horse dashes through the
gate and up the road towards home.
Some of the guard who have been looking on and listening burst into
roars of laughter. Mona bursts into tears and goes indoors. If her
stock is to be taken, the island, as well as Knockaloe, is lost to her!
Late that night Oskar comes again. His eyes are fierce and his face is
twitching.
“I’ve heard what happened,” he says, “and if I were a free man I should
break every bone in the blackguard’s skin. But I can’t let you go on
suffering like this for me. You must give me up, Mona.”
It is the first time an open acknowledgment of their love has passed
between them. Mona is confused for a moment. Then she says,
“Do you _want_ me to give you up, Oskar?”
He does not answer.
“To see you go away with the rest, and to think no more about you?”
Still he does not answer.
“Do you?”
“God knows I don’t,” he says, and at the next moment he is gone.
_TWELFTH CHAPTER_
Three nights later Oskar comes again. As usual he will not enter the
house, so she has to stand at the door to speak to him. His eyes are
bright and he is eager and excited.
“Mona, I have something to suggest to you.”
“Yes?”
“It’s not to be wondered at that people brought up in a little island
like this should have these hard feelings and narrow ideas. But the
English are not like that. They are a great, great people, and if you
are willing to go with me to England....”
“What are you thinking of, Oskar?”
He tells her more about himself than she has ever yet heard. He is an
electrical engineer, and before being brought to Knockaloe he had been
chief engineer to a big English company on the Mersey, at a salary of a
thousand a year. When the war broke out his sympathies had been dead
against his own country, chiefly because of “that quack, the Kaiser.”
“Oskar!”
“It’s true. I can’t account for it. I was secretly ashamed of it in
those days, but I would have joined up in the British Army if they
would have had me. They wouldn’t!”
On the contrary, the authorities had called him up for internment. Then
his firm, which had been loathe to lose him, had tried to obtain his
exemption. They had failed, and when the time came for him to go the
chairman of the company had said: “Heine, we’re sorry you have to leave
us, but if you want to come back when the war is over, your place will
be waiting for you.”
“But could he ... do you think it possible....”
“Certain! Oh, he’s a great old man, Mona, and if he were to break his
word to me I should lose faith in human nature. So I ... I....”
“Well?”
“I intend to write to him, telling him I shall soon be at liberty, and
if you will only agree to go with me....”
He stops, seeing tears in her eyes. Then, in a husky voice, he says:
“I’m sorry to ask you to leave your island.”
“It is turning me out, Oskar; that’s the bitterest part of it.”
“Then you _will_ go to England with me?”
“Yes,” she says, and he hurries off in high spirits to write his letter.
During the next week Mona tries hard to feel happy, but little by
little vague doubts oppress her. One day she overhears scraps of a
conversation between the Commandant and the Governor, who are arranging
for the breaking up of the camp and the disposal of its portable
property. As they stand in the avenue they are talking about the Peace
Conference.
“It’s a pity,” the Commandant is saying, “but it has always been my
experience that the first years of a peace are worse than the last
years of a war.”
And the Governor is answering: “All the same, we should be fools to
trust those traitors again. We have beaten the German brutes, and what
we have got to do now is to keep them beaten.”
“I’m not like that, your Excellency,” says the Commandant. “I’ll fight
my enemy with the best, but when the fighting is over I want to forget
and, if I can, forgive. I was at the front in the early days, and after
a bad bit of an engagement I came upon a German officer in a shell
hole. He was in a terrible state, poor fellow, and we couldn’t take him
in, so I decided to stay with him. His mind was perfectly clear, and he
said, ‘Colonel’ (I was colonel in those days), ‘don’t you think this is
strange?’ ‘What’s strange?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if you and I had
met in the trenches I suppose you would have tried to kill me for the
sake of Motherland, and I should have tried to kill you for the sake
of Fatherland, yet here you are trying to save me for the sake of ...
Brotherland.’ More of the same kind he said in those last hours, and
when the end came he was in my arms and his head was on my breast, and
I don’t mind telling you I ... kissed him.”
Mona felt a thrill going through and through her. Brotherland! That was
what all the world would be soon. And then Oskar and she, living in
Liverpool, in their great love would be happy and unashamed.
That night Oskar comes back. His face is pale and his lips are
quivering. He tries to speak, but finding it hard to do so he hands her
a letter. It is from the engineering firm on the Mersey.
SIR,--We have received your letter of the 10th inst. addressed
to our late chairman, who died during the war, and regret to say
in reply to your request that you should be taken back in your
former position, that it is now filled to our satisfaction by
another engineer, and that even if it were vacant we should find
it impossible to re-engage you for the reason that feeling against
the Germans is so strong among British workmen that none of them
would be willing to serve under you, and the fact that you had
married an English wife, as you say, would increase, not lessen,
their hostility.
Yours, etc.
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” says Oskar.
“It’s the war,” says Mona. “Will it never, never end?”
“Never,” says Oskar, and he turns away with clenched teeth.
Mona goes to bed that night with a heavy heart. If English workmen will
not work with Oskar, England, also, is closed to them, and Brotherland
is a cruel dream.
Another week passes. The disbanding of the camp goes on as usual, with
its toll of two hundred and fifty men daily. The Fourth and Second
Compounds are now beginning to be called upon. The men of the Third
are being kept to the last, because many of them, like Oskar, are
engineers, and therefore useful in removing the electric plant, which
is to be sold separately. But their turn will come soon and then ...
what _then?_
A week later Oskar comes again. His face is thin and pinched and his
eyes are bleared as from want of sleep, but his spirits are high,
almost hysterical.
“Mona,” he says, “I know what we have to do.”
“What?”
“The English may be hard and unforgiving, but the Germans are not like
that.”
“The Germans?”
“Oh, I know my people. They may fight like fiends and demons--they do,
I know they do--but when the fighting is over they are willing to be
friends with their enemies.”
“What are you thinking of now, Oskar?” says Mona, but she sees what is
coming.
“If you were willing ... if you could only find it possible to go with
me to Germany....”
“Germany?”
Mona feels dizzy.
“It’s a sin and a shame to ask you to leave your native country, Mona,
but since it is turning you out, as you say....”
Mona is covering her ears.
“Don’t speak of it, Oskar. I can’t listen to you! It’s impossible.”
Oskar is silent for a moment, then he says in a tremulous voice:
“I would make it up to you, Mona. Yes, I swear to God I should make it
up to you. I should dedicate every day and hour of my life to make it
up to you. You should never regret it--never for one single moment.”
“But how could I go....”
“Just as other women are going. Lots of the men are taking their German
wives back with them. Why shouldn’t I take my English wife?”
“Wife?”
“Certainly. The chaplain would marry us.”
“The chaplain?”
“Yes, in the camp chapel, late at night or early in the morning, with
two of my comrades as witnesses.”
“Have you spoken to him, then?”
“I have, and he says that being made in a Lutheran church by a Lutheran
clergyman, it would be a good marriage according to German law, so
Germany would receive you.”
“But where ... where should we go to?”
“My mother’s first.”
“Your mother’s?”
“Where else? Oh, she’d love it! She’s the best mother a man ever had.
Do you know, she has written to me every single week since I came here.
And now she’s only living to welcome me home.”
“But, Oskar, are you sure she will....”
“Welcome you? Of course she will. She’s growing old, poor soul, and has
been lonely since my sister’s death. After we’re married I’ll write to
say I’m bringing another daughter home to love and comfort her....”
“Write first, Oskar.”
“As you please. It isn’t necessary, though. I know quite well what
she’ll say. But even if she couldn’t welcome you for yourself--and why
shouldn’t she?--she would for my sake, anyway.”
“All the same, write first, Oskar.”
“Very well, I will. And if her answer is all right, you’ll go?”
“Ye-s.”
“Heavens, how happy I am! What have I done to deserve to be so happy?”
Mona watches him as he goes off, with his quick step, until he is lost
in the sinister shadows cast by the big arc-lamps that cut through the
night. Then she goes indoors and tries to compose herself. It takes
her a long time to do so, but at length, being in bed, she remembers
a beautiful thing she had read to her father in the days when he lay
upstairs:
“_Whither thou goest, I will go. Thy people shall be my people, and thy
God my God._”
For days after that Mona finds herself singing as she goes about her
work. And at night, when she is alone, she is always thinking of her
forthcoming life in Oskar’s home. She can scarcely remember her own
mother, except that she was an invalid for years, but she sees herself
nursing Oskar’s mother, now that she is old and has lost her daughter.
“I mustn’t go empty-handed, though,” she thinks.
That brings back the memory of Long John Corlett and his threat of
“putting the law” on her.
It must have been stuff and nonsense about the dilapidations eating
up the stock, but she will see an advocate and have things settled up
immediately.
“I’m afraid the man is right, miss.”
It is the advocate whom Mona is consulting.
“It was a bad bargain your poor father made with the Government,
and the only people likely to profit by it are the landlord and the
incoming tenant.”
“Then what do you advise me to do, sir?”
“Sell up your stock, have the dilapidations valued, pay the money due,
and start afresh on whatever is left.”
“Do it for me at once, please,” says Mona, and she sets off home with
an easy, if not a happy, mind.
But hardly has she got there and changed into her dairy clothes,
and begun on her evening milking in the cow-house, with the watery
winter sun coming in on her through the open door, when she sees Oskar
approaching with a look that strikes to her heart. His face is white,
almost ghastly, and he is walking like an old man, bent and feeble.
“What has happened?”
“There! What do you think of that?” he says, and with a grating laugh
he gives her a letter.
“Is it from your mother?”
“Look at it.”
“Is she refusing to receive me?”
“Read it. It’s written in English--for your benefit, apparently.”
Mona reads:
“OSKAR,--The contents of your letter have distressed me beyond
measure. That a son of mine should think of marrying an
Englishwoman--one of the vile and wicked race that killed his
sister--is the most shocking thing that has ever happened to me in
my life.”
There is more of the same kind--that if Oskar attempts to bring his
Englishwoman to Germany his mother will refuse to receive her; that if
she did receive her every self-respecting German woman would cry shame
on her and shun her house for ever; that the feeling in Germany against
the abominable English is so bitter, because of their brutal methods
of warfare and their barbarous ideas of peace (starving hundreds of
German children by their infamous blockade, drowning German sailors
under the sea in their submarines, burning German airmen alive in the
air, and now ruining everybody by crushing demands for reparations
which will leave Germany a nation of beggars), that no decent house
would shelter any of them.
“Tell your Englishwoman from me that if she marries you and comes
to this country she will be as a leper whom nobody will touch.
Never shall she cross this threshold! Oskar, my son, I love you,
and I have waited all this time for you; I am old, too, and have
not much longer to live, but rather than hear you had married an
Englishwoman I would see you dead and buried.”
When Mona looks up from the letter, Oskar is gazing into her face with
a ghastly smile.
“That’s a nice thing to send a fellow after four years’ imprisonment,
isn’t it?” he says, and then he breaks into heart-breaking laughter.
“I was so sure of her, too. I thought she would do anything for
me--anything.”
Again he laughs--wildly, fiercely.
“What has happened to the woman? Has the accursed war taken all the
heart out of her? The German people, too--have they all gone mad?
Starving German children, drowning German sailors, burning German
airmen! Good Lord, has the whole nation gone crazy?”
Mona feels as if she were choking.
“She is old and hasn’t much longer to live, and just because I’m going
to marry the best girl in the world and take her home with me....”
But his laughter breaks into sobs and he can say no more. Mona feels
the tears in her throat as well as in her eyes, but at length she says:
“Oskar, it’s all my fault. I’ve come between you. You must go home
without me--to your country and your mother.”
Oskar lifts his broken face and cries:
“Country? Mother? I’ve got no country and no mother either. Go home to
them? Never! Never in this world!”
At the next moment he has gone off, with long strides, before Mona can
reach out her hand to stop him.
Being alone, she has to go on with her work as usual--the “creatures”
have to be milked and foddered. But after the men from the compounds
have been served (only three of them now) she has time to think out her
situation.
Since Oskar’s mother refuses to receive her, Germany also is closed
to them. Because she loves Oskar, and Oskar loves her, and they are
of different races and their nations have been at war, they are to be
hunted through the world as outcasts, and no place is to be left for
them.
“Poor Oskar! It’s hardest for him, though,” she thinks.
_THIRTEENTH CHAPTER_
The men of the Fourth and Fifth Compounds, three-quarters of the guard
and many of the officers have gone, when a stranger comes to the camp
to make a bid for the purchase of the booths and huts.
After a tour of the wooden buildings he arrives at the farm-yard, and
steps on to the mounting-block to take a general view, and at the same
moment Mona comes to the door of her dairy.
He is an American, a cheerful and rather free-spoken person, and
he says, with a smile on his lips, by way of excuse for opening a
conversation:
“I guess the farm-house is not for sale, is it?”
“You must ask the landlord about that, sir,” says Mona.
“Not you also? You’re the tenant of the farm, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m leaving it presently.”
“Ah, I remember! I’ve heard something about you. And where are you
going to when you leave here?”
“I don’t know yet, sir.”
He looks at her as if measuring her from head to foot, and then says,
with another smile:
“Come to my country, girlie. We have some strapping young women out
west, but we can do with a few more of the same sort, I guess.”
Mona is startled. Obvious as the word is, it comes like an inspiration.
America! “The melting-pot of the nations!” All the races of the world
are there. They must live in peace together or life could not go on.
When Oskar comes that night she tells him what the stranger has said,
and his big, heavy, sleepless eyes become bright and excited.
“Why not? Why shouldn’t we? That great free country! What a relief to
leave all the d----d mess of this life in Europe behind us!”
There is a difficulty, though. He has heard that America refuses to
admit people who have been in prison. He has been four years in an
internment camp--will America allow him to land? He must ask the
chaplain.
The following night Oskar comes back with a still brighter face.
“It’s all right, Mona. Internment is not imprisonment in the eyes of
American law.”
But there is one other difficulty. America requires that every
immigrant shall have something in his pocket to prevent him from
becoming a burden on the new country.
“It’s not much, but I have too little. If I had been a free man I
should have earned four thousand pounds in the time I’ve been here, but
when I leave the camp I shall only have fifty.”
Mona is overjoyed--at length _she_ can do something.
“That’s no difficulty at all, Oskar. The auction is to come off soon,
and after I’ve paid what I owe I shall have enough for both of us.”
It is the day before the auction, and Mona is gathering up the stock
and bringing them down to the houses--the beasts she had put out on
the grass, the “dry” cows that are stretched on their bellies chewing
the cud, the sheep that are bleating, and the early lambs that are
baa-ing.
She is going up the mountain to fetch the young bull to which she has
taken a bowl of wheat twice a week throughout the winter. A new wave of
hope has come to her, a golden radiance is shining in the future, and
she is singing to herself as she climbs through the heather.
Suddenly, when she reaches the top of the hill, by the tower called
“Corrin’s Folly,” she hears fierce animals snorting, and at the next
moment sees that three bulls are fighting. One of them is her own young
bull, small and lithe, the two others are old and large and black and
have iron rings in their nostrils. She remembers the old ones. They
belong to John Corlett, and must have leapt over the boundary to get at
the young one, and are now goring it fearfully.
The fight is frightful. The young bull is bleeding horribly and trying
to escape. It leaps over the wall of the little cemetery around the
tower and makes for the land on the other side of it which goes down
by a steep descent to precipitous cliffs, with the broad sea lying
below at a terrible depth. But the old bulls, making hoarse noises from
their nostrils, are following it up on either side and intercepting it.
As often as the hunted animal runs to the right they gore it back to
the left, and when it flies to the left they gore it back to the right.
At length the young bull stands for a moment, with its wild eyes
flashing fire and its face towards the cliffs. And then, with a loud
snort as of despair and defiance, it bounds forward, gallops straight
ahead, and leaps clear over the cliff-head into the sea. The old bulls
look after it for a moment with heaving nostrils and dilated eyes, and
then begin to graze as if nothing had happened.
Mona has stood helpless and trembling while the fight has lasted, and
when it is over and she comes to herself she finds Oskar standing
behind her. He has been working on the roof of the tower, to remove the
electric wires which have been attached to it, and from there he has
seen everything.
“It was horrible, wasn’t it?”
“Horrible!”
“So cruel and cowardly.”
“Yes,” he says, from between his clenched teeth, “and so damnably
human.”
Mona looks at him. They go down the hill together without saying any
more.
At last it has come, the day of the sale. The Commandant has permitted
it to be held at the farm, although the camp is not yet entirely
cleared. It is his last act before leaving, for he is going away
that morning. Mona sees him driving off in his motor car, hardly
recognizable in his civilian clothes. As he passes the farm-house he
raises his hat to her--an English gentleman, every inch of him.
Towards eleven o’clock there is much commotion about the farmstead.
The guards (they have had orders to help) are bringing the big beasts
out of the houses into the “haggard” and driving the sheep and lambs
into pens. There is a great deal of bleating and lowing. Mona, who is
compelled to hear, but cannot bring herself to see what is going on, is
indoors, trying not to look or listen.
At length there is the sound of voices. The Advocate, with the
auctioneer and his clerk, are coming up the avenue, and behind them are
many farmers. Long John Corlett, in his chapel clothes, is prominent
among the latter, talking and laughing and hobnobbing with everybody.
Mona sees the look of impudent certainty in the man’s empty face. She
also sees Oskar, who is behind the barbed wire of the Third Compound,
with a face that is white and fierce.
After a short period for inspection the auction begins. The Advocate
reads the conditions of sale (the whole of the stock on the farm is
to be sold without reserve), and then the auctioneer steps up to the
top of the mounting-block, while the clerk takes his place at the foot
of it, and the farmers form a circle around them. There are the usual
facetiæ.
“Now, gentlemen, you’ve got the chance of your lives this morning.
John Corlett, I know you’ve come to buy up everything, so get your
purse-strings loosened. Mr. Lace, thou knows a good beast if anybody on
the island does, and there are lashings of them here, I can tell thee.”
The first animal to be led out by the guard into the circle of the
spectators is a fine milch cow, five years old. Mona remembers that she
gave forty pounds for it in the middle of the war. It is knocked down
for twenty.
“What name?”
“John Corlett.”
For a long half-hour there are scenes of the same kind. Every fresh
beast put up is knocked down at half its value, and always, after the
crack of the auctioneer’s hammer, there comes the same name--“John
Corlett.”
At length Mona’s anger becomes ungovernable. It is conspiracy,
collusion! John Corlett has bought up all competitors! She rises from
her seat by the fire with the intention of throwing up the window and
shouting her protest. But while her hand is on the sash she sees Oskar
at the other side of the barbed wire, striding hastily away, and she
returns to her seat.
The auction goes on for an hour longer. Mona does not look out again,
but she hears everything that is said outside, every word, almost every
whisper.
The farmers are beginning to laugh at the monotony of the proceedings.
At length there is a murmur of conversation between the auctioneer and
the Advocate, and the auctioneer says, “Very well, if you wish, sir,”
whereupon the Advocate raises his voice and cries:
“Gentlemen, this is going too far. If I hadn’t announced that the sale
would be without reserve I should stop it on my own responsibility.
Come now, be Manxmen. What’s doing on you anyway? Is it the war--or
what? Men, we all knew old Robert Craine. He is dead. Let us be fair to
his only daughter.”
After that there is no more laughter, but there is less bidding and
the results are the same. The sale, which was expected to last until
evening, is over by lunch-time.
“Gentlemen,” says the auctioneer, “I thank you for your attendance.
It’s just as I expected--John Corlett has bought in all the stock on
the farm.”
“And much good may it do him,” says the Advocate.
“I might have given her more for it without the auction, sir,” says
John Corlett.
“And so you might, or you should have been d---- well ashamed of
yourself.”
Then Mona hears the sound of trapesing feet on the avenue and the
various voices of people passing under her window.
“Serve her right, though! We want no Huns settling here on the island.”
“No, nor no good Manx money going over to Germany neither.”
A moment later the Advocate comes into the house.
“I’m sorry the sale has not been as good as we expected, miss. The
total receipts will scarcely cover the valuation.”
“Then there’s nothing left for me--nothing whatever?”
“Nothing! I’m sorry, very sorry.”
Mona, who had risen, sinks back into her seat as if stunned. After a
while, the Advocate having gone, she hears the barking of dogs, the
shouting of men, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle. The
stock are being driven back to the hill by the servants of their new
owner.
At length there is silence. It is not at first that Mona is able to
realize the full meaning of what has happened, but at last it falls
on her. America is closed to her now. And that means that there is no
place left to her in the world!
Oskar comes towards bed-time. He is biting his lips and his eyes are
bloodshot. She looks up at him helplessly--all the strength of her soul
has gone out of her.
“You’ve heard the result?”
“Yes, I have heard,” he says, speaking between his teeth.
“I can’t think how people could be so unkind.”
“Unkind!”
He is laughing bitterly, fiercely.
“One’s nearest neighbours--the people one has known all one’s life.”
“Oh, your people are no worse than any other--not an atom. People are
the same everywhere. It’s the war, Mona. It has drained every drop of
humanity out of them.”
He is laughing again, still more bitterly and fiercely.
“War! What a damned stupid, idiotic thing it is--and the people who
make it! Patriots? Criminals, I call them! Crowned criminals and their
mountebank crew conspiring against God and Nature.”
He smites the doorpost with his fist and says:
“But the war is not the worst by a long way.”
“What is, Oskar?”
“This damnable peace that has followed it. People thought when the
peace came they could go to sleep and forget. What fools! Think of
it! Miserable old men spouting about a table, gambling in the fate
of the young and the unborn; forgetting their loss in precious human
lives, but wrangling about their reparations, about land, about money,
which the little mother rocking her baby’s cradle will have to pay the
interest of in blood and tears some day; setting nation against nation;
brewing a cauldron of hate which is hardening the hearts and poisoning
the souls of men and women all the world over.”
Mona, who has hardly heard what he has said, is still looking up at him
helplessly.
“We couldn’t help it, could we, Oskar?”
Oskar, recovering his self-command, pity-struck and ashamed, lifts up
her work-stained hands and puts them to his lips.
“Forgive me, Mona.”
“We struggled hard, didn’t we?”
“Yes.”
“But since God had put it into our hearts we couldn’t resist it, could
we?”
“No.”
“And now He doesn’t seem to care, does He?”
“No! He doesn’t seem to care,” says Oskar. And then he goes off with
head down.
_FOURTEENTH CHAPTER_
It is the Saturday before Easter.
Looking out of her bedroom window in the morning, Mona sees nothing
but a desolate black waste where the crowded compounds have been.
Four unborn springs and summers buried in the bosom of the blackened
fields--when, oh when will they grow green again?
Only in the Third Compound is there any activity. Few men are left even
there. Oskar has told her he is to leave with the last batch, but the
time for him to go is coming on inexorably.
The “houses” are empty, the “creatures” no longer call, and the
unnatural silence of the farmyard oppresses her. As long as she had the
work of three farm hands to do her strength never failed her, but now
that she has only to attend to herself she is always tired and weary.
The spring is beginning to appear, and through the open door she sees
that the daffodils are blooming in the little patch of garden in
front of the house. This reminds her of what she did on the day of her
father’s burial, and she plucks some of the flowers, intending to lay
them on his grave.
There is nobody in the avenue when she walks through--between the lines
of barbed-wire fences that have no faces behind them now--and past the
empty guards’ houses near to the gate. There is nobody on the road
either, as far as to the lych-gate of Kirk Patrick.
There he lies, her father, his upright head-stone, inscribed to “Robert
Craine of Knockaloe,” cheek by jowl with the sloping marbles that
mark the graves of the Germans who had died during the four years of
internment--all his race-hatred quenched in the peace of death.
Only a few yards away, on the grass of a mound that had no stone
over it, is the glass dome of artificial flowers which she herself
had placed on the grave of Ludwig, the boy with the cough. The glass
is cracked, no doubt by the snow and frost of winter, and the white
flowers have perished. Poor father! Who knows but in a little while
his dust may mingle with that of the German boy in the mother-bosom
that bore them both! Oh God, how wicked is war, how cruel, how
senseless!
Mona is coming out of the churchyard when she hears the tapping of a
mason’s chisel and then sees the mason himself behind a canvas screen,
which shelters him from the winnowing of a light breeze that is blowing
up from the sea. He is at work on a large block of granite, lettering a
long list of names.
After a moment she speaks to him, and he tells her what the block
is--the base of a cross to the men of the district who fell in the war.
It is to be set up outside the gate of the parish church at Peel. The
ceremony of unveiling it is to be on Easter Monday--that is to say, the
day after to-morrow. The time is to be nine in the morning, because
that is the hour when the boys of Peel and Patrick who have survived
the war are expected to return home by the steamer that is to leave
Liverpool on Sunday night. The Lord Bishop of the Island is to unveil
the memorial, and all the clergy and Town Commissioners and big people
of the two parishes are to be present. All the men, too, and their
mothers and wives and children.
“It will be a grand sight, girl. I suppose you won’t be going, though?”
Mona catches her breath and answers:
“No.”
After another moment she begins to look over the names. All four sides
of the base are full of them, and the mason seems to be lettering the
last. She tries to find her brother’s name and cannot do so. At length,
not without an effort, she says:
“But where is Robbie’s name?”
The mason pauses in his work, and then answers:
“Robbie Craine’s? Well, to tell you the truth, it is not on the list
they made out for me.”
“They--who are they?”
“Well, the Bishop and the clergy and the Town Commissioners and so on.”
“But my brother died in the war, and won the Victoria Cross, didn’t he?”
“Maybe he did.”
“You know he did. Then what has he done that his name is not in the
list with the rest?”
The mason, preparing to resume his work, replies:
“Maybe it’s what somebody else has done that has kept him out of it.”
The word falls on her like a blow on the brain, and she goes off
hurriedly. As she turns the corner of the road she hears the thin ring
of the mason’s chisel, and it sounds like the thud of doom. Is she,
and everybody who has ever belonged to her, to be wiped out of living
memory? What has she done to deserve it? But after a moment of fierce
anger her former helplessness comes back on her and she begins to cry.
“I can’t tell in the world why good people should be so unkind.”
Later in the day a new strength, the strength of defiance, comes over
her. Oskar may say it is the war, and even the peace, that has poisoned
people’s souls, but if it was God who put it into her heart to love
Oskar, and into Oskar’s heart to love her, it is for God to see them
through. He will, too--certainly He will. If she has to become a
servant girl herself and scrub her fingers to the bone, why shouldn’t
she? God will open people’s eyes some day, and then the Bishop and the
clergy and the Town Commissioners will have to be ashamed of themselves.
“I’m a good woman--why shouldn’t they?”
Being without stock of her own now she has to go into town that evening
to buy provisions for housekeeping. The shop-keepers show her scant
courtesy, but she puts up with no neglect and no disrespect. It is
almost dark when she has finished her shopping, and then, for a near
cut back to Knockaloe, she passes, with her string bag in her hand,
through a by-street which has an ale-house at one corner.
There she comes upon a tumultuous scene. In front of a small house,
with the door standing open, a crowd of women and children have
gathered to listen to a wild quarrel that is going on within. There is
a man’s voice swearing, a girl’s voice screaming and an old woman’s
pleading.
“So this is what my maintenance from the army has been spent
on--keeping you and your ... German bastard.”
“It’s not my fault, Harry; I tried to get another place and nobody
would have me.”
“Neither will I have you, so get out of this house quick.”
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone, I tell you! If you touch my child I’ll
scratch your eyes out.”
“Out you go, you harlot, and to ... with you.”
“Harry! Liza! Harry! Harry! Children!” cries the old woman.
Mona asks the women of the crowd what is going on.
“Don’t you know, miss? It’s Liza Kinnish, the girl with the German
baby. Her brother has come home from the war, and he is turning her
out--and no wonder.”
A number of men, half-intoxicated, come from the ale-house, but they
make no attempt to intervene, and at the next moment a bare-headed
soldier, also in drink, with the upper buttons of his tunic torn open,
comes from the house, dragging after him a girl with a baby in her arms
and her disordered hair streaming on to her shoulders.
“Out you go--you and your d---- German offal!”
Flinging the girl into the street, the man returns to the house and
clashes the door behind him.
“Let me in!” screams the girl, hammering at the door with her spare
hand.
The door opens and the soldier comes to the threshold.
“Look here, you ... I’m not going to have the fellows sneering at me
when they come home on Monday morning, so if you are not gone to ...
out of this inside two minutes....”
“Why did _you_ come home?” cries the girl. “You beast! You brute! Why
didn’t the Germans kill you?”
At that the soldier, foaming at the mouth, is lifting his clenched fist
to the girl when Mona, crushing through the crowd of women and throwing
down her string bag, lifts her own hand and strikes the man full in
the jaw, and he falls like a log.
Then, while he squirms on the ground, stunned and winded, she turns on
the men from the ale-house, who have previously been drinking with him
and taunting him and egging him on.
“And you!” she cries. “What _are_ you? Are you _men?_ You white-livered
mongrels! Your mothers were _women_, and they’d be ashamed of you.”
By this time the soldier has scrambled to his feet and, with blood in
his mouth, he is trying to laugh.
“Ha, ha, ha! So this is another of them, is it? She’s in the same case
herself, they’re telling me. Oh, I’ve heard of you, my lady. You used
to think great things of yourself, but when the parson marries you
there’ll be three of you before him at the altar, as the saying is. Ha,
ha, ha!”
The men laugh and some of the women begin to titter. A harder blow
than she had dealt the soldier had fallen upon Mona. She stands for a
moment as if turned to stone, then picks up her bag, sweeps through the
crowd and hastens away.
So this is what people think of her! After all the struggling of her
heart and the travailing of her soul, this is what people think! Oh,
God! Oh, God!
She had been sleeping badly of late, but that night she hardly sleeps
at all. Towards the grey dawning she has a sense of Robbie being in
the room with her. He is wearing his officer’s uniform, just as in her
mind’s eye, when she felt so proud, she had often seen him. She knows
he is dead, and she thinks this is his spirit, and it has come to
reproach her.
“Mona, if anybody had told me three years ago that such a thing would
happen I should have killed him. Yes, by God, I should have killed him.”
Mona tries to speak, but cannot.
“Rob....”
“Lord, how proud I was of you! When they told me I had won the Victoria
Cross I laughed and said, ‘My sister would have won it long ago if she
had been here.’ Nobody hated the Germans as you used to do, but now
that you’ve given yourself to one of them....”
“Rob ... Rob....”
“What else could you have done it for? Everybody believes it, too.
Father believed it, and it was that that killed him.”
Again Mona tries to cry out and cannot.
“Hide yourself away, Mona. Hide your sin and shame in some miserable
corner of the earth where nobody will know you. You’ve broken my heart,
and now....”
“Robbie! Robbie!”
Her own voice awakens her. The rising sun shines on her as she sits up
in bed in her wretchedness.
Only a dream! Yet it has told her everything. This is the end. Here
has her road finally led her. Her love is doomed. Life, as well as the
world, is now closed to her. But to stand in the pillory as long as she
lives for a sin she has not committed--it is too much! Better die--a
thousand times better!
When she asks herself how, it seems so simple. And when she thinks
of the consequences they seem so slight. There will be nobody to
care--nobody except Oskar. He will be better without her, and can go
home when his time comes. Either of them could get on alone. It is only
together that they are not allowed to live, and since only one of them
can live, it is so much better it should be Oskar.
There is a pang in the thought that Oskar will suffer. Yes, he will be
sorry. But he will get over it. And when he is at home and the first
pang of losing her is past and he wants to be happy, being so young and
such a _man_, perhaps ... who knows....
But no, she cannot think of that.
_FIFTEENTH CHAPTER_
Easter Day--one of the God-blest mornings in the sweet of the year when
it is happiness enough to be alive.
Mona is setting her house in order and feeling as if she were doing
everything for the last time. When she thinks she has finished she
suddenly remembers that she has not had breakfast. But that does not
matter now. How thirsty she is, though! So she brews herself a pot of
tea and drinks two strong cups of it.
The church bells begin to ring, and she determines to go to
church--also for the last time. Why not? It is true she intends to do
something which good people would condemn, but it is no use thinking of
that now.
How sweet the air outside is, with the odour of the violets and the
gorse and with that tang of salt that comes up from the sea! The young
birds, too, how merrily they are singing! It is a pity! A great pity!
She is late. The bells have ceased to ring, and there is nobody on the
road. It had taken her long to dress--she had felt so tired and had had
to sit down so often.
The service has begun when she reaches the church. Through the inner
door, which is half open, she can see the congregation on their knees
and hear the vicar reading the General Confession, with the people
repeating it after him. She cannot go in just now, so she stands by the
porch and waits.
The Sunday-school children, kneeling together on the right of the
pulpit, are bobbing their heads up and down at intervals--they are so
happy and proud in their new Easter clothes. She, too, used to be proud
and happy in her Easter clothes. It is almost heartbreaking. Life looks
sweet now, death being at the door.
When the voices cease and she is about to enter, some of the
congregation look round at her. She feels as if they are thinking of
her as the kind of woman-penitent who in the old days used to stand at
the door of the church in her shame. That stops her, and she remains
where she is standing.
The service goes on--the psalms and lessons and hymns appropriate to
the day. At length comes the last hymn before the sermon:
“_Jesu, lover of my soul,_
_Let me to thy bosom fly...._”
Mona has known it all her life, yet it seems as if she had never
understood it until now.
“_While the gathering waters roll,_
_While the tempest still is high._”
She is in tears before she is aware of it. The sermon begins, and the
vicar’s voice comes out to her in the open air and mingles with the
twittering of the birds in the trees and the bleating of the lambs in
the fields.
It is about the last days of Jesus--His death and resurrection, the
hatred of His enemies and the desertion of His friends--all the
dreadful yet beautiful story.
“He might have avoided His death, but He did not do so. He died of His
own free will. Why? Because He was confirmed in the belief that His
death would save the world.”
Jesus died to show that nothing mattered to man but the welfare of
his soul. Riches did not matter, rank did not matter, poverty did not
matter. It was nothing to Jesus that He was hated and despised and
friendless and homeless and alone and cast out of the family of men.
Nothing mattered to Him but love, and because He loved the world He
died for it.
“And that is why all suffering souls come to Him--have been coming
to Him through all the two thousand years since His pilgrimage here
below--will continue to come to Him as long as the world lasts! ‘_Let
me to thy bosom fly._’”
Before the vicar’s voice has ceased, and while he is pronouncing the
blessing, Mona is hurrying home. There are no tears in her eyes now,
and in her heart there is only a great exaltation.
Hitherto she has been thinking of what she intends to do as something
that God would have to forgive her for. Not so now. If Jesus died of
His own free will, if He died for love, why shouldn’t she? And if by
dying He saved the world, would it not be the same with her also?
In the dizzy whirl of her brain she can see no difference. What she
intends to do ceases to be a sin and becomes a sacrifice. If the world
is full of hatred, as the consequence of the war, her death may save
it. She is only a poor girl, and nobody on earth may ever know what she
has done and why she has done it, yet God will know.
But Oskar? She had not intended to tell Oskar. He loved her so much
that he might have tried to dissuade her. Just to slip away when the
time came for him to go back to his own country--that had been her
plan. But she could not reconcile herself to this now--not now, after
this great new thought. Oskar must know everything.
Hours pass. She is sure Oskar will come to-day--quite sure. While
waiting for him she drinks many cups of tea, forgetting that she has
not eaten since yesterday. At last he comes. As usual, it is late at
night, and she is so weak from emotion and want of food that she can
scarcely reach the door to open it.
“May I come in?”
“Yes, indeed, come.”
He steps into the house, never having done so since the night of her
father’s seizure, and sits by her side before the fire. His face is
lividly white, his lips are twitching, and his voice is hoarse.
“What’s to do with you, Oskar?”
“Nothing. Don’t be afraid. I have come to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I’ve just had my orders. I am to go away in the morning.”
“In the morning?”
“Yes, with the last batch. The last of the officers and guard are going
too, so the camp will be empty after to-morrow.”
Mona’s heart is beating hard, and she tries to ease it by asking an
irrelevant question.
“What are the men saying?”
He laughs bitterly, and his words spurt out of his mouth.
“The men? Oh, they’re saying they’ll soon be here again. They want
to stay in England, and if they are to be sent back to their own
overburdened country, to suffer and to starve, they will return some
day with hatred in their hearts.”
“That means another war some day, doesn’t it?”
“It does, and when that day comes God help the poor old world and
everything in it.”
In her excited mood Mona thinks she knows better, but she cannot speak
of that yet; and Oskar, too, as if trying to gain time, goes on talking.
“The world had its great chance at the end of the war, Mona, but then
came those damnable old men with their conferences making a peace
that was worse than the war itself. And now the churches--look at
the churches who have been told to teach that there’s no peace under
the soldier’s sword, standing by while the world is rushing on to
destruction! What snares! What hypocrisy! What spiritual harlotry!
Why don’t they burn down their altars and shut their doors and be
honest?... But that is not what I came to say--to tell you.”
“What is, Oskar?”
He hesitates for a moment, and then in a flood of words he says:
“I don’t want to frighten you, Mona. You must not let me frighten you.
I should never forgive myself if.... But you are all I have now, and
... I can’t go away and leave you behind me.... I simply can’t.... It’s
impossible, quite impossible.”
“But if they force you, Oskar?”
Oskar laughs again--it is wild laughter.
“Force me? Nobody can be forced if only he has courage.”
“Courage?”
“Yes, courage.... Don’t you see what I’ve come to tell you, Mona? Come,
don’t you? When the idea came to me first I thought you might be afraid
and perhaps faint and even try to turn me from my purpose, so I made
up my mind to say nothing. But when the order came to-night I said to
myself, ‘No, she’s not like some women. She’s brave; she’ll see there’s
nothing else for it.’”
Mona sees what is coming, and her heart is throbbing hard, but she says:
“Tell me. It’s better that I should know, Oskar.”
With that he gets closer to her and speaks in a whisper, as if afraid
the very walls may hear:
“When they look for me in the morning I shall be gone.... Don’t you
understand me now?--gone! So I’ve come to-night to say farewell. We are
meeting for the last time, Mona.”
He looks at her, thinking she will cry out, perhaps scream, but her
eyes are shining. All the pain in the thought of their parting has
passed away with a mighty rushing.
“Oskar,” she says, “don’t you think it would be just as hard for me ...
to stay here after you were ... gone?”
The tears are in Oskar’s eyes now, for flesh is weak and his wild heart
is softening.
“What would become of me without you, Oskar?”
“Don’t say that, Mona.”
“But if ... if it’s inevitable that you should go, if there is nothing
else for it, can’t we ... can’t we go _together_?”
“Together?” He is looking searchingly into her shining face. “Do you
mean ...?”
She takes his hand. It is trembling. Her own is trembling also.
“Oskar, do you remember the fight of the bulls on the cliff-head?”
“When the old ones wouldn’t let the young one live, and he had to....”
She bows her head. He is breathing rapidly. She lifts her eyes and
looks at him. They are silent for a moment, then he says:
“My God, Mona! Do you mean _that_?... Really mean it?”
“Yes.”
And then she tells him everything--all her great, divine, delirious
project.
He gasps, and then his face also shines, as little by little her dream
rises before them.
“Do you think that vain and foolish, Oskar ... that we should do as He
did, of our own free will, to save the world from all this hatred and
bitterness?”
Oskar throws up his head; his eyes are streaming.
“No! No! For God’s in His heaven, Mona.”
And then, these two poor creatures whom the world has cast out,
clasped hand in hand, and seeing no difference in the wild confusion
and delirium of their whirling thoughts, talk together in whispers of
how they are going to save the world from war, and the bitter results
of war, by doing as He did who was the great Vanquisher of death
and Redeemer of the soul from sin--give up their lives in love and
sacrifice.
“So even if the churches are all you say, there’s Jesus still....”
“Yes, yes, there’s Jesus still, Mona.”
_SIXTEENTH CHAPTER_
At five o’clock next morning a young man and a young woman are climbing
the hill that stands between the camp and the sea.
There is only a pale grey light in the sky; the last stars are dying
out; the morning is very quiet. Sometimes a cock crows in the closed-up
hen houses of the neighbouring farms; sometimes a dog barks through the
half-darkness. Save for these there is no sound except that of the soft
breeze which passes over the earth before daybreak.
The two walk side by side. They can hardly see each other’s faces, and
are holding hands to keep together. Partly because of the darkness and
partly for reasons obscure even to themselves, they are walking slowly,
and pausing at every few steps to take breath. They are trying to make
their journey as long as possible. It is to be their last.
“Forgive me, Oskar,” says Mona.
“There is nothing to forgive, Mona. It had to be.”
“Yes, it had to be. There was no other way, was there?”
“No, there was no other way, Mona.”
What remained of the internment camp had not been stirring when they
passed through the lane that led from the farm to the grazing land,
but by the time they are half-way up the hill there are sounds from
the black ground below them. Looking back, they see groups of vague
figures moving about in the Third Compound. A little later they hear
the call of a bugle--the last batch of prisoners is being gathered up.
Still later, when the light is better, there is the sharp ringing of a
bell--the roll has been called and Oskar is missing.
“It’s for me,” he says, and they stop.
By this time they are near to the wall of the little cemetery that
surrounds the tower, and to avoid being seen they wait under its dark
shelter.
There is a period of suspense in which neither speaks, but after a
while they see the black-coated prisoners form into file, with their
yellow-clothed guard on either side, and march out of their compound.
“They’ve given me up,” says Oskar, and they both breathe freely.
They hear the word of command, deadened by distance. Then they see the
procession of men pass down the avenue and through the big outer gates
into the high road. At first there is only the dull thud of many feet
on the hard ground, but as the guards close the gates behind them, and
the sharp clang of the iron hasps comes up through the still air, the
prisoners break into a cheer.
It is wild, broken, irregular cheering, as of fierce disdain, and it is
followed by defiant singing--
“_Glo-ry to the brave men of old,_
_Their sons will copy their virtues bold,_
_Courage in heart and a sword in hand...._”
A few minutes later the dark figures are hidden by trees, and as they
turn the corner of the road by Kirk Patrick their voices die away.
They are gone--back to their own country, which wants them not. The
camp that has been their prison for four years is empty. It lies, in
the quickening daylight, like a vast black scar on the green face of
the mountain.
Suddenly a new thought comes to Mona. They may still avoid death. Life
may yet be open to them.
“Oskar,” she says, speaking in a rapid whisper, “now that the officers
and the guard have gone, isn’t it possible that we could escape to
somewhere ... where we should be unknown....”
“Impossible! Quite impossible, Mona.”
“Ah yes, I suppose it is,” she says, and they rise to resume their
journey.
But just then, in the first rays of morning, from a cottage that is
between them and the sea, she hears the voice of a woman singing. She
knows who the woman is--one of her former maids, who has lately been
married to a farm labourer. Perhaps her husband has gone to his work in
the fields, and she is out in their little garden, gathering up the
eggs of the hens that are clucking. How happy she must be!
For a moment Mona’s heart fails her. She forgets the great thoughts of
yesterday, and regrets the loss of the simple joys that are reserved
for other women.
“It seems a pity, though, doesn’t it?” she says.
“Do you regret it, Mona?” says Oskar, looking round at her. But at the
next moment her soul has regained its strength.
“No! Oh, no! It had to be.... And then there is our great hope, our
wonderful idea!”
“Yes, our great hope, our wonderful idea.”
They continue their climbing, still holding each other’s hands, but
rarely speaking. Sometimes she stumbles, but he holds her up. The
larks are singing now, and the young lambs on John Corlett’s farm are
bleating. Far down, on the seaward side, sheltering in the arms of its
red cliffs, is the little white town of Peel. It is beginning to smoke
for breakfast.
“Oskar, do you still think that when all this is over, and the hatred
and bitterness have died out of people’s hearts, they will make war on
each other no longer?”
“Yes, in the years to come, perhaps--or they must wipe themselves off
the earth, Mona.”
“And do you think that God will accept our sacrifice?”
“I’m sure He will--because we shall have died for love and given up
all.”
“Yes, we shall have died for love and given up all,” says Mona, and
after that she liberates her hand and walks on firmly.
As they approach the crest of the hill the deep murmur of the sea comes
over to them, and when they reach the top its salt breath smites their
faces. There it lies in a broad half-circle, stretching from east to
west, cold and grey and cruel.
Mona trembles, and the revulsion which comes to the strongest souls
at the first sight of death seizes her for an instant. In a faltering
voice she says:
“It won’t be long, will it, Oskar?”
“No, it won’t be long, Mona.”
“Only a few moments?”
“Yes, only a few moments.”
“And then we shall be together again for ever?”
“For ever.”
“Oh, I shan’t care if at the cost of a few moments of suffering I can
be happy with you for ever.”
She is not afraid now. In front of them are the heather-clad slopes
that go down to the precipitous cliffs. They clasp hands again and walk
forward. Tears are in their eyes, but the light of heaven is there also.
In a few minutes more they are on the cliff head. It overhangs the sea,
which is heaving and singing in its many voices, seventy feet below.
The sun is rising, and the sky to the east is flecked with crimson.
There is nothing else in sight anywhere, and no other sound except the
cry of the sea fowl on the rocks beneath.
“This is the place, isn’t it?”
“This is the place, Mona.”
“Shall we do as we intended?”
“Yes, let us do as we intended.”
And then these two children of the universal Father, cast out of the
company of men, separated in life and about to be united in death, go
through the burial service which they have appointed for themselves.
First, they kneel on the cliff edge, as close as they can get to it,
and repeat their prayer:
“_Our Father, who art in Heaven ..._
_Geheiligt wird dein name ..._
_Forgive us our trespasses ..._
_As we forgive them that trespass against us...._”
Then they rise, and, standing hand in hand, with their heads up and
their faces to the sea, they sing their hymn:
“_Jesu, lover of my soul ..._
_Lass mir an dein brust liegen...._”
Then Oskar unfastens his coat, and taking off the long belt he is
wearing he straps it about both of them. They are now eye to eye,
breast to breast, heart to heart.
“The time has come, hasn’t it, Oskar?”
“Yes, the time has come, Mona.”
“I can kiss you now, can’t I?”
He puts his arms tenderly about her and kisses her on the lips. She
kisses him. It is their first kiss and their last.
“God bless you for loving me, Oskar.”
“And God bless you, too, Mona. And now good-bye!”
“No, not good-bye. Only--until then.”
“Until then.”
The sun rises above the horizon in a blaze of glory. The broad sea
sings her everlasting song. The cliff head is empty.
After a while, when the sky is blue and the morning sunlight is dancing
on the waters, a steamer, decked with flags from stem to stern, comes
round the headland on the south. It is crowded with soldiers, who are
crushing to starboard to catch their first sight of the town which lies
behind the headland to the north.
There is the sharp crack of a rocket from the lifeboat house at Peel,
and then a band on the steamer begins to play, and the soldiers to sing
in rapturous chorus:
“_Keep the home-fires burning..._
_Till the boys come home...._”
A little later the church bells begin to ring. They ring louder and
louder and faster and faster every moment, as if pealing their joyous
message up to the cloudless sky:
“PEACE! PEACE! PEACE!”