eye-glasses, realisation of the utter importance of this moment overcame
her so that she could not speak. "Oh! dear"--she thought, while her
heart fluttered like a bird--"he'll never understand; I'll never be
able to make him." She saw her husband buried under the leaves of
despair; she saw her children getting too little food, the deaf aunt,
now bedridden, neglected in the new pressure of work that must fall on
the only breadwinner left. And, choking a little, she said:
"I'm sure I'm very sorry to take up your time, sir; but my 'usband's
been taken to the Palace; and we've been married over twenty years, and
he's been in England twenty-five; and he's a very good man and a good
workman; and I thought perhaps they didn't understand that; and we've
got three children and a relation that's bedridden. And of course, we
understand that the Germans have been very wicked; Gerhardt always said
that himself. And it isn't as if he was a spy; so I thought if you could
do something for us, sir, I being English myself."
The gentleman, looking past her at the wall, answered wearily:
"Gerhardt--I'll look into it. We have to do very hard things, Mrs.
Gerhardt."
Little Mrs. Gerhardt, with big eyes almost starting out of her head, for
she was no fool, and perceived that this was the end, said eagerly:
"Of course I know that there's a big outcry, and the papers are askin'
for it; but the people in our street don't mind 'im, sir. He's always
done little things for them; so I thought perhaps you might make an
exception in his case."
She noticed that the gentleman's lips tightened at the word outcry, and
that he was looking at her now.
"His case was before the Committee no doubt; but I'll inquire.
Good-morning."
Mrs. Gerhardt, accustomed to not being troublesome, rose; a tear rolled
down her cheek and was arrested by her smile.
"Thank you, sir, I'm sure. Good-morning, sir."
And she went out. Meeting the messenger in the corridor, and hearing
his: "Well, Missis?" she answered: "I don't know. I must look on the
bright side. Good-bye, and thank you for your trouble." And she turned
away feeling as if she had been beaten all over.
The bright side on which she looked did not include the return to her of
little Gerhardt, who was duly detained for the safety of the country.
Obedient to economy, and with a dim sense that her favourite papers were
in some way responsible for this, she ceased to take them in, and took
in sewing instead. It had become necessary to do so, for the allowance
she received from the government was about a quarter of Gerhardt's
weekly earnings. In spite of its inadequacy it was something, and she
felt she must be grateful. But, curiously enough, she could not forget
that she was English, and it seemed strange to her that, in addition to
the grief caused by separation from her husband from whom she had never
been parted not even for a night, she should now be compelled to work
twice as hard and eat half as much because that husband had paid her
country the compliment of preferring it to his own. But, after all, many
other people had much worse trouble to grieve over, so she looked on the
bright side of all this, especially on those days once a week when
alone, or accompanied by the little Violet, she visited that Palace
where she had read in her favourite journals to her great comfort that
her husband was treated like a prince. Since he had no money he was in
what they called "the battalion," and their meetings were held in the
bazaar, where things which "the princes" made were exposed for sale.
Here Mr. and Mrs. Gerhardt would stand in front of some doll, some
blotting-book, calendar, or walking-stick, which had been fashioned by
one of "the princes." There they would hold each others' hands and try
to imagine themselves unsurrounded by other men and wives, while the
little Violet would stray and return to embrace her father's leg
spasmodically. Standing there, Mrs. Gerhardt would look on the bright
side, and explain to Gerhardt how well everything was going, and he
mustn't fret about them, and how kind the police were, and how auntie
asked after him, and Minnie would get a prize; and how he oughtn't to
mope, but eat his food, and look on the bright side. And Gerhardt would
smile the smile which went into her heart just like a sword, and say:
"All right, Dollee. I'm getting on fine." Then, when the whistle blew
and he had kissed little Violet, they would be quite silent, looking at
each other. And she would say in a voice so matter-of-fact that it could
have deceived no one:
"Well, I must go now. Good-bye, old man!"
And he would say:
"Good-bye, Dollee. Kiss me."
They would kiss, and holding little Violet's hand very hard she would
hurry away in the crowd, taking care not to look back for fear she might
suddenly lose sight of the bright side. But as the months went on,
became a year, eighteen months, two years, and still she went weekly to
see her "prince" in his Palace, that visit became for her the hardest
experience of all her hard week's doings. For she was a realist, as well
as a heroine, and she could see the lines of despair not only in her
man's heart but in his face. For a long time he had not said: "I'm
getting on fine, Dollee." His face had a beaten look, his figure had
wasted, he complained of his head.
"It's so noisy," he would say constantly; "oh! it's so noisy--never a
quiet moment--never alone--never--never--never--never. And not enough to
eat; it's all reduced now, Dollee."
She learned to smuggle food into his hands, but it was very little, for
they had not enough at home either, with the price of living ever going
up and her depleted income ever stationary. They had--her "man" told
her--made a fuss in the papers about their being fed like turkeycocks,
while the "Huns" were sinking the ships. Gerhardt, always a spare little
man, had lost eighteen pounds. She, naturally well covered, was getting
thin herself, but that she did not notice, too busy all day long, and
too occupied in thinking of her "man." To watch him week by week, more
hopeless, as the months dragged on, was an acute torture, to disguise
which was torture even more acute. She had long seen that there _was_ no
bright side, but if she admitted that she knew she would go down; so she
did not. And she carefully kept from Gerhardt such matters as David's
overgrowing his strength, because she could not feed him properly; the
completely bedridden nature of auntie; and worse than these, the
growing coldness and unkindness of her neighbours. Perhaps they did not
mean to be unkind, perhaps they did, for it was not in their nature to
withstand the pressure of mass sentiment, the continual personal
discomfort of having to stand in queues, the fear of air raids, the
cumulative indignation caused by stories of atrocities true and untrue.
In spite of her record of kindliness towards them she became tarred with
the brush at last, for her nerves had given way once or twice, and she
had said it was a shame to keep her man like that, gettin' iller and
iller, who had never done a thing. Even her reasonableness--and she was
very reasonable--succumbed to the strain of that weekly sight of him,
till she could no longer allow for the difficulties which Mrs. Clirehugh
assured her the Government had to deal with. Then one day she used the
words "fair play," and at once it became current that she had "German
sympathies." From that time on she was somewhat doomed. Those who had
received kindnesses from her were foremost in showing her coldness,
being wounded in their self-esteem. To have received little benefits,
such as being nursed when they were sick, from one who had "German
sympathies" was too much for the pride which is in every human being,
however humble an inhabitant of Putney. Mrs. Gerhardt's Cockney spirit
could support this for herself, but she could not bear it for her
children. David came home with a black eye, and would not say why he had
got it. Minnie missed her prize at school, though she had clearly won
it. That was just after the last German offensive began; but Mrs.
Gerhardt refused to see that this was any reason. Little Violet twice
put the heart-rending question to her: "Aren't I English, Mummy?"
She was answered: "Yes, my dear, of course."
But the child obviously remained unconvinced in her troubled mind.
And then they took David for the British army. It was that which so
upset the applecart in Mrs. Gerhardt that she broke out to her last
friend, Mrs. Clirehugh:
"I do think it's hard, Eliza. They take his father and keep him there
for a dangerous Hun year after year like that; and then they take his
boy for the army to fight against him. And how I'm to get on without him
I don't know."
Little Mrs. Clirehugh, who was Scotch, with a Gloucestershire accent,
replied:
"Well, we've got to beat them. They're such a wicked lot. I daresay it's
'ard on you, but we've got to beat them."
"But _we_ never did nothing," cried Mrs. Gerhardt; "it isn't us that's
wicked. We never wanted the war; it's nothing but ruin to him. They did
ought to let me have my man, or my boy, one or the other."
"You should 'ave some feeling for the Government, Dora; they 'ave to do
'ard things."
Mrs. Gerhardt, with a quivering face, had looked at her friend.
"I have," she said at last in a tone which implanted in Mrs. Clirehugh's
heart the feeling that Dora was "bitter."
She could not forget it; and she would flaunt her head at any mention of
her former friend. It was a blow to Mrs. Gerhardt, who had now no
friends, except the deaf and bedridden aunt, to whom all things were the
same, war or no war, Germans or no Germans, so long as she was fed.
About then it was that the tide turned, and the Germans began to know
defeat. Even Mrs. Gerhardt, who read the papers no longer, learned it
daily, and her heart relaxed; that bright side began to reappear a
little. She felt they could not feel so hardly towards her "man" now as
when they were all in fear; and perhaps the war would be over before her
boy went out. But Gerhardt puzzled her. He did not brighten up. The iron
seemed to have entered his soul too deeply. And one day, in the bazaar,
passing an open doorway, Mrs. Gerhardt had a glimpse of why. There,
stretching before her astonished eyes, was a great, as it were,
encampment of brown blankets, slung and looped up anyhow, dividing from
each other countless sordid beds, which were almost touching, and a
whiff of huddled humanity came out to her keen nostrils, and a hum of
sound to her ears. So that was where her man had dwelt these thirty
months, in that dirty, crowded, noisy place, with dirty-looking men,
such as those she could see lying on the beds, or crouching by the side
of them, over their work. He had kept neat somehow, at least on the days
when she came to see him--but _that_ was where he lived! Alone again
(for she no longer brought the little Violet to see her German father),
she grieved all the way home. Whatever happened to him now, even if she
got him back, she knew he would never quite get over it.
And then came the morning when she came out of her door like the other
inhabitants of Putney, at sound of the maroons, thinking it was an air
raid; and, catching the smile on the toothless mouth of one of her old
neighbours, hearing the cheers of the boys in the school round the
corner, knew that it was Peace. Her heart overflowed then, and,
withdrawing hastily, she sat down on a shiny chair in her little empty
parlour. Her face crumpled suddenly, the tears came welling forth; she
cried and cried, alone in the little cold room. She cried from relief
and utter thankfulness. It was over--over at last! The long waiting--the
long misery--the yearning for her "man"--the grieving for all those poor
boys in the mud, and the dreadful shell holes, and the fighting, the
growing terror of anxiety for her own boy--over, all over! Now they
would let Max out, now David would come back from the army; and people
would not be unkind and spiteful to her and the children any more!
For all she was a Cockney, hers was a simple soul, associating Peace
with Good-will. Drying her tears, she stood up, and in the little cheap
mirror above the empty grate looked at her face. It was lined, and she
was grey; for more than two years her man had not seen her without her
hat. What ever would he say? And she rubbed and rubbed her cheeks,
trying to smooth them out. Then her conscience smote her, and she ran
upstairs to the back bedroom, where the deaf aunt lay. Taking up the
little amateur ear trumpet which Gerhardt himself had made for "auntie,"
before he was taken away, she bawled into it:
"Peace, Auntie; it's Peace! Think of that. It's Peace!"
"What's that?" answered the deaf woman.
"It's Peace, Auntie, Peace."
The deaf lady roused herself a little, and some meaning came into the
lack-lustre black eyes of her long, leathery face. "You don't say," she
said in her wooden voice, "I'm so hungry, Dolly, isn't it time for my
dinner?"
"I was just goin' to get it, dearie," replied Mrs. Gerhardt, and hurried
back downstairs with her brain teeming, to make the deaf woman's bowl of
bread, pepper, salt, and onions.
All that day and the next and the next she saw the bright side of things
with almost dazzling clearness, waiting to visit her "prince" in his
Palace. She found him in a strange and pitiful state of nerves. The news
had produced too intense and varied emotions among those crowded
thousands of men buried away from normal life so long. She spent all her
hour and a half trying desperately to make him see the bright side, but
he was too full of fears and doubts, and she went away smiling, but
utterly exhausted. Slowly in the weeks which followed she learned that
nothing was changed. In the fond hope that Gerhardt might be home now
any day, she was taking care that his slippers and some clothes of
David's were ready for him, and the hip bath handy for him to have a
lovely hot wash. She had even bought a bottle of beer and some of his
favourite pickle, saving the price out of her own food, and was taking
in the paper again, letting bygones be bygones. But he did not come. And
soon the paper informed her that the English prisoners were
returning--many in wretched state, poor things, so that her heart bled
for them, and made her fiercely angry with the cruel men who had treated
them so; but it informed her too, that if the paper had its way no
"Huns" would be tolerated in this country for the future. "Send them all
back!" were the words it used. She did not realise at first that this
applied to Gerhardt; but when she did, she dropped the journal as if it
had been a living coal of fire. Not let him come back to his home, and
family, not let him stay, after all they'd done to him, and he never did
anything to them! Not let him stay, but send him out to that dreadful
country, which he had almost forgotten in these thirty years, and he
with an English wife and children! In this new terror of utter
dislocation the bright side so slipped from her that she was obliged to
go out into the back garden in the dark, where a sou'-westerly wind was
driving the rain. There, lifting her eyes to the evening sky she uttered
a little moan. It couldn't be true; and yet what they said in her paper
had always turned out true, like the taking of Gerhardt away, and the
reduction of his food. And the face of the gentleman in the building at
Whitehall came before her out of the long past, with his lips
tightening, and his words: "We have to do very hard things, Mrs.
Gerhardt." Why had they to do them? Her man had never done no harm to no
one! A flood, bitter as sea water, surged in her, and seemed to choke
her very being. Those gentlemen in the papers--why should they go on
like that? Had they no hearts, no eyes to see the misery they brought to
humble folk? "I wish them nothing worse than what they've brought to him
and me," she thought wildly: "nothing worse!"
The rain beat on her face, wetted her grey hair, cooled her eyeballs. "I
mustn't be spiteful," she thought; and bending down in the dark she
touched the glass of the tiny conservatory built against the warm
kitchen wall, and heated by the cunning little hot-water pipe her man
had put there in his old handy days. Under it were one little monthly
rose, which still had blossoms, and some straggly small chrysanthemums.
She had been keeping them for the feast when he came home; but if he
wasn't to come, what should she do? She raised herself. Above the wet
roofs sky-rack was passing wild and dark, but in a little cleared space
one or two stars shone the brighter for the blackness below. "I must
look on the bright side," she thought, "or I can't bear myself." And she
went in to cook the porridge for the evening meal.
The winter passed for her in the most dreadful anxiety. "Repatriate the
Huns!" That cry continued to spurt up in her paper like a terrible face
seen in some recurrent nightmare; and each week that she went to visit
Gerhardt brought solid confirmation to her terror. He was taking it
hard, so that sometimes she was afraid that "something" was happening in
him. This was the utmost she went towards defining what doctors might
have diagnosed as incipient softening of the brain. He seemed to dread
the prospect of being sent to his native country.
"I couldn't stick it, Dollee," he would say. "What should I do--whatever
should I do? I haven't a friend. I haven't a spot to go to. I should be
lost. I'm afraid, Dollee. How could you come out there, you and the
children? I couldn't make a living for you. I couldn't make one for
myself now."
And she would say: "Cheer up, old man. Look on the bright side. Think of
the others." For, though those others were not precisely the bright
side, the mental picture of their sufferings, all those poor "princes"
and their families, somehow helped her to bear her own. But he shook
his head:
"No; I should never see you again."
"I'd follow you," she answered. "Never fear, Max, we'd work in the
fields--me and the children. We'd get on somehow. Bear up, my dearie.
It'll soon be over now. I'll stick to you, Max, never you fear. But they
won't send you, they never will."
And then, like a lump of ice pressed on her breast, came the thought:
"But if they do! Auntie! My boy! My girls! However shall I manage if
they do!"
Then long lists began to appear, and in great batches men were shovelled
wholesale back to the country whose speech some of them had well-nigh
forgotten. Little Gerhardt's name had not appeared yet. The lists were
hung up the day after Mrs. Gerhardt's weekly visit, but she urged him if
his name did appear to appeal against repatriation. It was with the
greatest difficulty that she roused in him the energy to promise. "Look
on the bright side, Max," she implored him. "You've got a son in the
British army; they'll never send you. They wouldn't be so cruel. Never
say die, old man."
His name appeared but was taken out, and the matter hung again in awful
suspense, while the evil face of the recurrent nightmare confronted
Mrs. Gerhardt out of her favourite journal. She read that journal again,
because, so far as in her gentle spirit lay, she hated it. It was slowly
killing her man, and all her chance of future happiness; she hated it,
and read it every morning. To the monthly rose and straggly little
brown-red chrysanthemums in the tiny hothouse there had succeeded spring
flowers--a few hardy January snowdrops, and one by one blue scillas, and
the little pale daffodils called "angels' tears."
Peace tarried, but the flowers came up long before their time in their
tiny hothouse against the kitchen flue. And then one wonderful day there
came to Mrs. Gerhardt a strange letter, announcing that Gerhardt was
coming home. He would not be sent to Germany--he was coming home!
To-day, that very day--any moment he might be with her. When she
received it, who had long received no letters save the weekly letters of
her boy still in the army, she was spreading margarine on auntie's bread
for breakfast, and, moved beyond all control, she spread it thick,
wickedly, wastefully thick, then dropped the knife, sobbed, laughed,
clasped her hands on her breast, and without rhyme or reason, began
singing: "Hark! the herald angels sing." The girls had gone to school
already, auntie in the room above could not hear her, no one heard her,
nor saw her drop suddenly into the wooden chair, and, with her bare arms
stretched out one on either side of the plate of bread and margarine,
cry her heart out against the clean white table. Coming home, coming
home, coming home! The bright side! The little white stars!
It was a quarter of an hour before she could trust herself to answer the
knocking on the floor, which meant that "auntie" was missing her
breakfast. Hastily she made the tea and went up with it and the bread
and margarine. The woman's dim long face gleamed greedily when she saw
how thick the margarine was spread; but little Mrs. Gerhardt said no
word of the reason for that feast. She just watched her only friend
eating it, while a little moisture still trickled out from her big eyes
on to her flushed cheeks, and the words still hummed in her brain:
"Peace on earth and mercy mild,
Jesus Christ a little child."
Then, still speaking no word, she ran out and put clean sheets on her
and her man's bed. She was on wires, she could not keep still, and all
the morning she polished, polished. About noon she went out into her
garden, and from under the glass plucked every flower that grew
there--snowdrops, scillas, "angels' tears," quite two dozen blossoms.
She brought them into the little parlour and opened its window wide. The
sun was shining, and fell on the flowers strewn on the table, ready to
be made into the nosegay of triumphant happiness. While she stood
fingering them, delicately breaking half an inch off their stalks so
that they should last the longer in water, she became conscious of
someone on the pavement outside the window, and looking up saw Mrs.
Clirehugh. The past, the sense of having been deserted by her friends,
left her, and she called out:
"Come in, Eliza; look at my flowers!"
Mrs. Clirehugh came in; she was in black, her cheekbones higher, her
hair looser, her eyes bigger. Mrs. Gerhardt saw tears starting from
those eyes, wetting those high cheekbones, and cried out:
"Why, what's the matter, dear?"
Mrs. Clirehugh choked. "My baby!"
Mrs. Gerhardt dropped an "angels' tear," and went up to her.
"Whatever's happened?" she cried.
"Dead!" replied Mrs. Clirehugh. "Dead o' the influenza. 'E's to be
buried to-day. I can't--I can't--I can't--" Wild choking stopped her
utterance. Mrs. Gerhardt put an arm round her and drew her head on to
her shoulder.
"I can't--I can't--" sobbed Mrs. Clirehugh; "I can't find any flowers.
It's seein' yours made me cry."
"There, there!" cried Mrs. Gerhardt. "Have them. I'm sure you're
welcome, dearie. Have them--I'm so sorry!"
"I don't know," choked Mrs. Clirehugh, "I 'aven't deserved them." Mrs.
Gerhardt gathered up the flowers.
"Take them," she said. "I couldn't think of it. Your poor little baby.
Take them! There, there, he's spared a lot of trouble. You must look on
the bright side, dearie."
Mrs. Clirehugh tossed up her head.
"You're an angel, that's what you are!" she said, and grasping the
flowers she hurried out, a little black figure passing the window in the
sunlight.
Mrs. Gerhardt stood above the emptied table, thinking: "Poor dear--I'm
glad she had the flowers. It was a mercy I didn't call out that Max was
coming!" And from the floor she picked up one "angels' tear" she had
dropped, and set it in a glass of water, where the sunlight fell. She
was still gazing at it, pale, slender, lonely in that coarse tumbler,
when she heard a knock on the parlour door, and went to open it. There
stood her man, with a large brown-paper parcel in his hand. He stood
quite still, his head a little down, the face very grey. She cried out;
"Max!" but the thought flashed through her: "He knocked on the door!
It's _his_ door--he knocked on the door!"
"Dollee?" he said, with a sort of question in his voice.
She threw her arms round him, drew him into the room, and shutting the
door, looked hard into his face. Yes, it was his face, but in the eyes
something wandered--lit up, went out, lit up.
"Dollee," he said again, and clutched her hand.
She strained him to her with a sob.
"I'm not well, Dollee," he murmured.
"No, of course not, my dearie man; but you'll soon be all right
now--home again with me. Cheer up, cheer up!"