Bible takes on new meanings these days. I can't recall the chapter at
this moment. I daresay, you will remember it at once. "Yet once more,
signifieth the removal of these things that are shaken--as of things
that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain."
What do these words mean quite? Have I been clinging too frankly to the
things that are made, and must they all go one by one, so that I may
realise and grip the things that cannot be shaken?
Perhaps that is the war in a nut-shell. It is a poignant, almost a
terrifying thought.
He went this morning, Cornelia, New Year's morning, "in a blast of
Januar wind that blew hansel in on Robin." He looked so dear and
splendid in his perfect-fitting uniform (you know he never leaves
anything of that kind to chance and would go without food any day if the
fit of his clothes depended on it). I was worshipping all the time and
Cook, our faithful chauffeur, left the car at the door to come and see
whether he could help with the leggings which were rather stiff and
new--and just to take a general view. He was the picture of desolation
and woe. Old servants don't like those cataclysms. They have no
reserve weapons to deal with them. They are conservative to the
innermost fibre of their being.
At last they drove away to catch the north-going train at the junction.
I have often envied other women when I heard them speak with conscious
pride of their men at the front--but oh, Cornelia, when the door was
shut and the toot of the horn echoed faintly in my ears, I forgot to be
proud--and was nothing at all but a lone woman, left desolate in the
house of her dreams.
*VI*
Reconstruction is now my job. Everything that could be removed from the
wreckage at the North House has been removed and the ruins left to the
owls and the bats. The retrieval was conducted during days of pitiless
rain which accentuated the desolation. But it is all accomplished now,
and I don't go around there any more.
We had twenty tons of coal buried in the debris of the old stabling,
where it was housed, and the police came to tell me it would have to be
removed, if I wanted to get the benefit of any, as a steady pilfering
was going on. It was a tremendous job but with coal at its present
price an effort had to be made to get it out. It has just been put down
in the cellar of this house and the transfer cost four pounds.
In the absence of Himself, I have concluded the arrangements for an
actual possession of this house, which we have taken for a term of three
years. No more leaseholds for me in this country, and though a casually
rented house gives one an odd feeling of insecurity--anything may happen
in three years. There will have to be a little papering and painting
done, just to make it clean and wholesome, and then I will bring back my
poor sticks from the repairing shops, and group them in this strange new
setting. It is really quite a nice house, with some points the other
lacked. A great advantage when one has a depleted staff is a kitchen on
the ground floor. It is a thoroughly bad kitchen, dark and gloomy, and
the hot water arrangements, and facilities for cooking are positively
the worst I, an experienced housewife, have ever encountered. If I had
not two specimens of the salt of the earth in these regions beyond, the
situation would be impossible. They are quite selfless, as far as their
own comfort and accommodations are concerned. They think only of us.
Such personal devotion takes the edge off many sorrows.
Already I have a scheme which perhaps in the far future will convert
this house into a real home. How ineradicable is the instinct to
reconstruct in the human breast! That it cannot be killed has been
incontestably proved by the persistence with which our poor French and
Belgian confrères creep back to their ravaged fatherland and begin
again.
Himself builded better than he knew when he began to talk of
reconstructing the moment the shock was over. He is always
distressingly right in the fundamentals, and our small internal wars
have invariably been caused by my refusal to admit it. But life is not
all fundamental, Cornelia, it needs camouflage, needs it desperately.
All women know it.
There are gleams of glory. The finest is the love of the people for my
lover. A poor woman rushed up to me to-day to ask the latest news of
him. From her I learned that they call him "The Friend of the Poor."
If I were to die to-morrow, Cornelia, I could ask no sweeter epitaph.
I have decided that the house is not bad at all, and I am beginning to
sit up and take a little notice. Only I must not look out of the back
windows.
You remember the enchanting vistas spread before the green bedroom, and
the study window around the corner. There was no fret of the spirit
that could not be healed and comforted, always there was beauty to lift
you up, and a message, no matter how bleak the prospect elsewhere. It
was that dear intimate kind of a garden where there was something for
every mood.
Doctor Horton once came to dine and sleep when speaking at a meeting
here, and at six next morning he was out roaming about, to the disquiet
of the staff. He had visions of a hermit's study cell in the ruined
tower by the waterfall, and wondered why I did not establish a writing
room out of doors.
I explained that my writing was a stern business which would admit of no
distractions. I have found that even a very comfortable study is a bad
place for the cultivation of thought. A wooden bench and bare walls, or
the "fender end" of my childhood and a block on my knee produced the
best results.
But to return to the only thing that matters at the moment. I am
reduced to a cabbage patch. Even that is a misnomer, for there is not
even a "Kailyaird runt" i.e. remnant, on that little ugly bit of mother
earth.
It is a slice of No Man's Land that has never grown anything but weeds.
It is relieved by a background of trees, our own chestnuts, Cornelia,
whose glory of pink-and-white cones we used to watch till they were
mirrored in all their majesty in the clean depths of the backwater above
the fall.
When I want positively to revel in heartbreak, to be homesick and
unashamedly miserable (which I fear I am most of the time, since Himself
retired from the scene), I go to the uttermost edge of my No Man's Land,
where I can hear the rush and tumble of the waterfall, though I cannot
see its foaming tears.
To descend to mundane things, let me explain that this house belonged to
a master-builder who once upon a time had his workshop and all the
paraphernalia of his business in the backyard. After a while he secured
more ambitious premises, and carried away all the plant, leaving us the
legacy of a concrete floor in the very middle of the patch.
So before we can obey the Food Administrator's order to plant potatoes,
the concrete will have to be broken up and removed by the hand of George
Cook.
His face was a study when I explained that as the young doctor preferred
to drive the car himself, his, George's, job would be to make the desert
blossom like the rose. He looked at me, and then at it, queerly, with
his one active eye; pulled his forelock with rather a grim smile, and
went forth for a pick. Inside of an hour he had started on that task
and now the thud of the pick is the music to which I waken of a morning.
Sometimes consulting together (I am beginning to be interested, though I
try not to be), we doubt very much whether the concrete plus the
ineradicable root of an obnoxious weed called horseradish, will ever be
gotten out in time for a spring crop. But Cook is very dogged; and the
joy of the creator is beginning to lay hold on him. I find it is a
better day's work when I potter round the patch, sympathising and
anathematising turn about. Anyhow, the work of reconstruction, as
ordained by Himself, is going forward cheerfully. The workmen are in
possession of most of the rooms, and I am just about as uncomfortable
and as busy as the most active housewife could desire to be.
My war-work has had to call a halt till I get through with this business
of home making; that being the duty that lies nearest. You think I'm
not saying so much as usual about Himself? I can't, because, oh,
Cornelia, he seems to have passed out of my life! I get his dear
letters, but they are all about people I have never seen and don't want
to see, because they are there with him, seeing him every day, and I am
not. He is loving the life--you know how he would--and the boys with
whom he lives in the mess, himself the biggest boy of all.
In every letter I can sense the buoyancy of spirit that comes with the
laying down of responsibility. Here he had so much, and now he is only
a nut in the great machine of war, and so long as he does his duty and
obeys orders he can have an easy and comfortable mind.
He is stationed at the moment up in what is the frozen north, but they
are the hills of home, and he is assuredly content. He is not even
homesick, though always asking when I am coming. I am waiting for
Effie's next leave, when we will go up together. Meanwhile I must hold
the fort here, or all the wrong wall papers will go up, and there might
even be structural undoing if the workmen were left to their own sweet
wills. But it is an empty life, Cornelia, out of which the soul has
gone. Even the picture in uniform, on my desk, the man of the house at
war, fails to afford the uplift or the comfort once imagined. I must
get through with this reconstruction job as it affects material things,
and start the reconstruction of my own inner life. I, too, must go to
the war.
*VII*
I had your dear letter yesterday and have every word of it by heart,
even George's postscript. I always knew him to be an understanding
creature, but his knowledge of human beings, more especially the heart
of woman, is a wee bit uncanny.
Is he your product, Cornelia, or is he just the American husband at his
best? It is long since you told me (it was on that wonderful testing
first visit which we essayed fearfully--not sure whether it would
grapple us to one another with hooks of steel or merely end in a polite
parting with regrets on either side) that English husbands are not
properly brought up. You imagined, or really perceived, in them a
lordly air of superiority--and even said that some of our households
bear the impress of the feudal age in which our race was cradled.
I remember wanting to say that the criticism did not, and could not,
apply to Scotch husbands. But perhaps wisely I held my peace.
We left it, what is called in Scotland "a moot point"--and a moot point,
I guess, it must remain. Anyway, wherever George got his knowledge,
whether natural or acquired, he has gripped the essence of this thing
when he calls separation the supreme test of the bond. I am going to
write to him when I am through with this, and you are not to see that
letter, nor yet ask to see it--I need him--I want the man's point of
view.
What is this all about anyway? I think I hear you say with the uplift
of the brows which is your very own.
You, in America, with your semi-detached ideas of marriage, which enable
you to bear six months' or a year's separation without any sinking of
heart, or vague questionings, must naturally find it difficult to
realise our point of view. With us marriage is "for keeps," as you say,
and when upheaval comes, it seems always to spell disaster.
Perhaps our theory is all wrong, and an unwarrantable interference with
the freedom of the individual. But I can't be happy thinking of Himself
with a whole lot of new interests I can't share, making shoals of
friends, which is as easy to him as breathing the air, friends whom
probably I shall never see. He can guess pretty well what I am about,
but I can't visualise him. Just think of the hundreds of wives, and of
other women who are feeling like this, and who are at war with the war,
that has brought it about.
There is another side to the picture, the side that proves the part
truth of your assertion that we don't bring up our husbands properly.
Let me present a little cameo of the times in which we live. I was at a
war tea at a women's club in London the other day, and there met an old
acquaintance I had not seen for some time. She was quite
middle-aged--and had been rather dowdy, not paying much attention to her
clothes. Before I spoke to her, I was arrested by a subtle change in
her outward appearance. She had a smart suit on, and wore a distinctly
youthful hat with a rakish air.
The thing interested me, and I had to find out its meaning.
When we exchanged greetings she informed me that her husband, retired,
had gone back to professional work, which meant that he could not live
at home, but at a military Headquarters.
I sympathised and asked how she got through the lonely days which I was
feeling so desperately. She looked at me queerly through her shrewd
candid grey eyes.
"Oh, I'm not lonely," she assured me. "In fact, _entre nous_, I'm
having the time of my life."
"Tell me about it," I asked breathlessly, and she told----
"Well, I go out and in as I like, do all the things I have always wanted
to do, but could not. Nobody now asks me where I've been or what I've
spent. In fact, I don't really think I have any more use for Dan."
There, Cornelia--it will make you smile, perhaps, but there is a tragedy
behind it. Poor old Dan! comfortable, complacent, no doubt inflated by a
new sense of his own importance because his country still needs him, to
what strange and hostile atmosphere will he return! I can imagine him
rubbing his eyes and wiping his _pince nez_ and saying, "Tut, tut, this
will never do!"
But he won't be able to put back the clock. He'll have to march to the
new marching tune.
I foresee ructions in the household of Dan.
Meanwhile, she is having the time of her life!
It makes no appeal to me, because I have always been able to have the
time of my life, as she understands it. I have gone in and out without
let or hindrance, none daring to make me afraid. And now, I am just a
lonely creature like a bit of drift on the shore.
There is another side to which George calls the supreme test--a horrible
sordid side. Hear it now. When I went to France first in 1915, to talk
to the boys, I was asked whether I would go to a small forage camp in a
God-forsaken place away up near Abbeville, beyond the British
Headquarters. It was a kind of No Man's Land which nobody ever visited.
Lectures and concert parties passed it by. I said, "Of course I'll go,
it is what I've come out for."
So Effie and I got up at four o'clock in the morning to catch the only
available civilian train leaving Rouen for "up the line." The distance
could not be far, according to the map, but it took us till three
o'clock in the afternoon to get there. We were shunted into sidings to
let troop trains and ammunition trains and hospital trains go by, and
there were no passengers in ours except French officers and other people
connected with the war.
No women, but we two. I was so thankful to have Effie. Her gay
inconsequence, her complete disregard of everything but the great
adventure, helped us over every stony bit of the ground. Gendarmes,
sentries with fixed bayonets, grumpy passport and permit officials--she
captured them all. Youth is quite invincible, and when its smile is
sweet like hers obstacles melt like mist before the rising sun. If I had
even attempted that wonderful journey through the war zone without her I
should either have been shot as a spy, or interned for the duration. It
is short shrift for the middle-aged and the ordinary beings who can't
explain their business in the area where death and destiny walk side by
side. Well, in course of time, through several minor adventures, we
reached our destination.
A sturdy little divinity student from Aberdeen was holding the fort
there for the Y.M.C.A. and holding it well. When he went first to give
them a bit of humanizing Christian comradeship, he had to sleep with a
revolver under his pillow, fully aware that any night he might get his
throat cut. These men were not soldiers, though they wore khaki, but
rough east-enders, dock laborers, most of them, with lawless anarchic
blood in their veins. They had spent the major part of their lives
rebelling against law and order. They were the husbands of some of the
women whose faces broke your heart when I took you to my big mothers'
meeting "down east" two years ago. The fortunes of war had cut them off
from the grime and glory of the Barking Road, and those in authority
found them a tough proposition in that sweet valley in the pleasant land
of France.
We pottered about the camp till nightfall, when the men gathered into
the tent to hear the woman who had brought them a message from home.
I knew when I stood up in front of them and saw their faces, looking
grim and unrelenting through the haze of tobacco smoke and the reek of
the oil lamp, that I was up against something, and would need not only
all my art, but the grace of God to help me through.
But I got them after a bit, got them in the hollow of my hand--playing
on their hearts with memories of home, though all the time I knew the
kind of homes they had left, and how hard most of them had made it there
for the women they had vowed to love, honour and cherish.
When the talk was over they crowded round and one particularly
unattractive person with a scowling eye inquired whether he could have a
word with me privately. We managed it later on in a remote corner, hard
by one of the evil-smelling lamps.
"'Ere, missus," he began. "Do yer 'appen to know the Barkin' Road?"
I eagerly asserted my complete familiarity with the Barking Road, the
Kings' Highway to Dockland! I was even ready to proclaim it the finest
thoroughfare in the world.
"See here, then, Lidy, thet was good talk, but it don't go far enough.
Maybe I weren't all I should a bin w'en I was back there, but my missus
she ain't played the game, she's played it low down on me since I've
been in this 'ere war. I ain't had no letters from 'er for over four
months, and I carnt 'ear nuthink about the four kids nah, but a bloke
wot lives dahn our street sends me word that she's sold up the whole
bloomin' shoot and nobody knows where she is, and the kids is in the
Union. An' I carnt git out of this blarsted 'ole to see to the kids and
give 'er wot for. Wot are ye goin' to do about it, Lidy?" That was
what people call a tough proposition, Cornelia, the whole tragedy of
one-half of the war in a nutshell.
I did what I could. I tried to comfort him and took down all the
particulars in the note book already bulging with behests, which it will
probably take me the rest of my natural life to fulfil.
When I got back to England I made the inquiries, put the Salvation Army
angel on the track, and found it all just as he described. His missus
has never been found--she has gone down in the underworld, urged there
by the very same temptations which made Dan's wife say she had no more
use for Dan. Tasting independence of action and of purse for the first
time, she lost her sense of proportion. With the well-to-do, it is the
sweets of independence that is testing them--with the other sort, the
lure of the separation allowances, which means more money in hand than
they had ever dreamed of before in their poor, narrow, sordid lives.
There's something all wrong with life, Cornelia. It will have to be
straightened out and evened up, and the poor and the oppressed will have
to taste a little of the glory and the beauty and the dignity of life.
Perhaps that is what the war is for.
Meanwhile the poor bond!
It will have to be recast in the new world we are coming to.
How many of us will stand the test?
Himself has been back on his first leave. It is Sunday night, he has
just gone, and the door is shut again; leaving me inside while he is
speeding away back to the unknown. It has been a lovely heartbreaking
time. But he is detached, Cornelia, he doesn't belong any more. I had
made superhuman efforts to get the whole house in order, sitting up late
at night to cover cushions and put in all the fixings that make the real
home. He was very polite, looking industriously at everything, and all
the time his eyes were not seeing my poor little attempts at
home-making--but something else far away. All he said was, "It's very
nice, but I have all I want in a tent," He didn't mean to be cruel; he
was only gripped by his new life, saw the mess table with his comrades
round about him--the route march--the sham attack, all the pomp and
preparation for the real war they are going out to presently. The
things no woman can share; or can be asked to share!
It is the man's life, the big grey splendid thing which we are outside
of, not once in a while, but forever and ever.
He has changed, Cornelia--not to me, but he has gotten the vision of the
fierce arena where men are fighting and dying that Liberty may live; has
not only gotten the vision, but has become part of it.
And I am only the woman left by the fireside. I don't see the glory of
the war as I used. The envy I felt towards the women who spoke proudly
of their men at the front has died utterly. I don't want him at the
front. I want him _here_ desperately, every minute of the time. He
doesn't feel like that. He can do without me.
You said somewhere that since George heard that Himself has gone, he is,
like Carlyle, "gey ill to live with," cursing the waiting policy of the
President, the everlasting framing of notes full of dignified protest
about nothing in particular.
He wants to have a hand in the great big game, I know. But if the time
should come, soon or late, when your roads and streets shall resound
with the beat of armed and arming men, put the lid on George. Never
mind how, but just do it.
It is hell!
*VIII*
I am writing this quite a long way from my base. The Black Watch, to
which regiment Himself now belongs, has been sent to the East coast and
I am here in a billet with him for a few weeks.
It is the loveliest old city, interwoven with all the ancient history,
when Flemings and Danes and all kinds of weird aliens invaded or flocked
to these shores. It is beloved by your American tourists; if George and
you did not differ from all American tourists whatsoever, you would have
been here long ago, and could tell me far more about it than is to be
obtained out of the most authenticated guide book. You, however, have
always preferred to take your travel in microscopic doses, to make a
little bit your intimate and dear possession for all time. I am
surprised to find this old Norwich such a noble city, and I should love
to show you the ancient landmarks. It is full of treasures, of values
which cannot be told, or was, rather, for the powers that be have
mysteriously spirited them away, and the priceless stained glass windows
have been boarded up--the very most priceless of all has been taken
down. The fate of Rheims and Louvain and Ypres has made the city
fathers wise. But it is an omen, Cornelia, which keeps me awake o'
nights and gives me the jumps when I hear the streets resound with the
tramp of armed men in the silent watches--Himself having been summoned
with the rest to "stand to" as they call it, with their faces toward the
sea.
The boys have an expression which sums up these frequent forced
marches--they call it "getting the wind up." The wind is up here more
often than I like it, and when I hear quite sober quiet matrons tell
what they will do if the dread moment ever comes when the Hun invades
these shores, I have no strength in me. I am not brave at all,
Cornelia, something has been left out of my composition. This is the
most vulnerable part of our far-flung coast, and there is a great
watching army right along. Those whose duty it will be to guide the
civilian population in case of emergency have what you call the schedule
ready, and nothing will be left to chance. I don't want to be here when
it happens, my dear; this nameless lurking fear that never sleeps takes
the edge off the joy of being with him. He has no belief at all in the
landing of German troops in England. You know he is an incurable
optimist about the War. He considers that we are invincible and that
victory is only a matter of time. It must be a delightful atmosphere to
live and move and have your being in; it helps to keep one young. He
can sleep through anything and only grumbles when he has not enough of
sleep.
My war experiences are widening. Yesterday we had a bombardment from
the sea--not of Norwich, of course--if you remember your geography you
will know that it is not possible--but of the coast places, Yarmouth and
Lowestoft, less than twenty miles away.