Scotland and I was not able to go. My marching orders were drastic.
Himself ordered me to Harrogate, where he said he would come the moment
he could get forty-eight hours' leave.
So I got me ready, and Janet went part of the way, branching off at
York, for Hull. I arrived at Harrogate like a person in a dream,
seeking a cure. A cure from what? Inside my heart were wounds for
which there never could be any cure this side the grave. I found I was
nearer the breaking point than I knew, for when I got to bed there I
found I was not able to get up again. The heart had gone clean out of
me. I remember Himself arriving from out of some void at six o'clock in
the morning, and his face as he stood over me asking me questions,
taking temperatures and doing all the things the Doctor has to do when
he is up against his job.
Then there were consultations and telephones and people coming in and
out of the room. Strange men asking questions and looking at me, and at
one another, with grave faces. I seemed so out of it all, and when I
heard them say outside of the door, "We'd better tell her," something
flashed through me with a thrill of unexplicable, inconceivable joy. I
had come to the end, the door was ajar, and I should get away clean and
forever from the fever and the fret--the holding up when you feel
yourself wilting, the carrying on when there is nothing to carry on
with.
Tired? There is no word that can begin to describe how tired I was.
Then they came in and told me I should have to have an operation
immediately--within an hour or two. I just smiled and said, "Very
well."
The next thing I was being carried down the hotel stairs on a stretcher
to the ambulance, where they laid me down rolled in a blanket--a nurse
was at the head and Himself sitting like a grim sentinel at the foot--we
never spoke to one another, not a single word. You have never seen him
look like that, Cornelia--you have only heard his laugh, and seen his
dancing eyes, while he tried to tease you and to imitate what he called
the Yankee twang.
As for me my eyes were fixed on the tender blue of the sky--flecked with
those wonderful delicious little fleecy clouds like foam flakes on an
azure sea, and all the time I wondered whether soon I would be up and
away beyond them.
It was to a private hospital they took me and I had to lie in a weird
kind of bed there till the hour came. I had no fear or apprehension--I
had just given up. Himself and I did not talk. When you have been so
long together surely everything has been said. But I saw his face hard
and set and sharp in the clear light, and understood that the bond had
stood the test.
The operation was successful, but when I awoke and found I was still in
the land of the living, I wept with sheer disappointment. I had relaxed
my hold, given up, wanted to be free. But apparently there is work
still to be done, but where, oh where, am I to find strength to do it?
Convalescence in pleasant surroundings is a kind of lotus land and I
have a sympathy I had never felt before for the women who acquire what
Himself calls the "nursing Home habit." The utter lack of
responsibility, submission to the will of others; complete surrender of
one's entity has its private and particular lure for the human soul. To
eat and sleep and get well is a simple creed enough, but it is apt to
have a corroding effect. Sometimes I had the awful feeling that I should
never be able to go back to the real world and begin the fight all over
again. I read much and was able to give my full attention to "Mr.
Britling Sees It Through."
It impressed me so much that I wrote a long letter to H.G. and had a
very characteristic reply. He is taking himself as seriously as ever,
and all the world is called to witness the evolution of his soul. I
have been watching it for quite a long time. To us who are veterans on
the road it seems all a little crude and pathetic.
Nevertheless it is one of the finest books of the war that has been
written. I expect you have already read it--tell me how it strikes you?
Himself, restored to his normal courage and cheerfulness, came and took
me home. His commanding officer has been very decent to him through it
all, and has not grudged nor forbidden the necessary leave. I was about
a week alone before Effie came and she is going to stay this time till I
am quite well. We have all sorts of plans. It all ended in our going
to Bournemouth to get out of the air raid zone and enjoy the sunshine of
the south coast.
The place was very full and though it was quite safe from the air
alarms--everywhere we met wounded and broken men, blinded men, and those
wearing on their faces the look of those who have seen and known. And
it was there at Bournemouth that we got the glad, the glorious news that
you had come in. We did not know how badly we had wanted it, how near
we were to the breaking point till the message which has transformed the
whole world was flashed across the seas.
We were at Boscombe and the Nicolls at the Bath Hotel at Bournemouth.
When we met that night I was struck by the expression on Sir William's
face even more than by anything he said. He looked like a man from whom
the cloud had been lifted and who could once more breathe freely. He
knows all there is to know about the war and when I saw the effect the
momentous decision had upon him, I seemed to realise how much had
depended on it. All he said was "Thank God, America has come in!"
* * * * *
I wanted to send a cable to George and the only thing I could think of
was "Hail Columbia!" Effie remarked, "It will be nice and cheap."
This has narrowed the dividing seas and I am seeing you and George and
all the other Georges and Cornelias who care, holding a jubilee.
Nothing seems to matter now--however long the war lasts, we can see it
out. Though the way may be uphill to the very end, we can climb it to
the victory peaks--companioned by your strength and sympathy and
substantial help.
I am so glad about it I can't sleep. Effie has just made a little
sketch of Uncle George receiving the news; it is a disrespectful sketch,
but I'm putting it in.
All that matters now is that we belong to one another and to posterity
forever and ever.
*XI*
I got your delightful letter yesterday. It came at the psychological
moment when I was right down in the depths. It was a friendly true hand
stretched across the dark void.
It has happened, Cornelia; Himself has gone beyond my ken in the troop
train and the troop ship, across the seas. It came, as all the marching
orders do, without warning or preparation. He was simply told to be
ready for embarkation in forty-eight hours--destination Egypt--not
France or Flanders, but away to the Orient, from whence come no leave
trains. How often have I stood on the platform at Victoria or Charing
Cross to bid some comrade good-bye; and been thrilled by the poignant
tenseness of the hour, the glory and the humour and the pathos of it.
Saying good-bye to a pal, however good he may be, is not the same as
saying good-bye to your very own, every hair of whose head is dear.
There was no glory nor humour for me that day at Waterloo, though Ronald
Robertson of the gallant Gordons did his best to provide both, with his
crutches and his merry smile.
I told you how he had lost his leg at Loos; a boy to whom legs meant so
much. All he says is that he would give the other one, too, if it would
do them any good. How are you to even _think_ of your own sorrow in the
face of a devotion so invincible, so divine?
We were a little company of close friends to see Himself go off; no
woman dare go through that ordeal quite alone. It was an officers'
train, some of them so very, very young, and so pathetically proud to be
really going at last in all the panoply of war, with the addition of
brand new pith helmets which extinguished their features when they put
them on, and made them look like overgrown mushrooms.
There was the usual hustle and delay, but at last the signal blew and
the snorting engine dragged them away to the tunnel which swallowed the
hearts of half the women left behind. It was an awful moment, just black
darkness that could be felt. There is something wrong, Cornelia,
something terribly wrong with a world in which such things are possible.
People can't have been meant to suffer so much, yet somehow I feel that
we have not come to the end of the pain yet. It is Calvary we are
coming to, and this is only getting us ready.
Himself said very little. He just looked wrung and asked some one in a
very quick, hoarse voice to take care of me.
So he is away out into the void, the biggest void of all, and I am left
to fill up and carry on as best I can.
Your dear letter has turned my thoughts into an entirely new direction.
George's summing up of your feverish war activities in America as
"getting restless in your sleep" is really fine. Tell him with my love
that I did not think he could have evolved it from his gay inner
consciousness. What I am absolutely sure about, is that there is
nothing feverish or casual about _his_ war activities. I shall expect
to receive a photograph of him in uniform. Age? What is Age? It
doesn't count in this war. The uniform took ten years off Himself's age
and he will see that they are kept off.
I know a man, one of our County magnates, who has given four sons to the
war. Two have been killed, one still fights and the last has been
invalided out and given a military post at home.
The old man, seventy, if he is a day, has got himself taken on somehow,
and in ranker's uniform acts as his Colonel Son's orderly and is very
particular about the salutes!
Love of country is ageless, thank God; Himself thinks before we are
through every veteran will have to take his stand.
Don't get worried, because you seem to be going slow. Of course, what
you tell me in confidence is a little disappointing. We did think you
were quietly getting ready before the clarion call was sounded.
Well, never mind, you will soon get a move on. You are such a
tremendous big brother. When you really get into fighting trim the
earth, to say nothing of the Kaiser, must tremble.
Tell George to write to me without fail whenever he gets back from
Washington.
I should love to come out to you now, but there is so much to do here
and so few to do it.
I am now strong enough to get into harness again and have been doing
quite a lot of talking at the camps and ammunition works.
The other night, I had rather a curious experience. They asked me if I
would go down to a big shell factory, almost entirely manned by women,
and speak to the squad on the night shift. I ought to explain a little
about the women working in Munitions.
They are not ordinary factory hands nor even all working girls.
When the urgent call went out that thousands of women were needed to
make the implements of war and stand as a rampart behind the fighting
men, the response came from all classes.
I know hundreds of women who formerly only knew work as something they
paid other people to do, who are now cheerfully standing on their feet
twelve hours a day with intervals for meals; living side by side in
horrid little communal villages with girls from the East End and the
slums, and who give all they earn to the war funds.
Further, they are happier than they have ever been in their lives. They
have found the key to one of the finest paradises available to humanity,
and are proving work to be a panacea for almost every sorrow. I don't
think they are going to lose that key any more.
But though it is all very fine, the first time I was in real big
munition works and saw these heads--some of them such pretty heads--bent
over the machines, I rebelled, just as I sometimes rebel over Effie's
youth being spent in the drudgery of the French war zone.
For we are only young once, and for youth there is no substitute. You
have to grip yourself hard sometimes when you are overwhelmed by the
sight of womanhood dedicated to the work of destruction and ask what it
all means. God made us creators, builders, conservers, and the waste and
cruelty of war is opposed to the very basic principles of our being.
Then why?
Just because there is one thing worse than war, a dishonourable peace
based on selfishness, and love of ease, and shirking of responsibility.
I had the same feeling always when I had to stand up in the huts in
France before the units of the First Hundred Thousand and it was only by
gripping myself tight and holding on to the great ideals they stood for,
that I had the courage to say anything to them at all.
The spirit is fine among the women munitioners but sometimes they get
tired and discouraged and long for the old sweet peace of home, and the
cheerful comradeship of the fireside. It is then that the welfare
superintendents, watching with unsleeping vigilance, call to the helpers
outside to come and do their bit. I was to speak to them at the lunch
hour, half past two in the morning, just to remind them that they are in
the trenches too and that they must stand solid and unflinching behind
the men who are laying down their lives for us.
I was walking to and fro on the great floor of the factory and had just
paused to ask a rather white, sad-faced girl what was worrying her, when
suddenly the lights went out. We knew what that meant, all of us, and
it really was one of the most awful moments I have ever experienced. As
we listened through a silence that could be felt, the machinery having
stopped as if by magic, we could hear the sinister grinding of the
Zeppelin engine overhead. We all knew that if a bomb crashed through
the frail roof very few of the four thousand would see another dawn.
Presently nerves began to break a little; a sob sounded here and there,
and once there was a little scream. Then some angel in a far corner,
guided from above, no doubt, began to sing low and softly, "Jesus lover
of my soul."
I have heard many lovely heart-breaking things, Cornelia, but never
anything that thrilled like that. It reminded me a little of your
Jubilee singers who came over with Moody, the Evangelist, so long ago
from your country. When they sang "Steal away to Jesus," it had the
same grip and thrill as it came stealing across the vast arena, taken up
by almost every voice. The effect was instantaneous; it fell like Balm
of Gilead on our terrified hearts.
We suddenly felt that God was over all, and that unless He permitted,
nothing could happen. Nothing did happen. After a time the menace
passed, lights went up again and work was quite quickly and cheerfully
resumed. We did not speak about it at all afterwards. It is just part
of the day's work.
I saw something quite as fine when I went to Gretna for a five-day visit
to the workers there. You know Gretna Green? Every good American does.
It is one of the shrines at which you worship. The sweet old world
village has been swept away, or rather become quite unrecognisable. A
great new city like those to which you are so accustomed "out West" has
sprung up. When I saw all the signs and symbols of organised industry
on a gigantic scale, I looked away across the shifting Solway sands and
wondered whether the ghost of Ravenswood, riding to his doom, ever comes
back to marvel at the thing that has happened.
Great crowds of women and girls are employed there and the welfare
superintendents have their hands full. The problems and grave menace to
youth segregated in such numbers far away from home influences are big
enough to keep some of us awake at nights. We are fully alive to them
and tackle them with all the wisdom and foresight we can muster for the
gigantic task.
The spirit is fine--patriotism is a holy fire indeed which can purge the
human heart clean of the dross itself.
I spoke a big incontrovertible truth in answer to a woman who was
condoling rather profusely on the loss of our dear home. "You can get
another house, but there is only _one_ country."
There are several rows of danger shops at Gretna, where the most
inflammable of all the high explosives is handled.
To minimise the loss in case of accident these shops have been made to
accommodate only ten or twelve workers. There was an explosion when I
was there, and some of the workers were killed. The girls behaved with
such quiet courage and endurance that one can hardly speak about it
without tears.
And every one of them insisted on being sent at once into another shop
to take the same risks all over again. The true war spirit which danger
and death only deepens and intensifies.
But oh, Cornelia, more and more I feel that it is all wrong.
If only all this splendid force could be dedicated to construction,
instead of to destruction, why then our social vices and problems would
melt like mist before the morning sun. But perhaps my vision is limited,
so that I do not see far enough. Perhaps we are building better than we
know in the midst of this mighty débâcle.
Perhaps, who knows,--the work of national reconstruction through the
discipline, the sorrow and the pain of its individual units has already
begun.
*XII*
Your last letter gave me so much to think about, that I have had to put
off answering it day after day. Have you observed that those who wait
for the convenient season, never, somehow come up with it? The time to
answer letters is when you get them, though there may be some danger
lurking in that admirable habit.
For instance, if you get one which causes your dander to be "riz," it is
better to wait for the cooling process. Disasters have been averted,
especially in business, by the counsel of patience. How often have I
had to get surreptitious hold of letters written by Himself and keep
them over till he said, "I wish I hadn't sent that. Why did you let
me?" Then I produce it and all is well. But sometimes I have been too
late, or he wouldn't let me intervene.
Then sometimes it was the right thing for the bomb to be thrown.
Peace at any price is not the best always; it can be the very worst.
And now he is away where there are no letters to answer, not even mine.
I haven't had a message of any kind for six weeks--I don't even know
where he is.
We live through these things. Thousands of women are eating their
hearts out all over the world, just as I am. It is the price of war.
What you tell me about your Anne fills me, not with your disquiet, but
with an understanding sympathy. You are feeling a little as I felt when
I realised that for a time I had lost the Boy. The period extended over
quite a few years from the second year of his school life. The first
year he was nothing but a homesick little chap, needing his mother
dreadfully. Then he began to stiffen up, his father standing like a
comrade by his side.
I never got him back, Cornelia, not as I had him once. He went out very
soon into the world of men, and the things he met there I could not
share. No woman can. When a man fails his young son during those
moulding years of destiny, there is no retrieval. It is the greatest
failure in history or in life.
Mine did not fail his son, and I stood by a little wistfully sometimes,
bolstering my heart with a vision of the days to be, when the grown man,
a child at heart, would creep back to his mother's arms.
But the day never came. I don't mind now, for he belongs to me so
utterly. Himself gave him up the day we laid him on the windy hill
above the sea; a chapter of his life that was the most radiant had
_Finis_ written across the page.
But I got my baby back, and can never lose him again.
You must not worry too much about Anne. Girls pass through quite as many
phases as their brothers and some of them are more tiresome. The only
child is an object for commiseration rather than for envy. Growth can
be retarded, sometimes even stopped, by over cultivation. Anne has had
too much waiting on, too much anxiety and sheltering care lavished on
her. She is the product of intensive culture.
But her nature is so sweet and wholesome that she'll come out on top
yet.
Of course the very best thing that could happen to her, would be to
marry a comparatively poor man and have a lot of children, certainly not
less than six.
I think I see you gasp, but Cornelia, in these words lie hidden one of
the first elemental truths of existence and of happiness. It is what we
were made for--to be mothers of men, and when for one reason or another
we miss, or shirk that high destiny, we have got to pay the price. What
can match the flowers of the field for beauty and strength? Their
sweetness is flung ungrudgingly on a desert world; no man prunes, or
trains or troubles about them; they are the children of mother earth and
greatly do her credit. We shall have to get back to old primeval simple
things where the big issues are concerned. The family, not the solitary
child, but the healthy, sturdy row, "steps and stairs," as we used to
call them, will have to become, as of yore, the basic column of our
national life.
The war which has torn at the very roots of our vaunted civilisation has
revealed to us the canker.
Anne is being as tiresome as a self-willed girl of seventeen can be, and
that is saying much. You see they know everything at that age, and
nobody else knows anything. Parents are back numbers, their only
function to provide the setting for the soaring ambitions, through which
seventeen aims at self-realisation.
I don't think there is much you can do at this juncture. If she had
been but two years older, I should have asked you to ship her over here
and I would have taken her to France. I expect to go there next month.
If she could be beside Effie and do a bit of honest work, the more
sordid and unattractive work the better, she would get something of a
perspective. When my girl went out first and I was very anxious, a wise
man and true friend said:
"Now you must leave Effie alone. You have done all you can. Let
Destiny do the rest."
It comforted me mightily and I have honestly tried to follow his advice.
It isn't easy. I am one of the candid outspoken kind of people, and I
never see any reason for not talking about what interests me.
But Himself and Effie don't talk. Half the time you never know what
they are thinking or meaning to do. I suppose they know themselves,
only they don't feel the need of sharing things. Once when particularly
exasperated, I informed Himself he ought never to have been married, as
he would have been a success as a Swiss Family Robinson, without the
family, quartered on a desert island. He just smiled and made no
comment.
A friend of mine, married to a very distinguished man, whose name I
daren't mention, said to me once: "It is quite possible to love your
husband dearly and yet to want frequently to throw him out of the
window."
I have just had an interruption from a woman who runs one of the camp
tents here--an awful kind of woman, who never stops talking about
herself for a moment. When she went away she thanked me for our
pleasant talk. I very nearly said: "Thank yourself, Ma'am--I had no
talk."
It took me back quite a long time to a Bohemian night in Douglas
Sladen's flat, at Kensington, which was filled to overflowing with a
motley crew of what are popularly termed "leading lights" of the stage,
literature, and art. The party overflowed itself out to the stairs. I
was caught in the passage beside Hall Caine; he did not know me, though
I knew him. How he talked! I was grateful to him, for it made me
forget the weariness and discomfort of the moment. A day or two later I
got a letter from him, written at Greeba Castle, Isle of Man, telling me
that the only thing he carried away from that party was the memory of
our interesting conversation. There was no conversation that I could
recall. What _I_ had carried away was a very interesting, one-man talk.
It was mostly about himself, but one forgets that when it is an
interesting self.
To return to Anne, I should not discourage that early love affair if I
were you. Some girls need such for their education.
From what you tell me about the boy, the experience is not likely to
seriously endanger her future settlement in life.
Don't worry, because she doesn't talk to you about it. You are the very
last person in the world she will make a confidant of in such an affair.
You are too near of an age, yet not near enough. Besides, you are her
mother. Don't bully poor George. He can't help it. Fathers can't bring
up girl-children; they only make it more difficult for the mother. He
can't do anything; and that he isn't worrying should reassure you, I
think. We have to admit that a man sees further and gets a grip of the
whole, while we are handling sections. Leave it at that. I mustn't
close without explaining why I am here in the midst of the great camps
stretching right through the heart of Surrey to the sea.