The Green Bough Part 35

Well--good Lord! It's worth while now, not that the blighters are going to kill me. I've got as much chance as any one of getting through. But you are glad I'm going, aren't you? You're not going to try to stop me.

They say the Army's big enough with the French on one side and the Russians on the other to knock Germany into a c.o.c.ked hat in three months. But I must get out and have one pot at 'em."

All this she had divined as her fingers tore open the envelope, but never had she dared to hope that the impulse of it would have come from his memory of what she had said to him those days when he was in the fashioning of her hands. This, she had made him. She clutched the letter in her hands and held it against her face and thanked G.o.d she had not wholly failed. The next two letters came together by the same post on the following day. She knew their handwriting. No envelope could have concealed their contents from her eyes. Liddiard's she opened first.

"MY DEAR MARY--"

"I suppose John has written to you of this preposterous suggestion of his that he should volunteer, and I know you will do all you can to prevent it. To begin with he is not of age. He will have to lie about it before they can accept him and, secondly, War is a job for soldiers and the Army is there to see it through. If they rush him out without proper training as I hear it is likely they may do, it's unfair on him; it's unfair on all of us. We've paid for our Army as a nation and now it's got its work to do. Calling for recruits now as they did in the South African war is not fair to the country. These young boys will go because they're hysterical with excitement for adventure, but where will the country be if they don't come back?

"I rely on you, my dear Mary, to do all you can to dissuade him from this mad project of his. With all the knowledge that one day he is to be master of Wenlock, I know he still looks reliantly towards you in that little farmhouse. Do all you can, my dear. We cannot lose him, neither you nor I."

With a hard line about her lips which, had she seen it, would have reminded her of her sister Jane, she laid the letter down and picked up that from Dorothy.

"Please--please don't let him go," it cried out from the written page to her. "I can't stop him. I've tried. He won't listen to me. I learnt those few days while I stayed at Yarningdale how he will listen to you.

He belongs to me. He told me so. Please--please don't let him go."

She picked up the other letter and stood looking at them together, side by side, then dropped them from her hand and from the bosom of her dress drew out the slip of paper John had written on and pressed it once more against her cheek.

Downstairs in the parlor kitchen with the pen and ink that Mr. Peverell used when he kept his farm accounts, Mary sat down and wrote to Liddiard.

"If I could do everything, I would do nothing," she wrote. "This is what I made him. I would not unmake him if I could. You must give. I must give. We must all give now. We've kept too long. Don't you know what this war is? It's not England fighting for her rights or Germany for her needs. It's Nature revolting against man. You've made your chapels and your t.i.the barns for yourselves. The earth is going to shake them into the dust again. If I could do everything, I would do nothing. He takes my heart with him when he goes. But there is nothing I can do. We must all give now--at last--women as well as men. These things that happen now--these are the consequences of pa.s.sion."

IX

To Mary Throgmorton, tending and milking Mr. Peverell's cows at Yarningdale Farm, those first few weeks of the Great War were as the resultant dream that shadows the apprehensive mind.

Every morning after her work was done, she would retire to her room with her newspapers, therein to read the countless conflicting reports which they contained. The feverish desire to give active help or be amongst the first of those personally to contribute to the cause found her calm and self-possessed. She had her work to do. So long as the cows were there in Mr. Peverell's meadows, they had to be milked. Her duty it had been for the last eighteen years to milk them. Her duty it seemed to her to continue.

From all the villages round about them, the young men were going up to join the colors. Little processions of them accompanied by their mothers and sweethearts pa.s.sed along the roads to the station, going to the nearest recruiting office. Most of them had flowers in their caps and went singing on their way, lifting their voices to a cheer at sight of any whom they pa.s.sed.

Whenever she met them, Mary cheered in fervent response; but looking back over her shoulder when they had gone by, there were tears, hot and stinging in her eyes, so that always their departure to her was through a mist. They vanished, nebulous, like spirits, out of her sight. She looked till she could see no longer. The vision of them trembled as the air trembles over the scorching earth on a summer's day. She felt it was the last vision she would ever have of them.

Only their mothers and their sweethearts came back, little weeping groups of them, along the same road. Whenever she saw these approaching her, she would break her way into the fields or the woods rather than pa.s.s them by. For more than the boys themselves with the high light of a strange laughter in their eyes, it was the faces of the mothers as they all went by together, that had dragged, like the warning pains of child-birth, at her heart.

Pale beneath the wind-burnt ruddy skins they were. It was pallor of anger; anger of soul at the senseless waste. The cry of England for her sons was loud indeed. In countless hearts the note of it was shrilling without need of proclamation. These boys had heard it and heard no more. Their mothers had heard it too. No less had it rung its cry in Mary's ears. But deeper and further-reaching was the hearing of the women in those early days of war.

Later, doubtless, their senses became almost numb to the true meaning of that voice flung far across the land. Even the vitality of despair grew still in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The horrors of war sickened, choked, asphyxiated them. They gave their sons like animals going to the slaughter house with eyes that were staring and wide, and in whose nostrils the heavy smell of blood had acted as a soporific on the brain.

But at first, Mary had little doubt of the look she saw in those mothers' eyes. They were giving up, not what they had got, but what they had made. The created thing they were sacrificing; the thing which in love and pain and energy of soul they had offered out of themselves to give life to. There was little of the fervor of patriotism about them. To those country railway stations they marched with their pale faces, their set lips, the aching pain in their eyes. Each for her son's sake smiled as he looked at her; each for her son's sake smiled as she waved farewell. But on the hollow mask she wore, that smile was but a painted thing. He looked to his sweetheart or he laughed to his companions and it died away.

Somewhere in their buried and inarticulate consciousness, those mothers knew that wrong was being done to them. Vaguely they knew it was man with his laws of force and his pa.s.sion of possession who had done that wrong; vaguely they knew it, but had no clear vision in their hearts to give them voice to revile.

Such an one Mary came upon, a day when rain had driven her to take shelter and she came back by a foot-path across the fields. On the smooth rail of a well-worn stile the woman was seated, her feet resting for support on the step below, her body faintly swinging to and fro, not for comfort but as though she rocked sorrow like a suffering babe in her arms.

At sound, then sight of Mary who must cross the stile if she pa.s.sed that way, the woman sat erect and took her feet down from their resting-place.

Once having seen her, she looked no more at Mary as she approached, but set her face outwards with a steady gaze in her eyes. In an impetus of memory, Mary recognized her as one of a little band she had seen marching to the station earlier in the day. She had been alone with her son. No sweetheart was there to share their parting. Alone she had bid farewell to him. Alone she returned.

Had there been others with her, Mary might have, turned back; at least she would have hurried by. Now, coming to the stile, she stopped.

"Have you lost your way?" she inquired.

"No, thank you, Miss."

"It was only I saw you coming by the road this morning and this footpath doesn't lead to Lonesome Ford."

"We came by the road because all the boys were going that way. They take it easier when they go all together. Seems they laugh in a crowd.

What we have acomin' back seems best alone."

Mary made gentle inquiries, what recruiting office her son had gone to--what regiment he hoped to join--his age--his trade--what other sons she had.

"He's my only--" she replied steadily.

Had she broken into weeping, Mary would have comforted and left her.

Tears are their own solace and need no company. But there were no tears here. She sat upon the top rail of the stile, her head high above Mary, her features sharp and almost hard against the sky, her eyes set fast across the rolling fields that dipped and lifted, with elm-treed hollows and uplands all spread gold with corn.

"I have one only," said Mary quietly. "He's in training now."

That made them one, but the calm voice of her who had spoken made the other lean towards that unity for dependence. Impulsively she stretched out her hand and straight and firmly Mary took it.

"I don't know who you are, Ma'am," she said with words her emotion quickened on her lips. "I'm more or less of a stranger to these parts.

You may be a grand lady for all I know and judging by your voice, but the way you spoke and all that's happening these days, seems to me we're all just women now."

"All just women," said Mary softly.

She responded eagerly to the gentle encouragement and went swiftly on as though no interruption had been made.

"What I mean," she said, "we've both just parted from what's dearest to us in life--that makes us one. You might be a lord's lady and I just one of common folk--no less, we're one. Something's happened to us that's made us look up like and see each other--it's made you put out your hand to me and what I want to know is what it is that's happened, because with all these talks of England in danger and hatred of those beasts of Germans, there seems something else and I can't get it right. I know, now it's come to it, my son's got to go out and fight. I wouldn't stop him. But I don't think I'd have brought him into the world if I'd known.

There are some as like fighting. He doesn't. He cried in my lap last night, but not because he couldn't make up his mind to go. He knew he was going this morning, but he cried in my lap and I heard him say, 'I know I shall fight and hate and go mad with the rest of them when it comes to the time.' I don't rightly know what he meant by that. I hope he does hate but it seemed to me as if it was that he feared most."

"Perhaps he saw himself mad and drunk with blood," said Mary. "Can't you imagine he'd loathe the sight of that? Have you ever seen a woman intoxicated with drink?"

"Once I did--no--twice I did."

"Would you like to think of yourself like that?"

She bent her head.

"You've made that plain," she muttered. "I didn't care asking him at the time. Seemed he just wanted to go talking on with no questions.

There'll be hundreds like him, I suppose, thousands perhaps and some as like fighting. 'Twill be an adventure to them, but h.e.l.l it'll be to him. P'r'aps that's as it must be. The world's all sorts. But I can't help thinking the world's wrong for us women. Be they the fighting kind or not, we didn't bring 'em into the world for this wasting. They say that thousands of our boys were lost during that first retreat from 'Mons' I think they call it. If you saw the thousands of mothers they belong to all come together in a crowd like the boys marching and they had some one to lead 'em, what would they do to them as have made this war? They'd tear them limb from limb. That's what they'd do. I used to think the world was a fair and sweet enough place once. They told us there, those people up in London in the Government there could be no war. The papers said it. Up to the last they said it. Every man said it to you, too. There can't be no war, they said, not a big European war, they said, the world 'd stop still in a month, they said, there'd be no trade. Seems to me men go sweating in labor and toiling with work and half the time they don't know what they're making."