‘Accident!’ said Nurse Eden promptly, and dashed through the empty bar, followed by Mary. They found Mrs Gerritt, the publican’s wife, who could only gasp and point to the yard, where a little cart-lodge10 was sliding sideways amid a clatter of tiles. Nurse Eden snatched up a sheet drying before the fire, ran out, lifted something from the ground, and flung the sheet round it. The sheet turned scarlet and half her uniform too, as she bore the load into the kitchen. It was little Edna Gerritt, aged nine, whom Mary had known since her perambulator days.
‘Am I hurted bad?’ Edna asked, and died between Nurse Eden’s dripping hands. The sheet fell aside and for an instant, before she could shut her eyes, Mary saw the ripped and shredded body.
‘It’s a wonder she spoke at all,’ said Nurse Eden. ‘What in God’s name was it?’
‘A bomb,’ said Mary.
‘One o’ the Zeppelins?’
‘No. An aeroplane. I thought I heard it on the Heath, but I fancied it was one of ours. It must have shut off its engines as it came down. That’s why we didn’t notice it.’
‘The filthy pigs!’ said Nurse Eden, all white and shaken. ‘See the pickle I’m in! Go and tell Dr Hennis, Miss Postgate.’ Nurse looked at the mother, who had dropped face down on the floor. ‘She’s only in a fit. Turn her over.’
Mary heaved Mrs Gerritt right side up, and hurried off for the doctor. When she told her tale, he asked her to sit down in the surgery till he got her something.
‘But I don’t need it, I assure you,’ said she. ‘I don’t think it would be wise to tell Miss Fowler about it, do you? Her heart is so irritable in this weather.’
Dr Hennis looked at her admiringly as he packed up his bag.
‘No. Don’t tell anybody till we’re sure,’ he said, and hastened to the ‘Royal Oak’, while Mary went on with the paraffin. The village behind her was as quiet as usual, for the news had not yet spread. She frowned a little to herself, her large nostrils expanded uglily, and from time to time she muttered a phrase which Wynn, who never restrained himself before his womenfolk, had applied to the enemy. ‘Bloody pagans! They are bloody pagans. But,’ she continued, falling back on the teaching that had made her what she was, ‘one mustn’t let one’s mind dwell on these things.’
Before she reached the house Dr Hennis, who was also a special constable, overtook her in his car.
‘Oh, Miss Postgate,’ he said, ‘I wanted to tell you that that accident at the “Royal Oak” was due to Gerritt’s stable tumbling down. It’s been dangerous for a long time. It ought to have been condemned.’
‘I thought I heard an explosion too,’ said Mary.
‘You might have been misled by the beams snapping. I’ve been looking at ’em. They were dry-rotted through and through. Of course, as they broke, they would make a noise just like a gun.’
‘Yes?’ said Mary politely.
‘Poor little Edna was playing underneath it,’ he went on, still holding her with his eyes, ‘and that and the tiles cut her to pieces, you see?’
‘I saw it,’ said Mary, shaking her head. ‘I heard it too.’
‘Well, we cannot be sure.’ Dr Hennis changed his tone completely. ‘I know both you and Nurse Eden (I’ve been speaking to her) are perfectly trustworthy, and I can rely on you not to say anything – yet, at least. It is no good to stir up people unless –’
‘Oh, I never do – anyhow,’ said Mary, and Dr Hennis went on to the county town.
After all, she told herself, it might, just possibly, have been the collapse of the old stable that had done all those things to poor little Edna. She was sorry she had even hinted at other things, but Nurse Eden was discretion itself. By the time she reached home the affair seemed increasingly remote by its very monstrosity. As she came in, Miss Fowler told her that a couple of aeroplanes had passed half an hour ago.
‘I thought I heard them,’ she replied. ‘I’m going down to the garden now. I’ve got the paraffin.’
‘Yes, but – what have you got on your boots? They’re soaking wet. Change them at once.’
Not only did Mary obey but she wrapped the boots in a newspaper, and put them into the string bag with the bottle. So, armed with the longest kitchen poker, she left.
‘It’s raining again,’ was Miss Fowler’s last word, ‘but – I know you won’t be happy till that’s disposed of.’
‘It won’t take long. I’ve got everything down there, and I’ve put the lid on the destructor to keep the wet out.’
The shrubbery was filling with twilight by the time she had completed her arrangements and sprinkled the sacrificial oil. As she lit the match that would burn her heart to ashes, she heard a groan or a grunt behind the dense Portugal laurels.
‘Cheape?’ she called impatiently, but Cheape, with his ancient lumbago, in his comfortable cottage would be the last man to profane the sanctuary. ‘Sheep,’ she concluded, and threw in the match. The pyre went up in a roar, and the immediate flames hastened night around her.
‘How Wynn would have loved this!’ she thought, stepping back from the blaze.
By its light she saw, half hidden behind a laurel not five paces away, a bareheaded man sitting very stiffly at the foot of one of the oaks. A broken branch lay across his lap – one booted leg protruding from beneath it. His head moved ceaselessly from side to side, but his body was as still as the tree’s trunk. He was dressed – she moved sideways to look more closely – in a uniform something like Wynn’s, with a flap buttoned across the chest. For an instant, she had some idea that it might be one of the young flying men she had met at the funeral. But their heads were dark and glossy. This man’s was as pale as a baby’s, and so closely cropped that she could see the disgusting pinky skin beneath. His lips moved.
‘What do you say?’ Mary moved towards him and stooped.
‘Laty! Laty! Laty!’ he muttered, while his hands picked at the dead wet leaves. There was no doubt as to his nationality. It made her so angry that she strode back to the destructor, though it was still too hot to use the poker there. Wynn’s books seemed to be catching well. She looked up at the oak behind the man; several of the light upper and two or three rotten lower branches had broken and scattered their rubbish on the shrubbery path. On the lowest fork a helmet, with dependent strings, showed like a bird’s-nest in the light of a long-tongued flame. Evidently this person had fallen through the tree. Wynn had told her that it was quite possible for people to fall out of aeroplanes. Wynn told her, too, that trees were useful things to break an aviator’s fall, but in this case the aviator must have been broken or he would have moved from his queer position. He seemed helpless except for his horrible rolling head. On the other hand, she could see a pistol-case at his belt – and Mary loathed pistols. Months ago, after reading certain Belgian reports11 together, she and Miss Fowler had had dealings with one – a huge revolver with flat-nosed bullets, which latter, Wynn said, were forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised enemies. ‘They’re good enough for us,’ Miss Fowler had replied. ‘Show Mary how it works.’ And Wynn, laughing at the mere possibility of any such need, had led the craven winking Mary into the Rector’s disused quarry, and had shown her how to fire the terrible machine. It lay now in the top left-hand drawer of her toilet-table – a memento not included in the burning. Wynn would be pleased to see how she was not afraid.
She slipped up to the house to get it. When she came through the rain, the eyes in the head were alive with expectation. The mouth even tried to smile. But at sight of the revolver its corners went down just like Edna Gerritt’s. A tear trickled from one eye, and the head rolled from shoulder to shoulder as though trying to point out something.
‘Cassée. Tout cassée,’ it whimpered.
‘What do you say?’ said Mary disgustedly, keeping well to one side, though only the head moved.
‘Cassée,’ it repeated. ‘Che me rends. Le médecin!12 Toctor!’
‘Nein!’ said she, bringing all her small German to bear with the big pistol. �
��Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.’13
The head was still. Mary’s hand dropped. She had been careful to keep her finger off the trigger for fear of accidents. After a few moments’ waiting, she returned to the destructor, where the flames were falling, and churned up Wynn’s charring books with the poker. Again the head groaned for the doctor.
‘Stop that!’ said Mary, and stamped her foot. ‘Stop that, you bloody pagan!’
The words came quite smoothly and naturally. They were Wynn’s own words, and Wynn was a gentleman who for no consideration on earth would have torn little Edna into those vividly coloured strips and strings. But this thing hunched under the oak-tree had done that thing. It was no question of reading horrors out of newspapers to Miss Fowler. Mary had seen it with her own eyes on the ‘Royal Oak’ kitchen table. She must not allow her mind to dwell upon it. Now Wynn was dead, and everything connected with him was lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy poker into red-black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the oak would die too. Mary had seen death more than once. She came of a family that had a knack of dying under, as she told Miss Fowler, ‘most distressing circumstances’. She would stay where she was till she was entirely satisfied that It was dead – dead as dear papa in the late ’Eighties; aunt Mary in ’Eighty-nine; mama in ’Ninety-one; cousin Dickin ’Ninety-five; Lady McCausland’s housemaid in ’Ninety-nine; Lady McCausland’s sister in Nineteen Hundred and One; Wynn buried five days ago; and Edna Gerritt still waiting for decent earth to hide her. As she thought – her underlip caught up by one faded canine, brows knit and nostrils wide – she wielded the poker with lunges that jarred the grating at the bottom, and careful scrapes round the brick-work above. She looked at her wrist-watch. It was getting on to half-past four, and the rain was coming down in earnest. Tea would be at five. If It did not die before that time, she would be soaked and would have to change. Meantime, and this occupied her, Wynn’s things were burning well in spite of the hissing wet, though now and again a book-back with a quite distinguishable title would be heaved up out of the mass. The exercise of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to the marrow of her bones. She hummed – Mary never had a voice – to herself. She had never believed in all those advanced views – though Miss Fowler herself leaned a little that way – of woman’s work in the world; but now she saw there was much to be said for them. This, for instance, was her work – work which no man, least of all Dr Hennis, would ever have done. A man, at such a crisis, would be what Wynn called a ‘sportsman’; would leave everything to fetch help, and would certainly bring It into the house. Now, a woman’s business was to make a happy home for – for a husband and children. Failing these – it was not a thing one should allow one’s mind to dwell upon – but –
‘Stop it!’ Mary cried once more across the shadows. ‘Nein, I tell you! Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.’
But it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things could still be useful – more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a pavior14 through the settling ashes at the secret thrill of it. The rain was damping the fire, but she could feel – it was too dark to see – that her work was done. There was a dull red glow at the bottom of the destructor, not enough to char the wooden lid if she slipped it half over against the driving wet. This arranged, she leaned on the poker and waited, while an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.
‘Go on,’ she murmured, half aloud. ‘That isn’t the end.’
Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot. ‘That’s all right,’ said she contentedly, and went up to the house, where she scandalised the whole routine by taking a luxurious hot bath before tea, and came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw her lying all relaxed on the other sofa, ‘quite handsome!’
A MADONNA OF THE TRENCHES
Whatever a man of the sons of men
Shall say to his heart of the lords above,
They have shown man, verily, once and again,
Marvellous mercies and infinite love.
O sweet one love, O my life’s delight,
Dear, though the days have divided us,
Lost beyond hope, taken far out of sight,
Not twice in the world shall the Gods do thus.
SWINBURNE, Les Noyades1
Seeing how many unstable ex-soldiers came to the Lodge of Instruction (attached to ‘Faith and Works EC 5837’2) in the years after the War, the wonder is there was not more trouble from Brethren whom sudden meetings with old comrades jerked back into their still raw past. But our round, torpedo-bearded local Doctor – Brother Keede, Senior Warden – always stood ready to deal with hysteria before it got out of hand; and when I examined Brethren unknown or imperfectly vouched for on the Masonic side, I passed on to him anything that seemed doubtful. He had had his experience as medical officer of a South London Battalion, during the last two years of the War; and, naturally, often found friends and acquaintances among the visitors.
Brother C. Strangwick, a young, tallish, new-made Brother, hailed from some South London Lodge. His papers and his answers were above suspicion, but his red-rimmed eyes had a puzzled glare that might mean nerves. So I introduced him particularly to Keede, who discovered in him a Headquarters Orderly of his old Battalion, congratulated him on his return to fitness – he had been discharged for some infirmity or other – and plunged at once into Somme memories.
‘I hope I did right, Keede,’ I said when we were robing before Lodge.
‘Oh, quite. He reminded me that I had him under my hands at Sampoux in ’Eighteen, when he went to bits. He was a Runner.’
‘Was it shock?’ I asked.
‘Of sorts – but not what he wanted me to think it was. No, he wasn’t shamming. He had Jumps to the limit – but he played up to mislead me about the reason of ’em … Well, if we could stop patients from lying, medicine would be too easy, I suppose.’
I noticed that, after Lodge-working, Keede gave him a seat a couple of rows in front of us, that he might enjoy a lecture on the Orientation of King Solomon’s Temple, which an earnest Brother thought would be a nice interlude between Labour and the high tea that we called our ‘Banquet’. Even helped by tobacco it was a dreary performance. About half-way through, Strangwick, who had been fidgeting and twitching for some minutes, rose, drove back his chair grinding across the tessellated floor, and yelped: ‘Oh, My Aunt! I can’t stand this any longer.’ Under cover of a general laugh of assent he brushed past us and stumbled towards the door.
‘I thought so!’ Keede whispered to me. ‘Come along!’ We overtook him in the passage, crowing hysterically and wringing his hands. Keede led him into the Tyler’s Room, a small office where we stored odds and ends of regalia and furniture, and locked the door.
‘I’m – I’m all right,’ the boy began piteously.
‘’Course you are.’ Keede opened a small cupboard which I had seen called upon before, mixed sal volatile3 and water in a graduated glass, and, as Strangwick drank, pushed him gently on to an old sofa. ‘There,’ he went on. ‘It’s nothing to write home about. I’ve seen you ten times worse. I expect our talk has brought things back.’
He hooked up a chair behind him with one foot, held the patient’s hands in his own, and sat down. The chair creaked.
‘Don’t!’ Strangwick squealed. ‘I can’t stand it! There’s nothing on earth creaks like they do! And – and when it thaws we – we’ve got to slap ’em back with a spa-ade! Remember those Frenchmen’s little boots under the duckboards? … What’ll I do? What’ll I do about it?’
Someone knocked at the door, to know if all were well.
‘Oh, quit
e, thanks!’ said Keede over his shoulder. ‘But I shall need this room a while. Draw the curtains, please.’
We heard the rings of the hangings that drape the passage from Lodge to Banquet Room click along their poles, and what sound there had been, of feet and voices, was shut off.
Strangwick, retching impotently, complained of the frozen dead who creak in the frost.
‘He’s playing up still,’ Keede whispered. ‘That’s not his real trouble – any more than ’twas last time.’
‘But surely,’ I replied, ‘men get those things on the brain pretty badly. Remember in October –’
‘This chap hasn’t, though. I wonder what’s really helling him. What are you thinking of?’ said Keede peremptorily.
‘French End an’ Butcher’s Row,’ Strangwick muttered.
‘Yes, there were a few there. But suppose we face Bogey instead of giving him best every time.’ Keede turned towards me with a hint in his eye that I was to play up to his leads.
‘What was the trouble with French End?’ I opened at a venture.
‘It was a bit by Sampoux, that we had taken over from the French. They’re tough, but you wouldn’t call ’em tidy as a nation. They had faced both sides of it with dead to keep the mud back. All those trenches were like gruel in a thaw. Our people had to do the same sort of thing – elsewhere; but Butcher’s Row in French End was the – er – show-piece. Luckily, we pinched a salient from Jerry just then, an’ straightened things out – so we didn’t need to use the Row after November. You remember, Strangwick?’
‘My God, yes! When the duckboard-slats were missin’ you’d tread on ’em, an’ they’d creak.’
‘They’re bound to. Like leather,’ said Keede. ‘It gets on one’s nerves a bit, but –’
The Man Who Would Be King Page 63
