by Ursula Bloom
‘Why do you always go about asking for trouble?’ Then she stopped, for she saw the bleeding knee and was angry with herself for bullying him. She made the excuse of seeing Stanley to the door, and in the thin hall found that she was shaking with temper. The bicycle must be mended at once, that would eat a goodly hole into next week’s money, and already four shillings of it was pledged for the flannel trousers. The ice bucket sank into the fathomless pit of things unattainable. She was annoyed with herself that she should be thinking of ways and means when Twit was badly hurt. She wished that she had not said so much and that she could control her resentment, and she determined that she would try. As she entered the dining-room she heard Isobel saying:
‘I believe I can mend those trousers. It is a clean tear.’
Things were not so bad after all.
‘You must take the bike to Harding’s first thing in the morning,’ began Jill. ‘I’ll give you the money in the evening when I am paid, only do beat him down to the lowest figure.’
Twit was still dabbing at his knee with a soiled handkerchief. His face was, if possible, even dirtier than before, because he had rubbed it with a blood-soaked finger. ‘All right,’ he said ungraciously.
‘Don’t say “thank you,” ’ remarked Jill, and instantly was angry with herself.
‘Children, children, why must you get on so badly? I am sure that Twit did not mean it. What did the man say?’
‘What man?’
‘The one you ran into.’
‘I was going fast down a hill, and the fog was thick. I saw them just as I shot between them. It fairly shook them up.’
‘Oh, Twit!’
‘I fell into the ditch and her dress got caught in the chain. The man was furious. He made me give him my name and address. I told him the lamp had blown out.’
‘Of course he didn’t believe you?’
‘No,’ said Twit savagely. ‘If you knew it all first why do you want me to tell you about it? He said he would run me in. They’d no business in the middle of the road in a fog. Just the sort of one-eyed thing Jill and Stanley would do.’
‘Oh, is it?’
‘Yes, it is! I think I shall go to bed, my knee feels rottenly stiff.’
Isobel thought apprehensively of tetanus. It would be all on a par with Twit’s record. She said that she would bind the knee up when he was in bed, and he went off uncomplaining. Jill felt that was the worst part about Twit. He bore pain with a noble serenity that made her uncomfortably conscious of having been unkind. All night she was angry with herself, in between those moments when she was trying to pan out the twenty-nine and threepence salary. There was the remainder on the flannel trousers and the repairs to the bicycle. Also something would have to be set aside supposing the irate gentleman who had been overridden should follow up his threats by taking proceedings.
In the morning Twit’s knee was too bad to allow him to go to the works. He had made no fuss about the injury and therefore they had underestimated it. In the evening they had to send for the doctor. He put two stitches in the gap, and Twit bore the pain with an unflinching fortitude. Later he said that he supposed his luck must be out. Jill was bitterly ashamed that she had blamed him so harshly, for, after all, the mere sacrifice of her petty little salary was small compared with the pain that he was suffering.
Twit, lying in bed, rebuilt his dream-castles. But the dream-castle in which Emily and her legacy existed was no more. Yesterday had shattered it. Somehow, with the ruins of it so close, he could not see the same clear rapture in the others. They were circumfused with disappointment. Yet others might leave him something ‒ Aunt Blanche, Uncle Henry, or even George himself. They were all established in this tall battlemented castle with ‘Legacy’ written in flaming golden letters across its portcullis. There was close to it the scintillating white castle marked ‘Genius.’ From this he imagined he would emerge proclaimed by the world. Some marvellous invention would have given him pride of place. Why not? He had the essentials for it. He was queer. All geniuses were queer, he believed. He acknowledged that dominating queerness, and it hurt him. His fellows shunned him because of it. The boys at school had avoided him. The men at the works considered him ‘stuck up’ and ‘sidey,’ but he attributed that to Jill and his mother. Twit had been content to acclaim himself as the very ordinary working man, but the men had realised a difference in Jill who was snobbish, and Isobel who retained her class superiority. There were two schools of opinion in regard to Twit at the works. One side thought he was ‘barmy,’ and the others liked him. To neither did he appear as a possible genius; but the working engineer, busy at his lathe and bench, is not looking for genius. In spite of this, Twit had his plans piled high in a funeral pyre upon which he hoped one day to set as a guy for burning the grotesque, obstinate freak of a nature that obsessed him. It was the outer husk that would not let the inner man act reasonably. To this pyre he would set the fuse of his ambition and ignite it.
He smiled with self-satisfaction.
V
The man did not take proceedings against them.
Twit’s knee healed slowly and extremely painfully and kept him from the works for ten days. Jill proceeded no further with the breaking of her engagement to Stanley, because she was afraid to take the step. Yet suddenly within her she found a new urge. Isobel was ailing. For some time she had looked fragile and had seemed strangely languid. The strain was telling on her, the disappointment of her children had absorbed her being. Jill did not like the look of her mother, and she largely blamed her own connection with the family of Buggins. If she broke it off now, would that help matters at all? She prayed that something might happen, something decisive and big. Jill got what she wanted.
The first rumours of war coming in upon the littleness of their life were almost amusing. She did not see how war could possibly disturb them, save as a change, just when everybody needed it most. Isobel, opening the paper at a late breakfast, read the headers.
‘It’s thrilling, I hope it comes off,’ said Jill.
‘But it will be dreadful.’
‘I don’t see that it will affect us.’
‘Things will be dear. Prices always go up in a war. They have never come down since the South African war.’
‘I dare say it won’t come off,’ said Jill comfortably; ‘it’s the Balkan States after all, and they don’t count for much. Why should they make all this fuss over an old archduke?’
‘It would be a dreadful thing if we had a war with Germany,’ said Isobel. She remembered the forts on the Rhine, the military discipline, the Death’s Head Hussars marching through Bonn on a spring morning, with the green light filtering through the trees along Liebestrasse.
‘Oh, we shan’t go to war with Germany.’
When Jill got to the Hippodrome she found Mr. Cox in the deepest gloom of despair. He did a little dabbling in stocks and shares, and the bottom had fallen out of his investments. He was both panicky and cross. He prophesied a war. He prophesied everything that was gloomy and dreadful and volcanic. In his opinion the worst had actually happened because he had been affected. Jill sat in the pay-desk and thought about it, all the while there was a little red fire of a thrill running through her. She felt that something was going to happen, and that she was pregnant with that happening. The same thrill was in the queue that passed before her. It was in the crowd. The primitive impulse stirred behind it all, it was even in Jill. If it all came to anything, England was ready for a war; her hands were itching to get at somebody’s throat, the impelling demand of it was staring out of all men’s eyes. They were sick of the folded wings of peace, they wanted instead the clattering, famine-infested hosts of war. They wanted to stare into the hideous, eyeless sockets, to smell the putrefying flesh of slaughter, to hear the pounding of great guns.
Walking home with Stanley through the peaceful night, that other impulse seemed to be unreal. The world was so quiet in the silver of derelict moonshine, so sweet with the smell of August roses
and dew-drenched mignonette. There was no war undermining the serenity.
‘All a silly rumour, I expect,’ she said. ‘As if an archduke were so important!’
‘I dunno. Old Higgins in the Club said that he believed it would come to something. It was a foul murder.’
‘I daresay, but lots of Royalties have been murdered before. The Italian King and Queen, and the King of Portugal and the Crown Prince.’
‘Yes, but they were murdered by their own people.’
‘It’s murder just the same.’
‘Not the same sort of murder.’
‘If we did have a war,’ said Jill, ‘what would happen?’
‘We’d all enlist, I suppose, and go marching away.’
She visualised long lines of marching men in scarlet tunics, with flashing swords and rifles. There would be much banging of drums and blaring of bugles. She laughed at the brave beauty of such a dream.
‘Oh, what fun?’ she said.
They arrived at the garden gate and stopped under the rowan tree heavy with green fruit.
‘But it won’t come to anything?’
‘No, of course not!’
In her dream the banging and the blaring died down. She saw the line of men in red grown thin, and become merely a trickle of blood. It trickled into void. She let herself in by the latchkey and turned out the gas in its peeling brass loop. She went upstairs cautiously, round the bend at the top, past Twit’s door, and on to the big front room occupied by herself and Isobel. Isobel lay asleep, with only the moon flooding the room. She looked pinched and the outline of her face was sharpened against the long strings of her grey hair. Quietly Jill undressed, laying her garments aside one by one. She poured out the hot Ovaltine from the Thermos by her bedside, for she had had no supper. Isobel always put it there for her last thing of all. She crept into bed and drew up the cheap cotton sheets.
But the rumour of war had come up the stairs with her, and into the peaceful room. It was colourful, it was romantic, and try as she would she could not repress it. Supposing Stanley were led away? Supposing Twit went too? Stanley she could not stay, but the passionate mother-instinct welled up in her when she thought of Twit going. He could not see after himself. He might be hurt. She found that she was even fonder of him than she had supposed, and that the idea of war touching Twit was terrifying. It was linked with a sickish fear like that when you behold some small white lamb walking in its pathetic innocence into a butcher’s slaughter-yard. She had had no thought of danger until now, but she pictured Twit in the carnage with a horrible acuteness. She could not sleep. Somebody must stop the war. Somebody ought to do something …
She supposed nobody would do anything. She had come to rely only on herself, and therefore doubted other people’s capacities.
Yet, although she did not know it, all through that memorable night the history-making politicians were struggling to avert the hideous catastrophe of battle. As she fell asleep, she told herself cheerfully that it wasn’t any good getting worried over a thing that would probably never happen. All the same, there was a genuine thrill in war.
It was the spirit of primitive adventuring.
CHAPTER III
Do you remember the rats and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front line trench?
And dawn coming dirty.
White and chilled with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask,
‘Is it going to happen again?’
‒ Siegfried Sassoon.
CARNAGE.
I
Next day they decided that there could not be a war at all. It was just a scare got up by the newspapers, and things were looking brighter. Austria would manage its own war; after all, why should England interfere? England had interfered in a great deal too much in bygone days already. Effie Hancox thought that a war would be awfully silly, though it might mean a lot of officers, which would be fun. Mr. Cox was determined to be depressed about his stocks and shares. Jill had suddenly forgotten about such a triviality as a war, for she had discovered a sale of ice buckets (not Gamage’s, but as good, the man at the shop assured her), and only five shillings. By selling a blouse to Effie she obtained the money. The blouse had been one of Aunt Blanche’s Christmas presents and had undoubtedly belonged to one of Monica’s children. Jill brought her ice bucket home in triumph. The first brew of custard got burnt, owing to her being called away in the middle. The second was successful. Jill took it up to the Hippodrome and spent a hot hour trying to turn it into ice-cream. At the first house they sold two ices, which was not encouraging. At the second they got many demands for it, but, owing to a shortage of ice, the cream had gone soft. It was sickening to have the demand and no supply, and the other way about. Jill returned home less enthusiastic on the subject of ice-creams.
All the time Isobel maintained her opinion that war would be declared. One by one the countries rushed into it. Newspapers dashed off special editions, and sold them out and printed off more.
‘Anyway, we shall have had the fun of it,’ said Twit.
He was not at all sure that he did not want it to be a war. He had at this time a particularly attractive dream, in which he was scampering over a battlefield, with his unconscious general suspended round his neck, and dragging the wounded adjutant by the collar of his scarlet uniform. Thousands of Germans and Austrians were at his heels, but by sheer luck he managed to reach the camp under the fluttering Union Jack. He was decorated at Buckingham Palace, and the V.C. carried with it a noble pension instead of its more usual pittance. Newspapers discussed him. Strong men were glad to know him, and his mother and Jill realised that all along they had misunderstood him! Stanley, too, he’d made that little beast change his tune. Twit in his dream made Stanley recognise that he was somebody at last.
II
On the night of the fateful fourth, Jill and Stanley, walking back from the Hippodrome through the tranquil streets, suddenly saw the hideous juggernaut of war swerving towards them.
‘It’s going to happen, eh?’ he asked. ‘There’s going to be a scrap. I thought we should avoid it, but we shan’t.’
‘Just when I’ve bought the ice bucket,’ Jill thought; and said aloud, ‘but it won’t affect us. Life will be just the same for us.’
‘Not it! I’ll have to join up.’
She came to a standstill, her back to the crumbling stone balustrade that bounded some Victorianly planned garden. There was the smell of deep red roses, and of mignonette. You could discern the white blurred faces of nicotiana peering over the balustrade. It seemed to be typically peaceful. Above there were the stabbings of stars like sabre-points in the sky, with the thin scimitar of Cassiopeia’s chair curled round them. A lovely night, of glinting silver and deep strange darknesses, such as she had visioned a hundred times before, yet strangely different because of the war which menaced its security.
‘You can’t join up.’
‘We shall all have to, you bet.’
‘But what about me?’
She saw this juggernaut car driving directly between them. It must separate them by reason of its crushing bulk. It was what she had been waiting for, yet she was dismayed now that she saw it lumbering over her horizon. She turned the corner of the street with him, climbed the steps of the villa, with the stars shining through the green berries and the thick fingers of leaves on the rowan tree. The house seemed eerie. It had the pregnant silence of all empty houses, which acquaint you of their void by their very voicelessness. It was quiet with a new quietness.
‘It seems queer,’ said Jill, ‘I believe that Mother and Twit are out. Hadn’t you better come in, while I see?’
He came in, closing the door. They went into the sitting-room where Twit’s breakfast was laid out on the table in readiness for the morning, with a clean cloth spread over it. She lit the hall gas and ran upstairs. The house was empty. By the Thermos of Ovaltine, she saw a little note written hurriedly:
We have gone to
the station, to hear if war is declared.
She put the note aside and took the Ovaltine downstairs to drink with Stanley. He had drawn the blinds, shutting out the summer’s night with its yellow inquisitive eyes and its warmly fragrant smells. He lit the gas with a pleasant plopping sound, and it illuminated the room. It seemed a tired room, orderly with little details of toil laid about it ‒ Isobel’s knitting ‒ Jill’s crochet ‒ some fretwork lying idly by belonging to Twit.
‘Oh!’ Stanley saw her enter with the Ovaltine. ‘I’ll wait with you until they come back. Sit here along of me,’ and invitingly he patted the sofa beside him.
His words jarred. She made an excuse for standing by the table to pour out the Ovaltine into the cup, yet all the time she was conscious that he watched her. She was afraid. After all, she had not left the old insurgent war atmosphere in the Hippodrome, but it was here standing between these two. It was everywhere these days. It was elemental and hungry, fed by lust and passion, and taking no nay. She sat down beside him, aware of a new impulse that had come over her. It was an alarming impulse striking warningly in upon her virgin emotion.
‘Jill, if there is a war, you’ll stick to me, won’t you?’
‘I can’t tell. A war would make such a difference. Just lately our engagement seems to have got a bit stale.’
‘It’s your Mum. She will go on so. She never has liked me, she never will. Then there’s other things.’
‘What other things?’
‘A chap can’t go on being “pi” all the time. I’ve been good, come now, haven’t I?’ He put his arms round her and drew her golden head down to his shoulder. His voice became a whisper, his lips were hot on her cheek. ‘You know what I mean?’
She had a sick presentiment of evil. Then she had been right; it was not only imagination that a primitive emotion had come into this room with her. It had been poured fluidwise over all Europe. Stanley was passionate, and his passion nauseated her. An intense horror numbed her, and she could not struggle, she could not even voice her fear to protest. She was aware that his right hand had moved from its position about her waist, and now held her right breast possessively. His kisses were different too. He was whispering furtively, impulsively, in her ear. She sprang up suddenly.
