The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  ‘My God! If only I were a man!’ she burst out, as she glared at Sarah and Fanny, ‘if only I had been born a man!’ Something in her was feeling deeply defrauded.

  Sarah and Fanny were soon knitting socks and mittens and mufflers and Jaeger trench-helmets.3 Other ladies were busily working at depots, making swabs at the Squire’s, or splints at the Parson’s; but Miss Ogilvy scowled and did none of these things – she was not at all like other ladies.

  For nearly twelve months she worried officials with a view to getting a job out in France – not in their way but in hers, and that was the trouble. She wished to go up to the front-line trenches, she wished to be actually under fire, she informed the harassed officials.

  To all her inquiries she received the same answer: ‘We regret that we cannot accept your offer.’ But once thoroughly roused she was hard to subdue, for her shyness had left her as though by magic.

  Sarah and Fanny shrugged angular shoulders: ‘There’s plenty of work here at home,’ they remarked, ‘though of course it’s not quite so melodramatic!’

  ‘Oh…?’ queried their sister, on a rising note of impatience – and she promptly cut off her hair: ‘That’ll jar them!’ she thought with satisfaction.

  Then she went up to London, formed her admirable Unit and finally got it accepted by the French, despite renewed opposition.

  In London she had found herself quite at her ease, for many another of her kind was in London doing excellent work for the nation. It was really surprising how many cropped heads had suddenly appeared as it were out of space; how many Miss Ogilvys, losing their shyness, had come forward asserting their right to serve, asserting their claim to attention.

  There followed those turbulent years at the Front, full of courage and hardship and high endeavour; and during those years Miss Ogilvy forgot the bad joke that Nature seemed to have played her. She was given the rank of a French lieutenant and she lived in a kind of blissful illusion; appalling reality lay on all sides and yet she managed to live in illusion. She was competent, fearless, devoted and untiring. What then? Could any man hope to do better? She was nearly fifty-eight, yet she walked with a stride, and at times she even swaggered a little.

  Poor Miss Ogilvy sitting so glumly in the train with her manly trench-boots and her forage-cap! Poor all the Miss Ogilvys back from the war with their tunics, their trench-boots, and their childish illusions! Wars come and wars go but the world does not change: it will always forget an indebtedness which it thinks it expedient not to remember.

  When Miss Ogilvy returned to her home in Surrey it was only to find that her sisters were ailing from the usual imaginary causes, and this to a woman who had seen the real thing was intolerable, so that she looked with distaste at Sarah and then at Fanny. Fanny was certainly not prepossessing, she was suffering from a spurious attack of hay fever.

  ‘Stop sneezing!’ commanded Miss Ogilvy, in the voice that had so much impressed the Unit. But as Fanny was not in the least impressed, she naturally went on sneezing.

  Miss Ogilvy’s desk was piled mountain-high with endless tiresome letters and papers: circulars, bills, months-old correspondence, the gardener’s accounts, an agent’s report on some fields that required land-draining. She seated herself before this collection; then she sighed, it all seemed so absurdly trivial.

  ‘Will you let your hair grow again?’ Fanny inquired… she and Sarah had followed her into the study. ‘I’m certain the Vicar would be glad if you did.’

  ‘Oh?’ murmured Miss Ogilvy, rather too blandly.

  ‘Wilhelmina!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You will do it, won’t you?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Let your hair grow; we all wish you would.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Oh, well, it will look less odd, especially now that the war is over – in a small place like this people notice such things.’

  ‘I entirely agree with Fanny,’ announced Sarah.

  Sarah had become very self-assertive, no doubt through having mismanaged the estate during the years of her sister’s absence. They had quite a heated dispute one morning over the south herbaceous border.

  ‘Whose garden is this?’ Miss Ogilvy asked sharply. ‘I insist on auricula-eyed sweet-williams! I even took the trouble to write from France, but it seems that my letter has been ignored.’

  ‘Don’t shout,’ rebuked Sarah, ‘you’re not in France now!’

  Miss Ogilvy could gladly have boxed her ears: ‘I only wish to God I were,’ she muttered.

  Another dispute followed close on its heels, and this time it happened to be over the dinner. Sarah and Fanny were living on weeds – at least that was the way Miss Ogilvy put it.

  ‘We’ve become vegetarians,’ Sarah said grandly.

  ‘You’ve become two damn tiresome cranks!’ snapped their sister.

  Now it never had been Miss Ogilvy’s way to indulge in acid recriminations, but somehow, these days, she forgot to say: ‘Oh?’ quite so often as expediency demanded. It may have been Fanny’s perpetual sneezing that had got on her nerves; or it may have been Sarah, or the gardener, or the Vicar, or even the canary; though it really did not matter very much what it was just so long as she found a convenient peg upon which to hang her growing irritation.

  ‘This won’t do at all,’ Miss Ogilvy thought sternly, ‘life’s not worth so much fuss, I must pull myself together.’ But it seemed this was easier said than done; not a day passed without her losing her temper and that over some trifle: ‘No, this won’t do at all – it just mustn’t be,’ she thought sternly.

  Everyone pitied Sarah and Fanny: ‘Such a dreadful, violent old thing,’ said the neighbours.

  But Sarah and Fanny had their revenge: ‘Poor darling, it’s shell-shock, you know,’ they murmured.

  Thus Miss Ogilvy’s prowess was whittled away until she herself was beginning to doubt it. Had she ever been that courageous person who had faced death in France with such perfect composure? Had she ever stood tranquilly under fire, without turning a hair, while she issued her orders? Had she ever been treated with marked respect? She herself was beginning to doubt it.

  Sometimes she would see an old member of the Unit, a girl who, more faithful to her than the others, would take the trouble to run down to Surrey. These visits, however, were seldom enlivening.

  ‘Oh, well… here we are…’ Miss Ogilvy would mutter.

  But one day the girl smiled and shook her blonde head: ‘I’m not – I’m going to be married.’

  Strange thoughts had come to Miss Ogilvy, unbidden, thoughts that had stayed for many an hour after the girl’s departure. Alone in her study she had suddenly shivered, feeling a sense of complete desolation. With cold hands she had lighted a cigarette.

  ‘I must be ill or something,’ she had mused, as she stared at her trembling fingers.

  After this she would sometimes cry out in her sleep, living over in dreams God knows what emotions; returning, maybe, to the battlefields of France. Her hair turned snow-white; it was not unbecoming yet she fretted about it.

  ‘I’m growing very old,’ she would sigh as she brushed her thick mop before the glass; and then she would peer at her wrinkles.

  For now that it had happened she hated being old; it no longer appeared such an easy solution of those difficulties that had always beset her. And this she resented most bitterly, so that she became the prey of self-pity, and of other undesirable states in which the body will torment the mind, and the mind, in its turn, the body. Then Miss Ogilvy straightened her ageing back, in spite of the fact that of late it had ached with muscular rheumatism, and she faced herself squarely and came to a resolve.

  ‘I’m off!’ she announced abruptly one day; and that evening she packed her kit-bag.

  Near the south coast of Devon there exists a small island that is still very little known to the world, but which, nevertheless, can boast an hotel; the only building upon it. Miss Ogilvy had chosen this place quite at random, it
was marked on her map by scarcely more than a dot, but somehow she had liked the look of that dot and had set forth alone to explore it.

  She found herself standing on the mainland one morning looking at a vague blur of green through the mist, a vague blur of green that rose out of the Channel like a tidal wave suddenly suspended. Miss Ogilvy was filled with a sense of adventure; she had not felt like this since the ending of the war.

  ‘I was right to come here, very right indeed. I’m going to shake off all my troubles,’ she decided.

  A fisherman’s boat was parting the mist, and before it was properly beached, in she bundled.

  ‘I hope they’re expecting me?’ she said gaily.

  ‘They du be expecting you,’ the man answered.

  The sea, which is generally rough off that coast, was indulging itself in an oily ground-swell; the broad, glossy swells struck the side of the boat, then broke and sprayed over Miss Ogilvy’s ankles.

  The fisherman grinned: ‘Feeling all right?’ he queried. ‘It du be tiresome most times about these parts.’ But the mist had suddenly drifted away and Miss Ogilvy was staring wide-eyed at the island.

  She saw a long shoal of jagged black rocks, and between them the curve of a small sloping beach, and above that the lift of the island itself, and above that again, blue heaven. Near the beach stood the little two-storeyed hotel which was thatched, and built entirely of timber; for the rest she could make out no signs of life apart from a host of white seagulls.

  Then Miss Ogilvy said a curious thing. She said: ‘On the south-west side of that place there was once a cave – a very large cave. I remember that it was some way from the sea.’

  ‘There du be a cave still,’ the fisherman told her, ‘but it’s just above highwater level.’

  ‘A-ah,’ murmured Miss Ogilvy thoughtfully, as though to herself; then she looked embarrassed.

  The little hotel proved both comfortable and clean, the hostess both pleasant and comely. Miss Ogilvy started unpacking her bag, changed her mind and went for a stroll round the island. The island was covered with turf and thistles and traversed by narrow green paths thick with daisies. It had four rock-bound coves of which the south-western was by far the most difficult of access. For just here the island descended abruptly as though it were hurtling down to the water; and just here the shale was most treacherous and the tide-swept rocks most aggressively pointed. Here it was that the seagulls, grown fearless of man by reason of his absurd limitations, built their nests on the ledges and reared countless young who multiplied, in their turn, every season. Yes, and here it was that Miss Ogilvy, greatly marvelling, stood and stared across at a cave; much too near the crumbling edge for her safety, but by now completely indifferent to caution.

  ‘I remember… I remember…’ she kept repeating. Then: ‘That’s all very well, but what do I remember?’

  She was conscious of somehow remembering all wrong, of her memory being distorted and coloured – perhaps by the endless things she had seen since her eyes had last rested upon that cave. This worried her sorely, far more than the fact that she should be remembering the cave at all, she who had never set foot on the island before that actual morning. Indeed, except for the sense of wrongness when she struggled to piece her memories together, she was steeped in a very profound contentment which surged over her spirit, wave upon wave.

  ‘It’s extremely odd,’ pondered Miss Ogilvy. Then she laughed, so pleased did she feel with its oddness.

  That night after supper she talked to her hostess who was only too glad, it seemed, to be questioned. She owned the whole island and was proud of the fact, as she very well might be, decided her boarder. Some curious things had been found on the island, according to comely Mrs Nanceskivel: bronze arrow-heads, pieces of ancient stone celts; and once they had dug up a man’s skull and thigh-bone – this had happened while they were sinking a well. Would Miss Ogilvy care to have a look at the bones? They were kept in a cupboard in the scullery.

  Miss Ogilvy nodded.

  ‘Then I’ll fetch him this moment,’ said Mrs Nanceskivel, briskly.

  In less than two minutes she was back with the box that contained those poor remnants of a man, and Miss Ogilvy, who had risen from her chair, was gazing down at those remnants. As she did so her mouth was sternly compressed, but her face and her neck flushed darkly.

  Mrs Nanceskivel was pointing to the skull: ‘Look, Miss, he was killed,’ she remarked rather proudly, ‘and they tell me that the axe that killed him was bronze. He’s thousands and thousands of years old, they tell me. Our local doctor knows a lot about such things and he wants me to send these bones to an expert; they ought to belong to the Nation, he says. But I know what would happen, they’d come digging up my island, and I won’t have people digging up my island, I’ve got enough worry with the rabbits as it is.’ But Miss Ogilvy could no longer hear the words for the pounding of the blood in her temples.

  She was filled with a sudden, inexplicable fury against the innocent Mrs Nanceskivel: ‘You… you…’ she began, then checked herself, fearful of what she might say to the woman.

  For her sense of outrage was overwhelming as she stared at those bones that were kept in the scullery; moreover, she knew how such men had been buried, which made the outrage seem all the more shameful. They had buried such men in deep, well-dug pits surmounted by four stout stones at their corners – four stout stones there had been and a covering stone. And all this Miss Ogilvy knew as by instinct, having no concrete knowledge on which to draw. But she knew it right down in the depths of her soul, and she hated Mrs Nanceskivel.

  And now she was swept by another emotion that was even more strange and more devastating: such a grief as she had not conceived could exist; a terrible unassuageable grief, without hope, without respite, without palliation, so that with something akin to despair she touched the long gash in the skull. Then her eyes, that had never wept since her childhood, filled slowly with large, hot, difficult tears. She must blink very hard, then close her eyelids, turn away from the lamp and say rather loudly:

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Nanceskivel. It’s past eleven – I think I’ll be going upstairs.’

  Miss Ogilvy closed the door of her bedroom, after which she stood quite still to consider: ‘Is it shell-shock?’ she muttered incredulously. ‘I wonder, can it be shell-shock?’

  She began to pace slowly about the room, smoking a Caporal. As usual her hands were deep in her pockets; she could feel small, familiar things in those pockets and she gripped them, glad of their presence. Then all of a sudden she was terribly tired, so tired that she flung herself down on the bed, unable to stand any longer.

  She thought that she lay there struggling to reason, that her eyes were closed in the painful effort, and that as she closed them she continued to puff the inevitable cigarette. At least that was what she thought at one moment – the next, she was out in a sunset evening, and a large red sun was sinking slowly to the rim of a distant sea.

  Miss Ogilvy knew that she was herself, that is to say she was conscious of her being, and yet she was not Miss Ogilvy at all, nor had she a memory of her. All that she now saw was very familiar, all that she now did was what she should do, and all that she now was seemed perfectly natural. Indeed, she did not think of these things; there seemed no reason for thinking about them.

  She was walking with bare feet on turf that felt springy and was greatly enjoying the sensation; she had always enjoyed it, ever since as an infant she had learned to crawl on this turf. On either hand stretched rolling green uplands, while at her back she knew that there were forests; but in front, far away, lay the gleam of the sea towards which the big sun was sinking. The air was cool and intensely still, with never so much as a ripple or birdsong. It was wonderfully pure – one might almost say young – but Miss Ogilvy thought of it merely as air. Having always breathed it she took it for granted, as she took the soft turf and the uplands.

  She pictured herself as immensely tall; she was feeling immensely tall at
that moment. As a matter of fact she was five feet eight which, however, was quite a considerable height when compared to that of her fellow-tribesmen. She was wearing a single garment of pelts, which came to her knees and left her arms sleeveless. Her arms and her legs, which were closely tattooed with blue zig-zag lines, were extremely hairy. From a leathern thong twisted about her waist there hung a clumsily made stone weapon, a celt, which in spite of its clumsiness was strongly hafted and useful for killing.

  Miss Ogilvy wanted to shout aloud from a glorious sense of physical well-being, but instead she picked up a heavy, round stone which she hurled with great force at some distant rocks.

  ‘Good! Strong!’ she exclaimed. ‘See how far it goes!’

  ‘Yes, strong. There is no one so strong as you. You are surely the strongest man in our tribe,’ replied her little companion.

  Miss Ogilvy glanced at this little companion and rejoiced that they two were alone together. The girl at her side had a smooth brownish skin, oblique black eyes and short, sturdy limbs. Miss Ogilvy marvelled because of her beauty. She also was wearing a single garment of pelts, new pelts, she had made it that morning. She had stitched at it diligently for hours with short lengths of gut and her best bone needle. A strand of black hair hung over her bosom, and this she was constantly stroking and fondling; then she lifted the strand and examined her hair.

  ‘Pretty,’ she remarked with childish complacence.

  ‘Pretty,’ echoed the young man at her side.

  ‘For you,’ she told him, ‘all of me is for you and none other. For you this body has ripened.’

  He shook back his own coarse hair from his eyes; he had sad brown eyes like those of a monkey. For the rest he was lean and steel-strong of loin, broad of chest, and with features not too uncomely. His prominent cheekbones were set rather high, his nose was blunt, his jaw somewhat bestial; but his mouth, though full-lipped, contradicted his jaw, being very gentle and sweet in expression. And now he smiled, showing big, square, white teeth.