Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "I'm not the least bit concerned with them," she snapped, "for they aren't my sons."

  "They're somebody's sons, and they lost their lives in what I think a damned poor cause. Sooner or later everyone will come round to that view. Even Hugo."

  "Is that going to help him?"

  "No, but neither is adding to that wretched woman's tragedy by letting her know you lay the blame at her door. She's all he's got now, for he'll never run again, and if I'm not mistaken he'll realise that."

  "I never thought to hear you talk so cold-bloodedly about your own flesh and blood!" she wailed.

  "I'm not cold-blooded!" he growled. "I'm simply trying to make the best of what can't be altered. She'll make sure he gets the best treatment in the world, and she's in a better position to do it than we are!"

  It provoked one of their rare, smouldering quarrels that persisted right into early July, when a wire came informing them that a shipload of wounded was arriving at Southampton and they could go along the coast and meet Hugo and Sybil on disembarkation. There was no question of bringing him home. He was scheduled to go straight into a private clinic, supervised by Sir Oscar Firbright, the famous eye specialist, there to undergo further surgery for several months.

  * * *

  It was on the quay, as the wounded were being carried ashore into the waiting hospital trains, that she first questioned her attitude and began to reflect upon Adam's forthright advice. The change was not effected by the sight of so much suffering but by her first glimpse of Sybil during the brief interval before the hospital train pulled out.

  The change in her was shattering. She seemed to Henrietta no more than a ghost of the brilliant creature who had bounced up the steps of Tryst seven months ago, dragging Hugo in her wake like a barge towed by a splendidly equipped steamer. Her cold, classical beauty was all but gone. Traces of its sparkle lingered in the hard blue eyes, but the cheeks were pitifully hollow, the full, sensual mouth dragged down at the corners, and the famous Uskdale bloom had been drained from her cheeks by the South African sun, the reality of war, or both. Her figure, Henrietta recalled, had been slight but very trim at that spectacular wedding at St. Margaret's. Now it seemed angular and graceless, whereas her voice, hitherto slightly hectoring, had dwindled to a murmur little above a whisper as she said, brushing Henrietta's cheek, "You don't have to berate me, Mamma. I've been doing that for myself all these weeks. But the only thing that matters now is to get him well and in a frame of mind when he'll put his trust in his surgeons and doctors. That's my responsibility mainly but you can help if you will. Remind him he's so much to live for, even if it takes him a year to adjust to not seeing."

  "Won't he… isn't he likely to see at all?" Henrietta had stammered. "I mean… isn't recovery a possibility?"

  "No, it isn't," Sybil said, staring down at her elegant boots. "There's no point in lying to you or to myself any longer. The best we can hope for is a glimmer of sight in his right eye, and I'll thank God to the end of my life if we can achieve even that. I have to go now. I'm travelling on with the unit. It was kind of you both to come all this way for a few minutes."

  She boarded the train then, without a backward glance, and Henrietta, eyes blurred with tears, accompanied Adam across the platform to where the civilian boat-train to London awaited them in a siding. He said, with something between a sigh and a groan, "Well, there's the war everybody wanted," but then, in a milder tone, "He's in good hands, Hetty. Something about that woman I like, despite everything. Spunk, maybe."

  They had arranged to stay at the Norfolk overnight before returning home and as the cab dropped them off at the portals her eye caught a newspaper placard reading "Peking: Massacre Feared." Her heavy heart gave a great leap and then seemed to subside well below the navel, for she remembered Joanna writing to her only last week saying that Helen had written to her in May, telling her that she was based on Peking but sometimes accompanied Rowley to help out at out-lying surgeries. She caught Adam's arm as he was paying off the cabbie and said, "Look at that! It can't be that Helen and Rowland are involved…" and he said, gruffly, "Come inside and take tea. I can tell you more than you're likely to learn from the Daily Mail," and she went into the tea-room where he ordered tea and buttered scones with an air of gravity that warned her he must have been aware of Helen's danger for some time but had postponed telling her, probably on account of Hugo. She said, "Tell me, Adam. I've a right to know."

  "Nobody knows anything for a fact. It's all guesswork so far. That, and the kind of sensation papers thrive on. You knew there had been unrest in North China, didn't you?"

  "No, I haven't even glanced at a paper since we heard about Hugo. Every page was full of war news, and it only made me more miserable than ever."

  "Well, there's been an uprising of some kind. A secret society they call the Boxers has been working up a hate campaign against the foreigners, especially the missionaries. They've even killed one or two, but not in her province, somewhere a long way to the north and west."

  "But it actually mentioned Peking on that poster."

  "There's an unconfirmed report from Hong Kong about the foreign community there. A German diplomat has been killed and our Government has asked their Government to protect British nationals."

  "Can't we find out anything specific about her? I don't think I could stand another shock of that kind."

  He took her hand and pressed it. "Leave it to me. I'll find out somehow. I've got a good agent in Hong Kong and I'd believe anything he wired me, but I can't do it tonight. I'll get the wheels moving first thing in the morning. I know roughly where that chap Coles operates and will put some feelers out." He paused, still holding her hand and regarding her with the vaguest suspicion of a twinkle. "Poor old Hetty, you are having a time of it! Haven't seen you this way for long enough. As a matter of fact, I can't remember how long."

  "I can," she said, sombrely, "since the time of that rail crash all of thirty-five years ago."

  "Well," he said, "we all get our turn if we hang around long enough." And then, "See here, we're not doing Hugo or Helen any good by moping. How would you like to go to a music hall and don't pretend it isn't 'decent'. It's the best way I know of holding trouble at bay for a couple of hours."

  She said, unexpectedly, "I'll do anything to take my mind off Hugo. What time do they start? Is it after or before dinner?"

  "Both," he said, grinning, "but I'd best take you to the first house. The second gets a bit rowdy."

  She thought: That's the really comforting thing about him. He knows things. About what's going on in Peking and what time the curtains at music-halls go up. He knows me, too, enough to give me that facesaver about the propriety of visiting a music-hall on a night like this… She finished her tea and went up to their room for a rest and a wash.

  He knew the entertainment world, too, it proved, for he chose the "Star" where the bill included the great illusionist Devant and a galaxy of eccentric comedians and daring acrobats, the latter all foreigners, she noted, working in family groups. For two hours she all but forgot her misery watching pyramids of men, women, and children in skin-tight costumes pile themselves almost as high as the proscenium arch, girls presumably sawn in half skip nimbly from gaudily painted closets shouting "Hoi!" as they flashed wide, toothy smiles at the audience, short fat men in baggy trousers screaming abuse at tall thin men in evening dress, soubrettes who specialised in songs that would never have been tolerated twenty years ago but seemed now to delight the patrons, and jugglers who whirled clubs so rapidly that it made one dizzy to watch. He said, as they settled into a hansom and made their way back to supper, "Well, Hetty?" and she kissed him impulsively on the cheek and then, quite irrationally, began to cry. Just a little; just enough to require a furtive dab or two between lamp-standards as they bowled down Fleet Street, past the Law Courts and into the Strand. He didn't notice. Or pretended he didn't.

  2

  As she had half-expected, there was worse to come.

 
She never recalled a period as sustained and depressing as this, for the crisis in 1865, when they came to her for permission to amputate his left leg, had lasted no more than a few weeks. After that, with him absent and on the road to recovery, she was able to adjust, losing herself in his concerns at the yard and watching the calendar against his return.

  This crisis needed more stamina and patience than she possessed. Wretchedness and uncertainty stretched into months, right through the remainder of the summer, the autumn, and into the new year, when a mantle of sadness settled over the whole nation with the death of the Queen at Osborne.

  It was September before they were called upon to face the fact that Hugo would never see again, that further surgery and visits to Continental doctors were pointless. But, mercifully perhaps, the sharp edges of Hugo's tragedy were blurred by the long spell of agonised waiting for news of Helen and Rowley, and finally the shattering announcement that Rowley had been murdered by those Chinese fiends and that Helen had survived the horrors of a seven-week siege.

  There was relief, to be sure, in the news that she was alive and was on her way home, but Henrietta, entirely without experience of this kind of situation, was not in the least sure what she would do with the girl when she arrived. She was sad then that Helen had no children to take her mind off the tragedy and very relieved when Joanna wrote from Dublin saying that, as soon as her sister had rested, she would be glad to welcome her for an indefinite stay. The two had always been very close, and Joanna's jolly household would surely have a more beneficial effect on a young widow than a sojourn at Tryst just now, with everyone so cast down about Hugo. Adam approved the plan at once, saying, "Best thing in the world for her. There's only young Margaret here and the age gap is too wide. We're in no fettle to cheer her up, are we?" And then, advertising his lifelong detachment from the brood once again, "How old is she now? I never can remember the order they came in."

  "She's thirty. Just a year younger than Hugo."

  "Ah," he said, vaguely, "then I daresay she'll marry again soon enough."

  "I really don't know how you can say such things," Henrietta protested. "For heaven's sake, don't mention such a thing in her presence."

  "I've a damned sight more sense than that," he said, smiling, "but it's the best thing she could do for all that. No sense in making a fetish of a dead husband like Queen Vic. Oh, people are sympathetic for a year or so, but after that they go out of their way to avoid you. Just remember that when I pop off, Hetty."

  He meant it jocularly enough, she supposed, but she did wish he would save his gallows humour for George and his male cronies. The prospect of widowhood, even at an advanced age, terrified her, notwithstanding a tribe of children and grandchildren, and she could never forget he was her senior by twelve years. She said, "I daresay you'll outlive me, and I hope to goodness you do," and went about her business, getting Helen's old room ready in the west wing beyond the gallery and remembering, as she entered it, how gay and hoydenish those girls had seemed growing up here in the days when their safety bicycles were novelties.

  She managed at last to put Rowland Coles and his horrid death out of mind. She could always do that with people who were not her flesh and blood and when Helen did arrive, in the last golden days of October, she was agreeably surprised to discover that the girl, outwardly at least, did not appear to be devastated by her frightful experiences. She looked sallow and peaky to be sure, but who wouldn't, after having one's husband murdered and afterwards enduring a seven-week bombardment in a fortress with temperatures into the hundreds, horsemeat for rations, and the prospect of butchery held at bay by a few barricades and one's own fortitude?

  Adam helped more than he realised, questioning her closely about the siege as soon as he realised she didn't mind discussing it, and as more and more horrific details emerged Henrietta began to feel a glow of pride in her daughter's hardihood. She was sure she could never have behaved so gallantly and upheld the honour of the flag in that way, not even if Adam had been by her side. She was shocked, however, to learn that Helen had not only killed a man but gloried in the fact.

  "You mean you… you know you killed him? You weren't just… well, there, with a gun in your hand?"

  "I killed him, sure enough," Helen said blandly, "and if you can bring yourself to believe it, killing him did me a great deal of good. I would have killed a few more if they had given me half a chance."

  "Well, I can understand you feeling bitter and… well, full of feelings of revenge," Henrietta said, turning away from her daughter's hard, rather brittle smile, "but I mean… well… it couldn't have been a pleasant experience. Not even in the circumstances. And I really don't understand how it could make you feel any better about poor Rowland."

  "Well, it did," Helen reaffirmed, "but as to expecting you to understand how, I don't think I could do that, Mamma. You would have to have lived in China and been there and listened to those savages howling for blood. Maybe Papa would understand, having served in the Mutiny and buried those women and children slaughtered at Cawnpore."

  Adam understood and the curious change in the girl interested him, bringing her a little closer somehow. He said, when Henrietta had excused herself on some domestic pretext, "Do you mind if I add something to that? Keep up the attack, girl. Don't ever let self-pity creep up on you. That's no road out of the woods, believe me. Came close to letting go myself when I had to learn to walk again at dam' near forty but I held on somehow. Matter of professional interest. What make was that rifle you used to swat the Chinaman?"

  "A Martini-Henry," she said. "I found that out later."

  "It had a devilish kick, didn't it?"

  "It left a bruise on my shoulder as big as an orange."

  "And popping that fellow didn't get into the official reports?"

  "No. I never told a soul about it until now."

  "That was wise," he said, thoughtfully, "for you're full young and can begin again. Go over to Ireland. Take it easy and look around. Ease yourself back into the mainstream as I did. It can happen. I'm proof of it. How are you off for cash?"

  "I've still got your two hundred a year, and I'll get a pension, they tell me. Plus compensation for all we lost at the bungalow, but it will take time to come through I suppose."

  "I'll double the allowance and see that it's paid through our Dublin branch."

  "That's very generous, Papa."

  "Is it? I wouldn't say it was. Not for a girl who can tote a Martini-Henry and live seven weeks on horsemeat and champagne."

  He kissed her absentmindedly and went out into the autumn sunshine and down the drive to his observation mound behind The Hermitage, pondering with the slow, massive strength of an ancestral tug. Swanns had been in the killing business for centuries and here it was, cropping out in a girl who was the daughter of a tradesman and reared in what most people would regard as genteel circumstances.

  * * *

  Lady Sybil brought Hugo on his first visit shortly after Helen had left, and Adam read them all a brief lecture the day they were due to arrive.

  "Don't treat that boy as a helpless invalid," he warned. "Nothing more irritating when you're crocked than people fuming and fussing about you, handing you this and that and telling you to watch out. God knows, you don't need hourly reminders of a handicap of that kind. Leave all the gentling to his wife. She's a professional and knows her business if I'm any judge."

  She did, too, as he was very quick to note. She didn't let the boy out of her sight, but her ministrations were wonderfully unobtrusive so that he gained the impression she was working round the clock to accustom him to routines that would build up his confidence. As to whether she was making real progress, it was difficult to say. Hugo was very subdued and sat about mostly, like a big, ageing collie, too old and tired to frolic. Who could tell what the boy was thinking when he felt the sun on his face or the wind in his hair?

  Adam had a private word with Sybil about his future and, as he had expected, she had specific plans
for him. "He's going to take a course as a masseur at one of the big military hospitals," she said. "It'll keep him in trim and give him something to think about, as well as contacts with other handicapped men of his kind and age. I'm going to make sure he rides, too, on a leading rein, and I've engaged a retired sergeant-major as his personal batman. Truscott, he's called, formerly of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. I chose him because he was once a well-known amateur walker. He has as many trophies as Hugo, I wouldn't wonder. He'll be reporting here tomorrow if that's agreeable to you, Mr. Swann."