The terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter, and Summer holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as jewels on a string; and as jewels Helen treasured them. In due time Michael developed his owninterests, which ran their courses and gave way to others; but his interest in Helen was constant and increasing throughout. She repaid it with all that she had of affection or could command of counsel and money; and since Michael was no fool, the War took him just before what was like to have been a most promising career.
He was to have gone up to Oxford, with a scholarship, in October. At the end of August he was on the edge of joining the first holocaust of public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line; but the captain of his OTC, where he had been sergeant for nearly a year, headed him off and steered him directly to a commission in a battalion so new that half of it still wore the old Army red, and the other half was breeding meningitis through living overcrowdedly in damp tents. Helen had been shocked at the idea of direct enlistment.
‘But it’s in the family,’ Michael laughed.
‘You don’t mean to tell me that you believed that old story all this time?’ said Helen. (Emma, her maid, had been dead now several years.) ‘I gave you my word of honour – and I give it again – that – that it’s all right. It is indeed.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t worry me. It never did,’ he replied valiantly. ‘What I meant was, I should have got into the show earlier if I’d enlisted – like my grandfather.’
‘Don’t talk like that! Are you afraid of it’s ending so soon, then?’
‘No such luck. You know what K. says.’
‘Yes. But my banker told me last Monday it couldn’t possibly last beyond Christmas – for financial reasons.’
‘Hope he’s right, but our Colonel – and he’s a Regular – says it’s going to be a long job.’
Michael’s battalion was fortunate in that, by some chance which meant several ‘leaves,’ it was used for coast-defence among shallow trenches on the Norfolk coast; thence sent north to watch the mouth of a Scotch estuary, and, lastly, held for weeks on a baseless rumour of distant service. But, the very day that Michael was to have met Helen for four whole hours at a railway-junction up the line, it was hurled out, to helpmake good the wastage of Loos, and he had only just time to send her a wire of farewell.
In France luck again helped the battalion. It was put down near the Salient, where it led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the Somme was being manufactured; and enjoyed the peace of the Armentieres and Laventie sectors when that battle began. Finding that it had sound views on protecting its own flanks and could dig, a prudent Commander stole it out of its own Division, under pretence of helping to lay telegraphs, and used it round Ypres at large.
A month later, and just after Michael had written Helen that there was nothing special doing and therefore no need to worry, a shell-splinter dropping out of a wet dawn killed him at once. The next shell uprooted and laid down over the body what had been the foundation of a barn wall, so neatly that none but an expert would have guessed that anything unpleasant had happened.
By this time the village was old in experience of war, and, English fashion, had evolved a ritual to meet it. When the postmistress handed her seven-year-old daughter the official telegram to take to Miss Turrell, she observed the Rector’s gardener: ‘It’s Miss Helen’s turn now.’ He replied, thinking of his own son: ‘Well, he’s lasted longer than some.’ The child herself came to the frontdoor weeping aloud, hecause Master Michael had often given her sweets. Helen, presently, found herself pulling down the house-blinds one after one with great care, and saying earnest to each: ‘Missing always means dead.’Then she took her place in the dreary procession that was impelled to go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions. The Rector, of course, preached hope and prophesied word, very soon, from a prison camp. Several friends, too, told her perfectly truthful tales, but always about other women, to whom, after months and months of silence, their missing had been miraculously restored. Other people urged her to communicate with infallible Secretaries of organisations who could communicate with benevolent neutrals, who couldextract accurate information from the most secretive of Hun prison commandants. Helen did and wrote and signed everything that was suggested or put before her.
Once, on one of Michael’s leaves, he had taken her over a munition factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article. It struck her at the time that the wretched thing was never left alone for a single second; and ‘I’m being manufactured into a bereaved next of kin,’ she told herself, as she prepared her documents.
In due course, when all the organisations had deeply or sincerely regretted their inability to trace, etc., something gave way within her and all sensation – save of thankfulness for the release – came to an end in blessed passivity. Michael had died and her world had stood still and she had been one with the full shock of that arrest. Now she was standing still and the world was going forward, but it did not concern her – in no way or relation did it touch her. She knew this by the ease with which she could slip Michael’s name into talk and incline her head to the proper angle, at the proper murmur of sympathy.
In the blessed realisation of that relief, the Armistice with all its bells broke over her and passed unheeded. At the end of another year she had overcome her physical loathing of the living and returned young, so that she could take them by the hand and – almost sincerely wish them well. She had no interest in any aftermath, national or personal, of the war, but, moving at an immense distance, she sat on various relief committees and held strong views – she heard herself delivering them – about the site of the proposed village War Memorial.
Then there came to her, as next of kin, an official intimation, backed by a page of a letter to her in indelible pencil, a silver identity-disc, and a watch, to the effect that the body of Lieutenant Michael Turrell had been found, identified, and re-interred in Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery – the letter of the row and the grave’s number in that row duly given.
So Helen found herself moved on to another process of the manufacture – to a world full of exultant or broken relatives,now strong in the certainty that there was an altar upon earth where they might lay their love. These soon told her, and by means of time-tables made clear, how easy it was and how little it interfered with life’s affairs to go and see one’s grave.
‘So different,’ as the Rector’s wife said, ‘if he’d been killed in Mesopotamia, or even Gallipoli.’
The agony of being waked up to some sort of second life drove Helen across the Channel, where, in a new world of abbreviated tides, she learnt that Hagenzeele Third could be comfortably reached by an afternoon train which fitted in with the morning boat, and that there was a comfortable little hotel not three kilometres from Hagenzeele itself, where one could spend quite a comfortable night and see one’s grave next morning. All this she had from a Central Authority who lived in a board and tar-paper shed on the skirts of a razed city full of whirling lime-dust and blown papers.
‘By the way,’ said he, ‘you know your grave, of course?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Helen, and showed its row and number typed on Michael’s own little typewriter. The officer would have checked it, out of one of his many books; but a large Lancashire woman thrust between them and bade him tell her where she might find her son, who had been corporal in the ASC. His proper name, she sobbed, was Anderson, but, coming of respectable folk, he had of course enlisted under the name of Smith; and had been killed at Dickiebush, in early ’Fifteen. She had not his number nor did she know which of his two Christian names he might have used with his alias; but her Cook’s tourist ticket expired at the end of Easter week, and if bythen she could not find her child she would go mad. Whereupon she fell forward on Helen’s breast; but the officer’s wife came out quickly from a little bedroom behind the office, and the three of them lifted the woman on to the cot.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Helen, and hurried out before the woman on the bed should begin to lament again.
Tea in a crowded mauve and blue striped wooden structure, with a false front, carried her still further into the nightmare. She paid her bill beside a stolid, plain-featured Englishwoman, who, hearing her inquire about the train to Hagenzeele, volunteered to come with her.
‘I’m going to Hagenzeele myself,’ she explained, ‘Not to Hagenzeele Third; mine is Sugar Factory, but they call it La Rosière now, It’s just south of Hagenzeele Three. Have you got your room at the hotel there?’
‘Oh yes, thank you. I’ve wired.’
‘That’s better. Sometimes the place is quite full, and at others there’s hardly a soul. But they’ve put bathrooms into the old Lion d’Or – that’s the hotel on the west side of Sugar Factory – and it draws off a lot of people, luckily.’
‘It’s all new to me. This is the first time I’ve been over.’
‘Indeed! This is my ninth time since the Armistice. Not on my own account. I haven’t lost any one, thank God – but, like every one else, I’ve a lot of friends at home who have. Coming over as often as I do, I find it helps them to have some one just look at the – the place and tell them about it afterwards. And one can take photos for them, too. I get quite a list of commissions to execute.’ She laughed nervously and tapped her slung Kodak. ‘There are two or three to see at Sugar Factory this time, and plenty of others in the cemeteries all about. My system is to save them up, and arrange them, you know. And when I’ve got enough commissions for one area to make it worth while, I pop over and execute them. It does comfort people.’
‘I suppose so,’ Helen answered, shivering as they entered the little train.
‘Of course it does. (Isn’t it lucky we’ve got window-seats?) It must do or they wouldn’t ask one to do it, would they? I’ve a list of quite twelve or fifteen commissions here’ – she tapped the Kodak again – ‘I must sort them out tonight. Oh, I forgot to ask you. What’s yours?’
‘My nephew,’ said Helen. ‘But I was very fond of him.’
‘Ah yes! I sometimes wonder whether they know after death? What do you think?’
‘Oh, I don’t – I haven’t dared to think much about that sort of thing,’ said Helen, almost lifting her hands to keep her off.
‘Perhaps that’s better,’ the woman answered. ‘The sense of loss must be enough, I expect. Well, I won’t worry you any more.’
Helen was grateful, but when they reached the hotel Mrs Scarsworth (they had exchanged names) insisted on dining at the same table with her, and after the meal, in the little, hideous salon full of low-voiced relatives, took Helen through her ‘commissions’ with biographies of the dead, where she happened to know them, and sketches of their next of kin. Helen endured till nearly half-past nine, ere she fled to her room.
Almost at once there was a knock at her door and Mrs Scarsworth entered; her hands, holding the dreadful list, clasped before her.
‘Yes – yes – I know,’ she began. ‘You’re sick of me, but I want to tell you something. You – you aren’t married, are you? Then perhaps you won’t… But it doesn’t matter. I’ve got to tell some one. I can’t go on any longer like this.’
‘But please—’ Mrs Scarsworth had backed against the shut door, and her mouth worked dryly.
‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘You – you know about these graves of mine I was telling you about downstairs, just now? They really are commissions. At least several of them are.’ Her eye wandered round the room. ‘What extraordinary wall-papers they have in Belgium, don’t you think? … Yes. I swear they are commissions. But there’s one,d’you see, and – and he was more to me than anything else in the world. Do you understand?’
Helen nodded.
‘More than any one else. And, of course, he oughtn’t to have been. He ought to have been nothing to me. But he was. He is. That’s why I do the commissions, you see. That’s all.’
‘But why do you tell me?’ Helen asked desperately.
‘Because I’m so tired of lying. Tired of lying – always lying – year in and year out. When I don’t tell lies I’ve got to act ’em and I’ve got to think ’em, always. You don’t know what that means. He was everything to me that he oughtn’t to have been – the one real thing – the only thing that ever happened to me in all my life; and I’ve had to pretend he wasn’t. I’ve had to watch every word I said, and think out what lie I’d tell next for years and years!’
‘How many years?’Helen asked.
‘Six years and four months before, and two and three-quarters after. I’ve gone to him eight times since. Tomorrow’ll make the ninth, and – and I can’t – I can’t go to him again with nobody in the world knowing. I want to be honest with some one before I go. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter about me. I was never truthful, even as a girl. But it isn’t worthy of him. So – so I – I had to tell you. I can’t keep it up any longer. Oh, I can’t!’
She lifted her joined hands almost to the level of her mouth, and brought them down sharply, still joined, to full arms’ length below her waist. Helen reached forward, caught them, bowed her head over them, and murmured: ‘Oh, my dear! My dear!’ Mrs Scarsworth stepped back, her face all mottled.
‘My God!’ said she. ‘Is that how you take it?’
Helen could not speak, and the woman went out; but it was a long while before Helen was able to sleep.
Next morning Mrs Scarsworth left early on her round of commissions, and Helen walked alone to Hagenzeele Third. The place was still in the making, and stood some five or six feet above the metalled road, which it flanked for hundreds of yards. Culverts across a deep ditch served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles cross their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing ather. She went forward, moved to the left and the right hopelessly wondering by what guidance she should ever come to her own. A great distance away there was a line of whiteness. It proved to be a block of some two or three hundred graves whose headstones had already been set, whose flowers were planted out, and whose new-sown grass showed green. Here she could see clear-cut letters at the ends of the rows, and, referring to her slip, realised that it was not here she must look.
A man knelt behind a line of headstones – evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him, her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘Lieutenant Michael Turrell – my nephew,’ said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.
The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses.
‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’
When Helen left the Cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.
THE EYE OF ALLAH
The Cantor of St Illod’s being far too enthusiastic a musician to concern himself with its Library, the Sub-Cantor, who idolised every detail of the work, was tidying up, after two hours’ writing and dictation in the Scriptorium. The copying-monks handed him in their sheets – it was a plain Four Gospels ordered by an Abbot at Evesham – and filed out to vespers. John Otho, better known as John of Burgos, took no heed. He wa
s burnishing a tiny boss of gold in his miniature of the Annunciation for his Gospel of St Luke, which it was hoped that Cardinal Falcodi, the Papal Legate, might later be pleased to accept.
‘Break off, John,’ said the Sub-Cantor in an undertone.
‘Eh? Gone, have they? I never heard. Hold a minute, Clement.’
‘The Sub-Cantor waited patiently. He had known John more than a dozen years, coming and going at St Illod’s, to which monastery John, when abroad, always said he belonged. The claim was gladly allowed for, more even than other Fitz Otho’s, he seemed to carry all the Arts under his hand, and most of their practical receipts under his hood.
The Sub-Cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with red-lac for a background to the Virgin’s hardly yet fired halo. She was shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched landscape in the middle distance.
‘You’ve made her all Jewess,’ said the Sub-Cantor, studyingtheolive-flushedcheekandtheeyeschargedwith foreknowledge.
‘What else was Our Lady?’ John slipped out the pins. ‘Listen, Clement. If I do not come back, this goes into my Great Luke, whoever finishes it.’ He slid the drawing between its guard-papers.
‘Then you’re for Burgos again – as I heard?’
‘In two days. The new Cathedral yonder – but they’re slower than the Wrath of God, those masons – is good for the soul.’
‘Thy soul?’ The Sub-Cantor seemed doubtful.
‘Even mine, by your permission. And down south – on the edge of the Conquered Countries – Granada way – there’s some Moorish diaper-work that’s wholesome. It allays vain thought and draws it toward the picture – as you felt, just now, in my Annunciation.’
‘She – it was very beautiful. No wonder you go. But you’ll not forget your absolution, John?’
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 78
