by Philip Child
“The last link with my father’s generation,” said Pen sadly. “I shall have to sell the house, I suppose. My great-grandfather built it almost a century and a half ago. Now, Dan, I should like you to come with me. It will do you good to see the roots you’ve grown from.”
Dan agreed to go. Cynthia would be in Toronto and he thought, quite wrongly, that it would be a good thing to give her time to think over what they had said to each other.
They went to Beulah. Pen had meant to stay a few days after the funeral but a telegram from Maud called them back abruptly. Come back at once. Alastair leaving for overseas.
V
Taking the earliest train from Beulah, they arrived in Wellington early next morning. Maud was waiting for them on the station platform in great excitement.
“Thank goodness you got here in time. Alastair’s over there with his men. They may go any moment.” If Maud was overwrought, it was revealed only in the fact that she had put on her hat without looking in the mirror so that it hung over her face at a rakish angle. She was excited but completely mistress of herself. She tucked her arm in Pen’s. “Oh, let’s hurry, Pen. Never mind the baggage. Let it go on to Toronto! Let’s hurry!”
Dan looked up toward the station. One could be in no uncertainty concerning the whereabouts of the troops. A long parade of coaches had been backed onto a siding, and from the windows, a lusty song came rolling down on the morning air.
K-K-K-Katy , beautiful Katy,
You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore;
When the m-m-m-moon shines,
Over the cow shed,
I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.
A great crowd of civilians, mothers, fathers, sisters, friends, and relatives were crowding about the coaches, cracking last minute jokes with a too-vociferous cheerfulness. Dan picked out the familiar figures of Cynthia and Joanna standing together beneath a window. Leaving his parents to hurry after him, he broke into a run.
Cynthia’s head was tilted upward toward the car window from which the faces of Alastair and two other subalterns projected. As he ran, she turned her profile to him, and he caught a fleeting impression of her face. She looked white and wild-eyed , and her hair was dishevelled. Why? He came behind her, and waving at Alastair, spoke her name. She started and dropped her purse, then turned and faced him with an expression of sheer fright, without speaking and without meeting his eyes.
“Am I a ghost?” asked Dan, laughing.
“You startled me so, Dan.”
He put his arm about Joanna and said, making his voice sound hearty: “Hullo, Alastair.”
“Hullo, old man,” responded Alastair.
Dan exclaimed: “What’s the matter with you two? Am I improperly dressed? Coat, trousers, tie, hat?”
A secret glance passed between Alastair and Cynthia. Alastair nodded his head.
“Dan, dear,” whispered Cynthia. “Please come over here. I want to tell you something.”
Puzzled, he followed her to a bench by the station wall. She made him sit beside her.
“What’s it all about, Cynthia?”
“You mustn’t let this hurt you.… You see, Alastair only knew yesterday that he was going. He needs me more than you do, Dan. Truly, he does.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“And,” said Cynthia wildly, “now he’ll have — this to remember at the front. He’ll — he can think of — Oh, Dan!” Her words came rushing out and ended in a sob.
“You and Alastair —”
“Yes, Dan. We were married yesterday.”
In a bewildered way he strove to comprehend the situation. Here was he, Dan Thatcher, come to say goodbye to his brother who was going overseas. And here was Cynthia — Oh my God! he thought, his heart turning over. She belongs to Alastair .… “K-K-K-Katy ” from the troops in the train hammered in the background of his mind.… “It isn’t possible.… Must get hold of myself.”
Cynthia was saying: “And we are still friends? You don’t hate me?”
“One question, Cynthia. You love him, of course?”
She stared straight in front of her and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Yes, I do,” she said defiantly.
“Well,” said he in a hard voice: “that’s that!”
Her hands were clenched into white fists. “Dan, will you be friends with Alastair … for old time’s sake?”
“Alastair can go to the dev — No, I certainly won’t!”
She flared into sudden anger. “Why are you always so sure you’re in the right! … Haven’t you a little bit of a mean streak in you, Dan?”
“Expect so,” he muttered. “Anyway, I won’t shake hands with him. Not yet.” To quarrel certainly made it easier.
“I think you’ll regret it if you don’t. You may not have another chance.”
“Alastair get killed? Not likely! You don’t know my brother. He always falls on his feet.”
“He’s not a coward, if that’s what you mean.”
“And I am?”
“Oh, Dan, why do you twist everything I say into something I didn’t mean!”
It suddenly struck him that besides being childish and a fool, he was being a perfect beast to her. He said: “I know he’s not a coward. I didn’t mean that.… I’ll go and talk to him anyway.”
He made his way through the crowd. Alastair, who had been watching him covertly, met him in the vestibule of the car.
“Well, Dan, do we shake hands?” said he jauntily.
“You let Cynthia think I was a slacker, Alastair.”
“I know you’re not a slacker.… Why didn’t you tell her so yourself? She thought you shied off because of the old man, because of Punch Elton.”
“Good God! And you let her think that?”
Alastair smiled uneasily. “How did I know it wasn’t true? Look here, Dan. It was you who gave her up. If you’d really wanted her she wouldn’t have fallen in love with me. Faint heart never won fair l — in love, I mean.”
“You’re my brother, but you’d better take that back!”
Alastair went white. “I didn’t mean that!” he exclaimed, in consternation.
They looked at each other. After all, Alastair is my brother; going to France.
“I hope you come through safely, Alastair. But I won’t shake hands with you.”
Alastair fumbled for a cigarette and lit it, his hands trembling. “All right. If that’s how you feel about it.… You always were a self-righteous devil.”
“Did you tell Mother?”
Alastair blew a cloud of smoke. “No, I didn’t want to upset them; they’ve enough to worry about.”
“They’ll be hurt if you don’t.”
“Oh, they’ll understand,” said Alastair easily. “You tell them.”
Dan thought: “Lord, that’s Alastair all over!” He said: “Goodbye, Alastair. And — good luck!”
His brother waved his cigarette gracefully, without replying.
Dan joined the family beneath Alastair’s window. None of them seemed to find much to say, though whenever Alastair caught his mother’s eye, she forced a smile as if to say: “We’ll be all right. You needn’t bother about us.”
Military police, with swagger sticks and an official air, began to move up the platform from the rear coach, marshalling the crowd. “Please move back! Move back, please!” The crowd surged in for the farewell. Pen stretched up his arm to shake hands with his son. He cleared his throat. “Well, my dear boy. Well.…” He could think of nothing to say and pressed Alastair’s hand hard. All this time Maud had been forming a secret plan of her own. She had something to say to Alastair, but it must be at the last minute so that he would remember it.
He leaned over to kiss her and she took his hand and held it long enough to
whisper, “Alastair. Be a good boy, my dear.”
Alastair had the grace to flush.
A shudder ran through the length of the train; car after car was jerked forward against the couplings; the puffing engine began to pull slowly. Instantly, the crowd became quiet as death. White faces, upturned, watched their flesh and blood moving away from their ken — a long journey. The engine picked up the cars and made them at one with its motion. The finality of the slow start and the gathering speed smote Dan’s imagination like a bolt of lightning. He thought: “God! I’m a swine to let Al go like that.” He started to run. A soldier wearing a red brassard tried to stop him; Dan pushed the man aside and ran on, hand outstretched. Alastair leaned out toward him, but the train had given in to the pull of the locomotive and was sliding into smooth speed; they could not touch hands. Alastair waved, grinning — a derisive, debonair grin.
“’Ere!” said the military policeman, confronting Dan. “’Oo do you think yer knockin’ arand? You have that for them Fritzes, chum. You ought to join up, that you ought.”
Dan took a deep breath and surveyed the soldier levelly. “Will you please take a good long run and jump in the lake!” he said politely.
Chapter VI
I
The English language had changed. New phrases and words ate into the mind of a people and burrowed there like moles, throwing behind them aching glories and despairs: going West, napoo, overseas, sector, over the top, no man’s land, somewhere in France. Battle names, weird and uncouth, echoed through the vast halls of the imagination: Mława, Przymy ´ sl, Verdun — and Ypres, soon to emerge less a name than the symbol of a generation’s Calvary. To have set up one’s puny ego against the atmosphere of excitement, of desperate sacrifice, of bravely supported fear, of stoic grief, of fearful hope — to have pinnacled oneself, for instance, as a “conscientious objector” (that new sort of martyr, or of coward, or of crank, view it how you would) would have seemed an insufferable presumption to the battalions of eager and earnest young men of twenty, who were not at all presumptuous for all their swagger, but conventionally and rather humbly anxious to “do the right thing” even as their fathers and elder brothers were doing it.
Letter from Quentin Thatcher to Dan:
My dear Dan,
As you can see by the postmark on this letter, I am, at present, in cadet school in England. I distinguished myself on the Somme and have been sent here to train for a commission. Yesterday I was paraded and decorated for “ bravery and presence of mind in the face of the enemy. ” The irony of this lies in the fact that I was rewarded for doing a deed which has filled my waking and sleeping hours with horror ever since.
It happened during a raid into the German trenches. We had to throw smoke bombs into a dugout to ferret out the Germans who were cowering down there, hysterical after a long bombardment. The first who comes up is taken prisoner for questioning; the rest are bayoneted or shot as they file out into the sunlight; we can spare no men to look after prisoners, so this is a military necessity.
They come lurching up the steps of the dugout, and Quentin Thatcher, a soldier, is stationed at the entrance to receive them.
I find I make an unwilling butcher. One or two of the poor devils showed fight when they saw what had happened to their comrades who had tried to surrender, and I had to chase one little rabbit down the trench — no, I’ll keep that to myself.
Most chaps get hardened to this sort of thing, but I find I can’t. My God! I dream of them every night. What am I to do, Dan? I’m not physically afraid a bit and never was. But I haven’t it in me to do a butchery like that again. Simply couldn’t make myself do it. You know me, Dan; I never was the normal sort of lad who can pull wings off flies out of sheer curiosity. Shall I become a conscientious objector and fight this whole dirty business? Shall I stand up against the impersonal machine even if I get shot by a firing squad for it? What do you advise? If I had one friend who approved, I could do it. The reason I’ve written so frankly is that I am certain you, too, must be a pacifist at heart. It must have taken great courage to stay out of the war when all your friends and even your own brother —
Dan slammed down the letter and swore. To be called a pacifist by Quentin — even approvingly — made him furiously angry. “God! If I could go I wouldn’t let myself bother about things like that. A man’s got to fight. It’s the way we are made. Well, then, all you need to worry about is whether you are fighting for what’s right. And hang it! A man ought to stick to his job. That’s what I am doing.… And all that womanish talk about friendship. A chap ought to stand on his own feet. Quentin’s a weakling!”
Dan was in a quarrelsome mood these days. Nothing had gone right. He had to sit back in a passive role when the whole world was rushing to action, and yet without the privilege of feeling bitter toward Joanna on that account. And on top of that Alastair had snapped up his girl under his eyes, and since that was partly his own fault, he hadn’t the privilege, either, of hating his brother or of feeling bitter toward Cynthia.
“I’m treed,” he thought bitterly, “there is not one blasted thing I can do except go and get tight.”
II
Dan walked up Galinée Street in the rain, going home. A compact, swarthy man in a battered felt hat leaned against the brick wall that surrounded Ardentinny: his hands were in his pockets, his feet were crossed, and he was whistling.
“You’re pretty cheerful,” said Dan; “do you always stand in the rain and whistle?”
The man pushed up his hat and surveyed Dan quizzically. Dark eyes, but with a gleam in them. Mocking. Friendly, too. The look made him feel inexperienced. “It’s worth a quarter to whistle in the rain.”
“I see. Broke?” Dan handed over the coin.
The man took it and tossed it high in the air; it fell neatly into his coat pocket. He grinned at Dan; the small trick and the grin turned the alms into a fee. “Not broke as long as there’s a fool to panhandle, ” he said.
Dan started to go through the gate, but a thought stopped him. Queer sort of a beggar, no whine, no abashment. He walked back to the man.
“You’re a gipsy, aren’t you?”
The man denied it vehemently.
“No offence,” said Dan.
“Then don’t say gipsy, say Romany. And you should say ‘my rye ’ when you’re talking to a traveller. ‘Rye ’ means ‘gentleman.’”
They both laughed.
“You asked me for a quarter, but you still think you’re as good a man as I am, don’t you?”
“Sure. Wafri bak in a boro ker, sin’s adree a bitti ker! ”
“What’s that mean?”
“You don’t rakker romanys ? It means ‘bad luck in a big house as well as a small.’”
“I see, all brothers, eh? I thought gip— thought travellers never would rakker romanys except among themselves.”
“That’s right, pal. But you’ve got the Romany blood. You’re push-ratt — a half blood.”
“How’d you know!”
“A Romany knows things. You have the look. And you ain’t exactly blond, now. An’ you’re restless. Yes, you’ve got a Romany look.”
“I’ve seen you before.”
“Sure.”
“Now I know who you are. I’ve seen you twice. You used to come to Cholera Point every August. You’ve changed. Do you remember me?”
The gipsy gave a grin and a wink. “Sure. You’re the little chavo who wanted to run away with the gipsies. Do you still want to run away?”
“Yes, in a way. But your caravan isn’t on Cholera Point this year.”
“Hard times like I told you. Too many motors. Horses no good now. No prastering grayas anymore — running horses.”
“But you still whistle in the rain?”
“I was conceived under a hedge on a rainy November night, see?”— again the
wink. “That’s why I have hot blood in me even when it’s cold.”
“Oh. Where do you live now?”
“You know the boathouses on the bay by the railroad?”
“Yes.”
“Third one from the city.… You come and see me and I’ll tell you something.”
“What will you tell me?”
“About yourself, what you’re like. Maybe you don’t know yet. You ain’t happy like me.”
“What’s your name, my rye ?”
“Jobey Loversedge — to you.… Now give me a dollar and I’ll mark the house for you.”
“Mark it?”
“So you won’t be pestered by thieving, begging gipsies.”
He decided that he would see Jobey Loversedge again.
“You’re restless, pal,” said Jobey Loversedge to Dan. “Ain’t you found out what to do when you’re restless? Come on, drink some more.”
They drank, looking at each other curiously.
“Now,” said Jobey, “you feel warm, eh? You don’t give a damn, eh?”
“I still give a damn,” said Dan grinning, “but not such a big one.”
“Now Zillah will tell your future. Have you got any money? Zillah, tell his fortune.”
“Is she your wife?”
Jobey laughed. “No. I wash my own shirts.”
Zillah was a woman, neither old nor young. Her black hair was done up in many tiny plaits, and she had gold earrings in the pattern, though she did not know it, of the trident of Shiva. She looked at Dan suspiciously, not liking to hear the Romany spoken before a gorgio . Dan said:
“You told my future before. You said I’d be unlucky in love the first time. You were right.”
“Well, there’s a second time, maybe,” said Jobey.
“Wait,” Dan exclaimed, “never mind my future. You might see a coffin, perhaps. Or a little white cross. I’d sooner think about now.”
