"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember them——"
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember them——"
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember them——"
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them——"
I slipped to my knees beside him and laid my head against his shoulder.
"Would they comfort you if I were to be killed?" he asked.
"Yes, they would—as much as anything could."
His eyes looked into mine curiously.
"What will you think in the years to come if I go down in this war, Big Yeogh Wough?"
"What shall I think? Well, first of all, I shallbe proud. I shall honour you very much—more than if you had lived to make yourself a king. But, just because you are you, I shall think it is a waste unless you get your death in doing a little more than an ordinary man would do. Look at your muscular body! I've thought of the wonder of it ever since the day when I first saw you boxing. What's the good of it in this war? It's no more good to resist flying bullets or shell splinters than an old tottering man's body. That's where I should feel bitter. These times are women's times and this war of machinery might as well be carried on by women, for all the good that male muscle can do in it. And yet they go and take the pick of the boys and let a stray bit of shell finish off in a second a splendid human creature whose mind might have been the driving force of the nation in a few years to come! That's where the pity of it would be if anything happened to you."
"But nothing is going to happen to me. You forget my lucky lock."
He lifted my hand and guided it to the curious little white patch at the side of his cropped head.
"You forget, too, that the fellow at school who knew all about palmistry told me he was sure I was not going to get killed till I was close on sixty. So, you see, I shall be quite safe in this war. They're not likely to add one more to the noonday strokes of the old School bell for me."
"The strokes of the old School bell? What do you mean?"
"Oh! Haven't you heard? The School bell tolls once at noon every day for every Old Boy who has lost his life in this war. They've got up to fifty-two strokes already and it's sure to go mounting up now by leaps and bounds. There are so many of us out there fighting."
Again I was struck by his tired-out look. I drew myself from his hold and got up from my knees.
"You must go to bed now," I told him. "I will go away for ten minutes and when I come back I must find you in bed."
He obeyed me as he had obeyed me when he was a child. I heard a great noise of shutting doors and drawers and box lids, and when I went in, exactly at the end of the ten minutes, he was lying between the sheets, luxuriously stretched out.
"Oh, the joy of being in a real bed again! I expect I shall sleep till eleven or twelve o'clock to-morrow. Then I shall have the rest of the day with you and shall go up to town and meet Vera Brennan next day; that is, if she can come up from her home. I want to buy a dagger, too, for hand-to-hand work in the trenches, and a few other things."
"Oughtn't you to have sent Vera a telegram to-night?"
"No. To-morrow will do. Oh, by the way,Big Yeogh Wough, have you got any new clothes to show me?"
"No." I laughed as I shook my head. "I couldn't have afforded them now in war time, even if I'd wanted them—and I haven't felt I wanted them with you away and in danger."
He drew my hand into his, and I stayed beside him with my head resting on his pillow, until he had fallen into a heavy sleep.
How boyish his face looked as he slept! and as I drew my hand from his and moved away from his bedside, turning off the electric light and leaving him in a full flood of August moon radiance, I could have fancied that I heard voices singing softly in the air around me:
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old"—
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old"—
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old"—
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old"—
I stole back and kissed his hair. Oh, human love! why must it be always pain—pain—pain?
He was his old bright self again next day, when, having walked with us all, he lay across my bed and laughed as he read me little French fairy stories while I put things straight in the room.
"It's like the old days, isn't it, when you used to lie across my bed and I taught you French while I brushed my hair? That reminds me that I met an officer last week who said he'd heard you were amazingly good at getting what you wanted out of the French farmer people round about you.He was a man of quite thirty-five, by the way, and I asked him if he didn't think he ought to marry before he went back to the Front. And what do you think he answered me? He rubbed his fingers through his hair, and reddened and said: 'Well, I've always been fonder of outdoor amusements.' So, you see, falling in love and getting married are indoor amusements. I suppose they are, really—only it sounded very funny."
"Oh, by the way, Big Yeogh Wough, can't you telephone up North to Vera Brennan's people to-morrow and ask them to let her come here till Monday? Say you'll be going up yourself with her and me on Monday."
"Are you getting fonder of her?"
"I don't know. I shan't know till I see her again. There's only one thing I do know and that is that absence never makes the heart grow fonder. I should like to ram that proverb down the throat of the man who invented it."
So the girl with the amethyst eyes came down to our house by the eastern sea.
There was only Sunday for her, since she came late on Saturday evening and we were all going up to London on Monday morning. But that Sunday was enjoyed to the uttermost.
It was so strange to see Little Yeogh Wough with her! No wonder his sister and his young brother looked on in frank bewilderment, remembering that he had been simply a masterfulschoolboy until the time of his putting on together of khaki and a moustache!
What a forcing power this war is! It changes people's ages as it changes their addresses, and that is saying a great deal.
At twelve o'clock that night I rose from the big old sofa where I had been sitting with the Boy and Vera Brennan, and said to them both:
"It is time we all went to bed now. That early train in the morning is really very inconveniently early, as you will find out."
The two of them looked at me and then at each other. Then the Boy laughed.
"You know, Vera, it's not a bit late for us in this house. Two o'clock is more like our time. But I'll go to bed, anyhow, and you can stay here and say what you want to say."
He was gone before I could say a word. And I was left alone with the girl with the amethyst eyes.
I got up from the sofa and walked up and down the room. It was a handsome room, large, many-windowed and high, but strangely gloomy. The electric light was so heavily shaded that there were grim corners. One might have thought that the wings of the Dark Angel hovered in the recesses, as he waited—waited—waited. And, though the month was August, there came up from the sea, hardly more than a stone's-throw away, a sobbing that had something so much like humangrief in it that it made one understand how it was that in the ominous spring of 1914 the village people of Russia kept on saying that they heard the earth crying and that there would be war.
Vera Brennan's small head had sunk lower and lower. She spoke to me without looking at me:
"You know I love Roland, don't you?"
"Yes," I answered her. "I know you love him."
"I can't help it," she said almost piteously. "I never loved anyone before. I never thought I should love anyone at all. My mind was all on other things. But he woke me up. I loved him directly I saw him and heard him speak. Of course, I know he's very young, but with him age doesn't seem to matter. He's a grown man in his mind and heart. He's everything to me now—everything."
I said nothing, but kept on walking up and down the room. She went on, more and more appealingly:
"He knows I'm saying all this to you. You see, he's told me all about you. He said that if I loved him I must love you, too, because you and he were like one life. And that is why I want to say this to you—that I love him so very much that I want to think of him more than of myself—that, if you think it would be better for him that I shouldgive him up and all my own life's happiness with him, I can do it and I will do it. Yes, I will find strength to do it—if you say I must."
She had stretched out her arms towards me from the deeper gloom in which she sat. And suddenly I realised, that, small and flowerlike and fragile though she was, she was not a girl who was going to take my treasure from me, but a woman who was asking me to let her share with me the pride and the anguish of living under the black shadow of Fear that had darkened my life for four months past.
I turned and went to her quickly and sat down on the sofa beside her and took her into my arms. We did not speak a word, but we stayed there like that for a long, long time—until the Boy's voice suddenly startled us:
"What are you doing here all this time? It's three o'clock. You will both be ill."
"Roland! I thought you were in bed and asleep."
"No. I tried to lie down, but I couldn't. I've been walking up and down the corridor."
He was stooping over us both, drawing us up. His boyish face had become suddenly the face of a man, his voice was the voice of a man, and his touch and his manner had a man's power and a man's dignity.
It was nearly four o'clock when I went to say good-night to him.
The next day in London was like a dream in which things happened with the speed of flashes. It was only at midnight that the Boy and I got any private talk together. His room adjoined mine at the hotel where we were staying for the night, and he came in to me to bring me an offering of sulphur carnations and to show me the dagger he had bought and his miraculously tiny medical outfit.
"Why were you so late for the dinner?" I asked him. For he and I had had a dinner engagement and he had kept dinner waiting for at least an hour.
"I didn't feel I could go anywhere and smile and talk to people who didn't understand, just after seeing Vera off at Euston. I should have liked to come straight back to you and talk to you quietly all the evening. Look here, let me fasten these carnations on you where I want you to wear them, just as I used to do before the war!"
"But I shall be going to bed in half an hour!"
"That doesn't matter. It's worth while for you to wear them for half an hour. Tell me what you think of the dagger. It's for hand-to-hand work in the trenches, where there isn't room to use a bayonet."
"Ah!" I took the newly bought thing in my hand and looked at it. "When it's done its workbring it back to me without cleaning it. I shall want to keep it always like that."
"And here's my little medicine chest. Don't they make things up splendidly? Here's some morphia. You see, many a fellow that's not very badly wounded does himself a lot of harm by wriggling about in his pain before he's picked up. Now, if you've got morphia, you can make the pain bearable and keep quiet."
"Yes," I said quite brightly. But I felt curiously sick at heart.
"Do you still feel you would rather I did not come to Victoria to see you off to-morrow?" I asked him when we said good-night.
"Yes. I don't feel I could stand it. You know, I've always been like that. I've never wanted people who really mattered to see me off at a station. Other people don't count. They can come in crowds. But not you. It'll be hard enough to go, anyhow."
"Very well, then, we'll have lunch at Almond's, with that dear Russian friend I want to show you off to, and then you can do the rest of your shopping while I go and keep a business appointment in Farringdon Street. I shall be back here to say good-bye to you at four o'clock."
But the business appointment next day in Farringdon Street kept me longer than I had expected it would do and when I came out I could not get a taxicab easily. Agitated, desperate, I hadalmost run well on to the Embankment before I picked one up and then I dashed up to the hotel steps to find the boy jumping in and out of his own cab with a harassed look on his face.
"If I stay another minute I shall be too late," he said.
There was no time for me to explain. One moment's clasp of hands—one quick, yet clinging, kiss—and he was gone!
Gone from me again—back to fight in France!
I stood looking straight before me with an odd feeling as if I were turning to stone. Why had I not thought of getting into the cab and driving to Victoria with him, without going on to the platform?
What a miserable good-bye I had had—I, who should have had the tenderest!
Yesterday morning, when we had left home, his good-bye to his sister and to the naval cadet had been sweet. He had leaned out of the railway carriage window looking with misty eyes at his father still standing on the platform of the East Coast town station, and had said to Vera and to me:
"Dear father! I haven't been half good enough to him."
And I—I had had to part from him, through no fault of his or mine, as if we were going to meet again in a few hours!
It is strange how vividly all these pictures of his whole past life have flashed across my mind again as I have been sitting here waiting for him!
It is four months since he went away that day after only that quick, unsatisfying kiss.
"I will take care to have a better good-bye when this second leave is over," I told myself aloud. "Only six days, including the travelling! But I don't suppose they can spare the officers for any longer."
He is certainly very late. It is beginning to look as if he will not come till to-morrow morning. The weather may be bad in the Channel. Anyhow, we shall have to go on with dinner.
I hear a noise of the opening and shutting of doors.
I start to my feet.
This is he! This must be he!
But two or three moments pass and he does not come into the room. And something new and strange and heavy has come into the air of the house; or so, at least, I fancy.
My husband comes along. There is something very odd about his step. And his face looks changed, somehow; sharpened in feature and greyish white.
"How true it is that electric light sometimesmakes people look a dreadful colour!" I think as he comes nearer to me.
I ran forward then to meet him.
"Where is Roland? Isn't he here? I thought I heard him come."
And then for the first time I noticed that the boy's father had a bit of pinkish paper crushed up in his hand.
"Is that a telegram?" I cried eagerly, putting out my own hand. "Oh, give it to me! What does it say? Isn't he coming to-night?"
One of my husband's arms was put quietly around me.
"No. It's no good our waiting for him any longer. He'll never come any more. He's dead. He was badly wounded on Wednesday at midnight, and he died on Thursday."
For minutes that were like years the world became to me a shapeless horror of greyness in which there was no beginning and no end, no light and no sound. I did not know anything except that I had to put out my hand and catch at something, with an animal instinct to steady myself so that I might not fall. And then, through the rolling, blinding waves of mist, there came to me suddenly the old childish cry:
"Come and see me in bed, mother!"
And I heard myself answering aloud:
"Yes, boy of my heart, I will come. As soonas the war is over I will come and see you in bed—in your bed under French grass. And I will say good-night to you—there—kneeling by your side—as I've always done."
"Good-night!Though Life and all take flight,Never Good-bye!"
"Good-night!Though Life and all take flight,Never Good-bye!"
"Good-night!Though Life and all take flight,Never Good-bye!"
"Good-night!
Though Life and all take flight,
Never Good-bye!"
THE END
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