A month has passed, yet the camp looks much the same as before. Mona had expected that the prisoners would be liberated by this time, but they are here still. The Commandant is said to be waiting for orders.
Meantime regulations have been relaxed. The men are no longer restricted to the various compounds. There is no limit to their liberty of moving about, except the big gates, guarded by soldiers, and the three lines of barbed wire by which the camp is surrounded. Why not? Nobody is likely to attempt to escape. Within a few weeks everybody will be free.
Mona has all the help she can do with now. The prisoners are constantly about the farm-house, doing anything they can for her. They show her photographs of their wives and children and get her to count up the savings that are coming to them.
At length comes word that the Peace Congress has begun and that the Commandant has received his orders. Two hundred and fifty of the prisoners are to be sent over the water every day until the camp is empty.
But there is a condition attaching to the liberation. Mona hears of it first from three prisoners belonging to distant compounds, who are talking outside the house. To her surprise they are speaking not only in English, but in British dialects.
“They ca’ me a Jarmin,” says one, “but what am I? I were browt to Owdham when I were five year owd and now ’am fifty, so ’am five year Jarmin and forty-five English. Yet they’re sending me back to Jarmany.”
“I’m no so sure but my case isna war’ nor that, though,” says the other. “I came to Glasgie when I was a bairn in my mither’s arms, and I’ve lived there all my life. I married there and my two sons were born there. And now that I’ve lost both of them fighting in the British army, and my wife’s dead of a broken heart and I’ve nobody leftbelonging to me, they’re for sending me back to a foreign country.”
“Aw well,” says the third man, speaking with a snatch of the Anglo-Manx, “I wouldn’t trust but my case is worse nor either of yours. I’m German born, that’s truth enough, but I’ve lived in this very island since I was a lump of a lad, and maybe I’m as Manx myself as some ones they make magistrates and judges of. More than that, my only son was born here, and when he grew up to be a fine young fellow, and they said his King and country needed him, he was one of the first to join up and go off to the war. Well, what d’ye think? Twelve month ago he was wounded and invalided home, and then, being no use for foreign service, they sent him to Knockaloe as one of the guard—to guard, among others, his own father. Think of that now! My son outside the barbed wire and me inside! And one of these days he’ll have to march me down to Douglas and ship me off to Germany, where I’ve neither chick nor child, no kith nor kin.... Yes,mylad, that I used to carry on my back and rock in his cradle!”
Mona is aghast. Something seems to creep between her skin and flesh. Never before, in all the long agony of the war, with its blood and tears and terror, has she heard of anything so cruel. What a mockery of the Almighty! Race, race, race! Mother and author of half the wars of the world—when, oh when would the Father of all living wipe the blasphemous word out of the mouths of Christian men?
But the conversation Mona has overheard cuts deeper and closer than that even. If all German-born prisoners are to be sent back to Germany, Oskar will have to go, and whatthen?
That night a knock comes to her door. It is Oskar himself. His eyes are wild and his lips are trembling.
“You’ve heard of the new order?” he asks.
“Yes. Will you have to go back also?”
“I must. I suppose I must.”
The first batch to go are from the “millionaires’” quarters. Being rich they have reconciled themselves to the conditions. Park Lane or theThiergarten—what matter which? In their black clothes, their spats and fur-lined coats, and with their suit-cases packed in a truck, they march off merrily.
The next to go are from the Second Compound, and they make a different picture—ill-clad, ill-shod, without an overcoat among them, with nothing in their pockets except the little money they have drawn at the last moment from the camp bank, and nothing in their hands except the canvas bags which contain all their belongings.
It is a miserable January morning, with drizzling rain and a thick mist over the mountains. At a sharp word of command the men go tramping towards the gate, a silent and melancholy lot, totally unlike the singing and swaggering gang who came up the avenue four years ago.
Later in the day the captain of the guard (the new captain) who has seen the men off by the steamer tells Mona a wretched story. The prisoners had passed through Douglas with heads down like men going to execution; they had been drawn up like sheep on the pier, while the ordinarypassengers went aboard to their cabins, and then they had been hurried down the gangway to the steerage quarters. And as the steamer moved away they had looked back with longing eyes at the island they were leaving behind them.
“Poor devils! They used to talk about the camp as a hell, but inside six months they’ll be ready to crawl on their stomachs to get back to it.”
“But why ... why are they all to be sent to Germany?” asks Mona.
“It’s the order of the congress, miss. No country wants to harbour its enemies—not a second time—unless they have something to make them friends.”
“But if they have?”
“Well, if a German has an English wife and an English business....”
“They let him remain—do they?”
“I believe they do, miss.”
Mona’s heart leaps, and a new thought comes to her. If Oskar does not wish to go back to Germany, why shouldn’t he stay here and farm Knockaloe?
Next morning, after the third gang has gone, she is on her way to her landlord’s. Her last half-year’s rent is due, and then there’s the question of the lease, which runs out in November.
It is a beautiful morning with blue sky and bright sunshine. The snowdrops are beginning to peep and the yellow eyes of the gorse are showing. As she goes down the road with a high step she is thinking of her landlord’s answer to her father when, four years ago, he asked what was to happen to the farm after the war was over: “Don’t trouble about that. You are here for life, Robert—you and your children.”
She meets her landlord at the gate of his house. He is in his church-going clothes, having just returned from Peel, where he has been sitting on the bench as a magistrate.
“The rent, I suppose?” he says, and he leads her into the sitting-room.
She counts it out to him in Treasury notes, and he gives her a receipt for it. Then he rises and makes for the door, as if wishing to be rid of her. She keeps her seat and says:
“What about the lease, sir?”
“We’ll not talk about that to-day,” says the landlord.
“I’m afraid we must. I have to make important arrangements.”
The landlord looks embarrassed.
“But if you say it will be all right when the time comes, we can leave it for the present, sir,” says Mona.
The landlord, who has reached the door and is holding it open, puts on a bold front and says:
“Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve had to make other arrangements.”
Mona is thunderstruck, and she rises rigidly.
“You don’t mean to say, sir, that you are ... letting the farm over my head?”
“And if I am, why shouldn’t I? It’s mine, I suppose, and I can do what I like with it.”
“But you promised my father—faithfully promised him when the farm was turned into a camp....”
“Circumstances alter cases. Your father is dead and so is his son....”
“But his daughter is alive, and what has she done....”
“Don’t ask me what she’s done, miss.”
“But I do, sir, I do.”
“Then if you must have it, you must. I want a good man of my own race to farm my land, not an enemy alien.”
Mona is speechless for one moment, choking with anger; at the next she is back on the road, weeping bitterly.
Oskar is in the avenue when she returns to it, and seeing she is in trouble he speaks to her.
She tells him what has happened, omitting what was said about himself.
“Your family have lived in Knockaloe for generations, haven’t they?” he says.
“Four generations.”
“And you were born there, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a shame—a damned shame.”
Mona is crushed. Knockaloe is lost to her. And this is the peace she has prayed and prayed for!
One day passes, then another. Every morning Mona sees a fresh batch of prisoners leaving the camp, and her heart sinks at the sight of them. Oskar’s turn will come some day. It tears her to pieces to think of it—Oskar going off at that melancholy pace, down the avenue and round by Kirk Patrick.
At length a spirit of defiance takes possession of her. Knockaloe is dear to her by a thousand memories, but it is not the only place on the island. She has heard of a farm in the north that is to be let in November. It is large, therefore it is not everybody who can stock it, butshecan, because she has always thought it her duty to put everything she has earned during the war into cattle to meet the requirements of the camp.
She is upstairs in her bedroom, making ready for a visit to the northern landlord, when she hears the loud clatter of hoofs in the avenue. Long John Corlett, who used to come courting her for the sake of the stock, is riding a heavy cart-horse up to the house. He sees her and, without troubling to dismount, he calls to her to come down.Resenting his impudence, she makes him wait, but at length she goes out to him.
“Well, what is it, John Corlett?”
“You’ll have heard, my girl, that I’m the new tenant of Knockaloe?”
“I haven’t; but if you are, what of it?”
“I’ve come to ask you how long you want to stay.”
“Until the lease runs out—what else do you expect, sir?”
“But why should you? The camp will be empty before that time comes, and what can you do with your milk when the men are gone?”
“I can do what I did before they came, if you want to know.”
“Oh, no, you can’t. You’ve lost your milk run, and you can never get it back again.”
“Who says I can’t?”
“I say so. Everybody says so. Ask anybody you like, woman—any of your old customers.”
Mona is colouring up to the eyes.
“Then tell them I don’t care if I nevercan,” she says, and turns back to the house.
“Wait! There’s something else, though. What about the dilapidations?”
“Dilapidations?”
“According to the agreement with the Government the landlord has to make good the damage to the houses and the tenant the injury to the land.”
It is true—she had forgotten all about it.
“Twenty-five thousand men here for four years—it will take something to put the land into cultivation.”
In a halting voice she asks Corlett what he thinks it will cost, and he mentions a monstrous figure.
“Three years’ rent of the farm—that’s the best I can make it.”
Mona gasps and her face becomes white.
“But that would leave me without a shilling,” she says.
“Tut, woman! With the big rent you’ve had from the Government you must have a nice little nest-egg somewhere.”
“But I haven’t. I’ve put everything into stock.”
The hulking fellow slaps his leg with his riding whip and makes a long whistle.
“Well, so much the better if it’s all on the land.”
Then he drops from his saddle to the ground, and comes close to Mona as if to coax her.
“Look here, Mona woman, no one shall say John Corlett is a hard man. Leave everything on the farm as it stands, and we’ll cry quits this very minute.”
Mona looks at him in silence for a moment. Then she says, breathing rapidly:
“John Corlett, do you want to turn me out of my father’s farm a beggar and a pauper?”
“Chut, girl, what’s the odds? There’s somebody will be wanting you to follow him to foreign parts when he goes himself—though you might have done better at home, I’m thinking.”
Mona’s breath comes hot and fast and her face grows crimson. Then she falls on the man like a fury.
“Out of this, you robber, you thief, you dirt!”
The big bully leaps back into his saddle. Snatching at his reins, he shouts that if she won’t listen to reason he will “put the law on her,” and not a beast shall she take off the land until his dues as incoming tenant are paid to him.
“Out of it!” cries Mona, and she lifts up a stick that lies near to her.
Seeing it swinging in the air and likely to fall on him, the man tugs at his reins to swirl out of reach of the blow, and the stick falls on his horse’s flank. The horse throws up her hind legs, leaps forward, and goes down the avenue at a gallop.
The rider has as much as he can do to keep his seat, and the last that is seen of him (shouting something about “you and your Boche”) is of his hindmost parts bobbing up and down as his horse dashes through the gate and up the road towards home.
Some of the guard who have been looking on and listening burst into roars of laughter. Mona bursts into tears and goes indoors. If her stockis to be taken, the island, as well as Knockaloe, is lost to her!
Late that night Oskar comes again. His eyes are fierce and his face is twitching.
“I’ve heard what happened,” he says, “and if I were a free man I should break every bone in the blackguard’s skin. But I can’t let you go on suffering like this for me. You must give me up, Mona.”
It is the first time an open acknowledgment of their love has passed between them. Mona is confused for a moment. Then she says,
“Do youwantme to give you up, Oskar?”
He does not answer.
“To see you go away with the rest, and to think no more about you?”
Still he does not answer.
“Do you?”
“God knows I don’t,” he says, and at the next moment he is gone.
Three nights later Oskar comes again. As usual he will not enter the house, so she has to stand at the door to speak to him. His eyes are bright and he is eager and excited.
“Mona, I have something to suggest to you.”
“Yes?”
“It’s not to be wondered at that people brought up in a little island like this should have these hard feelings and narrow ideas. But the English are not like that. They are a great, great people, and if you are willing to go with me to England....”
“What are you thinking of, Oskar?”
He tells her more about himself than she has ever yet heard. He is an electrical engineer, and before being brought to Knockaloe he had been chief engineer to a big English company on the Mersey, at a salary of a thousand a year. When the war broke out his sympathies had been deadagainst his own country, chiefly because of “that quack, the Kaiser.”
“Oskar!”
“It’s true. I can’t account for it. I was secretly ashamed of it in those days, but I would have joined up in the British Army if they would have had me. They wouldn’t!”
On the contrary, the authorities had called him up for internment. Then his firm, which had been loathe to lose him, had tried to obtain his exemption. They had failed, and when the time came for him to go the chairman of the company had said: “Heine, we’re sorry you have to leave us, but if you want to come back when the war is over, your place will be waiting for you.”
“But could he ... do you think it possible....”
“Certain! Oh, he’s a great old man, Mona, and if he were to break his word to me I should lose faith in human nature. So I ... I....”
“Well?”
“I intend to write to him, telling him I shallsoon be at liberty, and if you will only agree to go with me....”
He stops, seeing tears in her eyes. Then, in a husky voice, he says:
“I’m sorry to ask you to leave your island.”
“It is turning me out, Oskar; that’s the bitterest part of it.”
“Then youwillgo to England with me?”
“Yes,” she says, and he hurries off in high spirits to write his letter.
During the next week Mona tries hard to feel happy, but little by little vague doubts oppress her. One day she overhears scraps of a conversation between the Commandant and the Governor, who are arranging for the breaking up of the camp and the disposal of its portable property. As they stand in the avenue they are talking about the Peace Conference.
“It’s a pity,” the Commandant is saying, “but it has always been my experience that the first years of a peace are worse than the last years of a war.”
And the Governor is answering: “All thesame, we should be fools to trust those traitors again. We have beaten the German brutes, and what we have got to do now is to keep them beaten.”
“I’m not like that, your Excellency,” says the Commandant. “I’ll fight my enemy with the best, but when the fighting is over I want to forget and, if I can, forgive. I was at the front in the early days, and after a bad bit of an engagement I came upon a German officer in a shell hole. He was in a terrible state, poor fellow, and we couldn’t take him in, so I decided to stay with him. His mind was perfectly clear, and he said, ‘Colonel’ (I was colonel in those days), ‘don’t you think this is strange?’ ‘What’s strange?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if you and I had met in the trenches I suppose you would have tried to kill me for the sake of Motherland, and I should have tried to kill you for the sake of Fatherland, yet here you are trying to save me for the sake of ... Brotherland.’ More of the same kind he said in those last hours, and when the end came he was in my arms and his head was on my breast, and Idon’t mind telling you I ... kissed him.”
Mona felt a thrill going through and through her. Brotherland! That was what all the world would be soon. And then Oskar and she, living in Liverpool, in their great love would be happy and unashamed.
That night Oskar comes back. His face is pale and his lips are quivering. He tries to speak, but finding it hard to do so he hands her a letter. It is from the engineering firm on the Mersey.
Sir,—We have received your letter of the 10th inst. addressed to our late chairman, who died during the war, and regret to say in reply to your request that you should be taken back in your former position, that it is now filled to our satisfaction by another engineer, and that even if it were vacant we should find it impossible to re-engage you for the reason that feeling against the Germans is so strong among British workmen that none of them would be willing to serve under you, and the fact that you had married an English wife, as you say, would increase, not lessen, their hostility.Yours, etc.
Sir,—We have received your letter of the 10th inst. addressed to our late chairman, who died during the war, and regret to say in reply to your request that you should be taken back in your former position, that it is now filled to our satisfaction by another engineer, and that even if it were vacant we should find it impossible to re-engage you for the reason that feeling against the Germans is so strong among British workmen that none of them would be willing to serve under you, and the fact that you had married an English wife, as you say, would increase, not lessen, their hostility.
Yours, etc.
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” says Oskar.
“It’s the war,” says Mona. “Will it never, never end?”
“Never,” says Oskar, and he turns away with clenched teeth.
Mona goes to bed that night with a heavy heart. If English workmen will not work with Oskar, England, also, is closed to them, and Brotherland is a cruel dream.
Another week passes. The disbanding of the camp goes on as usual, with its toll of two hundred and fifty men daily. The Fourth and Second Compounds are now beginning to be called upon. The men of the Third are being kept to the last, because many of them, like Oskar, are engineers, and therefore useful in removing the electric plant, which is to be sold separately. But their turn will come soon and then ... whatthen?
A week later Oskar comes again. His face is thin and pinched and his eyes are bleared as from want of sleep, but his spirits are high, almost hysterical.
“Mona,” he says, “I know what we have to do.”
“What?”
“The English may be hard and unforgiving, but the Germans are not like that.”
“The Germans?”
“Oh, I know my people. They may fight like fiends and demons—they do, I know they do—but when the fighting is over they are willing to be friends with their enemies.”
“What are you thinking of now, Oskar?” says Mona, but she sees what is coming.
“If you were willing ... if you could only find it possible to go with me to Germany....”
“Germany?”
Mona feels dizzy.
“It’s a sin and a shame to ask you to leave your native country, Mona, but since it is turning you out, as you say....”
Mona is covering her ears.
“Don’t speak of it, Oskar. I can’t listen to you! It’s impossible.”
Oskar is silent for a moment, then he says in a tremulous voice:
“I would make it up to you, Mona. Yes, Iswear to God I should make it up to you. I should dedicate every day and hour of my life to make it up to you. You should never regret it—never for one single moment.”
“But how could I go....”
“Just as other women are going. Lots of the men are taking their German wives back with them. Why shouldn’t I take my English wife?”
“Wife?”
“Certainly. The chaplain would marry us.”
“The chaplain?”
“Yes, in the camp chapel, late at night or early in the morning, with two of my comrades as witnesses.”
“Have you spoken to him, then?”
“I have, and he says that being made in a Lutheran church by a Lutheran clergyman, it would be a good marriage according to German law, so Germany would receive you.”
“But where ... where should we go to?”
“My mother’s first.”
“Your mother’s?”
“Where else? Oh, she’d love it! She’s thebest mother a man ever had. Do you know, she has written to me every single week since I came here. And now she’s only living to welcome me home.”
“But, Oskar, are you sure she will....”
“Welcome you? Of course she will. She’s growing old, poor soul, and has been lonely since my sister’s death. After we’re married I’ll write to say I’m bringing another daughter home to love and comfort her....”
“Write first, Oskar.”
“As you please. It isn’t necessary, though. I know quite well what she’ll say. But even if she couldn’t welcome you for yourself—and why shouldn’t she?—she would for my sake, anyway.”
“All the same, write first, Oskar.”
“Very well, I will. And if her answer is all right, you’ll go?”
“Ye-s.”
“Heavens, how happy I am! What have I done to deserve to be so happy?”
Mona watches him as he goes off, with his quickstep, until he is lost in the sinister shadows cast by the big arc-lamps that cut through the night. Then she goes indoors and tries to compose herself. It takes her a long time to do so, but at length, being in bed, she remembers a beautiful thing she had read to her father in the days when he lay upstairs:
“Whither thou goest, I will go. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
For days after that Mona finds herself singing as she goes about her work. And at night, when she is alone, she is always thinking of her forthcoming life in Oskar’s home. She can scarcely remember her own mother, except that she was an invalid for years, but she sees herself nursing Oskar’s mother, now that she is old and has lost her daughter.
“I mustn’t go empty-handed, though,” she thinks.
That brings back the memory of Long John Corlett and his threat of “putting the law” on her.
It must have been stuff and nonsense about thedilapidations eating up the stock, but she will see an advocate and have things settled up immediately.
“I’m afraid the man is right, miss.”
It is the advocate whom Mona is consulting.
“It was a bad bargain your poor father made with the Government, and the only people likely to profit by it are the landlord and the incoming tenant.”
“Then what do you advise me to do, sir?”
“Sell up your stock, have the dilapidations valued, pay the money due, and start afresh on whatever is left.”
“Do it for me at once, please,” says Mona, and she sets off home with an easy, if not a happy, mind.
But hardly has she got there and changed into her dairy clothes, and begun on her evening milking in the cow-house, with the watery winter sun coming in on her through the open door, when she sees Oskar approaching with a look that strikes to her heart. His face is white, almost ghastly, andhe is walking like an old man, bent and feeble.
“What has happened?”
“There! What do you think of that?” he says, and with a grating laugh he gives her a letter.
“Is it from your mother?”
“Look at it.”
“Is she refusing to receive me?”
“Read it. It’s written in English—for your benefit, apparently.”
Mona reads:
“Oskar,—The contents of your letter have distressed me beyond measure. That a son of mine should think of marrying an Englishwoman—one of the vile and wicked race that killed his sister—is the most shocking thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”
“Oskar,—The contents of your letter have distressed me beyond measure. That a son of mine should think of marrying an Englishwoman—one of the vile and wicked race that killed his sister—is the most shocking thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”
There is more of the same kind—that if Oskar attempts to bring his Englishwoman to Germany his mother will refuse to receive her; that if she did receive her every self-respecting German woman would cry shame on her and shun her house for ever; that the feeling in Germany against the abominable English is so bitter, because of theirbrutal methods of warfare and their barbarous ideas of peace (starving hundreds of German children by their infamous blockade, drowning German sailors under the sea in their submarines, burning German airmen alive in the air, and now ruining everybody by crushing demands for reparations which will leave Germany a nation of beggars), that no decent house would shelter any of them.
“Tell your Englishwoman from me that if she marries you and comes to this country she will be as a leper whom nobody will touch. Never shall she cross this threshold! Oskar, my son, I love you, and I have waited all this time for you; I am old, too, and have not much longer to live, but rather than hear you had married an Englishwoman I would see you dead and buried.”
“Tell your Englishwoman from me that if she marries you and comes to this country she will be as a leper whom nobody will touch. Never shall she cross this threshold! Oskar, my son, I love you, and I have waited all this time for you; I am old, too, and have not much longer to live, but rather than hear you had married an Englishwoman I would see you dead and buried.”
When Mona looks up from the letter, Oskar is gazing into her face with a ghastly smile.
“That’s a nice thing to send a fellow after four years’ imprisonment, isn’t it?” he says, and then he breaks into heart-breaking laughter.
“I was so sure of her, too. I thought she would do anything for me—anything.”
Again he laughs—wildly, fiercely.
“What has happened to the woman? Has the accursed war taken all the heart out of her? The German people, too—have they all gone mad? Starving German children, drowning German sailors, burning German airmen! Good Lord, has the whole nation gone crazy?”
Mona feels as if she were choking.
“She is old and hasn’t much longer to live, and just because I’m going to marry the best girl in the world and take her home with me....”
But his laughter breaks into sobs and he can say no more. Mona feels the tears in her throat as well as in her eyes, but at length she says:
“Oskar, it’s all my fault. I’ve come between you. You must go home without me—to your country and your mother.”
Oskar lifts his broken face and cries:
“Country? Mother? I’ve got no country and no mother either. Go home to them? Never! Never in this world!”
At the next moment he has gone off, with long strides, before Mona can reach out her hand to stop him.
Being alone, she has to go on with her work as usual—the “creatures” have to be milked and foddered. But after the men from the compounds have been served (only three of them now) she has time to think out her situation.
Since Oskar’s mother refuses to receive her, Germany also is closed to them. Because she loves Oskar, and Oskar loves her, and they are of different races and their nations have been at war, they are to be hunted through the world as outcasts, and no place is to be left for them.
“Poor Oskar! It’s hardest for him, though,” she thinks.
The men of the Fourth and Fifth Compounds, three-quarters of the guard and many of the officers have gone, when a stranger comes to the camp to make a bid for the purchase of the booths and huts.
After a tour of the wooden buildings he arrives at the farm-yard, and steps on to the mounting-block to take a general view, and at the same moment Mona comes to the door of her dairy.
He is an American, a cheerful and rather free-spoken person, and he says, with a smile on his lips, by way of excuse for opening a conversation:
“I guess the farm-house is not for sale, is it?”
“You must ask the landlord about that, sir,” says Mona.
“Not you also? You’re the tenant of the farm, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m leaving it presently.”
“Ah, I remember! I’ve heard something aboutyou. And where are you going to when you leave here?”
“I don’t know yet, sir.”
He looks at her as if measuring her from head to foot, and then says, with another smile:
“Come to my country, girlie. We have some strapping young women out west, but we can do with a few more of the same sort, I guess.”
Mona is startled. Obvious as the word is, it comes like an inspiration. America! “The melting-pot of the nations!” All the races of the world are there. They must live in peace together or life could not go on.
When Oskar comes that night she tells him what the stranger has said, and his big, heavy, sleepless eyes become bright and excited.
“Why not? Why shouldn’t we? That great free country! What a relief to leave all the d——d mess of this life in Europe behind us!”
There is a difficulty, though. He has heard that America refuses to admit people who have been in prison. He has been four years in aninternment camp—will America allow him to land? He must ask the chaplain.
The following night Oskar comes back with a still brighter face.
“It’s all right, Mona. Internment is not imprisonment in the eyes of American law.”
But there is one other difficulty. America requires that every immigrant shall have something in his pocket to prevent him from becoming a burden on the new country.
“It’s not much, but I have too little. If I had been a free man I should have earned four thousand pounds in the time I’ve been here, but when I leave the camp I shall only have fifty.”
Mona is overjoyed—at lengthshecan do something.
“That’s no difficulty at all, Oskar. The auction is to come off soon, and after I’ve paid what I owe I shall have enough for both of us.”
It is the day before the auction, and Mona is gathering up the stock and bringing them down tothe houses—the beasts she had put out on the grass, the “dry” cows that are stretched on their bellies chewing the cud, the sheep that are bleating, and the early lambs that are baa-ing.
She is going up the mountain to fetch the young bull to which she has taken a bowl of wheat twice a week throughout the winter. A new wave of hope has come to her, a golden radiance is shining in the future, and she is singing to herself as she climbs through the heather.
Suddenly, when she reaches the top of the hill, by the tower called “Corrin’s Folly,” she hears fierce animals snorting, and at the next moment sees that three bulls are fighting. One of them is her own young bull, small and lithe, the two others are old and large and black and have iron rings in their nostrils. She remembers the old ones. They belong to John Corlett, and must have leapt over the boundary to get at the young one, and are now goring it fearfully.
The fight is frightful. The young bull is bleeding horribly and trying to escape. It leaps over the wall of the little cemetery around the towerand makes for the land on the other side of it which goes down by a steep descent to precipitous cliffs, with the broad sea lying below at a terrible depth. But the old bulls, making hoarse noises from their nostrils, are following it up on either side and intercepting it. As often as the hunted animal runs to the right they gore it back to the left, and when it flies to the left they gore it back to the right.
At length the young bull stands for a moment, with its wild eyes flashing fire and its face towards the cliffs. And then, with a loud snort as of despair and defiance, it bounds forward, gallops straight ahead, and leaps clear over the cliff-head into the sea. The old bulls look after it for a moment with heaving nostrils and dilated eyes, and then begin to graze as if nothing had happened.
Mona has stood helpless and trembling while the fight has lasted, and when it is over and she comes to herself she finds Oskar standing behind her. He has been working on the roof of the tower, to remove the electric wires which havebeen attached to it, and from there he has seen everything.
“It was horrible, wasn’t it?”
“Horrible!”
“So cruel and cowardly.”
“Yes,” he says, from between his clenched teeth, “and so damnably human.”
Mona looks at him. They go down the hill together without saying any more.
At last it has come, the day of the sale. The Commandant has permitted it to be held at the farm, although the camp is not yet entirely cleared. It is his last act before leaving, for he is going away that morning. Mona sees him driving off in his motor car, hardly recognizable in his civilian clothes. As he passes the farm-house he raises his hat to her—an English gentleman, every inch of him.
Towards eleven o’clock there is much commotion about the farmstead. The guards (they have had orders to help) are bringing the big beasts out of the houses into the “haggard” and drivingthe sheep and lambs into pens. There is a great deal of bleating and lowing. Mona, who is compelled to hear, but cannot bring herself to see what is going on, is indoors, trying not to look or listen.
At length there is the sound of voices. The Advocate, with the auctioneer and his clerk, are coming up the avenue, and behind them are many farmers. Long John Corlett, in his chapel clothes, is prominent among the latter, talking and laughing and hobnobbing with everybody. Mona sees the look of impudent certainty in the man’s empty face. She also sees Oskar, who is behind the barbed wire of the Third Compound, with a face that is white and fierce.
After a short period for inspection the auction begins. The Advocate reads the conditions of sale (the whole of the stock on the farm is to be sold without reserve), and then the auctioneer steps up to the top of the mounting-block, while the clerk takes his place at the foot of it, and the farmers form a circle around them. There are the usual facetiæ.
“Now, gentlemen, you’ve got the chance of yourlives this morning. John Corlett, I know you’ve come to buy up everything, so get your purse-strings loosened. Mr. Lace, thou knows a good beast if anybody on the island does, and there are lashings of them here, I can tell thee.”
The first animal to be led out by the guard into the circle of the spectators is a fine milch cow, five years old. Mona remembers that she gave forty pounds for it in the middle of the war. It is knocked down for twenty.
“What name?”
“John Corlett.”
For a long half-hour there are scenes of the same kind. Every fresh beast put up is knocked down at half its value, and always, after the crack of the auctioneer’s hammer, there comes the same name—“John Corlett.”
At length Mona’s anger becomes ungovernable. It is conspiracy, collusion! John Corlett has bought up all competitors! She rises from her seat by the fire with the intention of throwing up the window and shouting her protest. But while her hand is on the sash she sees Oskar at the otherside of the barbed wire, striding hastily away, and she returns to her seat.
The auction goes on for an hour longer. Mona does not look out again, but she hears everything that is said outside, every word, almost every whisper.
The farmers are beginning to laugh at the monotony of the proceedings. At length there is a murmur of conversation between the auctioneer and the Advocate, and the auctioneer says, “Very well, if you wish, sir,” whereupon the Advocate raises his voice and cries:
“Gentlemen, this is going too far. If I hadn’t announced that the sale would be without reserve I should stop it on my own responsibility. Come now, be Manxmen. What’s doing on you anyway? Is it the war—or what? Men, we all knew old Robert Craine. He is dead. Let us be fair to his only daughter.”
After that there is no more laughter, but there is less bidding and the results are the same. The sale, which was expected to last until evening, is over by lunch-time.
“Gentlemen,” says the auctioneer, “I thank you for your attendance. It’s just as I expected—John Corlett has bought in all the stock on the farm.”
“And much good may it do him,” says the Advocate.
“I might have given her more for it without the auction, sir,” says John Corlett.
“And so you might, or you should have been d—— well ashamed of yourself.”
Then Mona hears the sound of trapesing feet on the avenue and the various voices of people passing under her window.
“Serve her right, though! We want no Huns settling here on the island.”
“No, nor no good Manx money going over to Germany neither.”
A moment later the Advocate comes into the house.
“I’m sorry the sale has not been as good as we expected, miss. The total receipts will scarcely cover the valuation.”
“Then there’s nothing left for me—nothing whatever?”
“Nothing! I’m sorry, very sorry.”
Mona, who had risen, sinks back into her seat as if stunned. After a while, the Advocate having gone, she hears the barking of dogs, the shouting of men, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle. The stock are being driven back to the hill by the servants of their new owner.
At length there is silence. It is not at first that Mona is able to realize the full meaning of what has happened, but at last it falls on her. America is closed to her now. And that means that there is no place left to her in the world!
Oskar comes towards bed-time. He is biting his lips and his eyes are bloodshot. She looks up at him helplessly—all the strength of her soul has gone out of her.
“You’ve heard the result?”
“Yes, I have heard,” he says, speaking between his teeth.
“I can’t think how people could be so unkind.”
“Unkind!”
He is laughing bitterly, fiercely.
“One’s nearest neighbours—the people one has known all one’s life.”
“Oh, your people are no worse than any other—not an atom. People are the same everywhere. It’s the war, Mona. It has drained every drop of humanity out of them.”
He is laughing again, still more bitterly and fiercely.
“War! What a damned stupid, idiotic thing it is—and the people who make it! Patriots? Criminals, I call them! Crowned criminals and their mountebank crew conspiring against God and Nature.”
He smites the doorpost with his fist and says:
“But the war is not the worst by a long way.”
“What is, Oskar?”
“This damnable peace that has followed it. People thought when the peace came they could go to sleep and forget. What fools! Think of it! Miserable old men spouting about a table,gambling in the fate of the young and the unborn; forgetting their loss in precious human lives, but wrangling about their reparations, about land, about money, which the little mother rocking her baby’s cradle will have to pay the interest of in blood and tears some day; setting nation against nation; brewing a cauldron of hate which is hardening the hearts and poisoning the souls of men and women all the world over.”
Mona, who has hardly heard what he has said, is still looking up at him helplessly.
“We couldn’t help it, could we, Oskar?”
Oskar, recovering his self-command, pity-struck and ashamed, lifts up her work-stained hands and puts them to his lips.
“Forgive me, Mona.”
“We struggled hard, didn’t we?”
“Yes.”
“But since God had put it into our hearts we couldn’t resist it, could we?”
“No.”
“And now He doesn’t seem to care, does He?”
“No! He doesn’t seem to care,” says Oskar. And then he goes off with head down.
It is the Saturday before Easter.
Looking out of her bedroom window in the morning, Mona sees nothing but a desolate black waste where the crowded compounds have been. Four unborn springs and summers buried in the bosom of the blackened fields—when, oh when will they grow green again?
Only in the Third Compound is there any activity. Few men are left even there. Oskar has told her he is to leave with the last batch, but the time for him to go is coming on inexorably.
The “houses” are empty, the “creatures” no longer call, and the unnatural silence of the farmyard oppresses her. As long as she had the work of three farm hands to do her strength never failed her, but now that she has only to attend to herself she is always tired and weary.
The spring is beginning to appear, and through the open door she sees that the daffodils areblooming in the little patch of garden in front of the house. This reminds her of what she did on the day of her father’s burial, and she plucks some of the flowers, intending to lay them on his grave.
There is nobody in the avenue when she walks through—between the lines of barbed-wire fences that have no faces behind them now—and past the empty guards’ houses near to the gate. There is nobody on the road either, as far as to the lych-gate of Kirk Patrick.
There he lies, her father, his upright head-stone, inscribed to “Robert Craine of Knockaloe,” cheek by jowl with the sloping marbles that mark the graves of the Germans who had died during the four years of internment—all his race-hatred quenched in the peace of death.
Only a few yards away, on the grass of a mound that had no stone over it, is the glass dome of artificial flowers which she herself had placed on the grave of Ludwig, the boy with the cough. The glass is cracked, no doubt by the snow and frost of winter, and the white flowers have perished. Poorfather! Who knows but in a little while his dust may mingle with that of the German boy in the mother-bosom that bore them both! Oh God, how wicked is war, how cruel, how senseless!
Mona is coming out of the churchyard when she hears the tapping of a mason’s chisel and then sees the mason himself behind a canvas screen, which shelters him from the winnowing of a light breeze that is blowing up from the sea. He is at work on a large block of granite, lettering a long list of names.
After a moment she speaks to him, and he tells her what the block is—the base of a cross to the men of the district who fell in the war. It is to be set up outside the gate of the parish church at Peel. The ceremony of unveiling it is to be on Easter Monday—that is to say, the day after to-morrow. The time is to be nine in the morning, because that is the hour when the boys of Peel and Patrick who have survived the war are expected to return home by the steamer that is to leave Liverpool on Sunday night. The Lord Bishop of the Island is to unveil the memorial, and all the clergyand Town Commissioners and big people of the two parishes are to be present. All the men, too, and their mothers and wives and children.
“It will be a grand sight, girl. I suppose you won’t be going, though?”
Mona catches her breath and answers:
“No.”
After another moment she begins to look over the names. All four sides of the base are full of them, and the mason seems to be lettering the last. She tries to find her brother’s name and cannot do so. At length, not without an effort, she says:
“But where is Robbie’s name?”
The mason pauses in his work, and then answers:
“Robbie Craine’s? Well, to tell you the truth, it is not on the list they made out for me.”
“They—who are they?”
“Well, the Bishop and the clergy and the Town Commissioners and so on.”
“But my brother died in the war, and won the Victoria Cross, didn’t he?”
“Maybe he did.”
“You know he did. Then what has he donethat his name is not in the list with the rest?”
The mason, preparing to resume his work, replies:
“Maybe it’s what somebody else has done that has kept him out of it.”
The word falls on her like a blow on the brain, and she goes off hurriedly. As she turns the corner of the road she hears the thin ring of the mason’s chisel, and it sounds like the thud of doom. Is she, and everybody who has ever belonged to her, to be wiped out of living memory? What has she done to deserve it? But after a moment of fierce anger her former helplessness comes back on her and she begins to cry.
“I can’t tell in the world why good people should be so unkind.”
Later in the day a new strength, the strength of defiance, comes over her. Oskar may say it is the war, and even the peace, that has poisoned people’s souls, but if it was God who put it into her heart to love Oskar, and into Oskar’s heartto love her, it is for God to see them through. He will, too—certainly He will. If she has to become a servant girl herself and scrub her fingers to the bone, why shouldn’t she? God will open people’s eyes some day, and then the Bishop and the clergy and the Town Commissioners will have to be ashamed of themselves.
“I’m a good woman—why shouldn’t they?”
Being without stock of her own now she has to go into town that evening to buy provisions for housekeeping. The shop-keepers show her scant courtesy, but she puts up with no neglect and no disrespect. It is almost dark when she has finished her shopping, and then, for a near cut back to Knockaloe, she passes, with her string bag in her hand, through a by-street which has an ale-house at one corner.
There she comes upon a tumultuous scene. In front of a small house, with the door standing open, a crowd of women and children have gathered to listen to a wild quarrel that is going on within. There is a man’s voice swearing, agirl’s voice screaming and an old woman’s pleading.
“So this is what my maintenance from the army has been spent on—keeping you and your ... German bastard.”
“It’s not my fault, Harry; I tried to get another place and nobody would have me.”
“Neither will I have you, so get out of this house quick.”
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone, I tell you! If you touch my child I’ll scratch your eyes out.”
“Out you go, you harlot, and to ... with you.”
“Harry! Liza! Harry! Harry! Children!” cries the old woman.
Mona asks the women of the crowd what is going on.
“Don’t you know, miss? It’s Liza Kinnish, the girl with the German baby. Her brother has come home from the war, and he is turning her out—and no wonder.”
A number of men, half-intoxicated, come from the ale-house, but they make no attempt to intervene, and at the next moment a bare-headed soldier,also in drink, with the upper buttons of his tunic torn open, comes from the house, dragging after him a girl with a baby in her arms and her disordered hair streaming on to her shoulders.
“Out you go—you and your d—— German offal!”
Flinging the girl into the street, the man returns to the house and clashes the door behind him.
“Let me in!” screams the girl, hammering at the door with her spare hand.
The door opens and the soldier comes to the threshold.
“Look here, you ... I’m not going to have the fellows sneering at me when they come home on Monday morning, so if you are not gone to ... out of this inside two minutes....”
“Why didyoucome home?” cries the girl. “You beast! You brute! Why didn’t the Germans kill you?”
At that the soldier, foaming at the mouth, is lifting his clenched fist to the girl when Mona, crushing through the crowd of women and throwing down her string bag, lifts her own hand andstrikes the man full in the jaw, and he falls like a log.
Then, while he squirms on the ground, stunned and winded, she turns on the men from the ale-house, who have previously been drinking with him and taunting him and egging him on.
“And you!” she cries. “Whatareyou? Are youmen?You white-livered mongrels! Your mothers werewomen, and they’d be ashamed of you.”
By this time the soldier has scrambled to his feet and, with blood in his mouth, he is trying to laugh.
“Ha, ha, ha! So this is another of them, is it? She’s in the same case herself, they’re telling me. Oh, I’ve heard of you, my lady. You used to think great things of yourself, but when the parson marries you there’ll be three of you before him at the altar, as the saying is. Ha, ha, ha!”
The men laugh and some of the women begin to titter. A harder blow than she had dealt the soldier had fallen upon Mona. She stands for amoment as if turned to stone, then picks up her bag, sweeps through the crowd and hastens away.
So this is what people think of her! After all the struggling of her heart and the travailing of her soul, this is what people think! Oh, God! Oh, God!
She had been sleeping badly of late, but that night she hardly sleeps at all. Towards the grey dawning she has a sense of Robbie being in the room with her. He is wearing his officer’s uniform, just as in her mind’s eye, when she felt so proud, she had often seen him. She knows he is dead, and she thinks this is his spirit, and it has come to reproach her.
“Mona, if anybody had told me three years ago that such a thing would happen I should have killed him. Yes, by God, I should have killed him.”
Mona tries to speak, but cannot.
“Rob....”
“Lord, how proud I was of you! When they told me I had won the Victoria Cross I laughed and said, ‘My sister would have won it long agoif she had been here.’ Nobody hated the Germans as you used to do, but now that you’ve given yourself to one of them....”
“Rob ... Rob....”
“What else could you have done it for? Everybody believes it, too. Father believed it, and it was that that killed him.”
Again Mona tries to cry out and cannot.
“Hide yourself away, Mona. Hide your sin and shame in some miserable corner of the earth where nobody will know you. You’ve broken my heart, and now....”
“Robbie! Robbie!”
Her own voice awakens her. The rising sun shines on her as she sits up in bed in her wretchedness.
Only a dream! Yet it has told her everything. This is the end. Here has her road finally led her. Her love is doomed. Life, as well as the world, is now closed to her. But to stand in the pillory as long as she lives for a sin she has not committed—it is too much! Better die—a thousand times better!
When she asks herself how, it seems so simple. And when she thinks of the consequences they seem so slight. There will be nobody to care—nobody except Oskar. He will be better without her, and can go home when his time comes. Either of them could get on alone. It is only together that they are not allowed to live, and since only one of them can live, it is so much better it should be Oskar.
There is a pang in the thought that Oskar will suffer. Yes, he will be sorry. But he will get over it. And when he is at home and the first pang of losing her is past and he wants to be happy, being so young and such aman, perhaps ... who knows....
But no, she cannot think of that.