by Ursula Bloom
‘Stan, don’t! I won’t listen.’
‘You’re cold.’
‘That’s what Father said of Mother.’
‘Well, I bet he was right. My word, but she’s cold too.’
‘You shan’t say that of Mother.’
‘I’m not the only one. Your father ‒’
‘Shut up about him.’
‘Soon I’ll be shut up altogether. If there’s a war I’ll be rotting in my grave soon enough. Then you’ll be sorry you weren’t nice to me, and all.’
She turned and clung. ‘I’m sorry now.’
‘Come back on the sofa then and be nice.’
She demurred.
‘I’ll give you my word I’ll play straight. Come on.’
As she stood there hesitating, her fidelity believing in him, her virginity on the defensive against him, it suddenly struck her that the room was dimmer than it had been. Long shadows were reaching out of the corners; the line beneath the mantelshelf and under the windows was growing more intense.
‘What’s the matter with the light?’ she asked.
‘I expect it wants another bob.’
‘I haven’t one, I’m sure.’ She groped for the papery bag, fumbled in its depths, clutched some odd coppers and a half-crown, and added with a little deprecating gesture, ‘Have you one?’
‘No.’
‘Stan, you haven’t felt!’
‘Well, you feel.’
‘Stan!’
She was blurred in the dimness, he could not make out her features. ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said; ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-night. Life’s difficult, isn’t it?’
She came to him with a sob. Women forgive so easily. They excuse under any circumstances, they weaken and swerve, so willing to pardon are they. These two kissed as the gas ebbed out with a last plop. They did not hear the rattle of the latchkey in the hall door. Isobel came in crying hysterically from the excitement of the whole affair.
‘They’ve declared war. Midnight, at Buckingham Palace. Everybody has gone mad.’ Then she came to a standstill. ‘Why, you two?’
‘In the dark!’ echoed Twit.
Jill’s voice came faint and far away. ‘The gas has gone out. We hadn’t a shilling for it.’
All four of them were mere hulks, outlines in the moonshine which penetrated the thin curtains. The news was mere outline, too, an ugly outline in a pretty world waiting despoilment. Isobel felt in her bag, handed a coin to Twit, and he disappeared. They heard the crank of the meter in the hall and the chink as the shilling dropped, then the thin escaping sound of gas in the loop above the set table.
‘Quick, Stan,’ called Jill, ‘we left it on.’
Stanley pulled his box of matches from his pocket, caught the lining in with it, and brought out a hail of coins tumbling with an almost gleeful sound to the floor. He set a match to the gas, it lit noisily, and a fierce yellow glare jaundiced the room. The thready carpet was covered with small dark coins. At Isobel’s feet three single shillings lay in mute appeal. Jill, seeing them, made a hurried movement, hoping to put her foot out and hide them from her mother. Her startled eyes met those shamed ones of Stanley.
‘I thought you hadn’t a shilling!’ said Isobel hotly. She was resentful about the whole affair. ‘Prefer to sit in the dark, I suppose, knowing that Jill has no father to protect her.’
‘Mrs. Grimshaw!’
‘I’ve been young, too, but never like that. I don’t know what modern young people are coming to, it is disgusting.’
‘Mother, we weren’t ‒’
Then she stopped short. A terrible truth was stabbing into her being, and demanding utterance. Stanley had suggested it. He had been different to-night, quite different. She had supposed it to be the war impulse, and had a hundred excuses ready for him, and not one of them explained the position. She pulled herself together.
‘Stanley, please go, before Mother misunderstands more. I’ll explain. Do please go.’
‘It doesn’t seem gentlemanly to leave you like this.’
She heard him go down the hall, his feet on the linoleum, then muted on the oakum mat beyond. Her tense body relaxed.
‘I wouldn’t trust that fellow in the dark,’ said Twit, ‘sitting and cuddling like that, and thinking Mother wouldn’t know!’
‘It’s dreadful,’ said Isobel, and she began to cry again.
‘Life’s dreadful,’ said Jill gloomily; ‘and now there is going to be a war, and I hope we all get killed, the whole lot of us, and ‒’ from the hitherto silent garden without came the sudden raucous miaowing of Tiddles enjoying amatory entertainment, ‘and the cat as well,’ she added.
‘I don’t see that you’re any better than Tiddles,’ said Twit, who felt that there was a good deal more to be said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sitting in the dark with Stanley.’
‘Dreadful,’ moaned Isobel.
The desire filled her. Jill clenched her fist, she clenched it hard, and bit her underlip with determination. She hit out. She hit Twit full in the face as she had longed to hit him all those past years. She heard his howl of fury, and Isobel’s scream of anguish, and she saw him drop to the floor. She sped out of the room, wildly triumphant yet bitterly ashamed. Upstairs she held her face in her throbbing, stinging hands. ‘War!’ she told herself. ‘It’s awful! It goes to our heads. It’s got me too.’
She felt herself branded with the significant brand of Cain. She found that she was weeping for Twit.
III
Twenty-four hours later Twit abandoned his lathe, flung his articles to one side, and with them all hope of qualification as an engineer, and joined up with the Territorials. Isobel was intensely proud, but a little alarmed. Jill was merely proud. Stanley waited three days to put his business in order and then joined up in the same regiment. At the end of the first few hours both came back in uniform. Isobel thought that Twit ought to have been allowed to wear his own boots, and she did not like the spurs. Twit liked the spurs still less. His first attempt to descend the stairs in them was precipitous, if not actually dangerous. Well, he had taken the bull by the horns! He’d shown them that he had some guts in him, anyhow. He did not care what happened if only he could get Jill and Isobel to reshape their opinions of him.
It had not been all his fault. School had been difficult, his coddled upbringing had hindered his progress, Jill’s cold scorn the most enraging weapon against which to combat. He knew that he ought to fight it with some of its own sharpness, but he always failed miserably. When he got angry and excited he had no other weapon save sneaking. Every time it made Jill despise him more, and he despised himself, but he could not stop it. It would perhaps be a good thing if for a period of time he and Jill were divided.
Lying in the huge barn commandeered for the troops, unused to the hard bed and the long rows of companions, he lay awake thinking. It was Jill of whom he thought. Jill whom he admired more than anyone else in the world, yet with whom he quarrelled and bickered more than all others. How she had worked for him! How she had acted as a father towards him, and how cruel she had been in her sharp rebukes! Some day he would make his fortune, and bring her a Daimler car, and show her what a really grateful brother could do. He hoped that she would not marry that little cad Stanley, because she was worth something better than that. There was a chance now, a big chance, because the great engine of war had been set in motion, and nobody knew what might or might not happen. Anyway, Jill and Stanley would be divided, and perhaps Isobel might have decent men billeted there, which would change Jill’s outlook.
Twit had Jill’s future lying close to his heart. In the little leather note-case that Isobel had given him for his pocket was a photograph of Jill. It was perhaps his dearest possession. He had shown it to Higginson, the fellow who slept next to him, and Higginson confided in Twit that he thought Jill was pretty. Stanley’s arrival in the company was taken by Twit as a personal insult. He had not wanted Stanley to jo
in him, he had wanted to be free and to make a fresh start untrammelled by the old surroundings. Twit had suddenly come to think a little more seriously of his attitude towards life, and to re-mould his ideas. He hated the hard bed on which he found himself, and the draughty barn with its other occupants. He hated the tiny glimpses of the stars that he could see peering in between the chinks of corrugated iron roofing and sagging beams. The discomforts of limited washing arrangements and the enforced uncleanliness did not disturb him. He could only welcome the change as release from the smug villa, from Jill earning desperately for him, and from Isobel and Stanley.
Jill in her own fashion welcomed the change too, because it would free her from Stanley. She had not the will to break the tie herself and she had the good sense to welcome a condition that would sever it for her. During the first month, Jill was involved in double work at the Hippodrome, and worries as to six seven-pound pots of marmalade that she had bought.
The ice bucket had come to an untimely end. Owing to the impracticability of boiling water at the Hippodrome, it had been insufficiently washed. On the fourth day it had grown a strange kind of mildew upon it, and smelt atrociously. Jill had faced the problem, and had been obliged to admit that it defeated her. ‘Well,’ she had told herself, ‘all I can say is thank God that I didn’t spend eleven shillings on a Gamage’s one.’
Almost at once troops were billeted and extra matinees demanded. Jill was not given additional money, but in those days when everybody was merely concerned in doing their bit, and how long Lille would stand the siege, she did not care. For the first time in his nineteen years of life Twit was self-supporting, which was a great relief. The marmalade was a more alarming proposition. In the first food scare, Jill, drawing one pound from the Post Office Savings Bank, had invested it in the six seven-pound jars of marmalade. The shop being unable to send these, she had contrived to carry them home, one by one. At the time she had thought herself clever, and had commended her own foresight. She argued that the worst war could not possibly outlast six seven-pound jars of marmalade, and everybody knew that this war would be over by Christmas. All the nations were coming to our aid, and there was the steam-roller movement of the Russians, in fact everything save Kitchener’s pessimistic outlook to make it end quickly.
The moment when Jill had got her marmalade home, there came the fierce hostility against food hoarders. Not only a newspaper hostility, but close police investigations. Instantly Jill was not so sure that she had acted wisely. She deposited the jars in different parts of the house, ate the entire contents of one herself, and never fancied marmalade so much after. Then she settled down really to worry about it.
On the third of September Twit’s company was moved to Suffolk. Twit brought the news home. Isobel seemed to associate Suffolk with the front line, because she wept copiously and assured them all that he would be killed. She said that it was dreadful to think of a boy with Twit’s upbringing being in the ranks. He ought to have had a commission.
That very morning Stanley came in. A little band of twenty men was being sent in advance, and he had been chosen to go.
They were proceeding to Suffolk by train that very night.
IV
Jill had not expected separation to come on them like this. The suddenness of it being thrust at them was frightening. She quivered and clung to him. They had come into the garden to talk, to get away from the noisy, weeping Isobel and sullen-looking Twit. They were standing in the little summer-house sadly lumbered with Twit’s bicycle. There were also his old school tuck-box, and the iron-moulded, verdigrised skeleton of an invention that at one time he had supposed would make his fortune. They stood there under the shelter of the spidery honeysuckle and creeper, and thick, strong ivy leaves.
Before them stretched the ragged lawn, badly needing cutting, with the straggling borders of overgrown yellowed cornflowers and tall sunflowers bent with the wind. Over the fence peered round bright eyes of hollyhocks in petunia and claret and rose. She had planted them only last spring, when there had never been any thought of war, when they had gone on blindly in impenetrable peace. The very thought hurt her.
‘Don’t tell your Mum yet,’ said Stanley, ‘but I believe I am getting a commission. You know, through the O.T.C.’
‘Oh, Stan!’
‘We might almost be married if I do. It’s no good waiting, and it would entitle you to the pension if I went West. Most of us are going West, I dare bet.’
She clung to him, making no effort to restrain her tears. It was all incongruous. They had come out of the dining-room to get away from Isobel, who was doing the same thing with Twit. Now here was Jill weeping over Stanley.
She sobbed. ‘But you see, we can’t get married, never, Stanley, never. You’ve got sick of me, really; it’s only just the war that makes you think you haven’t. It can’t be.’
There was silence. When he spoke his voice was resentful. ‘It’s a bit dirty to try and break it off the very day I march away ‒ to die,’ he said.
‘It isn’t as if we hadn’t talked of it before. You know we have. We said we’d wait until something happened. Well, it’s happened.’
‘You’re going to chuck me?’
She hadn’t thought of it like that, but as an event to which they had been leading up for some long time. She thought that they had both accepted the inevitable, but he was deliberately twisting her words and distorting her meaning. War made a difference; it brought out brutality, but it brought out sentimentality too. Love for ever walks hand in hand with war, it is its pioneer and product in one. Stanley did not understand the psychology of it, but he accepted fact.
‘Stanley,’ she went on, ‘I’ve tried to be fair over this thing, but it has been difficult. Then there was that other night when war was declared‒’ she felt herself redden, ‘on ‒ on the sofa.’
She was ashamed. It was a strange antithesis of emotion when he should have been the shamed one. He excused himself hurriedly, making the usual masculine excuse of not being made of granite. He added:
‘It is women like you who make men desperate. Suicides, and all that.’
‘But I told you, Stan.’
‘I give you my word I didn’t understand. I just thought you were dissatisfied and you’d get over it. No more, on my Sam.’
‘Let’s be friends?’
‘I thought you’d be pleased about me being an officer, and all that, whilst that little rat of a brother of yours slogs his soul out in the ranks.’
She remembered Twit suddenly and forcefully. In a panic she sat down on the upturned tuck-box, and clasped Stanley’s hand in her own. There came to them both the keen strong smell of coarse ivy.
‘Dear, dear Stan. Don’t be unkind to Twit. He is very young. He does not mean to be such a hopeless little ass, and he wants somebody to take care of him. Whilst you are in the company, my dear, do this for me. Do take care of him, do help him.’
Twit would have bitterly resented her solicitations on his behalf. Nothing would have galled him more than the idea that Stanley was keeping a fraternal eye on him. Nothing irritated Stanley more than the idea that he might have to see after Twit; yet, as Jill asked him, he could see no help for it. He said with a bad grace, ‘He makes me tired! Stupid little fool.’
‘One day Twit will do something great,’ she explained with shining eyes.
‘With knobs on!’
‘Don’t! I hate that sort of expression. Twit is backward, his health has handicapped him, but he is going to be great yet.’
‘Most of us are going to moulder in French soil. That’s what greatness is going to do for us. I don’t care. You’ve chucked me.’
‘We can go on being engaged,’ she suggested, her resolution weakening.
‘Yes, that’s a fat lot of good, when there isn’t no chance of us being married. No, thank you.’
He got up, pulling his tunic down, and settling his bandolier. The sunlight filtered in goldly between the screen of green leaves. The wind bl
ew small gusts of fear through the frailer foliage of the honeysuckle. Beyond was the garden, the gay September garden, with the brilliant arms of trees against the clear wind-riven sky.
‘This is the end,’ said Stanley.
‘It can’t be.’
She was dazed. They kissed in a remote way, neither actually conscious of the caress. They stood for a moment staring dumbly each at a face they knew by heart, as though they made a last effort to take an impression of it on into the years yet to be. They clung with the ambient scent of leaves and fertility and hot sun-seared earth floating round them. Then Stanley marched down the bricked path, out into the street.
She heard the defiant echo of his spurs as he went, the hiccoughy closing of the wheezy gate on unoiled hinges. Still over the fence there stared the solemn round eyes of cherry and claret-coloured hollyhocks, and the somnolent brown eyes of heavy sunflowers. They were the flowers she had planted in peace-time.
V
Twit’s company followed two days later. The column would march past the house, and Jill and Isobel waited at the windows to wave a tearful good-bye. Isobel wanted to prolong the agony. She wanted every atom of emotional satisfaction out of this morbid leave-taking. They were due to pass at nine in the morning, but they had not come at twelve. Although the general public were unaware of it, there had been a hitch in the messing. The rations had not been delivered. The officers, new to routine, had hesitated about starting men on a long march eastwards on empty stomachs. In the early days of the war they floundered helplessly in their ignorance. Later they became used to adversity, with a tragic, weary use.
Although they waited until one o’clock, no rations arrived, and it was imperative that some sort of a start should be made. The conditions were rather aggravated than relieved by time. Some of the men, who had enlisted from good homes, and who were not yet in that hale and healthy state of being able to accept with a smile anything that came along, turned sick. They lined up gallantly enough, and marched out bravely into the bright main street of St. Laurence’s. They rolled away down the long road, dun-coloured figures, with horses prancing and pirouetting. The gun carriages cranked and creaked as they went on their way. A crowd that had collected set up a ringing cheer as the thin line went on. Jill caught sight of the column approaching, and flew to the gate.