by Ursula Bloom
‘Here they are, Mother, here they are!’
Two berries from the rowan tree fell like spots of blood on her. Isobel could hardly see through her tears. White-faced men, some of them mere boys, and one of them her boy! They were unused to the heavy boots and the tiring equipment. As they got level with the house, they called a halt. A lad had fainted. Of course it was Twit! A wild insurgence against war filled Jill. She pushed herself forward to his side. Twit was lying in the dust, with his white, pinched face and his pitifully brave khaki. Two men lifted him into a gun carriage; one of them ‒ Higginson ‒ recognised her.
‘No rations,’ he explained briefly.
Jill did not stop. She sped back into the house, her mind working rapidly. She snatched up a couple of loaves, and the cold joint. She ran back and thrust these hastily into the gun carriage. Rushing indoors again she picked up a melon, scattering the seeds to right and left as she did so. She found the company on the march once more, and had only just time to hand it to an amazed Higginson, turning to run back for yet more. The gun carriage creaked to the march and bore Twit away. Isobel could see his clumsy boots turned up over the back. She broke down utterly.
Jill came out of the house again, clasping one of the seven-pound jars of marmalade. She dropped it with a crash.
A thin column winding away into the grey of the distance, and Isobel weeping her heart out over the cheap little gate, with a rowan tree, withering, and dripping blood-like berries about her.
War …
INTERIM
CHAPTER I
‘For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.’ ‒ Cicero.
I
WOMAN-CHILD.
In the early July of nineteen nineteen Jill was awaiting Twit’s return from India. The war had been over many months now, and out of it there had grown a new Jill. She was a virile personality. For the first time she was conscious of the ego within her, as yet bound closely in swaddling clothes, but a definite self. It was reaching up towards the light of greater illumination. It was already demanding expression. It was as though she had lived her life in an old dark house, screened from the sunlight of knowledge by tall trees. Then, one day, the sunlight had filtered through the green leaves in figments of gold, and the house had changed with the new light. Life had come into it. Consciousness of greatness, the first intuition of giving birth to power.
Jill was sitting in her small drawing-room, which opened into a large and rather beautiful conservatory. This house had been her first form of self-expression. She had chosen bare walls at an epoch when patterns had been the rage. She preferred the restfulness of dull grey paint, and deep black bands of woodwork. She had refused all pictures, for the simple reason that she found she could gaze upon ungarnished walls and find peace, whereas pictures were for ever disturbing. She had preferred uncarpeted floors, and only the scantiest furniture. People had criticised her home as being bare, but Jill loved it for its restfulness, and for its personality. She disliked places cluttered up with furniture and ornaments. Isobel’s houses had been too full of articles that she one day hoped to find useful, but never did. There had been ornaments that had been Mamma’s and therefore could not be thrown away. Isobel suffered from the fetish of sentimentality and she also believed that to encumber herself with useless furnishings was an economy. Jill had swept sentimentality away. Long clean lines of rooms, bare, unburdened wall. A little furniture, and that little lovely. She asked no more.
Beyond the net-hung window lay the garden, the long red wavy roofs of a small town. Still beyond, rising in undulating green lengths spattered with gorse and undergrowth, lay the downs of Sussex.
Jill had come to Morsegate when she married. Morsegate lay just far enough from London to exempt it from Suburbia, yet near enough to facilitate attendance at a theatre at night. It had not been mere chance that had brought Jill to Morsegate, but the simple reason that Edward had been stationed there.
Isobel had died just after Jill was married to the young subaltern who had been billeted upon them. Lord Shane had arrived there with his battalion soon after Twit left, and he had immediately fallen in love with Jill. To say that she ever loved Edward Shane was to stretch a point. At the time Isobel was very ill, and Jill was divided between her work at the Hippodrome and nursing her mother.
She was obliged ultimately to give up her work and stay solely at home, confronted with the very knotty problem of making George’s £120 a year go round. Prices rose with the war. They rose alarmingly. Twit needed all manner of little things, though in the main he was self-supporting.
Early in the new year Jill realised in a panic that Isobel was going to die. Jill was afraid of life. She was afraid of all that it offered, or rather did not offer her. But she was also very much more afraid of death. Stanley had flickered out of her world like a candle-flame. He had been sent abroad the moment he had obtained his commission, a fact that Isobel strongly resented. She considered that it was a gross miscarriage of justice that Stanley should be an officer, when Twit was only in possession of the queer title of Bombardier. A Bombardier reminded Isobel of a material in which she had been wont to garb herself in her youth. It seemed all wrong that Stanley should be an officer and Twit remain non-commissioned. Stanley was sent to the front. He arrived there at a bad moment, when the first battle of Ypres was in progress. They were short of men, they could not delay, and the young and pitifully green were rushed out to deal with the emergency. Stanley lasted just a week. Isobel saw the notice in the morning paper, and for a moment she paused to wonder if she had been a little unkind about him. Stanley alive was a common little man, Stanley dead was a hero.
Jill maintained that she could see no difference in his characteristics whether he was alive or dead. Death could not canonise him. Isobel, misunderstanding, declared that Jill was heartless.
That was wrong.
In bed Jill lay pondering on this great mystery of life and death, on this leviathan of war which trod so ruthlessly on young bright lives, crushing them into the starkened lands, leaving the earth stained so redly. She could see no object in it. There seemed no single reason for its being. It was a skeleton staring out of eyeless sockets at her, and laughing fiendishly. It had snatched Stanley, who had had so little from life, to the great experience of death. She felt little and narrow and wondering, when she contemplated his greater knowledge from the other side.
Maybe that was when Jill found her ego.
When Lord Shane offered her his hand and heart, and incidentally the share in a couple of thousands a year, Jill said, very truthfully:
‘Do you know that I am not in the least in love with you?’
And he made the stereotyped remark that he had enough love for two.
He was a tall, dark, very companionable young man, and they were attracted to each other from the first. Frankly, he loved Jill for her beauty. She aroused in him a physical emotion that was interesting. Jill turned to him because she needed someone on whom she could lean, and she was so hungry for safety. If she had had any qualms, they were relieved by Isobel’s rapture over the engagement. She wrote at once to Blanche, and with no little pride. Monica’s children had not done so well. Isobel wrote a very Victorian letter, with much underlining, and many flourishes. She sealed it and posted it, and her eyes brightened as she visualised Blanche’s face when she read it.
Edward was proud of the plucky fight that Jill had endured. He disliked her father intensely, and he considered Isobel to be very middle-class. He wanted to hurry up the wedding because he expected to be sent to France any day. Isobel wanted to hurry it up before she died, or before Jill changed her mind. She believed Jill to be quite capable of backing out of the engagement at the last moment, and she was afraid of this happening. That was how Jill became Lady Shane.
She married with the unprepared mentality that was the order of that day. She believed herself to be sophisticated and sex-wise, but on the threshold of marriage she felt the first pangs of emotional fear. Ther
e was no one to whom she could turn in her dilemma. Isobel was the last person she could consult. She might have turned to Effie Hancox, but she had gone off to do war work in the South. Also Effie had a habit of turning exceedingly silly and girlish, and Jill felt that it would be almost sacrilegious to be silly and girlish on such a subject. She might have turned to Great-Granny, but dear little Great-Granny lay peacefully sleeping in a churchyard, with her precious love-letters as a pillow, and her face still beautiful in death. Aunt Blanche was too much of a fool.
Besides, she did not realise what it might be that she wanted to know, save that she was supremely conscious of ignorance on a vital point. War had swept the world with a devastating tempest. It had scorched it with flame. As she lay awake the night before her marriage, she was aware that a war was starting within herself too ‒ sex-war!
She was married with soldiers lining the path and afterwards dragging the car to the hotel for the reception. She came away under an archway of swords; with roses scattered before her satin-shod feet. She looked no older than little Great-Granny had done when, at sixteen, she married Great-Grandfather. Jill with her blonde hair, and her wide frightened eyes, and her goldenly-white face glimpsed through the mist of tulle. She was altogether a very golden person. The colour had never come back to her face since she had worked so hard at the Hippodrome, but it was replaced by a magnolia hue. There was a white-petal wonder about Jill that was provocative. Edward, glancing at her as she sat by his side in the car, said with a little shame:
‘Perhaps I’m rather a rotter in some things, but I’ll try. By God, I’ll try.’
Isobel died.
Later on, but unfortunately not soon enough, Edward Shane left Lady Shane a widow. Through those fierce years when the old Jill died, and the new Jill was born, her one effort was to hide the truth from Twit. Marriage was not the happy affair the Victorians averred. There was more in marriage than your duty to your husband, your housekeeping and childbirth. There were profundities of knowledge which drowned a better self. She had money and she was able to help her brother in this way. She fought valiantly for his commission, but she was unable to achieve it, and Twit did not entirely want one. It seemed inconceivable that she, who had been so poor and so desperate, so tortured with whimsical desires and conflicting doubts, should now be rich. For all her riches she was doubly unhappy. Isobel died before she realised the truth. Jill could not be anything but deeply grateful for that. Now, long after she had married, she realised that her intuitions had not been unfounded. They had warned her against marriage, they had been portentous, and they had not misled her. Fate had this ace of trumps tucked up its sleeve all the time. It had reserved this man with his strangely distorted views for her, and for her alone. Mercifully for a long time she was blind to his distortion, but after a while even those kind scales fell from her eyes. There are degrees in marriage. It is all a matter of balance and the merest atom makes all the difference. Edward could not help it. He had struggled through a warped childhood, and had formed his ideas of love wrongly. Jill suffered the torture of Edward with a grim obstinacy, and all the while she was learning, but she was learning cruelly. When a German bullet found his temple, and made pulp of his face, scattering his brains in a phlegm-like spatter along the trench, she was ashamed that she could not feel regret.
‘We will pray together,’ said the Rector, who had considered it his duty to call.
‘We will not,’ she said firmly. ‘I have lost faith in God.’
‘There are hundreds of other widows,’ he reminded her. ‘Yours is, alas, not an isolated sorrow.’
‘Do you think that is why I have lost faith?’ she demanded. ‘This is the only decent thing that God has ever done for me. This is the only time that He has played straight.’
The Rector was shocked. He was a kind little man and earnest. He believed, very charitably, that the bereavement had turned her brain. ‘Lord Shane was very much respected,’ he ventured, as he reached tentatively for his saucer hat.
‘Probably because he was Lord Shane.’ She slipped back the diamond wrist-watch, disclosing beneath it a thin white scar. ‘He could not help it. He was different from other people, but I have had to pay for that difference. Look at me! I wonder if I’ll ever see clearly, think clearly, again?’
The Rector believed that she must be hysterical. He did not care about hysterical women because they said such dreadful things.
‘The dead ‒’ he began.
But the ego of Jill was born. ‘Because they are dead it does not mean that they are sinless,’ she declared. ‘When I die, I don’t want to be whitewashed because I have died. I prefer canonisation because I have lived.’
Mr. Cushaw fingered the small gold crucifix which dangled from his watch-chain. ‘I am sure that it would comfort you to pray. It would help you a lot,’ he said.
Jill maintained fiercely that it would not help her in the least. She was right. At that stage prayer could not aid. Nothing could help from without; it was the fount from within that alone could cast its plume of healing water on her soul. She was savagely conscious of life having cheated her. She had abandoned her proposed marriage with Stanley and had, for the sake of everybody (including herself), made a marriage based upon good comradeship and respect. The first debauched evening, when Edward Shane had stoutly protested his social superiority and to prove it had knocked her down, had shattered her respect. Three years of marriage to him, and an intimate knowledge of his attitudes towards life in general, had sufficed to crash her esteem for him into an overwhelming abyss of bitter shame. Jill had been deserving of a fairer prize when she dipped into life’s bran-pie. She maintained her valiant fidelity. The small town of Morsegate ran away with the idea that Lord Shane had married beneath him and was disappointed in his wife. The idea was pleasing to the gossips. It afforded lively conversation at small tea-parties, at which the thin flame of slander flickered so continuously. Because Jill, possessed of the Grimshaw pluck, refused to acknowledge failure, they believed that she did not care.
When Lord Shane died, Morsegate made him into a plaster saint. They attributed an unhappy marriage to him, and blamed Jill for the unhappiness. Jill looked too exquisite in her widow’s dress, with its prim collar and cuffs and tiny bonnet, to suit the mothers of marriageable daughters. She was, of course, ridiculously young. Men were sorry for her, when they viewed that delicate triangle of a face, frail as porcelain against the long black veil. Women declared that her frock was a pose. In reality Jill wore the same widow’s garb that all her people had worn under such conditions. She was in mourning for herself, the childlike, happy Jill, with her brave bravado, who had married and who had died. It was not for Edward Shane that she mourned.
She was keenly alive to the hostility that tided round her in waves like some gigantic sea. Morsegate was afraid of her golden loveliness; she was too attractive. Wives with flighty husbands made plain and damning statements. A bewildered Jill at her wits’ end faced the world dismayed. She had never met with this sort of thing before. She had been able to cope with toil and poverty and hard work and suffering. She had been able to keep her stand with Edward. But she had never met the serpent in Eden before. It was the slimy poisonous serpent of inference, of petty scandal, of jealous and belittling womanhood. She told herself that it would be all right when Twit returned to her. To the masthead of his homecoming she nailed her flag of faith.
She felt herself standing beside the river of a new youth. Somehow she had stepped from childhood into old age. The brightness of the teens had been tarnished by responsibility, by care for Isobel, and by wage-earning. She had never had the teens. She would start them all over again now when Twit came back to her. They were to be two lonely young creatures facing the world virginally green with a fresh Springtime.
II
MAN-CHILD.
On the whole the war treated Twit better than his sister. With his usual perversity, though he did not want one, he felt disgusted that he failed to obtain
a commission. And at times he was a little dismayed at the way in which he was learning to talk and behave. It was disconcerting to think how he would ever drop the habit of interspersing his conversation with certain adjectives, and of eating with an entire disregard of table etiquette.
Twit during the war toured the world with his battalion. In France he contracted an influenza with complications, and divided his time between hospital and the trenches. He had seen quite enough of war in that appalling crossing from Dover to Calais. Mercifully he was a good sailor. He lashed himself to a seat with his bandolier and consigned himself to watching his companions’ misery. It was a greyish day with a light fog, and the destroyer that accompanied them was distorted by the mist. At times it loomed large and close like a leviathan of the deep, and at others it slid away as a long grey pencil of a vessel crouched close to the waves. Once, in the trough of a giant wave, he said, with a pleasantly Twit-like conviction:
‘I do believe there’s a Hun submarine.’
The man lying on the deck at his feet, groaning and retching, moaned, ‘I hope the blasted thing is, and that we bloody well sink,’ and consigned himself to his misery.
Twit arrived at Calais. Because he could stand and nobody else could do anything but crawl, a good deal of work came his way. Arrangements were bad. It was the good old Army muddle, with no proper quarters prepared for their reception, and a shortage of rations. For the next six weeks prior to his timely removal to hospital, Twit saw enough and suffered enough to sicken him of war. Ultimately he rejoined his battalion at Marseilles, where they were awaiting embarkation. Transport being difficult, they were kept waiting. Twit spent a jolly couple of months there, and for the first time in his life he became master of his freedom. It was odd that his silly dreams should slip from him as he sat in a street cafe with a French girl on his knee. Sex did not attract him, but the trimmings of sex’s gaudy garments did. He passed through a very pleasurable epoch with Jill and Isobel safely at home, and himself with his own money, his own blessed freedom, and few to say him nay. In those war days nobody bothered about tomorrow. It was a care-free, happy-go-lucky existence which suited him down to the ground. His castles in Spain had crumbled to dust, and he was better without them. He did not try to build any new ones for himself, because the German guns had blown those dreams into thin air. He discovered the attraction of the brittle moment, and for the moment he lived.