by None
‘Oh, I don’t know, Tom; if we’ve got to do it, we must do it. If them others can stand it, we can stand it. Whatever them others do, we can do.’
And then my visions jump rather wildly. And the War becomes to me epitomized in two women. One in this dim doorway in our obscure suburb of Dalston, scraping out a pan, and the other perhaps in some dark high house near a canal on the outskirts of Bremen. Them others! These two women silently enduring. And the trains rushing by, and all the dark, mysterious forces of the night operating on them equivocally.
Poor Mrs Frow Stelling! Perhaps those boys of hers are ‘missing, believed killed’. Perhaps they are killed for certain. She is as much outside ‘the things going on’ as Mrs Ward. Perhaps she is equally as patient, as brave.
And Mrs Ward enters the kitchen, and her eyes are blazing with a strange light as she says:
‘We’ll hear to-morrow, Tom. And if we don’t hear tomorrow, we’ll hear the next day. And if we don’t hear the next day, we’ll hear the day after. And if we don’t… if we don’t never hear… again… if them others can stand it, we can stand it, I say.’
And then her voice breaks, and she cries a little, for endurance has its limitations, and – the work is hard at Mrs Abbot’s.
And the months go by, and she stoops a little more as she walks, and – someone has thrown a cloth over the rabbit-hutch with its unfinished roof. And Mrs Ward is curiously introspective. It is useless to tell her of the things of the active world. She listens politely but she does not hear. She is full of reminiscences of Ernie’s and Lily’s childhood. She recounts again and again the story of how Ernie when he was a little boy ordered five tons of coal from a coal merchant to be sent to a girls’ school in Dalston High Road. She describes the coal carts arriving in the morning, and the consternation of the head-mistress.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she says; ‘the things he did!’
She does not talk much of the Stellings, but one day she says meditatively:
‘Mrs Frow Stelling thought a lot of that boy Hans. So she did of the other, as far as that goes. It’s only natural like, I suppose.’
As time went on Tom Ward lost all hope. He said he was convinced that the boy was killed. Having arrived at this conclusion he seemed to become more composed. He gradually began to accustom himself to the new point of view. But with Mrs Ward the exact opposite was the case.
She was convinced that the boy was alive, but she suffered terribly.
There came a time – it was in early April – when one felt that the strain could not last. She seemed to lose all interest in the passing world and lived entirely within herself. Even the arrival of Lily’s baby did not rouse her. She looked at the child queerly, as though she doubted whether any useful or happy purpose was served by its appearance.
It was a boy.
In spite of her averred optimism she lost her tremulous sense of apprehension when the bell went or the front door was tapped. She let the milkman – and even the postman – wait.
When she spoke it was invariably of things that happened years ago.
Sometimes she talked about the Stellings, and one Sunday she made a strange pilgrimage out to Finchley and visited Mr Stelling’s grave. I don’t know what she did there, but she returned looking very exhausted and unwell. As a matter of fact she was unwell for some days after this visit, and she suffered violent twinges of rheumatism in her legs.
I now come to my most unforgettable vision of Mrs Ward.
It was a day at the end of April, and warm for the time of the year. I was standing in the garden with her and it was nearly dark. A goods train had been shunting, and making a great deal of noise in front of the house, and at last had disappeared. I had not been able to help noticing that Mrs Ward’s garden was curiously neglected for her for the time of year. The grass was growing on the paths, and the snails had left their silver trail over all the fences.
I was telling her a rumour I had heard about the railway porter and his wife at number twenty-three, and she seemed fairly interested, for she had known John Hemsley, the porter, fifteen years ago, when Ernie was a baby. There were two old broken Windsor chairs in the garden, and on one was a zinc basin in which were some potatoes. She was peeling them, as Lily and her husband were coming to supper. By the kitchen door was a small sink. When she had finished the potatoes, she stood up and began to pour the water down the sink, taking care not to let the skins go too. I was noticing her old bent back, and her long bony hands gripping the sides of the basin, when suddenly a figure came limping round the bend of the house from the side passage, and two arms were thrown around her waist, and a voice said:
‘Mind them skins don’t go down the sink, Mother. They’ll stop it up!’
As I explained to Ernie afterwards, it was an extremely foolish thing to do. If his mother had had anything wrong with her heart, it might have been very serious. There have been many cases of people dying from the shock of such an experience.
As it was, she merely dropped the basin and stood there trembling like a leaf, and Ernie laughed loud and uproariously. It must have been three or four minutes before she could regain her speech, and then all she could manage to say was:
‘Ernie!… My Ernie!’
And the boy laughed and ragged his mother, and pulled her into the house, and Tom appeared and stared at his son, and said feebly:
‘Well, I never!’
I don’t know how it was that I found myself intruding upon the sanctity of the inner life of the Ward family that evening. I had never had a meal there before, but I felt I was holding a sort of watching brief over the soul and body of Mrs Ward. I had had a little medical training in my early youth, and this may have been one of the reasons which prompted me to stay.
When Lily and her husband appeared we sat down to a meal of mashed potatoes and onions stewed in milk, with bread and cheese, and very excellent it was.
Lily and her husband took the whole thing in a boisterous, high comedy manner that fitted in with the mood of Ernie. Old Tom sat there staring at his son, and repeating at intervals:
‘Well, I never!’
And Mrs Ward hovered round the boy’s plate. Her eyes divided their time between his plate and his face, and she hardly spoke all the evening.
Ernie’s story was remarkable enough. He told it disconnectedly and rather incoherently. There were moments when he rambled in a rather peculiar way, and sometimes he stammered, and seemed unable to frame a sentence. Lily’s husband went out to fetch some beer to celebrate the joyful occasion, and Ernie drank his in little sips, and spluttered. The boy must have suffered considerably, and he had a wound in the abdomen, and another in the right forearm which for a time had paralysed him.
As far as I could gather, his story was this:
He and a platoon of men had been ambushed and had had to surrender. When being sent back to a base, three of them tried to escape from the train, which had been held up at night. He did not know what had happened to the other two men, but it was on this occasion that he received his abdominal wound at the hands of a guard.
He had then been sent to some infirmary, where he was fairly well treated; but as soon as his wound had healed a little, he had been suddenly sent to some fortress prison, presumably as a punishment. He hadn’t the faintest idea how long he had been confined there. He said it seemed like fifteen years. It was probably nine months. He had solitary confinement in a cell, which was like a small lavatory. He had fifteen minutes’ exercise every day in a yard with some other prisoners, who were Russians, he thought. He spoke to no one. He used to sing and recite in his cell, and there were times when he was quite convinced that he was ‘off his chump’. He said he had lost ‘all sense of everything’ when he was suddenly transferred to another prison. Here the conditions were somewhat better and he was made to work. He said he wrote six or seven letters home from there, but received no reply. The letters certainly never reached Dalston. The food was execrable, but a big improvement on the dungeo
n. He was only there a few weeks when he and some thirty prisoners were sent suddenly to work on the land at a kind of settlement. He said that the life there would have been tolerable if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Commandant was an absolute brute. The food was worse than in the prison, and they were punished severely for the most trivial offences.
It was here, however, that he met a sailor named Martin, a Royal Naval Reservist, an elderly, thick-set man with a black beard and only one eye. Ernie said that this Martin ‘was an artist. He wangled everything. He had a genius for getting what he wanted. He would get a beef-steak out of a stone.’ In fact, it was obvious that the whole of Ernie’s narrative was coloured by his vision of Martin. He said he’d never met such a chap in his life. He admired him enormously, and he was also a little afraid of him.
By some miraculous means peculiar to sailors, Martin acquired a compass. Ernie hardly knew what a compass was, but the sailor explained to him that it was all that was necessary to take you straight to England. Ernie said he ‘had had enough of escaping. It didn’t agree with his health,’ but so strong was his faith and belief in Martin that he ultimately agreed to try with him.
He said Martin’s method of escape was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. He planned it all beforehand. It was the fag-end of the day, and the whistle had gone, and the prisoners were trooping back across a potato field. Martin and Ernie were very slow. They lingered apparently to discuss some matter connected with the soil. There were two sentries in sight, one near them and the other perhaps a hundred yards away. The potato field was on a slope; at the bottom of the field were two lines of barbed-wire entanglements. The other prisoners passed out of sight, and the sentry near them called out something, probably telling them to hurry up. They started to go up the field when suddenly Martin staggered and clutched his throat. Then he fell over backwards and commenced to have an epileptic fit. Ernie said it was the realest thing he’d ever seen. The sentry ran up, at the same time whistling to his comrade. Ernie released Martin’s collar-band and tried to help him. Both the sentries approached, and Ernie stood back. He saw them bending over the prostrate man, when suddenly a most extraordinary thing happened. Both their heads were brought together with fearful violence. One fell completely senseless, but the other staggered forward and groped for his rifle.
When Ernie told this part of the story he kept dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief.
‘I never seen such a man as Martin, I don’t think,’ he said. ‘Lord! he had a fist like a leg of mutton. He laid ’em out neatly on the grass, took off their coats and most of their other clothes, and flung ’em over the barbed wire, and then swarmed over like a cat. I had more difficulty, but he got me across too, somehow. Then we carted the clothes away to the next line.
‘We got up into a wood that night, and Martin draws out his compass and he says: “We’ve got a hundred and seven miles to do in night shifts, cully. And if we make a slip we’re shot as safe as a knife.” It sounded the maddest scheme in the world, but somehow I felt that Martin would get through it. The only thing that saved me was that – that I didn’t have to think. I simply left everything to him. If I’d started thinking I should have gone mad. I had it fixed in my mind, “Either he does it or he doesn’t do it. I can’t help it.” I reelly don’t remember much about that journey. It was all a dream like. We did all our travellin’ at night by compass, and hid by day. Neither of us had a word of German. But Gawd’s truth! that man Martin was a marvel! He turned our trousers inside out, and made ’em look like ordinary labourers’ trousers. He disappeared the first night and came back with some other old clothes. We lived mostly on raw potatoes we dug out of the ground with our hands, but not always. I believe Martin could have stole an egg from under a hen without her noticing it. He was the coolest card there ever was. Of course there was a lot of trouble one way and another. It wasn’t always easy to find wooded country or protection of any sort. We often ran into people and they stared at us, and we shifted our course. But I think we were only addressed three or four times by men, and then Martin’s methods were the simplest in the world. He just looked sort of blank for a moment, and then knocked them clean out and bolted. Of course they were after us all the time, and it was this constant tacking and shifting ground that took so long. Fancy! he had never a map, you know, nothing but the compass. We didn’t know what sort of country we were coming to, nothing. We just crept through the night like cats. I believe Martin could see in the dark … He killed a dog one night with his hands … It was necessary.’
It was impossible to discover from Ernie how long this amazing journey lasted – the best part of two months, I believe. He was himself a little uncertain with regard to many incidents, whether they were true or whether they were hallucinations. He suffered greatly from his wound and had periods of feverishness. But one morning, he said, Martin began ‘prancing’. He seemed to develop some curious sense that they were near the Dutch frontier. And then, according to Ernie, ‘a cat wasn’t in it with Martin’.
He was very mysterious about the actual crossing. I gather that there had been some ‘clumsy’ work with sentries. It was at that time that Ernie got a bullet through his arm. When he got to Holland he was very ill. It was not that the wound was a serious one, but, as he explained:
‘Me blood was in a bad state. I was nearly down and out.’
He was very kindly treated by some Dutch Sisters in a convent hospital. But he was delirious for a long time, and when he became more normal they wanted to communicate with his people in England, but this didn’t appeal to the dramatic sense of Ernie.
‘I thought I’d spring a surprise packet on you,’ he said, grinning.
We asked about Martin, but Ernie said he never saw him again. He went away while Ernie was delirious, and they said he had gone to Rotterdam to take ship somewhere. He thought Holland was a dull place.
During the relation of this narrative my attention was divided between watching the face of Ernie and the face of Ernie’s mother.
I am quite convinced that she did not listen to the story at all. She never took her eyes from his face, and although her tongue was following the flow of his remarks, her mind was occupied with the vision of Ernie when he was a little boy, and when he ordered five tons of coal to be sent to the girls’ school.
When he had finished, she said:
‘Did you meet either of them young Stellings?’
And Ernie laughed rather uproariously and said no, he didn’t have the pleasure of renewing their acquaintance.
On his way home, it appeared, he had reported himself at Headquarters, and his discharge was inevitable.
‘So now you’ll be able to finish the rabbit-hutch,’ said Lily’s husband, and we all laughed again, with the exception of Mrs Ward.
I found her later standing alone in the garden. It was a warm spring night. There was no moon, but the sky appeared restless with its burden of trembling stars. She had an old shawl drawn round her shoulders, and she stood there very silently with her arms crossed.
‘Well, this is splendid news, Mrs Ward,’ I said.
She started a little, and coughed, and pulled the shawl closer round her.
She said, ‘Yes, sir,’ very faintly.
I don’t think she was very conscious of me. She still appeared immersed in the contemplation of her inner visions. Her eyes settled upon the empty house next door, and I thought I detected the trail of a tear glistening on her cheeks. I lighted my pipe. We could hear Ernie, and Lily, and Lily’s husband still laughing and talking inside.
‘She used to make a very good puddin’,’ Mrs Ward said suddenly, at random. ‘Dried fruit inside, and that. My Ernie liked it very much…’
Somewhere away in the distance – probably outside the Unicorn – someone was playing a cornet. A train crashed by and disappeared, leaving a trail of foul smoke which obscured the sky. The smoke cleared slowly away. I struck another match to light my pipe.
It was quite true. On
either side of her cheek a tear had trickled. She was trembling a little, worn out by the emotions of the evening.
There was a moment of silence, unusual for Dalston.
‘It’s all very… perplexin’ and that,’ she said quietly.
And then I knew for certain that in that great hour of her happiness her mind was assailed by strange and tremulous doubts. She was thinking of ‘them others’ a little wistfully. She was doubting whether one could rejoice – when the thing became clear and actual to one – without sending out one’s thoughts into the dark garden to ‘them others’ who were suffering too. And she had come out into this little meagre yard at Dalston, and had gazed through the mist and smoke upwards to the stars, because she wanted peace intensely, and so she sought it within herself, because she knew that real peace is a thing which concerns the heart alone.
And so I left her standing there, and I went my way, for I knew that she was wiser than I.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
TOLD BY THE SCHOOLMASTER
We all remember still, I suppose, the singular beauty of the summer when the war broke out. I was then schoolmaster in a village on the Thames. Nearly fifty, with a game shoulder and extremely deficient sight, there was no question of my fitness for military service, and this, as with many other sensitive people, induced in me, I suppose, a mood abnormally receptive. The perfect weather, that glowing countryside, with corn harvest just beginning and the apples already ripening, the quiet nights trembling with moonlight and shadow and, in it all, this great horror launched and growing, the weazening of Europe deliberately undertaken, the death-warrant of millions of young men signed – Such summer loveliness walking hand in hand with murder thus magnified beyond conception was too piercingly ironical!