“Poor Letty!” she said very softly. “Suppose, after all, he is dead?”
Letty met her with a pitiless stare.
“He is a prisoner,” she said. “Isn’t that enough? Why do you jab at me by saying that? A wounded prisoner. Isn’t that enough despicable trickery for God even to play on Teddy—our Teddy? To the very last moment he shall not be dead. Until the war is over. Until six months after the war. …
“I will tell you why, Cissie. …”
She leaned across the table and pointed her remarks with her knitting-needles, speaking in a tone of reasonable remonstrance. “You see,” she said, “if people like Teddy are to be killed, then all our ideas that life is meant for honesty and sweetness and happiness are wrong, and this world is just a place of devils; just a dirty cruel hell. Getting born would be getting damned. And so one must not give way to that idea, however much it may seem likely that he is dead. …
“You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me for his death. … Some one must pay me. … I shall wait for six months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany and learn my way about there. And I will murder some German. Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind. A sacrifice. It ought for instance, to be comparatively easy to kill some of the children of the Crown Prince or some of the Bavarian princes. I shall prefer German children. I shall sacrifice them to Teddy. It ought not to be difficult to find people who can be made directly responsible, the people who invented the poison-gas, for instance, and kill them, or to kill people who are dear to them. Or necessary to them. … Women can do that so much more easily than men. …
“That perhaps is the only way in which wars of this kind will ever be brought to an end. By women insisting on killing the kind of people who make them. Rooting them out. By a campaign of pursuit and assassination that will go on for years and years after the war itself is over. … Murder is such a little gentle punishment for the crime of war. … It would be hardly more than a reproach for what has happened. Falling like snow. Death after death. Flake by flake. This prince. That statesman. The count who writes so fiercely for war. … That is what I am going to do. If Teddy is really dead. … We women were ready enough a year or so ago to starve and die for the Vote, and that was quite a little thing in comparison with this business. … Don’t you see what I mean? It’s so plain and sensible, Cissie. Whenever a man sits and thinks whether he will make a war or not, then he will think too of women, women with daggers, bombs; of a vengeance that will never tire nor rest; of consecrated patient women ready to start out upon a pilgrimage that will only end with his death. … I wouldn’t hurt these war-makers. No. In spite of the poison-gas. In spite of trench feet and the men who have been made blind and the wounded who have lain for days, dying slowly in the wet. Women ought not to hurt. But I would kill. Like killing dangerous vermin. It would go on year by year. Balkan kings. German princes, chancellors, they would have schemed for so much—and come to just a rattle in the throat. … And if presently other kings and emperors began to prance about and review armies, they too would go. …
“Until all the world understood that women would not stand war any more for ever. …
“Of course I shall do something of the sort. What else is there to do now for me?”
Letty’s eyes were bright and intense, but her voice was soft and subdued. She went on after a pause in the same casual voice. “You see now, Cissie, why I cling to the idea that Teddy is alive. If Teddy is alive, then even if he is wounded he will get some happiness out of it—and all this won’t be—just rot. If he is dead, then everything is so desperately silly and cruel from top to bottom——”
She smiled wanly to finish her sentence.
“But, Letty,” said Cissie, “there is the boy!”
“I shall leave the boy to you. Compared with Teddy I don’t care that for the boy. I never did. What is the good of pretending? Some women are made like that.”
She surveyed her knitting. “Poor stitches,” she said. …
“I’m hard stuff, Cissie. I take after mother more than father. Teddy is my darling. All the tenderness of my life is Teddy. If he goes, it goes. … I won’t crawl about the world like all these other snivelling widows. If they’ve killed my man I shall kill. Blood for blood and loss for loss. I shall get just as close to the particular Germans who made this war as I can, and I shall kill them and theirs. …
“The Women’s Association for the Extirpation of the whole breed of War Lords,” she threw out. “If I do happen to hurt— does it matter?”
She looked at her sister’s shocked face and smiled again.
“You think I go about staring at nothing,” she remarked. … “Not a bit of it! I have been planning all sorts of things. … I have been thinking how I could get to Germany. … Or one might catch them in Switzerland. … I’ve had all sorts of plans. They can’t go guarded for ever. …
“Oh, it makes me despise humanity to see how many soldiers and how few assassins there are in the world. … After the things we have seen. If people did their duty by the dagger there wouldn’t be such a thing as a War Lord in the world. Not one. … The Kaiser and his son and his sons’ sons would know nothing but fear now for all their lives. Fear would only cease to pursue as the coffin went down into the grave. Fear by sea, fear by land, for the vessel he sailed in, the train he travelled in, fear when he slept for the death in his dreams, fear when he waked for the death in every shadow; fear in every crowd, fear whenever he was alone. Fear would stalk him through the trees, hide in the corner of the staircase; make all his food taste perplexingly, so that he would want to spit it out. …”
She sat very still brooding on that idea for a time, and then stood up.
“What nonsense one talks!” she cried, and yawned. “I wonder why poor Teddy doesn’t send me a postcard or something to tell me his address. I tell you what I am afraid of sometimes about him, Cissie.”
“Yes?” said Cissie.
“Loss of memory. Suppose a beastly lump of shell or something whacked him on the head. … I had a dream of him looking strange about the eyes and not knowing me. That, you know, really may have happened. … It would be beastly, of course. …”
Cissie’s eyes were critical, but she had nothing ready to say.
There were some moments of silence.
“Oh! bed,” said Letty. “Though I shall just lie scheming.”
§ 2
Cissie lay awake that night thinking about her sister as if she had never thought about her before.
She began to weigh the concentrated impressions of a thousand memories. She and her sister were near in age; they knew each other with an extreme intimacy, and yet it seemed to Cissie that night as though she did not know Letty at all. A year ago she would have been certain she knew everything about her. But the old familiar Letty, with the bright complexion and the wicked eye, with her rebellious schoolgirl insistence upon the beautifulness of “Boof’l young men,” and her frank and glowing passion for Teddy, with her delight in humorous mystifications and open-air exercise and all the sunshine and laughter of life, this sister Letty who had been so satisfactory and complete and final, had been thrust aside like a mask. Cissie no longer knew her sister’s eyes. Letty’s hands had become thin and unfamiliar and a little wrinkled; she was sharp-featured and thin-lipped; her acts, which had once been predictable, were incomprehensible, and Cissie was thrown back upon speculations. In their schooldays Letty had had a streak of intense sensibility; she had been easily moved to tears. But never once had she wept or given any sign of weeping since Teddy’s name had appeared in the casualty list. … What was the strength of this tragic tension? How far would it carry her? Was Letty really capable of becoming a Charlotte Corday? Of carrying out a scheme of far-seeing vengeance, of making her way through long months and years nearer and nearer to revenge?
Were such revenges possible?
Would people presently begin to murder the m
akers of the Great War? What a strange thing it would be in history if so there came a punishment and end to the folly of kings!
Only a little while ago Cissie’s imagination might have been captured by so romantic a dream. She was still but a year or so out of the stage of melodrama. But she was out of it. She was growing up now to a subtler wisdom. People, she was beginning to realise, do not do these simple things. They make vows of devotion and they are not real vows of devotion; they love— quite honestly—and qualify. There are no great revenges but only little mean ones; no lifelong vindications except the unrelenting vengeance of the law. There is no real concentration of people’s lives anywhere such as romance demands. There is change, there is forgetfulness. Everywhere there is dispersal. Even to the tragic story of Teddy would come the modifications of time. Even to the wickedness of the German princes would presently be added some conflicting aspects. Could Letty keep things for years in her mind, hard and terrible, as they were now? Surely they would soften; other things would overlay them. …
There came a rush of memories of Letty in a dozen schoolgirl adventures, times when she had ventured, and times when she had failed; Letty frightened, Letty vexed, Letty launching out to great enterprises, going high and hard and well for a time, and then failing. She had seen Letty snivelling and dirty; Letty ashamed and humiliated. She knew her Letty to the soul. Poor Letty! Poor dear Letty! With a sudden clearness of vision Cissie realised what was happening in her sister’s mind. All this tense scheming of revenges was the imaginative play with which Letty warded off the black alternative to her hope; it was not strength, it was weakness. It was a form of giving way. She could not face starkly the simple fact of Teddy’s death. That was too much for her. So she was building up this dream of a mission of judgment against the day when she could resist the facts no longer. She was already persuaded, only she would not be persuaded until her dream was ready. If this state of suspense went on she might establish her dream so firmly that it would at last take complete possession of her mind. And by that time also she would have squared her existence at Matching’s Easy with the elaboration of her reverie.
She would go about the place then, fancying herself preparing for this tremendous task she would never really do; she would study German maps; she would read the papers about German statesmen and rulers; perhaps she would even make weak attempts to obtain a situation in Switzerland or in Germany. Perhaps she would buy a knife or a revolver. Perhaps presently she would begin to hover about Windsor or Sandringham when peace was made, and the German cousins came visiting again. …
Into Cissie’s mind came the image of the thing that might be; Letty, shabby, draggled, and her sharp bright prettiness become haggard, an assassin dreamer, still dependent on Mr. Britling, doing his work rather badly, in a distraught unpunctual fashion.
She must be told, she must be convinced soon, or assuredly she would become an eccentric, a strange character, a Matching’s Easy Miss Flite. …
§ 3
Cissie could think more clearly of Letty’s mind than of her own.
She herself was in a tangle. She had grown to be very fond of Mr. Direck and to have a profound trust and confidence in him, and her fondness seemed able to find no expression at all except a constant girding at his and America’s avoidance of war. She had fallen in love with him when he was wearing fancy dress; she was a young woman with a stronger taste for body and colour than she supposed; what indeed she resented about him, though she did not know it, was that he seemed never disposed to carry the spirit of fancy dress into everyday life. To begin with he had touched both her imagination and senses, and she wanted him to go on doing that. Instead of which he seemed lapsing more and more into reiterated assurances of devotion and the flat competent discharge of humanitarian duties. Always nowadays he was trying to persuade her that what he was doing was the right and honourable thing for him to do; what he did not realise, what indeed she did not realise, was the exasperation his rightness and reasonableness produced in her. When he saw he exasperated her he sought very earnestly to be righter and reasonabler and more plainly and demonstrably right and reasonable than ever.
Withal, as she felt and perceived, he was such a good thing, such a very good thing; so kind, so trustworthy with a sort of slow strength, with a careful honesty, a big good childishness, a passion for fairness. And so helpless in her hands. She could lash him and distress him. Yet she could not shake his slowly formed convictions.
When Cissie had dreamt of the lover that fate had in store for her in her old romantic days, he was to be perfect always, he and she were always to be absolutely in the right (and, if the story needed it, the world in the wrong). She had never expected to find herself tied by her affections to a man with whom she disagreed, and who went contrary to her standards, very much as if she was lashed on the back of a very nice elephant that would wince to but not obey the goad. …
So she nagged him and taunted him, and would hear no word of his case. And he wanted dreadfully to discuss his case. He felt that the point of conscience about the munitions was particularly fine and difficult. He wished she would listen and enter into it more. But she thought with that more rapid English flash which is not so much thinking as feeling. He loved that flash in her in spite of his persuasion of its injustice.
Her thought that he ought to go to the war made him feel like a renegade; her claim that he was somehow still English held him in spite of his reason. In the midst of such perplexities he was glad to find one neutral task wherein he could find himself wholeheartedly with and for Cissie.
He hunted up the evidence of Teddy’s fate with a devoted pertinacity.
And in the meanwhile the other riddle resolved itself. He had had a certain idea in his mind for some time. He discovered one day that it was an inspiration. He could keep his conscientious objection about America, and still take a line that would satisfy Cissie. He took it.
When he came down to Matching’s Easy at her summons to bear his convincing witness of Teddy’s fate, he came in an unwonted costume. It was a costume so wonderful in his imagination that it seemed to cry aloud, to sound like a trumpet as he went through London to Liverpool Street Station; it was a costume like an international event; it was a costume that he felt would blare right away to Berlin. And yet it was a costume so commonplace, so much the usual wear now, that Cissie, meeting him at the station and full of the thought of Letty’s trouble, did not remark it, felt indeed rather than observed that he was looking more strong and handsome than he had ever done since he struck upon her imagination in the fantastic wrap that Teddy had found for him in the merry days when there was no death in the world. And Letty too, resistant, incalculable, found no wonder in the wonderful suit.
He bore his testimony. It was the queer halting telling of a patched-together tale. …
“I suppose,” said Letty, “if I tell you now that I don’t believe that that officer was Teddy you will think I am cracked. … But I don’t.”
She sat staring straight before her for a time after saying this. Then suddenly she got up and began taking down her hat and coat from the peg behind the kitchen door. The hanging strap of the coat was twisted and she struggled with it petulantly until she tore it.
“Where are you going?” cried Cissie.
Letty’s voice over her shoulder was the harsh voice of a scolding woman.
“I’m going out—anywhere.” She turned, coat in hand. “Can’t I go out if I like?” she asked. “It’s a beautiful day. … Mustn’t I go out? … I suppose you think I ought to take in what you have told me in a moment. Just smile and say ‘Indeed!’ … Abandoned!— while his men retreated! How jolly! And then not think of it any more. … Besides, I must go out. You two want to be left together. You want to canoodle. Do it while you can!”
Then she put on coat and hat, jamming her hat down on her head, and said something that Cissie did not immediately understand.
“He’ll have his turn in the trenches soon enough. Now th
at he’s made up his mind. … He might have done it sooner. …”
She turned her back as though she had forgotten them. She stood for a moment as though her feet were wooden, not putting her feet as she usually put her feet. She took slow, wide, unsure steps. She went out—like something that is mortally injured and still walks—into the autumnal sunshine. She left the door wide open behind her.
§ 4
And Cissie, with eyes full of distress for her sister, had still to grasp the fact that Direck was wearing a Canadian uniform. …
He stood behind her, ashamed that in such a moment this fact and its neglect by every one could be so vivid in his mind.
§ 5
Cissie’s estimate of her sister’s psychology had been just. The reverie of revenge had not yet taken a grip upon Letty’s mind sufficiently strong to meet the challenge of this conclusive evidence of Teddy’s death. She walked out into a world of sunshine now almost completely convinced that Teddy was dead, and she knew quite well that her dream of some dramatic and terrible vindication had gone from her. She knew that in truth she could do nothing of that sort. …
She walked out with a set face and eyes that seemed unseeing, and yet it was as if some heavy weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was over; there was no more to hope for and there was nothing more to fear. She would have been shocked to realise that her mind was relieved.
She wanted to be alone. She wanted to be away from every eye. She was like some creature that after a long nightmare incubation is at last born into a clear, bleak day. She had to feel herself; she had to stretch her mind in this cheerless sunshine, this new world, where there was to be no more Teddy and no real revenge nor compensation for Teddy. Teddy was past. …
Mr. Britling Sees It Through Page 38