Mr. Britling Sees It Through (44 page)

It seemed he would never find what he sought. It came at last, a crumpled telegram. He threw it down before her, and then thrust his chair back clumsily and went hastily out of the room. She heard him sob. She had not dared to look at his face again.

“Oh
!” she cried, realising that an impossible task had been thrust upon her.

“But what can I
say
to him?” she said, with the telegram in her hand.

The parlour-maid came into the room.

“Clear the dinner away!” said Mrs. Britling, standing at her place. “Master Hugh is killed. …” And then wailing: “Oh! what can I
say?
What can I
say?
”

§ 24

That night Mrs. Britling made the supreme effort of her life to burst the prison of self-consciousness and inhibition in which she was confined. Never before in all her life had she so
desired to be spontaneous and unrestrained; never before had she so felt herself hampered by her timidity, her self-criticism, her deeply ingrained habit of never letting herself go. She was rent by reflected distress. It seemed to her that she would be ready to give her life and the whole world to be able to comfort her husband now. And she could conceive no gesture of comfort. She went out of the dining-room into the hall and listened. She went very softly upstairs until she came to the door of her husband's room. There she stood still. She could hear no sound from within. She put out her hand and turned the handle of the door a little way, and then she was startled by the loudness of the sound it made, and at her own boldness. She withdrew her hand, and then with a gesture of despair, with a face of white agony, she flitted along the corridor to her own room.

Her mind was beaten to the ground by this catastrophe, of which to this moment she had never allowed herself to think. She had never allowed herself to think of it. The figure of her husband, like some pitiful beast, wounded and bleeding, filled her mind. She gave scarcely a thought to Hugh. “Oh, what can I
do
for him?” she asked herself, sitting down before her unlit bedroom fire. … “What can I say or do?”

She brooded until she shivered, and then she lit her fire. …

It was late that night and after an eternity of resolutions and doubts and indecisions that Mrs. Britling went to her husband. He was sitting close up to the fire with his chin upon his hands, waiting for her; he felt that she would come to him, and he was thinking meanwhile of Hugh with a slow unprogressive movement of the mind. He showed by a movement that he heard her enter the room, but he did not turn to look at her. He shrank a little from her approach.

She came and stood beside him. She ventured to touch him very softly, and to stroke his head. “My dear,” she said. “My poor dear!”

“It is so dreadful for you,” she said, “it is so dreadful for you. I know how you loved him. …”

He spread his hands over his face and became very still.

“My poor dear!” she said, still stroking his hair, “my poor dear!”

And then she went on saying “poor dear,” saying it presently because there was nothing more had come into her mind. She desired supremely to be his comfort, and in a little while she was acting comfort so poorly that she perceived her own failure. And that increased her failure, and that increased her paralysing sense of failure. …

And suddenly her stroking hand ceased. Suddenly the real woman cried out from her.

“I can't
reach
you!” she cried aloud. “I can't reach you. I would do anything. … You! You with your heart half broken. …”

She turned towards the door. She moved clumsily, she was blinded by her tears.

Mr. Britling uncovered his face. He stood up astonished, and then pity and pitiful understanding came storming across his grief. He made a step and took her in his arms. “My dear,” he said, “don't go from me. …”

She turned to him weeping, and put her arms about his neck, and he too was weeping.

“My poor wife!” he said, “my dear wife. If it were not for you—I think I could kill myself tonight. Don't cry, my dear. Don't, don't cry. You do not know how you comfort me. You do not know how you help me.”

He drew her to him; he put her cheek against his own. …

His heart was so sore and wounded that he could not endure that another human being should go wretched. He sat down in his chair and drew her upon his knees, and said everything he could think of to console her and reassure her and make her feel that she was of value to him. He spoke of every pleasant aspect of their lives, of every aspect, except that he never named that dear pale youth who waited now. … He could wait a little longer. …

At last she went from him.

“Good night,” said Mr. Britling, and took her to the door. “It was very dear of you to come and comfort me,” he said. …

§ 25

He closed the door softly behind her.

The door had hardly shut upon her before he forgot her. Instantly he was alone again, utterly alone. He was alone in an empty world. …

Loneliness struck him like a blow. He had dependents, he had cares. He had never a soul to whom he might weep. …

For a time he stood beside his open window. He looked at the bed—but no sleep, he knew, would come that night— until the sleep of exhaustion came. He looked at the bureau at which he had so often written. But the writing there was a shrivelled thing. …

This room was unendurable. He must go out. He turned to the window, and outside was a troublesome noise of nightjars and a distant roaring of stags, black trees, blacknesses, the sky clear and remote with a great company of stars. … The stars seemed attentive. They stirred and yet were still. It was as if they were the eyes of watchers. He would go out to them. …

Very softly he went towards the passage door, and still more softly felt his way across the landing and down the staircase. Once or twice he paused to listen.

He let himself out with elaborate precautions. …

Across the dark he went, and suddenly his boy was all about him, playing, climbing the cedars, twisting miraculously about the lawn on a bicycle, discoursing gravely upon his future, lying on the grass, breathing very hard and drawing preposterous caricatures. Once again they walked side by side up and down—it was athwart this very spot—talking gravely but rather shyly. …

And here they had stood a little awkwardly, before the boy went in to say goodbye to his step-mother and go off with his father to the station. …

“I will work tomorrow again,” whispered Mr. Britling, “but tonight—tonight. … Tonight is yours. … Can you hear me, can you hear? Your father … who had counted on you. …”

§ 26

He went into the far corner of the hockey paddock, and there he moved about for a while and then stood for a long time holding the fence with both hands and staring blankly into the darkness. At last he turned away, and went stumbling and blundering towards the rose-garden. A spray of creeper tore his face and distressed him. He thrust it aside fretfully, and it scratched his hand. He made his way to the seat in the arbour, and sat down and whispered a little to himself, and then became very still with his arm upon the back of the seat and his head upon his arm.

BOOK III

THE TESTAMENT OF MATCHING'S EASY

§ 1

All over England now, where the livery of mourning had been a rare thing to see, women and children went about in the October sunshine in new black clothes. Everywhere one met these fresh griefs, mothers who had lost their sons, women who had lost their men, lives shattered and hopes destroyed. The dyers had a great time turning coloured garments to black. And there was also a growing multitude of crippled and disabled men. It was so in England, much more was it so in France and Russia, in all the countries of the Allies, and in Germany and Austria; away into Asia Minor and Egypt, in India and Japan and Italy there was mourning, the world was filled with loss and mourning and impoverishment and distress.

And still the mysterious powers that required these things of mankind were unappeased and each day added its quota of heart-stabbing messages and called for new mourning, and sent home fresh consignments of broken and tormented men.

Some clung to hopes that became at last almost more terrible than black certainties. …

Mrs. Teddy went about the village in a coloured dress bearing herself confidently. Teddy had been listed now as “missing, since reported killed,” and she had had two letters from his comrades. They said Teddy had been left behind in the ruins of a farm with one or two other wounded, and that when the Canadians retook the place these wounded had all been found butchered. None had been found alive. Afterwards the
Canadians had had to fall back. Mr. Direck had been at great pains to hunt up wounded men from Teddy's company, and also any likely Canadians both at the base hospital in France and in London, and to get what he could from them. He had made it a service to Cissie. Only one of his witnesses was quite clear about Teddy, but he, alas! was dreadfully clear. There had been only one lieutenant among the men left behind, he said, and obviously that must have been Teddy. “He had been prodded in half-a-dozen places. His head was nearly severed from his body.”

Direck came down and told the story to Cissie. “Shall I tell it to her?” he asked.

Cissie thought. “Not yet,” she said. …

Letty's face changed in those pitiful weeks when she was denying death. She lost her pretty colour, she became white; her mouth grew hard and her eyes had a hard brightness. She never wept, she never gave a sign of sorrow, and she insisted upon talking about Teddy, in a dry offhand voice. Constantly she referred to his final return. “Teddy” she said, “will be surprised at this,” or “Teddy will feel sold when he sees how I have altered that.”

“Presently we shall see his name in a list of prisoners,” she said. “He is a wounded prisoner in Germany.”

She adopted that story. She had no justification for it, but she would hear no doubts upon it. She presently began to prepare parcels to send him. “They want almost everything,” she told people. “They are treated abominably. He has not been able to write to me yet, but I do not think I ought to wait until he asks me.”

Cissie was afraid to interfere with this.

After a time Letty grew impatient at the delay in getting any address and took her first parcel to the post-office.

“Unless you know what prison he is at,” said the postmistress.

“Pity!” said Letty. “I don't know that. Must it wait for that? I thought the Germans were so systematic that it didn't matter.”

The postmistress made tedious explanations that Letty did not seem to hear. She stared straight in front of her at nothing. Then in a pause in the conversation she picked up her parcel.

“It's tiresome for him to have to wait,” she said. “But it can't be long before I know.”

She took the parcel back to the cottage.

“After all,” she said, “it gives us time to get the better sort of throat lozenges for him—the sort the syndicate shop doesn't keep.”

She put the parcel conspicuously upon the dresser in the kitchen where it was most in the way, and set herself to make a jersey for Teddy against the coming of the cold weather.

But one night the white mask fell for a moment from her face.

Cissie and she had been sitting in silence before the fire. She had been knitting—she knitted very badly—and Cissie had been pretending to read, and had been watching her furtively. Cissie eyed the slow, toilsome growth of the slack woolwork for a time, and the touch of angry effort in every stroke of the knitting-needles. Then she was stirred to remonstrance.

“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 makers 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.