Part 18

The colonel counted the minutes as the well-placed shells dropped around the château of his dreams. He saw, where none other saw, the sudden alarm below; the prisoner hurriedly evacuated from her home, dragged scrambling up through the dark trees into safety on the other side. One--two--three--four. She should be out of harm's way.

He turned his face to the trench, shouted an order. As he turned his gaze again swiftly towards the enemy he had a glimpse of something upon the bare lip of the ravine--something white, quickly moving. He had miscalculated! In a sudden agony, he shrieked rather than shouted a countermanding order. Too late! His voice was drowned in one long smashing detonation of a thousand rifles in an irregular volley from the trench. From the battery behind came the rapid, multiplied hammer-slams of the guns firing at their maximum speed.

He had a ghostly vision of an anguished woman's face, denying love.

The ravine was lashed by a tornado of shell and bullets. Caught in its depths, unseen yet precisely imagined from above, men were clambering in an agony of desperation to escape from the death that crashed unceasingly overhead and hailed about them. The white shrapnel puffs were countless against the dark background of the trees.

For a quarter of an hour the fierce fire continued, was answered in bitter anger from the opposing trenches. Then on both sides it died away. The dead in the valley lay in quiet.

The colonel, his face rigid, turned to walk along the trench. Suddenly a dog trailing a cord leaped over the parapet, dashed at him in a frenzy of joy. Then, perceiving the old woman, it jumped at her, nosed around her with vigorously wagging tail.

The old woman shrieked. The colonel looked. There was blood upon the dog's coat. The old woman drew herself up, held the colonel's eyes. "_Murderer!_" she cried with the intensity of a curse, and fainted.

The colonel strode on.

* * * * *

On a bitter day in December, three months later, the colonel returned from his morning tour of the trenches for which he was responsible. They were trenches in another landscape, far from those whose memory lay like a sear across his soul. At the entrance to the sandbagged, wrecked farmhouse which served him as a home the soldier-_courrier_ was in the act of extracting letters from his wallet. The colonel took the bundle destined for him. At the sight of the topmost envelope he stopped as though he had seen a ghost. With trembling fingers he tore it open, read:

"My hero! _I understood! I understood!_ Oh, didn't you know I understood? How grand you are--more than a man! All these weary months of imprisonment, trial, release and travel, I have been hungering to tell you this. Home once more, France is more than ever France to me since you ennobled me in sacrifice. Beloved!----"

The colonel hurried into his quarters to read the letter in solitude. None might see his face.

THEY COME BACK

Whittingham Street, N., had benefited by the war. The long vista of its windows flush with the pavement was decent with curtains of a cleanness unwonted before the cataclysm. There were strange dots of reflected sunlight from brass door-handles and knockers that were polished. These things were symbols of the newly realised importance of Whittingham Street's inhabitants in the scheme of society, an importance which, swiftly translated into self-esteem, expressed itself with a uniformity natural to life in a mean street. That house was poor indeed which did not possess its gramophone. The womenfolk were curiously predominant to those who remembered the old-time loungers at the corner "pubs," and that womenfolk, disdainful of the feathers of the long ago, was arrayed in startlingly smart, well-emphasized, cheap copies of the latest fashions, oddly incongruous with the tall, smoke-vomiting chimneys of Messrs. Hathaway's great factory which closed the vista of the street. The sparseness of the men, immediately remarked, received a solemn significance from the flag-hung shrine on the wall of the Council School. The children who played in front of it--paper helmet, tin-can drum and wooden sword--were vividly cognizant that this was a time of War.

It was evening, and from the great gates of Messrs. Hathaway's factory poured a ceaseless stream of women. But not this evening did that stream flow down the street with its usual swift and uninterrupted course. There were checks in it--obstacles of groups that talked excitedly and forgot to progress--while others in eager haste eddied round them. On the high wall by the gate, a bill-poster was covering a "War Savings" placard with another of different meaning. A black cloud of smoke drifted away from the tall chimneys and was not reinforced other than by faint and lessening wisps.

A young woman, one of those whose urgent haste trifled not with talk, hurried down the street, stopped before one of the neatest house-fronts, tremblingly thrust a key into the latch, opened and ran breathlessly upstairs.

A grey-haired old woman rose from a wooden chair by the side of a cradle in a clean and modestly furnished room. At the entrance of her daughter-in-law she laid a finger on her lips and looked warningly to the infant. Then remarking an obvious distress, she changed colour.

"What's the matter, Ann?" she whispered, shaking with a sudden alarm. She had to steady herself by the support of the table. "Not--Jim?"

The young woman shook her head, controlled her panting breath.

"Hathaway's!" she brought out. "Closing down!"

The elder stared speechlessly for a moment, then seated herself with that blank mute resignation of the aged poor, long disillusioned of any title to good fortune. The fingers of her unshapely hands twined and untwined themselves tensely in her lap.

"Don't you hear, mother?" said the young woman irritably. "Hathaway's are closing down!"

"Oh, dear!" the old woman raised a face that was strained with imminent tears. "I knew it 'ud never last--I knew it 'ud never last!"

"What we shall do, 'Eaven knows!" said Ann, viciously accenting the sole possible fount of knowledge. "They're all closing down--all of 'em, all round!" Her gesture, as she unpinned her hat and put it, with an excess of energy, on the table, testified to the completeness of the closed horizon. She stood looking at the sleeping child, her brows bent, her mouth troubled. Then suddenly she flung herself on her knees and buried her head in the old woman's lap, shaking with sobs.

"Oh, I did so want to keep it nice for Jim when 'e comes back! I did! I did! All we've got together. And now it'll all go--bit by bit! And I've worked so 'ard--so very 'ard! An' 'e'll never see, never know 'ow nice it was! Oh--mother!" She could utter no more words, only inarticulate sounds.

The old woman soothed her, stroking her hair.

"There, dear! there, dear! Don't take on! It'll all come right. I can go out again an' do a bit of cleanin'. I daresay Mrs. Smith'll take me on again. I ain't done no work for a long while--sitting 'ere eatin' your bread--I've 'ad a nice rest, I 'ave--I'm quite strong again now. We'll both get somethin', you see, dear!"

The young woman raised herself.

"No!--No!--No!--You shan't work any more!" She turned her head wearily. "I can't make it out. _What's happening?_ Why are they all shutting down like this?"

The old woman looked at her stupidly. The remote causes which made or unmade her unimportant existence were beyond her comprehension.

"What's that?" cried Ann, jumping to her feet. "_What's 'e calling?_"

The raucous shout of a newsvendor floated up from the street. Ann listened for a moment--and then, after a hurried search for a halfpenny in her purse, dashed out of the door and down the stairs.

She reappeared after a bare minute, brandishing the newspaper, wild-eyed, panting.

"Mother! Mother!" She could not wait to enter the door before commencing her news. "It's Peace! _Peace!_" She struggled with the unfolded paper, crushed it together again, searching eagerly for the magic headlines. "Here it is! Listen!" The old woman, equally all trembling eagerness, was standing at her side, pawing vaguely at the arm which held the newspaper. Ann read out the great news. "'_The wild rumours current during the past few days have received a startling confirmation. It is announced that an armistice has been signed on all the fronts. This undoubtedly means a general Peace. The end of the war has come._' Mother! it's all over! it's all over--and Jim'll be coming back! Oh, I can't 'ardly believe it! _It's all over!_ Oh, thank God--thank God!"

"All over! My Jim! Safe and sound! Oh," the old woman commenced that sniffling weep common to the aged and the young. "I can't 'elp it, Ann--I can't 'elp it!--I must cry!"

Ann dashed down the newspaper and flung her arms round the old woman in a close embrace. "Mother! Mother! I never was so"--and here a sob checked her speech also--"so 'appy in my life!" Face against face, the tears of the two women mingled--tears not of grief but of emotion for which there was no expression. Somewhere down the street church bells were ringing in joyous peal on peal. It might have been merely a coincidence of practice, but to the two women whose simple souls beat close together, in a swoon of intense feeling that obliterated the sharp outlines of environment, this happy rioting of the bells seemed a holy blessing on the moment.

"Oh, Ann dear, Ann dear," said the old woman, looking up. "What a thanksgiving it'll be for all the poor anxious women!"

"Oh, we're very lucky--we're very lucky. Jim'll be coming back. Think of it, mother!"

They kissed one another as if each were kissing the man who would come back as son and husband.

"We've got to keep it for 'im," said Ann. "All the little 'ome. An' 'e'll soon be back to work for us an' the baby, an' we shan't never be parted any more! Oh, mother, think of the poor women who won't 'ave no one to come back to 'em! When they see 'em marching by! Oh--we're lucky, we're very lucky!"

The old woman stood staring out of the window in vague thought, her eye caught by the vivid red of the flags on the War Shrine.

"It'll be a different world, Ann, when they all come back," she said. "Them what 'ave been left be'ind all through will find lots missing what they look for. And them what come back won't come back the same. It'll never be the same again, any of it; let's 'ope it'll be better."

* * * * *

_They_ were coming back. The Mother-City of the Empire woke, silent of traffic, decked for a day that knew no sufficient parallel, the day when the thousands of her sons--those who had gone in their ones and twos, their single battalions--should march back from vast adventure in the full majesty of their corporate soldier-life. The London Divisions were coming back from the War, were marching for the last time at full strength. And the London streets were tunnels of gay flags, walled with black masses of citizens kept clear from the sanded roadways. From every steeple the bells tossed out their exuberant rejoicing. In every breast of the millions there congregated was a surge of emotion that exhaled in one sustained murmur of the gladness for which there are no words but which fills the eyes and chokes the throat.

They were coming! The thrilling blare of instruments of brass; the heart-stirring tap and roll and beat of the drums; the intoxicating rhythmic swinging lilt and crash; the brave gay runs of melody, sublimely simple, that bring the tears; the solid, even tramp of thousands who march as one--and the leading files were passing in a storm of cheers, a madness of waving hands. For the last time they passed shoulder to shoulder in the familiar ranks, marching as they had marched for all the years of exile, marching as they had marched down the fatal roads to Loos and Gommecourt, Guillemont and all those rubble heaps where the bravest and the dearest of the greatest city of the world died for the fragment of a village and for England. Rifles at the slope, bare bayonets asserting the ancient privileges that they had won, O so dearly, the right to flaunt, the heavy weather-stained pack on the sturdy shoulders, the steel helmets awry with the tilt of long-familiar use, the brown strong faces gleaming with their smiles--so they marched, not any more under the thunder of the guns, but in a frenzy of voices where the madly rioting bells were lost.

Battalion by battalion--all the glorious names, London's own--the London Scottish, first in the fray in the long ago, the Queen's Westminsters, the Kensingtons, the London Rifle Brigade, the H.A.C., the numberless battalions of the London Regiment--they came, each with its aura of the deathless dead. They came from the interminable purgatory of the endless trenches, terminated at last, from the unimaginable inferno of Hill 60, from the hopeless dying of May the Ninth, from the fierce hopes, the bitter strife of Loos, from the massacre of Gommecourt and the bloody fights of Guillemont, of Vimy Ridge, of Messines, of a thousand places that were humble and are henceforth names of splendour. Miraculously strong, happy, pregnant with vivid life they emerged from that distant whelm of peril. And the eyes that had looked so long at death in the bare fields pocked hideously with the disease of war, looked up now at the ranked tall buildings, so familiar and yet so strange, so impressively permanent after timeless æons of destruction. Behind those windows--could it be?--they had sat at desk through months and years. Between them and that past was a curtain of fire, of emotions that had transformed, of the intensity of life which has persisted in the face of death. And rank by rank, battalion after battalion, swinging with powerful stride, they marched back into the past that had seemed for ever gone.

And those who watched the level ranks flowing in their endless stream, cheering with throats now incapable of aught but the inarticulate cry, perceiving them mistily through a blur of tears, saw more than the men who marched, treading once again the asphalt of the London streets. They saw the ghosts of ranks, doubling--more than doubling--the ranks of living men, the ghosts of those who had looked as these looked, brown-faced, strong-limbed, the incarnation of living will, and were now no more than the wind blowing over the desolate countrysides where they had ceased to be. Yet were they present, the men who had died that England might live. The stir of their souls was in the skirling pipes, the wail and feverish beat of the fifes and drums, the maddening purposeful blare and thud of the brass bands. They looked out of the eyes of those who marched--the soul unconquerable, the living spirit of the English race. And a divine afflatus swept over the waving, cheering crowds, swept them to a wilder intoxication. One, whose faculty of speech was not yet overwhelmed, cried: "Three cheers for the boys who are left behind! Hurrah! Hurrah!----" and could not finish. And a woman who stood, tensely pallid, staring at the so-familiar badges of the troops who passed, stared at utter strangeness, and fell as dead.

The next battalion followed on, singing, carrying on a tune caught up far back along the route, the farewell song of Kitchener's Army of 1915, sung now as an instinctive antistrophe to that old chorale when they had marched to war:

"Keep the home fires burning, While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away, they dream of home, There's a silver lining Through the dark cloud shining, Turn your dark clouds inside out Till the boys come home."

They passed in a roar of voices that drowned the band.

So the long, long columns of the London Divisions tramped through the heart of the Mother-City, under the fluttering of countless flags, under the surge and resurge of joy-bells from every steeple, under great banners that proclaimed the gratitude of the city. Rank after rank they lifted their eyes to the laurel-green inscription that spanned the street at Temple Bar: "SHALL WE FORGET?--NEVER!"

Rank by rank they passed under the promise--the thousands of men welded in the fires of war to a wondrous miracle of collective soul--passed onward for the last time as one living unit, ere they should lay down their arms, _fall out_--and disperse, individuals that were fragments of a sacred memory, the shreds of a battle-flag distributed.

* * * * *

Sir Thomas Jackson Hathaway, Kt., Alderman of the City of London, looked along the masculine faces, spaced with the interstices of the departed ladies, of the little dinner-party of intimate friends, and then again to the brown keen visage of his son. He pushed along the decanter--he was old-fashioned and made a virtue of it--"Fill up, Harry, my boy--I've been looking after the cellar while you've been away--there's more of it." He laughed a little at the mirth of his implied suggestion that there might possibly be a shortage in the cellars of Sir Thomas Hathaway. And his guests laughed a little in courtesy.

"We've kept the flag flying here also, my boy," said the big, heavily jovial host, puffing hugely at his cigar and then taking it from his mouth to examine it with a superfluously critical eye. "You'll find things as well--better, than when you left. You don't mind, gentlemen, this little talk of shop? After all, we're all friends together, and most of us have some small interest in the little business, ha! ha!" The guests were, in fact, Sir Thomas Hathaway's co-directors in the large enterprises he controlled. He continued: "Better I may say, for we have been very conservative--we've looked to the younger generation away fighting our battles for us--and we've built up a reserve fund that a few years ago we shouldn't have dreamed of. You've come back to a first-class concern, Harry, my boy. Here's to it!" He raised and drained his glass, setting a followed example to his guests.

Captain Hathaway had been toying with a match on the tablecloth. He looked up--quiet and thoughtful, his face clean-cut and aristocratic by contrast with the heavy opulence of his sire.

"You don't anticipate Labour trouble, then, father?"

Sir Thomas Hathaway laughed, a guffaw, and crashed his hand on the table.

"Labour troubles, my boy! You need have no fear on that score. We're going to teach Labour a lesson. We haven't built up our reserve for nothing.--not only ourselves, but all the houses in the trade. For long enough we've been dictated to by Labour--and now, by God, we're going to crush it! Do you know what's coming, my boy? Have you thought about it? There's going to be the biggest flood of Labour chucked on the market that the world has ever known. All of 'em fightin'--_fightin'_ for jobs! And the trade, Harry, my boy, is going to _lock out_! We're closed down now, and we shan't open again till our own good time. How long d'you think the Union funds'll last? _We'll bust 'em_--bust 'em for ever and a day. And when we open our shops again to Labour--it'll be on our own terms! Here, fill up, gentlemen, I can vouch for this wine--cost me a sinful price it did. We'll bust 'em, my lad, so that never again in our time shall we hear a word of Labour trouble." He gulped the glassful of his sinfully costly wine.

Captain Hathaway glanced round the table at the somewhat flushed, semi-senile features of his father's guests and partners. They were one and all nodding their heads in varying emphasis of approbation. He got up.

"Well, father, I don't think we'll discuss it now. Suppose we join the ladies?"

In the high drawing-room, softly lit with diffused radiance from the ceiling, draped with precious modern hangings that were genuine and spaced out with expensive antique paintings that were not, furnished with the luxury of a wealth too utterly complete in its overwhelming newness to allow imagination its leap across an artistic restraint, the ladies purred, or cooed in careful falsetto, as they awaited the entrance of the males. At a grand piano, slightly removed, a young woman with a delicately refined face played softly to herself--in a quiet ecstasy of gladness for which this was the only satisfying expression.

Captain Hathaway, entering with his father's guests, came straight across to her, and she looked up, smiling, into her husband's face as though he had come in response to a murmured summoning spell. She ceased and leaned back her head against him as he stood close behind her.

"Oh, Harry," she said, "it's so lovely to have you again--for always, always!" Her eyes half closed and her bosom heaved as she drank in an intoxicating realization of his definite return, sketched to herself a delicious little swoon.

"My dear!" he murmured. "It's good! Home--home for always with my beloved!"

She clutched at his hand, and for a moment, while the loud-voiced crowd vanished, they were secret lovers, snatched up to dizzy heights, intensely thrilling with an exquisite community, eyes looking into eyes and seeing more than human brain can translate of transcendent vision. She released him and bowed forward suddenly with a little gulp, striking, with trembling hands, vague chords on the piano.

"Now, Ethel, my dear," came the crass boom of her father-in-law's voice, "when you've finished your spooning, let's have something jolly. What about that bit out of 'Not a Word to the Wife!' Tra-la-la-la-la!" He sketched a hideous caricature of blatant banality. "We're all jolly to-night--none of your mooning sentiment, but jolly. Eh, ladies and gentlemen?--properly jolly for Harry's first night back."

Ethel got up from the piano, coupling an allegation of another's superior capacity with an invitation to perform, an invitation smirkingly accepted.

The slangy crash and bang alternating with hyper-emphasized sentimentality of the current tune was a cover under which Ethel Hathaway retreated to happy intimacy with her husband. Not for long was she allowed it. The very-consciously best-looking of the co-directors' wives sidled up and subsided into the adjacent chair. She yearned up into Captain Hathaway's face, while she cooed deprecation of her intrusion to his wife.

"But I do so want to hear how Captain Hathaway earned his Military Cross! Of course, I read all about it in the papers--but then--they're so bald, aren't they? One misses, what shall I say?--the human touch of heroism."

Mrs. Hathaway caught her husband's eye and forbade the instant flight.

"Tell Mrs. Jameson all about it, Harry," she commanded coolly. There was something in the tone which rendered Mrs. Jameson's extorted confidence quite worthless.

"There's little to tell," said Captain Hathaway. "The fellow who really earned anything there was to get--and, I'm glad to say, got the D.C.M.--was one of my men, a chap named Jim Swain. He used to be in our employment, Ethel, by the way. It was a pretty tight corner and I got practically left alone--all the other fellows knocked out--and this chap Swain came up with a bag of bombs--jolly plucky thing, for there didn't seem a dog's chance--and we chucked the bombs at the Hun till he didn't dare raise his head. After a bit, some of another company came up and we consolidated that bit of trench. That's all there was to it."

"Oh, how splendid!" Mrs. Jameson enthused vaguely. "Leadership _is_ everything, isn't it?"

"When you've got something to lead, Mrs. Jameson. One couldn't have better stuff than my men--they're magnificent. They're the nation--and now they're coming back they've got to be treated like the men they are and not like soulless machinery." He wound up on a note of fierce protest against something not obvious to his hearers.