Chapter 2

The newly-married pair crossed a wooden bridge over the stream from the Lake, and found themselves on its further shore, a shore as untouched and unspoilt now as when Wordsworth knew it, a hundred years ago. The sun had only just vanished out of sight behind the Grasmere fells, and the long Westmorland after-glow would linger for nearly a couple of hours yet. After much rain the skies were clear, and all the omens fair. But the rain had left its laughing message behind; in the full river, in the streams leaping down the fells, in the freshness of every living thing--the new-leafed trees, the grass with its flowers, the rushes spreading their light armies through the flooded margins of the lake, and bending to the light wind, which had just, as though in mischief, blotted out the dream-world in the water, and set it rippling eastwards in one sheet of living silver, broken only by a cloud-shadow at its further end. Fragrance was everywhere--from the trees, the young fern, the grass; and from the shining west, the shadowed fells, the brilliant water, there breathed a voice of triumphant beauty, of unconquered peace, which presently affected George Sarratt strangely.

They had just passed through a little wood; and in its friendly gloom, he had put his arm round his wife so that they had lingered a little, loth to leave its shelter. But now they had emerged again upon the radiance of the fell-side, and he had found a stone for Nelly to rest on.

'That those places in France, and that sky--should be in the same world!' he said, under his breath, pointing to the glow on the eastern fells, as he threw himself down on the turf beside her.

Her face flushed with exercise and happiness suddenly darkened.

'Don't--don't talk of them to-night!'--she said passionately--'not to-night--just to-night, George!'

And she stooped impetuously to lay her hand on his lips. He kissed the hand, held it, and remained silent, his eyes fixed upon the lake. On that day week he would probably just have rejoined his regiment. It was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bailleul. Hot work, he heard, was expected. There was still a scandalous shortage of ammunition--and if there was really to be a 'push,' the losses would be appalling. Man after man that he knew had been killed within a week--two or three days--twenty-four hours even!--of rejoining. Supposing that within a fortnight Nelly sat here, looking at this lake, with the War Office telegram in her hand--'Deeply regret to inform you, etc.' This was not a subject on which he had ever allowed himself to dwell, more than in his changed circumstances he was bound to dwell. Every soldier, normally, expects to get through. But of course he had done everything that was necessary for Nelly. His will was in the proper hands; and the night before their wedding he had written a letter to her, to be given her if he fell. Otherwise he had taken little account of possible death; nor had it cost him any trouble to banish the thought of it.

But the beauty of the evening--of this old earth, which takes no account of the perishing of men--and Nelly's warm life beside him, hanging upon his, perhaps already containing within it the mysterious promise of another life, had suddenly brought upon him a tremor of soul--an inward shudder. Did he really believe in existence after death--in a meeting again, in some dim other scene, if they were violently parted now? He had been confirmed while at school. His parents were Church people of a rather languid type, and it seemed the natural thing to do. Since then he had occasionally taken the Communion, largely to please an elder school-friend, who was ardently devout, and was now a Chaplain on the Western front. But what did it really mean to him?--what would it mean to _her_--if she were left alone? Images passed through his mind--the sights of the trenches--shattered and dying bodies. What was the _soul_?--had it really an independent life? _Something_ there was in men--quite rough and common men--something revealed by war and the sufferings of war--so splendid, so infinitely beyond anything he had ever dreamed of in ordinary life, that to think of it roused in him a passion of hidden feeling--perhaps adoration--but vague and speechless--adoration of he knew not what. He did not speak easily of his feeling, even to his young wife, to whom marriage had so closely, so ineffably bound him. But as he lay on the grass looking up at her--smiling--obeying her command of silence, his thoughts ranged irrepressibly. Supposing he fell, and she lived on--years and years--to be an old woman? Old! Nelly? Impossible! He put his hand gently on the slender foot, and felt the pulsing life in it. 'Dearest!' she murmured at his touch, and their eyes met tenderly.

'I should be content--' he thought--'if we could just live _this_ life out! I don't believe I should want another life. But to go--and leave her; to go--just at the beginning--before one knows anything--before one has finished anything--'

And again his eyes wandered from her to the suffusion of light and colour on the lake. 'How could anyone ever want anything better than this earth--this life--at its best--if only one were allowed a full and normal share of it!' And he thought again, almost with a leap of exasperation, of those dead and mangled men--out there--in France. Who was responsible--God?--or man? But man's will is--must be--something dependent--something included in God's will. If God really existed, and if He willed war, and sudden death--then there must be another life. Or else the power that devised the world was not a good, but an evil--at best, a blind one.

But while his young brain was racing through the old puzzles in the old ways, Nelly was thinking of something quite different. Her delicate small face kept breaking into little smiles with pensive intervals--till at last she broke out--

'Do you remember how I caught you--turning back to look after us--just here--just about here? You had passed that thorn tree--'

He came back to love-making with delight.

'"Caught me!" I like that! As if you weren't looking back too! How else did you know anything about me?'

He had taken his seat beside her on the rock, and her curly black head was nestling against his shoulder. There was no one on the mountain path, no one on the lake. Occasionally from the main road on the opposite shore there was a passing sound of wheels. Otherwise the world was theirs--its abysses of shadow, its 'majesties of light.'

She laughed joyously, not attempting to contradict him. It was on this very path, just two months before the war, that they had first seen each other. She with her father and Bridget were staying at Mrs. Weston's lodgings, because she, Nelly, had had influenza, and the doctor had sent her away for a change. They knew the Lakes well already, as is the way of Manchester folk. Their father, a hard-worked, and often melancholy man, had delighted in them, summer and winter, and his two girls had trudged about the fells with him year after year, and wanted nothing different or better. At least, Nelly had always been content. Bridget had grumbled often, and proposed Blackpool, or Llandudno, or Eastbourne for a change. But their father did not like 'crowds.' They came to the Lakes always before or after the regular season. Mr. Cookson hated the concourse of motorists in August, and never would use one himself. Not even when they went from Ambleside to Keswick. They must always walk, or go by the horse-coach.

Nelly presently looked up, and gave a little pull to the corner of her husband's moustache.

'Of course you know you behaved abominably that next day at Wythburn! You kept that whole party waiting while you ran after us. And I hadn't dropped that bag. You knew very well I hadn't dropped it!'

He chuckled.

'It did as well as anything else. I got five minutes' talk with you. I found out where you lodged.'

'Poor papa!'--said Nelly reflectively--'he was so puzzled. "There's that fellow we saw at Wythburn again! Why on earth does he come here to fish? I never saw anybody catch a thing in this bit of the river." Poor papa!'

They were both silent a little. Mr. Cookson had not lived long enough to see Nelly and George Sarratt engaged. The war had killed him. Financial embarrassment was already closing on him when it broke out, and he could not stand the shock and the general dislocation of the first weeks, as sounder men could. The terror of ruin broke him down--and he was dead before Christmas, nominally of bronchitis and heart failure. Nelly had worn mourning for him up to her wedding day. She had been very sorry for 'poor papa'--and very fond of him; whereas Bridget had been rather hard on him always. For really he had done his best. After all he had left them just enough to live upon. Nelly's conscience, grown tenderer than of old under the touch of joy, pricked her as she thought of her father. She knew he had loved her best of his two daughters. She would always remember his last lingering hand-clasp, always be thankful for his last few words--'God bless you, dear.' But had she cared for him enough in return?--had she really tried to understand him? Some vague sense of the pathos of age--of its isolation--its dumb renouncements--gripped her. If he had only lived longer! He would have been so proud of George.

She roused herself.

'You did really make up your mind--_then_?' she asked him, just for the pleasure of hearing him confess it again.

'Of course I did! But what was the good?'

She knew that he meant it had been impossible to speak while his mother was still alive, and he, her only child, was partly dependent upon her. But his mother had died not long after Nelly's father, and her little income had come to her son. So now what with Nelly's small portion, and his mother's two hundred and fifty a year in addition to his pay, the young subaltern thought himself almost rich--in comparison with so many others. His father, who had died while he was still at school, had been a master at Harrow, and he had been brought up in a refined home, with high standards and ideals. A scholarship at Oxford at one of the smaller colleges, a creditable degree, then an opening in the office of a well-known firm of solicitors, friends of his father, and a temporary commission, as soon as war broke out, on his record as a keen and diligent member of the Harrow and Oxford O.T.C.'s:--these had been the chief facts of his life up to August 1914;--that August which covered the roads leading to the Aldershot headquarters, day by day, with the ever-renewed columns of the army to be, with masses of marching men, whose eager eyes said one thing only--'_Training_!--_training_!'

The war, and the causes of the war, had moved his nature, which was sincere and upright, profoundly; all the more perhaps because of a certain kindling and awakening of the whole man, which had come from his first sight of Nelly Cookson in the previous June, and from his growing friendship with her--which he must not yet call love. He had decided however after three meetings with her that he would never marry anyone else. Her softness, her yieldingness, her delicate beauty intoxicated him. He rejoiced that she was no 'new woman,' but only a very girlish and undeveloped creature, who would naturally want his protection as well as his love. For it was his character to protect and serve. He had protected and served his mother--faithfully and well. And as she was dying, he had told her about Nelly--not before; only to find that she knew it all, and that the only soreness he had ever caused her came from the secrecy which he had tenderly thought her due.

But for all his sanity and sweet temper there was a hard tough strain in him, which had made war so far, even through the horrors of it, a great absorbing game to him, for which he knew himself fitted, in which he meant to excel. Several times during the fighting that led up to Neuve Chapelle he had drawn the attention of his superiors, both for bravery and judgment; and after Neuve Chapelle, he had been mentioned in despatches. He had never yet known fear in the field--never even such a shudder at the unknown--which was yet the possible!--as he had just been conscious of. His nerves had always been strong, his nature was in the main simple. Yet for him, as well as for so many other 'fellows' he knew, the war had meant a great deal of this new and puzzled thinking--on problems of right and wrong, of 'whence' and 'whither,' of the personal value of men--this man, or that man. By George, war brought them out!--these personal values. And the general result for him, up to now,--had he been specially lucky?--had been a vast increase of faith in his fellow men, yes, and faith in himself, modest as he was. He was proud to be an English soldier--proud to the roots of his being. His quiet patriotism had become a passion; he knew now in what he had believed.

Yes--England for ever! An English home after the war--and English children. Oh, he hoped Nelly would have children! As he held her pressed against him, he seemed to see her in the future--with the small things round her. But he did not speak of it.

She meanwhile was thinking of quite other things, and presently she said in a quick, troubled voice--

'George!--while you are away--you don't want me to do munitions?'

He laughed out.

'Munitions! I see you at a lathe! Dear--I don't think you'd earn your keep!' And he lifted her delicate arm and tiny hand, and looked at them with scientific curiosity. Her frail build was a constant wonder and pleasure to him. But small as she was, there was something unusual, some prophecy, perhaps, of developments to come, in the carriage of her head, and in some of her looks. Her education had been extremely slight, many of her ideas were still childish, and the circle from which she came had been inferior in birth and breeding to his own. But he had soon realised on their honeymoon, in spite of her simple talk, that she was very quick--very intelligent.

'Because--' she went on, doubtfully--'there are so many other things I could do--quite useful things. There's sphagnum moss! Everybody up here is gathering sphagnum moss--you know--for bandages--upon the fells. I daresay Bridget might help in that. She won't do any other sort of war-work.'

'Why, I thought all women were doing some kind of war-work!'

'Bridget won't. She doesn't want to hear about the war at all. She's bored with it.'

'Bored with it! Good heavens!' Sarratt's countenance clouded. 'Darling--that'll be rather hard on you, if you and she are going to live together.'

Nelly lifted her head from his shoulder, and looked at him rather gravely.

'I'm afraid you don't know much about Bridget, George. She's,--well, she's--one of the--oddest women you ever met.'

'So it seems! But why is she bored with the war?'

'Well--you see--it doesn't matter to _her_ in any way--and she doesn't want it to matter to her. There's nobody in it she cares about.'

'Thanks!' laughed Sarratt. But Nelly still grave, shook her head. 'Oh, she's not the least like other people. She won't care about you, George, just because you've married me. And--'

'And what? Is she still angry with me for not being rich?'

And his thoughts went back to his first interview with Bridget Cookson--on the day when their engagement was announced. He could see the tall sharp-featured woman now, standing with her back to the light in the little sitting-room of the Manchester lodgings. She had not been fierce or abusive at all. She had accepted it quietly--with only a few bitter sentences.

'All right, Mr. Sarratt. I have nothing to say. Nelly must please herself. But you've done her an injury! There are plenty of rich men that would have married her. You're very poor--and so are we.'

When the words were spoken, Nelly had just accepted him; she was her own mistress; he had not therefore taken her sister's disapproval much to heart. Still the words had rankled.

'Darling!--when I made you marry me--_did_ I do you an injury?' he said suddenly, as they were walking again hand in hand along the high green path with the lake at their feet, and a vision of blue and rose before them, in the shadowed western mountains, the lower grounds steeped in fiery light, and the red reflections in the still water.

'What _do_ you mean?' said Nelly, turning upon him a face of wonder.

'Well, that was what Bridget said to me, when I told her that you had accepted me. But I was a great fool to tell you, darling! I'm sorry I