Part 10

Within five minutes he was forcing the door of the fowl-house with a spade. The fowls were already settling down for the night, and they clucked rather alarmingly, but Edwin’s blood was up. He chased them all out, forty-five of them, and made savage lunges at them with his feet. Then he upset all the corn he could find, and poured water on it and jumped on it. He smashed the complicated invention suspended from the ceiling, whereby the fowls had to reach up and get one grain of corn at a time. To his joy he found a pot of green paint, which he flung promiscuously over the walls and floor (and incidentally his clothes).

Then he crept out and bolted both of the doors.

The sleepy creatures were standing about outside, some feebly pecking about on the ground. He chased them through into the vegetable garden; then he rubbed some of the dirt and paint from his clothes and returned to the road.

When he arrived home he said to his wife:

“I fell off a tram on Waterloo Bridge. Lost my hat.”

He was cold and wet and his teeth were chattering. His wife bustled him off to bed and gave him a little hot grog.

Between the sheets he recovered contentment. He gurgled exultantly at this last and only satisfying exploit of the day. He dreamed lazily of the blind rage of the Peels....

It must have been half-past ten when his wife came up to bring him some hot gruel. He had been asleep. She put the cup by the bedside and rearranged his pillow.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m right,” he murmured.

She sat on a chair by the side of the bed and after a few minutes remarked:

“You’ve missed an excitement while you’ve been asleep.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. A fire!”

“A fire?”

“The Peels came home about an hour and a half ago and found the place on fire at the back.”

“Oh?”

“Their cook Lizzie has been over. She said some straw near the wash-house must have started it. It’s burnt out the wash-house and both the fowl-houses. She says Mr. Peel says he don’t care very much because he was heavily insured for the lot. But the funny thing is, the fowls wasn’t insured and they’ve found the whole lot down the field on the rabbit-hutches. Somebody must have got in and let the whole lot out. It was a fine thing to do, or else the poor things would have been burnt up. What’s the matter, Ned? Is the gruel too hot?”

THEM OTHERS

THEM OTHERS

I

It is always disturbing to me when things fall into pattern form, when in fact incidents of real life dovetail with each other in such a manner as to suggest the shape of a story. A story is a nice neat little thing with what is called a “working-up” and a climax, and life is a clumsy, ungraspable thing, very incomplete in its periods, and with a poor sense of climax. In fact, death—which is a very uncertain quantity—is the only definite note it strikes, and even death has an uncomfortable way of setting other things in motion. If, therefore, in telling you about my friend Mrs. Ward, I am driven to the usual shifts of the story-teller, you must believe me that it is because this narrative concerns visions: Mrs. Ward’s visions, my visions, and your visions. Consequently I am dependent upon my own poor powers of transcription to mold these visions into some sort of shape, and am driven into the position of a story-teller against my will.

The first vision, then, concerns the back view of the Sheldrake Road, which, as you know, butts on to the railway embankment near Dalston Junction station. If you are of an adventurous turn of mind you shall accompany me, and we will creep up to the embankment together and look down into these back yards. (We shall be liable to a fine of 40/-, according to a bye-law of the Railway Company, for doing so, but the experience will justify us.)

There are twenty-two of these small buff-brick houses huddled together in this road, and there is surely no more certain way of judging not only the character of the individual inhabitants, but of their mode of life, than by a survey of these somewhat pathetic yards. Is it not, for instance, easy to determine the timid, well-ordered mind of little Miss Porson, the dressmaker at number nine, by its garden of neat mud paths, with its thin patch of meager grass, and the small bed of skimpy geraniums? Cannot one read the tragedy of those dreadful Alleson people at number four? The garden is a wilderness of filth and broken bottles, where even the weeds seem chary of establishing themselves. In fact, if we listen carefully—and the trains are not making too much noise—we can hear the shrill crescendo of Mrs. Alleson’s voice cursing at her husband in the kitchen, the half-empty gin-bottle between them.

The methodical pushfulness and practicability of young Mr. and Mrs. Andrew MacFarlane is evident at number fourteen. They have actually grown a patch of potatoes, and some scarlet-runners, and there is a chicken run near the house.

Those irresponsible people, the O’Neals, have grown a bed of hollyhocks, but for the rest the garden is untidy and unkempt. One could almost swear they were connected in some obscure way with the theatrical profession.

Mrs. Abbot’s garden is a sort of playground. It has asphalt paths, always swarming with small and not too clean children, and there are five lines of washing suspended above the mud. Every day seems to be Mrs. Abbot’s washing-day. Perhaps she “does” for others. Sam Abbot is certainly a lazy, insolent old rascal, and such always seem destined to be richly fertile. Mrs. Abbot is a pleasant “body,” though. The Greens are the swells of the road. George Green is in the grocery line, and both his sons are earning good money, and one daughter has piano lessons. The narrow strip of yard is actually divided into two sections, a flower-garden and a kitchen-garden. And they are the only people who have flower-boxes in the front.

Number eight is a curious place. Old Mr. Bilge lives there. He spends most of his time in the garden, but nothing ever seems to come up. He stands about in his shirt-sleeves, and with a circular paper hat on his head, like a printer. They say he was formerly a corn merchant but has lost all his money. He keeps the garden very neat and tidy, but nothing seems to grow. He stands there staring at the beds, as though he found their barrenness quite unaccountable.

Number eleven is unoccupied, and number twelve is Mrs. Ward’s.

We now come to an important vision, and I want you to come down with me from the embankment and to view Mrs. Ward’s garden from inside, and also Mrs. Ward as I saw her on that evening when I had occasion to pay my first visit.

It had been raining, but the sun had come out. We wandered round the paths together, and I can see her old face now, lined and seamed with years of anxious toil and struggle; her long, bony arms, slightly withered, but moving restlessly in the direction of snails and slugs.

“O dear! O dear!” she was saying. “What with the dogs, and the cats, and the snails, and the trains, it’s wonderful anything comes up at all!”

Mrs. Ward’s garden has a character of its own, and I cannot account for it. There is nothing very special growing—a few pansies and a narrow border of London Pride, several clumps of unrecognizable things that haven’t flowered, the grass patch in only fair order, and at the end of the garden an unfinished rabbit-hutch. But there is about Mrs. Ward’s garden an atmosphere. There is something about it that reflects her placid eye, the calm, somewhat contemplative way she has of looking right through things, as though they didn’t concern her too closely. As though, in fact, she were too occupied with her own inner visions.

“No,” she says in answer to my query, “we don’t mind the trains at all. In fact, me and my Tom we often come out here and sit after supper. And Tom smokes his pipe. We like to hear the trains go by.”

She gazes abstractedly at the embankment.

“I like to hear things ... going on and that. It’s Dalston Junction a little further on. The trains go from there to all parts, right out into the country they do ... ever so far.... My Ernie went from Dalston.”

She adds the last in a changed tone of voice. And now perhaps we come to the most important vision of all—Mrs. Ward’s vision of “my Ernie.”

I ought perhaps to mention that I had never met “my Ernie.” I can only see him through Mrs. Ward’s eyes. At the time when I met her, he had been away at the war for nearly a year. I need hardly say that “my Ernie” was a paragon of sons. He was brilliant, handsome, and incredibly clever. Everything that “my Ernie” said was treasured. Every opinion that he expressed stood. If “my Ernie” liked any one, that person was always a welcome guest. If “my Ernie” disliked any one they were not to be tolerated, however plausible they might appear.

I had seen Ernie’s photograph, and I must confess that he appeared a rather weak, extremely ordinary-looking young man, but then I would rather trust to Mrs. Ward’s visions than the art of any photographer.

Tom Ward was a mild, ineffectual-looking old man, with something of Mrs. Ward’s placidity but with nothing of her strong individual poise. He had some job in a gas-works. There was also a daughter named Lily, a brilliant person who served in a tea-shop, and sometimes went to theaters with young men. To both husband and daughter Mrs. Ward adopted an affectionate, mothering, almost pitying attitude. But with “my Ernie” it was quite a different thing. I can see her stooping figure, and her silver-white hair gleaming in the sun as we come to the unfinished rabbit-hutch, and the curious wistful tones of her voice as she touches it and says:

“When my Ernie comes home....”

The war to her was some unimaginable but disconcerting affair centered round Ernie. People seemed to have got into some desperate trouble, and Ernie was the only one capable of getting them out of it. I could not at that time gauge how much Mrs. Ward realized the dangers the boy was experiencing. She always spoke with conviction that he would return safely. Nearly every other sentence contained some reference to things that were to happen “when my Ernie comes home.” What doubts and fears she had were only recognizable by the subtlest shades in her voice.

When we looked over the wall into the deserted garden next door, she said:

“O dear! I’m afraid they’ll never let that place. It’s been empty since the Stellings went away. Oh, years ago, before this old war.”

II

It was on the occasion of my second visit that Mrs. Ward told me more about the Stellings. It appeared that they were a German family, of all things! There was a Mr. Stelling, and a Mrs. Frow Stelling, and two boys.

Mr. Stelling was a watchmaker, and he came from a place called Bremen. It was a very sad story Mrs. Ward told me. They had only been over here for ten months when Mr. Stelling died, and Mrs. Frow Stelling and the boys went back to Germany.

During the time of the Stellings’ sojourn in the Sheldrake Road it appeared that the Wards had seen quite a good deal of them, and though it would be an exaggeration to say that they ever became great friends, they certainly got through that period without any unpleasantness, and even developed a certain degree of intimacy.

“Allowing for their being foreigners,” Mrs. Ward explained, “they were quite pleasant people.”

On one or two occasions they invited each other to supper, and I wish my visions were sufficiently clear to envisage those two families indulging this social habit.

According to Mrs. Ward, Mr. Stelling was a kind little man with a round fat face. He spoke English fluently, but Mrs. Ward objected to his table manners.

“When my Tom eats,” she said, “you don’t hear a sound—I look after that!—But that Mr. Stelling.... O dear!”

The trouble with Mrs. Stelling was that she could only speak a few words of English, but Mrs. Ward said “she was a pleasant enough little body,” and she established herself quite definitely in Mrs. Ward’s affections for the reason that she was so obviously and so passionately devoted to her two sons.

“Oh, my word, though, they do have funny ways—these foreigners,” she continued. “The things they used to eat! most peculiar! I’ve known them eat stewed prunes with hot meat!”

Mrs. Ward repeated, “Stewed prunes with hot meat!” several times, and shook her head, as though this exotic mixture was a thing to be sternly discouraged. But she acknowledged that Mrs. Frow Stelling was in some ways a very good cook, in fact, her cakes were really wonderful, “the sort of thing you can’t even buy in a shop.”

About the boys there seemed to be a little divergence of opinion. They were both also fat-faced, and their heads were “almost shaved like convicts.” The elder one wore spectacles and was rather noisy, but:

“My Ernie liked the younger one. Oh, yes, my Ernie said that young Hans was quite a nice boy. It was funny the way they spoke, funny and difficult to understand.”

It was very patent that between the elder boy and Ernie, who were of about the same age, there was an element of rivalry which was perhaps more accentuated in the attitude of the mothers than in the boys themselves. Mrs. Ward could find little virtue in this elder boy. Most of her criticism of the family was leveled against him. The rest she found only a little peculiar. She said she had never heard such a funny Christian name as Frow. Florrie she had heard of, and even Flora, but not _Frow_. I suggested that perhaps Frow might be some sort of title, but she shook her head and said that that was what she was always known as in the Sheldrake Road, “Mrs. Frow Stelling.”

In spite of Mrs. Ward’s lack of opportunity for greater intimacy on account of the language problem, her own fine imaginative qualities helped her a great deal. And in one particular she seemed curiously vivid. She gathered an account from one of them—I’m not sure whether it was Mr. or Mrs. Frow Stelling or one of the boys—of a place they described near their home in Bremen. There was a narrow street of high buildings by a canal, and a little bridge that led over into a gentleman’s park. At a point where the canal turned sharply eastwards there was a clump of linden-trees, where one could go in the summer-time, and under their shade one might sit and drink light beer, and listen to a band that played in the early part of the evening.

Mrs. Ward was curiously clear about that. She said she often thought about Mr. Stelling sitting there after his day’s work. It must have been very pleasant for him, and he seemed to miss this luxury in Dalston more than anything. Once Ernie, in a friendly mood, had taken him into the four-ale bar of “The Unicorn” at the corner of the Sheldrake Road, but Mr. Stelling did not seem happy. Ernie acknowledged afterwards that it had been an unfortunate evening. The bar had been rather crowded, and there was a man and two women who had all been drinking too much. In any case, Mr. Stelling had been obviously restless there, and he had said afterwards:

“It is not that one wishes to drink only....”

And he had shaken his fat little head, and had never been known to visit “The Unicorn” again.

Mr. Stelling died quite suddenly of some heart trouble, and Mrs. Ward could not get it out of her head that his last illness was brought about by his disappointment and grief in not being able to go and sit quietly under the linden-trees after his day’s work and listen to a band.

“You know, my dear,” she said, “when you get accustomed to a thing, it’s _bad_ for you to leave it off.”

When poor Mr. Stelling died, Mrs. Frow Stelling was heart-broken, and I have reason to believe that Mrs. Ward went in and wept with her, and in their dumb way they forged the chains of some desperate understanding. When Mrs. Frow Stelling went back to Germany they promised to write to each other. But they never did, and for a very good reason. As Mrs. Ward said, she was “no scholard,” and as for Mrs. Frow Stelling, her English was such a doubtful quantity, she probably never got beyond addressing the envelope.

“That was three years ago,” said Mrs. Ward. “Them boys must be eighteen and nineteen now.”

III

If I have intruded too greatly into the intimacy of Mrs. Ward’s life, one of my excuses must be—not that I am “a scholard” but that I am in any case able to read a simple English letter. I was in fact on several occasions “requisitioned.” When Lily was not at home, some one had to read Ernie’s letters out loud. The arrival of Ernie’s letters was always an inspiring experience. I should perhaps be in the garden with Mrs. Ward, when Tom would come hurrying out to the back, and call out:

“Mother! a letter from Ernie!”

And then there would be such excitement and commotion. The first thing was always the hunt for Mrs. Ward’s spectacles. They were never where she had put them. Tom would keep on turning the letter over in his hands, and examining the postmark, and he would reiterate:

“Well, what did you do with them, mother?”

At length they would be found in some unlikely place, and she would take the letter tremblingly to the light. I never knew quite how much Mrs. Ward could read. She could certainly read a certain amount. I saw her old eyes sparkling and her tongue moving jerkily between her parted lips, as though she were formulating the words she read, and she would keep on repeating:

“T’ch! T’ch! O dear, O dear, the _things_ he says!”

And Tom impatiently by the door would say:

“Well, what _does_ he say?”

She never attempted to read the letter out loud, but at last she would wipe her spectacles and say:

“Oh, you read it, sir. The _things_ he says!”

They were indeed very good letters of Ernie’s, written apparently in the highest spirits. There was never a grumble, not a word. One might gather that he was away with a lot of young bloods on some sporting expedition, in which football, rags, sing-songs, and strange feeds played a conspicuous part. I read a good many of Ernie’s letters, and I do not remember that he ever made a single reference to the horrors of war, or said anything about his own personal discomforts. The boy must have had something of his mother in him in spite of the photograph.

And between the kitchen and the yard Mrs. Ward would spend her day placidly content, for Ernie never failed to write. There was sometimes a lapse of a few days, but the letter seldom failed to come every fortnight.

It would be difficult to know what Mrs. Ward’s actual conception of the war was. She never read the newspapers, for the reason, as she explained, that “there was nothing in them these days except about this old war.” She occasionally dived into Reynold’s newspaper on Sundays to see if there were any interesting law cases or any news of a romantic character. There was nothing romantic in the war news. It was all preposterous. She did indeed read the papers for the first few weeks, but this was for the reason that she had some vague idea that they might contain some account of Ernie’s doings. But as they did not, she dismissed them with contempt.

But I found her one night in a peculiarly preoccupied mood. She was out in the garden, and she kept staring abstractedly over the fence into the unoccupied ground next door. It appeared that it had dawned upon her that the war was to do with “these Germans,” that in fact we were fighting the Germans, and then she thought of the Stellings. Those boys would now be about eighteen and nineteen. They would be fighting too. They would be fighting against Ernie. This seemed very peculiar.

“Of course,” she said, “I never took to that elder boy—a greedy rough sort of boy he was. But I’m sure my Ernie wouldn’t hurt young Hans.”

She meditated for a moment as though she were contemplating what particular action Ernie would take in the matter. She knew he didn’t like the elder boy but she doubted whether he would want to do anything very violent to him.

“They went out to a music-hall one night together,” she explained, as though a friendship cemented in this luxurious fashion could hardly be broken by an unreasonable display of passion.

IV

It was a few weeks later that the terror suddenly crept into Mrs. Ward’s life. Ernie’s letters ceased abruptly. The fortnight passed, then three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, and not a word. I don’t think that Mrs. Ward’s character at any time stood out so vividly as during those weeks of stress. It is true she appeared a little feebler, and she trembled in her movements, whilst her eyes seemed abstracted as though all the power in them were concentrated in her ears, alert for the bell or the knock. She started visibly at odd moments, and her imagination was always carrying her tempestuously to the front door only to answer—a milkman or a casual hawker. But she never expressed her fear in words. When Tom came home—he seemed to have aged rapidly—he would come bustling out into the garden, and cry tremblingly:

“There ain’t been no letter to-day, mother?”

And she would say quite placidly:

“No, not to-day, Tom. It’ll come to-morrow, I expect.”

And she would rally him and talk of little things, and get busy with his supper. And in the garden I would try and talk to her about her clump of pansies, and the latest yarn about the neighbors, and I tried to get between her and the rabbit-hutch with its dumb appeal of incompletion. And I would notice her staring curiously over into the empty garden next door, as though she were being assailed by some disturbing apprehensions. Ernie would not hurt that eldest boy ... but suppose ... if things were reversed ... there was something inexplicable and terrible lurking in this passive silence.

During this period the old man was suddenly taken very ill. He came home one night with a high temperature and developed pneumonia. He was laid up for many weeks, and she kept back the telegram that came while he was almost unconscious, and she tended him night and day, nursing her own anguish with a calm face.

For the telegram told her that her Ernie was “missing, believed wounded.”

I do not know at what period she told the father this news, but it was certainly not till he was convalescent. And the old man seemed to sink into a kind of apathy. He sat feebly in front of the kitchen fire, coughing and making no effort to control his grief.

Outside the great trains went rushing by, night and day. Things were “going on,” but they were all meaningless, cruel.

We made enquiries at the War Office, but they could not amplify the laconic telegram.

And then the winter came on, and the gardens were bleak in the Sheldrake Road. And Lily ran away and married a young tobacconist, who was earning twenty-five shillings a week. And old Tom was dismissed from the gas-works. His work was not proving satisfactory. And he sat about at home and moped. And in the meantime the price of foodstuffs was going up, and coals were a luxury. And so in the early morning Mrs. Ward would go off and work for Mrs. Abbot at the wash-tub, and she would earn eight or twelve shillings a week.

It is difficult to know how they managed during those days, but one could see that Mrs. Ward was buoyed up by some poignant hope. She would not give way. Eventually old Tom did get some work to do at a stationer’s. The work was comparatively light, and the pay equally so, so Mrs. Ward still continued to work for Mrs. Abbot.

My next vision of Mrs. Ward concerns a certain winter evening. I could not see inside the kitchen, but the old man could be heard complaining. His querulous voice was rambling on, and Mrs. Ward was standing by the door leading into the garden. She had returned from her day’s work and was scraping a pan out into a bin near the door. A train shrieked by, and the wind was blowing a fine rain against the house. Suddenly she stood up and looked up at the sky; then she pushed back her hair from her brow, and frowned at the dark house next door. Then she turned and said: