Chapter 5

Thyrza herself was a little surprised to hear so often from Tom, and the brooch was a piece of daring she had never expected. It is true that from time to time she [78] sent him presents of chocolate and cigarettes, but his letters were much more than an acknowledgment of these. They were not love-letters, but Thyrza knew that they contained more confidences than those he sent to Worge—she was familiar with all the common round of his day, from rêveille to lights-out. He told her about the men he liked and those he didn’t, about his drills and fatigues, about his food and Cookie’s queer notions of a stew—Thyrza knew what was an “army biscuit,” a “choky,” a “gor’ blimey,” and the number of stripes worn respectively by “God Almighty,” “swank” and “goat.” Scarcely a week passed without one of those thin yellowish envelopes, with the red triangle in the corner, slipping under the shop door—addressed in smeary, indelible pencil, and smelling of woodbines.

She noticed a growing assurance in his style—partly due, perhaps, to the friendliness of her replies, partly, no doubt, to the growing manhood in him. She had always looked on Tom as a kind, slow chap, with very little to say for himself, and not too much thinking going on either, but with an unaccountable good heart. Now she realised that the Army was smartening him up, giving him confidence, enlarging his ideas. Thyrza was only a countrywoman herself, born within ten miles of where she lived now, but she did not fail to notice or to respect this growth in Tom. “He’s gitting new ideas in his head, and he’s waking up a bit. I shan’t lik him the less for being readier wud his tongue, surelye.”

One of the new ideas which got into Tom’s head at Waterheel was the desirability—indeed, the urgency—of having a “girl.” All the chaps had girls—Bill Putland wrote to Polly Sinden at Little Worge, though he had taken very little notice of her while he was at home; Jerry Sumption wrote half-threatening, half-appealing scrawls to Ivy Beatup; Kadwell and Viner had sweethearts [79] at the Foul Mile and the Trulilows—every evening at the Y.M.C.A. a hundred indelible pencils travelled to and fro from tongue to paper in the service of that god who campaigns with the god of war, and occasionally snatches his victories. There was also the need to receive letters—a need which Tom had never felt before, but now ached in his breast, when at post-time he saw other men walk away tearing envelopes, while he stood empty-handed. Thyrza wrote more often and more fully than his mother, and he would answer quickly, to make her write again. So closer and closer between them was drawn that link of smudged envelopes and ruled note-paper, with their formalities of “Your letter received quite safe,” and “Hoping this finds you well, as it leaves me at present”—till the chain was forged which should bind them for ever.

Thyrza pondered this in her heart. She was used to much indefinite courtship, most of it just before lamp-time in her own little shop, with the prelude of a “penn’orth of bull’s-eyes for the children” or “a packet of Player’s, please.” She had also been definitely courted once or twice in her short widowhood—by Bourner of the Forge, a widower with five sturdy children, and Hearsfield of Mystole. She was a type of girl who, while appealing little to her fellow-women, who “never cud see naun in Thyrza Honey,” yet had a definite attraction for men, by reason of that same softness and slowness for which her own sex despised her. She had no particular wish to marry again, and at the same time no particular objection. Her first marriage had not been so happy as to make her anxious to repeat it, but it had also lacked those elements of degradation which make a woman shrink from trusting herself a second time to a master. There was too much business and too much gossip in her life for her to feel her loneliness as a widow, and yet she [80] sometimes craved for the little child which had died at birth two years ago—she “cud do wud a child,” she sometimes said.

Tom Beatup attracted her strongly. He was much her own type—slow, ruminative and patient as the beasts he tended—yet she saw him as a being altogether more helpless than herself, one less able to think and plan, one whom she could “manage” tenderly. He was not so practical as she, and more in need of affection, of which he got less. Thyrza sometimes pictured his round dark head upon her breast, her arm about him, holding him there in the crook of it, both lover and child....

From the material point of view, the match was not a good one; but Thyrza was comfortably off, and her miniature trade was brisk. They were both too unsophisticated to make a barrier of her little stock of worldly goods—he had his pay, so his independence would not suffer, and she would have a separation allowance into the bargain. He was a slow wooer, and the tides of his boldness had never risen again to the level of that sticky kiss he had given her hand as she served the bull’s-eyes—but she was sure of him, and, being Thyrza, “slow as a cow,” had no objection to waiting.