PART VII: MR. SUMPTION Chapter 1

IT was early in April. A soft fleck of clouds lay over the sky, so thin, so rifted, that the sinking lights of afternoon bloomed their hollows with cowslip. A misty warmth hung over the fields, drawing up the perfume of violets and harrowed earth, of the soft clay-mud of the lanes, not yet dry after a shower and with puddles lying in the ruts like yellow milk.

Sunday Street was in stillness, like a village in a dream. Thin spines of wood-smoke rose from its chimneys, blue against the grey dapple of the clouds. The chink of a hammer came from the Forge, but so muffled, so rhythmic that it seemed part of the silence. The watery atmosphere intensified that effect of dream and illusion which the village had that evening. Through it the cottages and farms showed with a watery clearness and at the same time a strange air of distance and unreality. There was flooding light, yet no sunshine, distinctness of every line in eaves and tiling, of every daffodil and primrose in garden-borders, and yet that peculiar sense as of something far away, intangible, a mirage painted on a cloud. It was thus that the vision of his home might rise before the stretched, abnormal sight of a dying man, a simulacrum, a fetch....

Thyrza Beatup sat beside the willow pond at the corner of the Street, on the trunk of a fallen tree. In her arms she held her baby, asleep in a shawl. She felt warm and content and rather sleepy. In her pocket was Tom’s last [265] letter from France, but she did not read it, for she knew it by heart.... “I think of you always, you dear little creature, you and baby—even when my mind is full of the things out here, and this great battle which is seemingly the biggest there’s ever been.” ... “How I wonder when I’ll get another leave. I reckon baby ull have grown a bit and you’ll be just the same.” ... “I shut my eyes and I can see your face; reckon I love you more every time I think of you and I think of you day and night, so you can guess all the love that makes.” ... Tender phrases floated in and out of her mind, and then she smiled as she remembered a funny story Tom had told her about a chap in the A.S.C....

She drew the baby closer into her arms, looking down at his little sleeping face, which she thought was growing more and more like Tom’s. She drooped her eye-lids and in the mist of her lashes half seemed to see Tom’s face there in the crook of her elbow, where it had so often been, turning towards her breast. Poor Tom! his head was not so softly pillowed these nights ... and as suddenly she pictured him lying on the bare, foul ground, his head on his haversack, his cheeks unshaved, his body verminous, his limbs all aching with cold and stiffness—he, her man, her darling, whom she would have had rest so sweetly and so cleanly, with nothing but sweetness and comfort for the body that she loved—then a sudden flame of rebellion blazed up in her heart, and its simplicity was scarred with questions—Why was this terrible War allowed to be? How was it that women could let their men go to endure its horrors? Did anyone in England ever yet know what it was these boys had to suffer? Oh, stop it, stop it! for the sake of the boys out there, and for the boys who have still to go ... save at least a few straight limbs, a few unbroken hearts.

She clenched her hands, and little Will moaned against [266] her breast, and as she felt his little fists beating against her, the hard mood softened, and she bent over him with soothing words and caresses—words of comfort for herself as well as for her child.

“Don’t cry, liddle Will—daddy ull come back—daddy’s thinking of us. He’s out there so that you ull never have to go; he bears all that so that you may never have to bear it.”

A thick grape red had trickled into the west like a spill of wine. The afternoon had suddenly crimsoned into the evening, and ruddy lights came slanting over the fields, deepening, reddening, so that the willows were like flames, and the willow pond was like a lake of blood.... The night wind rose, and Thyrza shivered.

“We mun be gitting hoame, surelye,” and she stood up, pulling the shawl over the baby’s face.

At the same time her heart was full of peace. The questioning mood had passed, and had given place to one single deep assurance of her husband’s love. Tom’s love seemed to go with her into the house, to be with her as she bathed Will and put him to bed, to drive away her brooding thoughts when, later on, she sat alone in the lamplight at her supper. She sang to herself as she put away the supper, a silly old song of Tom’s when he first joined up:
“The bells of hell go ring-aling-aling
For you, but not for me;
For me the angels sing-aling-aling,
They’ve got the goods for me.
O Death, where is thy sting-aling-aling?
Where, grave, thy victory?
The bells of hell go ring-aling-aling
For you, but not for me.”

Now that darkness had fallen, the clouds had rolled away from the big stars blinking in the far-off peace. [267] A soft, sweet-smelling cold was in the house, the emanation of the damp mould of the garden, where hyacinths bathed their purples and yellows in the white flood of the moon—of the twinkling night air, cold and clear as water—of the fields with their brown moist ribs and clumps of violets.

Thyrza’s room was full of light, for the westering moon hung over Starnash like a sickle, and the fields showed grey against their hedges and the huddled woods. She undressed without a candle, so bright was the moon-dazzle on her window, and after saying her prayers climbed into bed, where little Will now lay in his father’s place. Once more she tried to picture that his head was Tom’s, and that her husband lay beside her, while Will slept in his cradle, as he had slept when Tom was at home. But the illusion faltered—Will was so small, and Tom was so big in spite of his stockiness, and took up so much more room, making the mattress cant under him, whereas Will lay on it as lightly as a kitten. However, she did not badly need the comfort of make-believe, for her sense of Tom’s love was so real, so intense, and so sweet, that it filled all the empty corners of her heart, making her forget the empty corners of her bed. She lay with one arm flung out towards the baby, the other curved against her side, while her hair spread over the pillow like a bed of celandines, and the moonlight drew in soft gleams and shadows the outlines of her breast.

She lay very still—nearly as still as Tom was lying in the light of the same moon.... But not quite so still, for the stillness of the living is never so perfect, so untroubled as the stillness of the dead.