Chapter 2

Worge knew nearly as soon as the Shop, for Nell, running down after breakfast to buy tobacco for her father, found the blinds still drawn. The door was unlocked, however, so she went in and called her sister-in-law. There was no answer, and, vaguely alarmed, she went upstairs, to find Thyrza sitting on the unmade bed, still wearing the print wrapper she had slipped on when the shop-bell rang during her dressing.

“I must go and tell his mother,” she kept repeating, when Nell had read the telegram, and had set about, with true female instinct, to make her a cup of tea.

“Don’t you worry over that, dear—I’ll tell her.”

“Reckon he’d sooner I did.”

“No—no; it would be such a strain for you. I’ll go when I’ve made your tea.”

At that moment little Will woke up, and cried for his breakfast—his mother had forgotten him for the first time since he was born. Nell welcomed the distraction, though her heart tightened as she saw Thyrza’s arms sweep to the child, and quiver while she held him with his little cool tear-dabbled cheek against her own so tearless and so dry. Nell left her with the boy at her breast, a big yellow hank of hair adrift upon her shoulder, and her eyes staring from under the tangle, fixed, strangely dark, strangely bright, as if their grief were both a shadow and an illumination.

She herself ran back on her self-inflicted errand, all her being merged into the one pain of knowing that in ten minutes she would have turned a jogging peace to bitterness, and bankrupted her mother’s life of its chief treasure. She saw herself as a flame leaping from one burning house to set another light.

Mrs. Beatup’s reception of the news held both the expected and the unexpected.

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“I knew it,” she said stonily—“I felt it—I felt it in my boans. And I toald him, too—I told him, poor soul, as he’d never come back, and now he’ll never come, surelye.” Then she said suddenly—“I mun go to her.”

“Go to whom, mother dear?”

“Thyrza. He’d want it ... and reckon she feels it even wuss than me.”

Nothing could dissuade her, and off she went, to comfort the woman with whom she had so long played tug-of-war for her son.

Nell stayed behind in the dreary house, where it seemed as if things slunk and crept. It was holiday-time, so Zacky was at home, sobbing in a corner of the haystack, crying on and on monotonously till he scarcely knew what he cried for, then suddenly charmed out of his grief by a big rat that popped out of the straw and ran across his legs. Elphick and Juglery mumbled and grumbled together in the barn, and talked of the shame of a yeoman dying out of his bed, and cast deprecating eyes on the indecency of Harry, dark against the sky on the ribbed swell of the Street field, making his late sowings with the new boy at his heels. Up and down the furrows went Harry, with his head hung low, in his ears the mutter of the guns, so faint on the windless April noon that he sometimes thought they were just the sorrowful beating of his own heart—up and down, scattering seed into the earth, leaving his token of life in the fields he loved before he was himself taken up and cast, vital and insignificant as a seed, into the furrows of Aceldama or the Field of Blood....

Mus’ Beatup sat crouched over the fire, the tears every now and then welling up in his eyes, and sometimes overflowing on his cheeks, whence he wiped them away with the back of his hand. “’Tis enough to maake a man taake to drink,” he muttered to himself—“this is wot [270] drives men to drink, surelye.” Every now and then he looked up at the clock.

The clock struck twelve, and the Rifle Volunteer called over the fields:

“Come, farmer, and have a pot with me. You’ve lost a son in your War—there were no sons lost in mine, but pots of beer are good for joy or sorrow. Come and forget that boy for five minutes, how he looked and what he said to you, forget this War through which good yeomen die out of their beds, and drink with the Volunteer, who drilled and marched and camped and did every other warlike thing save fighting, and died between his sheets.”

Mus’ Beatup groped for his stick. Then he shook his head rather sadly. “The boy’s scarce cold in his grave. Reckon I mun wait a day or two before I disremember his last words to me.”

Mrs. Beatup did not come home till after supper, and went to bed almost at once. She felt fagged and tottery, and there was a shrivelled, fallen look about her face. When she was in bed, she could not sleep, but lay watching the moon travel across the room, lighting first the mirror, then the wall, then her own head, then maaster’s, then climbing away up the chimney like a ghost. Every now and then she fell into a little, light dose, so thridden with dreams that it was scarcely sleeping.

In these dreams Tom was always a child, in her arms, or at her feet, or spannelling about after the manner of small boys with tops and string. She did not dream of him as grown, and this was the basis of her new agreement with Thyrza. Thyrza could never think of him as a child, for she had never seen him younger than eighteen; all her memories were concentrated in his few short years of manhood, and his childhood belonged to his mother. So his mother and his wife divided his memory up between them, and each thought she had the better part.

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Mrs. Beatup wondered if anyone—Bill Putland or Mus’ Archie—would write and tell her about Tom’s end. So far she had no idea how he had died, and her imagination crept tearfully round him, asking little piteous questions of the darkness—Had he suffered much? Had he asked for her? Had he wanted her?—Oh, reckon he had wanted her, and she had not been there, she had not known that he was dying, she had been pottering round after her household, cooking and washing up and sweeping and dusting, and thinking of him as alive and well, while all the time he was perhaps crying out for her in the mud of No Man’s Land....

The tears rolled down her cheeks in the darkness that followed the setting of the moon. Was it for this that she had borne him in hope and anguish?—that he should die alone, away from her, like a dog, in the mud?... She saw the mud, he had so often told her of it, she saw it sucking and oozing round him like the mud outside the cowhouse door; she saw the milky puddles ... she saw them grow dark and streaked with blood. Then, just as her heart was breaking, she pictured him in the bare clean ward of a hospital, as she had seen him at Eastbourne, with a kind nurse to relieve his last pain and take down his last little messages. Oh, someone was sure to write to Tom’s mother and tell her how he had died, and perhaps send her a message from him.

The daylight crept into the room, stabbing like a finger under the blind, and with it her restlessness increased. Then a pool of sunshine gleamed at the side of the bed. She felt that she could not lie any longer, so climbed out slowly from under the blankets. She tried not to disturb her husband, but she was too unwieldy for a noiseless rising, and she heard him turn over and mutter, asking her what she meant by “waaking a man to his trouble”—then falling asleep again.

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She went down to the kitchen, to find Harry, his eyes big and blurred with sleep, just going to set about his business in the yard. Moved by a quake of tenderness for this surviving son, she made him a cup of cocoa, and insisted on his drinking it before he went out to work. Then she did her own scrubbing with more care than usual—“Reckon we must kip the farm up, now he’s agone.” Urged by the same thought she went out to the Dutch barn and mixed the chicken food, then opened the hen-houses, feeling in the warm nests for eggs.

By now the sun was high, a big blazing pan slopping fire over the roofs and into the ponds. The air was full of sounds—crowings, cacklings, cluckings, the scurry of fowls, the stamping of horses, and then the whining hiss of milk into zinc pails. Hoofs thudded in the lane, the call of a girl came from a distant field, all the country of the Four Roads was waking to life and work, faltering no more than light and darkness because one of its sons had died for the fields he used to plough. Wheels crunched in the drive, and then came the postman’s knock. Mrs. Beatup put down her trug of meal, and waddled off towards the house ... perhaps a letter had come about Tom; it was rather early yet, still, perhaps it had come.

But Harry had already been to the door, and shook his head when she asked if there was anything for her.

“Thur’s naun.”

“Naun fur none of us?”

“Only fur me.”

She saw that he was carrying a long, official-looking envelope, and that his hand was clenched round it, as if he held a knife.

“Wot’s that?”

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“My calling-up paapers.”