And when Fate threw Miss Fowler’s nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven, on Miss Fowler’s hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business of education as practised in private and public schools. She checked printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of extras; wrote to Head and House masters, matrons, nurses, and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by calling her ‘Gatepost’, ‘Postey’, or ‘Packthread’, by thumping her between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a stiff-necked shamble very like a camel’s. Later on he filled the house with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes, and dislikes, and the limitations of ‘you women’, reducing Mary to tears of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older, she was his ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who had no large sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the councils on his future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for mislaid boots and garments; always his butt and his slave.
And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an office in London; when his greeting had changed from ‘Hullo, Postey, you old beast’, to ‘Mornin’, Packthread’, there came a war which, unlike all wars that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew. As she said to Miss Fowler, it was ‘most vexatious’. It took the Rector’s son, who was going into business with his elder brother; it took the Colonel’s nephew on the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs Grant’s son, who, his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very early indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.
‘He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,’ said Miss Fowler. So Mary got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of her establishment – two gardeners and an odd man, aged sixty – that those who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape, the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener’s cottage. The cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited scene with Miss Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler gazetted Nellie, Cheape’s seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant post; Mrs Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts; and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.
Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always looked facts in the face, said, ‘He must have it. The chances are he won’t live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy –’
Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of machines. He gave Mary such a chart.
‘And you’d better study it, Postey,’ he said. ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of ’em soon.’ So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.
‘You look more or less like a human being,’ he said in his new Service voice. ‘You must have had a brain at some time in your past. What have you done with it? Where d’you keep it? A sheep would know more than you do, Postey. You’re lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can, you dowey old cassowary.’1
‘I suppose that’s how your superior officer talks to you?’ said Miss Fowler from her chair.
‘But Postey doesn’t mind,’ Wynn replied. ‘Do you, Packthread?’
‘Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you come,’ she muttered, and knitted her pale eyebrows again over the diagrams of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.
In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished ‘rolling’ (whatever that might be) and had gone on from a ‘taxi’2 to a machine more or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys, alighted on Vegg’s Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler’s bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at the biplane. Mary observed that ‘it smelt very badly.’
‘Postey, I believe you think with your nose,’ said Wynn. ‘I know you don’t with your mind. Now, what type’s that?’
‘I’ll go and get the chart,’ said Mary.
‘You’re hopeless! You haven’t the mental capacity of a white mouse,’ he cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.
‘Ah!’ said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. ‘Wait till our Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it’s much safer than in the trenches.’
‘I wonder,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Tell Cheape to come and tow me home again.’
‘It’s all downhill. I can do it,’ said Mary, ‘if you put the brake on.’ She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.
‘Now, be careful you aren’t heated and catch a chill,’ said overdressed Miss Fowler.
‘Nothing makes me perspire,’ said Mary. As she bumped the chair under the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead. Miss Fowler glanced at her.
‘What do you ever think of, Mary?’ she demanded suddenly.
‘Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings – as thick as we can make them.’
‘Yes. But I mean the things that women think about. Here you are, more than forty –’
‘Forty-four,’ said truthful Mary.
‘Well?’
‘Well?’ Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.
‘And you’ve been with me ten years now.’
‘Let’s see,’ said Mary. ‘Wynn was eleven when he came. He’s twenty now, and I came two years before that. It must be eleven.’
‘Eleven! And you’ve never told me anything that matters in all that while. Looking back, it seems to me that I’ve done all the talking.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I haven’t the mind. Let me take your hat.’
Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her rubber-tipped stick on the tiled hall floor. ‘Mary, aren’t you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?’
Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. ‘No,’ she said after consideration. ‘I don’t imagine I ever should. But I’ve no imagination, I’m afraid.’
She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o’clock glass of Contrexéville.3
That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the month, and the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn’s flying chariot visited them several times, and for two mornings (he had warned her by postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers at dawn. The second time she ran to the window, and stared at the whitening sky. A little blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean arms towards it.
That evening at six o’clock there came an announcement in an official envelope that Second-Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed during a trial flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and carried it to Miss Fowler.
‘I never expected anything else,’ said Miss Fowler; ‘but I’m sorry it happened before he had done anything.’
The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite steady in the midst of it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a great pity he didn’t die in action after he had killed somebody.’
‘He was killed instantly. That’s one comfort,’ Miss Fowler went on.
‘But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once – whatever happens to the t
anks,’ quoted Mary.
The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say impatiently, ‘But why can’t we cry, Mary?’ and herself replying, ‘There’s nothing to cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs Grant’s son did.’
‘And when he died, she came and cried all the morning,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘This only makes me feel tired – terribly tired. Will you help me to bed, please, Mary? – And I think I’d like the hot-water bottle.’
So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his riotous youth.
‘I believe,’ said Miss Fowler suddenly, ‘that old people and young people slip from under a stroke like this. The middle-aged feel it most.’
‘I expect that’s true,’ said Mary, rising. ‘I’m going to put away the things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Except, of course, at the funeral. I can’t go. You will. I want you to arrange about his being buried here. What a blessing it didn’t happen at Salisbury!’4
Everyone, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the Rector, was most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the moment in a world where bodies were in the habit of being dispatched by all sorts of conveyances to all sorts of places. And at the funeral two young men in buttoned-up uniforms stood beside the grave and spoke to her afterwards.
‘You’re Miss Postgate, aren’t you?’ said one. ‘Fowler told me about you. He was a good chap – a first-class fellow – a great loss.’
‘Great loss!’ growled his companion. ‘We’re all awfully sorry.’
‘How high did he fall from?’ Mary whispered.
‘Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn’t he? You were up that day, Monkey?’
‘All of that,’ the other child replied. ‘My bar made three thousand, and I wasn’t as high as him by a lot.’
‘Then that’s all right,’ said Mary. ‘Thank you very much.’
They moved away as Mrs Grant flung herself weeping on Mary’s flat chest, under the lych-gate, and cried, ‘I know how it feels! I know how it feels!’
‘But both his parents are dead,’ Mary returned, as she fended her off. ‘Perhaps they’ve all met by now,’ she added vaguely as she escaped towards the coach.
‘I’ve thought of that too,’ wailed Mrs Grant; ‘but then he’ll be practically a stranger to them. Quite embarrassing!’
Mary faithfully reported every detail of the ceremony to Miss Fowler, who, when she described Mrs Grant’s outburst, laughed aloud.
‘Oh, how Wynn would have enjoyed it! He was always utterly unreliable at funerals. D’you remember –’ And they talked of him again, each piecing out the other’s gaps. ‘And now,’ said Miss Fowler, ‘we’ll pull up the blinds and we’ll have a general tidy. That always does us good. Have you seen to Wynn’s things?’
‘Everything – since he first came,’ said Mary. ‘He was never destructive – even with his toys.’
They faced that neat room.
‘It can’t be natural not to cry,’ Mary said at last. ‘I’m so afraid you’ll have a reaction.’
‘As I told you, we old people slip from under the stroke. It’s you I’m afraid for. Have you cried yet?’
‘I can’t. It only makes me angry with the Germans.’
‘That’s sheer waste of vitality,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘We must live till the War’s finished.’ She opened a full wardrobe. ‘Now, I’ve been thinking things over. This is my plan. All his civilian clothes can be given away – Belgian refugees, and so on.’
Mary nodded. ‘Boots, collars, and gloves?’
‘Yes. We don’t need to keep anything except his cap and belt.’
‘They came back yesterday with his Flying Corps clothes’ – Mary pointed to a roll on the little iron bed.
‘Ah, but keep his Service things. Someone may be glad of them later. Do you remember his sizes?’
‘Five feet eight and a half; thirty-six inches round the chest. But he told me he’s just put on an inch and a half. I’ll mark it on a label and tie it on his sleeping-bag.’
‘So that disposes of that,’ said Miss Fowler, tapping the palm of one hand with the ringed third finger of the other. ‘What waste it all is! We’ll get his old school-trunks to-morrow and pack his civilian clothes.’
‘And the rest?’ said Mary. ‘His books and pictures and the games and the toys – and – and the rest?’
‘My plan is to burn every single thing,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Then we shall know where they are and no one can handle them afterwards. What do you think?’
‘I think that would be much the best,’ said Mary. ‘But there’s such a lot of them.’
‘We’ll burn them in the destructor,’ said Miss Fowler.
This was an open-air furnace for the consumption of refuse; a little circular four-foot tower of pierced brick over an iron grating. Miss Fowler had noticed the design in a gardening journal years ago, and had had it built at the bottom of the garden. It suited her tidy soul, for it saved unsightly rubbish-heaps, and the ashes lightened the stiff clay soil.
Mary considered for a moment, saw her way clear, and nodded again. They spent the evening putting away well-remembered civilian suits, underclothes that Mary had marked, and the regiments of very gaudy socks and ties. A second trunk was needed, and, after that, a little packing-case, and it was late next day when Cheape and the local carrier lifted them to the cart. The Rector luckily knew of a friend’s son, about five feet eight and a half inches high, to whom a complete Flying Corps outfit would be most acceptable, and sent his gardener’s son down with a barrow to take delivery of it. The cap was hung up in Miss Fowler’s bedroom, the belt in Miss Postgate’s; for, as Miss Fowler said, they had no desire to make tea-party talk of them.
‘That disposes of that,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘I’ll leave the rest to you, Mary. I can’t run up and down the garden. You’d better take the big clothes-basket and get Nellie to help you.’
‘I shall take the wheelbarrow and do it myself,’ said Mary, and for once in her life closed her mouth.
Miss Fowler, in moments of irritation, had called Mary deadly methodical. She put on her oldest waterproof and gardening-hat and her ever-slipping goloshes, for the weather was on the edge of more rain. She gathered fire-lighters from the kitchen, a half-scuttle of coals, and a faggot of brushwood. These she wheeled in the barrow down the mossed paths to the dank little laurel shrubbery where the destructor stood under the drip of three oaks. She climbed the wire fence into the Rector’s glebe5 just behind, and from his tenant’s rick pulled two large armfuls of good hay, which she spread neatly on the fire-bars. Next, journey by journey, passing Miss Fowler’s white face at the morning-room window each time, she brought down in the towel-covered clothes-basket, on the wheelbarrow, thumbed and used Hentys, Marryats, Levers, Stevensons, Baroness Orczys, Garvices,6 school-books, and atlases, unrelated piles of the Motor Cyclist, the Light Car, and catalogues of Olympia Exhibitions; the remnants of a fleet of sailing-ships from ninepenny cutters to a three-guinea yacht; a prep.-school7 dressing-gown; bats from three-and-sixpence to twenty-four shillings; cricket and tennis balls; disintegrated steam and clockwork locomotives with their twisted rails; a grey-and-red tin model of a submarine; a dumb gramophone and cracked records; golf-clubs that had to be broken across the knee, like his walking-sticks, and an assegai;8 photographs of private and public school cricket and football elevens, and his OTC9 on the line of march; kodaks and film-rolls; some pewters, and one real silver cup, for boxing competitions and Junior Hurdles; sheaves of school photographs; Miss Fowler’s photograph; her own which he had borne off in fun and (good care she took not to ask!) had never returned; a playbox with a secret drawer; a load of flannels, belts, and jerseys, and a pair of spiked shoes unearthed in the attic; a packet of all the letters that Miss Fowler and she had ever written to him, kept for some absurd reason through all these years; a five-day attempt at a diary; framed pictures of racing motors in full Brook
lands career, and load upon load of undistinguishable wreckage of tool-boxes, rabbit-hutches, electric batteries, tin soldiers, fret-saw outfits, and jig-saw puzzles.
Miss Fowler at the window watched her come and go, and said to herself, ‘Mary’s an old woman. I never realised it before.’
After lunch she recommended her to rest.
‘I’m not in the least tired,’ said Mary. ‘I’ve got it all arranged. I’m going to the village at two o’clock for some paraffin. Nellie hasn’t enough, and the walk will do me good.’
She made one last quest round the house before she started, and found that she had overlooked nothing. It began to mist as soon as she had skirted Vegg’s Heath, where Wynn used to descend – it seemed to her that she could almost hear the beat of his propellers overhead, but there was nothing to see. She hoisted her umbrella and lunged into the blind wet till she had reached the shelter of the empty village. As she came out of Mr Kidd’s shop with a bottle full of paraffin in her string shopping-bag, she met Nurse Eden, the village nurse, and fell into talk with her, as usual, about the village children. They were just parting opposite the ‘Royal Oak’, when a gun, they fancied, was fired immediately behind the house. It was followed by a child’s shriek dying into a wail.