Mrs Fettley rocked with small laughter.
‘That day,’ Mrs Ashcroft went on, ‘I’d stood on me feet nigh all the time, watchin’ the doctor go in an’ out; for they thought it might be ’is ribs, too. That made my boil break again, issuin’ an’ weepin’. But it turned out ’twadn’t ribs at all, an’ ’Arry ’ad a good night. When I heard that, nex’ mornin’, I says to meself, “I won’t lay two an’ two together yit. I’ll keep me leg down a week, an’ see what comes of it.” It didn’t hurt me that day, to speak of – seemed more to draw the strength out o’ me like – an’ ’Arry ’ad another good night. That made me persevere; but I didn’t dare lay two an’ two together till the week-end, an’ then, ’Arry come forth e’en a’most ’imself again – na’un hurt outside ner in of him. I nigh fell on me knees in de wash-house when Bessie was upstreet. “I’ve got ye now, my man,” I says. “You’ll take your good from me ’thout knowin’ it till my life’s end. O God, send me long to live for ’Arry’s sake!” I says. An’ I dunno that didn’t still me ragin’s.’
‘For good?’ Mrs Fettley asked.
‘They come back, plenty times, but, let be how ’twould, I knowed I was doin’ for ’im. I knowed it. I took an’ worked me pains on an’ off, like regulatin’ me own range, till I learned to ’ave ’em at my commandments. An’ that was funny, too. There was times, Liz, when my trouble ’ud all s’rink an’ dry up, like. First, I used to try an’ fetch it on again; bein’ fearful to leave ’Arry alone too long for anythin’ to lay ’old of. Prasin’ly I come to see that was a sign he’d do all right awhile, an’ so I saved myself.’
‘’Ow long for?’ Mrs Fettley asked, with deepest interest.
‘I’ve gone de better part of a year onct or twice with na’un more to show than the liddle weepin’ core of it, like. All s’rinked up an’ dried off. Then he’d inflame up – for a warnin’ – an’ I’d suffer it. When I couldn’t no more – an’ I ’ad to keep on goin’ with my Lunnon work – I’d lay me leg high on a cheer till it eased. Not too quick. I knowed by the feel of it, those times, dat ’Arry was in need. Then I’d send another five shillin’s to Bess, or somethin’ for the chillern, to find out if, mebbe, ’e’d took any hurt through my neglects. ’Twas so! Year in, year out, I worked it dat way, Liz, an’ ’e got ’is good from me ’thout knowin’ – for years and years.’
‘But what did you get out of it, Gra’?’ Mrs Fettley almost wailed. ‘Did ye see ’im reg’lar?’
‘Times – when I was ’ere on me ’ol’days. An’ more, now that I’m ’ere for good. But ’e’s never looked at me, ner any other woman ’cept ’is mother. ’Ow I used to watch an’ listen! So did she.’
‘Years an’ years!’ Mrs Fettley repeated. ‘An’ where’s ’e workin’ at now?’
‘Oh, ’e’s give up carterin’ quite a while. He’s workin’ for one o’ them big tractorisin’ firms – plowin’ sometimes, an’ sometimes off with lorries – fur as Wales, I’ve ’eard. He comes ’ome to ’is mother ’tween whiles; but I don’t set eyes on him now, fer weeks on end. No odds! ’Is job keeps ’im from continuin’ in one stay anywheres.’
‘But – just for de sake o’ sayin’ somethin’ – s’pose ’Arry did get married?’ said Mrs Fettley.
Mrs Ashcroft drew her breath sharply between her still even and natural teeth. ‘Dat ain’t been required of me,’ she answered. ‘I reckon my pains ’ull be counted agin that. Don’t you, Liz?’
‘It ought to be, dearie. It ought to be.’
‘It do ’urt sometimes. You shall see it when Nurse comes. She thinks I don’t know it’s turned.’
Mrs Fettley understood. Human nature seldom walks up to the word ‘cancer’.
‘Be ye certain sure, Gra’?’ she asked.
‘I was sure of it when old Mr Marshall ’ad me up to ’is study an’ spoke a long piece about my faithful service. I’ve obliged ’em on an’ off for a goodish time, but not enough for a pension. But they give me a weekly ’lowance for life. I knew what that sinnified – as long as three years ago.’
‘Dat don’t prove it, Gra’.’
‘To give fifteen bob a week12 to a woman ’oo’d live twenty year in the course o’ nature? It do!’
‘You’re mistook! You’re mistook!’ Mrs Fettley insisted.
‘Liz, there’s no mistakin’ when the edges are all heaped up,13 like – same as a collar. You’ll see it. An’ I laid out Dora Wickwood, too. She ’ad it under the arm-pit, like.’
Mrs Fettley considered awhile, and bowed her head in finality.
‘’Ow long d’you reckon ’twill allow ye, countin’ from now, dearie?’
‘Slow come, slow go. But if I don’t set eyes on ye ’fore next hoppin’, this’ll be good-bye, Liz.’
‘Dunno as I’ll be able to manage by then – not ’thout I have a liddle dog to lead me. For de chillern, dey won’t be troubled, an’ – O Gra’! – I’m blindin’ up – I’m blindin’ up!’
‘Oh, dat was why you didn’t more’n finger with your quilt-patches all this while! I was wonderin’ … But the pain do count, don’t ye think, Liz? The pain do count to keep ’Arry – where I want ’im. Say it can’t be wasted, like.’
‘I’m sure of it – sure of it, dearie. You’ll ’ave your reward.’
‘I don’t want no more’n this – if de pain is taken into de reckonin’.’
‘’Twill be – ’twill be, Gra’.’
There was a knock on the door.
‘That’s Nurse. She’s before ’er time,’ said Mrs Ashcroft. ‘Open to ’er.’
The young lady entered briskly, all the bottles in her bag clicking. ‘Evenin’, Mrs Ashcroft,’ she began. ‘I’ve come raound a little earlier than usual because of the Institute dance to-na-ite. You won’t ma-ind, will you?’
‘Oh no. Me dancin’ days are over.’ Mrs Ashcroft was the self-contained domestic at once. ‘My old friend, Mrs Fettley ’ere, has been settin’ talkin’ with me a while.’
‘I hope she ’asn’t been fatiguing you,’ said the Nurse a little frostily.
‘Quite the contrary. It ’as been a pleasure. Only – only – just at the end I felt a bit – a bit flogged out, like.’
‘Yes, yes.’ The Nurse was on her knees already, with the washes to hand. ‘When old ladies get together they talk a deal too much, I’ve noticed.’
‘Mebbe we do,’ said Mrs Fettley, rising. ‘So now I’ll make myself scarce.’
‘Look at it first, though,’ said Mrs Ashcroft feebly. ‘I’d like ye to look at it.’
Mrs Fettley looked, and shivered. Then she leaned over, and kissed Mrs Ashcroft once on the waxy yellow forehead, and again on the faded grey eyes.
‘It do count, don’t it – de pain?’ The lips that still kept trace of their original moulding hardly more than breathed the words.
Mrs Fettley kissed them and moved toward the door.
THE GARDENER
One grave to me was given,
One watch till Judgment Day;
And God looked down from Heaven
And rolled the stone away.
One day in all the years,
One hour in that one day,
His Angel saw my tears,
And rolled the stone away!1
Everyone in the village knew that Helen Turrell did her duty by all her world, and by none more honourably than by her only brother’s unfortunate child. The village knew, too, that George Turrell had tried his family severely since early youth, and were not surprised to be told that, after many fresh starts given and thrown away, he, an Inspector of Indian Police, had entangled himself with the daughter of a retired non-commissioned officer, and had died of a fall from a horse a few weeks before his child was born. Mercifully, George’s father and mother were both dead, and though Helen, thirty-five and independent, might well have washed her hands of the whole disgraceful affair, she most nobly took charge, though she was, at the time, under threat of lung trouble which had driven her to the South of France. She arra
nged for the passage of the child and a nurse from Bombay, met them at Marseilles, nursed the baby through an attack of infantile dysentery due to the carelessness of the nurse, whom she had had to dismiss, and at last, thin and worn but triumphant, brought the boy late in the autumn, wholly restored, to her Hampshire home.
All these details were public property, for Helen was as open as the day, and held that scandals are only increased by hushing them up. She admitted that George had always been rather a black sheep, but things might have been much worse if the mother had insisted on her right to keep the boy. Luckily, it seemed that people of that class would do almost anything for money, and, as George had always turned to her in his scrapes, she felt herself justified – her friends agreed with her – in cutting the whole non-commissioned officer connection, and giving the child every advantage. A christening, by the Rector, under the name of Michael, was the first step. So far as she knew herself, she was not, she said, a child-lover, but, for all his faults, she had been very fond of George, and she pointed out that little Michael had his father’s mouth to a line; which made something to build upon.
As a matter of fact, it was the Turrell forehead, broad, low, and well-shaped, with the widely spaced eyes beneath it, that Michael had most faithfully reproduced. His mouth was somewhat better cut than the family type. But Helen, who would concede nothing good to his mother’s side, vowed he was a Turrell all over, and, there being no one to contradict, the likeness was established.
In a few years Michael took his place, as accepted as Helen had always been – fearless, philosophical, and fairly good-looking. At six, he wished to know why he could not call her ‘Mummy’, as other boys called their mothers. She explained that she was only his auntie, and that aunties were not quite the same as mummies, but that, if it gave him pleasure, he might call her ‘Mummy’ at bedtime, for a pet-name between themselves.
Michael kept his secret most loyally, but Helen, as usual, explained the fact to her friends; which when Michael heard, he raged.
‘Why did you tell? Why did you tell?’ came at the end of the storm.
‘Because it’s always best to tell the truth,’ Helen answered, her arm round him as he shook in his cot.
‘All right, but when the troof’s ugly I don’t think it’s nice.’
‘Don’t you, dear?’
‘No, I don’t, and’ – she felt the small body stiffen – ‘now you’ve told, I won’t call you “Mummy” any more – not even at bedtimes.’
‘But isn’t that rather unkind?’ said Helen softly.
‘I don’t care! I don’t care! You’ve hurted me in my insides and I’ll hurt you back. I’ll hurt you as long as I live!’
‘Don’t, oh, don’t talk like that, dear! You don’t know what –’
‘I will! And when I’m dead I’ll hurt you worse!’
‘Thank goodness, I shall be dead long before you, darling.’
‘Huh! Emma says, “Never know your luck.” ’ (Michael had been talking to Helen’s elderly, flat-faced maid.) ‘Lots of little boys die quite soon. So’ll I. Then you’ll see!’
Helen caught her breath and moved towards the door, but the wail of ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ drew her back again, and the two wept together.
At ten years old, after two terms at a prep. school,2 something or somebody gave him the idea that his civil status was not quite regular. He attacked Helen on the subject, breaking down her stammered defences with the family directness.
‘’Don’t believe a word of it,’ he said, cheerily, at the end. ‘People wouldn’t have talked like they did if my people had been married. But don’t you bother, Auntie. I’ve found out all about my sort in English Hist’ry and the Shakespeare bits. There was William the Conqueror3 to begin with, and – oh, heaps more, and they all got on first-rate. ’Twon’t make any difference to you, my being that – will it?’
‘As if anything could –,’ she began.
‘All right. We won’t talk about it any more if it makes you cry.’ He never mentioned the thing again of his own will, but when, two years later, he skilfully managed to have measles in the holidays, as his temperature went up to the appointed one hundred and four he muttered of nothing else, till Helen’s voice, piercing at last his delirium, reached him with assurance that nothing on earth or beyond could make any difference between them.
The terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter, and Summer holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as jewels on a string; and as jewels Helen treasured them. In due time Michael developed his own interests, which ran their courses and gave way to others; but his interest in Helen was constant and increasing throughout. She repaid it with all that she had of affection or could command of counsel and money; and since Michael was no fool, the War took him just before what was like to have been a most promising career.
He was to have gone up to Oxford, with a scholarship, in October. At the end of August he was on the edge of joining the first holocaust of public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line; but the Captain of his OTC,4 where he had been sergeant for nearly a year, headed him off and steered him directly to a commission in a battalion so new that half of it still wore the old Army red, and the other half was breeding meningitis through living overcrowdedly in damp tents. Helen had been shocked at the idea of direct enlistment.
‘But it’s in the family,’ Michael laughed.
‘You don’t mean to tell me that you believed that old story all this time?’ said Helen. (Emma, her maid, had been dead now several years.) ‘I gave you my word of honour – and I give it again – that – that it’s all right. It is indeed.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t worry me. It never did,’ he replied valiantly. ‘What I meant was, I should have got into the show earlier if I’d enlisted – like my grandfather.’
‘Don’t talk like that! Are you afraid of its ending so soon, then?’
‘No such luck. You know what K.5 says.’
‘Yes. But my banker told me last Monday it couldn’t possibly last beyond Christmas – for financial reasons.’
‘Hope he’s right, but our Colonel – and he’s a Regular – says it’s going to be a long job.’
Michael’s battalion was fortunate in that, by some chance which meant several ‘leaves’, it was used for coast-defence among shallow trenches on the Norfolk coast; thence sent north to watch the mouth of a Scotch estuary, and, lastly, held for weeks on a baseless rumour of distant service. But, the very day that Michael was to have met Helen for four whole hours at a railway-junction up the line, it was hurled out, to help make good the wastage of Loos,6 and he had only just time to send her a wire of farewell.
In France luck again helped the battalion. It was put down near the Salient, where it led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the Somme7 was being manufactured; and enjoyed the peace of the Armentières and Laventie sectors when that battle began. Finding that it had sound views on protecting its own flanks and could dig, a prudent Commander stole it out of its own Division, under pretence of helping to lay telegraphs, and used it round Ypres at large.
A month later, and just after Michael had written Helen that there was nothing special doing and therefore no need to worry, a shell-splinter dropping out of a wet dawn killed him at once. The next shell uprooted and laid down over the body what had been the foundation of a barn wall, so neatly that none but an expert would have guessed that anything unpleasant had happened.
By this time the village was old in experience of war, and, English-fashion, had evolved a ritual to meet it. When the postmistress handed her seven-year-old daughter the official telegram to take to Miss Turrell, she observed to the Rector’s gardener: ‘It’s Miss Helen’s turn now.’ He replied, thinking of his own son: ‘Well, he’s lasted longer than some.’ The child herself came to the front-door weeping aloud, because Master Michael had often given her sweets. Helen, presently, found herself pulling down the house-blinds one after one with great care, and saying earnestly
to each: ‘Missing always means dead.’ Then she took her place in the dreary procession that was impelled to go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions. The Rector, of course, preached hope and prophesied word, very soon, from a prison camp. Several friends, too, told her perfectly truthful tales, but always about other women, to whom, after months and months of silence, their missing had been miraculously restored. Other people urged her to communicate with infallible Secretaries of organisations who could communicate with benevolent neutrals, who could extract accurate information from the most secretive of Hun prison commandants. Helen did and wrote and signed everything that was suggested or put before her.
Once, on one of Michael’s leaves, he had taken her over a munition factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article. It struck her at the time that the wretched thing was never left alone for a single second; and ‘I’m being manufactured into a bereaved next of kin,’ she told herself, as she prepared her documents.
In due course, when all the organisations had deeply or sincerely regretted their inability to trace, etc., something gave way within her and all sensation – save of thankfulness for the release – came to an end in blessed passivity. Michael had died and her world had stood still and she had been one with the full shock of that arrest. Now she was standing still and the world was going forward, but it did not concern her – in no way or relation did it touch her. She knew this by the ease with which she could slip Michael’s name into talk and incline her head to the proper angle, at the proper murmur of sympathy.
In the blessed realisation of that relief, the Armistice8 with all its bells broke over her and passed unheeded. At the end of another year she had overcome her physical loathing of the living and returned young, so that she could take them by the hand and almost sincerely wish them well. She had no interest in any aftermath, national or personal, of the War, but, moving at an immense distance, she sat on various relief committees and held strong views – she heard herself delivering them – about the site of the proposed village War Memorial.