Part 35 (2/2)
”I never supposed she was going to have your uncle Henry's chair for her weak back or for any other back. Ask Mr. Sabre what he thinks. There he is. Ask him.”
Sabre said, ”But you do like the girl, don't you, Mrs. Perch?”
Mrs. Perch pursed her lips.
”I don't say I don't like her. I merely ask what I'm going to do with her in the house. When Freddie said he wanted to bring some one in to be with me, I never supposed he was going to bring a chit of a child into the house. I a.s.sure you I never supposed that was going to be done to me.”
And then quite suddenly Mrs. Perch dropped into a chair and said in a horribly weak voice, ”I don't mind who comes into the house, now. I can't contend like I used to contend.” Immense tears gathered in her eyes and began to run swiftly down her cheeks. ”I'm not fit for anything now. I can't live without Freddie. I like the girl; but all this house where we've been so happy ... without Freddie ... I shall see his dear, bright face everywhere. Why must he go, Mr. Sabre? Why must he go? I don't understand this war at all.” Her voice trailed off. Her hands fumbled on her lap. A tear fell on them. She brushed at it with a fumbling motion but it remained there.
Young Perch took her hand and fondled it. Sabre saw the wrinkled, fumbling old hand between the strong brown fingers. ”That's all right, Mother. Of course, you don't understand it. That's just it. You think I'm going out to fighting and all that. And I'm just going into a training camp here in England for a bit. And before Christmas it will all be over and I shall come flying back and we'll send Miss Bright toddling off home and--Don't cry, Mother. Don't cry, Mother. Isn't that so, Sabre? Just training in England. Isn't that so? Now wherever's your old handkerchief got to? Look here; here's mine. Look, this is the one I chose that day with you in Tidborough. Do you remember what a jolly tea we had that day? Remember what a laugh we had over that funny teapot. There, let me wipe them, Mother....”
Sabre turned away. This frightful war....
CHAPTER VI
I
This frightful war! On his brain like a weight. On his heart like a pressing hand.
Came Christmas by which, at the outset, everybody knew it would be over, and it was not over. Came June, 1915, concerning which, at the outset, he had joined with Mr. Fortune, Twyning and Harold in laughter at his own grotesque idea of the war lasting to the dramatic effect of a culminating battle on the centenary of Waterloo, and the war had lasted, and was still lasting.
”This frightful war!” The words were constantly upon his lips, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed to himself in reception of new manifestations of its eruptions; forever in his mind, like a live thing gnawing there. Other people seemed to suffer the war in spasms, isolated amidst the round of their customary routines, of dejection or of optimistic rea.s.surance. The splendid sentiment of ”Business as usual” was in many valiant mouths.
The land, in so far as provisions and prices were concerned, continued to flow in milk and honey as the British Isles had always flowed in milk and honey. In July a rival multiple grocer's shop opened premises opposite the multiple grocer's shop already established in the shopping centre of the Garden Home and Mabel told Sabre how very exciting it was.
The rivals piled their windows, one against the other, with stupendous stacks of margarine and cheese at sevenpence the pound each; and then one day, ”Whatever do you think?” the new man interspersed his mountains of margarine and cheese with wooden bowls running over with bright new pennies, and flamed his windows with announcements that this was ”The Money-back Shop.” You bought a pound of margarine for sevenpence and were handed a penny with your purchase! And the next day, ”Only fancy!”
the other man also had bright new pennies (in bursting bags from the bank) and also bellowed that he too was a Money-back Shop.
”The fact is the war really hasn't mattered a bit,” Mabel said. ”I think it's wonderful. And when you remember at the beginning how people rushed to buy up food and what awful ideas of starvation went about; you were one of the worst.”
And Sabre agreed that it really was wonderful: and agreed too with Mabel's further opinion that he really ought not to get so fearfully depressed.
But he remained fearfully depressed. The abundance of food, and such manifestations of plenty as the bowls and bags of bright new pennies meant nothing to him. He knew nothing about war. Very possibly the prophecies of shortage and restrictions and starvation were, in the proof, to be refuted as a thousand other prophecies of the early days, optimistic and pessimistic, were being refuted. What had that to do with it? Remained the frightful facts that were going on out there in Belgium and in Gallipoli and in Russia. Remained the increasing revelation of Germany's enormous might in war and the revelation of what war was as she conducted it. Remained the sinister revelation that we were not winning as in the past we had ”always won.” Remained his envisagement of England--England!--standing four-square to her enemies, but standing as some huge and splendid animal something bewildered by the fury of the onset upon it. Shaking her head whereon had fallen stunning and unexpected blows, as it might be a lion enormously smashed across the face; roaring her defiance; baring her fangs; tearing up the ground before her; dreadful and undaunted and tremendous; but stricken; in sore agony; in heavy amazement; her pride thrust through with swords; her glory answered by another's glory; her dominion challenged; shaken, bleeding.
England.... This frightful war!
II
Remained also, blowing about the streets, in the newspapers and at meetings, in the mouths of many, and in the eyes of most, the new popular question, ”Why aren't you in khaki?” The subject of age, always shrouded in a seemly and decorous modesty in England, and especially since, a few years previously, an eminent professor of medicine had unloosed the alarming theory of ”Too old at forty”, was suddenly ripped out of its prudish coverings. One generation of men began to talk with thoroughly engaging frankness and largeness about their age. They would even announce it in a loud voice in crowded public conveyances. It was nothing, in those days, to hear a man suddenly declare in an omnibus or tramway car, ”Well, I'm thirty-eight and I only wish to heaven I was a few years younger.” Other men would heartfully chime in, ”Ah, same thing with me. It's hard.” And all these men, thus cruelly burdened with a few more years than the age limit, would look with great intensity at other men, apparently not thus burdened, who for their part would a.s.sume att.i.tudes of physical unfitness or gaze very sternly out of the window.
Several of the younger employees of Fortune, East and Sabre's joined up (as the current phrase had it) in the first weeks of the war. In the third month Mr. Fortune a.s.sembled the hands and from across the whale-like front indicated the path of duty and announced that the places of all those who followed it would be kept open for them. ”Hear, hear!” said Twyning. ”Hear, hear!” and as the men were filing out he took Sabre affectionately by the arm and explained to him that young Harold was dying to go. ”But I feel a certain duty is due to the firm, old man. What I mean is, that the boy's only just come here and I feel that in my position as a partner it wouldn't look well for me practically with my own hand to be paying out unearned salary to a chap who'd not been four months in the place. Don't you agree, old man?”
Sabre said, ”But we wouldn't be paying him, would we? Fortune said salaries of married men.”
”Ah, yes, old man, but between you and me he's going to do it for unmarried men as well, as the cases come up.”
”Why didn't he tell them so?”
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