Gilbert Frankau

“ Let the old, the emasculate, the pimps and the panderers haggle in their market-places, babble at their talking-shops: his path led clean away from their market-places and their talking-places, clean across the seas into that other country where neither his money nor his talk but only a man’s manhood availed him: a loathsome and a desolate country, a country of fear and mud and boredom intolerable, of maiming and of death: yet a country above whose desolation shone always the one clear light—the Light of Duty! ”

“ Mapwise, from that high eminence, the shires outspread their panorama, pasture on rolling pasture, with here a bright square of young green cornland, here a dark blob of covert, here a blue hill and there a vale, here a great house nestling among trees, there a red farm, there a church, and there a white railway-gate, but scarce a factory chimney from horizon to horizon.
Not for nothing do men hark back to the place of their father's birth! To Ronnie, ever since he had first set eyes on this panorama, it had been home. ”

“ But you will not find, search the City as you will, Peter Jameson, sometime senior partner in Peter Jameson & Company, and chairman of Nirvana Limited, Manufacturers of High-grade Cigarettes. Because—whatever war may have accomplished of good or evil to us other millions whom it caught up into its vortex—to Peter it came like a great cleansing storm, terrifying in its violence, unfathomable in its purposes, but bearing him at the last, past many rocks of doubt and fear, to sure harbourage, to certainty of body and of soul—and, better even than these, to Love. ”

“ We were pals on earth: but by God’s brave Son and the bomb that I reached too late,
I damn the day and I blast the hour when first I called you mate;
And I’d sell my soul for one of my feet, to hack you from the gate—
To hack you hence to the lukewarm hells that the priest-made ovens heat,
Or the faked-pearl heaven of pulpit gods, where the sheep-faced angels bleat
And the halo’s rim is as hard to the head as the gilded floor to the feet.”
It heard the stumps of Its one-time mate go waddling back to the Feast. ”

“ But Ronnie, in that moment of fear, had forgotten everything except Aliette. The lane saved a mile and a half, and the lane was all soft turf--good going--the first five furlongs of it straight as a race-course.
Down those first five furlongs Miracle went like a steed possessed. The turf thudded under his hoofs. The hawthorn-hedges streaked past him like snowbanks alongside a train. "Hope to God we don't meet any one at the bend," thought Ronnie, his silk-socked ankles thrust home in the irons, his trousered knees gripping the saddle-flaps, his hands low and his body a little forward. ”

“ Peter had never known Bromley speak so crisply.
They pashed back to the lines; found confusion indescribable. Mosely had by now got his company into some sort of order; they stood there, dripping and shivering, faces white under the big flare, unlaced boots flopping as they stamped on the lime-washed slime: but Simcox’s lines looked as if a tornado had struck them. Tents lay in writhing coils; from under them, men crawled, mud-soaked and cursing; the stockbroker, in gum-boots and pyjamas, a “British Warm” coat to complete the costume, alternately damned their eyes and adjured them to “buck up” ”

“ For the best part of a week, Aliette motored about the southern counties. April was almost May; the blossomed countryside a dream of green and white beauty. Rushing lonely through the sunlit air, hedges, fields, and orchards streaming by, it seemed impossible that any breathing creature should be near to death. Her mood expanded to the expanding summer, so that she forgot her personal troubles, too, in the sheer fun of her quest, and enjoyed every minute of it, from the setting-out of midday to the evening consultations with her "mother-in-law" and Ronnie about the places she had seen. ”

“ Peter went back to his telephonist.
Now, the glimmer of dawn turned to a faint dark blue radiance. Nothing stirred on the plain below. Light grew; revealing the silent village street, the churchyard, the ruined chapel of “Our Lady of Consolation” battered among her poplars, the long tree-girt stretch of the Hulluch Road. Beyond, like a dun still sea streaked with unmoving foam, lay the trenches. Beyond them, mist.
Peter drew out his map; unslung his glasses; threw away the stump of his cigar. ”

“ The sight of her beauty, so virginal in its white simplicity of attire, so alone with him in that emptiness of green, struck Ronnie speechless. He stood enthralled--the magic of her harping sheer music against the hush in his brain.
"I--I think I ought to be going home," said Aliette.
She, too, heard that sheer music which is love. Once more, tempest-wise, emotion swept her through and through: sweeping away inhibition; sweeping away all false fastidiousness; cleansing her soul of all instincts save the instinct for loving, for being loved. ”

“ Death is simpler out there. And I am only fit for death, because I am afraid to go back to the front. . . . She mustn’t know that I am afraid, she must never guess that I am afraid.”
And the woman used to say to herself: “O God, what is behind Peter’s eyes? He hates it all—me, the children, this house I have made for him. His voice praises, but his heart condemns me. O God, if he’d only say what he is thinking. We used to be pals once—and that was not enough for me. I used to call myself his chattel. Now, I am not even chattel to him. We are strangers in a strange house. He hates me. ”

“ And to-day, more than ever before, the shires set their spell upon him, so that he imagined--sitting there motionless on the motionless horse--a son soon to be born, a son who would esteem the Tudor house on the brow of Little Overdine Hill, and all this wide champaign, these counties which were neither pretty-pretty as the garden South, nor rocked and sea-girt as the West, nor grandly cragged and forested as the North, but just--so Ronnie put it to himself that afternoon--just England, the old England of bold horses and bold hounds and bolder men. ”

“ In the fighting-zone itself, boredom followed fear, fear boredom, with monotonous and unending regularity. There were some days when never a rifle cracked, never a gun barked: others—as that Sunday which saw Stark’s headquarters moved to the Ramparts—when unanswered salvos rained on ruined streets, on gun-positions, and cross-roads, on stumbling fatigue-parties and sentries acrouch behind sandbags; when the very breastworks heaved and blew skyward, crashing down in mud and mine-débris on the corpses of the men who had inhabited them. ”

“ Aliette kissed her sister good night. During the last two hours her relenting mood had almost evaporated under the fire of Hector's covert glances. Her mind no longer whirled. She knew now--definitely--that contest between them was unavoidable; and, though she still dreaded it, her courage refused to postpone the ordeal.
The door closed behind Mollie; and, after a moment's hesitancy, Hector leaned forward from his chair. Aliette saw that there were pearls of sweat on his forehead. His hands gripped the blue grapes of the cretonne chair-cover as though he would squeeze them dry. ”

“ Their life—from the front-line infantry, frozen blue or blown to bits between rotting sandbags, to the drivers in the swamped horse-lines where the dumb beasts stood all day, tail to storm, fetlock-deep in mud, and whence men and beasts sallied forth every night up that road of death between the scarred poplars—was indescribably foul, a reversion to conditions at which an aristocratic caveman might well have jibbed. ”

“ There was love of the countryside in her heart as she rode, love of horse and love of hound, love for the quick scurry of hoofs on turf, for the white scuttle of rabbits to bramble. But there was no love for any man. That love she had never known. Marriage--as she still imagined marriage--meant affection: mutual regard, mutual interests, children. Especially children! If only she could have had children!
Putting thought away from her, Aliette let Miracle have his head, and cantered on between the gorse and the brambles. ”

“ In the scullery, Miss Tebbits was washing up: Peter could hear the trickle of water, the clink of crockery, as he stood gazing down on the gnarled happy face. “Thus, men should die,” thought Peter “not. . . .” Old pictures came crowding on his mind; he saw other faces, dreadful faces, faces of young men who should have been alive. . . .
Charlie Tebbits, summoned from Arlsfield, stalked hatless into the room. “He was a good father,” said Charlie, “I’ve no complaint to make about him.”
Peter wanted to get away, to leave these two alone with their dead. He held out his hand to Charlie. ”

“ Sound swept back, as a wave sweeps, leaping down the valley towards them—horns shrieked, gongs dinned, whistles blew: rifle-fire crackled, burst to a roar: guns boomed dully from beyond the horizon; they caught the far crash of shell-fire. The sky blazed with electric flashes, with whitely-soaring lights, with orange hints of machine-gun flame. Hedges, trees, crest-line, sprang from shadow into silhouette. And suddenly, near and high above the silhouetted valley, soared the crimson rockets of the S.O.S. station on Hill 63; hung a moment; waking pandemonium as they drooped to ground. ”

“ Mollie Fullerford blushed. Her reticent virginity revolted from the idea of confessing herself, to Betty, in love with James Wilberforce. Yet that she was in love with the man, most uncomfortably in love with him, Mollie knew. Despite all her efforts to maintain the pose of the modern young, the pose of cold-blooded mate-selection, she had failed as lamentably as most others of her kind to control nature. Nature and the modern creed refused to be reconciled. ”

“ For the moment, the reticences of civilized life were in abeyance. Each of these two knew, as he crouched over the bacon-box in the sodden broken chalk-trench, that he was hanging on by the eye-teeth to his last remnant of sanity.
Each still saw the same bestial vision: smashed pit, half-buried gun, slithering soil, mangled men writhing and groaning, mangled men lying deadly still, Charlie Straker’s face white and drawn in the light of the hurricane-lamp—and the Head that watched him, the Head that still grinned under its shrapnel-helmet, the Head which had been Pettigrew. . . . ”

“ A life for a life, members of the jury. That is the penalty which, on behalf of the Crown, I shall demand against this woman whom counsel for the defense would have you find not guilty of any crime whatsoever."
Slowly Hector Brunton's eyes turned from the woman in the dock toward his enemy; till even Ronnie shrank before the vindictive fury in those gray and glimmering pupils.
"This is the man," muttered the voiceless soul behind those grayly glimmering eyes, "this is the man who stole your woman; the man who dares defend this other adulteress against you." ”

“ Began too, for Peter Jameson, a new life—the life which every untrained gentleman of the Empire who could spoof a recruiting doctor into passing him young enough or fit enough for service, was then living. A life neither of comfort nor—as many wrote and made much money by their writing—of good humour. A life of adults gone back to the irritation of school: save that for school-house they had sodden camps; for dining-hall, a draughty tent where fleecing contractors served half-cold meals; for schoolmasters, the incompetence of brave fellows wrongly employed. ”

“ The women whose sole excuse for illegal matehood is love! There are half a million such in Great Britain to-day: women whose only crime is that, craving happiness, they have taken their happiness in defiance of some male.
They are of all classes, our Aliettes. You will find them alike in our West End and in our slums, in little lost cottages beneath whose windows the sea moans all day long, and in prim suburban villas where the milk-cart clatters on asphalt roads and cap-and-aproned servants gossip of a morning under the peeky laburnum. ”

“ Outwardly, to her watchers, to Ronnie, nurse, Aliette, and Mrs. Sanderson, she played a part; the part of the convalescent. That they, in their ignorance, should believe the part she played to be real, gave to her detachment a whimsical and peculiar happiness.
And always in those days the illusion of immortality sustained her. She used to think, lying weary of work on her great bed: "Like Horace, I shall not utterly die. Dying, I shall leave my Ronnie this sword of the written word. What greater proof of love and service could any son or any god require?" ”