A few days after this, Mrs. Holmes sent me under cover a telegram
which she had received from her son. It was dispatched from
Aberdeen and ran: "Perfectly well. Don't worry about me. Love.
Randall." And that was all I heard of him for some considerable
time. What he was doing in Aberdeen, a city remote from his sphere
of intellectual, political, and social activities, Heaven and
himself alone knew. I must confess that I cared very little. He
was alive, he was well, and his mother had no cause for anxiety.
Phyllis had definitely sent him packing. There was no reason for
me to allow speculation concerning him to keep me awake of nights.
I had plenty to think about besides Randall. They made me Honorary
Treasurer of the local Volunteer Training Corps which had just
been formed. The members not in uniform wore a red brassard with
"G.R." in black. The facetious all over the country called them
"Gorgeous Wrecks." I must confess that on their first few parades
they did not look very military. Their composite paunchiness,
beardedness, scragginess, spectacledness, impressed me
unfavourably when, from my Hosea-carriage, I first beheld them.
Marigold, who was one of the first to join and to leap into the
grey uniform, tried to swagger about as an instructor. But as the
little infantry drill he had ever learned had all been changed
since the Boer War, I gathered an unholy joy from seeing him hang
like a little child on the lips of the official Sergeant
Instructor of the corps. In the evenings he and I mugged up the
text-books together; and with the aid of the books I put him
through all the new physical exercises. I was a privileged person.
I could take my own malicious pleasure out of Marigold's enforced
humility, but I would be hanged if anybody else should. Sergeant
Marigold should instruct those volunteers as he once instructed
the recruits of his own battery. So I worked with him like a
nigger until there was nothing in the various drills of a modern
platoon that he didn't know, and nothing that he could not do with
the mathematical precision of his splendid old training.
One night during the thick of it Betty came in. I waved her into a
corner of the library out of the way, and she smoked cigarettes
and looked on at the performance. Now I come to think of it, we
must have afforded an interesting spectacle. There was the gaunt,
one-eyed, preposterously wigged image clad in undervest and
shrunken yellow flannel trousers which must have dated from his
gym-instructor days in the nineties, violently darting down on
his heels, springing up, kicking out his legs, shooting out his
arms, like an inspired marionette, all at the words of command
shouted in fervent earnest by a shrivelled up little cripple in a
wheel-chair.
When it was over--the weather was warm--he passed a curved
forefinger over his dripping forehead, cut himself short in an
instinctive action and politely dried his hand on the seat of his
trousers. Then his one eye gleamed homage at Betty and he drew
himself up to attention.
"Do you mind, sir, if I send in Ellen with the drinks?"
I nodded. "You'll do very well with a drink yourself, Marigold."
"It's thirsty work and weather, sir."
He made a queer movement of his hand--it would have been idiotic
of him to salute--but he had just been dismissed from military
drill, so his hand went up to the level of his breast and--right
about turn--he marched out of the room. Betty rose from her corner
and threw herself in her usual impetuous way on the ground by my
chair.
"Do you know," she cried, "you two dear old things were too funny
for words."
But as I saw that her eyes were foolishly moist, I was not as
offended as I might have been by her perception of the ludicrous.
When I said that I had plenty to think about besides Randall, I
meant to string off a list. My prolixity over the Volunteer
Training Corps came upon me unawares. I wanted to show you that my
time was fairly well occupied. I was Chairman of our town Belgian
Relief Committee. I was a member of our County Territorial
Association and took over a good deal of special work connected
with one of our battalions that was covering itself with glory and
little mounds topped with white crosses at the front. If you think
I lived a Tom-tabby, tea-party sort of life, you are quite
mistaken, if the War Office could have its way, it would have
lashed me in red tape, gagged me with Regulations, and sealing-
waxed me up in my bed-room. And there are thousands of us who have
shaken our fists under the nose of the War Office and shouted,
"All your blighting, Man-with-the-Mudrake officialdom shan't
prevent us from serving our country." And it hasn't! The very
Government itself, in spite of its monumental efforts, has not
been able to shackle us into inertia or drug us into apathy. Such
non-combatant francs-tireurs in England have done a power of good
work.
And then, of course, there was the hospital which, in one way or
another, took up a good deal of my time.
I was reposing in the front garden one late afternoon in mid-June,
after a well-filled day, when a car pulled up at the gate, in
which were Betty (at the wheel) and a wounded soldier, in khaki,
his cap perched on top of a bandaged head. I don't know whether it
is usual for young women in nurse's uniform to career about the
country driving wounded men in motor cars, but Betty did it. She
cared very little for the usual. She came in, leaving the man in
the car, and crossed the lawn, flushed and bright-eyed, a
refreshing picture for a tired man.
"We're in a fix up at the hospital," she announced as soon as she
was in reasonable speaking distance, "and I want you to get us out
of it."
Sitting on the grass, she told me the difficulty. A wounded
soldier, discharged from some distant hospital, and home now on
sick furlough before rejoining his depot, had been brought into
the hospital with a broken head. The modern improvements on
vinegar and brown paper having been applied, the man was now ready
to leave. I interrupted with the obvious question. Why couldn't he
go to his own home? It appeared that the prospect terrified him.
On his arrival, at midday, after eight months' absence in France,
he found that his wife had sold or pawned practically everything
in the place, and that the lady herself was in the violent phase
of intoxication. His natural remonstrances not being received with
due meekness, a quarrel arose from which the lady emerged
victorious. She laid her poor husband out with a poker. They could
not keep him in hospital. He shied at an immediate renewal of
conjugal life. He had no relations or intimate friends in
Wellingsford. Where was the poor devil to go?
"I thought I might bring him along here and let the Marigolds look
after him for a week or two."
"Indeed," said I. "I admire your airy ways."
"I know you do," she replied, "and that's why I've brought him."
"Is that the fellow?"
She laughed. "You're right first time. How did you guess?" She
scrambled to her feet. "I'll fetch him in."
She fetched him in, a haggard, broad-shouldered man with a back
like a sloping plank of wood. He wore corporal's stripes. He
saluted and stood at rigid attention.
"This is Tufton," said Betty.
I despatched her in search of Marigold. To Tufton I said,
regarding him with what, without vanity, I may term an expert eye:
"You're an old soldier."
"Yes, sir."
"Guards?"
His eyes brightened. "Yes, sir. Seven years in the Grenadiers.
Then two years out. Rejoined on outbreak of war, sir."
I rubbed my hands together in satisfaction. "I'm an old soldier
too," said I
"So Sister told me, sir."
A delicate shade in the man's tone and manner caught at my heart.
Perhaps it was the remotest fraction of a glance at my rug-covered
legs, the pleased recognition of my recognition, ... perhaps some
queer freemasonry of the old Army.
"You seem to be in trouble, boy," said I. "Tell me all about it
and I'll do what I can to help you."
So he told his story. After his discharge from the Army he had
looked about for a job and found one at the mills in Wellingsford,
where he had met the woman, a mill-hand, older than himself, whom
he had married. She had been a bit extravagant and fond of her
glass, but when he left her to rejoin the regiment, he had had no
anxieties. She did not write often, not being very well educated
and finding difficult the composition of letters. A machine gun
bullet had gone through his chest, just missing his lung. He had
been two months in hospital. He had written to her announcing his
arrival. She had not met him at the station. He had tramped home
with his kit-bag on his back--and the cracked head was his
reception. He supposed she had had a lot of easy money and had
given way to temptation--and
"And what's a man to do, sir?"
"I'm sure I don't know, Corporal," said I. "It's damned hard lines
on you. But, at any rate, you can look upon this as your home for
as long as you like to stay."
"Thank you kindly, sir," said he.
I turned and beckoned to Betty and Marigold, who had been hovering
out of earshot by the house door. They approached.
"I want to have a word with Marigold," I said.
Tufton saluted and went off with Betty. Sergeant Marigold stood
stiff as a ramrod on the spot which Tufton had occupied.
"I suppose Mrs. Connor," said I, "has told you all about this poor
chap?"
"Yes, sir," said Marigold.
"We must put him up comfortably. That's quite simple. The only
thing that worries me is this--supposing his wife comes around
here raising Cain--?"
Marigold held me with his one glittering eye--an eye glittering
with the pride of the gunner and the pride (more chastened) of the
husband.
"You can leave all that, sir, to Mrs. Marigold. If she isn't more
than a match for any Grenadier Guardsman's wife, then I haven't
been married to her for the last twenty years."
Nothing more was to be said. Marigold marched the man off, leaving
me alone with Betty.
"I'm going to get in before Mrs. Marigold," she remarked, with a
smile. "I'm off now to interview Madam Tufton and bring back her
husband's kit."
In some ways it is a pity Betty isn't a man. She would make a
splendid soldier. I don't think such a thing as fear, physical,
moral, or spiritual, lurks in any recess of Betty's nature. Not
every young woman would brave, without trepidation, a virago who
had cracked a hard-bitten warrior's head with a poker.
"Marigold and I will come with you," I said.
She protested. It was nonsense. Suppose Mrs. Tufton went for
Marigold and spoiled his beauty? No. It was too dangerous. No
place for men. We argued. At last I blew the police-whistle which
I wear on the end of my watch-chain. Marigold came hurrying out of
the house.
"Mrs. Connor is going to take us for a run," said I.
"Very good, sir."
"Your blood be on your own heads," said Betty.
We talked a while of what had happened. Vague stories of the
demoralization of wives left alone with a far greater weekly
income than they had ever handled before had reached our ears. We
had read them in the newspapers. But till now we had never come
across an example. The woman in question belonged to a bad type.
Various dregs from large cities drift into the mills around little
country towns and are the despair of Mayors, curates, and other
local authorities. We genteel folk regarded them as a plague-spot
in the midst of us.
I remember the scandal when the troops first came in August, 1914,
to Wellingsford--a scandal put a summary end to, after a
fortnight's grinning amazement at our country morals, by the
troops themselves. Tufton had married into an undesirable
community.
"We're wasting time," said Betty.
So Marigold put me into the back of the car and mounted into the
front seat by Betty, and we started.
Flowery End was the poetic name of the mean little row of red-
brick houses inhabited exclusively by Mrs. Tufton and her
colleagues at the mills. To get to it you turn off the High Street
by the Post Office, turn to the right down Avonmore Avenue, and
then to the left. There you find Flowery End, and, fifty yards
further on, the main road to Godbury crosses it at right angles.
Betty, who lived on the Godbury Road, was quite familiar with
Flowery End. Mid-June did its best to justify the name. Here and
there, in the tiny patches of front garden, a tenant tried to help
mid-June by cultivating wall-flowers and geraniums and snapdragon
and a rose or two; but the majority cared as much for the beauty
of mid-June as for the cleanliness of their children,--an
unsightly brood, with any slovenly rags about their bodies, and
the circular crust of last week's treacle on their cheeks. In his
abominable speeches before the war Gedge used to point out these
children to unsympathetic Wellingsfordians as the Infant Martyrs
of an Accursed Capitalism.
Betty pulled up the car at Number Seven. Marigold sprang out,
helped her down, and would have walked up the narrow flagged path
to knock at the door. But she declined his aid, and he stood
sentry by the gap where the wicket gate of the garden should have
been. I saw the door open on Betty's summons, and a brawny,
tousled, red-faced woman appear--a most horrible and forbidding
female, although bearing traces of a once blowsy beauty. As in
most cottages hereabouts, you entered straight from garden-plot
into the principal livingroom. On each side of the two figures I
obtained a glimpse of stark emptiness.
Betty said: "Are you Mrs. Tufton? I've come to talk to you about
your husband. Let me come in."
The attack was so debonair, so unquestioning, that the woman
withdrew a pace or two and Betty, following up her advantage,
entered and shut the door behind her. I could not have done what
Betty did if I had had as many legs as a centipede. Marigold
turned to me anxiously.
"You do think she's safe, sir?"
I nodded. "Anyway, stand by."
The neighbours came out of adjoining houses; slatternly women with
babies, more unwashed children, an elderly, vacant male or two--
the young men and maidens had not yet been released from the
mills. As far as I could gather, there was amused discussion among
the gossips concerning the salient features of Sergeant Marigold's
physical appearance. I heard one lady bid another to look at his
wicked old eye, and receive the humorous rejoinder: "Which one?" I
should have liked to burn them as witches; but Marigold stood his
ground, imperturbable.
Presently the door opened, and Betty came sailing down the path
with a red spot on each cheek, followed by Mrs. Tufton,
vociferous.
"Sergeant Marigold," cried Betty. "Will you kindly go into that
house and fetch out Corporal Tufton's kit-bag?"
"Very good, madam," said Marigold.
"Sergeant or no sergeant," cried Mrs. Tufton, squaring her elbows
and barring his way, "nobody's coming into my house to touch any
of my husband's property...." Really what she said I cannot
record. The British Tommy I know upside-down, inside-out. I could
talk to you about him for the week together. The ordinary
soldier's wife, good, straight, heroic soul, I know as well and
and profoundly admire as I do the ordinary wife of a brother-
officer, and I could tell you what she thinks and feels in her own
language. But the class whence Mrs. Tufton proceeded is out of my
social ken. She was stale-drunk; she had, doubtless, a vile
headache; probably she felt twinges of remorse and apprehension of
possible police interference. As a counter-irritant to this, she
had worked herself into an astounding temper. She would give up
none of her husband's belongings. She would have the law on them
if they tried. Bad enough it was for her husband to come home
after a year's desertion, leaving her penniless, and the moment he
set eyes on her begin to knock her about; but for sergeants
suffering under a blight and characterless females masquerading as
hospital nurses to come and ride rough-shod over an honest working
woman was past endurance. Thus I paraphrase my memory of the
lady's torrential speech. "Lay your hand on me," she cried, "and
I'll summons you for assault."
As Marigold could not pass her without laying hands on her, and as
the laying of hands on her, no matter how lightly, would
indubitably have constituted an assault in the eyes of the law,
Marigold stiffly confronted her and tried to argue.
The neighbours listened in sardonic amusement. Betty stood by,
with the spots burning on her cheek, clenching her slender capable
fingers, furious at defeat. I was condemned to sit in the car a
few yards off, an anxious spectator. In a moment's lull of the
argument, Betty interposed:
"Every woman here knows what you have done. You ought to be
ashamed of yourself."
"And you ought to be ashamed of yourself," Mrs. Tufton retorted--
"taking an honest woman's husband away from her."
It was time to interfere. I called out:
"Betty, let us get back. I'll fix the man up with everything he
wants."
At the moment of her turning to me a telegraph boy hopped from his
bicycle on the off-side of the ear and touched his cap.
"I've a telegram for Mrs. Connor, sir. I recognised the car and I
think that's the lady. So instead of going on to the house--"
I cut him short. Yes. That was Mrs. Connor of Telford Lodge. He
dodged round the car and, entering the garden path, handed the
orange-coloured envelope to Betty. She took it from him absent-
mindedly, her heart and soul engaged in the battle with Mrs.
Tufton. The boy stood patient for a second or two.
"Any answer, ma'am?"
She turned so that I could see her face in profile, and
impatiently opened the envelope and glanced at the message. Then
she stiffened, seeming in a curious way to become many inches
taller, and grew deadly white. The paper dropped from her hand.
Marigold picked it up.
The diversion of the telegraph boy had checked Mrs. Tufton's
eloquence and compelled the idle interest of the neighbours. I
cried out from the car:
"What's the matter?"
But I don't think Betty heard me. She recovered herself, took the
telegram from Marigold, and showed it to the woman.
"Read it," said Betty, in a strange, hard voice. "This is to tell
me that my husband was killed yesterday in France. Go on your
knees and thank God that you have a brave husband still alive and
pray that you may be worthy of him."
She went into the house and in a moment reappeared like a ghost of
steel, carrying the disputed canvas kit-bag over her shoulder. The
woman stared open-mouthed and said nothing. Marigold came forward
to relieve Betty of her burden, but she waved him imperiously
away, passed him and, opening the car-door, threw the bag at my
feet. Not one of the rough crowd moved a foot or uttered a sound,
save a baby in arms two doors off, who cut the silence with a
sickly wail and was immediately hushed by its mother. Betty turned
to the attendant Marigold.
"You can drive me home."
She sat by my side. Marigold took the wheel in front and drove on.
She sought for my hand, held it in an iron grip, and said not a
word. It was but a five minutes' run at the pace to which
Marigold, time-worn master of crises of life and death, put the
car. Betty held herself rigid, staring straight in front of her,
and striving in vain to stifle horrible little sounds that would
break through her tightly closed lips.
When we pulled up at her door she said queerly: "Forgive me. I'm a
damned little coward."
And she bolted from the car into the house.
