Chapter V

Anthony’s breakfast was sent up to his room on a tray. He felt an absurd inclination to cry at the sight of the delicate linen, the golden creaminess of the butter, the liquid sunshine of a honeycomb, and the thin egg-shell china, white with a green sprig, which had been one of his mother’s wedding presents.

He wished he could get used to the physical beauty of inanimate things. Beauty struck raw against his strained and awakened senses, like the piercing music of a violin.

After breakfast Anthony found his mother in the morning-room. She was always to be found there at the same time, interviewing servants, going over household accounts, or writing her family letters. Her even, blameless existence was full of little cares and arrangements for her family’s comfort.

Nothing had ever broken into Mrs. Arden’s habits. She was always willing to assist poor people if they had anything usual the matter with them; and if what they had the matter with them was unusual, she referred it to the squire.

The room looked south on to the terrace, fronting the downs. It was full of sunshine. On the table by the window stood a bowl of early daffodils. Mrs. Arden turned as Anthony came in.

“I hoped you’d come here, dear,” she said as he kissed her. “I rather wanted you all to myself this morning. The girls are in the garden, and your father had to go out. While we are alone together, I want to show you all the wonderful letters about dear Tom. You would hardly believe people could be so kind; every one wrote to us.”

Anthony sat down on the window-seat, and Mrs. Arden took out the letters.

They were kept in a long, open box on her writing-table, and labeled in her exquisite, neat hand-writing: “From Tom’s friends.” “From his relations.” “From the people on the estate.” “From his regiment.” “From the clergy.” “From public people.”

“I think I like his friends’ letters best,” Mrs. Arden explained quietly. “They sound more like him, and some of the villagers wrote about when he was a child. It is such a comfort to know how well he was understood and loved. What I like best is to think of him being remembered. I don’t know how to put it quite, but when people live a very long time, they are connected with so many things and events, aren’t they? Even if they’re quite dull people, they don’t drop out so easily; but short lives like Tom’s might disappear and be lost,—I mean humanly speaking,—mightn’t they, if people weren’t specially kind about remembering? Dear Mr. Medal is so good to me! He preached a wonderful sermon on purpose to reassure me about the remembrances of God. I think that was what he called it. But of course one believes that God remembers; only sometimes (perhaps you’ll understand what I mean better than Mr. Medal did), one wants to think the _earth_ remembered Tom as well. He did so much for it, didn’t he, here at Pannell?”

Anthony nodded. He knew exactly what his mother meant. He, too, had the same feeling. He wanted the earth to remember Tom—the earth which he had tended with such care and had slipped out of at the last so unobtrusively.

Anthony read the letters out loud to his mother. She sat beside him, with her hand on his arm, and every now and then she cried a little, because it was such a comfort having Anthony read the letters out loud to her.

Anthony read packet after packet, holding on to himself and keeping his voice even. When he had finished them all, Mrs. Arden said:

“Now, then, if you wouldn’t mind telling me all about Germany before your father comes in, then I should really understand what you have been through.”

Mrs. Arden could say “Germany” better than Mr. Arden could, but she couldn’t for the life of her say “prison.”

“I tried to read all that the newspapers said about it, you know, Anthony,” she explained, “and all the books that came out on the subject. I am sure they were wonderfully written, and no doubt their authors knew all about their subjects, only, you see, they never said any of the things I particularly wanted to know. I dare say it was my fault. I am so stupid at understanding descriptions in books; I always wish people would just tell you what happened.”

Anthony cleared his throat and looked at the daffodils.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you had better ask me exactly what you do want to know.” Anthony expected to get off rather cheaply with his mother. She was, as a rule, very easy to get off cheaply from. She never saw points very clearly, her own or any one else’s. He had not counted on her asking questions, which, if he hadn’t been very careful, would have told her far too much. He did not know how the most ignorant fears, if they come direct from the heart, hit at truth.

Of course he was intensely careful. He got round all her questions, he evaded the sharp issues of her fears, and he told her the strictest minimum of painful things. The Ardens never frightened women except by reassuring them.

Mrs. Arden listened anxiously to Anthony’s answers. She did not press her points. She saw after a few moments that Anthony was sparing her, and that it made it easier for him to spare her.

Once she sighed a little, and at the end she said:

“People’s hair isn’t usually so gray at twenty-eight, Anthony.”

Anthony got out of that very cleverly. He said it was the climate. Quite young Germans had gray hair or else they were bald. She couldn’t say his hair wasn’t thick.

“And they were really nice to you,” Mrs. Arden murmured, “after the first?”

Anthony had admitted to her that at first they weren’t very nice to him.

“They were all right,” he said a little restlessly—“what they had to be, you know, Mother. Guards aren’t supposed to be friendly, and the commandant was quite a good fellow, really. He had to be a bit stiff, you know; that was what he was there for. I generally took him the complaints; he was always quite decent to me.”

“And what complaints did you take him, dear?” Mrs. Arden softly questioned.

Anthony did not meet her eyes.

“Oh, ordinary prisoners’ complaints, you know,” he explained carelessly. “Sometimes we wanted more exercise, or the heating went wrong, or what we had in the way of food wasn’t quite up to the mark. You know the kind of thing.”

Mrs. Arden was silent for a moment. She was not quite sure that she did know the kind of thing, but she saw that Anthony wanted her to know it. Then she said:

“Your father has asked Mr. Medal to dine with us to-night. He wants so much to see you again and to hear your experiences, and so does your father, of course. I thought perhaps you would tell them after dinner, when the girls and I had gone, you know.”

Anthony stiffened. He did not want to see the vicar or to tell him his experiences; he saw that his mother thought he would talk more freely to the two men.

He did not guess that she thought it would be good for him to talk more freely, and still less that if he had told her everything, she would not have known more surely than she did what he had suffered.

“I suppose I shall have to see Medal sooner or later,” he agreed after a pause, “only I don’t want to see people just yet or to be asked questions. I don’t mean yours, Mother, of course. It isn’t that one’s had such a hard time, you know. Most fellows have had a far worse one; only one wants to get used to things gradually.”

“Yes, dear, I understand,” said Mrs. Arden, gently. “Only, of course, you’ll want to tell your father, and I thought Mr. Medal might be a help. After all, he’s almost like one of ourselves.”

“He isn’t much like one of me,” said Anthony, with a rueful grin. “You forget he hasn’t got over my shocking opinions. He told me that I was the most poisoned skeptic he ever prepared for confirmation.”

Mrs. Arden smiled.

“Well, dear,” she said, “haven’t _you_ got over your shocking opinions yet? I think one does, as one gets older, cease to shock.”

But Anthony had not got as old as that yet.

“I’m not the least more religious, if that’s what you mean, Mother,” he confessed a little uncomfortably.

Mrs. Arden sighed gently, but she waived the question. She did not think that with a really good man like Anthony it mattered very much what he thought he believed. Mrs. Arden never interfered with men’s opinions or children’s toys; it was her experience that they both preferred what you would least have chosen for them. But that as long as they were kept amused, it did not greatly matter what object their choice fell upon.

“Max is longing to take you round the garden,” she said. “You’ll find the girls out there waiting for you; they want to show you their improvements. They’ve been really wonderful since the war, you know, helping your father on the estate; and Ursula is quite pretty, but not, of course, as pretty as Daphne. Go out and be nice to them; and don’t, if you can help it, be too clever, Anthony.”

Anthony couldn’t really help it. He always had been too clever for the rest of his family. His mother and Daphne overlooked it, but it stuck in the throats of the others; they found it as difficult to swallow as a fishbone.

Ursula and Gladys did what they could with him. They strolled round the park together, and showed him where they had planted potatoes when the Government had made all that fuss about potatoes, and how much ground they had persuaded father to have cut up into allotments for the villagers. Ursula knew all about the land. It had been her war work, and she was rather disappointed to find that Anthony knew something about it, too. He was apologetic over his knowledge, but he had to admit that he had picked up a thing or two in Germany, and had ideas of his own.

Gladys had been a V.A.D. and of course she expected Anthony to talk to her about the extraordinary cases they had had in their cottage hospital. All their cases had been extraordinary, and what was the use of having a doctor in the family if you couldn’t talk things over with him, and tell the other V.A.D.’s afterward where they were wrong? But Anthony said it was no use theorizing about a case you hadn’t seen; you might as well try to paint a picture from a description of your great-grandmother.

When they asked him about his experiences in Germany he told them how he and the other officers had got up charades and mock parliamentary debates. They had had really tremendous fun over woman’s suffrage, and Anthony had argued on both sides so persuasively that nobody had been able to guess what his real opinions were.

“But you do believe in suffrage now, don’t you?” both his sisters cried breathlessly. “Almost everybody does since the war. It’s not a bit like what it was when the Suffragettes were so silly, and father got so angry about it. Besides, we’ve got the vote!”

“It seems to me exactly what it was,” said Anthony, aggravatingly, “and I always agreed with it. That is to say, I always agreed women had as much right as they had ability; until they have the right, of course we cannot judge of their ability. My theory has always been, if you want people to hang themselves, give them the longest rope.”

“But do you want them to hang themselves?” Ursula asked uncertainly. “That’s not being on their side, is it?”

Anthony looked from one flushed young face to the other. He felt he was, after all, tremendously on the side of women. But he was not considering them at all as they wished him to consider them: an intense tenderness pervaded his judgment.

His sisters were eighteen and twenty years old, bewilderingly young and untried. Nothing had finished for them, nor had they ever seen the betrayal of illusion.

The war had been a great call on their young and unawakened energies; they had met it dauntlessly, protected from all its horrors and free from its indelible stains. The tragic early deaths of their contemporaries had saddened and ennobled their lives. They had been tried by sorrow, but they had not been brutalized by pain. They had made the sacrifice of the pleasures of their class and race with a willing heart. All that had come to them and all that they had given up had developed and enriched them.

They had found out what was in themselves, and had acted capably and conscientiously on the material that lay to their hands. Beauty had never left them; love and companionship remained the unconscious support of their lives. They had never been terrified or beaten down or come to the end of their tether. Anthony, looking at their smooth young faces and fearless eyes, hoped passionately that they would continue to escape all such realities. If he had believed in prayer, he would have prayed that they might never know anything more terrible than their protected duty. He looked away from them so that they should not see his haunted eyes.

“I am on your side” he said after a long pause, “more, perhaps, than you know. As to believing in you as individuals, I believe in you very strongly. It’s quite a part of my creed to believe in my sisters.”

Neither Ursula nor Gladys was satisfied with this answer. They didn’t wish to be believed in as sisters, and they couldn’t explain what they did wish, so they showed Anthony the stables instead.

There was no doubt that Mr. Medal helped at dinner. He had a great deal of natural tact, and a good many openings arose for the use of it. The squire was irritable. He did not like Anthony’s ideas about land, he suspected him of socialism; and though, of course, a certain amount of socialism had to be let in to save worse, if Anthony was socialistic, it wouldn’t be in the kind of way that the “Times” suggested canny landlords should adopt.

Mrs. Arden was nervous because she thought it would be unfortunate if politics or religion turned up; but when there are one or two large subjects which it would be unfortunate to mention, the conversation has a strange way of turning slap in their direction, especially if you are nervous about it.

The girls were a little nervous, too, because they felt they had the position of women to uphold before Anthony, and were not quite sure that their father and Mr. Medal would remember to show Anthony that they were quite grown up.

Mr. Medal did, however; he remembered it beautifully. He recounted all the girls had done for the cottage hospital, drew out the squire’s well-known theories on agricultural prospects, and touched lightly on the histories of village families (not related to the footmen) in a way that did credit to his cloth.

Mrs. Arden kept thinking:

“How wonderful clergymen are! I am sure they must be specially helped.”

And Mr. Arden gradually thawed over the food. It was very good food, but if the conversation had gone wrong, he would have thought it wasn’t. They did not talk about anything painful till the women had left the room; then the squire said:

“Now, Anthony, my boy, we should like to hear how those scoundrels treated you. Let’s have the whole thing from the start, without any gloves on. I understand you were all taken in a lump, the men on your flanks having retreated without your knowing it. They killed some of you after you had surrendered, didn’t they?”

Anthony looked down at the white tablecloth and began to play nervously with his empty glass. It had been a very long day. Of course he wasn’t going to break down and see things, and only housemaids scream. He would get through quite easily if he just steered clear of a few awkward corners.

“Three hundred of us were taken together,” he began in a low, even voice, “but they killed about fifty or sixty before they were stopped by a fat man with glasses. I think he was a Bavarian. He said, ‘My God! these are men, not chickens.’ My leg was broken, so I was on the ground.” This was an awkward corner. Anthony couldn’t tell them anything about that. He went on hurriedly:

“It was awfully cold, you know, in December, and we had five days on the train. For two days we hadn’t any water,—I think it was two days,—and I don’t remember much about the food on the journey. The guards were rather rough. I was in a hospital for three months. It was quite well managed, on the whole, a little dirty, according to our ideas; probably on account of the nursing. Some of the nurses behaved well, and others didn’t. There were one or two who took the patients’ food, and nobody had any too much food.

“For the first six months we had rather a bad time; that was before we got the letters and parcels regularly. We were shunted about a good deal in cold, badly arranged camps; the bedding was very insufficient.

“We must remember that the Germans were not organized for a long war. They expected a short war and great victories, but not large quantities of prisoners to keep indefinitely without any prospect of final victory; and then there was the blockade.”

“Ah, yes; we had them there,” said the squire, cheerfully. “What happened when you made complaints about the food?”

“We didn’t make complaints then,” said Anthony, slowly. He looked up across the shaded electric lights, covered with yellow silk in the shape of tulips, at Mr. Medal’s face. Mr. Medal was following Anthony with kindly intentness and peeling a walnut. He had a benevolent, comfortable face, with fixed ideas behind it. It was quite funny to think what his face would look like if a shrieking woman had spat into it and called him a cursed pig-dog.

When Mr. Medal was preparing Anthony for confirmation he had warned him against certain temptations which he might be called upon to face in his future life. A scene in the prison camp flashed before Anthony’s eyes; it was another of his awkward corners. There was a temptation in it, but not in the least like anything the vicar had mentioned.

“When I could walk all right,” he went on after a short pause, “I was put in the Westphalian camp I told you about, Father. It was in a bad sanitary condition; there was a great deal of dysentery and light typhoid, with some graver cases. I made complaints then, regularly, till they altered the conditions. I wasn’t very popular with the authorities. You have no idea how difficult it is to face a well-fed, angry man and state your rights as a human being. When you are rather down in the mouth, you do not feel as if you have any rights, and they don’t either, of course.”

“They’re not human beings at all!” shouted the squire, banging his fist on the table. “Damned bullying blackguards!”

Anthony jumped as if his father had struck him.

“It’s funny your saying that, sir,” he said after a pause. “They struck me as very human always, and very like some of our own people. It occurred to me that we might be treating Germans just the same if we thought of them what they thought of us. I often used to wonder if we weren’t. War makes people untruthful.”

“My dear boy,” said Mr. Medal, softly, before the squire could interfere, “it is your rundown condition which makes you feel like this. An underfed brain is hardly master of itself.”

“That’s quite true,” agreed Anthony, “and yet you have no idea how clearly one sees things when one is underfed. One sees everything as clear as glass. And not only the usual things, but what people are thinking as well, and why they think it. It is curiously disturbing to see so many things so plainly, and not be able to help them.”

He pulled himself up; this wasn’t what he had meant to say at all.

“We cleaned the camp,” he went on, “and the condition of the men improved greatly, and the rest of the time we just—well, you know—waited. I got a certain amount of exercise allowed me, and I taught the men Swedish drill to make them fit. They let me act as camp doctor, with a German medico to refer to if I needed outside help.

“I used to need outside help, you see, when any one went mad.”

Mr. Medal stopped peeling walnuts.

“Mad!” spluttered the squire. “What d’you mean, my boy? What did any one go mad for?”

And then what Anthony was afraid might be going to happen to him happened. He began to see things. He caught hold of the table to steady himself, and his glass rolled on to the floor and smashed to pieces. He tried to get up and go outside the circle of the light. Light infuriated as well as terrified him.

He saw the vicar’s face in a kind of blur jumping between him and the pictures, his large, round, contented face as frightened as a startled rabbit.

Anthony’s teeth began to chatter, and he felt he was going to scream. He caught hold of his lips and bit them till the blood came. That helped him to get to the window and open it without screaming. The cool, clean air from the downs caught and soothed him like the touch of a friendly hand.

He stood there breathing deeply, while the merciful, soft darkness covered up all he could not forget. The things themselves had never been so terrible as the pictures. Anthony had been able to deal with what had happened, but he could not deal with the memories of what had happened. They ripped his self-control as if it was calico.

He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.

“Are you all right, my boy?” the squire asked unsteadily.

“Quite all right, sir,” said Anthony.

For a moment they stood there together, and it seemed to Anthony as if some ineradicable stubbornness of blood connected him with his father and his father with him. It was an instinct stronger than any misunderstanding.

The squire said nothing, and in a minute they were all three sitting around the table as if nothing had happened.

Mr. Medal looked the most disturbed of the three.

Anthony finished his experiences quite comfortably without any awkward corners.

“D’you know, Mary,” said the squire when he joined his wife in their room, “those German pirates have upset that boy of ours; I don’t think I quite took it in at first. His nerve’s shaken. What do you think we’d better do about it? Medal suggests sea-bathing. Did you notice the boy was at all upset?”

Mrs. Arden looked at the back of the squire’s head with tender exasperation.

“Yes, dear,” she said. “When I gave him his tea—when he first came in, you know—his hands shook. Anthony always has such perfectly steady hands. I don’t think sea-bathing would help him at all. I want him to go and stay with Daphne. So many young people run in and out there in such a simple, free-and-easy way, I think it might be good for him. I have written to Daphne about it. It seems to me that some really nice girl, whose people we knew all about, would quiet Anthony’s nerves down better than anything.”

“Marry him?” said the squire, reflectively. “That’s what you’re up to, is it? Well, of course he’s Pannell to think of now; but falling in love mightn’t have such a quieting effect as you seem to fancy, Mary. I can remember that it had rather a stimulating effect on me.”

“It depends,” said his wife, slipping his pocket-handkerchief under his pillow, “on whom you fall in love with. I specially said to Daphne—a nice, quiet girl.”