Читать книгу The Battle Within - Philip Gibbs - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Mrs. Haddon, the doctor’s wife, sat waiting for her husband in the car after driving him to one of his patients—Myra Lehmann, poor dear—on the edge of Fallow Green, half a mile from Ashleigh Heath. She was used to these long waits now since she had taken to driving her husband at night after he had turned his car into a ditch and bashed it through a five-barred gate. His eyes were not good enough for night driving, though he refused to admit it, and he was an absent-minded beggar anyhow.

It was twenty minutes to eleven on an April night in this marvellous Spring which had brought out all the flowers and fruit blossom with a rush of glory. She could smell the May-blossom above the unkempt hedge of this old cottage, with its peaked gable and black beams between the plaster. It drenched the still air.

There was still a glamour in the sky and it was light enough to see the pale gold of buttercups in the tangled grass of Fallow Green on both sides of a muddy track and the wooden bridge over the stream two hundred yards away.

There were little stirrings in the grass beyond the car. Mrs. Haddon saw a field-mouse run across the track, and a young rabbit scuttled into a sandbank beyond the cottage. Two birds were making love in a holly bush close by. It was a nightingale and his mate. The female gave four long-drawn notes, answered by little chirrupings of liquid sound, and then one fine burst of song magical in the surrounding silence.

Mrs. Haddon spoke inside herself.

“The darlings,” she said: “They know nothing of this war. They have no anguish. For them life is love.”

She gave a sharp sigh and spoke aloud.

“If only Pearl—”

She was anxious about her daughter Pearl. She was working too hard and showed signs of strain like so many other young women—and in fact all of them. They were getting a bit nervy after more than three years of war and overwork and lack of fats, and the inner spiritual ordeal. They had been wonderful and heroic, but it was hard to go on being wonderful and heroic year after year. How long now? The Eighth Army were doing marvellous things in Tunisia. It might hurry things up. It might save Peter. It was Peter who made it difficult for her to hide her terror sometimes. She had to pretend to go on being brave. They all thought she was so brave and serene. Little did they know her spasms of terror because of Peter. She had to hide all that.

An air-raid siren wailed with its rising and falling note across the countryside. There was no terror in that. Probably there was another raid on the coast. It was a long time since Ashleigh had had a bomb in its neighbourhood. The nightingale gave no heed to that banshee. It was singing with passion.

It was darker now. The glamour in the sky was fading out. Darkness was closing her about, but she could see the figure of a man in a steel helmet and the dark uniform of the Special Police moving towards her. He came close to the open window of the car and greeted her.

“Hullo, Irene. What a patient Griselda you are. Do you ever get any sleep?”

Mrs. Haddon laughed, and people in Ashleigh Heath liked the way she laughed. It was part of her charm and a sign of her courage. She was always so brave they thought, not knowing her secret terror.

“Oh, I get plenty of sleep at odd hours. What about yourself, Bob? As air-raid warden, you don’t get much peace at night.”

The man at the car window, who was Robert Fellowes, late of the Indian Civil Service, answered cheerfully.

“Oh, I go to bed in my pants until the alert sounds. All damn silly, anyhow.”

Something seemed to startle him, and he uttered an oath in Hindustani.

“That blasted woman is showing a light again. I’ve ticked her off three times already.”

Mrs. Haddon laughed again.

“Poor Marjorie. Don’t be hard on her. She’s working her fingers to the bone in the munitions factory.”

“Anyhow she has turned her light out.”

A gleam of light from the top window of a cottage three hundred yards away towards the village which had pierced the darkness for a moment was suddenly extinguished.

“All these women make me tired,” said the man in the steel helmet, grumpily. “They’ve no sense of law and order.”

“Now you’re talking nonsense, Bob,” said Mrs. Haddon. “I marvel at their patience with rules and regulations—all these women working and waiting while their husbands are away. Huddled into these cottages with their children, lining up in queues to get their rations, doing half-time jobs, like Pearl, with only time to get home and sleep before starting to work again. I’m sorry for them, poor dears. I know all their little troubles.”

Robert Fellowes—once of the Indian Civil Service, with guns popping off in salute when he went forth on an elephant before he retired to a small house in Surrey—did not argue the point with a doctor’s wife sitting in a small car on the edge of the common an hour before midnight. He could see her face vaguely—a beautiful face he always thought—with high cheek-bones and laughing eyes and a humorous mouth.

“They all confide in you,” he said. “My wife always takes her troubles to you. You hold up the morale of the whole neighbourhood.”

“I wish I could,” said Mrs. Haddon.

“You’re darned wonderful,” he told her. “We all adore you, and you know I was in love with you before you went and married that damned doctor.”

“I know,” she answered; and he could see the smile in her eyes. “But all the same you went and married Gladys, and all the same my dear damned doctor was a very nice lover. But I wish to goodness he would come out of that cottage. I’m afraid poor Myra is in a bad way.”

“Serve her right,” said Fellowes. “I’m sorry I didn’t let her drown. She made me spoil a perfectly good pair of grey flannel bags when she walked into that pond the other night. A deliberate attempt at suicide. If she wanted to kill herself, why couldn’t she do it in her own bedroom without making me plunge into a filthy pond at midnight?”

“You’re a monster, Bob,” said Mrs. Haddon. “If I didn’t know you were the kindest man alive I should put you in the same class as Hitler.”

“I’m an anti-Semite,” said Fellowes, “and I don’t approve of suicide; and I spoilt a pair of grey flannel bags and have used up my clothing coupons until next September.”

The siren was howling again over the countryside, with one long steady note.

“All Clear,” said Fellowes, “and there’s your apothecary.”

The door of the cottage with the peaked gable and the timbered walls had opened for a moment and a tall figure came through the garden gate.

“So sorry to have been so long,” he said. “Hullo, Fellowes, making love to my wife? That’s kind of you.”

“How is she?” asked Mrs. Haddon.

“Oh, I’ll pull her through. A touch of pneumonia. I think that M & B will do the trick.”

He sat beside his wife, who started up the car, and spoke to Fellowes out of the window.

“Great news from Tunisia. Anything from your son, old man?”

“Not a word,” answered Fellowes. “We haven’t had a letter for two months. Gladys is worrying, of course. Well, get some sleep.”

“Good night,” said Mrs. Haddon. “My love to Gladys.”

Fellowes touched his steel helmet and watched the car disappear down the bend of the lane.

The village of Ashleigh was in darkness now. No chink of light showed through the black-out curtains or through windows not curtained because these villagers had gone to bed before black-out time. “All our friends are asleep,” said Mrs. Haddon. “Peace be to their dreams.”

She knew them all along this double line of small dwelling places, some very old and some very new. The old ones, as old as Shakespeare’s England, with black beams cut from Elizabethan oaks, had once belonged to farm labourers. Now they had been bought and modernized before the war by women with a taste for the antique and money enough, though not much more for such a hobby. Some of them had planted flower-beds outside the garden walls. There was one fairy-tale cottage on the roadside like the witches’ cot to which Hansel and Gretel went wandering hand in hand. But here was no witch. In the tiny bedroom with the lattice window was old Miss Martindale, who kept a Swiss maid and a canary and a married niece with two children. She had a kind heart, a bitter tongue and a passion for bridge. She was also a fierce patriot, like Mrs. Marlow, the vicar’s wife, and an optimist even in the darkest days, believing that the Germans were on the point of collapse.

Mrs. Haddon, driving her husband slowly through the village street, had a mental picture of the people inside those little houses as she passed each one. Some of them were very over-crowded with children evacuated from the cities—though many of them had now gone back—or with paying guests: young mothers and their babes who had flown from London to escape the Blitz.

“It’s very strange and rather tragic,” said Mrs. Haddon aloud, after this film of silent thought.

“What is, old dear?” asked Dr. Haddon.

“It’s a funny thing, John,” answered his wife, “this village of ours is inhabited almost entirely by women.”

“Well do I know to my cost,” said Dr. Haddon. “They give me a hell of a lot of trouble every time a child sneezes.”

“Solitary women,” said Mrs. Haddon, thinking aloud, “husbandless mothers because the men are away in the war, young wives now alone, girls without sweethearts nearer than Africa, women of every age and type without a man younger than yourself or Mr. Marlow.”

“That’s why so many fall in love with me,” answered the doctor, with a grin into the darkness. “As for our parson, he’s constantly pursued by neurotic females. He’s getting scared about it.”

Mrs. Haddon laughed and then was silent again before slowing down outside her own gate at the end of Ashleigh village.

“All these women are waiting ... waiting ... waiting,” she thought, “hiding their terrors like I do. They’re waiting for the miracle of peace so that their men may come back—husbands and sons before they get killed. The odds are against them the longer it lasts. The odds are against Peter.”

“Some of these women,” said Dr. Haddon before getting out of the car, “are darned glad to get rid of their men—pub-crawling husbands, sulky brutes, troublesome fellows in the house. Now they’re heroes over in Africa, a nice distance away. Their wives feel free again. That’s why they’re all so cheerful and gay as long as the bombing is on other people’s towns. ‘Let the people sing,’ says that fellow Priestley. Lots of ’em like the war better than peace, just as they did last time. It’s more stimulating. It takes the women out of their stuffy little homes. It proves to them what they always believed. They can get on very well without the men, who are mostly a damn nuisance after the love-making and the honeymoon.”

Mrs. Haddon smiled as she put on her brakes, and the smile was in her voice.

“You’re a sham cynic, old dear. As if I hadn’t found you out years ago. But don’t sit there all night. And don’t wake Pearl up when you come in. I’ll put the car away.”