Читать книгу Seven Men Came Back - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

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A little Gothic figure like some bronze out of a saga swinging a hammer amid a shower of autumn leaves. The hammer was a wooden mawl, and that which was smitten a sweet chestnut post. Crabtree was putting up wire along the southern edge of Darrel’s Wood.

The day was very still, and yet there seemed sufficient wind to bring down the beech leaves. They lay under and about his feet with the dry mast of the beech trees and the yellow fronds of the fern. In May there were bluebells here in azure sheets, and on this November day the little valley that fell away from the high wood had a distant tinge of vapoury blueness. The chimneys and roofs of Darrel’s Farm and its byres, barn and outhouses lay half-way down the valley. There was a length of black, close-boarded fence, a thorn hedge with a white gate in it, an orchard. South of the farmstead a very green field contrasted with the pale shimmer of a larch-wood.

Crabtree put down the mawl, and going to the pile of posts, chose one, and turning it on end, bent to sharpen it with a billhook. The white flakes fell away from the steel edge. He set the bill on an old tree stump that he was using as a block and straightened himself. He looked into the deeps of the wood, and that which was mysterious and beautiful in it was reflected in his eyes.

He thought—“I’m losing my flabbiness. The old cunning has come back. It’s marvellous—that bracken.”

Pacing off the distance he tossed the heavy post from his shoulder, kicked a mark with his heel, went for the crowbar that he had left lying among the leaves, and returned to the spot where the post was to stand. With three or four plunges of the bar he made a socket in the soil to receive the pointed end of the post. He paused and stood at gaze.

He was looking towards the white gate in the thorn hedge.

It was November 11th, 1919.

He saw the white gate swing open. His sister was standing there. She had an old Sussex sheep’s bell in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. Crabtree’s wrist-watch had failed him that morning.

He heard the ringing of the bell, and saw her wave. She had promised to come and give him this signal. She was not a woman who forgot or who failed. It was one minute to eleven on Armistice Day.

Crabtree walked out from under the splendour of the beech boughs with the crowbar in his hand. He shouted.

“All right, Una. Thanks.”

He stood there where the grass met the wood, the crowbar over his shoulder. There seemed to be no movement anywhere save the flutter of the falling leaves. He could see his sister’s figure at the gate, her yellow knitted coat and black skirt. She seemed to be looking towards him and the domed splendour of the wood.

Two minutes’ silence. Crabtree made it more than two minutes. He was thinking of names, faces, the names and faces of men. He saw sandbags, yellow mud in a trench, shell craters. Now—stillness, peace! Behind him those towering trees.

His lips moved.

“Thank God.”

He came out of a kind of dream. His sister was waving. He heard her voice in the November stillness.

“Elevens, Dave.”

He planted the crowbar in the ground, went for his coat that hung over a bough, and walked long-legged down the meadow to the farm. He was wearing out a pair of army breeches and puttees that were beginning to fray, and as he went down the field he thought—“I shall see all those chaps to-night—Sherring, Archie, the Doc.—Damned good.”

Una Crabtree waited at the gate. She was like her brother, but that which was virile and convincing in him became in the sister a pathetic plainness. She was one of those women with no definite colour, save in her eyes. Her hair was brownish and without lustre, her hands large and red, her shoulders too angular, her neck too long. There was about her an air of vague and honest awkwardness both in posture and in movement. She held herself rather like a man. She was freckled. Her only beauty lived in her eyes.

Within her—it was otherwise. She waited at the gate for her brother. She had shared the two minutes’ silence with him even as she shared the life of the farm, and to Una her brother was a creature of infinite simplicity. He had all the patience of the man who lives with the soil and loves it. His serenity in the face of life’s exasperations had often filled her with wonder. Like a tree he accepted the seasons. To Una, who was so much more subtle and restless than he was, his simplicity could be as consoling as music. Also, there was about him a quaint and admirable austerity that smiled gently at provocation, yet never stooped to meanness. She had come to understand just why he was so successful in his handling of men and beasts and that new servant of the soil—the machine.

A brick-paved path led from the white gate to the porch of “Darrels,” a home-made porch built of Scotch fir and roofed with weatherboard. To Una this path was so like her brother in its directness and its weathered colouring. She paused half-way up the path to pull a chrysanthemum that had survived the frost. Her brother, behind her, pausing when she paused, reached over to touch the branch of an apple tree.

“I’ll winter wash these if I get time.”

She could have told him that half these old trees were grey lichened pensioners, and should be cut down, but he knew that as well as she did. He rather liked the tangle of these old trees, and their spreading, unpruned shadows. She liked him for liking such things.

“Have you dug me out a boiled shirt, Una?”

Yes, she had. It was a pre-war shirt and rather old-fashioned, and in those respects would keep his dinner-jacket in countenance.

“You’ve only got black boots—your Sunday boots.”

He said it wouldn’t matter. One did not worry about such trifles when you went up to dine with a lot of fellows who had been lousy with you, and who had laughed with you, and felt windy with you. Had her brother felt windy? She couldn’t quite believe it. She led the way into the sitting-room, where a log fire was burning in the open brick hearth, and his glass of hot milk and a slice of cake waited on the table. In the window stood his bureau, meticulously neat, as neat as his barn and his tool-house. He kept his letters and bills and catalogues in three shallow deal trays. The desk was as much his as her bookcase was hers. He read very little; she read everything that she could come by. He would have said perhaps, had he said such things, that he preferred living to reading. He was a man of his hands.

He sat down in front of the fire, glass in one hand, slice of cake in the other.

“I shall catch the 5.37 from Midworth.”

She stood at the window.

“I suppose they will all be there?”

He was certain of it.

“All those who matter. I wonder what old Sherring has been doing.”

“You’ll have so much to talk about.”

“Oh, rather.”

She turned and looked at him over her shoulder. She had been a V.A.D. nurse during the war at a base hospital, and she had come back to this quiet corner of the world where Sussex meets Surrey, and where so little that the modern world craves for ever happened. Only natural things happened. Its rhythm was like that of deep and quiet breathing.

Did he ever suspect her of restlessness? Did he guess how she had had to fight herself, clench the fists of her soul? She was a plain woman with a capacity for profound passion, and all such elemental things had passed her by.

“I wonder whether you will find them—just the same?”

He munched cake.

“What, the old crowd?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they’ll be in dinner-jackets.”

She laughed softly and gently at him, and bitterly at herself.

“Just that.”

He had finished his milk and the cake, and he got up and took a pipe and a tobacco tin from the high, black mantel-shelf.

“Does anyone change much, Unie?”

“Not you.”

“Oh, I’m a bit of a clod, I know.”

She was thinking that both to change and not to change might be tragic. To feel the cold, sweet anguish of the spring in winter! She looked at her bookcase and frowned.

Her brother could go back to his work in the wood.