How Dear Is Life (19 page)

*

Five minutes later, stepping up to where Fiery Forbes stood, ‘Colours’ beside him with note-book, he said he would volunteer
for foreign service. Then stepping back a pace, he saluted: and it was Baldwin’s turn. They had agreed to go together.

It was rather strange to learn who had not volunteered. Lance-corporal Mortimore said he was expecting his commission to be gazetted: and several others, who looked big and strong, had decided for Home Service. Among them was Downham. He was a single man, and like Lance-corporal Furrow of Head Office, a member of the London Rowing Club. It was all a bit of a surprise, for many of the smaller chaps, not looking half so strong, like Kirk and Blunden, had put down their names. Even so, what had he done? What would Mother say? He had thought that everyone else would volunteer, and had not liked to appear different. But when he heard that the three Wallace brothers had volunteered, as well as Bertie and Gerry and Sergeant Bolton, Phillip felt reassured.

Soon afterwards Gerry sought him out to say that Aunt Hetty and Aunt Dora were waiting by the gate. Hurrying thither, he told them what he had done. Then seeing Mother’s rather sad-smiling face, he felt slight panic. Bayonets! His panic was controlled: but it showed itself in the sharpened features, and clenched hands, as observed by both women. To Dora, he was still the unhappiest little boy she had ever seen.

“Perhaps I can take it back, Mum. I can ask ‘Colours’.”

“You must do what you think right, Phillip, of course, naturally,” said Hetty.

Newsboys in the street beyond the sentry were shouting. They listened.

“My heavy shoes, where are they? Why have you not brought them up for me, as I asked repeatedly? I must have them, I must!”

“They will come soon, I expect, dear. The man in the shop said the factory had a lot of orders for the Army.”

“I knew that would happen!” he said, with strained look. “That’s why I took them at once! Oh well, I must say goodbye now,” he said, unable to bear the further thought of being seen talking to his mother at the gate.

When they had gone, he wandered about the playground with Baldwin. He did not speak to the Colour-sergeant. ‘Colours’
would suspect him of being what he was, and always had been, cowardly.

As far as that went, Phillip deceived himself: for the Colour-
sergeant, a married man with three children, had not volunteered.

T
HEODORA
M
ADDISON
left her sister-in-law at Charing Cross, out of consideration for Hetty’s feelings having refrained from saying what she believed: and suffering because of the self-imposed restriction. Poor Hetty, she thought, poor Hetty; all that little mother could do now was to hope and pray. It would be a crime to enlighten her about the dreadful reality of the war, which was sweeping away more and more people in its evil deluge of hysteria, and darkening the very sun of truth.

She had listened to the Bishop’s address, keeping silent afterwards. She tried to reassure Hetty by a calm and unruffled presence. She must dissemble her real thoughts. What did the Bishop know of living truth? Had he not visited Holloway Prison seven months before, and declared after his ‘investigation’ that the ‘alleged ill-treatment’ of Suffragettes had no basis in reality? The rich and the comfortable lived in an entirely different world. It was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich human being to know the truth of Christ. Theodora, making her way back on foot to Old Ford, heard again the sudden cheering, saw the wild delight, the excitement, as part of the maniac flashing of bayonets throughout the world.

In the grey city of Dublin, before the outbreak of the war, she had watched a grim prelude of what was to come. The voice of a half-starved child still haunted her, as it cried out from among the crowd to the English soldiers marching to the docks.
You
killed
my
father!
The tattered mite had shaken her small fist at the hard faces below the undulating, sloping frise of bayonets fixed on rifles at the slope. She and Sylvia had been at the inquest of the Dubliners killed when the troops had fired into a crowd. The jury had been magnanimous, blaming not the soldiers, but the Government, declaring that the military were illegally on the streets.

The scenes at the boat station had been of the same spiritual devastation. Dense, dark crowds swayed before the big locked door, an almost senseless packed mass of reservists in civilian clothes, younger soldiers in khaki; children screaming in the pressure of bodies, drunken men cursing and quarrelling; white-faced babies carried on the shoulders of women blasphemous, piteous, or praying aloud to the Saints and the Mother of God. Periodically the great door opened as though to Gehenna, revealing a double line of burly uniforms of the Royal Irish Constabulary. For hours the struggle seemed to go on, thousands of people fighting to get past the door through which, she thought, not one of them truly wanted to go.

When at last she and Sylvia got through to the other side, the scene on the platform and around the booking counters was of a deeper sadness. Hundreds of drunken soldiers lurching about arm in arm, caps on backs of heads; staggering, glass-eyed, as they sang, or spewed. Many were lying down in pools of their own urine upon the platform. Oaths, curses, swinging blows upon heads and bodies; wailing of little frightened children, weeping red-eyed mothers. They behave like that because they do not think, Sylvia’s voice said beside her. But they
dare
not think, she replied; and that was why not one man, or woman or child among them all was doing what he or she wanted to do.

To Dora the scene at the boat-side was the climax of the Aeschylean drama. Here women in the poorest clothes, wives of men, surplus of the labour market, who had taken the King’s shilling as an alternative to starvation—here the women had broken through the thin, undernourished restraint which had buoyed them white-faced and staring until then. They clung with loud sobs and moans to their men. Some of the younger ones, who had not been able to get up the gangway to the ship, in despair of being able to pick out a loved face in the immense mass of figures crowding the rails high above, were sobbing, faces in hands, doubled up, against the walls of a warehouse. O, the sad gestures of love!

And then, in the strange manner of humanity, as the ship was under way, slowly edging from the quay, a transformation had come about in the spirit of place and scene; and into her mind had come the Latin tag,
Dolor
decrescit
, for at some point, starting either on the ship or from the quay, people began to wave and cheer; and the emotion spread until every ship in harbour and
in dock was blowing its sirens, answered by short jubilant blasts from the departing transport. Minute after minute the excitement was kept up; and when at last Kingstown had receded and the wake was spreading wider and smoother to the Irish shore, then within the ship could be heard shouted tuneless choruses, aimless yelling, discordant cheering.

So the evening came on. As she stood upon the small enclosed cabin-class deck, she noticed, with a sense of premonition, that the planets Mars and Venus were in conjunction, low in the north-west. Did the planets affect human life, indeed all life, upon the inhabited earth, as the Ancients had thought? The moon visibly did so: Diana ruled the tides, some said the seasons of seeding and fertility; and the menstrual life of women, linked to the periods of the moon, was a fact that needed no proof. Mars and Venus together, sinking down to the ocean, their lights a reflection from the sun certainly; but so was the light of the moon.

Ah, there was the moon, near to the full disc, rising up over unseen England—England, land of her fathers, country of great wealth side by side with abysmal poverty, at war with the country of her mother’s family, cousin nation against cousin nation! She thought of her friends in Austria and France, in Hungary and Greece, in Italy and Germany; of those members of the League of Youth in Vienna, so ardent for beauty to come into the lives of the people, for universal peace in which to build a life based on the age-old dreams of the artists and poets, from the dawn of Hellas and onwards down the centuries of nearly three millennia of great visions of ineffable beauty. Was Europe to suffer the fate of the Greek City States, warring one with another until even the radiance of Hellas was extinguished?

*

In the East End of London, Sylvia and Dora found on their return a dilemma which at first very nearly daunted even those dedicated women. Hundreds of reservists had been called to the colours, and their families were left entirely without support. Women were starving, for many of the factories where they had worked were closed, in panic of the unknown. A man earning fourteen to eighteen shillings a week before the war, sole support of wife and half a dozen or more children, had not been able to save. Prices had risen sharply in the shops on the day after war was declared; and they went on rising daily.

As soon as it was known that Sylvia was back—for she was
the leading spirit in the women’s political movement—her premises were thronged with white-faced mothers, some with babies in arms, others in rickety prams and so weak that they had ceased to grizzle. O, the pity of the little discoloured bundles of skin and bone, regarding her with the sad eyes of age, lying helplessly in muted weakness!

As the hot August days went on, some families were threatened with eviction unless the weekly rent, which had taken up to a third of the former weekly wage, was paid. There was a small unemployment benefit available to a few trades, under the National Insurance; but this affected only about one family in six. Again, Poor Law relief applied only to the crippled, not to the able-bodied; so this could not help the wives whose men had gone.

Breasts of nursing mothers shrunk bag-like from lack of food. Dora sold some of her few remaining securities, inherited from her father. They were sold far below their peace-time value; still, bread and milk must be bought. Sylvia opened a depot; the news spread swiftly; long queues of mothers, with prams and soap-boxes on wheels—the trollies which had taken piece-work garments to clothing factories and shops—formed outside the old house.

A letter was sent to
The
Times
. Money came by post, enough to revive hope. A milk centre was established.
Sylvia
will
save
us
ran the wild, hopeful cry through the streets.

Old people, as they waited for bread, told of the corn-fields they had known as children, when the old ford was across the stream which was now the canal. Behind the house was a decaying small hall, turned into a meeting room before the war. Its rough interior brick walls were colour-washed. At one end was a platform; at the other a wooden archway with niches wherein stood plaster casts of Greek figures—the Venus de Milo, Homer, the Delphic Apollo among them. Into this hall shuffled the head of the queue, through the house from the open front door: young mothers, lily-pale of face, bearing themselves with such fortitude, she thought. She was inspired by their patience, by their beauty as of twilight before the halls of Aides; their eyes dark-ringed, brow and cheek of Persephone lost to the sun. What pride they had! Tidy clothes, however poor and worn, clean aprons over threadbare shirts, hair closely braided, or twisted tight in curling pins! They were neat, they were presentable even on the brink of collapse, out of respect for themselves and for their adored leader.
Sylvia
will
save
us
.

Some of the infants, their legs no thicker than a man’s thumbs, were too ill to digest cow’s milk. What was wanted was albumen water. In Sylvia’s weekly broadsheet appeals were made for eggs. A clinic was formed, a woman doctor gave her services. How could they be found
work
? “Everything pawned, and nothing coming in.” It was a common statement.

One woman, expecting a baby, another in her arms, three mites hanging to her skirts, fainted in the queue. Another with six young children, two of them twin babies, said that for nearly three weeks they had been fed only on boiled white bread. Prematurely aged, the young mother lived in dread of eviction from her one tenement room wherein always by day and night arose the whimper of hunger. A third, also with six children, had had no food for four days.

And yet—and yet——

“But look what the Germans are doin’ in Belgium, miss!”

“Alf Burgess dahn our street bin’n lost ’is job, why don’t ’e go for a sojer? A big strong man like ’im, eating food what’s needed for the children, ’t’aint right, miss!”

Alfred Burgess came to see Sylvia. Before the war he had aided the suffragette movement—and lost several jobs on account of his loyalty. He was white to the lips with starvation. “What do I do, miss? Even the missus says as ’ow I ought to go, miss.” Later that morning Alfred Burgess, his wife’s nerve-thin nagging yet audible in his mind, had gone for a soldier, feeling he had betrayed Sylvia. O for the pen of Euripides!

“Their minds cannot hold out against hysteria, and the lies of the yellow press, Dora. You see, they will not even save themselves! Their loyalties are divided between our movement, and what they think of as their country. Their country—look at it——” Sylvia pointed at the shabby street, the decaying houses, the melancholy and patient mothers waiting in the queues. What would be the end of i tall? What would happen to Sylvia? Dora saw her as one pre-destined to be crushed by the dark forces. Her mother and sister, both militant sufferers in the cause before the war, had already publicly disclaimed her.

But the little body known as Grannie Nobbs was of undefeatable stuff. She came to whisper, bonnet nodding, that coppers’ narks had been planted among the mothers. “I’ll mother’m, I will! But look out, Miss Sylvia, don’t say nuffink to strangers abaht th’ war bein’ all wrong, see? If ’ey do arst yer, tell’m vose
what arst no questions’ll be to’d no lies, see?” Black tags of her bonnet shaking grimly, Grannie Nobbs, black shawl over black bodice, shuffled away.

An old man with weary eyes in a face of great beauty and suffering, his white and silky hair giving him the look of an old North Country sheep-dog who had lost his sheep, appeared one day. His eyes brightened when some of the mothers exclaimed, “Gawd bless yer, Mr. Keir Hardie, sir!”

To Sylvia he said, in private, “I have heard that a lot of our lads have fallen down out there.”

The old man sat still on a wooden chair for some time; then with a long sigh, as he rose to go he said, “As Jaurès remarked before the hand of the assassin struck him down, ‘Away and seek pardon of God and man’.”

*

“You know,” said Dora, “I have a feeling that the corner has been turned, dear Sylvia. The first confused rushing of the unprepared to meet the unimagined is over. Have you read Queen Mary’s Message to the Women of Great Britain? How simply it is worded; I am sure she wrote it herself.”

“That is all very well in so far as it goes,” remarked Sylvia, “but what is it but charity? It is only a sop to us, because we have shown that we refuse to accept the Gadarene Rush to destruction.”

“A sop to
us
? It is giving a lead to the entire country, surely? After all, dear Sylvia, it is what you have done here in the East End. Now through the Queen, who has a sense of high duty, the nation will be awakened to its responsibilities.”

“I have no quarrel with the Queen. She is both gracious and her life is ruled, as you say, by a sense of high duty. But the Crown is, after all, only a figurehead. It is the System that must be changed. I shall continue to oppose the war and the ideas of the entire nation while the continuance of the war is being
urged. In this I am with Keir Hardie. Dora, in his eyes when he came here yesterday I saw death. He is stricken in his soul. Now if you will excuse me, I have some work to do.”

Dora knew that Sylvia was near the point of exhaustion herself. She seldom slept for more than an hour or two at a time. Often her lamp was burning until the small hours, into the dawn and the day, while she sat at her table, papers everywhere, envelopes, pamphlets, articles for her weekly broadsheet, begging letters, letters written to men, called up, on behalf of wives who could not write themselves, or lacked paper and penny stamp. If she was curt at times, was it not the momentary rigidity of one steeling herself for the ‘mental fight’ of William Blake, ‘till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land’?