The Tree of Heaven Part 47

So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the ambulance cla.s.ses of the Red Cross. And presently they learned to their disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.

At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business by a sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the War would be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate message for him was that business must be attended to. He had not attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories.

He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the glamour of the Front. The particular business in hand had great issues and a fascination of its own.

And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and abstracted soul.

And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through the first courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder every day.

And every day the empty spiritual s.p.a.ce between him and Michael widened.

With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's entire family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained and ready when the moment of the summons came. Strong young girls hustled for the best places at the ambulance cla.s.ses. Fragile, elderly women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained by their extraordinary illusion.

Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if n.o.body else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral excitement, while still struggling to find each other's arteries, declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no earthly reason why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency cla.s.s-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor. He got mixed up with his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders to go to the Front.

They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each other's hopes.

For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a curious gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael's study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline's head, and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie's little, clumsy, pinching fingers. It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.

And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out her lower lip at them.

"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every woman in England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have enough socks for his Army."

Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted conspicuously, as a protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be unravelled overnight, to save the wool.

"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting khaki!"

Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were interfering with them.

Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men.

The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture and embara.s.sment.

The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and went into uniform.

And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it.

Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon Street Station.

She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery of Belgium poured and was congested.

Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with the scene.

Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a ghastly, ruinous life.

The iron b.r.e.a.s.t.s of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of carriages packed tight with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.

For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding wounds and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this one incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon Street Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the sequences of which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of men, women and children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they were staggering under those bundles along their straight, flat roads between the everlasting rows of poplars; their towns and villages flamed and smoked behind them; some of them, goaded like tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at their backs--yesterday. And this morning they were here, brave and gay, smiling at Dorothea as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their small children in her arms.

And they were still proud of themselves.

A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a large pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other a cage with a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and smiled, proud of herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A Belgium boy carried a paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He grinned at Dorothea, proud of himself because he had saved his grandfather. A young Flemish peasant woman pushed back the shawl that covered her baby's face to show her how pretty he was; she laughed because she had borne him and saved him.

And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women and girls idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in trying to throw himself into a moving train because he thought his lost mother was in it. The ring screening the agony of a woman giving birth to her child on the platform. A death in the train; stiff, upturned feet at the end of a stretcher that the police-ambulance carried away.

And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the sh.e.l.ls burst, and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger. She was not feeling anything now except the shame of her immunity.

She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wis.h.i.+ng I were dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."

Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were in Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could walk."

Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians, because it was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate, were safe. Her father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not in it--yet; though of course he would be in it some time. She tried not to think too much about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next six months. And Frank was safe. Frank was training recruits. He had told her he might be kept indefinitely at that infernal job. But for that he would be fighting now. He wanted her to be sorry for him; and she was sorry for him. And she was glad too.

One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she found him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting for her by himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.

"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait up here."

She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.

He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was the first time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust and dirt of her; and he smiled. His smile had none of the cynical derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant suffragist.

"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe me now."

"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.

"Not _yet_--worse luck."

"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas, or what?"

"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair off?"

"They might. They might do anything. This is a most extraordinary war."

"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."

"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in him.

"What did you think?"

"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like business.

Do you really mean it? Are you really going to Flanders?"

"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she wasn't going _some_where?"

He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And then: "It makes you look about eighteen."

"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."

"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that you're not eighteen? You're eight and twenty."

"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you did, you wouldn't say so."