Three things happened to change me from a child. Three things, one after another. The birthday dance, Mother’s death, and, a few weeks after that, the war. After the long peaceful years of childhood the three things happened so quickly that there was no time to think. I was eighteen when the war came—it was a bad age to be. I was too old to take it—as Kitty took it—with the excitement of a child over a new experience. Too young to remember another war, to have achieved philosophy and to realize that it would pass. To eighteen things do not pass quickly—neither grief nor pleasures—a trouble seems to be for all time. Eighteen cannot see through present darkness to future light.
The war was incredible to me, a nightmare of pain. I could not believe that a few miles away across the sea men were killing each other—civilized men killing each other like savages—I could not believe it at first. Nothing that had gone before in my life had prepared my mind for such a thing. I had read of wars in history but I had never visualized them. They had happened long ago, and the people who fought in them were not real to me, not real, everyday people like ourselves. I can’t explain the horror and perplexity of my feelings; it is no use to try. Nobody could understand what I felt unless they had felt it, and if they have felt it they can understand without any explanation at all.
At first I could not believe it was true. And then gradually I came to believe it, and the war settled upon my spirit like a dark cloud. It was always there, that dark cloud, it never lifted for a moment. I knew, as I went about my work that men were dying every moment, dying in agony, and the guns were roaring day and night.
Garth went at the very beginning (war was in the Wisdon blood), and men from the village whom I had known all my life, men who had never been out of Hinkleton in their lives, who had spent their time in peaceful pastoral pursuits, went off to fight for England. The postman, the jobbing gardener, the boy from the farm, they all went. Some of these men returned, wounded, maimed, sick in mind and body, and some of them would never return. So the war came to be a reality, a grim dark burden that pressed upon my mind night and day, shutting out the sunshine, poisoning the wells of life.
What did you do in the war, Clare? I did nothing. There was father, you see. I had to stay with him and take care of him. All of a sudden he became old, old and helpless. It was the war, even more than Mother’s death, that aged him and broke his heart. Mother’s death was a natural thing to him, we all die sooner or later, and he was not rebellious. God had taken her from him and he could say, “Thy Will be done”; but the war was unnatural, he felt that the war was an Evil Thing, he felt that God was hiding His face.
Nowadays quite a lot of people think about the war as father thought, but, at the time, the idea was unpopular. The clergy waved banners like the rest, and declared that God was on our side. Father thought that God was on nobody’s side. Father thought that the world had gone mad, and God was angry. His sermons caused some trouble; it was only because he was so well beloved in the parish that they did not cause more.
He was so aged and broken that he could not undertake Kitty’s education; we arranged for her to go to a boarding-school at Bournemouth. She was very happy there, the life suited her, and the companionship of the other girls went to her head like wine. She made innumerable friends—different ones each term—and stayed with them in the holidays. It was much more fun than coming home to Hinkleton.
Father and I lived a very lonely life during those four years of war. Garth was in Flanders; Mr. Wisdon shut up the Manor and took a flat in London. He said he could not stand the quiet of Hinkleton; he must be near the center of things. Garth led a charmed life, first in the line and afterward on the lines of communication. He came down to Hinkleton once to see father, he had heard disquieting accounts of father from a man who came from Hinkleton village, and whom he had met abroad. We walked together in the garden and talked about the flowers, he told me that the flowers in Flanders were very pretty. I had to warn him not to talk to father about the war, I warned everybody that came. It worried father so, it upset him, he got angry and muddled when he tried to argue about it.
“I shan’t talk about it,” he said. “It’s the last thing I want to talk about.”
There was a queer, strained look in his face as he said the words; I had seen it in the faces of other men. It made the horror and agony of war more real to me than any amount of talk. Garth talked to me about the flowers in Flanders, and the look in his face told me that he had been living in hell.
Garth went into the study after that, to see father, and I left them alone, for I knew that they could talk more openly in my absence. I busied myself about the house until I heard the door open and Garth came out. I saw that he was grieved over father’s condition, terribly grieved. Garth realized—far more clearly than I who was with father constantly—how changed he was, how broken and aged. There were tears in Garth’s eyes when he said good-bye.
“I think he will be better when it is over,” I said, trying to comfort him.
“If it is ever over,” Garth said. “I feel as if the war had been going on forever, and will never stop. If it ever does stop, Char, and I’m alive, I shall come back to you.”
“Come back safely, my dear,” I told him.
When the war ended Mr. Wisdon came down to Hinkleton and opened the Manor. He hoped that Garth would be demobilized soon after the Armistice, and he bought a couple of hunters for the winter. But the time dragged on and no news came. It took a long time before Garth’s demobilization papers went through. He was on the staff, and there was more work to do than ever.
That winter of 1918 was a difficult time—the awful nightmare of killing was over, but everybody was very weary, and food was scarce. Influenza ravaged the village, carrying off the strong and weak with nice impartiality.
The only bright spot for me in that long winter was the coming of a curious old man to Hinkleton. He stayed at the Hinkleton Arms for weeks while he studied father’s church and made drawings of the nave. Hinkleton Church is very old and beautiful. I should have told you more about it for it played a big part in my life—especially during the war years when I was so lonely and unhappy. I don’t think I could have survived those years if it had not been for the church. When everything seemed dark and dreadful I would go there and sit for hours, letting the peace which passeth all understanding sink into my soul. Sometimes it failed, but usually it was successful and I came out into the sunshine or the rain, feeling that God was somewhere, and that things must come right.
The church is of gray stone, beautifully simple and bare, and the windows are of that clear, transparent glass which transmutes the sunbeams to shafts of jeweled light. I can never see a ruby without thinking of the windows of Hinkleton Church and of one window in particular—the subject is Ruth, gleaning in the fields, her dress is the color of the purest ruby in the world.
The strange man who appeared in Hinkleton that winter of 1918 knew all about churches, and stained glass windows—he was writing a book upon the subject. He taught me many things about the church and revealed beauties which I had not appreciated. He found a leper window in the south wall, and obtained permission to open it up and glaze it with plain glass. He raved about the leper window for hours to anybody who would listen. I was quite willing to listen to Mr. Senture, for I was weary of my own company. It mattered little to me whether he talked about the window, or the stained glass or the beauty of the arching roof. Sometimes he would tire of these subjects and talk about his invalid wife (she was the passion of his life, he wrote to her every day). He talked about what he would be able to do for her when his book was published, and the money came rolling in. I grew very much interested in Mr. Senture’s book, it pleased me that our own lovely old church was to be made the subject of a book, that there would be pictures of it for all the world to see. The book was eventually published—Mr. Senture sent me a copy of it—and I have often wondered whether he made any money for his invalid wife. I loved the book, of course, but it would not appeal to a wide public, I am afraid.
We went over to Canterbury one day—Mr. Senture and I—he wanted to make some notes about the cathedral and to see an old friend who was a keen archaeologist, and he offered to take me with him. I think he thought I had rather a dull life and was sorry for me; he was a kind old man. I enjoyed the day. It took us hours to get to Canterbury and hours to get home, for the trains did not fit in well, but even the long, tiresome journey was a pleasure to me. I had been for so long a prisoner in Hinkleton that I felt like a child on a Sunday school excursion. We had lunch at a tea shop, explored the cathedral and came home. It may not sound very thrilling to you, Clare, to spend a day with an old gentleman—most of it in the train—but I was delighted with my outing. We did not get home till long after midnight and that seemed the most amusing thing of all—I was very young.
Kitty came to us at Christmas for a few days. She was going to spend most of the holidays in London with the Eltons—it would be more amusing than Hinkleton, she thought. She brought an invitation to me to go up and spend a weekend with the Eltons while she was there. They were going to have a dance and they thought I might like to come. It was kind of them to ask me, but I never felt at home with the Eltons and their friends—I was too old for them, too old at twenty-three. They were a bright, merry family, too bright to be natural, I thought. Their conversation was too “modern,” their jokes too personal. I decided to stay at home with father, and I think Kitty was relieved at my decision. I was no credit to Kitty in the Eltons’ society.
My friendship with Mr. Senture amused Kitty. She could not understand how I liked to sit for hours in the cold church, taking rubbings of the brasses for him while he talked and made little sketches of the columns and windows for his book. I suppose it was rather a strange taste for a girl of my age, but life at Hinkleton was so dull and uneventful that anything out of the ordinary was an excitement to me.
The winter passed—all things pass if you can only be patient enough, even the longest winter—and in the spring Kitty came home from school, finished. It seemed right that Kitty should come in spring, for she was spring personified, she was laughter and flowers and the singing of birds. She made my twenty-three years look like senility.
Father brightened a little when Kitty came home, he chaffed her quite in the old manner, chaffed her about her new, pretty clothes and her grown-up hair. He made her sing to him in the evenings and she was always glad to sing. She had a pretty voice and had been well-trained by good masters. I was glad to see father so happy for now it would not be so hard to leave him. I was sure that when Garth came home he would want me to leave father and go to the Manor as his wife. Everything seemed to be waiting for Garth, there was a kind of breathless suspense in the soft spring air and the flowers seemed to bloom brighter—it was all because Garth was coming home soon now, coming back to me as he had promised—I had kept my part of the unspoken pact, I was waiting for him.