The Loving Spirit Part 30

Afterwards Jennifer remembered this picture of him, his head thrown back, his chin in the air, and a queer fluttering smile on his lips.

'Germany's started fighting Russia,' he said.

Jennifer went on with her painting.

6.

At first the war made very little difference to Jennifer's life. They came back to London after the holiday at Swanage, and by the end of September term had started and she was at school again. Grown-up people were making a great fuss, as they always did, and talking very big. During the autumn evenings Jennifer used to bring down her homework to a corner of the drawing-room - there was never a fire in her bedroom of course - and as she bit the end of her penholder and rested her head on her hands, trying to concentrate on the preparation before her, she would listen to the conversation round the fire in the centre of the room. Grandmamma had pinned a map of Europe on the wall, and this she dotted over with little flags to mark the advance of the enemy.

Grandmamma and Mother bought great b.a.l.l.s of red wool and started to knit socks. Jennifer began a scarf, but she left it after a week.

It seemed to Jennifer that the war had made a new interest for grown-up people; they had started a fresh pretence of being important and were inwardly enjoying it, for all their serious words. It was amusing to watch them send away parcels to the trenches every week.

Grandmamma's question, 'Well, dear, have you forgotten anything?' and Mother's reply, 'No, Mamma, it's all here. Potted meat, biscuits, tinned sardines, and tobacco.'

She spoke briskly, and tying her parcel she snapped the string with a new pair of sharp bright scissors. It was only a game after all, thought Jennifer, watching her from behind an arithmetic book.

Gradually the men boarders began to disappear from Maple Street, and they would come in one day in khaki, looking very tall and different. The women could not do enough for them then.

Everyone left off sugar in their tea, and Mother, not to be outdone, refused to touch any b.u.t.ter. Jennifer shrugged her shoulders. This war would not affect her, she touched neither.

She was only a little girl who took no part in conversations and must learn lessons every day.

On her way to school in St John's Wood she watched soldiers drilling in Regent's Park. Sometimes they marched in long columns in the streets, their arms swinging in time to their feet.

She liked the songs they sang.

Who were you with last night

Out in the pale moonlight,

It wasn't your sister,

It wasn't your Ma . . .

Often they called out to the children in perambulators wheeled by superior nannies in blue veils - 'Hullo, baby, how's nurse?'

They were jolly and full of fun these soldiers, they didn't care about Grandmamma knitting ugly socks, or Mother posting deadly parcels.

Who - who - who's your lady friend,

Who's the little girlie by your side?

They shouted this out with a roar, and Jennifer halted on the pavement, swinging her satchel behind her, and waved her hand to the men who waved back to her. These men understood how stupid it was to be serious.

Jennifer skipped along on her way to school, and that morning she realized that this war was something besides a string of words in the newspapers, it was something that could touch people. They were having a drawing-lesson in her form, and the mistress was Mrs James, a patient, ineffectual woman without authority.

In the middle of the lesson when Jennifer was behaving badly, standing on one leg and waving a ruler in the air, the wretched mistress calling to her to be good, someone came to the door, and said - 'Please, Mrs James, Miss Hanc.o.c.k wishes to see you.'

The room clear, the children indulged in an orgy of freedom, Jennifer leading the crowd over desks in a wild stampede. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour pa.s.sed, and still the mistress did not return.

Jennifer seized the chalk and drew a feeble picture of a donkey on the blackboard, with 'Mrs James' written underneath. The children screamed with laughter. Flushed with success she rubbed it out, and was about to start another when the door opened and one of the elder girls appeared.

'Will you please be quiet, all of you,' she said gravely, 'and sit down at your desks. You can start your homework. Mrs James won't come back this morning. She has had a telegram to say her husband has been killed. She's gone away in a taxi.'

The room was suddenly silent.

The children sat down at their desks and opened their books without a word. The chalk fell from Jennifer's hand. She looked at the pencil on the mistress's desk that Mrs James had laid aside hastily when she was summoned. She pictured her hurrying along the corridor to the study, wiping her chalky hands on a handkerchief, and opening the door, and seeing Miss Hanc.o.c.k with a telegram in her hands.

A nervous, plain little girl called Lucy began to cry noisily from her desk at the back of the room.

'Oh! it's beastly,' whispered Jennifer, 'beastly . . . beastly.' And she remembered Harold in his uniform, waving to her from the window of a packed train at Waterloo Station, and she was afraid.

Children often stayed away from school now for a week, and when they returned they wore black bands round their arms. This meant they had lost somebody at the front. The food was horrid at the boarding-house.The bread was a dark brown colour, there was no jam, and margarine instead of b.u.t.ter. They had rice now, no potatoes, and stuff called swedes instead of cabbage.

If pudding was sour it was sweetened by little white tablets named saccharine. Jennifer began to forget what the old food had been like. She forgot also what sort of suits men wore in the days before the war. Everyone had khaki now. It was difficult to imagine anything else.

She wondered whether Daddy would have gone to the war if he had not died. She tried to remember his face and his figure, but all she could ever see was the tangled hair on the pillow. Even his photograph failed to remind her. He belonged to another time, long, long ago. There was something pathetic in the fact that he would never know about the war. His infinite wisdom dwindled in her eyes, and she saw him smaller than he had been before, smaller and shrinking in value, a pale shadow compared to the living stalwart presence of Harold and Willie. Already she herself was older, superior to him.

He was a tombstone in a churchyard now, and the churchyard itself a far, forgotten place.

Jennifer pushed the photograph carelessly behind the ornament on the mantelpiece, and ran down the stairs, her satchel on her shoulder, humming 'Tipperary', a song he had never sung.

Harold was killed in March.

She returned home from school in time for tea, and directly the front door was opened she knew what had happened.The servant's expression was scared, and she fumbled with the handle of the door, avoiding Jennifer's eyes. There was a man's hat lying in the hall. She looked into the dining-room and saw that tea had not been laid. One of the boarders came out of the drawing-room, and as soon as she saw Jennifer, her mouth worked queerly, and she stepped back again, closing the door softly. The rims of her eyes had been red.

A pain came into Jennifer's heart. She must not let the servant know that she had guessed.

'Where's Mother?' she asked.

'Upstairs with your granny - she's - she's not very well, I think,' said the woman, and slipped away silently to the bas.e.m.e.nt. For a moment Jennifer hesitated, wondering whether she could creep from the house and run somewhere far, run so that she would never have to find out whether this thing was true. Terrified lest she should meet someone who would tell her she went along to the downstairs lavatory, and locked the door. No one would find her here. She knelt on the floor and prayed. 'Please, G.o.d, don't let it be Harold or Willie, please G.o.d, let it be just my imagination.' Then she rose and waited, her ear to the door, listening for footsteps.

In about twenty minutes she heard a slow, heavy footfall descending the stairs. It moved across the hall and went into the drawing-room.Then the door closed.All was silent. Jennifer knew that it was Grandmamma. Stealthily she opened the lavatory door and stepped into the hall. It was no use, she could not wait any longer. She must know the truth. She stole up the staircase to her mother's bedroom, and with her heart thumping and her hands clammy with sweat, she crept inside.

The room was quite dark, and the curtains were drawn. Faintly Jennifer could make out the figure of her mother on the bed. She stood by the door, holding her breath, terrified that she would be seen. The blind flapped against the window pane. There was a little sound from the bed, and the figure moved.

Mother spoke, in a thick swollen voice that she had never used before.

'Is that Jenny?'

'Yes, Mother.'

There was a silence, and she waited, her heart thumping ... thumping; her throat dry.

Her legs suddenly began to tremble.

'Harold's been killed, darling ...' the voice trailed off, smothered and lost.

'Yes' - whispered Jennifer. 'Yes - I know.'

For one moment she longed to go to the figure on the bed and creep next to her, holding her very close, making by this humble effort of consolation the beginning of friends.h.i.+p, love, and understanding. She did not know that the whole of their future might depend upon this moment.

Jennifer was too shy.

She stole from the silent room and crouched in the pa.s.sage outside, the scalding tears blinding her eyes, running down into her mouth . . .

Jennifer woke with a start. It seemed as though the gun had sounded next to her, close to her ear. Once again the report rang out, shaking the very walls of the house with its vibration. She sat up in bed and reached for her dressing-gown. This signal to which she was so accustomed never failed to waken within her a smouldering whisper of dread, a cold senseless touch of babyish fear. Then the maroons began. Screaming, whistling, they lifted their voices, filling the air with a hideous cry of panic, stirring the slow and sleepy part of her to action, causing her to jump from her bed and run crazily to the door, stuffing her fingers in her ears. Already the three servants were tumbling down the staircase from their cheerless rooms beneath the roof. Their figures were clumsy and grotesque. Impossible to connect the cook, the martinet of the boarding-house kitchen, with this lumpy, moon-faced woman, clutching her flannel dressing-gown to her with trembling hands. There was something painfully intimate about seeing her thus, something almost shocking. Jennifer smiled politely, but avoided her eyes. Mother appeared on the landing, helping Grandmamma, a monstrous, horrible figure in a red dressing-gown.

The boarders came out of their rooms.The women in various stages of undress, hair screwed anyhow, grease at the corners of their noses, and the only two men of the boarding-house who were left, old Mr Hobson, kicking his stomach before him as he walked, and Mr Weymes who had only one lung and could not fight, his long red nose sniffing the air, his pale eyes seeming to apologize for the fact, 'Really, you know, it isn't my fault that I'm here.'

They went down into the cellar, where campstools and rugs were already prepared, and huddled together they seemed a preposterous little group, the women nervous, the men over-smiling, their faces yellow and strange in the dim candlelight.

Jennifer sat next to her mother, her teeth chattering. Funny - she wasn't afraid but - but she could not keep her body from shaking like this, nor her teeth from rattling. They went on, in spite of her efforts to control them. It was the silence that was unbearable, the straining her ears to listen, and wondering what was happening up in the sky above.

'Hark! did you hear that?'

One of the boarders spoke sharply.

The air was filled with sound now. First the terrible splitting echo of the Hampstead gun, followed by the low thunder and steady rumbling of the others. Jennifer closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her tummy.

It was something that would never stop, that would go on for ever, that she would know to the end of her days.

While the guns paused for a moment it seemed there came a high thin humming, steady and unmistakable, the hum of distant bees, crowded together in a flock, moving slowly. Somebody whispered in the darkness, 'There are the Gothas - they're right above our heads.'

Once more the guns broke out, deafening the world with the explosion.

It seemed to Jennifer that she had sat in the cellar from the beginning of things, that never, since she could remember, had there been anything in her life but this. One day, so she was told, it would be ended. One day there would be no war.

Now she was twelve, she was old, she understood.

The war had killed Harold and Willie. Once they were alive, laughing with her, playing with her, she had touched them, knowing them to be true, then all that was left of them were two telegrams, two letters from strange officers. However much she called to them in lonely moments, they would not come. Soon their photographs would seem unreal, like the photograph of Daddy.They would be dead people. She herself, as a grown-up woman, would glance towards them casually, seeing their faces younger than hers, faded, curiously old-fas.h.i.+oned - 'Yes, those were my brothers.'

They would not even have the reality of an old toy, found in a forgotten cupboard, dusty and reproachful.

The guns were quieter now, from time to time there came a low rumble and a fierce short clamour, then they ceased again, muttering distantly a grumble and a threat.

Jennifer saw herself growing up and leaving Daddy and the boys behind, pa.s.sing beyond them, to strange fancies and new thoughts, remembering them in quiet moments as belonging to a list of discarded things, children's books at the back of a shelf, the ill.u.s.trations torn, boxes of cracked paints, an armless teddy bear - jerseys she had outgrown.

And Plyn, a queer blurred vision of the sea, high hills, and a path across the fields.

The horror of growing up, the horror of no longer laughing at really funny things, nor caring to run wildly, forgetting to pretend you are a boy, walking dully instead of slas.h.i.+ng at trees with your sword. Never seeing again the fun of kicking autumn leaves in the gutter, stamping in puddles, banging a stick along railings, turning chairs and dust-sheets into camps, making food out of twigs and gra.s.s and pulling the petals off daisies for potatoes. No more to stroll hands in pockets, humming a tune, sniffing adventure round the corner.

Jumbled and confused the thoughts scattered themselves in Jennifer's mind as she crouched on her campstool, her eyes closed, her teeth chattering. Soon she would be old with the noise of the guns in her ears, London her home, Daddy, the boys, and Plyn the dead dreams of a forgotten year, and running by her side the shadow of a little girl who wanted to stay young.

Everything was silent now, the rumbling and the muttering had ceased. Suddenly, with the suggestion of a whisper, like a faint far echo, came the sweet m.u.f.fled call of a bugle.

Two little notes, twice repeated, losing themselves in the distant streets.

'All clear' . . . 'All clear' . . .

7.

Jennifer stayed at school until she was seventeen. She was twelve at the end of the war, and during the next five years she developed rapidly in mind and body, throwing aside her old childish shyness and timidity and becoming aware of her own latent will-power. At school she worked when she chose to give her mind to it, but remained throughout curiously detached as though she considered education merely a way of spending her time. Her teachers could make little of her.

Jennifer left school at the end of the summer term of 1923, and after the annual dreary holiday at the seaside, Felixstowe this year, she found herself back at No. 7 Maple Street with the prospect of empty days before her. Grandmamma, who merely sat in a chair in the drawing-room now and directed operations from there, advised her to help her mother with the business of running the boarding-house, and to be thankful that owing to her own generosity there was no need for her to tramp the streets looking for work.

'At the same time, Jennifer, I trust you realize what a lucky girl you have been all these years, receiving that splendid education, treating this home as your own, and now at the age of seventeen enjoying such liberty as your mother never had at your age, I can a.s.sure you.'

Jennifer glanced up from her book. She had grown so used to these speeches that they had little effect on her.

'I don't know about the liberty,' she said. 'The only difference is that I go about in the tubes and buses alone and Mother didn't. Otherwise I should think I lead very much the same sort of life.'