Chapter VIII

John waited a little as he had said he would. Two days later, keeping his silence, he returned to Oxford. In her first encounter with Mary, Dorothy knew that she had lost. She was no equal, she realized it, to that serene and quiet woman who gave her smile for smile and in whose eyes the smile still lingered when in her own it had faded away.

It was not before the latter end of July that the first whisper of war came to Yarningdale. Conflagrations might burst forth in Europe; the world might be set alight. It mattered little to them at Yarningdale farm. Whatever might happen, the cows had still to be milked, the crops to be gathered, the stacks to be built. How did it effect them what an Emperor might say, or a little gathering of men elect to do? They could not stop the wheat from ripening. They could not stop the earth from giving back a thousandfold that which man had given to the earth.

"War!" exclaimed Mr. Peverell. "Men beant such fools as that! 'Tis all a lot of talk to make the likes of us think mighty fine of them that says they stopped it. We'm have taxes to pay and if those what are in the Government doant make a noise about something, we might begin awonderin' what they did to earn 'em."

It was all very well to talk like that and likely enough it sounded in their parlor kitchen at Yarningdale. But there were other thoughts than these in Mary's mind and not all the confident beliefs of peace amongst those who had nothing to gain and all to lose, could shake her from them.

When once it had become a daily topic of speculation and newspapers in Yarningdale were being read every morning, she formed her own opinions as to what would happen out of the subconscious impulses of her mind.

Deep in her heart, she knew there would be war, a mighty war, a devastating war. Something the spirit of her being had sense of revealed to her that this was the inevitable fruit of that tree of civilization men had trained to the hour of bearing. This was its season. War was its yield. With blood and iron the crop of men's lives must be gathered. Inevitably must the possessive passion turn upon itself and rend the very structure it had made. The homes that had been built with greed, by greed must be destroyed. This, as they had made it, was the everlasting cycle Nature demanded of life. Energy must be consumed to give out energy. To inherit and possess was not enough. It was no more than weeds accumulating and clogging in the mill-wheel. If man had no ambition other than to possess; if in his spirit it was not the emotion of the earth to give, then the great plow of war must drive its furrow through the lives of all of them.

In some untraceable fashion, Mary felt that the whole of her life had been building up to this. Somehow it seemed the consummation of all she had tried and failed to do. At the supreme moment of her life, she had been lacking in faith of her ideals. She had lost the clear sight of her vision. The whole world had done that and now it was faced with the stern justice of retribution.

There must be war. She knew there must. Men and women, all of them had failed. What could there be but the devastating horror of war to cleanse the evil and rid of the folly of weeds the idle fallows of their lives?

"Well, if it is to be war," said the Vicar one day, having tea with Mary and Mrs. Peverell in the parlor kitchen, "Germany's not the nation of shrewd men we've thought her. If she insists upon it," he added, his spirit rising from meekness with a glitter in his eye, "she'll have forgotten we're the richest nation in the world. On the British possessions the sun never sets. She'll have forgotten to take that into account."

Every man was talking in this fashion. She read the papers. It was there as well. Long articles appeared describing the wealth of the German colonies and what their acquisition would mean to England if she were victorious on the sea. Extracts were printed from the German papers exposing her lust and greed because, with envious eyes upon the British Colonies she was already counting the spoils of victory.

There in the quiet and the seclusion at Yarningdale, Mary with many another woman those days, not conscious enough of vision to speak their thoughts, saw the world gone mad in its passion to possess.

It seemed to matter little to her at whose door the iniquity of lighting the firebrand lay. War had been inevitable whoever had declared it. The cry of broken treaties and sullied honor stirred but little in her heart as she heard it. What mattered it if a man was true to his word when all through the years he had been false to the very earth he dwelt on?

That cry of sullied honor through the land was as unreal to her as was the cry of sullied virtue that ever had conscripted women to the needs of men. The principles of possession could never be established with honor, the functions of life could never be circumscribed by virtue. It was not honorable to gain and keep. It was not virtuous to waste and wither.

War was inevitable. By the limitations of their own vision men had made it so. There was horror but no revolt in her mind when, on the morning of that fourth of August, she read the text of the British Ultimatum.

"They must give back now," she muttered to herself as she stood by her dressing table gazing down at a photograph of John in its frame. "They must all give back, sons, homes--everything. They've kept too long. It had to come."

A few days passed and then three letters came for her, one swift upon another. Each one as she received it, so certain had her subconscious knowledge been, she read almost without emotion. The announcement of war had not staggered her. She felt the ache of pain, as when the barren cows were driven out of the farmyard to go to the market, but since she had been at Yarningdale, knew well enough the unerring and merciless power of retribution in Nature upon those who clogged the mill-wheel of life, who broke the impetus of its ceaseless revolutions whereby no speed was left to fling off the water drops of created energy.

Each letter as she received it, she divined its contents. The first was from John.

"DEAR OLD MATER--"

She heard the ring of vitality in that.

"They're all going from here. If I cock on a year or two, they'll take me. I sort of know you'd like me to. Do you know why? Do you remember once my asking you something about a couple of moles the hay knives had chopped? I was thinking of it yesterday, I don't know why, and that made me realize you'd understand. Do you remember what you said about Death, that sometimes it was just a gift when things were worth while? Well--good Lord! It's worth while now, not that the blighters are going to kill me. I've got as much chance as any one of getting through. But you are glad I'm going, aren't you? You're not going to try to stop me. They say the Army's big enough with the French on one side and the Russians on the other to knock Germany into a cocked hat in three months. But I must get out and have one pot at 'em."

All this she had divined as her fingers tore open the envelope, but never had she dared to hope that the impulse of it would have come from his memory of what she had said to him those days when he was in the fashioning of her hands. This, she had made him. She clutched the letter in her hands and held it against her face and thanked God she had not wholly failed. The next two letters came together by the same post on the following day. She knew their handwriting. No envelope could have concealed their contents from her eyes. Liddiard's she opened first.

"MY DEAR MARY--"

"I suppose John has written to you of this preposterous suggestion of his that he should volunteer, and I know you will do all you can to prevent it. To begin with he is not of age. He will have to lie about it before they can accept him and, secondly, War is a job for soldiers and the Army is there to see it through. If they rush him out without proper training as I hear it is likely they may do, it's unfair on him; it's unfair on all of us. We've paid for our Army as a nation and now it's got its work to do. Calling for recruits now as they did in the South African war is not fair to the country. These young boys will go because they're hysterical with excitement for adventure, but where will the country be if they don't come back?

"I rely on you, my dear Mary, to do all you can to dissuade him from this mad project of his. With all the knowledge that one day he is to be master of Wenlock, I know he still looks reliantly towards you in that little farmhouse. Do all you can, my dear. We cannot lose him, neither you nor I."

With a hard line about her lips which, had she seen it, would have reminded her of her sister Jane, she laid the letter down and picked up that from Dorothy.

"Please--please don't let him go," it cried out from the written page to her. "I can't stop him. I've tried. He won't listen to me. I learnt those few days while I stayed at Yarningdale how he will listen to you. He belongs to me. He told me so. Please--please don't let him go."

She picked up the other letter and stood looking at them together, side by side, then dropped them from her hand and from the bosom of her dress drew out the slip of paper John had written on and pressed it once more against her cheek.

Downstairs in the parlor kitchen with the pen and ink that Mr. Peverell used when he kept his farm accounts, Mary sat down and wrote to Liddiard.

"If I could do everything, I would do nothing," she wrote. "This is what I made him. I would not unmake him if I could. You must give. I must give. We must all give now. We've kept too long. Don't you know what this war is? It's not England fighting for her rights or Germany for her needs. It's Nature revolting against man. You've made your chapels and your tithe barns for yourselves. The earth is going to shake them into the dust again. If I could do everything, I would do nothing. He takes my heart with him when he goes. But there is nothing I can do. We must all give now--at last--women as well as men. These things that happen now--these are the consequences of passion."