IT was early in April. A soft fleck of clouds lay over the sky, so thin, so rifted, that the sinking lights of afternoon bloomed their hollows with cowslip. A misty warmth hung over the fields, drawing up the perfume of violets and harrowed earth, of the soft clay-mud of the lanes, not yet dry after a shower and with puddles lying in the ruts like yellow milk.
Sunday Street was in stillness, like a village in a dream. Thin spines of wood-smoke rose from its chimneys, blue against the grey dapple of the clouds. The chink of a hammer came from the Forge, but so muffled, so rhythmic that it seemed part of the silence. The watery atmosphere intensified that effect of dream and illusion which the village had that evening. Through it the cottages and farms showed with a watery clearness and at the same time a strange air of distance and unreality. There was flooding light, yet no sunshine, distinctness of every line in eaves and tiling, of every daffodil and primrose in garden-borders, and yet that peculiar sense as of something far away, intangible, a mirage painted on a cloud. It was thus that the vision of his home might rise before the stretched, abnormal sight of a dying man, a simulacrum, a fetch....
Thyrza Beatup sat beside the willow pond at the corner of the Street, on the trunk of a fallen tree. In her arms she held her baby, asleep in a shawl. She felt warm and content and rather sleepy. In her pocket was Tom’s last [265] letter from France, but she did not read it, for she knew it by heart.... “I think of you always, you dear little creature, you and baby—even when my mind is full of the things out here, and this great battle which is seemingly the biggest there’s ever been.” ... “How I wonder when I’ll get another leave. I reckon baby ull have grown a bit and you’ll be just the same.” ... “I shut my eyes and I can see your face; reckon I love you more every time I think of you and I think of you day and night, so you can guess all the love that makes.” ... Tender phrases floated in and out of her mind, and then she smiled as she remembered a funny story Tom had told her about a chap in the A.S.C....
She drew the baby closer into her arms, looking down at his little sleeping face, which she thought was growing more and more like Tom’s. She drooped her eye-lids and in the mist of her lashes half seemed to see Tom’s face there in the crook of her elbow, where it had so often been, turning towards her breast. Poor Tom! his head was not so softly pillowed these nights ... and as suddenly she pictured him lying on the bare, foul ground, his head on his haversack, his cheeks unshaved, his body verminous, his limbs all aching with cold and stiffness—he, her man, her darling, whom she would have had rest so sweetly and so cleanly, with nothing but sweetness and comfort for the body that she loved—then a sudden flame of rebellion blazed up in her heart, and its simplicity was scarred with questions—Why was this terrible War allowed to be? How was it that women could let their men go to endure its horrors? Did anyone in England ever yet know what it was these boys had to suffer? Oh, stop it, stop it! for the sake of the boys out there, and for the boys who have still to go ... save at least a few straight limbs, a few unbroken hearts.
She clenched her hands, and little Will moaned against [266] her breast, and as she felt his little fists b............