HER LEGACY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 236, 5 October 1936, Page 15

HER LEGACY.

By P. HOOLE-JACKSON,

THE ■ thin woman in the faded coat descended from the bus and went slowly down the road. She heard the bell tinkle behind her. Then the vehicle, with its chattering load of passengers, swept away, its windows glittering in the sunlight. She was glad to be away from the voices. She did not resent them: she was used to rubbing shoulders daily with her fellow men and women. But this was different. She was living in the past with happy ghosts, and she wished to avoid physical contacts. Jn the poplar trees that lined the road she walked along, the birds were singing. Labourers were still working in the fields, the afternoon sunshine making their implements glitter. From a meadow came the sound of a girl's voice singing iti a clear contralto. By the door of a cottage an old man was sitting, spectacles tilted forward on his nose, reading a newspaper; from one trouser leg protruded a wooden stump. He lifted his hand and. gave a halfmilitary salute, smiling at her as she passed. Perhaps it was only his beard that made him look old; there were many cripples in the land. She walked slowly. This was the last day slio would walk that road, she wanted to drink every scrap of the scene in, to impress it 011 her memory. She would never lie able to return. Everyone hud been kind. The old woman where she lodged had mothered her. people dropping in had shaken hands and dropped their village reserve when they knew who she was. Little gifts of fruit and vegetables had been brought in neat baskets and left for her.

The world was a queer place—hard and kind; gentle and savage. When all that was best seemed trampled on for ever, some deed came shilling out of the darkness and lighted the gloom.

She passed through a tiny hamlet and two children came running towards her. One held out a grubby hand. She dropped a coin in each tiny palm and passed on. A* woman, scrubbing the white doorstep of a neat brick house with spotless window sills and steps, looked up and smiled. The road bent in a gentle curve, swept through an avenue of new, bright young trees. Their bark glittered in the afternoon sunlight; their leaves were fresh and beautiful, the road newly made and pleasant. Beyond, flowering shrubs made a bright patch in the green of the countryside. It was all so beautiful. Tears came to her eyes. When she was old she would remember it. Remember the peasants and that girl singing, remember the days in the little cottage with its box of geraniums on the sill and the fuchsia's blood-like flowers at the gate. The owls at night, the larks in the sunny sky, the road whose dust she had once bent and kissed because feet she had loved had trodden it many times in the years that were gone. The dust had been moist and sweet and her act unseen. She walked between the flowers and the bright bushes. On a low ridge the smoke from a little village rose from between young trees to the sky and vanished in the gentle, windless air. Far away, on lower land, she could see the roofs and pinnacles of a city; they seemed to bejong to a fairy town. The starlings chuckled in the bushes; a robin hopped about the tiny beds of flowers; an aeroplane, like a shining bird, crossing the distant heavens so far away that the noise of its engine was muted to the faintest whisper. From a distant road came the low hum of motors. There must have been many days like this when he trod these roads or rested by the side of the wide, grassy ditches. Only one thought disturbed her peace —if he knew how he had been betrayed, what then? Perhaps he knew and might understand . . . the world needed so much understanding; the mind and soul must be open, broad and generous, if it were one's desire to see clearly and lovins'y- , . . , A sound rolled across the countryside —low, heavy, rumbling. It died away and returned, and so fell and rose again and again like heavy waves battering a rocky shore. The woman's hand went to her throat; her face paled. She knew the sound —guns. Of > course —they were practising near the great quarries to the south; the woman she was staying with had told her so, warned her to keep away. For a moment she had thought — but that was foolishness. He, too, would have heard that sound.

The woman drank in the scene; let her ears catch that distant, rolling roar; let her eyes devour every tree, flower, pathway and stone. She lifted theni to the sky and gazed into the milky blue dome above. The sun was sinking down the last beautiful stretch of sky. one frail white cloud, trailing diaphanous wisps across the blue, hung in the dome of heaven, seemingly motionless. From the village came the tinkle of bells. Sheep cropped the grass of an adjacent meadow, cows stood in the shallows of a stream. He must have loved all this. He had always hated cities, the imprisoning houses, the lost fields. They "were to have lived in a place like this . . . but life smashed one's dream, or was it that men bent life to wrong ends and broke the dreams themselves? The heat was cooling. A faint breeze stirred the leaves of the bushes, seeming to make them whisper; the poplar leaves shivered like wisps of silver; bees were homing with heavy loads, the gold pollen shining on their tiny thighs.

She seated herself. She was very tired. Life had tired her since liis going. Every day the same tasks nuist be done, .the body driven, the heart kept up, the soul persuaded that, in the end, it would be worth while. To fail to believe that was the end. Some she had known had broken on the wheel, made their own end. But she shrank from that- Better life in her little room, the grind of work in the slave-driven office, where she strove to satisfy lynx-eyed officials, who, in turn, feared * for their own jobs, and ■drove those below theni on relentlessly. Was this what had been planned one cosmic morning long ago when earth lay steaming arid strange beasts began to crawl from her morasses ? Better not play with thoughts like that . . . but reading made the mind ask questions, and one must read and learn; perhaps light was given to understand in time. "Suddenly she knelt and kissed the plain cross at the head of that tiny bed of flowers; the words "'Private William Aston . . . killed in action . . ." blurred before her eyes. She wiped them hastily and glanced round. She mustn't spoil it.

(SHORT STORY.)

Her vision cleared. She saw all the rows and rows of crosses • . . there seemed millions . . . there were only a few thousands . . . only . . . yes, only, compared with all the million dead who lay under crosses iike these. English —- German - —■ French — Indians from the jungle lands, tall Australians, brown men from the desert colonies of France. So queer . . . these had scarcely known why they fought and died. The earth's great ones had excused their use because this was the "war to end war, to save civilisation." Anything, they had said, was worth while to accomplish that. So men had died and women had given, and she had lost wifehood, motherhood, and her mate, and tried to think of his tortured, ruined life and sacrilical death as part of the great price of peace. Ah, yes, some soon forgot . . . forgot she had heard a man in the train saying. So long ago! With the graves so fresh, with thousands of homes with vacant spaces, with men still failing and dying because of injuries received or health ruined. Ah, yes, some soon forgot . . . forgot the nights when villages were smashed down into the mud under a hail of flaying iron that stormed from the'sky and spumed up the earth . . . the bodies of little children lying by the wayside . . • the young men who gave their yoiltli, life and limbs because of some quarrel of the men they paid to rule tliein. What did it matter? What did anything matter? Her man was dead; her life was ruined. If the new generations could not be loyal to the dead, courageous enough to face the words "pacifist and coward," then let theni pay ... let the young, red-lipped women lose their men and have hell loosed out of the sky on theni and their babes. Damn them! What right had they to make the sacrifice those crosses stood for into worthless waste of fine lives? Let them taste the bitterness of anxious days, of wakeful nights, of seeing the eternal lists of dead that filled the newspapers, the sick feeling in the heart as these were scanned for a name. Let them learn what living in the foiil mud, where headless, limbless bodies slowly sank into the foul earth, was like. Fools . , . fools • . . Again she wept. A man limped towards her; his hand was on her shoulder. One of the guardians of the great war-cemetery. He spoke no word, just pressed her thin shoulder and passed on. She rose, smiled, thanked him. "I'm better now," she said. "I've saved to come here. . . Of course, I've been helped as well. J couldn't manage it before, and I didn't want to come with a party."

Again she pressed his hand and walked away. He stood watching her. So many came. He, too, wondered if the world were mad. Had German women no love for their fathers and sons, a love beyond that of selfish national aims? God help the world if her people would not be brothers in spite of these fools who ruled. The woman passed down the avenue, back to the little French village, into her rooms. To-night she must pack. In the morning she would travel by rail through stations he had known. The scars of the land were healed . . . but all the trees were young; the villages were new. Loss, death, ruin and desolation were eloquently expressed by this. England had not known this. She crept to lier room. Madame followed her, found her kneeling, pressed a tiny rosary into her hand. "You are not of the faith, madame," she said softly. "But we are one in this ... I, too. lost husband . . . and three sons. Keep the little cross, madame. My prayers shall follow it." They clasped each other tightly. God knows how women are so brave! Hell smiles because they arc so foolish. Will they always give? The two women talked of this as they sat side by side at the window watching the red glory of the sunset fade across the fields. Sitting in thr; trenches that had seared the earth not far away men had watched the same glorious sight . . . and turned to face a night of death and terror once moj'c.