Chapter XX Waiting
Autumn gave place to winter and winter to spring. Another summer came, and people began to resign themselves to the hitherto almost incredible idea of the war lasting over another winter. That winter passed away and the interminable struggle went on.
But even after two years the texture of life had not very greatly altered in England. Conscription had not yet come in; there was no food control; motor cars could be used for purposes of pleasure or convenience; the chief opportunities for the work of women in connection with the war were in nursing, and for girls in government clerkships. It was not for another full year that country life in England seemed quite a different thing from what it had been before the war. The change had come by degrees and its last stages were passed through much more quickly than the first. In the summer of 1916 it was still possible to live in a country house without being much affected by the war.
Lady Brent lived on at Royd Castle to all outward appearances in much the same way as she had lived there since her widowhood. There came to be fewer servants, and her work in connection with the estate increased, for her bailiff had joined up, and she had not tried to replace him. She did much of his work herself, with the help of the estate staff, and perhaps welcomed the increased responsibility, for her life during those two first years was sad enough, with all that she had lived for taken from her just at the time when the hopes of years were to have been put to the test.
Harry had written to his mother within a few days of Wilbraham’s return from London, and again from time to time to her and to his grandmother and to Wilbraham; also to the children. But his letters contained very little news about himself. They were posted in London and gave no address to which answers could be sent. After some months there was a long silence, and then he wrote from Egypt, where his regiment had been sent. After that he wrote mostly to his mother. He told her more about his life, but never anything that would identify him.
The letters sent from Egypt were subject to censorship, but they arrived at Royd in envelopes bearing a London postmark and with no label or stamp on them. Yet they were addressed in Harry’s writing. He must have left a supply of them behind him.
The clue to all this was no doubt a strong and considered determination to carry out his plan without risk of interference. The message carried to him by Viola had brought letters from him, but that was as far as he would go; and perhaps he would have written in any case. After the first one had been received Lady Brent wrote to Mr. Gulliver and told him not to pursue his inquiries. Harry must have his own way. As he had written, after it had seemed that he had made up his mind not even to do that, so perhaps he would some day relent and let them write to him. But nearly two years went by and he had not done so.
In the long sad conversations they had about him at Royd during the early months, they arrived at some sort of conclusions, helped by an occasional expression in his letters. He had gone out of his own world, and as long as his time of probation lasted he would keep out of it. He was not likely to think himself degraded by serving in the ranks, but they came to understand that he was keeping his actual condition hidden. There was nothing in his letters, which would be read by his superior officers, to indicate it, and before he left England they were more about Royd than about himself. There was never very much about himself. Every time he wrote he said he was well and happy; but it peeped through that the change in his life was not without its effect upon him. How could it be otherwise, brought up as he had been? He was learning in a hard school; but he was learning, and flashes of his old boyish brightness broke through the reticence which he seemed to have imposed upon himself. They came to look upon it as a time of probation for him, and to believe that so he looked upon it himself. Sometimes they thought they saw signs of expectation. He was working for and looking forward to something. Viola, said Wilbraham to himself. His commission to be won in the field, said Lady Brent. He wanted no help towards it, as might have been given by finding him out, which should not have been difficult after he had left England, and pulling strings. When he had gained his commission, by his own unaided effort, and by no reliance upon his place in the world outside the army, then he would come back to them. It was hard on Lady Brent to wait, and to lift no finger, and harder still on his mother. But he must be trusted. They had directed him through his childhood, and youth, and now he would brook no direction. The only consolation they had was that his upbringing had not taken from him a man’s initiative and determination. The experiment seemed to have been justified; but with a greater knowledge of the world beforehand he might not have thought it necessary so to cut his life in two. They were paying a heavy price.
Wilbraham, who had more of a clue to Harry’s actions than the others, was not without irritation against what at times he set down as mere hard undutifulness. He had great sympathy with Lady Brent, who had so wonderfully sunk her own feelings in acquiescing in the boy’s unreasonable determination. She could almost certainly have traced him had she wished to do so. And Wilbraham, at least, knew that he must have been told at the very beginning that he would not be interfered with. Why could he not then have softened the hardship to those who loved him? Granted that the new love that had come into his life was so much more to him than the old; but it was not like him to throw over the old altogether, and indeed his letters showed that he had not done so.
After a time his irritation died away. It could not be so distressing to Harry to be cut off from Royd as it was to them to be cut off from him, but his letters showed that he felt it, and especially the few letters that he wrote to little Jane, in which he seemed to be reaching out after the untroubled innocent happiness of his youth, and the beauty and freedom that had lain all about it. It was the old Harry that appeared in those letters, and here and there in others; the new Harry became more and more evident otherwise—a man doing a man’s hard work in hard and uncongenial surroundings, much older than his years, where in some ways he had been so much younger.
He was hard on himself as well as hard upon them. They had given him happiness in his sheltered youth, but the plunge he had taken into a life different from any that could have been anticipated for him can have been none the easier on that account. The ugliness and crudity that other boys might in some measure have been prepared for would bear very hardly upon him, and he would have to fight through it alone. Wilbraham came to see that he might shrink from mixing it up with his home life. Perhaps he was afraid that he might weaken in it if he was subject to any pressure. It would surely have been open to him to have had at least a few days at home before he went abroad; but he had not taken the opportunity.
Had he blamed them for bringing him up in that seclusion? There was nothing in his letters to show it. But it must have been very soon revealed to him how exceptional his life had been, and how much he had missed of what other boys had had. He would not always be capable of gauging the value of what he had missed, when face to face with some situation with which his inexperience had unfitted him to cope lightly. It might take him a long time to acknowledge that what he had gained had been more than what he had missed, and partly arose from it. He would know, too, before long that the immovable seclusion in which his grandmother and mother and Wilbraham himself lived was anything but the normal state of affairs that it had been implicitly represented to him. He would ask himself why they had never left Royd from one year’s end to another, and why so few people had ever come there; and he would see that it had all been with reference to him. He would hardly be able to understand it. If he acknowledged the freedom he had enjoyed, the limits of it would still strike him, with his new knowledge of the world’s ways. If he had not, since his childhood, been dominated by women, he had certainly been managed, without knowing it. Whether, in the strangeness and disagreeableness and difficulty of much of his new life he was inclined to resent this unduly, or whether he saw behind it enough to admit that there had been wisdom as well as apparent eccentricity, and certainly love, in the steps his youth had been made to tread, it would not be surprising if he made up his mind at an early date that the managing should come to an end. It was for him to direct his own life now. He would run no further risk of influence brought to bear upon it, the clue to which was not in his hands.
In the first spring Wilbraham left Royd to take up work in a Government office in London, for which Lady Brent had asked for him. A few months later Mrs. Brent broke loose from the now insupportable stagnation of Royd, and went to London with the avowed object of nursing. She had had no training and was quite ignorant of the steps to be taken, but Lady Brent arranged an income for her, and made no attempt to direct her movements in any way. She was left alone in the Castle, and stayed there alone for another year. To all outward appearance she was exactly what she had always been, always occupied, always unemotional, though sometimes more unapproachable than at others. The months dragged on.