As they stood at the corner of Quay Street Sammy said, with an effort at his old smile:
“Don’t take on, Annie, lass. The pit hasn’t done that much for me after all. Maybe the war’ll do a bit more.”
“Maybe,” Annie said: and with a sudden catch in her breath: “I’ll see you to-morrow, Sammy. I’ll see you for sure before you go.”
Sammy nodded his head, still holding his smile, then he exclaimed:
“Give us a kiss, lass, to show you’re not angry wi’ us.”
Annie kissed Sammy, then she turned away for fear Sammy should see the tears that were in her eyes. Holding her head down she walked rapidly towards her home.
Sammy climbed the Terraces slowly. He was a fool, he knew he was a fool to be leaving Annie and his good job for a war that did not interest him. And yet he couldn’t help himself. The disaster had done something to him — ay, just like it had to David. Where he was going didn’t matter; all that mattered was that he was getting out of the pit.
When he reached Inkerman his mother was sitting up for him as usual in her own hard, straight-backed chair by the window and the minute he came in she rose to get him some hot cocoa.
She gave him his cocoa, and, standing by the grate where she had just put the steaming kettle, she watched him, her hands folded beneath her breast, elbows rather gaunt, eyes sombre and loving.
“Will I cut you a piece of cake, son?”
He had sat down rather wearily at the table with his cap pushed back on his head and now he raised his eyes and looked at her.
She had altered. Though she did not fight within herself against the disaster but received it sombrely with the calm fatality of a woman who has always known and accepted the danger of the pit, the calamity at the Neptune had left its mark on Martha too. The lines on her face were deeper and her cheeks more fallen in, one grey strand made a curious streak on the black of her tight-drawn hair, there was a little pattern of furrows graven upon her brow. But she still held herself erect without effort. Her vitality seemed inexhaustible.
Sammy hated to have to tell his mother; but there was no other way; and as he was without subtlety he spoke directly.
“Mother,” he said, “I’ve joined up.”
She went an ashen grey. Her face and her lips turned as grey as the grey strand of her hair; and her hand flew instinctively to her throat. A sudden wildness came into her eyes.
“You don’t mean”—she stopped, but at last she brought herself to say it—“the army?”
He nodded moodily:
“The Fifth Fusiliers. I fetched my tools outbye this afternoon. The draft leaves for camp on Monday.”
“On Monday,” she stammered, in that same tone of wild and incredulous dismay.
Still looking at him she sat down upon a chair. She sat down very carefully, her hand still pressed to her throat. She seemed shrunken, crushed into that chair by what he had told her; but still she refused to believe it. In a low voice she said:
“They’ll not take you. They want the miners back here at home. They can’t possibly take a good man like you.”
He avoided her beseeching eyes.
“They have taken me.”
The words extinguished her. There was a long silence, then almost in a whisper she asked:
“What way did you have to do a thing like that, Sammy? Oh, what way did you have to do it?”
He answered doggedly:
“I cannot help it, mother, I cannot go on any longer we the pit.”
FIVE
It was about five o’clock on the following Tuesday evening and though still light the streets were quiet as David walked along Lamb Lane and entered his house. In the narrow hall he stopped, his first glance towards the little electro-plated tray upon which Jenny, with her deathless sense of etiquette, always placed his mail. One letter lay upon the tray. He picked it up and his dark face brightened.
He went into the kitchen, where he sat down by the small fire and began to take off his boots, unlacing them with one hand and staring at the letter in the other.
Jenny brought him his slippers. That was unusual, but lately Jenny had been most unusual, worried and almost timid, looking after him in small ways, as though subdued by his sombre uncommunicativeness.
He thanked Jenny with a look. He could smell the sweet odour of port on her breath but he refrained from speaking, he had spoken so often and he was tired of words. She took very little, she explained, just a glass when she felt low. The disgrace — her own word — of his dismissal from New Bethel Street had naturally predisposed her to lowness.
He opened the letter and read it slowly and carefully, then he rested it on his knee and gazed into the fire. His face was fixed and unimpassioned and mature. In those six months since the disaster he seemed to have grown older by a good ten years.
Jenny moved about the kitchen pretending to be busy but glancing at him furtively from time to time, as if curious to know what was in the letter. She felt that deep currents were working secretly within David’s mind; she did not fully understand; a look, almost of fear, was in her eyes.
“Is it anything important?” she asked at length. She could not help asking, the words slipped out.
“It’s from Nugent,” he answered.
She stared at him blankly, then her features sharpened with temper. She distrusted this sudden and spontaneous friendship with Harry Nugent which had sprung from the disaster at the Neptune; it struck her almost as an alliance; she felt excluded and was jealous.
“I thought it was about a job, I’m about sick of you going idle.”
He roused himself and looked at her.
“In a way it is about a job, Jenny. It’s the answer to a letter I wrote Harry Nugent last week. He’s joining the ambulance corps, going out to France as a stretcher-bearer, and I’ve decided that the only thing to do is to go with him.”
Jenny gasped — her reaction was unbelievably intense. She turned quite green, a ghastly colour, her whole body wilted. She looked cowed. He thought for a moment she was going to be sick, she had lately had some queer bouts of sickness, and he jumped up and went over to her.
“Don’t worry, Jenny,” he said. “There isn’t the slightest reason to worry.”
“But why must you go?” she quavered in that odd frightened voice. “Why have you got to let this Nugent drag you in? You don’t believe in it, there isn’t any need for you to go.”
He was moved by her concern; lately he had resigned himself to the conviction that Jenny’s love for him was not what it had been. And he hardly knew how to answer her. It was true that he had no patriotism. The political machinery which had produced the war was linked in his mind with the economic machinery which had produced the disaster in the Neptune. Behind each he saw that insatiable lust for power, for possessions; the quenchless self-interest of man. But although he had no patriotism he felt he could not keep out of the war. This was exactly Nugent’s feeling too. It was awful to be in the war but it was more awful not to be in the war. He need not go to the war to kill. He could go to the war to save. To stand aside palely while humanity lay locked in the anguished struggle was to proclaim himself a fraud for ever. It was like standing upon the pit-bank of the Neptune watching the cage descend filled with men upon whose foreheads was the predestined seal of the disaster, standing aside and saying, you are in the cage, my brothers, but I will not enter with you because the terror and the danger which await you should never have arisen.