About the Story ...
Two women disagree over whether a husband’s primary duty is to his wife or to his country. When Helen Ford’s husband, who has already served in the Boer War, re-enlists on the outbreak of World War I, her friend Mrs Printer is furious that he would abandon his duty to his wife for his perceived duty to his country. But Helen supports her husband’s decision, despite his absence driving her nearly to insanity:
How can you bear to be left out of it like — like a child — to sit down and sew, and talk, and chatter, and just be a woman?
The story has an uncanny aspect: not strictly fantasy, it has strongly fantastic elements, as Helen watches hallucinatory artillery battles unfold in the movement of the landscape around her — hallucinatory, and yet tied to the actual battles in which her husband is engaged, so that Helen witnesses the moment of his injury as it occurs. The story also has a cruel streak, as Mrs Printer and her husband are both bitterly punished by the narrative for their slavish adherence to domestic gender roles.
“A man’s duty begins at home,” said Mrs. Printer, quickly. “Why, I should absolutely die of fright if Edward left me for a night, much less an indefinite period, while he goes into some dreadful trenches to fight beastly little oily Germans, and where I couldn't even accompany him. Don't let us discuss the subject, Helen. You've got the nerve of a — a — an Amazon, or a — an American, to be able to speak of the war as you do.”
Helen Ford put down a very shaky empty cup. She had been trying to get her forces ready to go out and fight a time of dreadful loneliness, heartache and mental anxiety, ever since her husband had “signed on,” and taken up with his old regiment. She was small and dainty as a morning flower that has reared itself by the love of the sunshine, and that has lived a quiet little life somewhere just away from the heavy traffic of the town. Helen Ford was very much like a tender wood-violet. The man who had picked her out of the deep, wild grasses had never treated her as anything else, until it came to a time of war with Germany, and then he called upon her to be brave and strong as the very wind that had blown through her life, and that so far he had always protected her from. With the true spirit of deep-pulsing womanhood she had responded to his calling, and now at this very minute, when Mrs. Printer had called upon her, in the usual fashion of uncrushable silks and pearl-grey silk hosiery, she was experiencing her first bit of the battle. Mrs. Printer always said that Helen Ford was a “doll,” and that nobody ought to take her seriously. On this occasion she had altered her opinion, but she had gone no further. She absolutely refused to take her friend seriously.
“But —” The hand that put the cup down trembled so much that Helen had to put it behind her to hide her agitation — “we must talk of it. There — there is nothing else — I mean there is nothing so — so near us, and so vital or so discomforting. I’ve been talking to Douglas all night about it, and the night before last —”
“Then no wonder you are so pale and delicate-looking, Helen. I wonder that Douglas can keep you awake at nights over this wretched war. It isn’t manly or kind when you are so —”
Helen’s small frame caught some of the tremble. “Oh, but don’t you see, Douglas is going — going to the front. He might be called any time now; and he’s getting his commission as an officer, too.”
“Well, I call that simply MEAN of Douglas, Helen. Considering that you are people with a decent income, and no need for that kind of thing, I think Douglas ought not to have thought about himself at all.”
“Oh, but he isn’t thinking of himself. He’s dreadfully serious about fighting for his country —”
“The country doesn’t matter a row of pins, Helen, when a man has home duties. I believe that Douglas is like all the other young men, anxious to see himself in uniform, especially if he’s to be an officer. If he was going out now as an ordinary private, I must say I’d admire him more.”
“Oh, but you don’t understand. My husband went through the African war, and, seeing he is an ex-service man and knows the game —”
Mrs. Printer rose indignantly. Horror was on her clear face.
“My dear, you speak positively as if you had been in the ranks yourself; and I tell you, that a lower place for a man — I mean as regards language and that sort of thing, couldn’t be found. Helen, we all love you dearly, but don't let Douglas teach you to be quite so masculine in your remarks and opinions. Edward never even mentions the war to me.”
But Helen Ford had come of a fighting race, and, though she didn't know it, the spirit of her progenitors was rising in her now like something that had been thrown down too long. Her eyes filled with a sudden bright light. It was the “right” in her — triumphing.
“I’d die — positively die, if my husband never talked to me of the war, and of every little thing that makes his life anything at all. How can you bear to be left out of it like — like a child — to sit down and sew, and talk, and chatter, and just be a woman? Oh, it makes me mad. Just being a woman, I tell you, would kill me if it wasn't for Douglas —”
She was choking slightly, and her eyes ran tears at the edge.
“Just being a woman, Helen, is the very best thing for us.” Mrs Printer sat straighter. She thought that she had the advantage of a more upright spine in everything than this wood-violet.
“Come, Helen, don't be silly. If Douglas goes to the front, and leaves you, a delicate little thing, alone to face this terrible loneliness and heartache, I’ll never forgive him.”
A perfect torrent of tears kept Helen Ford busy for quite two hours after her visitor had gone. During this time, as fate had arranged it, Mr. Edward Printer dropped into Douglas Ford's office. Everything was in a state of mobilisation.
“Heard that I’m off?” said Ford, and Printer took a revolving chair.
“I’d envy you myself if it wasn’t for my wife.” Printer was a bigger man than Ford. The superfluous flesh on him always suggested that he was much more comfortable if he never got up out of his chair. Bullock strength versus intellect it seemed, in comparison to Ford.
“Your wife?”
“Why, yes, Ford. She’d break up if I went. And when a fellow takes it on himself to love and cherish a woman who’s been fair to him most of her life, he ought not to break her heart by going to his death and leaving her the brunt of everything. I’ve got a kiddle, too, and I must think of him.”
Ford looked out of startled eyes.
“But even if I had a kid I’d go, Printer. I think it is out of respect for that kid and woman that every man ought to put at least two bullets into two German hides — one for the wife, Printer, and one for the kid. I only wish I had a number of them, and I’d try and empty the same amount of shot into the same number of Prussians. My God, Printer — think of the chance.”
“I can’t think of it, Ford. Shooting is a good game when it’s sport, and no doubt you’d find it so out there, but I can’t hurt my wife. Not after she has stuck to me so good and strong. She would never face things alone with the child.”
“Therefore, she takes your right of duty from you!”
“Not at all. My duty in this instance is with my wife and child.”
Ford looked heated.
“So is mine. That’s why I’m going to the front. I want to pot at least one German for the beastly atrocities put upon women and children in Belgium. I recognise that as duty alone.”
Printer managed to lift his heavy body out of the chair.
“And in doing so, you’ll probably be killed, and leave your wife to a worse fate if there happened to be an invasion over here. I guess I'll stay at home, Ford, and live for her sake.”
With the air of a man who has fired the last shot and turned the tide of victory to his own side, Printer went through the glass swing-doors.
* * * *
Ford stood in full uniform, holding his Majesty’s commission, in front of his wife. She was touching every buckle and strap on his body as if they were jewels. He was just looking into her deep wood-violet eyes and fighting the desire to crush her in his arms, which, had he done so, would have brought tears into both their eyes. Instead of which he just stood there and let her ask stupid, foolish questions.
“I just think you are the most perfect — man,” she said presently, looking right up into his face. “I never knew anyone so wonderful and brave and — well-formed in my life. Dear, it’s the most marvellous thing to think that you are MY dear man, and that you are going out to — to fight for the country, and to take two great big heavy field guns in charge.”
“And the safety of my dear wife, also," said Ford, hardly touching her in his intense suffering. “Guns are nothing — it’s the minding what happens to the whole of the British race that matters. To the women and children — mostly. And the one vital point in it, dear, is that — I’m going to fight for you.”
Two sparkling tears were shaken off the woman's lids before she spoke. Then her voice came uneven and restrained. “You'll try — try and come back, Douglas?”
“Harder than I’ve ever tried in my life, dear.” One hand went out to touch her chin. “Oh, my dear, I want to come back. More than anything in my life I want to come back directly I can. You — you don’t know just how much I want to come back —”
When he joined his men he found himself struggling with a handkerchief, and everybody was trying to look in the opposite direction. His wife was walking away — in the opposite direction.
After this there was a long period of waiting for letters, and then several cards and fat envelopes came in. Then the break again and no news whatever. Helen Ford grew whiter than the white wood violet, bleached in the chilly dews and cold of the sun-deserted valleys. She began to look into deep shadows at night time and from the shadows there came faint imagined shapes that seemed to worry her. Mrs Printer found her one day staring into the little garden. She hadn’t moved her eyes for several minutes till interrupted.
“I’m watching the artillery,” she said to her friend. “It’s cruel, but it’s grand. I can see Douglas ... his long thin legs are firmly planted beside his guns. Men are carrying ammunition, and someone is opening the breach. Oh ... didn’t you hear that report? There’s another! Little brown men across the open country are tumbling down everywhere. Douglas hasn’t moved an inch, but he is calling out all the time.
“Sometimes he cheers! Good boy, I can hear him cheering. Ah ... that shell burst just under the hill, away ... away. Didn’t you see the rocks fly up and the soil? Douglas hasn't moved for hours … and the noise is deafening.”
Mrs Printer stood near listening. Then she shrugged her shoulders: — “This comes of that man leaving her at such a time,” she said, and went to her husband. Manlike, he insisted on both the women taking an immediate holiday. He said that he would hold the office work back a month and go with them to the seaside. They went and took the wood-violet with them. Still she sat about and watched the armies in France. She told her friends daily every detail that she imagined. Printer shrugged his shoulders and wrote a stiff letter to Ford, which was never delivered. He told Ford that, if he couldn’t have foreseen what was happening to his wife he wasn’t worth calling her husband. And they took her climbing. They climbed the cliffs, and watched the long roll of the sea. Helen Ford used to say it was the grumbling of a great army.
“It’s always coming our way,” she said. “Presently it will retreat again. Then Douglas will come home …”
Edward Printer thought that he was doing a great thing, plastering fine oils and lineaments on his own conscience at the same time, by devoting all his time now to the two women.
“Get her out of herself,” he told his wife. But nothing could stir Helen from watching. Every stone and stick she came across was some weapon in the armory. Every muttering of the sea or sky was a battle begun or ended. She never despaired.
One day she jumped up from watching the shifting sands.
“Douglas,” she called. “Oh, he didn’t see that shell. He was talking to the Sergeant ... They are both down. Five men have been killed in the battery …”
Again the Printers took her into strange places. They tried to interest her in moving pictures, shows, and dance pavilions. Helen went through it all now without a word. She knew that she would get a cable presently saying her husband had been wounded, perhaps killed. Nothing else mattered. She only had to wait for that.
And then the news came that Douglas Ford had been wounded too badly for him to go back to the front. He had had to have his right arm amputated, and so he was to be invalided home to his wife as soon as he could travel.
“A lot of good he’s done,” said Mrs. Printer. “It’s a wonder she never lost her reason altogether. I’ll be surprised if the baby is born alive, that’s all.”
But the baby was born alive and the wood violet picked up wonderfully on the news. Meantime Mrs. Printer was so run down and nervy with her duty to her “stupid little friend”, as she called Helen, that she allowed her husband to take her away by herself to some country place where they could recuperate. Printer, fatter than ever, overdid it one day in trying to cross a narrow bridge to get some wonderful plant growing the other side of the gap. Mrs. Printer was peevish, and he was only doing his duty in trying to please her, but he gave his life for her to no advantage and through some foolish feminine whim. The bridge had not been used for years, and with his heavy weight in the middle it gave.