MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK

Section 1

All over England now, where the livery of mourning had been a rare thing to see, women and children went about in the October sunshine in new black clothes.  Everywhere one met these fresh griefs, mothers who had lost their sons, women who had lost their men, lives shattered and hopes destroyed.  The dyers had a great time turning coloured garments to black.  And there was also a growing multitude of crippled and disabled men.  It was so in England, much more was it so in France and Russia, in all the countries of the Allies, and in Germany and Austria; away into Asia Minor and Egypt, in India and Japan and Italy there was mourning, the world was filled with loss and mourning and impoverishment and distress.

And still the mysterious powers that required these things of mankind were unappeased, and each day added its quota of heart-stabbing messages and called for new mourning, and sent home fresh consignments of broken and tormented men.

Some clung to hopes that became at last almost more terrible than black certainties....

Mrs. Teddy went about the village in a coloured dress bearing herself confidently.  Teddy had been listed now as “missing, since reported killed,” and she had had two letters from his comrades.  They said Teddy had been left behind in the ruins of a farm with one or two other wounded, and that when the Canadians retook the place these wounded had all been found butchered.  None had been found alive.  Afterwards the Canadians had had to fall back.  Mr. Direck had been at great pains to hunt up wounded men from Teddy’s company, and also any likely Canadians both at the base hospital in France and in London, and to get what he could from them.  He had made it a service to Cissie.  Only one of his witnesses was quite clear about Teddy, but he, alas! was dreadfully clear.  There had been only one lieutenant among the men left behind, he said, and obviously that must have been Teddy.  “He had been prodded in half-a-dozen places.  His head was nearly severed from his body.”

Direck came down and told the story to Cissie.  “Shall I tell it to her?” he asked.

Cissie thought.  “Not yet,” she said....

Letty’s face changed in those pitiful weeks when she was denying death.  She lost her pretty colour, she became white; her mouth grew hard and her eyes had a hard brightness.  She never wept, she never gave a sign of sorrow, and she insisted upon talking about Teddy, in a dry offhand voice.  Constantly she referred to his final return.  “Teddy,” she said, “will be surprised at this,” or “Teddy will feel sold when he sees how I have altered that.”

“Presently we shall see his name in a list of prisoners,” she said.  “He is a wounded prisoner in Germany.”

She adopted that story.  She had no justification for it, but she would hear no doubts upon it.  She presently began to prepare parcels to send him.  “They want almost everything,” she told people.  “They are treated abominably.  He has not been able to write to me yet, but I do not think I ought to wait until he asks me.”