Read Online No Man's Land by Pete Ayrton - Free Book Online Page A

other poor villagers. For he was poorer even than they. – Still, it made him very happy to do these things – to see a big, glowing pile of wood-flakes in his shed – and to dig the garden, and set the rubbish burning in the late, wistful autumn – or to wander through the hazel copses, away to the real old English hamlets, that are still like Shakespeare – and like Hardy’s Woodlanders .
    Then, in November, the Armistice. It was almost too much to believe. The war was over! It was too much to believe. He and Harriett sat and sang German songs, in the cottage, that strange night of the Armistice, away there in the country: and she cried – and he wondered what now, now the walls would come no nearer. It had been like Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the Pit and the Pendulum – where the walls come in, in, in, till the prisoner is almost squeezed. So the black walls of the war – and he had been trapped and very nearly squeezed into the pit, where the rats were. So nearly! So very nearly. And now the black walls had stopped, and he was not pushed into the pit, with the rats. And he knew it in his soul. – What next then?
    He insisted on going back to Derbyshire. Harriett, who hated him for the move, refused to go. So he went alone: back to his sisters, and to finish the year in the house which they had paid for for him. Harriett refused to go. She stayed with Hattie in London.
    At St. Pancras, as Somers left the taxi and went across the pavement to the station, he fell down: fell smack down on the pavement. He did not hurt himself. But he got up rather dazed, saying to himself, ‘Is that a bad omen? Ought I not to be going back?’ But again he thought of Scipio Africanus, and went on.
    The cold, black December days, alone in the cottage on the cold hills – Adam Bede country, Snowfields, Dinah Morris’ home. Such heavy, cold, savage, frustrated blackness. He had known it when he was a boy. – Then Harriett came – and they spent Christmas with his sister. And when January came he fell ill with the influenza, and was ill for a long time. In March the snow was up to the window-sills of their house.
    â€˜Will the winter never end?’ he asked his soul. May brought the year’s house-rent of the Derbyshire cottage to an end: and back they went to Oxfordshire. But now the place seemed weary to him, tame, after the black iron of the North. The walls had gone – and now he felt nowhere.
    So they applied for passports – Harriett to go to Germany, himself to Italy. A lovely summer went by, a lovely autumn came. But the meaning had gone out of everything for him. He had lost his meaning. England had lost its meaning for him. The free England had died, this England of the peace was like a corpse. It was the corpse of a country to him.
    In October came the passports. He saw Harriett off to Germany – said Goodbye at the Great Eastern Station, while she sat in the Harwich-Hook-of-Holland express. She had a look of almost vindictive triumph, and almost malignant love, as the train drew out. So he went back to his meaninglessness at the cottage.
    Then, finding the meaninglessness too much, he gathered his little money together and in November left for Italy. Left England. England which he had loved so bitterly, bitterly – and now was leaving, alone, and with a feeling of expressionlessness in his soul. It was a cold day. There was snow on the downs like a shroud. And as he looked back from the boat, when they had left Folkestone behind and only England was there, England looked like a grey, dreary-grey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with her dead grey cliffs and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above.
    Memory of all this came on him so violently, now in the Australian night, that he trembled helplessly under the shock of it. He ought to have gone up to Jack’s place for the night. But no, he could not speak to anybody. Of all the black throng in