She lies still in the dim light. Then she asks anxiously:
“Are you wounded?” and I feel her searching glance.
“No, I have got leave.”
My mother is very pale. I am afraid to make a light.
“Here I lie now,” says she, “and cry instead of being glad.”
“Are you sick, Mother?” I ask.
“I am going to get up a little today,” she says and turns to my sister, who is continually running to the kitchen to watch that the food does not burn: “And put out that jar of preserved whortleberries—you like that, don’t you?” she asks me.
“Yes, Mother, I haven’t had any for a long time.”
“We might almost have known you were coming,” laughs my sister, “there is just your favourite dish, potato-cakes, and even whortleberries to go with them too.”
“And it is Saturday,” I add.
“Sit here beside me,” says my mother.
She looks at me. Her hands are white and sickly and frail compared with mine. We say very little and I am thankful that she asks nothing. What ought I to say? Everything I could have wished for has happened. I have come out of it safely and sit here beside her. And in the kitchen stands my sister preparing supper and singing.
“Dear boy,” says my mother softly.
We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me “dear boy,” it means much more than when another uses it. I know well enough that the jar of whortleberries is the only one they have had for months, and that she has kept it for me; and the somewhat stale cakes that she gives me too. She must have got them cheap some time and put them all by for me.
I sit by her bed, and through the window the chestnut trees in the beer garden opposite glow in brown and gold. I breathe deeply and say over to myself:—“You are at home, you are at home.” But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano—but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.
I go and fetch my pack to the bedside and turn out the things I have brought—a whole Edamer cheese, that Kat provided me with, two loaves of army bread, three-quarters of a pound of butter, two tins of livered sausage, a pound of dripping and a little bag of rice.
“I suppose you can make some use of that—”
They nod.
“It is pretty bad for food here?” I enquire.
“Yes, there’s not much. Do you get enough out there?”
I smile and point to the things I have brought. “Not always quite as much as that, of course, but we fare reasonably well.”
Erna takes away the food. Suddenly my mother seizes hold of my hand and asks falteringly: “Was it very bad out there, Paul?”
Mother, what should I answer to that! You would not understand, you could never realize it. And you shall never realize it. Was it bad, you ask.—You, Mother—I shake my head and say: “No, Mother, not so very. There are always a lot of us together so it isn’t so bad.”
“Yes, but Heinrich Bredemeyer was here just lately and said it was terrible out there now, with the gas and all the rest of it.”
It is my mother who says that. She says: “With the gas and all the rest of it.” She does not know what she is saying, she is merely anxious for me. Should I tell her how we once found three enemy trenches with their garrison all stiff as though stricken with apoplexy? against the parapet, in the dugouts, just where they were, the men stood and lay about, with blue faces, dead.
“No Mother, that’s only talk,” I answer, “there’s not very much in what Bredemeyer says. You see for instance, I’m well and fit—”
Before my mother’s tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone.
My mother wants to get up. So I go for a while to my sister in the kitchen. “What is the matter with her?” I ask.
She shrugs her shoulders: “She has been in bed some months now, but we did not want to write and tell you. Several doctors have been to see her. One of them said it is probably cancer again.”
I go to the district commandant to report myself. Slowly I wander through the streets. Occasionally someone speaks to me. I do not delay long for I have little inclination to talk.
On the way back from the barracks a loud voice calls out to me. Still lost in thought I turn round and find myself confronted by a Major. “Can’t you salute?” he blusters.
“Sorry, Major,” I say in embarrassment, “I didn’t notice you.”
“Don’t you know how to speak properly?” he roars.
I would like to hit him in the face, but control myself, for my leave depends on it. I click my heels and say: “I did not see you, Herr Major.”
“Then keep your eyes open,” he snorts. “What is your name?” I give it.
His fat red face is furious. “What regiment?”
I give him full particulars. Even yet he has not had enough. “Where are you quartered?”
But I have had more than enough and say: “Between Langemark and Bixschoote.”
“Eh?” he asks, a bit stupefied.
I explain to him that I arrived on leave only an hour or two since, thinking that he would then trot along. But not at all. He gets even more furious: “You think you can bring your front-line manners here, what? Well, we don’t stand for
