THE WOMAN OF KNOCKALOE

The publishers wish it to be understood that nothing in this book is intended to refer to real-life persons in the Isle of Man or elsewhere.

THE WOMAN
OF KNOCKALOE

A Parable

By
HALL CAINE

“Love is strong as death; jealousy
is cruel as the grave;... Many
waters cannot quench love, neither
can the floods drown it.”

TORONTO
THE RYERSON PRESS
1923

Copyright, 1923,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK

EDITORIAL NOTE

“The Woman of Knockaloe” is first of all a love story. In our opinion it is a charming and natural love story, beautiful in its purity, and irresistible in its human appeal; so simple in its incidents that it might be a nursery tale, so stark in its telling that it might be a Saga, so inevitable in the march of its scenes, from its almost breathless beginning to its tremendous end, that it might be a Greek tragedy. In this character alone I think it calls for serious consideration.

But it is more than a love story. It is a Parable, carrying an unmistakable message, an ostensible argument. Readers all over the world will so interpret it. They will see that it has special application to the times, that it is directed against War as the first author of the racial hatred, the material ruin, the sorrow and suffering, the poverty and want, which are now threatening the world with destruction; that it is a plea for universal peace, for speedy and universal disarmament, as the only alternative to universal anarchy.

The story is laid in a little backwater of the war—a backwater which has never before, perhaps, been explored in literature—but nevertheless it is not in the ordinary sense a war story. The late Great War does not enter it at all, except as an evil wind which blows over a mile and a half by half a mile of land in a small island in the Irish Sea, an Internment Camp, wherein twenty-five thousand men and one woman, cut off from life, pass four and a half years within an enclosure of barbed wire.

This narrow space of blackened earth is intended to stand for the world in little, from 1914 to the present year, and the few incidents of the simple yet poignant tale are meant to illustrate the effect of the late war on the heart of humanity, to describe at very close quarters the consequences of what we call The Peace on the condition of the world and the soul of mankind, and to point to what the author believes to be the only hope of saving both from the spiritual and material suicide to which they are hurrying on. It is neither pro-British nor pro-German in sympathy, but purely pro-human. War itself is the only enemy the Parable is intended to attack.

The battlefield the author has chosen is dangerous ground, but the public will not question his sincerity. Hall Caine is seventy years of age, and down to 1914 he was a life-long and even an extreme pacifist. More than one of his best known books was intended to show not only the barbarity and immorality of warfare, but also its cowardice and futility. Yet when the Great War broke out no man of letters became more speedily or remained more consistently an advocate of the Allied cause. The paradox is not difficult of explanation. In the face of what he, in common with countless pre-war pacifists, believed to be a deliberate plot whereby liberty was to be violated, civilization was to be outraged, religion was to be degraded, the right was to be wronged, the weak were to be oppressed, the helpless were to be injured, and before the iron arm of a merciless military tyranny, justice and mercy and charity were to be wiped out of the world, he became one of the most passionate supporters of the war of resistance. The Great War stood to him, as to others, as a war to end war.

It cannot be necessary to describe in detail his war activities even at a moment when, by the publication of this challenging book, his patriotism may possibly be questioned. They are matters of common knowledge not only in Great Britain and America, but also in many foreign countries in which his books have made his name known and his opinions respected. For his war services he was honoured by his own nation, and at least one of her Allies, being knighted in 1918, made an Officer of the Order of Leopold in 1920, and a Companion of Honour in 1922.

But the war-propagandist never wholly submerged the pacifist. His last war article was written on Armistice Day, 1918, and it was intended to show that while the price paid for the victory of the Allied cause had been a terribly bitter one it had been justified, inasmuch as it had killed warfare, and so banished from the earth for ever the greatest scourge of mankind.

Hall Caine has lived long enough since to see the falseness of that judgment. No one can have suffered more from the disappointments and disillusionment of the war, its political uselessness, its immeasurable cruelty, its limitless waste, its widespread wretchedness, and above all its inhuman demoralization. That the Great War has been in vain, that so much sacrifice, so much heroism, so many brave young lives have been thrown away, he would not for one moment say, being sure that in the long review of a mysterious Providence all these must have their place. But he is none the less sure that the late war has left the world worse than it found it; that the after-war, which we call The Peace, has been more productive of evil passions than the war itself was; that violence has never been more rampant or faith in the sanctity of life so low; that the poor have never been poorer, or the struggle to live so severe; and that Christian Europe has never before been such a chaos of separate and selfish interests or so full of threats of renewed and still deadlier warfare in the future—in a word that the Great War has not only failed to kill war but has frightfully strengthened and inflamed the spirit of it.

And now he publishes his Parable, the little story called “The Woman of Knockaloe,” in the hope of showing that there can be “no peace under the soldier’s sword,” that the salvation of the world from the moral and material destruction which threatens to overwhelm it is not to be found in governments or parliaments or peace conferences, but only in a purging of the heart of individual man of the hatreds and jealousies and other corruptions which the war created—in a personal return of all men, regardless of nation or race, or politics or creed, or (as in the case of the American people) remoteness from the central scene of strife, to the spiritual and natural laws which alone can bring the human family back to true peace and real security—the laws of love and mutual sacrifice, above all the law of human brotherhood, which was at once the law and the first commandment of Christ.

That this is a great Evangel none can doubt, and that it will go far in the beautiful human form in which it is presented, that of a deeply moving story, few will question. But is the world prepared for it? Is this the hour for such a plea? Is the Great War too recent to permit any of the nations who engaged in it to forgive their enemies? In this new book Hall Caine touches upon wounds that are not yet healed and sometimes the touch hurts. If it is an all-healing touch the pain may be endured. But is it? What will the British people think? What will the Belgians, the French and the Americans, who are still suffering from their bereavements, say to a writer who asks them, in effect, to shake hands with the Germans who caused them? Will not the nations which have suffered most from the war say that, having beaten the Germans, it is their first duty to themselves and to humanity to keep them beaten? Will not a residue of bitterness against an author who calls upon the peoples of the world to make an effort that is impossible to the human heart at such a time obscure the sublimity of his message?

On the other hand will it not be agreed that the Christian ideal of the forgiveness of injuries and the brotherhood of man is the only remaining hope of the redemption of the world from the lamentable condition into which the war, and the passions provoked by the war, have plunged it; that without this ideal, politics are a meaningless mockery, religion is an organized hypocrisy, and the churches are a snare, and that, however hard it may be to learn the lesson, and however cruel the pain of it, there never was a time when it was more needed than now?

Here lies the theme for many a sermon, and judging of “The Woman of Knockaloe” by its effect upon those who, besides myself, have read it, it is hardly possible to question its missionary value, apart from its human beauty and charm. At least it is certain that readers in many lands will think and continue to think of some of the greatest of human problems long after they have closed the book.

The Publishers.

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,

It hath not been my use to pray

With moving lips or bended knees,

But silently, by slow degrees,

My spirit I to love compose,

In humble trust mine eyelids close,

With reverential resignation.

No wish conceived, no thought exprest,

Only a sense of supplication;

A sense o’er all my soul imprest

That I am weak, yet not unblest,

Since in me, round me, everywhere

Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

But yester-night I prayed aloud,

In anguish and in agony,

Upstarting from the fiendish crowd

Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:

A lurid light, a trampling throng,

Sense of intolerable wrong,

And whom I scorned, those only strong:

Thirst of revenge, the powerless will

Still baffled, and yet burning still!

Desire with loathing strangely mixed

On wild and hateful objects fixed,

Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!

And shame and terror over all!

Coleridge.

THE WOMAN OF KNOCKALOE

INTRODUCTORY

I should like to say, for whatever it may be worth in excuse and explanation, that the following story, in all its essential features, came to me in a dream on a night of disturbed sleep early in December, 1922. Awakening in the grey dawning with the dream still clear in my mind, I wrote it out hastily, briefly, in the present tense, without any consciousness of effort, not as a smooth and continuous tale, but in broken scenes, now vague, now vivid, just as it seemed to pass before me.

Only then did I realize, first, that my dream contained incidents of actual occurrence which had quite faded from my conscious memory; next, that it could not claim to be otherwise true to the scene of it; and finally, that it was in the nature of a parable which expressed, through the medium of a simple domestic tale, the feelings which had long oppressed me on seeing that my cherished hope of a blessed Peace that should wipe out war by war and build up a glorious future for mankind, had fallen to a welter of wreck and ruin.

There were reasons why I should not put aside an urgent task and write out my dream into a story, and other reasons why I should not attempt to publish anything that was so much opposed to the temper of the time, but I had to write it for the relief of my own feelings, and here it is written. And now I publish it with many misgivings and only one expectation—that in the present troubled condition of the world, in the midst of the jealousy and hatred, the suffering and misery of the nations, which leave them groaning and travailing in pain, and heading on to an apparently inevitable catastrophe, even so humble and so slight a thing as this may perhaps help the march of a moving Providence and the healing of the Almighty hand.

“It was a dream. Ah, what is not a dream?”

FIRST CHAPTER

Knockaloe[1] is a large farm on the west of the Isle of Man, a little to the south of the fishing town of Peel. From the farmstead I can see the harbour and the breakwater, with the fishing boats moored within and the broad curve of the sea outside.

There is a ridge of hills that separates the farm from the coast, which is rocky and precipitous. On the crest of the hills there is a square tower that is commonly called “Corrin’s Folly,” and at the foot of the tower there is a small graveyard surrounded by a stone wall.

Too far inland to hear the roar of the sea except in winter, it is near enough to feel its salt breath in the summer. Not rich or leafy or luxuriant, but with a broad sunny bareness as of a place where a glacier has been and passed over, and with a deep peace, a glacial peace, always lying on it—such is Knockaloe.

The farm-house lies in the valley, close under the shelter of the hills. It is a substantial building with large outhouses, and it is approached from the road by a long, straight, narrow lane that is bordered by short trees.

The farmer is Robert Craine, a stalwart old man in a sleeve waistcoat. I seem to know him well. He has farmed Knockaloe all his life, following three or four generations of his family. But now he is a little past his best, and rarely goes far from home except on Sundays to one or other of the chapels round about, for he is a local preacher among the Wesleyans.

“I’m not too good at the farming now,” he says, “but, man, I love to preach.”

His wife is dead, and she is buried in the churchyard of Kirk Patrick, which lies near his gate at the turn of the road to the railway station. He has a son and a daughter. The son, another Robert, but commonly called Robbie, is a fine young fellow with clear flashing eyes, about six and twenty, as fresh as the heather on the mountains, and his father’s right-hand man. The daughter is named Mona, and she is a splendid girl of about twenty-three or four, distinctly good-looking, tall, full-bosomed, strong of limb, even muscular, with firm step and upright figure, big brown eyes and coal-black hair—a picture of grown-up health. Since her mother’s death she has become “the big woman” of the farm, managing everything and everybody, the farm-servants of both sexes, her brother and even her father.

Mona has no sweetheart, but she has many suitors. The most persistent is heir to the cold and “boney” farm which makes boundary with Knockaloe. They call him “long John Corlett,” and his love-making is as crude as his figure.

“Wouldn’t it be grand if we only had enough cattle between us to run milk into Douglas?”

Mona reads him like a book and sends him about his business.

Knockaloe has a few fields under cultivation (I see some acres of oats and wheat), but it is chiefly a grazing farm, supplying most of the milk for the people of Peel. At six in the morning the maids milk the cows, and at seven Mona drives the milk into town in a shandry that is full of tall milk-cans.

It is Sunday morning in the early part of August, nineteen hundred and fourteen. The sun has risen bright and clear, giving promise of another good day. Mona is driving out of the gate when she hears the crack of a rocket from the rocket-house connected with the lifeboat. She looks towards the sea. It lies as calm as a sleeping child, and there is not a ship in sight anywhere. What does it mean?

A cock is crowing in the barn-yard, Robbie’s dog is barking among the sheep on the hill, the bees are humming in the hedges of yellow gorse and the larks are singing in the blue sky. There is no other sound except the rattle of the shandry in which the fine girl, as fresh as the morning, stands driving in the midst of her pails, and whistling to herself as she drives.

On reaching Peel she sees men in the blue costume of the naval reserve bursting out of their houses, shouting hurried adieux to their wives and children, and then flying off with cries and laughter in the direction of the railway station.

“What’s going on?” asks Mona of one of the wives.

“Haven’t you heard, woman? It’s the war! Mobilization begins to-day, and four steamers are leaving Douglas”—the chief port of the island—“to take the men to their ships.”

“And who are we going to war with?”

“The Germans, of course.”

Germany has jumped on Belgium—the big brute on the little creature, and the men are going to show her how to mend her manners.

“They will, too,” says Mona.

They will give the Germans a jolly good thrashing and then the war will soon be over. She has always hated the Germans—she hardly knows why. May they get what they deserve this time!

Back at Knockaloe she finds Robbie visibly excited.

“You’ve heard the news, then?”

“I have that.”

“They’ll be calling you boys off the land next.”

“Will they? Do you think they will, girl?”

Robbie’s black eyes were glistening. He looks round on the fields near the house. They are yellow and red; the harvest will soon be over, and then....

It is a fortnight later. There is high commotion in the island. Kitchener has put out his cry: “Your King and Country need you.” It is posted up on all the walls and printed in the insular newspapers. Young men from the remotest parts are hurrying off to the recruiting stations. Mona and Robbie are at work in the harvest fields. Mona cannot contain her excitement.

“Oh, why am I not a man?”

“Would you go yourself, girl?”

“Wouldn’t I just,” says Mona, throwing up her head.

The corn is cut and stooked; nothing remains but to stack it. Robbie has gone into town for the evening. Mona and her father are indoors. The old man is looking grave. He remembers the Crimean war and its consequences.

“Robbie is getting restless,” he says.

“What wonder?” says Mona.

Suddenly, like a whirlwind, Robbie dashes into the house.

“I’ve joined up, dad! I’ve joined up, Mona!”

Mona flings her arms about his neck and kisses him. The old man says little, and after a while he goes up to bed.

A few days pass. It is the evening of Robbie’s departure. The household (all except Robbie) are at tea in the kitchen—the old man at the top of the long table, the maids and men-servants at either side of it, and Mona serving, according to Manx custom. Robbie comes leaping downstairs in his khaki uniform. Mona has never before seen her brother look so fine.

“Good-bye all! Good-bye!”

Mona goes down to the gate with Robbie, linking arms with him, walking with long strides and talking excitedly. He is to kill more and more Germans. The dirts! The scoundrels! Oh, if she could only go with him!

There is a joyful noise of men tramping on the high road. A company of khaki-clad lads on their way to the station come down from a mining village on the mountain, with high step, singing their “Tipperary.”

Robbie falls in, and Mona watches him until he turns the corner by Kirk Patrick and the trees have hidden him. Then she goes slowly back to the house. Her father, with a heavy heart, has gone to bed. God’s way is on the sea, and His path is on the great deep.

Two months have passed. Mona is managing the farm splendidly and everything is going well. About once a week there is a post-card from Robbie. At first the post-cards are playful, almost jubilant. War is a fine old game, a great adventure; he is to be sent to the front soon. Later there are letters from Robbie, and they are more serious. But nobody is to trouble about him. He is all right. They will lick these rascals before long and be home for Christmas.

Every night after supper the old man sits by the fire and reads aloud to the household from an English newspaper, never before having read anything except his Bible and the weekly insular paper.

There are hideous reports of German atrocities in Belgium. Mona is furious. Why doesn’t God hunt the whole race of wild beasts off the face of the earth? She would if she were God. The old man is silent. When the time comes to read the chapter from the Gospels he cannot do so, and creeps off to bed. Dark is the way of Providence. Who shall say what is meant by it?

The winter is deepening. It is a wild night outside. The old man is reading a report of shocking treachery in London. Germans, whom the English people had believed to be loyal friends and honest servants, have turned out to be nothing but spies. There has been a Zeppelin raid over London, and, though no lives have been lost, it is clear that Germans have been giving signals.

“Why doesn’t the Government put them all in prison?” says Mona. “Yes, every one of them. The hypocrites! The traitors! The assassins!”

The old man, who had opened the Bible, closes it, and goes upstairs.

“You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” he says.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Pronounced Knock-ā-loe.

SECOND CHAPTER

Christmas has gone; the spring has come; the seed is in the ground; the cattle are out on the hill after their long winter imprisonment in the cow-houses; but the war is still going on and Robbie has not yet returned home.

It is a bright spring morning. Mona is coming back from Peel in her shandry when she sees three gentlemen walking over the farm with her father, one of them in officer’s uniform, the other two in silk hats and light overcoats.

As she turns in at the gate she sees a fourth gentleman come down from the hillside and join them in the lane. He wears a Norfolk jacket, has a gun under his arm and two or three dogs at his heels. Mona recognizes the fourth gentleman as their landlord, and as she drives slowly past she hears her father say to him:

“But what about the farm, sir, when the war is over?”

“Don’t trouble about that,” says the landlord. “You are here for life, Robert—you and your children.”

Mona puts up her horse and goes into the house, and when the gentlemen have gone her father comes in to her. With a halting embarrassment he tells her what has happened. One of the gentlemen had been the Governor of the island, the strangers had been officials from the Home Office.

“It seems the Government in London have come to your opinion, girl.”

“What’s that?” says Mona.

“That the civilian Germans must be interned.”

“Interned? What does that mean?”

“Shut up in camps to keep them out of mischief.”

“Prison camps?”

“That’s so.”

“Serve them right, the spies and sneaks! But why did the gentlemen come here?”

“The Governor brought them. He thinks Knockaloe is the best place in the island for an internment camp.”

Mona is aghast.

“What? Those creatures! Are we to be turned out of the farm for the like of them?”

“Not that exactly,” says the old man, and he explains the plan that had been proposed to him by the gentlemen from London. He and his family are to remain in the farm-house and keep that part of the pasture land that lies on the hill-side in order to provide the fresh milk that will be required for the camp.

Mona is indignant.

“Do you mean that we are to work to keep alive those Germans whose brothers are killing our boys in France? Never! Never in this world.”

Her father must refuse. Of course he must. The farm is theirs—for as long as the lease lasts, anyway.

“Tell the Governor to find some other place for his internment camp.”

The old man explains that he has no choice. What the Government wants in a time of war it must have.

“Very well,” says Mona; “let them have the farm and we’ll go elsewhere.”

The old man tells her that he must remain. He is practically conscripted.

“They don’t want me, though, do they?”

“Well, yes, they do. They are not for having other women about the camp, but under the circumstances they must have one woman anyway.”

“It won’t be me, then. Not likely!”

The old man pleads with the girl. Is she going to leave him alone?

“Me growing old, too, and Robbie at the war!”

At length Mona consents. She will remain for her father’s sake, but she hates the thought of living in the midst of Germans and helping to provide for them.

“It will be worse than being at the war—a thousand times worse.”

It is a fortnight later. Huge wagons, full of bricks and timber and other building materials, with vast rolls of barbed wire, have been arriving at the farm, and a multitude of bricklayers and carpenters have been working all day long and half the night. Ugly stone-paved paths have been cut through the green fields; the grass-grown lane from the farm-house to the high road has been made into a broad bare avenue; gorse-covered hedges, already beginning to bloom, have been torn down, and long rows of hideous wooden booths have been thrown up and then tarred and pitched on their faces and roofs. It has been like magic—black magic, Mona calls it.

Already a large area on the left of the avenue, encompassed by double lines of barbed wire, which look like cages for wild beasts, is ready for occupation. It is called Compound Number One.

Mona is now the only woman on the land, the maids being dismissed, and men and boys employed to take their places. The last of the girls to go is a pert young thing from Peel. Her name is Liza Kinnish, and before the war she used to make eyes at Robbie. Now that other men are to come she wants to remain, but Mona packs her off with the rest.

It is evening. Mona hears the whistle of the last train pulling up in the railway station, and a little later the cadenced tramp, tramp, tramp, as of an advancing army on the high road.

It is the first of the Germans. From the door of the house she looks at them as they come up the avenue—a long procession of men in dark civilian clothes, marching in double file, with a thinner line of British soldiers on either side of them. Mona shudders. She thinks they look like a long black serpent.

Next morning from the window of her bedroom Mona sees more of them. They are a sullen-looking lot, but generally well-dressed and with a certain air of breeding. On going towards the cow-house she speaks to one of the guard. He tells her they are the best she is likely to see. Many of them are well-to-do men. Some are rich, and have been carrying on great businesses in London and living in large houses and even mansions. Later she hears from her father that they are grumbling about their quarters and the food provided for them.

“Let them,” she says. “They deserve no better.”

In a half-hearted way the old man excuses them. After all they are prisoners, cut off from their wives and children.

“Well, and what worse off are they than our men who are fighting at the front? The hypocrites! The traitors!”

“You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” says the old man.

It is another fortnight later. The black magic has been going on as before, and Compound Number Two, on the right of the avenue, is ready for occupation.

At the same hour in the evening Mona hears the tramp, tramp, tramp, as of another army coming up the high road. It is the second company of the Germans, and they are a hundredfold worse-looking than the first. A coarse, dirty, brutal lot, some of them in rags—sailors, chiefly, who have been captured at the docks in Liverpool and Glasgow and in certain cases taken off ships at sea. But they are all in high spirits, or pretend to be so. They come up the avenue laughing, singing and swearing.

Mona is standing at the door to look at them. They see her, address her with coarse pleasantries which she does not understand, and finally make noises with their lips as if they were kissing her. She turns indoors.

“The scum! The beasts!” she says.

“You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” says the old man.

A month later Compound Number Three is ready, and once more there is the sound of marching on the high road. Mona, who is in the house, will not go to the door again. She is sour of heart and stomach at the thought that she has to live among the Germans and help to provide for them.

She hears the new batch pass through to their compound, which is on the seaward side of the farm-house, and is compelled to notice that, unlike their predecessors, they make no noise. Next morning her father tells her they are young men for the most part, young clerks, young doctors, young professional men of many sorts.

“Quite a decent-looking lot,” the old man says.

Mona curls her lips. They are Germans. That’s enough for her.

“You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” the old man says. “What did the old Book teach thee to pray?—Our Father!”

Mona’s hatred of the Germans is deepening every hour, yet twice a day she has to meet with some of them. Morning and evening she serves the regulated supply of milk to the men who come from the compounds, attended by their guard. They try to engage her in conversation, but she rarely answers them, and she tries not to listen.

Always the last to come is a pale-faced young fellow from the Third Compound. He has a hacking cough, and Mona thinks he must be consumptive. An impulse of pity sometimes seizes her, but she fights it down. After all, what matter? He belongs to the breed of the brutes who plotted the war.

The newspapers continue to come, and every night after supper the old man reads the war news to his household. The Germans, who seem to have been always advancing, are beginning to fall back. The armies of the Allies are co-operating, and it is hoped that before long a decisive blow will be struck. The old man’s voice, which has usually had a certain tremor, grows strong and triumphant to-night. And when he has come to the end of his reading of the Gospel, which always follows the reading of the newspaper, he closes the big book, drops his head over it, shuts his eyes and, putting his hands together, says:

“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

When the farm-servants have gone out of the kitchen, Mona, who has been standing by the fireplace leaning one hand on the high mantelpiece, says, in a vibrant voice:

“Father, do you really want peace?”

“Goodness sakes, girl, why not?”

“I don’t. I want war and more war until those demons are driven home or wiped out of the world.”

A few days later a letter comes from Robbie. He has been made lieutenant, and is in high spirits. They have had a pretty rotten time thus far, but things are coming round now. He has heard it whispered that there is to be a great offensive soon, and that he himself is to go, for the first time, up to the front trenches. He is in a hurry now, preparations going forward so furiously, but they’ll hear of him again before long.

“So bye-bye for the present, dad, and wish me luck! And, by the way, tell Mona I read a part of her last letter to some of the officers at the mess last night, and when I had finished they all cried out, like one man, ‘My God! That girl’s a stunner!’ And then the major said, ‘If we had a thousand men with the spirit of your sister the war wouldn’t last a month longer.’”

A week has passed since Robbie’s letter, and the newspapers report a wonderful victory—the enemy is on the run. Every evening, at the hour when the postman is expected to arrive at the camp, the old man, who has said nothing, has been out on the paved way in front of the farm-house (the “street,” as the Manx call it), in his sleeve waistcoat, smoking his pipe and with the setting sun from over the sea on his face.

The other letter Robbie promised has not come yet. But this evening through the kitchen window Mona sees the postman striding slowly up the garden path with his head down and a letter in his hand, and something grips at her heart. The postman gives the letter to her father, and goes off without speaking. The old man fumbles it, turning the envelope over and over in his hands. It is a large one, and it has printing across the top. At length, as if making a call on his resolution, he opens it with a trembling hand, tearing the letter as he drags it out of the envelope. He looks at it, seems to be trying to read it and finding himself unable to do so. Mona goes out to him, and he gives her the torn sheet of typewriting.

“Read it, girl,” he says helplessly, and then he lays hold of the trammon tree that grows by the porch. Mona begins, “The Secretary of State for War regrets....”

She stops. There is no need to go farther. Robbie has fallen in action.

The truth dawns on the old man in a moment. An unseen flash as of lightning seems to strike him, and he reels as if about to fall. Mona calls to some of the farm hands, and they help her father indoors and up to bed, and then run for the nearest doctor—the English doctor of the First Compound.

The old man has had a stroke. It is a slight one, but he must stay in bed for a long time and be kept absolutely quiet. No more letters or newspapers—nothing that will startle or distress him. It is his only chance.

Mona does not cry, but her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver. Her hatred of the Germans is now fiercer than ever. They have killed her brother and stricken her father. May God punish them—every one of them! Not their Kings and Kaisers only, but every man, woman and child! If He does not, there is no God at all—there cannot be.

THIRD CHAPTER

Three months pass. The Internment Camp has been growing larger and larger. There are five compounds in it now, and twenty-five thousand civilian prisoners, besides the British Commandant and his officers and guard—two thousand more. It is a big ugly blotch of booths and tents and bare ground, surrounded by barbed wire and covering with black ashes like a black hand the green pastures where the sweet-smelling farm had been. In the middle of the camp, cut off from the compounds, is the farm-house, and its outhouses, with their many cows, and its farm-servants who sleep in the rooms over the dairy.

Mona is the only woman among twenty-seven thousand men. The Commandant, who is kind, calls her “The Woman of Knockaloe.” The first shock of her brother’s loss and her father’s seizure is over and she is going on with her work as before. After all the “creatures” of the cow-house have to be attended to, and if she could not leave Knockaloe before the Germans came she cannot leave it now when her father lies half-paralysed upstairs.

As often as she can do so during the day she runs up to him, and at night, after she has given the men their supper, she reads to him. It is only the Bible now, and by the old man’s choice no longer the Gospels, but the Old Testament—Job with its lamentations, and afterwards the Psalms, but not the joyful ones, only those in which David calls on the Lord to revenge him upon his enemies. Her father is a changed man. His heart has grown bitter. He takes a fierce joy in David’s denunciations and mutters them to himself when he is alone.

The girl was right. Those spawn of the Pit—what fate is too bad for them?

Christmas comes, the second Christmas, then spring, the second spring. Mona watches the life of the camp with loathing. Rising in the grey of the morning, she sees the prisoners ranging round their compounds like beasts in a cage, and on going to bed in the dark she sees the white light of the arc-lamps which have been set up at the far corners of the camp to prevent their escape during the night. She hears of frequent rioting, rigorously put down, and then of an attempt at insurrection in the messroom of the First Compound and of four prisoners being shot down by the guard. Serve them right! She has no pity.

She overhears the guards talking of indescribable vices among the men of the Third Compound and then of terrible punishments. Her work sometimes requires that she should pass this compound, and as often as she does so she becomes conscious that behind the barbed wires the men are looking at her with evil eyes and laughing like monkeys. Her flesh creeps—she feels as if they were stripping her naked. The beasts! The monsters!

One sunny morning in the early summer Mona is awakened by the loud boom of a gun from the sea. Looking out she sees a warship coming to anchor in the bay. Later she sees great activity in the officers’ quarters and hears that the Home Secretary has come from London to make an inspection of the camp and that the Commandant has sent for the Governor. Still later she sees the three going the rounds of the compounds. Towards noon they pass the farm on their way to the Commandant’s dining-room, and, the kitchen window being open, Mona hears what the stranger, who looks angry, is saying:

“What can you expect? Shut men up like dogs and what wonder if they develop the vices of dogs! The only remedy is work, work, work.”

A few days after that the joiners and bricklayers are building workshops all over the camp and within a month there is the sound of hammering and sawing and planing from inside these places, as if the prisoners were working. Mona laughs. They will never turn these creatures into human beings—never!

Autumn comes and the fields outside the camp are waving yellow and red to the harvest, but the Manx boys, nearly all that are worth anything, are away at the war, and the farmers are saying the corn will lie down uncut and rot on the ground if they cannot get help to gather it.

One night she hears that the better-behaved of the prisoners are to be sent out to the neighbouring farms to work at the harvesting, and next morning she sees a batch of them going off with their guard, down the avenue and through the gates.

“There’ll be trouble coming of this,” she thinks. “Such men are not to be trusted.”

Inside a month the camp is ringing with a scandal. The letters arriving at the camp for the prisoners have always been examined by censors. Most of the letters have come from friends in their own country, but now it is found that some are from Manx girls, who, having met with German prisoners while working on the land, have struck up friendships. One of these girls has written to tell her German lover that she is in “trouble” and that the wife of her master is turning her out. Her name is Liza Kinnish.

Mona’s anger is unbounded. The slut! She has a brother at the war too! Mona has no pity for such creatures. While their boys out there at the front are fighting and dying for them they are carrying on at home with these German reptiles! Serve them right, whatever the disgrace that falls on them!

“I’d have such women whipped—yes, whipped in the public market-place.”

From that time forward Mona hates the prisoners as she had never hated them before. She cannot bear to look into their German faces or to hear the sound of their German voices. All the same she has to live among them for her father’s sake and even to serve them twice a day with the milk from the dairy.

Late in the year, at seven in the morning, she is measuring the milk into the cans, which are marked with the numbers of the various compounds. The prisoners come to carry them away, saluting her with the mist about their mouths as they do so, but she makes no answer. When she thinks they have all gone she finds the can of the Third Compound still standing by the dairy door where she had left it.

The pale-faced boy who coughed always came for that, and was generally the last to arrive. After a while, when she has her back to the door, she hears a voice behind her.

“Is this for me, miss?”

She starts. Something in his voice arrests her. It is not harsh and guttural, like that of the other prisoners, but soft, deep and human. For one dizzy moment she almost thinks it is Robbie’s.

She turns. A young man, whom she has never seen before, is on the threshold. He is about thirty years of age, tall, slim, erect, fair-haired, with hazel eyes and a clean-cut face that has an open expression. Can this be a German?

After a moment of silence Mona says:

“Who are you?”

He tells her. The young fellow who had fetched the milk before had broken a blood-vessel on awakening early that morning and been carried up to the hospital.

“What’s your name?”

“Oskar.”

“Oskar what?”

“Oskar Heine.”

“And you are in Compound Three?”

“Yes.”

Mona gazes at him in silence for a moment, and then recovering herself, she says:

“Yes, that’s yours.”

The young man touches his cap and says:

“Thank you.”

Mona tries to answer him but she cannot. He goes off, carrying his can, and with his guard behind him. Mona finds herself looking after him, first through the door and then through the dairy window.

All that day she goes about her work with a serious face and is cross with the farm hands when they do anything amiss. And at night, when supper is over, and her father calls down to her to come up and read his Bible, she calls back.

“Not to-night, dad—I’ve got a headache.”

Then she sits before the fire alone and does not go to bed until morning.

FOURTH CHAPTER

Another month has passed. Mona has been fighting a hard battle with herself. Some evil spirit seems to have found its way into her heart and she has had to struggle against it all day and every day.

“It can’t be true! It’s impossible! I should hate myself,” she thinks.

To fortify herself against her secret enemy she spends as much time as she can spare with her father. The old man is now bitterer than ever against the Germans. They have killed his son, and he can never forgive them.

“Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.... Let not the ungodly have their desire, O Lord; let hot burning coals fall upon them; let them be cast into the fire and into the pit, that they may never rise again.”

Mona hears the old man’s voice through the thin partition wall that separates her room from his, and she makes an effort to join in his imprecations. But the terrible thing is that she catches herself thinking they are wicked psalms, and that David, when he said such things, was not “a man after God’s own heart” but a devil.

This frightens her and she tries to make amends to her conscience by being as harsh as possible to the prisoners. When Oskar comes to the dairy with the rest she never allows herself to look at him, and when he speaks, which is seldom, she snaps at him or else tries not to hear what he is saying. But one morning she is compelled to listen.

“Ludwig’s gone.”

“Ludwig?”

“The man who used to come for the milk.”

“The boy with the cough?”

“Yes. Died in the night and is to be buried to-morrow. Just twenty-two and such a quiet young fellow. He was the only son of his mother too, and she is a widow. I’ve got to write and tell her. She’ll be broken-hearted.”

Mona feels a tightening at her throat, and then tears in her eyes, but she forces herself to say: “Well, she’s not the only mother who has lost a son. People who make wars must expect to suffer for them.”

Oskar looks at her for a moment and then goes off without speaking again. At the next moment she catches herself looking after him through the window just as he turns his head and looks back.

“Oh God, forgive me! Forgive me!” she thinks and feels as if she would like to beat herself.

A week later when Oskar comes as usual he is carrying a small wooden box, which he sets down inside the dairy door. It is from Ludwig’s mother, and contains one of the little glass domes of artificial flowers which the Germans lay on the graves of their dead.

“She asks me to lay them on Ludwig’s, but how can I, not being allowed to go out of the gates?”

The lid of the box has been loosened, and lifting it, he shows the glass dome with an inscription attached. Mona allows herself to stoop and look at it. It is in German.

“What does it say?” she asks.

“‘With Mother’s everlasting love.’”

Mona feels as if a knife has gone to her heart, but she rises hastily and says sharply: “You may take it away. I’ll have nothing to do with it,” and Oskar goes off, but he leaves the box behind him.

All day long she tries not to look at it, but it is constantly meeting her eye, and in the evening, when her work is done and everything is quiet, she picks up the box, puts it under her cloak and turns towards the gates of the encampment.

“Better have it out of my sight,” she thinks as she goes into the churchyard of Kirk Patrick.

She has no difficulty in finding the place. Other Germans have died and been buried since the camp began. Here they lie in a little square by themselves at the back of the church, with recumbent white marble stones above them inscribed with their foreign names. On the last of the graves, not yet covered, she lays the flowers and then throws the box away.

“After all, it’s only human. Nobody can blame me for that.”

But do what she will she cannot help thinking of the German boy and of his mother weeping for him in his German home.

She has heard the tramp of a horse’s hoofs on the road behind her, and as she returns through the lych-gate the rider draws up and speaks to her. It is the Commandant, who has been taking his evening ride before dinner. He asks what she has been doing and she tells him quite truthfully. He looks serious and says: “It’s natural that you should feel pity for some of these men, but take an old man’s advice, my child, and don’t let it go any further.”

Mona tries to follow the Commandant’s counsel, but doing so tears her heart until it bleeds. Even the hours with her father fail to fortify her. The old man is well enough now to sit up in a chair in his bedroom and certain of his neighbouring farmers are permitted to see him. One of them, a babbling fellow, tells him of the sinking of a great passenger liner by an enemy submarine and the loss of more than a thousand lives.

The old man breaks into a towering passion. “Those sons of darkness, may the Lord destroy them for ever! May the captain of that submarine never know another night’s sleep as long as he lives! May the cries of the drowning torment his soul until it comes up for judgment, and may it then be damned for ever!”

“Be quiet, father,” says Mona. “You know what the doctor said. Besides, is it Christian-like to follow the sins of a man to the next world and wish his soul in hell?”

But when she is alone in her own room she knows that her Christian charity is all a delusion.

“Oh God help me! God help me! Send me something to help me,” she cries.

One morning in summer the Commandant calls on her father and she leads him upstairs. He takes a little leather-covered case out of his pocket and, opening it by its spring, shows a military medal.

“What is it?” asks the old man.

“The Victoria Cross, old friend, won by your son for conspicuous bravery in battle and sent to you by the King.”

The old man wipes his eyes and says: “But who is to wear it now that Robbie is gone?”

“May I make a suggestion?” says the Commandant. “Let your daughter wear it. Why not?”

“Yes, yes, why not?” says Mona, and she seizes it convulsively and pins it on her breast.

Next morning, feeling braver, with the medal on her breast, she looks Oskar Heine full in the face when he comes to the dairy door as usual. He sees it and asks what it is and where it came from, and with a proud lift of the head she tells him, almost defiantly, about Robbie and what he did at the war.