“We thought to fetch perhaps ten or twelve suitable refugees to begin with?” said Mrs. Fothergill. “Our illustrious neighbors, in the town of Bexhill-on-Sea, already claim to have twenty-six,” she added. “Not that one wishes to accuse them of broadcasting their own generosity.”
“My wife, as you can see, has already devoted some time to the study of this issue,” said the Mayor.
“Oh no you do not,” whispered Agatha Kent, rising to her feet and waving.
“Mrs. Kent?” said the Mayor.
“If I may beg the indulgence of the room to hear a word from the concerned ladies of Rye, I would just like to applaud dear Mrs. Fothergill, on behalf of all of us, for her leadership in this area.” She paused for a hearty round of applause.
“Thank you, dear Mrs. Kent,” said Mrs. Fothergill, simpering.
“Mrs. Fothergill and I are eager to work on this issue together,” continued Agatha, “and I believe we ladies have the opportunity to do so under the guidance of a gentleman who not only has been working on this matter locally but has been asked to take a lead on the national stage.”
“Who is she talking about?” said the Mayor in a loud whisper to his wife, who could not answer him through her clamped lips. Her face turned as pale as her dress.
“For the sake of the Belgians and for the opportunity to associate our town with a national spokesman on this issue, I know dear Mrs. Fothergill and I will join Colonel Wheaton and Dr. Lawton in asking the room to nominate Mr. Tillingham by acclamation.”
“I think Mrs. Fothergill is quite capable…” But the Mayor’s voice was drowned out by an enthusiastic round of cheering and clapping, which grew louder as Mr. Tillingham stood up from his seat at the front of the room, waving his hat to all sides and bowing modestly under the applause.
“We have our full committee heads, I think,” said Colonel Wheaton. If he had been primed by his wife to act in concert with Agatha Kent, he gave no sign. The Mayor glared, and his wife sat down abruptly, but the room was decidedly in favor of Mr. Tillingham, who made some show of reluctance before mounting to the podium to speak to the room.
“This small corner of immutable England has been a home and a refuge for this poor wandering scribe, and so I cannot express my gratitude that you would entrust me to represent you in this important cause,” said Mr. Tillingham. He held his hat over his heart and looked to the heavens as if asking for divine inspiration. “In a time of great peril, one cannot but look around this ancient town, filled with generations of stouthearted, generous English men and women, and know that our Belgian neighbors could not ask a kinder, more welcoming sanctuary.”
“Actually the good people of our town are as frugal and suspicious a group as I have ever met, and they actively dislike all foreigners,” whispered Agatha to Beatrice. “But we will hope for the best.”
As the meeting concluded, Beatrice looked around to see how she might escape the ladies, such as Bettina Fothergill, who now measured all women by whether one was at leisure to work full-time on the war effort. Agatha, rising to move swiftly to the aisle, took the time to stop and pat her hand.
“If anyone should ask, you are pledged to Belgian Relief full-time, my dear,” she said. “Direct all further questions to me.”
“Thank you,” said Beatrice, grateful again for Agatha’s sharp understanding. As she slipped from the room, she grinned to see Agatha shake hands with Miss Finch and her companion and direct them, deliberately, towards the tea table, where, Beatrice assumed, Agatha intended their enthusiasm to be the final straw in Mrs. Fothergill’s bad day.
—
Snout was after rabbits. He had thin wire snares set below two of the many holes in the bank, a small pile of apple skin left a few inches away. He knew the sweet, clean smell was all in the warren, filling the dark tunnels and causing rabbits to flick sleepy ears and snuffle their noses. As he crouched against the high bank of the dirt lane, his back buried as much as possible into a patch of tall, furry nettles, he could smell the bitter, milky sap of the crushed stalks. The flowers of a tall pink mallow trembled over his head, and he smelled his own warm sweat and the sharpness of fallen apples in the orchard above the bank.
While he waited, he pulled from his bag a dog-eared translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. He had borrowed the book for the summer, slipping in when the school library was empty and dropping the book out of the window into a yew bush to avoid Miss Devon, who seemed to think her job as English teacher included defending the school’s books against dirty boys. His fellow pupils would have pilloried any boy for reading a single page more than required, but he had whiled away many a detention in the library breathlessly following the Trojan Aeneas on his quest to found the Roman Empire. At year’s end, and halfway through his third rereading, he could not bear to leave Aeneas outside the stench-filled cave to the Underworld, with the hell dogs baying at the dreadful Sibyl’s approach. He had resisted the urge to show Miss Nash the book. Teachers enjoyed their godlike powers to toy with him and punish as they pleased, and he had already let slip too much enthusiasm for Virgil. But he had a strange feeling she would have understood.
As he waited and read, he kept one eye on his snares and one ear cocked for any sound of the farmer. Any nailed boots, any cart wheel or snorting of ewes being herded in a mass of hot, oily wool, a collie nipping at their heels. It was not the farmer’s time to be in this lane, he was likely harvesting corn in his upper fields, but it was always wise to listen. The farmer had no respect for the track being a public way and would box the ears of rabbiting boys and threaten them with the constable for poaching. Snout could still feel a blow he had once had from the farmer and being held almost to choking, by the collar, until the constable was called, and the constable asking for his full name with which he was christened, and the farmer shouting that he was a dirty Gypsy and not deserving of the benefits of Church.
“Richard Edmund Sidley,” he had said, the name almost unfamiliar in his ears. Everyone called him Snout, except his mother, who called him Dickie darling (which was worse than Snout if there were other boys about to hear), and his father, who called him Son.
“Fancy name for a low poacher,” the farmer replied, and the constable arrested him and hauled him away in his dog cart, taking along one of the two dead rabbits. Near town, the constable gave him a halfhearted box on the ear, not half as hard as his sister or mother could deliver, and told him to run home.
“Lucky for you we don’t hang poachers no more,” he said.
“Can I have my rabbit?” Snout asked.
“Course, I could send you to the reformatory,” the constable said. Snout took off running and heard the constable calling after him, “Tell your mother Arnie Sprigs sends his best regards.” His mother had been a beauty in her day, and many a man in Rye still shook his head in disbelief that she had chosen to marry his father instead.
A leaf twitched at the nearest hole. A soft gray nose wriggled and sniffed. Snout held his breath and did his best to quiet the beat of his heart. A bird sang a clear note in the treetops, the leaves of the hedges shivered, and a gray-brown rabbit dashed headlong into the wire noose to fall, writhing in the dirty lane, blood spurting from its neck. Snout wrapped the body as best he could in big dock leaves and put it in his bag. He put the Virgil on top and hoped the rabbit wouldn’t bleed all over it.
War broke: and now the Winter of the world With perishing great darkness closes in.
…
For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece, And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome, An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home, A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.
WILFRED OWEN, “1914”