Homing by Elswyth Thane

Author:Elswyth Thane [Elswyth Thane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719813481
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2013-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

5

When the pony-cart returned just before lunch, Virginia was sitting in the drawing room with Tracy Marsh, drinking sherry.

The rest of them gathered round the fire with their own glasses, trying not to stare at him, but obviously mesmerized by so glamorous a figure, fresh out of Warsaw, and on top of that an American, and furthermore a beau of Virginia’s.

Jeff contained himself with difficulty, restrained by the awful unwritten law—you can’t print that. When a man is at his ease among friends with a drink in his hand, you don’t pump him for the newspaper. He may talk a million dollars’ worth of front-page stuff, but you can’t use it.

He told them very little anyway that had not already been in print or rumour. The point was, he had seen it. His mere presence in their midst, untalkative, unexcitable, unpretentious, but authentic, made the nightmare of Warsaw real. It was plain that he had digested his experience, accepted it, made his deductions, and reported accordingly to those who sent him there. He had no desire to shock or frighten his present audience with hair-raising tales. But small anecdotes and word vignettes could not help but emerge if he so much as opened his mouth—the flame-streaked rubble and blood and terror of a bombed city—the raw-boned Stukas in a screaming dive on the target—the stumbling, sobbing lines of refugees shattered and panicked by a hail of machine gun bullets from above—the old lady dressed in her Sunday best and riding in a wheelbarrow—the child who carried a dead bird in a bent and battered wire cage—the boy who wept beside a dying cart-horse….

He had seen a fallen Government go into exile in the crowded border towns of countries which were so far safe—and their faces wore the same dazed hopelessness as the faces in the roadside camps set up by people who had no money to buy shelter and nowhere to go. A world had ended. A nation had perished. Tracy was there when it happened, and it had marked him, but he was not one to dramatize it.

Virginia, watching and listening with the rest, was wrung with pride and pity. Here was a man to love and to cherish. And some fool of a woman had bungled it and gone off with some one easier. Well, that made two fool women, didn’t it. In an hour or so he would be gone again. What could you do in an hour to make up for twenty years? Better to let it go now. Don’t look back. Don’t entangle him. There was no future. There was only a war.

The talk had moved on to Finland, where the Russians were being made to pay for every inch of ground, but where there was no chloroform for the wounded.

“Aren’t we going to help Finland either?” Anne cried unexpectedly, and then flushed as they all looked at her with surprise and affection. “Can’t we even send them hospital supplies? Performing amputations without anaesthetics is

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