The Wild Dark Flowers Read Online Free Page A

the long months of winter training had disheartened them. It seemed as if his own prophecy might come true—that it would all be finished before their regiment got itself organized.
    But then, by this spring, the stories of their great derring-do had begun to ring hollow, and he heard it unmistakably in his own voice. The edge had gone off the great adventure; they were glad lads no longer, their jauntiness had been replaced by a more determined grim humor. They had counted the numbers of the dead in the newspapers and started to guess the odds. The word “Ypres,” for instance, had taken on a bitter, awful ring since last October. All hell had broken loose there again last month, apparently. And he had no doubt that it was there—or thereabouts—where the regiment would end up. But there was no turning back. If anything, it was even more important to go.
    He watched the glorious blue sky now and considered himself, just an inconsequential body of a man lying on the back of a three-thousand-foot-high mountain, of no greater worth than the grass. Not in himself. Not in everyday matters. He was ordinary from the outside; he knew it. But perhaps war would make him better than he had ever been before; of more use, of more purpose. Perhaps it would steel him a bit, make him bigger in some way that he couldn’t get a grasp on, couldn’t define.
    He knew that he was not much to look at; he was not handsome, he would be passed over in a line. The battalion had already had some photographs taken in training, and, when he had come to look at them when they were pinned up at the barracks, he couldn’t place himself for a long time. When he did, it was to see with some chagrin that he had nothing striking about him; nothing made him stand out from the crowd. He was tall, right enough, but his shoulders were sloping—he supposed from so many years of service, trying to polish up a kind of obsequious look. He was thin, too—pale handed, thin wristed—he was hardly the soldierly ideal.
    Mary had been surprised when he came back and said that he had signed up; she had raised an eyebrow. “I had you down for a quiet man,” she told him. His hackles rose at the subtle insinuation. Seeing his frown, she smiled. “I can’t see you as a soldier, that’s all I meant,” she whispered when they saw each other again, passing in the corridor from the kitchen. “With your poetry and all.” He had considered her. “A poet can carry a gun,” he told her. “I’ll come back in uniform, see how you like me then.” She smiled back at him. “I like you enough as it is,” she replied. Astonished, he had watched her back as she hurried away.
    He propped himself up on one elbow now and looked down towards Ullswater. Just below him began Striding Edge, the long narrow ledge that led away from Helvellyn and down towards the distant lake and Glenridding. He’d walked it before; it was not as bad as it looked from here. He would be down in the village by sunset. It was not as hard as the way he had already come, from Dale Head—a grinding, exhausting, exhilarating walk. Tomorrow he would climb to Bampton Common and finish at Shap, where he would rest his back against the Guggleby Stone, a relic of a thousand years or more, of stone circles and avenues that no one understood.
    He’d done it so that he could carry the walk and the mountains with him, keep the images of it all in his head—as a kind of invisible keepsake.
    This time last year, he had never realized that there would be a war at all—never even dreamed of such a thing. He had been doing what he always did at Rutherford; waiting table, laying out clothes, polishing silver. He thought of the steamy servants’ kitchen, where Mary even now would be laboriously laying the trays for afternoon tea, and tried to put himself alongside her, and dreamed of putting his hand, thin as it was, frail as it seemed, over her ruddy, hardworking fingers. He imagined stopping her in her work,