Chapter Eighteen—The Letter
"Won't you go back?" Una asked Walter the next morning. "I'm sure that there must have been some mistake."
"What kind of mistake could there have been? Right after the Armistice, when a Canadian battalion came to the camp where we were stationed, I wrote my letter. I said that I'd worked with a German doctor for three years and had come to believe that England had not totally been in the right during the War, nor Germany in the wrong. I signed, sealed, and addressed the envelope. I couldn't deliver it personally to the commanding officer because I had patients to deal with, so I gave it to Doktor Schwartz to give to him."
"And it couldn't have been lost somewhere between Germany and P.E.I.?"
"I suppose so…but why would it have been? It was given to an officer who was returning to Canada. He would have sent it in the first mail possible, and it would have had top priority, since it was in with military documents."
Una sighed softly. Convincing Walter that he needed to come home to his family was a task she wasn't sure if she could handle. Believing he was alive was almost inconceivable—if it wasn't for his almost continual presence, she was sure that she would have doubted herself—but trying to persuade him to return to the Island was an even more difficult task. He was convinced that Anne and Gilbert, once they received the letter, had decided to blot him out of their existence and never tell anyone that he was alive.
"But they're your parents!" Una said in frustration. "It practically killed your mother when the news of your 'death' reached her. You knew your parents—would they really do that to their own flesh and blood? Think of your mother, and how she grew up without a loving family for so long. Would she deliberately decrease the size of the one she has now? They love you, Walter, whether alive or dead."
"But what about the letter?" Walter asked. "You can't escape that part of it."
Una inwardly gritted her teeth. "We don't know what happened to the letter…ad infinitum. I suppose we'll never come to a resolution on this point. I just don't understand why you think that your family would reject you."
"They already did…and I don't mean the letter."
"What?" Una felt her head start to hurt again. The beauty of the French countryside was lost on her and Walter as their eyes met—hers shocked, his bitter.
"I hated to tell you this part; I know that you're marrying into our family, and I didn't want you to think less kindly of us because of it."
"Shirley? But how?"
"Not Shirley—Jem. I told you that Doktor Schwartz was transferred to Holland and that I went with him as an assistant. I wore a German medic's uniform—my Canadian one was completely out of the question, even if it hadn't been tattered and bloodstained. Jem was in that camp for a while, until he escaped." Walter paused. "Did he make it home safely?"
"Yes, he did," Una said. "He and Faith were married, and they have three children—Walter, Matthew, and Meredith."
"And that is how it should be, I suppose. The hero slays the dragon, marries the princess, and lives happily ever after, while the wandering minstrel…but I digress. I didn't know that Jem was there for quite a while; he must have been in good health. But one night, the Doktor sent me out to deliver medicine to a prison guard. On my way back, I was met by a group of prisoners returning from the latrines. One of them spat at me…I looked up into the hate-filled eyes of my older brother." Walter's face was filled with pain. Una held his hands between hers, trying to comfort him.
"Are you sure it was him?"
"Yes. One of the other men with him said, 'He's not worth your time, Blythe,' and Jem agreed. 'I suppose you're right, Barry. Boche!' He spit at me again. No, Una, I'm not going back." Walter got up abruptly from the chair by her bedside and went outside, slamming the door behind him.
Una remembered an odd story that Jem had told the family after the War, one that she felt might have been the other side to Walter's tale. "It was the oddest thing, one night in the prison camp. Stephen Barry—you know, he married Esme Dalley—and I were coming back from the latrines with a group of other prisoners. It was night, so of course I couldn't see clearly, but one of the medical assistants walked by. In the dim light, he reminded me of Walter so strongly. I knew Walter was dead, of course, and it made me angry. What right had a German to look like my brother? I spat at him, and he looked up at me. The look on his face reminded me so much of Walter after we'd have an argument…at that moment, I hated war with a passion."
Una decided to tell Walter what she remembered Jem saying. Of course, he would tell her that Jem had simply made it up, but maybe it could help change his mind. Wanting to keep her mind off of both the pain in her head and in her heart, she rummaged through Walter's bedside table, looking for a book to read. The Bible; Keats's poems; The Moral of the Rose, by Emily Byrd Starr—apparently Walter had tried to keep in touch with what was being written. Somehow, though, none of those appealed to her. She flipped through several more books, but couldn't find anything. Goethe's Faust was the last book on the pile. Una had never read Faust, but what she had heard of the plot was sufficiently gloomy to fit with her mood.
The book was old, with a green and gold cover, and didn't appear to have been read in years. When Una opened it, she felt a sense of disappointment—it was in German. As she placed it back on the table, an old, yellowed envelope fluttered to the floor.
*****************
When Walter came back in several hours later after roaming the grounds of Courcelette, he was met at the door by Una, looking as if she had experienced a resurrection. Tears were in her eyes, and an old letter was in her hand. Wordlessly, she handed him the envelope. It was addressed to Dr. Gilbert Blythe, Ingleside, Glen St. Mary's, PEI, Canada.
Walter looked at the seal. It had never been broken. There were no postage marks on the letter whatsoever. He looked incredulously at Una, who read the unspoken question in his eyes.
"In your copy of Faust."
Walter's reply came slowly. "That was the Doktor's favorite book…he spent hours reading it. He said once that he'd seen enough people in the War sell their souls that the concept seemed plausible. He left me the book, but my grasp of written German is poor enough that I never attempted to read it." Walter looked at Una, truth beginning to dawn. "He never mailed that letter."
"You said last night that he considered you a son. Perhaps he didn't want to lose you, too."
"He never mailed it, Una. For years, I've believed that my family disowned me. I never knew."
"But now you do," Una said softly. "Don't judge him too harshly, Walter. Who knows why he kept the letter. He must have intended you to find it at some point after his death."
Walter stroked the address on the letter. "My…my family! How will they ever forgive me for not trying harder to let them know I was alive?" He began to weep, the pent-up tears of years spilling over. Una saw the boy she had known in those tears, and she held him as he wept, crying herself for both joy and sorrow.
"You'll come home now?"
"I'll come home, if they'll have me."