The Parts Men Play Part 38

'You poor innocent! Some one always paid--don't worry. So we parted company on that issue, and I asked Mabel to take Edna's place. Mabel was frightfully nice, but took to opium cigarettes, and then to heroin. She disappeared one night, and never came back. Poor girl! Her going made room for Lily, who read the very nicest modern novels, and always cried through the love scenes. I wish you could have seen her sitting up in bed reading a book, eating chocolates, and sobbing like a crocodile.

Lily had only one weakness--marrying Flying Corps officers. It was really the army's fault giving two of her husbands leave at the same time.'

Selwyn frowned, 'What a dreadful experience!' he said.

'Oh, I don't know.' She gave a little shrug of her shoulders, but the spirit of badinage had vanished both from her face and from her voice.

'It didn't take long to lose most of one's illusions. It is one thing to meet people as Lord Durwent's daughter, and quite another as a free-lance ambulance-driver. I've seen what people really are since I've been on my own, and I'm sick of the whole thing.'

'You don't mean that, Elise?'

'I do. Men are rotten, and women are cats.'

He smiled quizzically, but she kept her eyes averted from his. It almost appeared as if she were determined to retain her pose of callousness at any effort, but his sense of psychology told him that his first conjecture was correct. The girl who had endured was trying to hide herself behind the personality of her old self.

'My dear girl,' he said slowly, 'it is an old trick of women to talk for the purpose of convincing themselves. I don't care what you have seen--you could not have pa.s.sed through the ordeal of these long months and believe in your innermost soul that either men or women are rotten.

In many ways I feel as if what little knowledge I possess dates from last night; and I have learned things about men right here in this ward to-day that have made me humble. These chaps that we call ignorant, the lower cla.s.ses--why, they are superb, wonderful. I tell you they have greatness in them. I wish you could have seen them'----

'Haven't I seen them,' she cried, with a little catch in her throat, 'hundreds and hundreds of times? Almost every day, and at all hours of the night, I've gone to meet the Red Cross trains. I have seen men die while being lifted out of the ambulance--men who would try to smile their thanks to us just before the end came. I have'---- She caught her hands in a tight grip, and her eyes welled with tears. 'But they're just jingoes, I suppose,' she said, blending a scornfulness with her repressed grief.

'I have deserved this,' said Selwyn, his face drawn. 'Nothing that you can say is half so bitter as my thoughts.'

'I didn't mean to hurt you,' she said.

'If ever a man was sincere, I was, Elise. Since I left you at Roselawn I have followed the one path, thinking there was a great light ahead. Now I am afraid that, perhaps, it was only a mirage.'

'No, it wasn't,' she replied vehemently. 'I hated you for thinking English women would not aid their men to fight, and I wanted never to see you again. But do you remember when I said that the glory of war was in women's blood? There was a certain amount of truth in it at the beginning; for when I first saw the wounded arrive I was madly excited.

I wanted to shout and cheer. But as the months have gone on, and I have seen our soldiers maimed and bleeding and suffering, while thousands of their women at home have simply broken loose and lost all sense of decency or self-respect--oh, what's the use?'

'But you mustn't forget the women who have done such great things for the country.'

'I know--but what's it all for? Since this battle of the Somme our casualties have been frightful, and every day means so many of our real men killed, and so many more s.h.i.+rkers and rotters in proportion to carry on the life of England. We've had our women's revolution all right.

There are not many of the old barriers left; but what a mess we have made of our freedom! When I think of all that, and then recall what you said about war, I know that you were right, and we were wrong.'

'You are wonderfully brave,' said Selwyn, 'not only for having done so much, but in telling me that.'

'No,' she said, lowering her eyes to the gloves which she held in her hand; 'I have lost all my courage. Every night I feel as if another day of meeting the wounded will kill me. . . . If it could only end!

Anything would be better than these awful casualty lists.'

'Elise'--he raised himself on his elbow and leaned towards her--'you prove yourself a woman when you say that; but you're wrong. I can't give my reasons yet, but since last night I have been seeing clearer and clearer that Britain not only must not lose, but must _win_. I know other men have said it ten thousand times, but only to-day have I begun to see that, in its own strange, unidealistic manner, this Empire is fighting for civilisation.'

'Then'--her eyes were lit with sudden, glistening radiancy--'then you don't think our men have died uselessly?'

'I could not believe in G.o.d,' he answered, wondering at the calm certainty of his voice uttering things which would have infuriated him a few hours before, 'if I thought that this war's dead had fallen for nothing.' His hand, which had been raised in gesture, fell limply on the bed. 'Up to yesterday,' he went on slowly, 'I reasoned truth; to-day--I feel truth. I wonder if it is not always so, that higher knowledge begins with the end of reasoning.'

For a couple of minutes neither spoke, and his head was throbbing with anvil-beats. Twice she started to speak, but stopped each time as though distrustful of her own words.

'I am going back to America, Elise.' His dreamy eyes were gazing beyond her into the distance, or he might have noted that the colour in her cheeks fluctuated suddenly and the fingers on her gloves tightened.

'Why?' There was nothing in her voice to indicate anything but casual interest.

'I must go back,' he said, leaning towards her--'back to my own country.

You don't understand. . . . There comes a moment when every fibre of a man's being craves for his own people, for the very air that he breathed as a boy. All these wasted months and last night's climax of d.a.m.nable murder have left me dazed. I am floundering hopelessly--but at home I shall be able to clear my mind of its mists and see this whole thing as it really is.'

A wall of pain pressed against his head, and his face went gray with agony. In an instant she was standing over him arranging his pillows, and soothing his temples with the gentle pressure of her hands.

For the first time in many months he knew the help and compa.s.sion of a woman--and the woman was Elise. He was weak from loss of blood, weary from the long travail of the mind, and her presence, with its indefinable fragrance of clover and morning flowers, was as exquisite music to his senses.

'If you only knew,' he murmured, 'how I have longed for this moment. It has been very lonely for me--and I have wanted you so much, Elise. G.o.d!

I've wanted you until I had to struggle to keep from crying out your name in the very streets. Forgive me talking like this.' He groped for her hand and held it tightly in his. 'I never had any right to tell you what you meant to me--and less now than before--but when I come back'----

'You will never come back.' She laughed with a strange tremulousness, but in her eyes there was something of the scorn she had shown towards him at Roselawn.

'You are wrong,' he said; 'I must'----

'You are an American,' she answered quickly, 'and that comes first with you. Your country has nothing to do with this war, and you are going back to it. You will stay there. I know you will.'

With his old decisive mannerism he sat up, and his eyes flashed with vigour.

'I will come back,' he said firmly. 'Life has separated us--it has not been your fault or mine--but some day, Elise, when I get my grip on things again, I shall come to you, and you will have to listen. We need each other, and nothing on the earth can alter that'----

'Except America!' She laughed again, and withdrew her hand from his.

'Elise!' he cried, reaching towards her, 'listen to me'----

The c.o.c.kney patient leaned over with a bag in his hand. ''Ave a gripe?'

he said genially.

'No, th'---- began Selwyn.

'Thanks so much,' said Elise, taking the bag and picking a small cl.u.s.ter for the American, afterwards handing the bag back to the Tommy.

''Ave a few yourself, won't yer?' said the warrior.

'May I?'

''Ere,' said the c.o.c.kney, with mock brusqueness. 'Tike a bunch.'

Perhaps from the very intensity of their previous talk, the threads snapped, and her quickly uttered sentences, with the accompanying sparkle in her eyes, showed him that he could hope for little more than badinage for the rest of her visit. Almost as if she desired to eradicate the memory of her emotional admission, she gave her vivacity full play. For a few minutes he tried to bring back the close intimacy of their souls, but she fenced him off, and met his heart-hungry glances with the gayest of smiles.

Roselawn, she told him, had been transformed into a convalescent home, and Lord and Lady Durwent were living in one of the wings. Practically all the servants had enlisted or gone into war-work; and even Mathews, the groom, after perjuring himself before a whole regiment of army doctors, had been accepted (with grave official doubts) for military service.

Interspersed with these details she recounted incidents of her London life as an ambulance-driver, and it was all her listener could do to follow the swift irrelevance of her course. Only once did she pause when, in answer to his question, she told him she had heard nothing of d.i.c.k.

IV.

A few minutes later she rose to go.

'I have stayed much too long,' she said. 'I do hope you'll get better quickly.'