Our Casualty, and Other Stories Part 11

"Simc.o.x, I suppose, just sat by himself in a corner of the veranda and glowered?"

"Exactly. And at first my wife could do nothing with him. In the end, of course----"

"In the end," I said, "she persuaded him to tell her his inmost secrets and to confide to her the tragedy of his soul. That's just what she would do."

Mrs. Daintree is a very kind and sympathetic lady. When she talks to me I feel ready to tell her anything. A man like Simc.o.x, shy, reserved, and wholly unaccustomed to charming ladies, would succ.u.mb to her easily and pour out a love story or anything else he happened to have on his chest at the time.

"You see," said Daintree, "his leg was pretty stiff and he couldn't get about much, even if he'd wanted to. There was nothing for him to do except sit in a deck-chair. My wife felt it her duty to talk to him a good deal."

Daintree seemed to be making excuses for Mrs. Daintree and Simc.o.x. They were unnecessary. Mrs. Daintree would have got his story out of him if she thought he was really in need of sympathy, whether he sat in a chair all day or was able to row races in the lake in the gardener's punt.

"Anyhow," said Daintree, "what he told her--he told it to me afterwards, so there's no secret about it--was this: He got hit in the leg during an advance through one of those woods north of the Somme, Mametz, I think.

It was a beastly place. Our fellows had been in there two days before and had to clear out again. Then Simc.o.x's lot went in--you know the sort of thing it was?"

I nodded.

"Sh.e.l.l holes, and splintered tree trunks," I said. "Machine-guns enfilading you, and H.E. bursting promiscuous. I know."

"Well, Sirmc.o.x' fellows went in all right, and stayed there for a while.

Simc.o.x says he remembers noticing that the ground was strewed with debris left by the Germans when they cleared out, and by our fellows afterwards. Equipment, rifles and all the rest of it lying about, as well as other things--pretty ghastly things."

"You needn't go into details," I said. "I can guess."

"I'm only telling you this," said Daintree, "because all the stuff lying about seems to have interested Simc.o.x. It's odd the feelings men have at these times. Simc.o.x says the thing he chiefly wanted to do was to tidy up. He had a kind of strong desire to pick things up and put them away somewhere. Of course he couldn't; but he did pick up one thing, a cigarette case. He showed it to me. It was one of those long-shaped, flat white metal cases which fellows carry because they hold about thirty cigarettes. Simc.o.x says he doesn't know why he picked it up. He didn't want it in the least. He just saw it lying there on the ground and stuffed it into his pocket Almost immediately after that he was. .h.i.t.

Bit of shrapnel under the knee."

"I remember hearing about that business," I said. "We were driven out again, weren't we?"

"Exactly. And Simc.o.x was left behind. He couldn't walk, of course. But he crawled into a sh.e.l.l hole, and there he lay. Well, for the next two days that wood wasn't healthy for either side. The Germans couldn't get back, because we were sprinkling the whole place with shrapnel. We couldn't advance for similar reasons. Simc.o.x just lay in his sh.e.l.l hole.

He tied up his leg somehow. He had some brandy in a flask as well as his iron rations. But he hadn't much tobacco. There were only two cigarettes in his own case. However, he had the other case, the one he picked up.

There were nearly twenty in it Also there was--I say, at this point the story gets sloppy."

"Never mind," I said. "Go on. What else was in the cigarette case? A farewell letter to a loving wife? Love to little Willie and a text of Scripture?"

"Not so bad as that. A photo of a girl. He showed it to me when he told me the story."

"Good looking girl?"

"Very. Large eyes--sort of tender, you know, and appealing; and a gentle, innocent face, and a mouth----"

"I suppose," I said, "that these raptures are necessary if I'm to understand the story. Otherwise, you may skip them."

"Can't possibly skip them," said Daintree. "The whole point of the story depends on your realizing the sort of girl she was.

Pathetic--that's the word I want. Looked at you out of the photo as if she was a poor, lonely, but uncommonly fetching little thing, who wanted a strong, true man to shelter her from the evil world. She was got up in some sort of fancy dress which kind of heightened the effect. I don't altogether profess to understand what happened, though my wife says she does. But Simc.o.x in a sort of way fell in love with her. That's not the way he put it He didn't feel that she was just an ordinary girl--the sort one falls in love with. She was--well, he didn't think of her as flesh and blood--more a kind of vision--spiritual, you know."

"Angel?" I said.

"That sort of thing. You know. That was the idea that gripped Simc.o.x while he lay there in the sh.e.l.l hole. Stars came out at night and Simc.o.x felt that she was looking down at him. In the day he used to lie and gaze at her. When he thought it was all up with him and that he couldn't live, he seemed to hear her voice--I say, you ought to hear my wife telling this part of the story. Simc.o.x wouldn't tell it to me, naturally; but he seems to have enlarged on it a good deal to her.

He says that only for that photo he'd have given in and just died. I daresay he wouldn't really, but he thinks he would. Anyhow, he didn't He stuck it out and his leg didn't hurt nearly as much as he expected. He attributes that to the influence of this--this----"

"Angel visitant?" I said.

"You can call her an angel if you like," said Daintree.

"This," I said, "seems to me a pure sob story. If there's any other part less harrowing, I wish you'd hurry up and get to it."

"All right," said Daintree. "I'll cut out the rest of his experiences in that sh.e.l.l hole, though, mind you, they're rather interesting and frightfully poetic the way my wife tells them. After two days our fellows got back into the wood and kept it. The stretcher-bearers found Simc.o.x in his hole and they lugged him down to a Casualty Clearing Station. From that he went to a hospital--the usual round, He had a pretty bad time, first over there, and then, when they could move him, in London. By degrees he got more sane about the photo. He stopped thinking she was any kind of spirit and took to regarding her just as a girl, though a very exceptional kind of girl, of course. He was hopelessly in love with her. Do you think a man really could fall in love with a photo?"

"Simc.o.x did," I said, "so we needn't discuss that point."

"The chances were, of course," said Daintree, "that she was some other fellow's girl, possibly some other fellow's wife. But Simc.o.x didn't care. He was too far gone to care for anything except to get that girl.

Those morose, shy men are frightfully hard hit in that sort of way, I'm told. That's what my wife says, anyhow. They get it much worse than we do when they do get it. Simc.o.x would have dragged that girl out of the arms of an archbishop if that was where he found her. Of course he couldn't go hunting her over England while he was in hospital with a bad leg; but he made up his mind to find out who she was and where she lived as soon as he was well enough to go about He'd very little to go on--practically nothing. The photo had been cut down so as to fit into the cigarette case, so that there wasn't even a photographer's name on it."

"He might have advertised," I said. "There are papers which go in for that sort of thing, publish rows of reproductions of photographs 'Found on the battle-field,'with requests for identification."

"My wife thought of that," said Daintree, "but Simc.o.x didn't seem to take to the idea. He said the photo was too sacred a thing to be reproduced in a paper. My own idea is that he was afraid of any kind of publicity. You see, the other fellow might turn up--the fellow who really had a right to the girl."

"How the deuce did he propose to find her?"

"I don't know. He told my wife some rotten yarn about instinct guiding him to her; said he felt sure that the strength of his great love would somehow lead him to her side. He didn't say that to me, couldn't, you know. But it's wonderful what a fellow will say to a woman, if she's sympathetic, and my wife is. Still, even so, he must be more or less mad to think a thing like that. Mad about the girl. He's sane enough in every other way."

"He can't be so mad as that," I said. "Just fancy going out into a field--I suppose that's the way you'd do it--and hanging about until your great love set you strolling off either to the right or to the left. No man, however mad, could expect to come on a girl that way--no one particular girl, I mean. Of course you'd meet several girls whichever way you went. Couldn't help it. The world's full of girls."

"I don't know what he meant," said Daintree, "but my wife sympathized with him and seemed to think he'd pull it off in the end. At first he was a bit shy of letting her see the photo; but when he saw she was as sympathetic as all that he showed it to her. Well, the moment she saw it, she felt that she knew the face."

"That was a stroke of luck for Simc.o.x."

"No it wasn't," said Daintree, "for my wife couldn't put a name to the girl. She was sure she had seen her somewhere, knew her quite well, in fact, but simply couldn't fix her. Funny thing, but it was exactly the same when they showed me the photo. At the first glance I said right away that I knew her. Then I found I couldn't say exactly who she was.

The more I looked the more certain I was that I'd seen her somewhere, her or someone very like her. And it wasn't a commonplace face by any means. Poor Simc.o.x kept begging us to think. My wife went over our visitors' book--we've kept one of those silly things for years--but there wasn't a name in it which we couldn't account for. I got out all the old alb.u.ms of snapshots and amateur photos in the house. You know the way those things acc.u.mulate; groups of all sorts. But we couldn't find the girl. And yet both my wife and I were sure we'd met her. Then one morning Simc.o.x burst into my wife's little sitting-room--a place none of the convalescents have any right to go. He was in a fierce state of excitement. Said that an officer who'd arrived the night before was exactly like the photo and that the girl must be his sister or cousin, or something. The only officer who came that night was--you'd never guess!--Pat Singleton."

"Pat," I said, "though a young devil, is cheerful, and I never saw him anything but self-confident I can't imagine a girl such as you described bearing the faintest resemblance to that boy. You said that she was a kind of die-away, pathetic, appealing angel. Now Pat----"

"I know," said Daintree. "All the same, the likeness was there. The moment I looked at the photo with Pat in my mind I knew why I thought I recognized it My wife said the same thing."

"But Pat Singleton hasn't any sisters," I said.

"No, he hasn't He hasn't even a first cousin anything like the age of the girl in the photo. I knew all the Singletons well, have for years.

But Simc.o.x insisted his girl must be some relation of Pat's, and in the end I promised to ask the boy. In the first place, if she was a relation, it seemed an impudent sort of thing to do, and if she wasn't, Pat would be sure to make up some infernal story about me and a girl and tell it all over the place. However, my wife egged me on and poor Simc.o.x was so frightfully keen that I promised.

"Well, I sent for Pat Singleton next morning. He was a little subdued at first, as much subdued as I've ever seen him. He thought I was going to rag him about the spoof he'd played off on the nurse. He did that before he was twelve hours in the house. Remind me to tell you about it afterwards. I don't wonder he looked piano. She'd been going for him herself and that woman is a real terror. However, he cheered up the moment I showed him the photo of the girl. He asked me first of all where the devil I'd got it. Said he'd lost it somewhere before he was wounded."

"Oh, it was his, then?" I said.

"Yes," said Daintree, grinning, "it was his. He was particularly anxious to know how I came by it. I didn't tell him, of course. Couldn't give Simc.o.x away, you know. Then Pat began to cheek me. Asked if I'd fallen in love with the girl and what my wife would say when he told her. Said he carried the photo about with him and showed it to fellows just to watch them falling in love with her. It seems that nine men out of ten admired her greatly. He asked me if I didn't think she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen, and that I wasn't the first man by any means who wanted her name and address. He grinned in a most offensive way and said that he never gave away that girl's name to anyone; that I ought to know better than to go running after a nice, innocent little thing like that who wouldn't know how to take care of herself. I wasn't going to stand much of that sort of talk from Pat Singleton. I told him straight that if he didn't tell me that girl's name and where she lived I'd make things hot for him. I threatened to report the little game he'd had with the nurse and that if I did he'd be court-martialled. I don't know whether a man could be court-martialled for cheeking a nurse, but the threat had a good effect on Pat He really was a bit afraid of that woman. I don't wonder, though it's the first time I've ever known him afraid of anyone."

Daintree paused and chuckled horribly.

"Well," I said, "who was the girl?"