Elizabeth's Campaign Part 40

'Inconsistent woman!' cried the inner voice, but Elizabeth silenced it. She was not inconsistent. She would have resented love-making, but _feeling_--something to gild the chain!--that she had certainly expected. The absence of it humiliated her.

The Squire's countenance fell.

'Deeper?' he said, with a puzzled look. 'I wonder what you mean? I haven't anything "deeper." There isn't anything "deep" about me.'

Was it true? Elizabeth suddenly recalled those midnight steps on the night of Desmond's departure.

'You know,' he resumed, 'for you have worked with me now for six months--you know at least what kind of a man I am. I a.s.sure you it's at any rate no worse than that! And if I ever annoyed you too much, why you could always keep me in order--by the mere threat of going away! I could have cut my throat any day with pleasure during those weeks you were absent!'

Again Elizabeth hid her face in her hands and laughed--rather hysterically. There _was_ something in this last appeal that touched her--some note of 'the imperishable child,' which indeed she had always recognized in the Squire's strange personality.

The Squire waited--frowning. When she looked up at last she spoke in her natural friendly voice.

'I don't think, Mr. Mannering, we had better go on talking like this. I can't accept what you offer me--'

'Again I can't think why,' he interrupted vehemently; 'you have given me no sort of explanation. Why must you refuse?'

'Because I don't feel like it,' she said, smiling. 'That's all I need say. Please don't think me ungrateful. You've offered me now a position and a home--and you've given me my head all this time. I shall never forget it. But I'm afraid--'

'That now I've made such an a.s.s of myself you'll have to go?'

She thought a moment.

'I don't know that I need say that--if--if I could be sure--'

'Of what? Name your conditions!'

His face suddenly lightened again. And again a quick compunction struck her.

She looked at him gently.

'It's only--that I couldn't stay here--you will see of course that I couldn't--unless I were quite sure that this was dead and buried between us--that you would forget it entirely--and let me forget it!'

Was it fancy, or did the long Don Quixotish countenance quiver a little?

'Very well. I will never speak of it again. Will that do?' There was a long pause. The Squire's stick attacked a root of primroses closely, prized it out of the damp ground, and left it there. Then he turned to his companion with a changed aspect. 'Well, now, then--we are as we were--and'--with a long half-indignant breath--'remember I have signed that contract!'

He rose from his seat as he spoke.

They walked home together through the great wood, and across the park. They were mostly silent. The Squire's words 'we are as we were' echoed in the ears of both. And yet both were secretly aware that something irrevocable had happened.

Then, suddenly, beating down all the personal trouble and disquiet in Elizabeth's mind, there rushed upon her afresh, as she walked beside the Squire, that which seemed to shame all personal feeling--the renewed consciousness of England's death-grapple with her enemy--the horror of its approaching crisis. How could this strange being at her elbow be still deaf and blind to it!

They parted in the hall.

'Shall I expect you at six?' said the Squire formally. 'I have some geographical notes I should like you to take down.'

She a.s.sented. He went to his study, and shut himself in. For a long time he paced up and down, flinging himself finally into a chair in front of Desmond's portrait. There his thoughts took shape.

'Well, my boy, I thought I'd won some trenches--but the counter-attack has swept me out. Where are you? Are you still alive?

If not, I shan't be long after you. I'm getting old, my boy--and this world, as the devil has made it, is not meant for me.'

He remained there for some time, his hands on his knees, staring into the bright face of his son.

Elizabeth too went to her room. On her table lay the _Times_. She took it up and read the telegrams again. Raid and counter-raid all along the front--and in every letter and telegram the shudder of the nearing event, ghastly hints of that incredible battlefield to come, that hideous hurricane of death in which Europe was to see once more her n.o.blest and her youngest perish.

'Oh, why, why am I a woman?' she clasped her hands above her head in a pa.s.sion of revolt. 'What does one's own life matter? Why waste a thought--an hour upon it!'

In a second she was at her table putting together the notes she had made that morning in the wood. About a hundred and fifty more ash marked in that wood alone!--thanks to Sir Henry. She rang up Captain Dell, and made sure that they would be offered that night direct to the Government timber department--the Squire's ash, for greater haste, having been now expressly exempted from the general contract.

Canadians were coming down to fell them at once. They must be housed. One of the vacant farms, not yet let, was to be got ready for them. She made preliminary arrangements by telephone. Then, after a hasty lunch, at which the Squire did not appear, and Mrs.

Gaddesden was more than usually languid and selfish, Elizabeth rushed off to the village on her bicycle. The hospital Commandant was waiting for her, with such workpeople as could be found, and the preparation of the empty house for fifty more beds was well begun.

Elizabeth was frugal, but resolute, with the Squire's money. She had leave to spend. But she would not abuse her power; and all through her work she was conscious of a queer remorseful grat.i.tude towards the man in whose name she was acting.

Then she bicycled to the School, where a group of girls whom she had captured for the land were waiting to see her. Their uniforms were lying ready on one of the schoolroom tables. She helped the girls to put them on, laughing, chatting, admiring--ready besides with a dozen homely hints on how to keep well--how to fend for themselves, perhaps in a lonely cottage--how to get on with the farmer--above all, how to get on with the farmer's wife. Her sympathy made everything worth while--put colour and pleasure into this new and strange adventure, of women going out to break up and plough and sow the ancient land of our fathers, which the fighting men had handed over to them. Elizabeth decked the task with honour, so that the girls in their khaki stood round her at last glowing, though dumb!--and felt themselves--as she bade them feel--the comrades-in-arms of their sweethearts and their brothers.

Then with the March twilight she was again at Mannering. She changed her bicycling dress, and six o'clock found her at her desk, obediently writing from the Squire's dictation.

He put her through a stiff series of geographical notes, including a number of quotations from Homer and Herodotus, bearing on the spread of Greek culture in the Aegean. During the course of them he broke out once or twice into his characteristic sayings and ill.u.s.trations, racy or poetic, as usual, and Elizabeth would lift her blue eyes, with the responsive look in them, on which he had begun to think all his real power of work depended. But not a word pa.s.sed between them on any other subject; and when it was over she rose, said a quiet good-night, and went away. After she had gone, the Squire sat over the fire, brooding and motionless, for most of the evening.

One March afternoon, a few days later, the following letter reached Pamela, who was still with her sister. It was addressed in Desmond Mannering's large and boyish handwriting.

'B.E.F., _March_.

'MY DEAR PAMELA--I am kicking my heels here at an engineer's store, waiting for an engineer officer who is wanted to plan some new dug-outs for our battery, and as there is no one to talk to inside except the most inarticulate Hielander I ever struck, I shall at last make use of one of your little oddments, my dear, which are mostly too good to use out here--and write you a letter on a brand new pocket-pad, with a brand new stylo.

'I expect you know from Arthur about where we are. It's a pretty nasty bit of the line. The snipers here are the cleverest beasts out. There isn't a night they don't get some of us, though our fellows are as sharp as needles too. I went over a sniping school last week with a jolly fellow who used to hunt lions in Africa. My hat!--we have learnt a thing or two from the Huns since we started. But you have to keep a steady look-out, I can tell you. There was a man here last night in a sniper's post, shooting through a trench loophole, you understand, which had an iron panel. Well, he actually went to sleep with his rifle in his hand, having had a dog's life for two or three nights. But for a mercy, he had pulled down his panel--didn't know he had!--and the next thing he knew was a bullet spattering on it--just where his eye should have been.

He was jolly quick in backing out and into a dug-out, and an hour later he got the man.

'But there was an awful thing here last night. An officer was directing one of our snipers--stooping down just behind him, when a Hun got him--right in the eyes. I was down at the dressing-station visiting one of our men who had been knocked over--and I saw him led in. He was quite blind,--and as calm as anything--telling people what to do, and dictating a post card to the padre, who was much more cut up than he was. I can tell you, Pamela, our Army is _fine_! Well, thank G.o.d, I'm in it--and not a year too late. That's what I keep saying to myself. And the great show can't be far off now. I wouldn't miss it for anything, so I don't give the Hun any more chances of knocking me over than I can help.

'You always want to know what things look like, old Pam, so I'll try and tell you. In the first place, it's just a glorious spring day. At the back of the cranky bit of a ruined farm where we have our diggings (by the way, you may always go back at night and find half your bedroom shot away--that happened to me the other night--there was a tunic of mine still hanging on the door, and when you opened the door, nothing but a hole ten feet deep full of rubble--jolly luck, it didn't happen at night-time!) there are actually some lilac trees, and the buds on them are quite big. And somehow or other the birds manage to sing in spite of the h.e.l.l the Huns have made of things.

'I'm looking out now due east. There's a tangled ma.s.s of trenches not far off, where there's been some hot raiding lately. I see an engineer officer with a fatigue party working away at them--he's showing the men how to lay down a new trench with tapes and pegs. Just to my left some men are filling up a crater. Then there's a lorry full of bits of an old corduroy road they're going to lay down somewhere over a marshy place. There are two sausage balloons sitting up aloft, and some aeroplanes coming and going. Our front line is not more than a mile away, and the German line is about a mile and a quarter. Far off to my right I can just see a field with tanks in it. Ah--there goes a sh.e.l.l on the Hun line--another!

Can't think why we're tuning up at this time of day. We shall be getting some of their heavy stuff over directly, if we don't look out. It's rot!

'And the sun is s.h.i.+ning like blazes on it all. As I came up I saw some of our men resting on the gra.s.s by the wayside. They were going up to the trenches--but it was too early--the sun was too high--they don't send them in till dusk. Awfully good fellows they looked! And I pa.s.sed a company of Bantams, little Welsh chaps, as fit as mustard. Also a poor mad woman, with a basket of cakes and chocolate. She used to live in the village where I'm sitting now--on a few bricks of it, I mean. Then her farm was sh.e.l.led to bits and her old husband and her daughter killed. And nothing will persuade her to go. Our people have moved her away several times--but she always comes back--and now they let her alone. Our soldiers indeed are awfully good to her, and she looks after the graves in the little cemetery. But when you speak to her, she never seems to understand, and her eyes--well, they haunt one.

'I'm beginning to get quite used to the life--and lately I have been doing some observation work with an F.O.O. (that means Forward Observation Officer), which is awfully exciting. Your business on these occasions is to get as close to the Germans as you can, without being seen, and you take a telephonist with you to send back word to the guns, and, by Jove, we do get close sometimes!

'Well, dear old Pam, there's my engineer coming across the fields, and I must shut up. Mind--if I don't come back to you--you're just to think, as I told you before, that it's _all right_. Nothing matters--_nothing_--but seeing this thing through. Any day we may be in the thick of such a fight as I suppose was never seen in the world before. Or any night--hard luck! one may be killed in a beastly little raid that n.o.body will ever hear of again. But anyway it's all one. It's worth it.

'_Your_ letters don't sound to me as though you were particularly enjoying life. Why don't you ever give me news of Arthur? He writes me awfully jolly letters, and always says something nice about you. Father has written to me _three_ times--decent, I call it,--though he always abuses Lloyd George, and generally puts some Greek in I can't read. I wonder if we were quite right about Broomie? You never say anything about her either. But I got a letter from Beryl the other day, and what Miss B. seems to be doing with Father and the estate is pretty marvellous.

'All the same I don't hear any gossip as to what you and I were afraid of. I wonder if I was a brute to answer her as I did--and after her nice letter to me? Anyway, it's no wonder she doesn't write to me any more. And she _did_ tell me such a lot of news.

'Good-bye. Your writing-pad is really ripping. Likewise pen.

Hullo, there go some more sh.e.l.ls. I really must get back and see what's up.--Your loving