If Winter Comes Part 37

"Well, they didn't."

"Quite so, old man. Quite so. Funny, that's all."

Sabre paused on the threshold. He perfectly well understood the villainous implication. Vile, intolerable! But of what service to take it up?--To hear Twyning's laugh and his "My dear old chap, as if I should think such a thing!" He pa.s.sed into his room. The thought he had had which had arrested his anger at Mr. Fortune's hints, revealing this incident in another light, was, "They want to get rid of me."

V

In August, the anniversary month of the war, he again offered himself for enlistment and was again rejected, but this time after a longer scrutiny: the standard was not at its first height of perfection.

Earnshaw, Colonel Rattray, all the remnant of his former friends, were gone to the front: Sabre submitted himself through the ordinary channels and this time received what Twyning had called his "paper." He did not show it to Twyning, nor mention either to him or to Mr. Fortune that he had tried again. "Again! most creditable of you, my dear Sabre." "Again, have you, though? By Jove, that's sporting of you. Did they give you a paper this time, old man?" No. Not much. Feeling as he felt about the war, acutely aware as he was of the partners' interest in the matter, that, he felt, could not be borne.

But on this occasion he told Mabel.

The war had not altered his relations with Mabel. He had had the feeling that it ought to bring them closer together, to make her more susceptible to his attempts to do the right thing by her. But it did not bring them closer together: the acc.u.mulating months, the imperceptibly increasing strangeness and tension and high pitch of the war atmosphere increased, rather, her susceptibility to those characteristics of his which were most impossible to her. He felt things with draught too deep and with burthen too capacious for the navigability of her mind; and here was an ever-present thing, this (in her phrase) most unsettling war, which must be taken (in her view) on a high, brisk note that was as impossible to him as was his own att.i.tude towards the war to her. The effect of the war, in this result, was but to sunder them on a new dimension: whereas formerly he had learned not to join with her on subjects his feelings about which he had been taught to shrink from exposing before her, now the world contained but one subject; there was no choice and there was no upshot but clash of incompatibility. His feelings were daily forced to the ordeal; his ideas daily exasperated her. The path he had set himself was not to mind her abuse of his feelings, and he tried with some success not to mind; but (in his own expression, brooding in his mind's solitude) they riled her and he had nothing else to offer her; they riled her and he had set himself not to rile her. It was like desiring to ease a querulous invalid and having in the dispensary but a single--and a detested--palliative.

Things were not better; they were worse.--But he made his efforts. The matter of telling her (when he tried in August) that he thought he ought to join the Army was one, and it came nearest to establis.h.i.+ng pleasant relations. That it revealed a profound difference of sensibility was nothing. He blamed himself for causing that side to appear.

Her comment when, on the eve of his attempt, he rather diffidently acquainted her with his intention, was, "Do you really think you ought to?" This was not enthusiastic; but he went ahead with it and made a joke, which amused her, about how funny it would be if she had to start making "comforts" for him at the War Knitting League which she was attending with great energy at the Garden Home. He found, as they talked, that it never occurred to her but that it was as an officer that he would be going, and something warned him not to correct her a.s.sumption. He found with pleased surprise quite a friendly chat afoot between them. She only began to fall away in interest when he, made forgetful by this new quality in their contact, allowed his deeper feelings to find voice. Once started, he was away before he had realised it, in how one couldn't help feeling about England and how utterly glorious would be his own sensations if he could actually get into uniform and feel that England had admitted him to be a part of her.

She looked at the clock.

His face was reddening in its customary signal of his enthusiasm. He noticed her glance, but was not altogether checked. He went on quickly, "Well, look here. I must tell you this. I'll tell you what I'll say to myself first thing if I really do get in. A thing out of the Psalms. By Jove, an absolutely terrific thing, Mabel. In the Forty-fifth. Has old Bag--has Boom Bagshaw told you people up at the church what absolutely magnificent reading the Psalms are just now, in this war?"

She shook her head. "We sing them every Sunday, of course. But I don't see how the Psalms--you mean the Bible Psalms, don't you?--can have anything to do with war."

"Oh, but they have. They're absolutely hung full of it. Half of them are the finest battle chants ever written. You ought to read them, Mabel; every one ought to be reading them these days. Well, this verse I'm telling you about. I say, do listen, I won't keep you a minute. It's in that one where there comes in a magnificent chant to some princess who was being brought to marriage to some foreign king--"

Mabel's dispersing attention took arms. "To a princess! However can it be? It's the Psalms. You do mean the Bible Psalms, don't you?"

He said quickly, "Oh, well, never mind that. Look here, this is it. I shall say it to myself directly I get in, and then often and often again. It ought to be printed on a card and given to every recruit. Just listen:

"Good luck have thou with thine honour; ride on, because of the word of truth, of meekness and of righteousness: and thy right hand shall show thee terrible things.

"Isn't that terrific? Isn't it tremendous? By Jove, it--"

For the first time in her married life she looked at him, in this humour, not distastefully but curiously. His flushed face and s.h.i.+ning eyes! Whatever about? He was perfectly incomprehensible to her. She got up. She said, "Yes--but 'Ride on'--of course you're not going in the cavalry, are you?"

He said, "Oh, well. Sorry. It's just a thing, you know. Yes, it's your bedtime, I'm afraid. I've kept you up, ga.s.sing. Well, dream good luck for me to-morrow."

His thoughts, when she had gone from the room, went, "A better evening!

That's the way! I can do it, you see, if I try. That other thing doesn't matter. I was a fool to drag that in. She doesn't understand. Yes, that's the way!"

He sat late, happily. If only he could get past the doctor to-morrow!

VI

That's the way! But on the following evening the way was not to be recaptured. The old way was restored. He was enormously cast down by his rejection. When he got back that night he went straight in to her. "I say, they've rejected me. They won't have me." His face was working.

"It's that cursed heart."

She slightly puckered her brows. "Oh--d'you know, for the minute I couldn't think what on earth you were talking about. Were you rejected?

Well, I must say I'm glad. Up at the Knitting League Mrs. Turner was saying her son saw you at the recruiting office after you were rejected and that it was into the ranks you were going. You never told me that. I must say I don't think you ought to have thought about the ranks without telling me. And I wouldn't have liked it. I wouldn't have liked it at all. I think you ought to be very thankful you were rejected. I'm sure I am."

He said flatly, "_Why_ are you? Thankful--good lord--you don't know--what do you mean, I ought to be thankful?"

"Because you ought to be an officer, if you go at all. It's not the place for you in your position. And apart from anything else--" She gave her sudden burst of laughter.

He felt arise within him violent and horrible feelings about her. "What are you laughing at?"

"Well, do just imagine what you'd look like in private soldier's clothing!" She laughed very heartily again.

He turned away.

CHAPTER VII

I

Up in his room he began a long letter to Nona, pouring out to her all his feelings about this second rejection. He was writing to her--and hearing from her--regularly and frequently now. It was his only vent in the oppression of these frightful days. She said that it was hers, too.

After that letter of hers, at the outbreak of the war, in which she had said that she thanked G.o.d for him that he had delayed her decision to unchain their chains and to join their lives, no further reference had been made by either to that near touch of desire's wand. It was, as he had said it should be, as though her letter had never been written. And in her letters she always mentioned Tony. She wrote to Tony every day, she told him; and there were few of her letters but mentioned a parcel of some kind sent to her husband. Tony never wrote. Sometimes, she said, there came a sc.r.a.p from him relative to some business matter she must see to; but never any response to her daily budget of gossip--"the kind of news I know he likes to hear"--or any news of himself and his doings.

She once or twice said, without any comment, "But he is writing often to Mrs. Stanley and Lady Grace Heddon and Sophie Basildon and I hear bits of him from them and know he is keeping well. Of course, I pretend to them that their news is stale to me." Another time, "I've just finished my budget to Tony," she wrote, "and have sent him two sets of those patent rubber soles for his boots. Do you think he can get them put on?

Every day I try to think of some new trifle he'd like; and you'd be shocked, and think I care nothing about the war, at the number of theatres I make time to go to. You see, it makes something bright and amusing to tell him, describing the plays. I feel most frightfully that, although of course my canteen work is useful, the real best thing every woman can do in this frightful time is to do all she can for her man out there; and Tony's mine. When this is all over--oh, Marko, is it ever going to be over?--things will hurt again; but while he's out there the old things are dead and Tony's mine and England's--my man for England: that is my thought; that is my pride; that is my prayer."

And a few lines farther on, "And he's so splendid. Of course you can imagine how utterly splendid he is. Lady King-Warner, his colonel's wife, told me yesterday her husband says he's brave beyond anything she could imagine. He said--she's given me his letter--'the men have picked up from home this story about angels at Mons and are beginning to believe they saw them. Tybar says he hopes the angels were near him, because he thought he was in h.e.l.l, the particular bit he got into, and he thinks it must be good for angels, enlarging for their minds, to know what h.e.l.l is like! As a matter of fact, Tybar himself is nearer to the superhuman than anything I saw knocking about at Mons. His daring and his coolness and his example are a byword in a battalion composed, my dear, with the solitary exception of the writer, entirely of heroes. In sticky places Tybar is the most wonderful thing that ever happened. I like to be near him because his immediate vicinity is unquestionably a charmed circle; and I shudder to be near him because his is always the worst spot.'

"Can't you imagine him, Marko?"

II

And always her letters breathed to Sabre his own pa.s.sionate love of England, his own poignant sense of possession in her and by her, his own intolerable aching at the heart at his envisagement of her enormously beset. They reflected his own frightful oppression and they a.s.suaged it, as his letters, she told him, a.s.suaged hers, as burdens are a.s.suaged by mingling of distress. "There is no good news," he told her, "and for me who can do nothing--and sometimes things are a little difficult with me here and I suppose that makes it worse--there seems to be no way out.

But your letters are more than good news and more than rescue; they are courage. Courage is like love, Nona: it touches the spirit; and the spirit, amazing essence, is like a spring: it is never touched but it--springs!"

She was working daily at a canteen at Victoria station. She had been on the night s.h.i.+ft "but I can't sleep, I simply cannot sleep nowadays"; and so, shortly before he wrote to her of his second rejection, she had changed on to the day s.h.i.+ft and at night took out the car to run arriving men from one terminus to another. "And about twice a week I get dog-tired and feel sleepy and send the chauffeur with the car and stay at home and do sleep. It's splendid!"

Northrepps had been handed over to the Red Cross as a military hospital.

Her answer to his letter telling of his second rejection at the recruiting office--most tender words from her heart to his heart, comforting his spirit as transfusion of blood from health to sickness maintains the exhausted body--her reply told him that on that day fortnight she was coming down to say of his disappointment what she could so inadequately express in writing. She was going out to war work in France--in Tony's name she had presented a fleet of ambulance cars to a Red Cross unit and she was going out to drive one--and she was coming down to look at things at Northrepps before she left.

On the following day Tidborough, opening its newspapers, shook hands with itself in all its houses, shops and offices on its own special and most glorious V.C.,--Lord Tybar.

III