MOSTLY CONVERSATION
"To talk of Love is soon to make Love."--PROVERB.
After this strange question of mine, there was a moment's pause.
It rang in my ears still, my quick, but quietly uttered,--
"Isn't your name Richard Wynn?"
What on earth had possessed me to say that? The moment after I was
as surprised at it as he was himself. Or wasn't he surprised? His
face had hardly changed. He looked quite steadily back at me. What
did he think? I wondered in a flash. What would he say?
Quite quietly he replied:
"No, no, it isn't. Surely you know my name's Holiday?"
As if I hadn't ever heard it! How absurd I'd been! How idiotic!
How wool-gathering!
I pulled myself together.
"Oh, I know," I said quickly and apologetically, as I caught up a
handful of the poultry-food. "Yes. Of course, I know that."
"Then," returned Captain Holiday, "why did you ask me if my name was
Richard Wynn?"
I laughed a little.
"It was a silly question," I admitted. "It must have sounded quite
mad! Only for one minute, seeing you in these clothes, I suppose----"
He looked swiftly down at the shaggy cuff of that quite disreputable
Norfolk jacket. "Seeing me in these clothes; yes----?"
"Tock, tock, tock," put in the grey hen.
"Well, you suddenly reminded me of somebody I used to know," said I,
and I turned to scatter that handful to those clucking, calling fowls.
Captain Holiday--whose name ought to have been Curiosity--put his
hands behind his back, and tilted his head to one side, taking almost
the pose of a small boy who is still at the deadly age of questions.
Evidently this tall young man had never outgrown it! How simply, but
in what a not-to-be-put-off voice he persisted:
"What was this 'somebody' like?"
"I've just said he was something like you, Captain Holiday. That
is," I added, "I couldn't really tell you if he were or not."
"What d'you mean by that?" Captain Holiday asked.
I laughed again. One simply could not feel impatient or annoyed with
this extraordinarily inquisitive young man. He took one past that!
So, as I walked on with my pail to the next coop, followed by the
young man and the dog, I said:
"What I mean--if you must know all about it----"
"Yes, I must. I mean I'd love to."
Well! "knowing all about it" must be a sort of mild obsession of his.
Perhaps he'd been Intelligence Officer or something. The only thing
to be done appeared to be to humour him!
So I said:
"What I mean about that young man called Richard Wynn, your double,
is that I can't honestly say I know what he was like!"
"Why can't you?" barked the catechist.
"Because I don't remember."
"You don't remember?" quite sharply from Captain Holiday. "How,
don't remember? Why don't you?"
"Because it's such ages ago since I saw him," I replied. "Seven
years! And what is the next question, please?"
The next question was a brusque
"How often had you seen him, then?"
"Often? Why, I saw him every day," I replied, going down on one
knickerbockered knee to wrestle with the refractory door of a coop.
"He stayed at my father's place for six months."
The voice above me decreed:
"Then, of course, you must know what the fellow was like."
Extraordinary, the constant interest he took in subjects which had
absolutely nothing to do with him! But I'd said a man was like
himself. That was next door to talking about what he was like
himself--which Elizabeth had declared was all young men ever did want
to talk about!
"I don't know," I persisted, rattling the wire-netted door. "I've
forgotten Mr. Wynn's face."
"You can't have 'forgotten' the face of a man you saw every day of
your life for six months," Captain Holiday informed me,
authoritatively. "You must have been what? Thirteen or fourteen.
No girl 'forgets' a man's face like that!"
"She does!" I declared.
"People don't 'forget' faces," he repeated. "It's nonsense."
"It is not," I cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated, as I rose.
"People do forget what they've never taken very much notice of, even
when it was there! I've no memory at all for faces. I only know
what I thought of them at the time."
I thought his next question would be, "What did you think of the
young man you imagine was like me?" But this was not what came. He
demanded, more casually. "And what became of him?"
"I don't know," I replied. "I never heard. Except----" Here I
suppressed a half-rueful smile at the thought of what I had heard,
only some weeks ago, from this same long-forgotten Richard Wynn.
"Except what?" took up the Inquisitor.
I sighed elaborately. For a moment I felt almost inclined to tell
him deliberately the whole madcap story of Richard Wynn's proposal of
marriage to me; but for some reason I didn't.
So, looking straight at him, I adopted a tone of studied and
explanatory politeness. I hoped this gentle irony might have the
effect of making him a little bit ashamed of all his questions.
"I only heard from this Mr. Wynn once," I said. "Then he did not
tell me what he was doing, or what had happened to him all these
years. So I can't tell you. And I could not write to him, or ask
him about anything, because I'd thrown away his letter."
"Thrown it away?" Captain Holiday exclaimed, quite loudly.
"I threw it away by mistake--with the address. So that was that--and
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that's absolutely all I can tell you about
him, Captain Holiday!"
I scattered my last handful, let the last replete and peeping chick
out of the last coop. Captain Holiday--perhaps feeling a trifle
rebuked--said nothing further. Swinging my empty pail I ran down the
hillside. He and his dog followed me through the farm gate and went
on.
At the door of the kitchen I handed in my pail. The rosy
farm-servant said to me:
"Miss, you'll have to run if you want to catch up your friends.
They've been gone some time."
I glanced up at the clock.
"Is it so late, Maggie-Mary!" I exclaimed.
I sped through the yard and on to the up-and-down high road, thinking
as I went the question that almost every Land Girl asks herself at
some time:
"How did I ever manage to walk at any pace at all in the days when I
wore hampering skirts to flap about me wherever I turned?"
Before I could find an answer to this question I found Captain
Holiday at my side again!
"Let me walk along a bit of the way with you," he suggested quite
nicely. "May I?"
What could I say but "If you like"? My way back to camp did take him
past the Lodge, after all.
However, I didn't want another Longer Catechism. So, as we fell into
step, walking towards the sunset, down the road with basking green on
either hand, I decided to introduce the subject of the forthcoming
and much-discussed Hospital Concert!
But I was not in time. It was Captain Holiday who started the
conversation, and on lines that I hardly expected, but beginning,
once again, with one of his questions!
"Is that little pal of yours engaged to be married?"
Surprised, I replied:
"Elizabeth? Miss Weare? To be married? I should think not! I
mean, I don't think she ever means to marry."
"That's good," remarked Captain Holiday, cheerfully.
I stared at him.
"'Good'? Why good?"
He said "Oh!" and fumbled in the pocket of his Norfolk for his pipe.
"Oh, perhaps I meant she'd be all the more company for you down here.
People in love are poisonously poor company, I find!" he went on,
turning to me as if with a burst of confidence. Then he twinkled,
gave me a swift glance, opened his lips as if to ask a question; shut
them.
I knew what he meant.
Quickly and definitely I snapped out the answer to the question he
hadn't asked.
"No! I'm not engaged either!" I said. Then, carrying this war of
questions into the odd creature's country, I added, "Are you?"
"Why? I suppose you mean you find me poisonously poor company?" he
asked, with a defiant jerk of the head in that scarecrow's tweed hat
of his.
"Not at all," I said politely. "But are you?"
Instead of answering he stopped and glanced to the right. There was
a break in the hedge.
"Shall we take this short cut home through the fields?" he said.
I followed him to the narrow, greasy path, if it were a path.
It seemed to me one of those short cuts home that are certainly the
longest way round! ... How could I--oh, how could I not have realized
already that all I wanted was to be walking anywhere--for any
distance--with him!
That realization was not to come yet....
But to go back to the beginning of this ramble, Captain Holiday,
striding and smoking beside me, said:
"Am I engaged? Well, I say! May I tell you something about myself?"
"That would be a change! Generally, you want to be told things about
other people!" I said.
He gave a short laugh.
"Yes; well, now you can have a bit of your own back. I want a
woman's point of view on a certain matter. You're sure it won't bore
you? I don't mind if it does," he added quickly, with that quicker
smile that always brushed any offence out of his words. "Women are
put here to listen to men's grousing. However! Seriously, I want to
talk to you. You could help me about this."
"I? Help you?" I said. "D'you mean it?" But I knew he meant it.
Sincerity was in his tone. Also a new note--appeal.
I could not help feeling pleased. He did not think me a fool then,
even if he had seen me first in circumstances that might have given
him that impression. He thought that I could help him in his own
difficulty, whatever it was.
This was where I suddenly found I must have skipped whole stages in
my acquaintanceship with this young man. He had jumped from being a
busybody and a stranger to being a friend--yes! A friend to whom one
felt positively motherly--or at least sisterly.
I turned to him as we walked, and said:
"Of course I'd be glad to advise you in any way that would be of any
use to you. You tell me first."
"Righto!" said Captain Holiday. "By Jove, here's some more of this
wire. Never mind. We'll turn off here--I think I struck the wrong
field. Well! You were asking me if I were engaged. I am not. I
asked a girl to marry me, though, not so long ago."
He stopped. I said, sympathetically:
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"Are you? Why?"
I couldn't help opening my eyes.
"Why? I mean--sorry she turned you down."
Now Captain Holiday opened his eyes.
"Who said she turned me down?" he asked.
In spite of how he improved upon acquaintance, in spite of his
friendliness, his nice smile and ways, he was very difficult to make
out.
"You said the girl wouldn't be engaged to you----" I began patiently.
"I said nothing of the kind," Captain Holiday interrupted,
contradicting me flatly. "I told you I was not engaged--here, it
must have been that other turning after all, we'll go back--not
engaged, but that I had asked a girl to marry me."
More at sea than before, I retraced my steps down the path beside
him, and suggested:
"Then, if the girl said 'Yes' to you----"
"She," explained Captain Holiday, looking serenely over the evening
landscape, "did not say either 'Yes' or 'No.'"
Now I saw his difficulty!
Suspense!
Yes. I understood that. How I understood the chills--and flames--of
that fever! Hadn't I suffered from them myself, in the days when I
had had to think in turn. "He will," "He won't," or "Will he?"
"That's horrible for you," I agreed warmly to this other young man.
"It's bad enough to know the worst. But not to know which it's to be
is----"
"Quite so," finished Captain Holiday.
"Still, you needn't make up your mind at once that it will be the
worst, need you?" I went on soothingly.
"You think I needn't?"
"Why d'you feel you must give up all hope?" I asked.
"Sometimes I don't," he admitted simply.
I nodded, saying:
"It's the other 'sometimes' that's so awful."
"Exactly," he said. "When I think 'after all, why should any girl
like me particularly?'"
"You don't often think that, do you?"
"No, not often," said Captain Holiday serenely again, "only
occasionally when I've had a bad night and feel off colour and pippy!"
I couldn't help laughing. The sustaining, intoxicating conceit of
men! As Elizabeth says, it's the only thing that could keep them
going since the war restrictions!
Then he looked quickly sideways at me.
"You think that's neck," he remarked. "Perhaps you think there is no
reason why any girl should like me?"
And for the moment his voice dropped a tone, and there was a
wistfulness on his brown face. I stopped laughing. I didn't want to
hurt his feelings in any way. Besides, when one came to think of it,
he was quite nice enough for a girl to like him--quite much!
Thoughtfully I said:--
"So much depends upon the kind of girl!" and then I asked, "What kind
of girl is she?" in a tone as gentle as I could make it, so as to
avoid jarring him.
But in quite a matter-of-fact, usual sort of tone the young man
replied:
"Oh, well! She's the girl I want."
Helpful, wasn't it?
"I see," said I, not seeing anything, of course, except that, as
Elizabeth once said, it's quite impossible to get a man to describe
anything or anybody so that you know what they are like.
We walked on for a moment in silence, following our shadows on the
goldy-green grass; evening shadows that caricatured a giant soldier
man striding across the field beside a giantess of a Land Girl.
I began again:
"She might be the type of girl who honestly did not know herself
whether it was 'Yes' or 'No' that she wanted to say," I said. "Some
girls simply have to take lots of time to consider whether they care
for the man in that way or not--even after he's asked them! They
have to think things over. They have to look at the man from every
point of view before they know their own minds about him. I've met
that type of girl. I can't say I understand her mys----"
"Ah," he put in with a quick turn of the head, "you wouldn't be like
that! You'd know at once if you could stand the man?"
"I think so," I said, a little shortly. I didn't want to be reminded
of what my own views had been about "the man"--that is, Harry. They
had led me into making a fool of myself. Hadn't I liked him at once,
disastrously, from his first soft dark-eyed glances at me? What I
was "like," myself, was not the question. Also I didn't see how it
was going to help Captain Holiday.
He, on the other hand, seemed to think it might throw some light upon
the subject.
"You'd know at once if it was all N. G. as far as your own feelings
were concerned?" he persisted.
"At once," I agreed.
"That would save the other person a lot of trouble, of course," said
the young man at my side. "I think you're right. One ought to
'know' at once, about that sort of thing. You would, you say?"
"Yes, I should. But there are such lots of different kinds of girls,
Captain Holiday----"
"Of course, I don't see that."
"No. Because you're in love, you see, and people never do see more
than just the one person then."
"I expect you're right again," said Captain Holiday. He looked down
at me quite submissively--at me, to whom he'd laid down the law in
that hectoring fashion every time he'd seen me! He might be right
about cow-houses and the laws of gravity and about stock, as well as
about any question in his own profession of soldiering--but at least
he saw now that I could teach him something about the ways of human
beings!
And I felt no longer a Land Girl who was still months away from
earning her first stripe, but quite a woman of the world for once!
Encouragingly I went on:
"Perhaps she is the kind of girl who does mean 'Yes' all the time----"
"And didn't say so?"
"Because perhaps she put it off to make it seem all the more
wonderful to you when it came," I suggested.
"Ah," he said. "It would be wonderful then?"
How little he must know about love, I thought, to ask such a question.
"Wonderful?" I said, looking away from him across to the sunset. In
the radiance of the level rays a swarm of tiny insects spun
enraptured--each thinking, possibly, that the sun had risen and shone
only for him and his little winged love, creatures of a day.
"One five minutes of that," I said, as much to myself as to him, "is
worth having lived for twenty stodgy years without it. Even if you
lose it again it would have been worth it!"
"You think so?"
"Yes! And I do hope that it will happen like that for you," I told
him. "I don't mean the losing it again part. I do hope that you
will get everything that you want."
"Yes, so do I," said Captain Holiday, in that rather disconcerting
way of his. "But, look here--you seem to be able to tell one so
much--supposing it were neither of those two things that you suggest
that kept the girl from answering, as I want her to? What about
that?"
"Couldn't you," I suggested, "ask her again some time?"
He fingered his small, obstinately-growing moustache.
"That's an idea. Yes. Well! Thanks very much. I'll think about
what you've said, Joan."
Joan----!
"By the way, I have decided to call you by your Christian name."
"Oh! Er--yes," I agreed, staggered, but feeling that I could not
refuse this proof of goodwill to a young man who had just made me the
confidante of so much. "H--How did you know it?"
"Doesn't your little pal call you by it? Mine's Dick, you know."
I nodded, not feeling I could use it just yet. If he'd been as
abrupt in his love-making as he was in his making friends, there was
some excuse, thought I, for the young woman who kept him waiting for
his answer.
Then, with equal brightness, he changed the subject altogether.
"D'you know that I'm having a house-party at the Lodge next week?
For the concert--yes. You've seen my wounded pal, haven't you? Then
I've got a girl from London and her mother coming down to stay."
"A girl--oh! have you?"
And then I could not help it. The question slipped out, as it were,
of its own accord.
"Captain Holiday, is she 'the' girl?"
But the exasperating man wouldn't give me a direct answer.
"The girl," he said with a laugh. "Ah, well, I suppose most girls
have got somebody who'd consider they were 'the' girl."
"Yes, yes; but I mean is she the girl you've been talking to me about
all this time?"
Again he only laughed, and said something chaffing about "curiosity."
Curiosity indeed! From him! Pretty good, wasn't it? And not
another sensible word could I get out of Captain Holiday for the rest
of the walk.
When we did finally reach the field, however, from which we could see
the corrugated iron roof of our hut set in the trees, he did
vouchsafe to me one more remark about the girl who was shortly coming
down from London. Just after his salute and "good evening," he
turned back to me to say:
"I'll tell you this much: she happens to be my own first cousin."
However, he'd said enough--or left enough unsaid. I knew well enough
that, cousin or no cousin, she was the girl about whom there'd been
all that discussion.