COLONEL FIELDING DISCUSSES "LOVE AND THE LIKE"
"'Tis Love breeds love in me, and cold disdain
Kills that again."--DONNE.
With the morning we had pulled ourselves together again. Not a word
did Elizabeth address to me on the subject of our having met my old
love in attendance on Muriel. Not a syllable did I say to her about
the object of her own misplaced affections, that finished and
unscrupulous flirt, that philanderer more accomplished than
Harry--Colonel Fielding. The name of Captain Holiday was not
mentioned. In fact, there might not have been "such a thing as young
men" in our world that morning.
A wet morning it had turned out! Hay-culling would be out of the
question. This we knew even before we scrambled into our brown Land
Army mackintoshes and splashed away down the road.
Elizabeth congratulated herself on the nice dry indoor job that would
be hers, for Mrs. Price was going to let us take turns at helping her
on baking-day, and this was the turn of my chum.
As for me, I found that I should also be kept out of the wet. My
morning's work was in the big shearing-shed, turning the
shearing-machine for Ivor, the shepherd. He held down the fat lambs
on a wooden bench set on the great black floor-sheet of tarpaulin,
and went slowly and methodically to work with a sort of
twelve-pointed clipping-knife over the body of the lamb, while I
turned the big red wheel with its belt and pipe attached to the
knife. It was not hard work, but quite soothing--rather like
knitting!
And I was at this occupation when I had a visitor, brought in by Mr.
Price. It was none other than young Colonel Fielding, who asked
diffidently whether he might take a turn and give a hand either to
Ivor or Miss Matthews.
Ivor, a blond, quiet man in a dark-blue linen coat, looked up and
smiled benignantly upon this slim young officer. Ivor had no
English, Mr. Price explained, but he understood pretty well
everything else. Especially everything about sheep.
"Then--er--you're lucky to have had him turned down by the doctor,
and to be able to keep him on the farm," said Colonel Fielding.
"Oh, he would make a very poor soldier," was the Welsh farmer's
verdict. "Very reserved man; very reserved indeed!"
Ivor smiled again as the lamb upon which he had been operating
dropped the last of his heavy coat upon the sheet and, shaven, shorn,
and freed at last, scrambled out into the adjoining shed.
The shepherd seized another struggling and woolly one, downed him
into his place, and took up the shearing-knife once more.
"Now," he said in Welsh, with a little nod to me, and I continued to
work the wheel.
Mr. Price in his oilskin coat had stepped out again into the rain.
Colonel Fielding did not go with him. He unfastened his brown,
trench-worn mackintosh, threw it on one of the big wool-sacks, and
took a pace nearer to me and my wheel.
I wondered if he had expected to see Elizabeth in the shed. Taking
absolutely no notice of him I worked on.
"Let me have a turn, won't you?" came the meek voice of the
intruder--for I felt, as I never had with Captain Holiday, that an
intruder he was. "You take a rest, Miss Matthews."
"Thank you, I am not in the least tired." I said it coldly. I
thoroughly disapproved of this young man who had been trifling with
Elizabeth's feelings.
Elizabeth, bless her, was too good to be at the mercy of this young
scamp with his D.S.O. and his subtle way of flirting so that you
could hardly nail it down and say that it was flirting at all.
Elizabeth had said hard things of Harry, in the days of my
infatuation for him. But she hadn't thought any harder things of him
than I thought now of this slender-waisted ruffian with the moustache
that looked as if a pinch of light-gold paint had been rubbed on to
his upper lip.
Cruel hard lines that he should turn out to be the one and only
exception to Elizabeth's rule of hating men!
In his meekest of voices he said:
"Perhaps you are not tired. But why are you so--er--poisonously
angry with me?"
Before I could reply he answered, still meekly, his own question.
"You loathe me because you think I've been heartlessly flirting with
your little friend."
I stared!
He smiled deprecatingly.
"Oh, yes!" he continued, "women think it takes a woman to spot those
things. But--er--I knew. Now I'll tell you--er--something."
He glanced towards that "reserved" man, the shepherd.
"No English, eh?" he broke off. "I wish no servants knew any! By
Jove, how it would simplify life for a lot of people----"
"But what did you want to tell me?" I said crossly.
"Just this," replied Colonel Fielding, with his most deceptive, most
shrinking bashfulness. "I'm going to marry your little friend, Miss
Weare."
"To marry Miss Weare?"
You can imagine how I stared afresh at this. In fact, I stopped
turning the wheel.
Deftly taking the handle from me, Colonel Fielding began turning it
in my place rhythmically, easily. I stood there beside him, watching
him blankly.
I remembered Elizabeth's forlorn mood of last night. I went back to
her, as I'd seen her this morning, turning to the kitchen, where she
was to help Mrs. Price bake. Her small face under its thick crop had
been set with the determination to let work drive away trouble. For
trouble, I knew, had been as heavy at her heart as it was at my own.
Then was all that altered already?
"What!" I exclaimed. "You've seen her this morning?"
His eyes under their long lashes did not leave the turning-wheel. He
only said gently:
"No, I haven't seen her this morning."
"But----" I exclaimed. I knew he could not have seen her last night
after we got back to camp.
"You haven't even asked her yet?" I said.
"No," he agreed. "I haven't asked her yet." And he went on turning
that big red wheel as if he were a Fate in khaki. After half a dozen
turns he added, "But I am going to marry her, for all that."
Rebukefully I said, "You mean you're going to marry her if she'll
have you?"
"She will have me," he said gently, but firmly. He blushed a little,
but the girlish blushes that this young man went in for never seemed
to make the faintest difference to his cheek--in another sense.
"She'll have me. I know that."
"How do you know that?" I retorted, sitting there on that sack, and
hardly knowing whether I were more glad on Elizabeth's account, or
more indignant or more puzzled by this young man of hers.
He answered: "I know, because I know the--er--the kind of man I am
myself." ... Here he looked up, shyly, from that wheel, and said,
"Miss Matthews, you think I'm--er--the last word in fatuous conceit."
I was thinking so. How could I help it after what he had just said?
"Er--I'd hate you to think that. You are her pal. I--er--owe you an
explanation. Please forgive me if I talk to you for a bit just about
myself----"
I put in "That's a thing all men do."
"Yes. But--er--all men don't ask you to forgive them first, do
they?" he said very quickly. "Generally they yarn on and on and on,
imagining a woman must be jolly interested to hear it. They don't
realize that the woman (unless she happens to be wildly in love with
them), the woman's--er--mostly thinking of something miles away all
the time!"
I couldn't help smiling. To hear a man himself say such a thing! It
sounded more like something Elizabeth herself might give out.
He said, "You have forgiven me? Well, I'll tell you why I know Miss
Weare will have me. If she were not attracted enough for that, I
should not be attracted. You see I am talking--er--quite frankly; no
camouflage at all. Unless a girl liked me, I shouldn't begin to seek
her. Not after the first look. I must be liked," he said very
simply and with that blush, but very definitely, "I must feel that I
am wanted."
He seemed to me extraordinary, from what I knew of men. I said,
"But, Colonel Fielding, men always prefer a girl who doesn't seem to
want to have anything to say to them! They say men want the chase!"
"I can't help a lot of the silly conventional things people say," he
declared blandly. "Er--I suppose those things are true enough about
people who are all alike, like a flock of sheep." Here he nodded
towards the lamb which had just sprung out of Ivor's hands, and had
made off to join his shorn brethren. "But I say--er--what I feel
myself."
I looked at him doubtfully, the graceful creature whom I personally
could not admire.
He said, "It wouldn't amuse me to try to make--er--love to anybody
unless I felt that it would amuse them too, and--er--delight them!"
I objected, "But that's a woman's point of view."
"Why only a woman's?" asked the young soldier mildly, turning his
wheel. "I learnt it from my mother. The woman's view! I find it
useful to look at--er--Love and the like. '_Two things greater than
all things are, the first is Love and the next is War._' The average
man has made good on War, these last four years. But--er--I don't
listen to him much on Love."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't think the average man makes a success of it,"
declared this puzzling creature coolly. "Give a kid of two a violin
to play; what? I think he (the average man) could learn plenty from
the average woman--on that one subject. It's with her my sympathies
are, Miss Matthews.... Of course I talk too much.... And now you'll
call me effeminate."
His face wore a mask of harmless politeness with a gleam behind his
lashes as I looked at him. Effeminate? With that striped ribbon on
his breast, with his colonelcy at twenty-six, with all the praise and
devotion of his men? These things are not won by effeminates.
He was a man all right, even if he did say and think things which we
imagine are exclusively feminine. He was a puzzling exception. And
even if he were the kind of man whom I could never have loved I was
beginning to like him.
Without replying to his remark about effeminacy, I smiled and got up.
"Let me take a turn," I said.
I took the handle of the wheel from him and began to work. He sat
down on the wool-sack that I had left. And even as we changed places
something else changed between us.
He realized it, as I did.
"We shall be friends now," he said very quickly and gently.
"Yes," I nodded.
"They say--your dear 'They'!--that there's no such thing as Platonic
friendship. Here's the one exception," he told me. "Where all the
Love goes elsewhere. You know you think I'm utterly unattractive.
But you want to listen to me. As a matter of fact, you'll never talk
to a _fiancé_, Miss Matthews, as freely as you'll talk to me."
"Never," I agreed.
"Nor shall I ever jaw like this, to Elizabeth." ... He broke off and
said affectionately, "You're such a pal to her!"
"She is to me."
"I know," he said. "I knew it before I saw you two girls. It spoke
out of her letters to me from the flat. You know, when I got her
letters, I--er--wanted to see her!"
"They were mostly about the kitchen sink," I said, laughing.
"Yes, that's what she told me when I told her she put herself into
her letters," said the man whom we had called "the old Colonel" in
those days. "Somehow I made up my mind that this girl I'd never seen
would be different from--er--most girls. I came down here, you know,
to look. And then--when I caught sight of her by that cart in the
field--looking such a little picture!--I could have caught her up
then and there!"
"I wonder you weren't discouraged; she was chilling enough that
morning!"
"No," he denied. "I felt she didn't mean that. That was just the
first minute when she had realized I was that distasteful creature a
man, and yet that she didn't dislike the look of me."
"Ah! She's told you she hates men."
"Yes, we've had all that," he admitted, "and I explained to her that
I ought to understand, because, as a rule, I don't like girls."
Here I lifted my head and looked severely at this humbug.
"You? Not like girls!" I exclaimed.
"Not usually," he persisted, smiling at me. "I think they're too
little."
"Little? But you are in love with Elizabeth. And Elizabeth's tiny!"
"Elizabeth," he repeated, and I heard him give a little laugh of
delight over the name of the beloved. "Elizabeth has a heart as big
as the earth! I was--er--talking of hearts, natures, minds. So
often girls make me feel their minds are rather narrow," confessed
this odd type of woman-hater.
"Petty, you know," he went on. "Saying--er--things about other
women--oh, brrrr! Spiteful to their own sex. Then being decent and
jolly enough with--er--us. _That_ puts me off; by Jove, nothing
worse! I can say all this to you, Miss Matthews. You're different;
like her. But lots of girls make me feel they--they---- Well, not
enough cold tub!" he wound up ingenuously, "and too much face-powder!"
The last words brought a certain image into my mind;
exquisitely-dressed, scented, powdered Muriel!
Thinking of yesterday, I said to the young man, "You're very severe
on girls, but I saw you when you were flirting outrageously with
one--no, not with Elizabeth. With Miss Elvey."
"To see if it annoyed Elizabeth!" he admitted, so frankly that I had
to laugh over my work.
I said: "Now that was feminine enough! That was 'little'! Anybody
would have imagined that you were very much attracted. In fact, I
thought you were."
"Attracted? To Miss Elvey?" he cried out as if I'd said something
too wildly improbable. "I? To her? Of all the girls on this earth?"
"Why not?" I asked, surprised. "Nearly every man is!"
"Yes, but I couldn't possibly be--er--attracted to Muriel Elvey!" he
declared, vigorously shaking that small golden head of his. "Oh, no.
Not to her! I know too much!"
"You hardly know her at all. You've only met twice."
"I know a great deal about her," declared young Colonel Fielding,
impressively. "Not about this girl personally, perhaps. But about
her kind."
He got up off the sack with an air of "that finishes it."
Deeply interested, since this was Dick Holiday's pal speaking of Dick
Holiday's lady-love, I asked: "What do you mean by 'her kind'?"
"I'll tell you some day," the young man promised me, getting into his
Burberry again. "I could tell you--er--yards! And I will. Only I
am afraid there isn't time just now. I promised to meet old Dick at
the bridge at eleven, by Jove. I must tear myself away. Good-bye.
I say, I am glad we had this--er--little talk."
"Little talk" was good! His tongue had been going at least as fast
as the shearing-wheel, or as the clipping-knife in Ivor's hand.
As he nodded to the shepherd and saluted me, I said, in a tone more
cheerily friendly than I'd ever thought I should use to him, "Wait,
wait; do stop a minute! This is all very well, Colonel Fielding, but
when are you going to have that other little talk?"
"Which other?" he asked, standing, a graceful black silhouette, in
the opening of the shearing-shed.
"Oh, you know! What a young Pretender you are, always!" I cried,
half laughing. "I mean when are you going to speak about this, to
her?"
He looked down, tilting his head sideways in a characteristic pose he
had, lashes down, a gleam of small white teeth showing between the
parted lips under the Avenue-gold smudge that he called a moustache.
Oh, he was much too like a coloured advertisement for Burberry's!
Still, it was Elizabeth's choice. I was thankful that she was going
to be happy with it. Only, when?
He said, laughing, "What a staunch little friend you are to her! You
even go as far as to--er--ask people their 'intentions' about her....
Miss Matthews, you'll be the first person we shall tell!"
Now what did he mean?
In spite of his caring, genuinely, was he going to keep his love
guessing a little longer?
"Do you think," he said teasingly to me, "that I ought to go off and
bother her with this--er--on the nail? In the middle of whatever job
she's on? I don't knew where she is?"
He was answered--as he deserved.
Not by me!
It was that "reserved man," Ivor the shepherd, reputed to speak only
his own language, who suddenly took us both aback.
Lifting his head from his shearing, the Welshman put in, in his
pleasant up-and-down accent, "You looking for that other lady, sir?
Miss Weare? I do think it is in the kitchen!"
Here was a bit of a shock.
The young Colonel and I had been chatting so freely, so
confidentially! Imagining ourselves quite uncomprehended, we had
literally forgotten the presence of the silent, blue-jacketed Welsh
shepherd, who knelt there busily shearing, while one of us turned the
wheel and both of us talked.... How we had talked, to be sure!
And Ivor had not only heard; he had followed the conversation!
This was what he sprung upon us now! Consternation! The blankest of
awkward pauses!
Then Colonel Fielding, biting that golden morsel of a moustache,
cleared his throat, turned to the shepherd, and said coldly and with
as much dignity as could be lent to an obviously foolish remark, "I
thought you didn't know any English?"
Ivor blinked mildly back at the officer and answered: "'Deed, I not
know only very little, sir."
"I expect you all know a great deal more than you--er--give out, you
Welsh!" declared Colonel Fielding, half-exasperated, half-amused.
"That's how you get on in the world, isn't it?"
"Sir?" said Ivor, with a pleasant, puzzled smile.
Impossible to tell whether he understood or not! We should never
know, either, how much of the talk we'd had had been eagerly taken in
by him! All of it? We couldn't exactly ask him! Colonel Fielding
glanced at me with a half-humorous little shrug. The same thought
struck us both at the same minute.
One thing was pretty certain. Very shortly Ivor would retail to Mrs.
Ivor in fluent Welsh everything that he had understood of our
English. In that gossipy little nest which was Careg, gaping for any
crumb of news, it would very soon be all over the place that Colonel
Fielding was to marry "that little young lady that's working for Mr.
Price"! Yes; by midday it would be proclaimed. It would run like
wildfire up to the Hospital and down to the Land Girls' Camp.
Everybody would know! Before Elizabeth herself knew!
I could not help laughing at the dismayed face of young Colonel
Fielding as he stood there, frowning, the wind taken out of his
sails. It did serve him right! Mischievous as he was, and full of
guile and wile and teasing, sheltering himself behind that pretence
of shyness, he found his match in this Welshman who put up that bluff
of ignorance! The game was to Ivor the shepherd, who did understand
English after all....
But Colonel Fielding trumped that. He turned to me and remarked: "I
am going to find her now, at once."
And he said it in rapid French!
With which he left me to my soothing mechanical work in the
shearing-shed.
I watched his figure (waisted as if he wore corsets always, though to
do him justice he never did except for his masquerades) disappear
across the farmyard to the red-brick house.