There were thirty or forty officers in the lounge of the hotel, all
condemned, as I was, to spend the greater part of the day there. Some
men have better luck. It was the fourth time I had been held up in this
wretched place on my way back to France after leave. Dragged out of our
beds at an unreasonable hour, crammed into a train at Victoria, rushed
down to an embarkation port as if the fate of the empire depended on our
getting there without a minute’s delay, we find, when we get out of the
train, that the steamer will not start for three hours, four hours,
on this occasion six hours. We are compelled to sit about in an hotel,
desolate and disgusted, when we might have been comfortable in London.
I looked round to see if there were anyone I wanted to talk to. There
were--I had seen them at Victoria--three or four men whom I knew
slightly, but I had no particular wish to spend hours with any one of
them. I had just decided to go out for a walk by myself when I felt a
slap on my shoulder. I turned and saw Daintree. I was uncommonly glad
to see him. Daintree and I were friends before the war and I have always
found him an amusing companion. He greeted me heartily.
“Great luck,” he said, “running into you like this. I don’t see a single
other man I know in the whole crowd. And any way I particularly wanted
to talk to you. I’ve got a story to tell you.”
We secured a corner and two comfortable chairs. I lit a pipe and waited.
Daintree is a wonderful man for picking up stories. The most unusual
things happen to him and he gets mixed up in far more adventures than
anyone else I know. And he likes telling stories. Usually, the men who
have stories to tell will not talk, and the men who like talking have
nothing interesting to tell. Daintree is exceptional.
“What is it this time?” I asked. “What journalists call a ‘sob story,’
or is it meant to be humorous?”
“I should call it a kind of joke,” said Daintree; “but my wife says it’s
the most pathetic thing she’s ever heard. It makes her cry even to think
of it You can take it either way. I’ll be interested to see how you do
take it. I was thinking of writing it to you, ‘for your information and
necessary action, please.’ My wife wanted me to, but it’s too long for
a letter. Besides, I don’t see what you or anyone else could possibly
do in the matter. You may give advice--that’s what my wife expects of
you--but there’s really no advice to give. However, you can tell me how
it strikes you. That’s what I want to know, whether you agree with my
wife or with me. You know Simcox, don’t you, or do you? I forget.”
“Simcox?” I said. “Is that a tall, cadaverous man in the Wessex? Rather
mournful looking?”
“That’s the man. Came home from a remote corner of the Argentine, or
somewhere like that, early in the war, and got a commission. He’s a
captain now.”
“I met him,” I said, “down Albert way, shortly before the push last
year. I can’t say I knew him. He seemed to me rather a difficult kind of
man to know.”
“So my wife says,” said Daintree. “He’s older than most of us, for
one thing, and has spent twenty years all by himself herding sheep
or branding bullocks, or whatever it is they do out in those places.
Naturally he’d rather lost touch with life at home and found it
difficult to fit himself in; especially with a lot of boys straight
from the ‘Varsities or school. They were mostly boys in his battalion.
Anyhow, he seems to have been a bit morose, but he did his job all right
in the regiment and was recommended for the M.C.. He got knocked out in
the Somme push and jolly nearly lost a leg. They saved it in the end and
sent him down to my place to convalesce.”
Daintree owns a very nice place in the Midlands. In the old days it was
one of the pleasantest houses I know to stay in. Daintree himself was
a capital host and his wife is a charming woman. The house is a
convalescent home for officers now, and Mrs. Daintree, with the help of
three nurses, runs it. Daintree pretends to regard this as a grievance,
and says it was all his wife’s doing, though he was just as keen on the
place as she was.
“Damned nuisance,” he said, “finding the place full of boys rioting
when I get home on leave. And it’s full up now--twelve of them, no
less. There’s hardly a spot in the house I can call my own, and they’ve
spoiled the little lake I made at the bottom of the lawn. That young ass
Pat Singleton started what he called boat-races on it----”
“Oh, Pat Singleton’s there?” I said. “I knew he’d been wounded, but I
didn’t hear he’d been sent to your place.”
“Pat Singleton’s always everywhere,” said Daintree. “I’ve never come
across a place where he wasn’t, and he’s a devil for mischief. Remind me
afterwards to tell you about the trick he played on the principal nurse,
a Scotchwoman with a perfectly terrific sense of her own dignity,”
Daintree chuckled.
“If you’d rather tell me that story,” I said, “instead of the one about
Simcox, I’d just as soon have it. In fact, I’d prefer it. Sob stories
are always trying.”
“But I’m not sure that the Simcox one is a sob story, though there’s a
certain amount of slosh in it. Anyhow, I’ve got to tell it to you, for
my wife says you’re the only man she knows who can advise what ought to
be done.”
“All right,” I said, “but Pat Singleton’s escapades always amuse me. I’d
like to hear about his making an apple-pie bed for that nurse.”
Daintree chuckled again, and I gathered from the expression of his face
that the nurse had endured something worse than an apple-pie bed.
“Or about the boat-races,” I said. “I didn’t know you had anything which
floated on that lake of yours.”
“I haven’t,” said Daintree, “except the kind of wooden box in which the
gardener goes out to clear away the duck-weed. However, Pat Singleton
comes into the Simcox story in the end. It’s really about him that my
wife wants your advice.”
“No one,” I said, “can give advice about Pat Singleton.”
“Knowing the sort of man Simcox is,” said Daintree, “you’ll understand
that he was rather out of it at first in a house full of boys just out
of hospital and jolly glad to have a chance of running about a bit. Pat
Singleton wasn’t there when Simcox arrived. But the others were nearly
as bad; silly jokes from morning to night and an infernal row always
going on. My wife likes that sort of thing, fortunately.”
“Simcox, 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 Simcox, shy, reserved, and
wholly unaccustomed to charming ladies, would succumb 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 Simcox. 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 Simcox’s lot went in--you know the sort
of thing it was?”