In search of Lady Wastwood, temporarily busy in that Department,
Katharine later on betook herself to the cool and pleasant quarters
on the Palace second floor, devoted to Secretarial Work and Accounts.
"Be good enough to explain why you cut the Staff lunch to-day?" Miss
Forbis said with severity, as Trixie's white triangular face and
bright green eyes came out of a big parchment ledger to smile a tired
welcome at her friend.
"Because of the food!" said Lady Wastwood briefly.
"The food is ripping!" pronounced Miss Forbis.
"I admit that! It's seeing you other people eat it that I mind!"
"So you avoid meals, and live on eggs and coffee, and fresh dates,
and figs and bananas and grapes and custard-apples. You'll be in for
Gippy Tummy if you don't take care!"
"Precious Person, I will take care. But fruit is so simply gorgeous
here!--and it reminds me of Old Diplomatic Service days at
Constantinople and Calcutta, when I and Wastwood used to eat figs and
mangoes and fresh-picked oranges one against the other, for bets in
gloves. And neither of us died--though I suppose we ought to have.
Don't go, my dinkie! I'm nearly done!"
And Trixie, coming out of the big ledger with a sheaf of pencilled
extracts, arranged a huge sheet of foolscap on the blotter and began
to write, while Katharine waited, looking out of the window across
the lawns and the elaborately-cultivated shrubberies to the line
where the blue sea,--traversed by innumerable Allied steamers,--and
the bluer sky, threaded by French and British aircraft--met and
mingled beyond a wide expanse of light brown sand-dunes, and a belt
of casuarina-trees, and tall, waving palms:
"Report On The Working of the Red Cross Motor-Ambulance and Cars For
the Month of October, 1917.
"During October our 11 Cars used for General Administrative Work and
for the Conveyance of Convalescents, ran 9576 miles on 636 gallons of
petrol, making an average of 15.05 miles to the gallon.
"159 Convalescent Patients were taken out for Drives, and nearly all
of them given tea at the Nouzah Gardens--"
"I wonder," Katharine began, after watching the long thin hand move
over the paper for a minute or so, "whether you ought to be doing
that?"
Lady Wastwood's incredibly arched, impossibly-black eyebrows moved
nearer her green-golden hair.
"Because my heart goes biff after a ducking, I resolutely decline to
be treated as an invalid. Isn't it bad enough to know that another
woman is doing my work of organisation at the Convalescent Officers'
Hostel at El Naza--and doing it on rottenly unimaginative lines! A
woman more than a dozen years younger,--who learned from me in the
days of flapperdom how to camouflage a shiny nose? No, you mustn't
try to take my work from me. It helps me to forget my unrealised
visions of green lawns of rabbia shaded with palms and dotted with
snow white sleeping tents, and golden haired English nurses in pale
blue linen overalls, ministering to hundreds of weary War-worn men."
"But the nurses mightn't all have been golden-haired," objected
Katharine.
"Peroxide," said Lady Wastwood, brainily, "is fairly cheap in Egypt.
And I know a Contractor who would have supplied it in seven gallon
glass jars." Her small triangular face regained its old vivacity,
and her green eyes their brilliancy as she pursued: "Then, I meant,
to have a restaurant built far out on the sea shore, where the surf
ran up under the tables as the patients sat at lunch, or tea.
Rowing, riding and fishing, camel-rides and picnics would have been
part of the treatment under my _régime_. And now--" Trixie's voice
wobbled a little and she cautiously dabbed with a minute lawn
handkerchief at the corners of her bright green eyes--"when I think
of all those Convalescent Officers and what they have lost through
Me, I get pippy. To have pulled the thing through and made a success
of it would have got back my credit with Wastwood and the boys."
"My dear!" Katharine began, and hesitated: "You don't believe
_really_--"
Trixie dabbed her eyes again,--and dabbed her nose as an
afterthought, and resolutely put away the handkerchief.
"I don't quite think Wastwood--my husband--would judge me hardly. He
took me three times round the world with him, and though I was a
jelly of terror all the time at sea, I somehow managed to camouflage
my cowardice. It's only when I remember how I groused on that ship
that I imagine I can hear my Jerry saying to his brother: 'Old Man, I
don't half like to say it, but the Mums is rather letting us down ...
What?' And Wastwood--"
"If Wastwood or Jerry said anything so unjust," Katharine broke out,
"they ought to--to be thoroughly well spanked--both of them!" She
went on as Trixie reluctantly yielded to laughter, "I don't know
whether you've found it out yet,--but Nurse-Superintendent Bulleyne
is in charge of No. 2 Ground Floor Ward at the Harem. And she has
told Lady Donnithorpe and every one else here how--when the
Incendiary Bomb from the Zeppelin dropped through the roof of No.
100, West Central Square--where you used to have your Red Cross Work
Rooms,--and killed two poor orderlies, and dear Alicia
Macintosh!--you went into action with sand-boxes and water-buckets,
and fire-extinguishers,--and saved the place from being burned out!
..."
"That was nothing to brag about," declared Trixie. "Things that go
off with a bang and a piff never much frighten me, and anyone with an
iota of sense knows what to do in a fire. But shipwreck"--she
shuddered "and drowning--"
Katharine saw the look on the white triangular face, and came to
Trixie's side protectingly. Ever since the sinking of the Hospital
Transport _Loyalty_, the terrible experience had been renewed in Lady
Wastwood's nightly dreams. She looked frailer and more startlingly
attenuated than ever, as she sat among the ledgers heading a fresh
sheet of foolscap: