I do love him so much, every day I seem to love him more and more and
more.
I suppose I ought to be ashamed and humiliated to write that down,
because I simply bore him to tears; but I'm not, mine isn't a silly
love--he's my very, very dear, the most wonderful man I have ever seen
or known.
Sometimes people say things that simply wring my heart.
"I suppose you'll get married directly after the war?" the C.O.'s wife
said. "Will you live in England?"
"I--I don't know," I answered.
"We shall winter in the South," said Cheneston; he glanced at Grace
Gilpin and I knew she was listening. "We shall probably go to Norway
for the sports, and spend the rest of the time in England."
"It sounds like a fairy tale," said the C.O.'s wife.
"I think it is," I broke in unexpectedly.
Grace Gilpin turned in her chair and glanced at me. She was lovely; she
wore cornflower blue crepe and white collar and cuffs.
"I think Cheneston would be quite wonderful in the role of a fairy
prince," she said.
He laughed, rose, and walked away.
Going home he looked at me gravely.
"I hope you're not getting romantic about our engagement. I don't mean
anything rotten, child--but all that silly rubbish about fairy tales and
fairy princes. I have only five weeks more--then I go to the front."
"Did you care for Grace most frightfully?" I asked boldly.
He looked down at me with slightly puzzled eyes. I can't describe his
eyes exactly, they are hazel, and when he is going to laugh they laugh
first; and they are hard and honest and straight.
"I thought," he said. "I gave my very soul into her hands, to play with
and laugh at--but I don't know. It doesn't hurt so much--as it did.
Pam--I gave her everything that was best in me; and she encouraged me,
she let me give, and when I had beggared myself--when I cared like
hell--she flung my gifts back in my face and laughed. I wanted to
humiliate her as she had humiliated me. I'm not a great man, Pam; she
ground my pride and my love and my manhood under her heel--and I wanted
to hit back."
"And I afforded you the opportunity," I said very quietly.
He looked out over the downs, his eyes were worried and troubled and his
face was white.
"I wouldn't hurt you for the world, Pam; I have been thinking over this
make-believe engagement of ours, wondering if it could possibly hurt you
in any single way. The only thing I can see is that it might keep off
another man who might want to marry you--and there isn't one about. It
simply amounts to this: I give you a good time, and you wear a ring I
gave you. I wouldn't hurt you, Pam. Sometimes I could almost fancy
you're not like other women--you're not a beastly little actress. I
suppose I seem an awful cad sometimes. We can't cry off just now, kid;
the Service makes prisoners of us all. I can't leave here, whatever
happens, until I go to France with my battery in five weeks' time; and
if we pretended things were broken off now our position would be
intolerable. We've got to carry on. I'll make the next five weeks as
pleasant as ever I can for you."
Mother came out as we reached our gate, and Cheneston said good-bye.
She looked at me curiously as we went inside.
"You funny cold little thing," she said, "never a kiss."
One of the things that makes me feel frightfully sick is the amount
mother and father are spending on clothes for me.
It's rather like an Arabian Nights dream to have a wardrobe full of
perfectly adorable frocks, but I feel it's so unfair to let them spend
all this money to get me settled when being settled is as remote as it
ever has been.
I try to accept the light and airy "take what the good gods give"
philosophy, but I am too aware that it isn't the good gods, it's mother
and father who give, on a Major's pay, fully believing their reward will
be made concrete in "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden," and the
disposing of a singularly plain and unexciting daughter to a handsome
young man with pots of money.
I would so like to be angry with someone for being plain, but I did it
absolutely on my own, because mother is quite a beautiful person and
father is frightfully aristocratic and romanish--they are both rather
splendidly beaky, but mine is a pure and unadulterated snub.
I suppose I have a petty, shallow nature, but I pine to be romantic and
wonderful like Grace Gilpin, and simply draw people to me; no one but
deaf old ladies who think I look kind and good ever ask to be introduced
to me; and only chivalrous men who think I look tired and anaemic and
work for my living ever offer me seats in buses or tubes.
Grace Gilpin takes her surroundings and uses them as a background--she
is always to the fore. I sink into the background and become part of
them.
Yesterday we took out lunch on the links, caviare sandwiches and stuff,
and Grace sat down by a flaming gorse-bush in a grey frock and a grey
jersey. She just used that glorious bit of flame as an "effect." I sat
on the other side, and they all nearly forgot me and went off without
me.
"I didn't see you," Walter Markham said.
It's true; there are heaps of people in this life you don't see because
of the more ornamental people.
I would have given almost anything to have been born showy, so that
people would look at me. I want Cheneston to look at me as he, and
other men, look at Grace, as if she were a splendid vision vouchsafed to
them for five minutes.
I do love that man, and love isn't one bit what I thought it was. I
always imagined it was a mixture of bubble and scorch, but it
isn't--it's so sweet to love. I could be good! It makes me feel good
right to my finger-nails, and full of that
after-church-on-a-summer-Sunday evening-in-peace-time feeling; that's
why I think that my love for the man isn't anything to be ashamed of or
humiliated about. He doesn't love me, I know; but I have a conviction
you can't grow unless you love, and I feel so much more use in the world
since I've started growing.
Loving Cheneston has made life perfectly wonderful for me. He doesn't
know it and he never will, but he's shown me all the dear beauty of the
world--and it is beautiful.
Walter Markham is awfully nice to me; sometimes he leaves Grace Gilpin
to Cheneston and walks with me, and he is teaching me tennis in the
mornings before breakfast. He is much older than Cheneston, Grace, or
I--he must be forty--and he is very rich.
I wonder if Grace will marry him--or if she will marry Cheneston.
Sometimes I think he will forget he is angry with her, and he will tell
her how the mistaken idea of our "engagement" arose, and why he let it
prosper--there is a frightful lot of the open-hearted, impetuous
schoolboy about Cheneston.