"What can I do to show you how splendid I think you are?" he said. "You
wonderful small person!"
And something inside me wanted to say, "Exchange all this chivalrous
gratitude for just a tiny bit of love"; but I sat on the something's
head _hard_, like a good girl, and I said:
"Why, you can get me my ticket; the booking-office is open now."
There is nothing more cheerless and depressing than going to a place you
don't know and arriving all alone. If only there is a pillar-box in the
vicinity where you have once posted a letter, or a tea-shop where you
bought chocolates, it establishes a feeling of intimacy. At Long
Woodstock I felt an alien of aliens, an Englishwoman in a foreign
country.
I swallowed a cup of tea and had a wash on the cheerless northern
station; then I took a mouldy old fly that smelt of innumerable weddings
and funerals, and set out for Lynn Lytton Hospital, and as I travelled
past the rows of grey stone houses I felt myself shedding my high-flown
courage of the morning feather by feather, until I became the reserved,
nervous little coward I had always been. Furthermore, I began to feel
very sick.
I feel with intense earnestness that Charlotte Corday and Nurse Cavell
and Christobel Pankhurst, and those wonderful women who fought in the
Russian Army, could never have felt sick as I can feel sick, or they
would have stopped in the middle of their heroic deeds and gone home to
bed.
I can think of nothing more unheroic than to feel sick on all the great
and emotional occasions of your life.
We seemed to climb Lynn Lytton, it was high up on a hill, and by the
time we reached it the birds were twittering their benedictions and the
first stars were netted in the tree-tops.
I told the cabman to wait, and climbed some steps--they seemed like the
steps of the Monument.
I am glad the door opened at once, or I would have turned and bolted
down them like a rabbit.
I must have been feeling pretty bad, because there was some late
clematis clinging to one of the pillars of the portico, and they seemed
to me in the twilight like large and particularly meaty spiders.
I want so badly to write of the heroic sentiments and thoughts I had,
but I was sick, and the clematis looked like fat spiders, and I wanted
to run away. That is the honest truth.
"I want to see Captain Markham," I told the sister who came to the door.
"It is after visiting hours," said the sister gently. "Are you his
wife?"
"No--he hasn't a wife."
"His sister?"
"No--just--just----"
"I see," said the sister very gently. "Please come in," and I saw that
she did not see--she thought that Walter Markham and I had sentimental
relations.
She took me into a little grey distempered room hung with orange
curtains, and sent the matron to me. She reminded me of snow, so deep
that it could never, never melt--kind snow, deep enough to be soft.
"Are you Pam?" she said.