SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY
1
Sunday morning was quiet and misty, and Clapton was full of bells. At
Violette on Sundays each person led a different life. Kate, who attended
St. Austin's church, went to early Mass at eight, sung Mass for children
at 9.45, Sunday-school at 10.30, matins (said hastily) at 11, High Mass
(sung slowly) at 11.30, children's catechising at 3, and evensong at 7.
Mrs. Frampton went to a quite different church, to 11 o'clock matins,
and once a month (the first Sunday) did what was called in that church
'staying on.' She often went again in the evening.
Evie often accompanied her mother, and found, as many have, that after
church is a good time and place for the gathering together of friends.
Alix did not attend church, not having been brought up to do so. She
often went off somewhere on Sunday with friends, as to-day.
Mrs. Frampton said at breakfast, 'Take warm coats, dears; it's quite a
fog, and your cough sounds nasty, Alix love. And don't leave your
umbrellas; it might very well turn to rain.'
'It's quite cold enough for furs, _I_ think,' said Evie, pleased,
because her furs became her.
Through a pale blurred morning Alix and Evie travelled by bus and
metropolitan to Victoria. Evie, lithe and fawn-like in dark brown, with
her wide, far-set, haunting eyes and sudden dimples, was a vivid note in
the blurred world; any one must be glad of her. Evie needed not to say
words of salt or savour; her natural high spirits and young buoyancy
were lifted from the commonplace to the charming by her face and smile.
Alix by Evie's side was pale and elusive and dim; her only note of
colour was the dark, shadowed blue of her black-lashed eyes. She
coughed, and her throat was sore. She talked, and made Evie laugh.
2
They entered Victoria Station at 10.29. Waiting in the booking-hall were
their friends: Basil Doye, a married young man and young woman of
prepossessing exterior, two or three others of both sexes, and Terry
Orme with a friend, both on a week's leave. Terry was spending the
week-end in town, with another subaltern, and was joining in the
expedition at Alix's suggestion. Alix was fond of Terry, who was John's
younger brother, and a fair, serene, sweet-tempered, mathematical, very
musical person of nineteen. He seemed one of those who, as Basil Doye
had put it, come through the war unmoved. His smile was sweet and
infectious, and he was restful and full of joy, and could consume more
chocolates at a sitting than any one else (of over fifteen) that he
knew.
His friend was a cheery, sunburnt youth called Ingram, who had got the
D.C.M.
Terry said, 'Hullo, Alix, how are you?' and had the gift of showing,
without demonstration, that he knew things were rotten for her, because
of Paul. He was a sympathetic boy, and tender-hearted, and thought Alix
looked in poor case; quite different from his own vigorous and cheerful
and busy sisters at Wood End. But then of course he and John hadn't been
killed, and Paul had. It was frightfully rough luck on Alix. Terry was
inclined to think that people out there had much the best of it, on the
whole, beastly as it often was, and interrupting to the things that
really mattered, such as music, and Cambridge.
Evie was introduced to every one, and they all had a friendly and
pleased look at so much grace and vividness.
In the train they filled a compartment. Alix sat between Terry and the
married young man, who was something in a government office. Opposite
were Evie and Basil and the married young woman, who had lovely furs and
a spoilt, charming face, and was selfish about the foot-warmer.
In the train they read a newspaper. Evie got the impression from their
manner of reading it that they all knew beforehand what the news was,
and a good deal more than was in the paper too; perhaps this impression
was produced merely by nobody's saying 'Fancy,' as they did at Violette.
From their style of comment Evie was inclined to gather that some of
them had helped to write the paper and that others were acquainted with
the unwritten facts behind and so different from the printed words;
perhaps it was merely that they had studied last night's late editions,
or perhaps some were journalists, others makers of history, others
gifted with invention. Anyhow they seemed to think they knew as much as,
or a good deal more than, the paper did. Even the married young woman
stopped for a moment being sleepy and sulky about the cold to contribute
something she had heard from a Foreign Office man at dinner.
'He was pulling your leg,' her husband said. 'Linsey always does; he
thinks it's funny.'
Evie thought him and his high sweet voice conceited.
Alix, looking at Evie opposite, speculated amusedly for a moment where
Evie came in: Evie, who knew and cared for no news and had heard nothing
from people behind the scenes, and hadn't even had her leg pulled by
Foreign Office men. Well, Evie, of course, came in on her face. It was
jolly to have a face like that, to cover all vacancies within. Evie sat
there, understanding little, yet people spoke to her merely to discover
what, with that face, she would say. And what she said pleased and
amused merely by reason of its grace of setting.
Evie shivered, and Basil asked if she would like the window up.
'Well, it _is_ cold,' said Evie, and he leaned across and pulled it up,
asking no one else.
'Thanks so much,' said Evie, taking it prettily to herself. Her face and
eyes were brilliant above her furs. Basil, with an artist's pleasure,
took in her beauty; Alix felt him doing it. Yes, Evie came in all right.
They got out at some station. The air was like damp blankets, thick and
pale and chill. There was no joy in it; dead wet leaves floated
earthwards, unhappy like tears. They started walking somewhere. Alix
leaned on her stick. She could walk all right, but she limped. She might
soon tire, but she wasn't going to say so. They walked uphill, on a
forlorn, muddy road. They walked in groups of two or three, changing and
mixing and dividing as they went. They talked....
3
Basil for a minute was beside Alix. He said, 'I say, will this be too
much for you? Do say if you get tired, and we'll stop and rest.'
Alix hated him because she was lame and he hated lameness and loved
wholeness and strength.
She said, 'No thanks, I'm all right,' and had no more to say at the
moment. His eyes were on Evie's back, where she walked ahead with
Maynard, the married man. He thought she walked like Diana, straight and
free, with a swing.
Alix turned to speak to Terry, who was just behind with his friend
Ingram. He came abreast of her, answering. Basil caught up the two in
front.
'You look pretty fit, Terry,' said Alix.
'Oh, I'm in the pink.' His fair, unbrowned face was serene and smiling.
His far-set blue eyes were not nervous, only watchful, and seemed to see
a long way. He hadn't got Basil's or John's quick, jerky, restless
movements of the hands. He looked as if the war had more let him alone,
left him detached, unconsumed. Perhaps it was because he was a musician;
perhaps because he was naturally of a serene spirit; perhaps because he
was so young.
'Have a choc,' said Terry, and produced a box of them from the pocket of
his Burberry.
Alix had one.
'How are they all at Wood End?' she asked.
'They too appear to be in the pink. They haven't much time to spare for
me, though, they're so marvellously busy. Mother always was, of course;
but Margot and Dorothy are at it all day too now. I wonder what they'll
do with it when the war's over, all this energy. Mother says the war has
been good for them; made them more industrious, I suppose. It's a funny
thought, that the war can have been _good_ for any one; I can't quite
swallow it. I don't think a thing bad in itself can be good for people,
do you? It's very bad for me; it's spoiling my ear; the noise, you know;
guns and shells and gramophones and so on.... By the way, I wish you'd
come and hear Lovinski with me on Monday night, it's a jolly programme.'
'All right,' said Alix, who found Terry restful.
She talked to Terry, and saw Evie and Basil walking in front, side by
side, laughing, Evie's joyous, young smile answering that other quick,
amused, friendly smile that she knew.
4
'You _are_ all funny,' said Evie to Basil.
'No?'
'Oh, you are. You do talk so.... About such mad things.'
'Do we? What do _you_ talk about at home?'
Evie tried to consider.
'Don't know, I'm sure. Oh, just things that happen, I suppose; and
mother and Kate talk about servants and household things, and we all
talk about the people we know, and what they've done and said. But
you ... you all talk about....'
'About the people we don't know, and what they've done and said. Is that
it?'
'Perhaps. And public things, out of the papers, and what's going to
happen, and why, and pictures, and ... nonsense.... Oh, I don't know....
And you find such queer things funny.... Anyhow, you all _talk_, even if
it's only nonsense most of the time.... And the girls and the men talk
just the same way. That's funny. Alix is the same. She's the queerest
kid; makes me scream with laughter often. She's a pet, though.'
'She is,' said Basil. 'But what people say--the way they talk--makes
extraordinarily little difference, you know. It's what they are.... The
funny thing is, I didn't know that, not so clearly, at least, till I'd
been out at the war. A thing like a war seems to settle values,
somehow--shows one what matters and what doesn't; shovels away the cant
and leaves one with the essentials....' ('Oh dear me,' said Evie.)
'Sorry; I'm talking rot. What I mean is, isn't it a jolly day and jolly
country, and don't you love walking and getting warm?... I suppose you
chose your hat to match your face, didn't you?--pink on brown. Don't
apologise: I like it. Yes, the hat too, of course, but I didn't mean
that.'
'Well, really!' said Evie.
5
They stopped at an inn for lunch. They crowded round a fire and got
warm. They had hot things to eat and drink. They laughed and talked.
Outside the wet leaves blew about. Alix's leg ached. Maynard, who talked
too much and about the wrong things, persisted in talking about the
psychological and social effects of the war. An uncertain subject, and
sad, too; but probably he was writing an article about it somewhere; it
was the sort of thing Maynard did, in his spare time.
'It's an interesting intellectual phenomenon,' he was saying. 'So many
of the intelligent people in all the nations reduced largely to
emotional pulp--sunk in blithering jingoism, like a school treat or a
mothers' meeting.'
His wife, who had been a bored vicar's daughter before her marriage, and
knew, said sleepily, 'Mothers' meetings aren't a bit like that. You
don't know anything about them. They mostly don't think anything about
jingoism or the war, except that they hope their boys won't go, and that
the Keyser must be an 'ard-'earted man. That's not blithering jingoism,
it's common sense.'
Ingram, the cheerful young subaltern, said boldly, 'I think jingoism is
an under-rated virtue. There's a lot to be said for it. It makes
recruits, anyhow. As long as people don't _talk_ jingo, I think it's a
jolly useful thing.'
'It's turning some of our best professional cynics into primitive
sentimentalists, anyhow,' said Maynard, thinking out his article. 'It's
making Europe simple, sensuous and passionate. As evidenced by the
war-poetry that was poured forth in 1914. (That flood seems a little
spent now; I suppose we're all getting too tired of the war even to
write verse about it.) ... As evidenced also by the Hymn of Hate and the
Deptford riots and other exhibitions of primitive emotion. The question
is, is all this emotion going to last, and to be poured out on other
things after the war, or shall we be too tired to feel anything at all,
or will there be a reaction to dryness and cynicism? People, for
instance, have learnt more or less to give their money away: will they
go on giving it, or shall we afterwards be closer-fisted than before?'
'O Lord!' said Basil, 'we shall have nothing left to give. Not even
munition-makers will, if it's true that the income-tax is going to be
quadrupled next year. It's about five bob now, isn't it? Give, indeed!'
'People,' continued Maynard, still on his own train of thought, 'may be
divided, as regards the ultimate effects on them of any movement, into
two sections--those who respond to the movement and join in all its
works and are propelled along in a certain direction by it and continue
to be so; and those who, either early or late, react against it, and are
propelled in the opposite direction. Every movement has got its reaction
tucked away inside it; and the more violent the movement, the more
violent the possible reaction. The reactionary forces that come into
play during and after war are quite incalculable. Goodness only knows
where they'll land us ... whether they'll prevail over the responding
forces or not. For instance, shall we be left a socialistic,
centralised, autocratically governed, pre-Magna-Carta state, bound hand
and foot by the Defence of the Realm Act, with all businesses
state-controlled and all persons subject to imprisonment and sudden
death without trial by jury, or will there be a tremendous reaction
towards liberal individualism and _laissez-faire_? Who knows? None of
us.... What do you think about it all, Miss Tucker?' He addressed Evie,
to tease her, and make her say something in that fresh, buoyant voice of
hers.
She did. She said, 'I'm sure I don't know anything about it. I can't see
that the war makes such a lot of difference, to ordinary people. One
seems to go on much the same from day to day, doesn't one?'
'I'm not at all sure,' said Basil, suddenly interested, 'that Miss
Tucker hasn't got hold of the crux of the whole matter. There aren't two
sections of people, Maynard--there are three; the respondents, the
reactors, and the indifferents--ordinary people, that's to say. What
difference _does_ the war make, after all--to ordinary people? I believe
the fact that it, so to speak, doesn't, is going to settle the destiny
of this country. People like you talk of effects and tendencies; you're
caught by influences and reactions and carried about; but then, perish
the thought that you're an ordinary person. You're only an ordinary
person of a certain order, the fairly civilised, not quite unthinking
order, that sees and discusses and talks a lot too much. A thing like a
war, when it comes along, upsets the whole outlook of your lot; it
dissolves the fabric of your world, and you have to build it up
again--and whether you like it or not, it will be something new for you.
But does it upset and dissolve, or even disturb very much, the world of
all the people (the non-combatants, I mean, of course, not the fighters)
who don't think, or only think from hand to mouth? There'll be no
reaction for them, or any such foolishness, because there's been no
force. Here's to Ordinary People!' He emptied his glass of beer, and if
he seemed to do it to Evie Tucker, that might be taken merely as
acknowledgment of her discerning remark.
'Oh, mercy,' said Evie, on a laugh and a yawn. 'You do all go on, don't
you.'
Alix, black-browed and sulky, thought so too. Why talk about rotten
things like these? Why not talk about the weather, or the countryside,
or birds and leaves, or servants, as at Violette, instead of these
futile speculations on the effects of a war that should not be thought
about, should not be mentioned, and would probably anyhow never never
end? It was Maynard's fault; he was conceited, and a gasbag, and talked
about the wrong things. Terry Orme agreed with her.
But young Ingram said, practically, 'Surely that's all rot, isn't it? I
mean, there can be no indifferents, in your sense of the word. Every one
must be affected, even if they haven't people of their own in the show,
by the general kick-up. I don't believe in your indifferents; they
wouldn't be human beings. They'd be like the calm crowds in the papers,
don't you know, who aren't flustered by Zepps. I simply don't believe
they exist.'
'The fundamentally untouched,' Maynard explained. 'Superficially, of
course, they are, as you put it, flustered. They read the papers, of
course, for the incidents; but the fundamental issues beneath don't
touch them. They're impervious; they're of an immobility; they're
sublimely stable. The war, for them, really isn't. The new world,
however it shapes, simply won't be. What's the war doing to them? All
the beastliness, and bravery, and ugliness, and brutality, and cold, and
blood, and mud, and gaiety, and misery, and idiotic muddle, and
splendour, and squalor, and general lunacy ... you'd think it must
overturn even the most stable ... do something with them--harden them,
or soften them, or send them mad, or teach them geography or foreign
politics or knitting or self-denial or thrift or extravagance or
international hatred or brotherhood. But has it? Does it? I believe
often not. They haven't learnt geography, because they don't like using
maps. They've not learnt to fight, because it's non-combatants I'm
talking of. They've not even learnt to write to the papers--thank
goodness. Nor even to knit, because I believe they mostly knew how
already. Nor to preserve their lives in unlit streets, for they are
nightly done in in their hundreds. Nor, I was told by a clergyman of my
acquaintance the other day, to pray (but that is still hoped for them, I
believe). The war, like everything else, will come and go and leave them
where it found them--the solid backbone of the world. The rest of the
world may go on its head with ideas, or progress, or despair, or war, or
joy, or madness, or sanctity, or revolution--but they remain unstirred.
I don't suppose a foreign invasion would affect them fundamentally. They
couldn't take in invasion, only the invaders. They remain themselves,
through every vicissitude. That's why the world after the war will be
essentially the same as the world before it; it takes more than a war to
move most of us.... We all hope our own pet organisation or tendency is
going to step in after the war and because of the war and take
possession and transform society. Social workers hope for a new burst of
philanthropic brotherhood; Christians hope for Christianity; artists and
writers for a new art and literature; pacificists for a general
disarmament; militarists for permanent conscription; democrats say there
will be a levelling of class barriers; and I heard a subaltern the other
day remark that the war would 'put a stopper on all this beastly
democracy.' We all seem to think the world will emerge out of the
melting-pot into some strange new shape; optimists hope and believe it
will be the shape they prefer, pessimists are almost sure it will be the
one they can least approve. Optimists say the world will have been
brought to a state of mind in which wars can never be again; pessimists
say, on the contrary, we are in for a long succession of them, because
we have revived a habit, and habit forms character, and character forms
conduct. But really I believe the world will be left very much where it
was before, because of that great immobile section which weighs it
down.'
Mrs. Maynard, who had been making a very good lunch, yawned at this
point, and said, 'Roger, you're boring every one to death. You don't
know anything more about the future than we do. None of us know anything
at all. You're not Old Moore.'
'Old Moore,' Evie contributed (she had not been attending to Maynard's
discourse, but was caught by this), 'says something important in foreign
courts is going to happen in November, connected with a sick-bed. I
expect that means the Kaiser's going to be ill. Perhaps he'll die.'
'Sure to,' agreed Basil. 'He's done it so many times already this year,
it's becoming a habit.... I say, we ought to be getting on, don't you
think?'
Mrs. Maynard shivered, and said it was quite an unfit day to be out in,
and she wasn't enjoying herself in the least, and was anybody else?
Basil said he was, immensely, and found the day picturesque in colour
effects.
Evie said she thought it was jolly so long as they kept moving.
Maynard said it was jollier talking and eating, but he supposed that
couldn't last.
Terry said it could, if one had chocolates in one's pocket and didn't
hurry too much.
6
Basil walked beside Evie. Evie's beauty was whipped to brilliancy by the
damp wind. Evie was life. She might not have the thousand vivid
awarenesses to life, the thousand responses to its multitudinous calls,
that the others had, the keen-witted young persons who had been bred up
to live by their heads; but, in some more fundamental way, she was life
itself: life which, like love and hate, is primitive, uncivilised,
intellectually unprogressive, but basic and inevitable.
Basil had once resented the type. In old days he would have called it
names, such as Woman, and Violette. Now he liked Woman, found her
satisfactory to some deep need in him; the eternal masculine, roused
from slumber by war, cried to its counterpart, ignoring the
adulterations that filled the gulf between. Possibly he even liked
Violette, which produced Woman.
Ingram walked by Alix. The yellow leaves drifted suddenly on to the wet
road. Alix's hands were as cold as fishes; her lame leg was tired. She
talked and laughed. Ingram was talking about dogs--some foolish pug he
knew.
Alix too talked of pugs, and chows, and goldfish, and guinea-pigs.
Ingram said there had been a pug in his platoon; he told tales of its
sagacity and intrepidity in the trenches.
'And then--it was a funny thing--he lost his nerve one day absolutely;
simply went to pieces and whimpered in my dug-out, and stayed so till we
got back into billets again. He wouldn't come in to the trench again
next go; he'd had enough. Funny, rather, because it was so sudden, and
nothing special to account for it. But it's the way with some men, just
the same. I've known chaps as cheery as crickets, wriggling in frozen
mud up to the waist, getting frost-bitten, watching shrapnel and
whizz-bangs flying round them as calmly as if they were gnats, and
seeing their friends slip up all round them ... and never turning a
hair. And then one day, for no earthly reason, they'll go to pot--break
up altogether. Funny things, nerves....'
Alix suddenly perceived that he knew more about them than appeared in
his jolly, sunburnt face; he was talking on rapidly, as if he had to,
with inward-looking eyes.
'Of course there are some men out there who never ought to be there at
all; not strong enough in body or mind. There was a man in my company;
he was quite young; he'd got his commission straight from school; and he
simply went to pieces when he'd been in and out of trenches for a few
weeks. He was a nervous, sensitive sort of chap, and delicate; he ought
never to have come out, I should say. Anyhow he went all to bits and
lost his pluck; he simply couldn't stand the noise and the horror and
the wounds and the men getting smashed up round him: I believe he saw
his best friend cut to pieces by a bit of shell before his eyes. He kept
being sick after that; couldn't stop. And ... it was awfully sad ... he
took to exposing himself, taking absurd risks, in order to get laid out;
every one noticed it. But he couldn't get hit; people sometimes can't
when they go on like that, you know--it's a funny thing--and one night
he let off his revolver into his own shoulder. I imagine he thought he
wasn't seen, but he was, by several men, poor chap. No one ever knew
whether he meant to do for himself, or only to hurt himself and get
invalided back; anyhow things went badly and he died of it.... I can
tell you this, because you won't know who he was, of course....' (But
really he was telling it because, like the Ancient Mariner, he had to
talk and tell.) He went on quickly, looking vacantly ahead, 'I was there
when he fired.... Some of us went up to him, and he knew we'd seen.... I
shan't forget his face when we spoke to him.... I can see it now ... his
eyes....' He looked back into the past at them, then met Alix's, and it
was suddenly as if he was looking again at a boy's white, shamed face
and great haunted blue eyes and crooked, sensitive mouth and brows....
He stopped abruptly and stood still, and said sharply beneath his
breath, 'Oh, good Lord!' Horror started to his face; it mounted and grew
as he stared; it leaped from his eyes to the shadowed blue ones he
looked into. He guessed what he had done, and, because he guessed, Alix
guessed too. Suddenly paler, and very cold and sick, she said, 'Oh ...'
on a long shivering note; and that too was what the boy in the trenches
had said, and how he had said it. Perspiration bedewed the young man's
brow, though the air hung clammy and cold about them.
'I beg your pardon,' said Ingram, 'but I didn't hear your name. Do you
mind....'
'Sandomir,' she whispered, with cold lips. 'It's the same, isn't it?'
He could not now pretend it wasn't.
'I--I'm sickeningly sorry,' he muttered. 'I'm an ass ... a brute ...
telling you the whole story like that.... Oh, I do wish I hadn't. If
only you'd stopped me.'
Alix pulled her dazed faculties together. She was occupied in trying not
to be sick. It was unfortunate: strong emotion often took her like that;
in that too she was like Paul.
'I d-didn't know,' she stammered. 'I never knew before how Paul died.
They never said ... just said shot....'
He could have bitten his tongue out now.
'You mustn't believe it, please.... Sandomir wasn't the name ... it was
my mistake.... Sandberg--that was it.'
'They never said,' Alix repeated. She felt remote from him and his
remorse, emptied of pity and drained of all emotions, only very sick,
and her hands were as cold as fishes.
A little way in front Evie and Basil were laughing together. A robin
sang on a swaying bough. Alix thought how sad he was. She had a sore
throat and a headache. The mist clung round, clammy and cold, like her
hands....
'I don't know what to say,' Ingram was muttering. 'There's nothing _to_
say....'
Alix stopped walking. The sky went dark.
'Terry,' she said.
Terry was at her side.
'All right.... Aren't you well?'
She held on to his arm.
'Terry, I'm going home.'
He looked at her face.
'All right. I'll come too.... If you're going to faint, you'd better sit
down first.'
'I shan't faint,' said Alix. 'But I think ... I think I may be going to
be sick.'
'Well,' said Terry, 'just wait till the others have gone on, or they'll
fuss round.... I say, good-bye, all of you; Alix is rather done, and
we're going to the nearest station for the next train. No thanks, don't
bother to come; we shall be all right.'
Alix heard far-away offers of help; heard Evie's 'Shall I come with you,
Al?' and Basil's 'What bad luck,' and the others' sympathies and
regrets, and Terry keeping them off.
7
Alix and Terry were alone together.
Then Alix was, as she had foretold, sick, crouching on damp heather by
the roadside.
'Have you done?' inquired Terry presently.
'Yes. I hope so, at least. Let's go on to the station.'
'I wonder, is it something beginning? Do you feel like flu? Or is it
biliousness, or a chill? Or have you walked too far? I was afraid you
were.'
'I'm all right. Only that man--Mr. Ingram--told me things, and suddenly
I felt sick.... He told me things about Paul.... He didn't know who I
was, and then suddenly he knew, and I saw him know, and I knew too. Do
_you_ know, Terry?'
'No,' said Terry, levelly. 'I know what some men who were out there
thought, but it wasn't true.'
Terry was a good liar, but now no use at all. Alix twisted her cold
hands together and whispered hoarsely, 'You've known all the time,
then.... Oh, Paul, Paul--to have minded as much as all that before you
died ... to have been hurt like that for weeks and weeks....'
She was crying now, and could not stop.
'Don't,' said Terry gently. 'Don't think like that about it; it's not
the way. Don't think of Paul, except that he got out of it quicker than
most people, and is safe now from any more of it. One's got to keep on
thinking of that, whenever any of them slip up.... I hoped you'd none of
you ever know.... That bungling ass.... Alix, don't: it was such a short
time he had of it....'
Alix gasped, her hands pressed to her choked throat, 'It seemed hundreds
of years, to him. Hundreds and hundreds of years, of being hurt like
that, hurt more than he could bear, till he had to end it.... He was
such a _little_ boy, Terry ... he minded things so much....'
'The thing is,' Terry repeated, frowning, and prodding the mud in the
road with his stick, 'not to _think_. Not to _imagine_. Not to
_remember_.... It's _over_, don't you see, for Paul. He's clean out of
it.... It's a score for him really, as he was like that and did mind so
much.'
'It would be easier,' said Alix presently, husky and strangled, 'if he
hadn't liked things so much too; if he hadn't been so awfully happy; if
he hadn't so loved being alive.... It isn't a score for him to lose all
the rest of his life, that he might have had afterwards.'
'No,' Terry agreed, sadly. 'It isn't. It's rotten luck, that is. Simply
rotten. That's one of the most sickening things about this whole show,
the way people are doing that.... But there's one thing about Paul,
Alix; if he'd come through it he'd have kept on remembering all the
things one tries to forget. More than most people, I mean. He was that
sort. Lots of people don't mind so much, and can get things out of their
heads when they aren't actually seeing them. I can, pretty well, you
know. I think about other things, and don't worry, and eat and sleep
like a prize-fighter. A chap like Ingram's all right, too; lots of men
are. (Though what I suppose Ingram would call his brain seems to have
gone pretty well to pot to-day. My word, I shall let him hear about that
this evening.) But Paul--Paul would have minded awfully always; it might
have spoilt his life a bit, you know.... And worse things might have
happened to him, too; he might have been taken prisoner.... Paul,' he
added slowly--'Paul is better off than lots of men.'
Alix was staring at him now with wide, frightened eyes.
'I say, Terry,' she said hoarsely, 'what--what on earth are we to _do_
about it all? It--it's going on now--this moment.... I've tried so hard
not to let it come near ... and now ... now....' She was cold and
shaking with terror.
'Now you'd better go on trying,' Terry suggested, and looked at his
watch. 'Thinking's no good, anyhow.... We ought to hit off the 3.15 with
any luck. Are you going to be sick any more, by the way?'
'I can never tell, till just beforehand,' said Alix gloomily. 'But I
wouldn't be much surprised.'
That was a sad thing about the Sandomirs: when they began to be sick it
often took them quite a long time to leave off. It was most unfortunate,
and they got it from their father, who had sometimes been taken that way
on public platforms.
'Well,' said Terry patiently.
8
The others walked, and had tea, and walked again, and took a train back.
Londoners like this sort of day. They like to see hedges, and grass, and
pick berries, and hear birds. It refreshes them for their next week's
work, even though they have been at the time cold, and tired, and
perhaps bored.