THE VISIT
Well, I went.
I mean, to see Mr. Lascelles in the Nursing Home for wounded officers
at Nowhere Junction.
I thought it would be rather cat-like not to when he did want to see
me, after all, even if he is engaged to somebody else--I mean, to
somebody. Besides, he might want to say something about some of his
things that he had left at his billet with us.
So off I went on what you can only describe as a pious errand. It
was a horrible day, neither wet nor dry, but cold and piercing and
depressing. I think the most depressing day I've ever spent in the
whole course of my life.
Everything went wrong from the start. First I forgot one of the
parcels that I'd got to take Mr. Lascelles. Then my suspender broke.
And though I fastened it up with a safety-pin at the Junction
waiting-room, still, you never know when a thing like that may not
give, and there it is hanging over you like a pale-blue sword of
Damocles the whole time that you're out.
Then I missed my way to the place and wasted about a quarter of an
hour going back to the right turning.
Then, when I had got to the blessed home--a large, new, red-brick
building surrounded by sprouts of laurel--there was some mistake
about my having come.
They didn't seem to realise that I had been asked to visit a wounded
officer.
They showed me into an awful little bleak waiting-room with nothing
in it but a gas-fireplace and a framed photograph of a lot of nurses
in a group, with Miss Gates in the middle with her hair done like
they used to when mother was a girl.
I waited for what seemed like an hour, which, of course, made me
furious. I should have been far better employed sitting at home
going on embroidering Nancy's chemise-top or darning my own stockings
or something really productive like that, instead of hanging on
waiting until this wretched matron-fiancée person of Mr. Lascelles's
chose to think that I had been there long enough.
I wondered why a woman like that with a big nursing home of her own
and what they call one of the most sacred professions should choose
to go and get herself engaged to be married.
And at her age, too!
Just as I was thinking this the door opened, and in came the
so-called fair fiancée herself--Miss Gates--the matron.
She had a little starchy cap perched on her brown hair with lots of
grey in it--I mean the hair, not the cap--and she also had on a
business-like looking navy blue alpaca gown with little lawn collar
and cuffs, but no apron. What a very different sort of bride she'll
make from Nancy!
Well, in she came and shook hands very briskly with me and said: "Oh,
yes, Mr. Lascelles does expect you; so I think I may permit you to
see him for a few minutes."
Permit you, you know! That made me so annoyed that I didn't do what
I intended to do--namely, ask if I might congratulate her on her
engagement to our old friend.
Yes, I say old friend because when a person has been billeted on you,
you get to know him better in a week or two than you would get to
know in years and years some young man that you only saw at hockey
matches or at Badminton or subscription dances and that sort of thing.
Well, led by this matron, I went upstairs to an upper landing that
went all round the well of the staircase.
There was a sound of playing the piano and singing "When the Girls
come up to Town----" from one of the rooms where I suppose a lot of
them were, and a quite young youth came out in very beautiful grey
mufti and only one leg, poor darling, hopping and holding on to the
banisters and laughing at some one behind him.
"Now, Mr. Tracey, Mr. Tracey," the matron called, "where are your
crutches?"
"Oh, Sister, I do hate the beastly things," said this young wounded
officer in a very drawly sort of voice, looking hard through a
monocle at me. "They simply ruin the set of one's coat, don't you
know."
"Once a nut, always a nut, I suppose," said Miss Gates, and then she
opened a door and said, "Here's a visitor to see you, Frankie."
Mr. Lascelles was sitting up in bed, looking, I must say, not nearly
as well as he did when he left the Moated Grange. I don't believe he
is one bit better for having left there, in spite of being nursed by
his fiancée. He was wearing the same striped cream and pale blue
pyjamas that he had on the night of the Zeppelin raid, and his
red-gold hair was all rumpled under the bandage round his head, and
his eyes were much brighter than they had any business to be, and his
cheeks were flushed--feverishly flushed.
As for his hands, I could have cried over them! They were shrunk so
very tiny, and they had got so white and transparent, with blue veins
showing through the backs of them. They felt so absurdly soft, too,
for a man's hands, for he took both of them to hold my hand when I
put it out to him and said, "How do you do?"
Never again shall I call the young man, as I have once or twice
called him, by his sort of pet name of "Lonely Subaltern"!
You see, never again will he be that, now that he is engaged to this
business-like person who owns this nursing home.
I suppose she will never leave him. I thought she was never going to
leave him, even this afternoon, when I came to see him, for there she
sat smiling patronisingly upon me as I brought out the various little
presents and parcels that I had got with me.
"Thank you, it was most awfully sweet of you, Miss Elizabeth," he
said, smiling for the first time really as he touched a little white
china jar of lemon-cheese that I had made for him, tied up with
lemon-coloured ribbon off a chocolate box.
Then I said something about the weather being very warm for the time
of year, and Miss Gates said that personally she had thought it was
rather cold, and Mr. Lascelles said in a sort of duty voice that
being in bed still he hadn't noticed much what the weather was like.
And then a terrible pause ensued, and nobody said anything or seemed
to know what to say next.
I was just going to get up and say that Aunt Victoria was expecting
me back immediately.
Just then the door opened and the nurse came in and said: "Sister,
there is an officer downstairs come to ask how many patients you will
be able to take in by Wednesday."
"Oh, I will come down and see him at once," said Miss Gates, getting
up briskly. Then she said to me: "Excuse me a moment," and went out.
I was only too thankful to excuse her for any number of minutes. All
curiosity, of course, because of what I had to ask Mr. Lascelles. I
was determined not to go back without having found out something I
had been bothering about ever since I had first got his message.
So no sooner had the door closed behind Miss Gates's blue alpaca back
than I turned to Mr. Lascelles, and began gabbling quickly so as to
get it all in. "Oh, before I go away, there is something I simply
must ask you, Mr. Lascelles."
"Oh, yes, do tell me what it is," he said, in a much more natural
sort of voice--his old schoolboyish one, like before he was engaged.
"I say, it was most frightfully ripping of you to come."
"Oh, not at all," I said politely; "somebody had to come, and Evelyn
and Nancy were busy, and Aunt Victoria can't stand these draughty
trains, so, you see, I was the only one who could manage it."
"Otherwise, I suppose you would have let one of the others do it?"
said Mr. Lascelles, in rather a hurt voice, though what he had to be
hurt about goodness only knows!
So I began again, and said: "Look here, Mr. Lascelles. You know you
wrote a letter to me the day before you were taken--I mean, the day
before you came here?"
"Yes, I did," said little Mr. Lascelles, flushing up to the roots of
his hair again, "and look here! I've something to say about that. I
never got any answer to it, Miss Elizabeth."
"Well! I don't think," I said, "there could be any answer to it.
You see, in the letter, you asked me to come up and see you because
you wanted to speak to me; and I couldn't very well come up and see
you when you had just been whisked off--I mean, when you had just
gone away to a nursing home."
"You might have written," said Mr. Lascelles, sitting up, a little,
bolt upright figure, in the bed, and speaking quite resentfully. "I
thought you might have written if you wanted to know what it was all
about, that is."
"Of course I wanted to know," I said, speaking as dignifiedly and
calmly as I could, and gazing aloofly at the bottle of eau de Cologne
on his dressing-table. "I knew there was something you wanted to ask
me, even before that night. Will you tell me what it is?"
"Sure you care to hear?"
"I shouldn't ask," I said, quite angrily, "if I didn't want to know!"
"Very well, then, I had better tell you," said Mr. Lascelles, also
gabbling a little, as if he wasn't quite sure that his destined bride
might not come prancing in at any moment.
"You--you--that--that----"
He actually began to stammer in a most absurd way and to look more
feverishly flushed than ever as he went on at last: "You remember
that blessed photograph that you sent to me when I was the 'Lonely
Subaltern'?"
I said, rather sharply: "I don't think you need remind me of that
now."
"Why not? Why not?" asked Mr. Lascelles, quite heatedly.
Well, of course, it was obvious why not.
It was because I didn't think an engaged young man ought to rake up
any bygones, however merely platonic they were, with any sort of
other girl, if his fiancée could be called a girl exactly.
However, I couldn't tell him this; it sounded so absolutely silly, so
I adopted my cool, dignified manner again and merely said: "Well, but
I thought we had arranged to forget about that idiotic quarrel of
ours."
"It was the quarrel I was remembering," said Mr. Lascelles, pushing
his hair off his fevered brow at he spoke; "although you did tear it,
you know you did, and that is what I have been going to ask you about
that photograph. You know I have got one half and you kept the other
half of it. I want to know whether I mayn't have it to join on to my
half." This was unexpected. In a kind of way it was touching, his
still thinking about old friends and caring to have photographs of
them. But I couldn't let him see I was touched. It would seem so
absurd.
So I spoke as if I had a heart as light as a feather.
"Join on? Oh, no; I don't think so," I said. "It would be too
silly; it would make such an idiotic mark right across. I think
those bits had better be burnt."
Mr. Lascelles said nothing for a minute. Then he shut up his mouth
very tight under his baby moustache as he said, rather shortly: "Very
well, since you won't let me have that, can't you let me have another
photograph some time, Miss Betty?"
I was so pleased--I mean surprised--to hear that old name coming out
that I nearly said in the first moment, "Yes, I will send you another
copy." However, thank goodness, I refrained in time. I think I was
reminded by hearing the jingling of the keys and the quick step in
the passage of Miss Gates, his fiancée.
Let her give him her photograph--hers is the only woman's photograph
he has got any right to want, or even to say he wants, since I don't
suppose he wants mine at all, really.
So I got up from the white bedroom chair and said with a conventional
sort of smile: "I am so afraid I haven't got another copy of that
photograph."
"Is there no such thing as getting another copy off the negative?"
demanded Mr. Lascelles, quite in his own quarrelling voice.
"No, I don't think so," I said.
Mr. Lascelles, sitting up there in his pyjamas, and looking very
nearly as angry as that afternoon when I had slapped his face for
him, said: "Why not? Why not?"
In another minute I should have told him why, and I should have said
something quite bitter, too, on the subject of the greed and
grabbiness of engaged men who ask for the photographs of other girls
as well as those of their own legitimate fiancées--but, of course! at
that moment the door opened, and in whisked his everlasting
legitimate fiancée once more.
"Now, Frankie, I think you have talked quite enough," she said, in
that brisk, managing voice of hers which I should find so trying if I
were her fiancé. "You will be getting a temperature, you know, and
it will be ages before you are allowed out again, and as for
duty--oh! no, no. Miss Verdeley," turning to me, "I am afraid that I
shall have to send you away now."
But I was already at the door. I wasn't waiting to be sent away, I
can tell you!
And so I told her practically, for I said: "Oh, yes, I have been
longing to go for the last ten minutes. I have a really very
important engagement at home that I have got to keep, only I thought
I had better wait and say good-bye to you, Miss Gates."
And I shook hands with her, though I didn't want to a bit, really.
I noticed she wore a plain gold signet ring on her engagement finger.
I suppose Mr. Lascelles will choose the real engagement ring for her
later when he is well enough to go out.
I didn't shake hands with him; I just didn't think he deserved it. I
only nodded to him and said: "Well, good-bye again, Mr. Lascelles! I
am so glad to have seen you looking so much better."
Which I hadn't, of course!
"And in such good hands."
Which, of course, I thought awful--still, of course, they were his
choice!
Then I went out of the room and downstairs and out of the house and
through the town again, walking so quickly that when I got to the
station I found I had three-quarters of an hour to wait for the train
back to Mud Flats.