Chapter 7

You needn't worry about me. I'm keeping awfully fit. I _am_ glad now I've always lived in the open air and played games and ploughed my own land. My muscles are as hard as any Tommie's. So are Queenie's. You see, we have to act as stretcher bearers as well as chauffeurs. You're not much good if you can't carry your own wounded.

Queenie is simply splendid. She really _doesn't_ know what fear is, and she's at her very best under fire. It sort of excites her and bucks her up. I can't help seeing how fine she is, though she was so beastly to poor old Col-Col before he joined up. But talk of the War bringing out the best in people, you should simply see her out here with the wounded. Dr. Cutler (the Commandant) thinks no end of her. She drives for him and I drive for a little doctor man called Dicky Cartwright. He's awfully good at his job and decent. Queenie doesn't like him. I can't think why.

Good-bye, darling. Take care of yourself.

Your loving

Anne.

Antwerp. _October 3rd._

... You ask me what I really think of Queenie at close quarters. Well, the quarters are very close and I know she simply hates me. She was fearfully sick when she found we were both in the same Corps. She's always trying to get up a row about something. She'd like to have me fired out of Belgium if she could, but I mean to stay as long as I can, so I won't quarrel with her. She can't do it all by herself. And when I feel like going back on her I tell myself how magnificent she is, so plucky and so clever at her job. I don't wonder that half the men in our Corps are gone on her. And there's a Belgian Colonel, the one Cutler gets his orders from, who'd make a frantic fool of himself if she'd let him. But good old Queenie sticks to her job and behaves as if they weren't there. That makes them madder. You'd have thought they'd never have had the time to be such asses in, but it's wonderful what a state you can get into in your few odd moments. Dicky says it's the War whips you up and makes it all the easier. I don't know....

FURNES.

_November._

That's where we are now. I simply can't describe the retreat. It was too awful, and I don't want to think about it. We've "settled" down in a house we've commandeered and I suppose we shall stick here till we're shelled out of it.

Talking of shelling, Queenie is funny. She's quite annoyed if anybody besides herself gets anywhere near a shell. We picked up two more stretcher-bearers in Ostend and a queer little middle-aged lady out for a job at the front. Cutler took her on as a sort of secretary. At first Queenie was so frantic that she wouldn't speak to her, and swore she'd make the Corps too hot to hold her. But when she found that the little lady wasn't for the danger zone and only proposed to cook and keep our accounts for us, she calmed down and was quite decent. Then the other day Miss Mullins came and told us that a bit of shell had chipped off the corner of her kitchen. The poor old thing was ever so proud and pleased about it, and Queenie snubbed her frightfully, and said she wasn't in any danger at all, and asked her how she'd enjoy it if she was out all day under fire, like us.

And she was furious with me because I had the luck to get into the bombardment at Dixmude and she hadn't. She talked as if I'd done her out of her shelling on purpose, whereas it only meant that I happened to be on the spot when the ambulances were sent out and she was away somewhere with her own car. She really is rather vulgar about shells. Dicky says it's a form of war snobbishness (he hasn't got a scrap of it), but I think it really is because all the time she's afraid of one of us being killed. It must be that. Even Dicky owns that she's splendid, though he doesn't like her....

iv

Five months later.

The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.

_May 30th, 1915._

My darling Anne,--Queenie will have told you about Colin. He was through all that frightful shelling at Ypres in April. He's been three weeks in the hospital at Boulogne with shell-shock--had it twice--and now he's back and in that Officers' Hospital in Kensington, not a bit better. I really think Queenie ought to get leave and come over and see him.

Eliot was perfectly right. He ought never to have gone out. Of course he was as plucky as they make them--went back into the trenches after his first shell-shock--but his nerves couldn't stand it. Whether they're treating him right or not, they don't seem to be able to do anything for him.

I'm writing to Queenie. But tell her she must come and see him.

Your loving

Adeline Fielding.

Three months later.

The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.

_August 30th._

Darling Anne,--Colin has been discharged at last as incurable. He is with me here. I'm so glad to have him, the darling. But oh, his nerves are in an awful state--all to bits. He's an utter wreck, my beautiful Colin; it would make your heart bleed to see him. He can't sleep at night; he keeps on hearing shells; and if he does sleep he dreams about them and wakes up screaming. It's awful to hear a man scream. Anne, Queenie must come home and look after him. My nerves are going. I can't sleep any more than Colin. I lie awake waiting for the scream. I can't take the responsibility of him alone, I can't really. After all, she's his wife, and she made him go out and fight, though she knew what Eliot said it would do to him. It's too cruel that it should have happened to Col-Col of all people. _Make_ that woman come.

Your loving

Adeline Fielding.

Nieuport. _September 5th, 1915._

Darling Auntie,--I'm so sorry about dear Col-Col. And I quite agree that Queenie ought to go back and look after him. But she won't. She says her work here is much more important and that she can't give up hundreds of wounded soldiers for just one man. Of course she is doing splendidly, and Cutler says he can't spare her and she'd be simply thrown away on one case. They think Colin's people ought to look after him. It doesn't seem to matter to either of them that he's her husband. They've got into the way of looking at everybody as a case. They say it's not even as if Colin could be got better so as to be sent out to fight again. It would be sheer waste of Queenie.

But Cutler has given me leave to go over and see him. I shall get to Wyck as soon as this letter.

Dear Col-Col, I wish I could do something for him. I feel as if we could never, never do too much after all he's been through. Fancy Eliot knowing exactly what would happen.

Your loving

Anne.

Nieuport. _September 7th._

Dear Anne,--Now that you _have_ gone I think I ought to tell you that it would be just as well if you didn't come back. I've got a man to take your place; Queenie picked him up at Dunkirk the day you sailed, and he's doing very well.

The fact is we're getting on much better since you left. There's perfect peace now. You and Queenie didn't hit it off, you know, and for a job like ours it's absolutely essential that everybody should pull together like one. It doesn't do to have two in a Corps always at loggerheads.

I don't like to lose you, and I know you've done splendidly. But I've got to choose between Queenie and you, and I must keep her, if it's only because she's worked with me all the time. So now that you've made the break I take the opportunity of asking you to resign. Personally I'm sorry, but the good of the Corps must come before everything.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Cutler.

The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.

_September 11th, 1915._

Dear Dicky,--This is only to say good-bye, as I shan't see you again. Cutler's fired me out of the Corps. He _says_ it's because Queenie and I don't hit it off. I shouldn't have thought that was my fault, but he seems to think it is. He says there's been perfect peace since I left.

Well, we've had some tremendous times together, and I wish we could have gone on.

Good-bye and Good Luck,

Yours ever,

Anne Severn.

P. S.--Poor Colin Fielding's in an awful state. But he's been a bit better since I came. Even if Cutler'd let me come back I couldn't leave him. This is my job. The queer thing is he's afraid of Queenie, so it's just as well she didn't come home.

Nieuport.

_September 15th, 1915._

Dear Old Thing,--We're all furious here at the way you've been treated. I've resigned as a protest, and I'm going into the R. A. M. So has Miss Mullins--: resigned I mean--so Queenie's the only woman left in the Corps. That'll suit her down to the ground.

I gave myself the treat of telling Cutler what I jolly well think of him. But of course you know she made him hoof you out. She's been trying for it ever since you joined. It's all rot his saying you didn't hit it off with her, when everybody knows you were a perfect angel to her. Why, you backed her every time when we were all going for her. It's quite true that the peace of God has settled on the Corps since you left it; but that's only because Queenie doesn't rage round any more.

You'll observe that she never went for Miss Mullins. That's because Miss Mullins kept well out of the line of fire. And if you hadn't jolly well distinguished yourself there she'd have let you alone, too. The real trouble began that day you were at Dixmude. It wasn't a bit because she was afraid you'd be killed. Queenie doesn't want you about when the War medals are handed round. Everybody sees that but old Cutler. He's too much gone on her to see anything. She can twist him round and round and tie him up in knots.

But Cutler isn't in it now. Queenie's turned him down for that young Noel Fenwick who's got your job. Cutler's nose was a sight, I can tell you.

Well, I'm not surprised that Queenie's husband funks her. She's a terror. Worse than war.

Good-bye and Good Luck, Old Thing, till we meet again.

Yours ever,

Dicky Cartwright.

VII

ADELINE

i

They would never know what it cost her to come back and look after Colin. That knowledge was beyond Adeline Fielding. She congratulated Anne and expected Anne to congratulate herself on being "well out of it." Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought of Queenie and Cutler and Dicky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the allied armies in the thick of it. She had left a world where life was lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world where people were only half-alive. To be safe from the chance of sudden violent death was to be only half-alive.

Her one consolation had been that now she would see Jerrold. But she did not see him. Jerrold had given up his appointment in the Punjaub three weeks before the outbreak of the war. His return coincided with the retreat from Mons. He had not been in England a week before he was in training on Salisbury Plain. Anne had left Wyck when he arrived; and before he got leave she was in Belgium with her Field Ambulance. And now, in October of nineteen fifteen, when she came back to Wyck, Jerrold was fighting in France.

At least they knew what had happened to Colin; but about Eliot and Jerrold they knew nothing. Anything might have happened to them since they had written the letters that let them off from week to week, telling them that they were safe. Anything might happen and they might never know.

Anne's fear was dumb and secret. She couldn't talk about Jerrold. She lived every minute in terror of Adeline's talking, of the cries that came from her at queer unexpected moments: between two cups of tea, two glances at the mirror, two careful gestures of her hands pinning up her hair.

"I cannot bear it if anything happens to Jerrold, Anne."

"Oh Anne, I wonder what's happening to Jerrold."

"If only I knew what was happening to Jerrold."

"If only I knew where Jerrold _was_. Nothing's so awful as not knowing."

And at breakfast, over toast and marmalade: "Anne, I've got such an awful feeling that something's happened to Jerrold. I'm sure these feelings aren't given you for nothing... You aren't eating anything, darling. You _must_ eat."

Every morning at breakfast Anne had to look through the lists of killed, missing and wounded, to save Adeline the shock of coming upon Jerrold's or Eliot's name. Every morning Adeline gazed at Anne across the table with the same look of strained and agonised enquiry. Every morning Anne's heart tightened and dragged, then loosened and lifted, as they were let off for one more day.

One more day? Not one more hour, one minute. Any second the wire from the War Office might come.

ii

Anne never knew the moment when she was first aware that Colin's mother was afraid of him. Aunt Adeline was very busy, making swabs and bandages. Every day she went off to her War Hospital Supply work at the Town Hall, and Anne was left to take care of Colin. She began to wonder whether the swabs and bandages were not a pretext for getting away from Colin.

"It's no use," Adeline said. "I cannot stand the strain of it. Anne, he's worse with me than he is with you. Everything I say and do is wrong. You don't know what it was like before you came."

Anne did know. The awful thing was that Colin couldn't bear to be left alone, day or night. He would lie awake shivering with terror. If he dropped off to sleep he woke screaming. At first Pinkney slept with him. But Pinkney had joined up, and old Wilkins, the butler, was impossible because he snored.

Anne had her old room across the passage where she had slept when they were children. And now, as then, their doors were left open, so that at a sound from Colin she could get up and go to him.

She was used to the lacerating, unearthly scream that woke her, the scream that terrified Adeline, that made her cover her head tight with the bed-clothes, to shut it out, that made her lock her door to shut out Colin. Once he had come into his mother's room and she had found him standing by her bed and looking at her with the queer frightened face that frightened her. She was always afraid of this happening again.

Anne couldn't bear to think of that locked door. She was used to the sight of Colin standing in her doorway, to the watches beside his bed where he lay shivering, holding her hand tight as he used to hold it when he was a child. To Anne he was "poor Col-Col" again, the little boy who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more unresisting.

He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement. He would burst into tears at any sudden sound. Small noises, whisperings, murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him. Loud noises, the slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, made him writhe in agony. For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always coming and never came. The droop of the mouth that used to appear suddenly in his moments of childish anguish was fixed now, and fixed the little tortured twist of his eyebrows and his look of anxiety and fear. His head drooped, his shoulders were hunched slightly, as if he cowered before some perpetually falling blow.

On fine warm days he lay out on the terrace on Adeline's long chair; on wet days he lay on the couch in the library, or sat crouching over the fire. Anne brought him milk or beef tea or Benger's Food every two hours. He was content to be waited on; he had no will to move, no desire to get up and do things for himself. He lay or sat still, shivering every now and then as he remembered or imagined some horror. And as he was afraid to be left alone Anne sat with him.

"How can you say this is a quiet place?" he said.

"It's quiet enough now."

"It isn't. It's full of noises. Loud, thundering noises going on and on. Awful noises.... You know what it is? It's the guns in France. I can hear them all the time."

"No, Colin. That isn't what you hear. We're much too far off. Nobody could hear them."

"_I_ can."

"I don't think so."

"Do you mean it's noises in my head?"

"Yes. They'll go away when you're stronger."

"I shall never be strong again."

"Oh yes, you will be. You're better already."

"If I get better they'll send me out again."

"Never. Never again."

"I ought to be out. I oughtn't to be sticking here doing nothing.... Anne, you don't think Queenie'll come over, do you?"

"No, I don't. She's got much too much to do out there."

"You know, that's what I'm afraid of, more than anything, Queenie's coming. She'll tell me I funked. She thinks I funked. She thinks that's what's the matter with me."

"She doesn't. She knows it's your body, not you. Your nerves are shaken to bits, that's all."

"I didn't funk, Anne." (He said it for the hundredth time.) "I mean I stuck it all right. I went back after I had shell-shock the first time--straight back into the trenches. It was at the very end of the fighting that I got it again. Then I couldn't go back. I couldn't move."

"I know, Colin, I know."

"Does Queenie know?"

"Of course she does. She understands perfectly. Why, she sees men with shell-shock every day. She knows you were splendid."

"I wasn't. But I wasn't as bad as she thinks me. ... Don't let her see me if she comes back."

"She won't come."

"She will. She will. She'll get leave some day. Tell her not to come. Tell her she can't see me. Say I'm off my head. Any old lie that'll stop her."

"Don't think about her."

"I can't help thinking. She said such beastly things. You can't think what disgusting things she said."

"She says them to everybody. She doesn't mean them."

"Oh, doesn't she!... Is that mother? You might tell her I'm sleeping."

For Colin was afraid of his mother, too. He was afraid that she would talk, that she would talk about the War and about Jerrold. Colin had been home six weeks and he had not once spoken Jerrold's name. He read his letters and handed them to Anne and Adeline without a word. It was as if between him and the thought of Jerrold there was darkness and a supreme, nameless terror.

One morning at dawn Anne was wakened by Colin's voice in her room.

"Anne, are you awake?"

The room was full of the white dawn. She saw him standing in it by her bedside.

"My head's awfully queer," he said. "I can feel my brain shaking and wobbling inside it, as if the convolutions had come undone. Could they?"

"Of course they couldn't."

"The noise might have loosened them."

"It isn't your brain you feel, Colin. It's your nerves. It's just the shock still going on in them."

"Is it never going to stop?"

"Yes, when you're stronger. Go back to bed and I'll come to you."

He went back. She slipped on her dressing-gown and came to him. She sat by his bed and put her hand on his forehead.

"There--it stops when you put your hand on."

"Yes. And you'll sleep."

Presently, to her joy, he slept.

She stood up and looked at him as he lay there in the white dawn. He was utterly innocent, utterly pathetic in his sleep, and beautiful. Sleep smoothed out his vexed face and brought back the likeness of the boy Colin, Jerrold's brother.

That morning a letter came to her from Jerrold. He wrote: "Don't worry too much about Col-Col. He'll be all right as long as you'll look after him."

She thought: "I wonder whether he remembers that he asked me to."

But she was glad he was not there to hear Colin scream.

iii

"Anne, can _you_ sleep?" said Adeline. Colin had gone to bed and they were sitting together in the drawing-room for the last hour of the evening.

"Not very well, when Colin has such bad nights."

"Do you think he's ever going to get right again?"

"Yes. But it'll take time."

"A long time?"

"Very long, probably."

"My dear, if it does, I don't know how I'm going to stand it. And if I only knew what was happening to Jerrold and Eliot. Sometimes I wonder how I've lived through these five years. First, Robert's death; then the War. And before that there was nothing but perfect happiness. I think trouble's worse to bear when you've known nothing but happiness before.... If I could only die instead of all these boys, Anne. Why can't I? What is there to live for?"

"There's Jerrold and Eliot and Colin."

"Oh, my dear, Jerrold and Eliot may never come back. And look at poor Colin. _That_ isn't the Colin I know. He'll never be the same again. I'd almost rather he'd been killed than that he should be like this. If he'd lost a leg or an arm.... It's all very well for you, Anne. He isn't your son."

"You don't know what he is," said Anne. She thought: "He's Jerrold's brother. He's what Jerrold loves more than anything."

"No," said Adeline. "Everything ended for me when Robert died. I shall never marry again. I couldn't bear to put anybody in Robert's place."

"Of course you couldn't. I know it's been awful for you, Auntie."

"I couldn't bear it, Anne, if I didn't believe that there is Something Somewhere. I can't think how you get on without any religion."

"How do you know I haven't any?"

"Well, you've no faith in Anything. Have you, ducky?"

"I don't know what I've faith in. It's too difficult. If you love people, that's enough, I think. It keeps you going through everything."

"No, it doesn't. It's all the other way about. It's loving people that makes it all so hard. If you didn't love them you wouldn't care what happened to them. If I didn't love Colin I could bear his shell-shock better."

"If _I_ didn't love him, I couldn't bear it at all."

"I expect," said Adeline, "we both mean the same thing."

Anne thought of Adeline's locked door; and, in spite of her love for her, she had a doubt. She wondered whether in this matter of loving they had ever meant the same thing. With Adeline love was a passive state that began and ended in emotion. With Anne love was power in action. More than anything it meant doing things for the people that you loved. Adeline loved her husband and her sons, but she had run away from the sight of Robert's haemorrhage, she had tried to keep back Eliot and Jerrold from the life they wanted, she locked her door at night and shut Colin out. To Anne that was the worst thing Adeline had done yet. She tried not to think of that locked door.

"I suppose," said Adeline, "you'll leave me now your father's coming home?"

John Severn's letter lay between them on the table. He was retiring after twenty-five years of India. He would be home as soon as his letter.

"I shall do nothing of the sort," said Anne. "I shall stay as long as you want me. If father wants me he must come down here."

In another three days he had come.

iv

He had grey hair now and his face was a little lined, a little faded, but he was slender and handsome still--handsomer, more distinguished, Adeline thought, than ever.

Again he sat out with her on the terrace when the October days were warm; he walked with her up and down the lawn and on the flagged paths of the flower garden. Again he followed her from the drawing-room to the library where Colin was, and back again. He waited, ready for her.

Again Adeline smiled her self-satisfied, self-conscious smile. She had the look of a young girl, moving in perfect happiness. She was perpetually aware of him.

One night Colin called out to Anne that he couldn't sleep. People were walking about outside under his window. Anne looked out. In the full moonlight she saw Adeline and her father walking together on the terrace. Adeline was wrapped in a long cloak; she held his arm and they leaned toward each other as they walked. His man's voice sounded tender and low.