"'Holiday.' Wonder if that's got anything to do with the farm?"
Here, as the men passed by my window, I caught a few words, uttered by that carrying voice. The stranger was saying: "What was the name of that girl I spoke to?"
What, I thought, irritably, had my name got to do with him? Again I felt the stab of anger with which I'd heard him ask me how long I thought I was going to stand "this"—the Land Army and roughing it in camp. Impertinence! Anyhow, I was at the end of my tether for tonight. Aching with fatigue, I got up and approached the laughing Vic.
"Please," I asked her, "could you show us where the bedrooms are?"
"Bedrooms?" echoed the big Land Girl, and then burst into a fresh peal of laughter. "Bedrooms? Hear that, girls? Celery-face wants to know where the bedrooms are!" General laughter. "No luxuries of that sort here, dear. As you were! Here's where we all sleep."
Blankly Elizabeth and I gazed about that bleak hall.
"On the floor," added Vic cheerfully.
"Floor!" I repeated, giving an appalled glance down at those hard scrubbed boards.
But here our Cockney friend relented.
"Ah, it's not come to that yet, even in the Land Army," she said. "Here, I'll show you." She put a large brown hand on the arm of each of us, led us to the further end of the hall and pulled aside a curtain.
Behind it an alcove was piled with rolled-up mattresses.
"We drag these out, d'you see," explained Vic. "Lay 'em in a line along the wall here. Here's two for you—here's your blankets. I'll tuck you up in your little byes. Sleep like tops here, see if you don't."
I was amazed to find how cosily I curled up, presently on that mattress without sheets or pillows, set on the floor near that open window through which the air swept sweet with the breath of growing things. Vic tucked the khaki blankets round me with a gesture that I hadn't seen so near me since I lost my mother.
"Sleep well," she said comfortably. "Dream of 'him'!"
And it was into the profoundest sleep that I'd known since Harry sailed that I presently sank.
My last waking thoughts were a jumble of the train journey, the unfamiliar country, the laughing, rosy faces of the Land Girls. Then clearly there stood out, in front of all, the face of that strange young man who had walked into the camp, looking as if he were searching for somebody. That searching, disconcerting stare of his at me—why atme?—that brusque demand: "How long d'you imagine you'll stick this?" Why did he say that tome?
"Something attempted, something done."—LONGFELLOW.
Next morning at two o'clock—or such the unearthly hour seemed to me—I was awakened by a resonant girlish voice.
"Tumble up! It's late! I left you girls till the last minute. You were so dead asleep you never heard a sound. Up with you!"
Deeply-drowsy, bewildered, but refreshed, I scrambled out of my blankets and blinked about. Where was——
Ah! The hut!
Every mattress but Elizabeth's and mine was rolled up and stowed away. Every "Campite" had disappeared but big Vic and two who were on fatigue. Vic was hooking scarlet stripes to the sleeve of her clean smock. The others cleared breakfast away from the mess-table.
"You buck up and dress," Vic advised us. "The Timber-Girls and Miss Easton are all off to the woods already"—this was the first I'd heard of so many of the girls here being in the Forestry Corps—"and the other two farm-pupils have gone on.
"It's no use you asking for any bathrooms, Celery-face," he added good-humouredly. "Here's a basin. Young Sybil always takes a dip in the pool just outside, but you've no time today."
I also had no wish, at that moment, to go and dip into any ice-cold, fresh-water pools, out of doors and in the chill grey dawn. Brrr!
"No time for you to sit down for your breakfast either," Vic pursued, as we huddled on our unfamiliar garments and struggled with the lacings of our leggings. "Lil! Just pour these girls out their tea, and butter 'em some bread—they must eat as they go along."
In the early sunshine on the road Elizabeth and I devoured the country bread and the real farm-butter. Our guide and mentor, Vic, strode along between us in the slouch hat, holland overall, breeches, and leggings that looked so natural and becoming on her, though my chum and I, glancing at each other, could not yet grow accustomed to our own appearances.
My feet seemed to belong to somebody else, in these boots! They were so very different from the feet in the shoes that had pattered down streets and along corridors on my daily tube scramble in town!
Harry had always "noticed" what shoes I wore, more than any other part of my get-up. But now——
"'Let us go hence, my shoes, he will not see,'" I parodied gloomily to myself as I tramped along that lane.
Meanwhile Vic, cheerful as the morning, was pointing out to us what she considered the objects of interest as we went along.
"See that big white place over there in the trees? That's the hospital," Vic told us, pointing. "There's two o' the boys coming out now—see? This is the turning off to the town—at least, what they call a town. Mouldy! No pictures, nothing; still, why go to theatres when you can see life?
"You ought to have been here for the concert at the hospital last week. It was all right. They wanted to give it again at our hut; but Miss Easton and Mr. Rhys said 'No fear.' A shame, wasn't it? Never mind; they are going to have another, some time. See that hill to the right where that smoke's going up? That's where our girls work at the trees. And those corrugated iron roofs you can just see over there—that's the camp for the German prisoners, and——"
Vic broke off to ask if she were running us off our legs. Certainly she was a quicker walker than either of us. But I enjoyed the tramp through this heavenly air as much as I ever could enjoy anything again, I thought, in this Harry-less world.
So far, I thought "going on the land" was not so bad after all. Eating delicious bread and butter out-of-doors on a glorious morning at an hour when, in London, I should still have been a-bed! Not at all bad. It might even do a little to take my thoughts off the wound that could not help aching for ever.
And besides this, I was conscious that in the whole air of the place there was something as distinctive, as familiar as in the taste of the farmhouse bread and butter. It was a something that I had not savoured since I was a growing girl....
Other country landscapes that I had since seen had always made me feel the lack of this "something." ...
That these others were often, in a different way, as beautiful, I did admit. I appreciated their dignity, the prosperity of their wide, flat lands. They had so much that was to be admired, but not——
Ah! Not the "flavour" of Wales!
That wild charm one can no more describe than one could photograph the skylark's song. But, with that in one's blood, other charms leave one temperate. Once tasted, never to be forgotten.... I found myself sniffing it up now as if it were some rich and definite perfume, instead of some atmosphere made up of a thousand elusive things ... the dreams of youth included!
And I was glad—that is, as glad as I could allow myself to feel in the circumstances—that, to take up my new venture, Fate had sent me back to the Land of my Fathers.
"There!" exclaimed Vic presently. "There's the farm!"
She pointed to a square building of apricot red, backed by trees and a gently-sloping green hill. It had a flat slate roof, and its many windows glittered in the sun.
With interested curiosity I gazed upon it as we came nearer—the farm where my chum and I were to receive our training for this new life which we'd chosen for ourselves—on a toss-up! That farm—stacked with such memories for me now! On that first morning I wondered what it would mean for me.
"Here's our way, round by the back," Vic piloted us. Up a short lane we went, through a big, red wooden gate, and into the farmyard. It was the first farmyard I'd been into since Dad gave up that farm of his that had swallowed, sovereign by sovereign, all his capital. This other place looked—ah, how much larger and more prosperous!
The big, oblong yard was bordered by buildings that gave the place the air of a homely monastery with cloisters.
By a shed door to the left a labourer in shirt-sleeves and wearing a soldier's cap was holding a horse, and talking to a very big man in tweeds. As this man turned his face I saw it was the kindest-looking one that I had ever seen.
Vic led us up to him.
"Here's our two new pupils, Mr. Price," she introduced us. "This little one's Elizabeth Weare. This other young lady with the white face is Joan Matthews."
A very kindly smile was sent down upon us from the top reaches of that farmer's six-foot-four. He was indeed a gentle giant.
"You will soon get rosy cheeks here," he assured me. "Yes, yes. Vic, now, wasn't so much to look at when she came here first, a twelvemonth ago. Didn't like it at first!" This with a twinkle. "Couldn't get rid of her afterwards. Shows she likes it here now, doesn't it, for her to want to stay on as instructor?"
"Instructor!" murmured Elizabeth and I together. For the first time we realized this big, laughing Cockney-voiced Campite was also an official.
The farmer turned away with a friendly nod to us; and to Vic he added:
"You will put them on to their jobs of work, then, won't you—same as I told you yesterday?"
"Right you are, Mr. Price," returned Vic briskly. "Now, then, dear," to Elizabeth, "you'd better come along with me. Picking up stones for you. I'll show you the field that's got to be cleared."
I saw an indescribable mingling of expressions cross Elizabeth's small face under that brand-new Land Army hat. Pick up stones! The thing any child at the seaside can do! Was it for this that she had given up her post as an efficient clerk and had joined the Land Army? Such, I know, was her thought. But she only said "Right!" and stood by for our instructor's orders.
Vic turned to me.
"Now you," she went on, with a gesture towards the shed near which that labourer had been standing. "Here's your little job."
Now, I appeal to all you girls who joined up as I did, ignorant and "townified," to work on the Land! Had you any clear idea of what you thought would be the first task to which you would be set?
I hadn't.
But Elizabeth mischievously declares that I had already pictured my first job thus:
Scene, a shining, fragrant dairy, with roses framing the open lattice. Myself, in a lilac sun-bonnet, looking like a lady land-worker out of some revue, and wielding a snowy, carved wooden implement with which I printed a clover-blossom design off on to innumerable pats of golden butter.
If this was "The Ideal," how different was "The Real" to which Vic pointed now!
My "little job"!
I had smelt it the moment that I'd entered the farmyard. As a child I'd seen Dad's roughest farm-lad engaged upon a similar "little job," and I'd been sorry for him—it had seemed not only such hard work, but so disgusting!
It involved spade work and a pitchfork, a wheelbarrow and the midden in the centre of the yard, on which a speckled hen and her brood were peering and running about. It also involved a dive into dark and very evil-smelling recesses, with noisome straw underfoot and festoons of grey cobwebs overhead. Never had I thought I should set foot—or nose—in such a place.
But it was in tones of the cheeriest matter-of-course that Vic concluded:
"Yes, you start cleaning out that cow-house."
That cow-house! Start cleaning it out! I——!
Vic gave me my tools, bore off Elizabeth, and left me to it.
There I stood in the farmyard—I, the would-be farm-worker, to whom "work" had always meant sitting indoors and checking papers and clicking a typewriter!
Well, I must make a beginning.
I made the beginning that beginners do make—namely, I went at it like a bull at a gate.
With my hands that had not held any tool heavier than a fountain-pen, I grasped, I clutched the spade-handle, that felt so huge and so unwieldy. Violently I drove that spade into that brown and malodorous mass at my feet. Ugh! Violently I tried to raise the heavy spadeful of that horror. It was too heavy to lift. I struggled.
At the third or fourth effort I heaved the load up. Wildly I cast the foul burden into the wheelbarrow. I missed it by half, though; half that spadeful fell upon my boots and upon my immaculate gaiters. How revolting. I stamped myself free, shuddering.
Savagely I stooped to my loathsome task. I dug, heaved, threw. In ten minutes I was hot, dripping, exhausted. My arms shook and twitched with over-exertion.
And with a sudden more violent lunge than any of the others, I thrust my spade into the half-heaped barrow and left it.
I'd made up my mind. I wasn't going to stick this. I'd buy myself out. Going back to London offices and tightly-shut windows would be anyhow better than this.
I'd go! Yes! Now!
Hurriedly I began pulling down the sleeves of the smock that I'd rolled up above my elbows. I'd got one sleeve down, when the shed-door was suddenly darkened. A man's shape shut out the glimpse of farmyard. A man's eyes were upon me with an amused and curious stare.
I recognized him.
Yes! He was that young officer who had taken it upon himself, last night at the hut, to ask me how long I thought I should stick this.
Of course, he would—he would choose this moment to come upon me again!
Angry was not the word for my feelings towards the young man!
This was unfair. But it didn't affect him. He looked at me, and at the one sleeve that I had rolled down again. He gave the honeyed smile that every Land Girl at the camp had noticed for its sweetness. And then, in the brusque voice that was such a contrast to the smile, he said—without even a "good morning":
"Any one could see that you had never set foot on a farm before."
"How d'you know I haven't? As it happens I have!" I retorted crossly, and again I caught up the spade that I'd flung into the barrow.
"Anyhow, you don't know how to handle those things," he said, moving forward. "That's not the way to hold a spade."
Without more ado he took the spade out of my hands, holding it lightly. He drove it without violence into the foul mess that heaped the floor, taking up about half the quantity that I had done.
"You'll find," he remarked, "that if you don't overload the spade it will balance itself. Same with the pitchfork. Let the work do itself. Look."
He let that spade swing back, and the weight on it swung forward to the barrow with almost no exertion at all.
"Let weight weigh on your side," he said, driving in the spade. "Let force force. Let gravity grav. You see what I mean."
He gave me a little nod as I watched.
"You'll find," he said again, "that you can't fight nature. You can make her work for you, though."
Turning to the wheelbarrow, he picked up the handles of it and trundled it out into the sunny farmyard. Not quite knowing what he would be at, I followed the light figure in khaki towards that mound of unspeakableness, where the grey hen clucked to her young. A board slanted up the side of it. The young man turned to speak to me as he trundled.
"The same with the barrow," Captain Holiday went on. "You don't let it stand still at the foot of that plank and then heave it up. You heave it along the level here, where it's easiest. Then it'll go halfway up by itself. Like this."
Easily he ran the barrow halfway up the plank. Then, when I thought he was going to tip it over, he let it run down again, and wheeled it back with its noisome load to the cowshed.
"D'ye see?"
"Yes. But you might have emptied it for me," I suggested, "while you'd got it there."
"Oh, no," he said coolly, "that's not the idea." Then, quickly: "Won't you roll that sleeve of yours up again?"
This with a twinkle?
I bit my lip.
Of course he had caught me out in the very act of "chucking it." This made me all the more furious because I couldn't show it. Who was this Captain Holiday who permeated this district, asking leading questions of land-workers, and, without encouragement, showing them how and how not to do their work? Surely it was hardly any business of his, after all?
In what I meant to be a crushing tone, I asked him:
"Do you wheel many barrows in the Army?"
He replied cheerfully, and in a disarmingly boyish manner:
"It's just the same principle if you're swinging a bayonet. They're both weights. Now, you try again."
And I actually found myself rolling up my sleeves again and—obeying orders!
Yes! I did as I was told by this incredible young man, as I called him inwardly at the time.
I see now what he meant. Any other man would have gone on doing my work while I leaned against the edge of the stall. He made me do it myself, and at the exact moment when I'd decided I'd had enough of it!
"Take a rest now," broke in this Captain Holiday after he'd watched me critically for some minutes. "Resting is just as important as thrusting."
He drew up a long wooden crate near the cow-house door.
"Sit down," he ordered.
I did, still wondering half-exasperatedly who this tall young captain was.
Did he think that just because I was on the land I was to be spoken to by any stranger who drifted along? If so—well!
I was just wondering how I had better show him very plainly that he'd made a big mistake, when again I was disarmed by the sight of that charming smile. No man with a smile like that could make that kind of mistake. But again the smile was accompanied by the bluntest remark.
"You were jacking up just now, weren't you? Thinking you'd chuck the whole show?"
This nettled me exceedingly.
"No! I was doing nothing of the kind," I replied hotly.
"You know quite well that you were," he retorted quickly. "But you will always contradict me, and I shall never admit what you say. That's understood."
Evidently he meant that our acquaintance was to go on, whatever I intended.
He crossed his legs and pulled a loose nail out of the side of the crate on which we sat. I hadn't asked him to sit down by me. That, too, he'd taken as a matter of course.
Was this young soldier some relation of Mr. Price? Had he anything to do with this farm? Or did he just appoint himself instructor to any Land Girl he happened to meet?
Hoping to find out what his position was, I asked vaguely, but more politely than I had spoken before:
"Are you stationed here?"
"Here in this cowshed?" Captain Holiday asked blandly.
At this I told him, quite shortly, not to be silly.
Whereupon he laughed.
"Well, then, if you mean for a mile or two round here"—he gave a little circular jerk of his head—"I suppose I am. My house is here. You haven't seen my house yet, but you'd pass it coming from the camp. It's that white place in the trees beyond the hill."
"But—that's the hospital. Then you're wounded,"—I glanced at his gold stripes—"or still sick?"
"That doesn't follow. What I mean is that it's my house."
"Then you turned it into a hospital?"
"No," replied this puzzling young man quietly. Then added, as if he were speaking to one of his own soldiers: "Come along. Time's up! Take a turn with the spade again. And see if you can make the wheelbarrow go up easily next journey."
As I took up the spade again he strolled out of the shed. I thought he was not even going to have the manners to bid me good morning. But he turned his face, and said laughingly over his shoulder:
"Au revoir—unless you mean to jack up before I see you again?"
Without waiting for a reply, he crossed the yard towards the farmhouse.
I went on with my so-far-from-romantic task, a little surprised to find that there did seem to be something in what this Captain Holiday had said about handling spades and wheeling barrows. His was the better way, after all. I tried to follow it. I still found the unusual exercise was labour; but it was not altogether the struggle that it had been at my first ignorant and violent efforts.
I worked, getting more flushed and moist and dishevelled as the cleared space on the slate floor grew—very gradually—larger.
There—I'd managed to tip the barrow over quite neatly that time. I wished I could turn through that cow-house the canal of which I saw the silver blink between meadows beyond the stack-roofs. That would be "making Nature work for one" with a vengeance!
Now! This time the spade seemed ever so much lighter, and yet I'd managed to get quite a good load on to it.
Presently I was startled to hear a bell clanging noisily across the yard. A woman's voice called to some one "Dinner!"
"Thank God and the Land Army for my good dinner; Amen."—GRACE (revised).
Dinner! At the word there invaded me an extraordinary feeling, to which I'd been a stranger for months in town. What was it?—hunger, ravenous and primitive—fervently I hoped that this summons meant dinner for everybody!
I glanced at my filthy forearms and hands. Remembering my "blunder" about the bedrooms in camp, I did not look for anybody to tell me where the bathroom was.
I made for the pump in the yard. And then, as I dried my arms and face as well as I could on a comparatively clean piece of my smock, I heard a good-natured Cockney voice behind me say:
"Oh, look at Celery Face sluicing herself in a young cataract!"
Turning, I found big Vic coming up with Elizabeth. My chum's small face was redder than I had ever seen it. It wore an "in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound" expression, and her uniform (though not filthy like mine) was no longer the immaculate fancy dress that it had seemed on the road to work.
Vic grinned.
"This little 'un is going to shape fine, only for breaking her back nearly," she told me. "How've you been getting on, young Joan? Let's have a look at your shed. Yes, that's the style. This 'ere job will be part of your cowman's test, you know. Cleaning out shed, maximum 10 marks. Seventy-five per cent. marks you've got to get in the tests before you pass out of here and get a swanky post somewhere, and be a credit to your instructress, don't you forget it!"
I couldn't help laughing as we followed her up to the farmhouse.
"Instructress, indeed!" I exclaimed. "I was expecting some 'instruction,' and you never came! You never even showed me how to hold the spade."
Vic flashed upon me her most teasing grin.
"I did come," she said with a nod. "Only you weren't wanting any 'instruction,' I noticed, from little Me. Went away again, I did—hooked it. You were all right. Never even saw me. You and your landowner!"
Before I could ask what Vic meant by "my landowner" we were all in the big front kitchen, with its dresser, its tridarn (or three-decker oaken chest), its grandfather clock, and its long table set for seven.
This was the first time Elizabeth or I had sat down to dinner in a kitchen. Much we should have cared had it been in the scullery, the barn, or the hen-house! There is no appetite like that which comes from physical toil!
Glorious greed was a delicious sauce—if any sauce had been needed—to the plentiful and savoury farm-house meal that was provided for us of boiled bacon, potatoes, greens, butter, bread, buttermilk, fruit tart, and cheese.
At the risk of writing myself down a glutton—or of reading like an advertisement for somebody's cocoa—I must dwell on the taste of that loaf, that butter, those other wholesome and delicious things with their suggestion of building healthy bodies and reddening rosy cheeks—the food with which England should be fed.
"Everything home-grown!" we were smilingly told by Mrs. Price, the farmer's wife, who took one end of the table, while her husband carved at the other. Their own dining-room in the front of the house was exquisite with old oak and the silver pots of two generations of agricultural prize-winners; but they elected to share their Land Girls' kitchen dinner because it seemed more hospitable and homely.
"There's nothing here that hasn't come off the farm," Mrs. Price added. "Those black currants in the tart are my last year's bottling, of course. But they were straight out of the garden here. I expect you find it dreadfully countrified fare after London—those of you that come from there."
* * * * * * *
Elizabeth and I here spared a moment from revelling in our second helpings of those home-grown vegetables, so efficiently cooked, to look up and laugh. What we were both thinking of was our last, farewell, midday meal in town.
It had consisted of:
(1) Hors d'œuvre, highly vinegary and suspect—tasting of nothing on earth.
(2) A morsel of sole that had distinctly not come "straight" out of the sea, and tasting of the fact.
(3) Escaloppes de veau with tomato sauce. I don't know what they tasted of, though they cost us a meat-ticket; they smelt, too, forbiddingly of the substitute fat in which they'd been fried.
(4) A small greyish roll, tasting of sawdust.
(5) One half peach, tasting of tin.
(6) Black coffee, tasting of dish-cloth, with a virulently green liqueur that we hoped might drown the tastes of the other courses, and a cheap cigarette.
England's lunch!
* * * * * * *
Certainly life was a succession of contrasts. From the dark fugginess of that crowded little Italian restaurant—which I'd loved because Harry "discovered" it—to this spotless Welsh kitchen where the kindly farm people "mothered" the five girls in farm-kit—Vic, Elizabeth, myself and the other two more advanced pupils. One of these was "Sybil," who had played the piano at the Hut last night, and who took her dip in the pool before going to work; the other was a bright-looking girl they called "Curley," though her hair was the straightest imaginable.
That gentle giant, Mr. Price, had a word for each as he carved.
"I like to know something about all you young ladies who've come down here to work," he said to me. "A lot we've had down here since the start. Twenty, I think, coming and going; splendid girls—good little workers, all. And some were one thing and some another. From South Wales the two last were who were here; fathers in the collieries. Then there's Curley," he nodded at her, "all her people in works, Birmingham. And Sybil here," with another nod, "from Buckinghamshire, never been away from home before without a maid, she told my wife. Father a general. May I ask if your father was in the Army too, perhaps?"
"No; my father wasn't in anything particular," I said. "He used to do a little bit of farming himself."
A gleam of interest lighted up the giant's blue eyes.
"Dear me! Farmed himself, did he? How big a farm, missy?" he asked.
"Oh, not big at all. Nor at all successful!" I told him ruefully. "I'm afraid he just lost money over it about seven years ago."
More interest from this other, prosperous-looking farmer.
"Farming," he told me gravely, "was no life for a man in this country until just lately. An existence, that was all. All the food we ought to have grown came in from over the sea. Agriculture, before the war, was simply hand to mouth, hand to mouth." He looked at his wife and added: "If it hadn't been for pedigree poultry and shire horses the farmers would have starved."
His wife nodded across the table; she was the sort of small, dainty little woman that you would expect that great-framed man to choose; her thick hair was prematurely grey, and her well-cut and tiny features, though composed, seemed as if they had looked on struggles in her time.
Then came something that, though it was only talk at a farmhouse table, was significant. It made me think. This new problem of my life on the land was full of old problems to others. Across that liberally-spread board that farmer's wife launched an astonishing remark.
"We nearly starved," she said, "when we were children in my father's time. One New Year he made up his accounts and he was down a thousand pounds. The next year again he was down a thousand. And the third year again he had lost another thousand. That January, I remember, he did not speak for a week."
Her soft voice shook. The faces of the Land Girls were all turned towards her, listening, surprised.
"Then," continued Mrs. Price, "he came into our nursery and said, 'Children, I'm broke. The dear old home will have to go.'"
Here the Land Girl Sybil put in gently:
"But you told me your brother had that farm now. So you didn't have to leave, Mrs. Price?"
"No! Because of my father fighting for it. He borrowed money at very high interest and went in for shire horses. In ten years he was just feeling his feet again. It was twenty years before he paid off everything. That was a struggle. Those were the hard times for farmers. It makes me feel bitter now, girls, when they say farmers are 'grasping,' and 'make money hand over fist,' just because the tide has turned at last, and farming isn't the terribly losing game it was!"
"Well, it'll never be so again, I hope," her husband assured her. Then he beamed about the table and added: "Not with all these young ladies here turning out to help like this! And that one," nodding at me, "a farmer's daughter herself! Where is your father living now, then?"
I told him the name of the village on the borderline between England and Wales.
"Not so far from here, then. Fifty miles off, perhaps. They'll be able to come down and see how you are getting on."
But here Vic broke in mischievously over her bread and cheese.
"Don't you worry, Mr. Price. She isn't going to bust herself with any homesickness. She don't want any more people. She's got off with a young man of her own down here already."
Here Elizabeth must needs turn her head sharply, to glance at me with an inquiry full of rebuke; uttering it aloud as well. "What young man?"
I took no notice of her. I looked at the others; the others who did not think (as she did) that I was far too fond of the whole Repulsive Sex.
"There was no young man—I mean, not in that sort of way at all—Vic's talking nonsense to tease me!" I assured the party, definitely.
"It was simply that Captain Holiday—whoever he is, he seems to think he can go anywhere and do anything—came into the shed where I was working and gave me a few tips about my work."
"Ah, Captain Holiday. Yes. It was him you were asking about, Vic," said Mr. Price, his blue eyes interested again. "Yes, he's our landlord here now that poor old Mr. Holiday's gone. Most of the property about belongs to him. The hospital, and your camp, and this farm, and all. A great interest he takes in all of it. All over it he was this morning. So he went and showed this young lady how to set about her job? Very obliging of him."
Vic again retorted teasingly.
"Oh, I don't know so much! I haven't noticed that young men are so nice and 'obliging' over helping girls with their jobs without they're interested in the girls themselves!"
I really failed to see why every one of the other girls should seem to take such a vivid interest in this argument—particularly Elizabeth, who ought to have known better!
Quite nettled, I put in quickly:
"Personally I shouldn't call this Captain Holiday a very 'obliging' young man." I was thinking of the way in which he'd trundled that wheelbarrow back with its noisome load, instead of emptying it for me, and I concluded, "Rather annoying, I should call him."
Then I was sorry I'd said that. Mr. Price, who had unfolded his long legs from under the table and was rising to his feet at the end of the meal, looked grave and gave me a quick glance.
"Indeed?" he said seriously. "I am sorry to hear it. I can't have anything like that, landlord or no landlord. If Captain Holiday was annoying one of my workers, I shall have to tell him——"
"Oh, please don't," I put in hastily. "I didn't mean that kind of 'annoying' at all. I only meant I was rather annoyed that any one should see I was such a raw beginner at my job. That was all."
In common fairness to the young man I felt I had to speak up for him to that extent. On returning to my cow-house I forgot all about him, forgot even that it was he who'd saved me from half the difficulty of my task. It was not all drudgery, when one found out the best and quickest way of doing what was so new to me—manual work.
Thankful enough was I, though, to knock off!
But on the way home Elizabeth brought up Captain Holiday again.
"Joan," she began, "what do you think of that
Rosalind: "Oh, Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!"Celia: "I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not so weary."—SHAKESPEARE.
Severely I looked at my chum.
She and I were walking down the road between the flowering hedges back to camp behind Vic, Sybil, and Curley.
Now the other two pupils—who had wound up their day's work by milking, which we had been sent to watch—had knocked off obviously as fresh as paint. Elizabeth, too, made no complaint of feeling tired after her day's stone-picking. She strode along manfully, and I thought that the rather wooden way she moved was just because of the clumsy land-boots.
So that I vowed to myself that I'd never let her know what I'd begun to feel, after the midday rest, and in every muscle, namely, the relentless strain of unusual physical exertion.
Ah! How it had got me!
The first game of tennis, the first bicycle ride, the first row, the first long tramp of a summer holiday—everybody knows the ache that comes after these. Multiply that ache by fifty, and you'll have some idea of what happens after the first day's land-work. Personally I felt it would be all I could do to drag my stiffening limbs back to the hut!
I also felt that for Elizabeth to cross-question me at this moment was adding insult to aches. After staring at dinner, too!
"Elizabeth, you are a little owl," I informed her. "I know what you imagine. Can't any sort of young man say a word to me without it's starting some idea of a love-affair?"
Elizabeth, set-faced, said coolly, "Apparently not."
I straightened my back indignantly. Then caught my breath because it hurt me so. Hoping she hadn't noticed this, I demanded, "What d'you mean by that?"
"Wherever you go, Joan, young men always seem to break out," Elizabeth replied rebukefully.
She spoke the words "young men" just as Farmer Price might have mentioned caterpillars in his standing crops.
"You forget that I came down here just because I'd had enough of them!" I said wearily.
Elizabeth, scowling:
"We've only just finished with the eternal Harry. For a year he monopolized you; nobody else existed! Then he went, leaving you without an ounce of go or fun in you—anyhow, he did go; at last. But the very day he'd gone you got a proposal from that other Man-thing; what was his name?"
"D'you mean Richard Wynn?"
"Yes. There was that. Well, you lost his letter. So he was off——"
"Shouldn't have taken him, anyhow," I protested.
"You said you would."
"People will say anything," I defended myself, "after a day like I'd just had in that office."
"I sometimes think you'd be quite silly enough to accept him yet," declared my candid friend as we tramped past the park trees that gave a glimpse of the white hospital. "But then we come down here. And the very first evening—what happens? A third young man crops up!"
"He didn't crop up to see me."
"Curious that you should be the only girl in the camp that he picked out to speak to," sniffed Elizabeth. "And that the next morning he should make a bee line for that cow-house of yours, and——"
Here she broke off with an alarmingly sudden little screech of "Ow!"
I stopped.
"What is the matter!"
"Nothing," retorted Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes.
"My dear old girl, what is it?" I insisted anxiously.
Then she laughed. She blurted out quickly:
"It's only that—the more I move the more it hurts me! Oh, Joan, I'm sore! That's why I snapped at you so crossly. They say 'Cross as a bear with a sore paw'—but—but I'm sore everywhere!"
"Oh! So am I!" I groaned, laughing with the relief of the confession. "I feel as if I'd got fifty new bones."
"So do I!"
"All hurting me like mad!"
"So are mine!" declared Elizabeth, hobbling. "Well, I suppose we'll get used to it. They say this wears off. Let's hope for the best—and for goodness' sake don't let us squabble."
"I never want to!"
"Righto. And tell me," continued my chum, "what you really do think of that young man Captain Holiday?"
I couldn't help laughing. If Elizabeth wants to get at anything, it comes off in the long run. So, as we hobbled stiffly down the road together, I told her as much as I did "think" on the score of this new acquaintance. I described the cow-house scene.
"Such a truly idyllic setting," I chaffed her, "for any sort of atête-à-tête!"
I repeated the young man's remarks about the way to "make work do itself, and to let gravity grav." I told her how he'd made me roll down my sleeves again, and had ordered me about generally.
"I think he's rather a domineerer. But he is a sahib, of course. He's rather original, too. And almost the rudest person I've met," I said critically. "He is the rudest, next to you."
Elizabeth said blandly:
"Yes, and yet you've always liked me most awfully. I suppose you'll soon find out how much you like him."
I began to say, "We shall probably never see the man again," but remembered that he was the owner of this land on which we toiled, and that it would sound silly. So I merely said:
"I don't dislike him at all."
Elizabeth shook her bobbed hair against her cheeks. Grimly, fatalistically, she added:
"I know you're going to like him horribly."
"I know your poor little sore bones have affected your brain!" I told her. "Haven't I just had one 'doing' over liking some one too horribly? Yet, in the middle of that, you say——"
"It isn't the middle," Elizabeth returned very quickly, "it is coming to the end."
"What!"
"It is the beginning of the end. You won't go on thinking of Harry to the end of your days."
"Much you know about it, child!" I said, and as I spoke the wide sun-lighted green lands faded from before me, and I saw Harry's polished black head above the pink lights of a restaurant table—Harry's handsome, straying eyes. "The thought never leaves me, Elizabeth."
"Hasn't it left you once today?"
Here—well, it was the greatest surprise to me, but I did have to straighten my mouth out of a smile. Today? The thought of Harry had certainly been somewhat overlaid by—cow-house. But I said:
"It's there always, worse luck, at the back of my mind."
"Making more room in front," said my impish chum. "You're better about him already."
Patiently I sighed.
"You're better," insisted Elizabeth, "even this little time away in this weird place with this extraordinary job lot of people has done you good. You will begin to forget soon."
Pityingly I smiled at her.
"Harry," I told her, "is not the kind of man who gets forgotten. I wish he were. He is one of those charmers who leave their mark on a woman's life. He'd such wonderful ways. He——"
"Don't shove me into the wall," begged Elizabeth. "I feel knocked about enough as it is."
"Sorry. I wish I could make you realize, though, about Harry. He once took me to a play where the woman says: 'There are two kinds of love affairs. There are affairs—and there are just loves.' Unfortunately this is one of those."
"Oh, yes," said Elizabeth drily.
"If you'd ever had one of either," said I, nettled, "you'd know the difference."
"So that there will always be one thing that I shall never know," concluded the Man-hater, limping along.
I glanced at the small dog-tired but resolute figure in the smock that the evening sunlight was gilding from holland to cloth of gold.
"Wait!" I threatened her again. "Wait until some great huge ultra-masculine man comes along and begins to bully you in a voice like a typhoon!"
"Like a what?"
"Like a gale! Like a Bull of Basan! That sort of huge brute who'd terrify the life out of you, Elizabeth my child, and order you about like Petruchio and Katherine inThe Taming of the Shrew! That's what'll happen! I shall simply love to watch you being absolutely subjugated"—
"Book early, to avoid disappointment," mocked my chum.
"—subjugated by a gigantic, navvy sort of person with muscles as big as vegetable-marrows bobbling all over his arms and shoulders!"
"It sounds too fascinating, doesn't it?" jeered the girl whose head reached up to my ear. "I love your prognostications, Joan, especially after a hard day's work! It puts you in train! You really think a bully-ragging Prize-fighter-type will be my Fate!"
"Unless——" Here I had another idea. "Unless you ever meet the one and only man in this world that you've ever written letters to. What about that old Colonel of yours?" I laughed.
A word of explanation here.
"The Old Colonel" had been for a year a standing joke in our Londonménage. He was the officer whose furnished flat we had taken over by the week in Golder's Green—and which we'd now left for such very different quarters. His flat was full of neat contrivances, such as the bath-mat, hand-made out of rounds of bottle corks; full, too, of books on "Tactics," all annotated in a neat, old-maidish hand.
We had amused ourselves by making a mental picture of their owner—a methodical, fussy, white-moustached "old" soldier. This had seemed all of a piece, too, with the Colonel's letters; for he and Elizabeth had exchanged much formal correspondence on the subjects of the kitchen chimney and of the tabby-cat he pensioned.
"When he comes back from the Front and sees you," I threatened her, "it may alter everything. If you become an old man's darling——"
"Brrrr!" shuddered Elizabeth.
"Plenty of girls do. You might like it better than marrying the Lion-Tamer, after all.... And don't say I didn't warn you if it does come off——"
"Give me your handkerchief," said Elizabeth, without ceremony plucking the green silk handkerchief out of my smock pocket. "I want to tie a knot in it."
She tossed it back to me as we went on.
"What's that for?" I demanded. "To remind you of what I said about that old Colonel of yours?"
"No," from Elizabeth. "It's to remind you of something, Joan."
As the corrugated iron roof of the hut came into sight beyond the great white cliff of a hawthorn bush she spoke earnestly, but with an imp of mischief dancing in each of her eyes.
"Whatever happens, however much better you may feel, however much more you may laugh and talk like your old self, I want you always to remember one thing. I want you to be sure—sure to go on thinking of Harry at least once every day!"
And before I could take the unsympathetic little wretch by her overalled shoulders and shake her, before I could pull her short hair, or even retort by a single word, we were back at the camp among the girls—with a fresh trial awaiting us!
"Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave."—MILTON.
Yes! Not even yet was there to be rest after the exertions of the first day's land-work.
As Elizabeth and I hobbled into the hut ten minutes after the others, Vic's voice hailed us above the laughing clatter:
"Here, Celery-face and Mop! Off with your spotless—I don't think—uniforms, and come on for a nice swim!"
"Swim?" we echoed, glancing aghast about the hut.
The gang of timber girls, with Miss Easton, had returned from their woods, and they and the farm girls were in various stages of getting out of land-kit and into swimming costumes.
After hard work, here they were all ready again for hard play, for exercise, for plunging into cold water.
I began to say something wistful about embrocation.
"Embrocation? There's a whole pool of something better for you than embrocation outside," Vic said with scorn. "You get those two extra costumes out, Sybil, will you? And you, kids, off with your boots."
There was no gainsaying this redoubtable Vic. Big, and brown, and beaming with good-humor, she stood over us. We just had to start unlacing our gaiters.
The girls trooped out into the meadow in coats over their bathing dresses. Vic and Sybil waited inexorably, for us. Reluctantly and stiffly I took off my overall. And I saw Vic's eyes fasten upon the garments that I was wearing underneath.
They were the same "pretties" that I always wore in town under my georgette blouses. I made them myself. The under-bodice that attracted Vic's notice was of bluish-pink crêpe-de-chine with mauve satin ribbon shoulder-straps, and with the wings of a sky-blue bird—for Happiness—embroidered across the front.
"That's a dinky 'casserole' you've got on there, young Celery-face," pronounced Vic, scrutinizing this garment. "Swanky Royal Air Service crest touch! And a silk 'chim' underneath it, too! My word! You won't be wearing those things long on the farm, though. Look here, Syb!"
Sybil, who had brought out the spare costumes, came up. From her voice and ways I'd fancied that she would sympathize with my own idea of dressing for the Land. This was to make it a point of self-respect that, though I must wear coarse holland and rough stuff for my outside things, my under-garments should still be as dainty as ever.
It surprised me when Sybil, glancing at my underthings, shook her head deprecatingly.
"Those won't do," she told me gently. "Not for cleaning out cow-houses in! You don't find a man-worker—well!" she laughed, "you never find a man wearing pink crêpe-de-chine all day. But what I mean is that when you're on a man's job you've got to dress the part, not just for the look of it, but for the use. A man works 'in the sweat of his brow'—and of his body. So he has got to have clothes he can sweat into comfortably—to put it frankly. He doesn't wear things that hold the moisture and cling—as yours are doing now."
I glanced down. The crepe and ribbons certainly were clinging to me. Moreover, they were very chilly now I'd stopped moving about.
"Give you your death of cold, those would," Vic declared, and Sybil, wrapping a towel round my shoulders, supported her.
"Working as a man, you simply can't wear the clothes you wore when you were just sitting still as a girl!" she remarked.
"I can't wear woollies and sweaters next me," I protested. "I would rather die of cold!"
"You needn't wear wool," Sybil said, as I got stiffly into my costume. "Though of course athletes say a sweater next your skin is the only thing. They do scoff at the way women wear four thicknesses of silk or lace, and then a 'sweater' over it all, doing no good! But you must wear a woven vest or one of linen mesh—or anything that dries quickly, and lets the air through to your skin. I'll lend you something, then you can order more."
"And keep dinky undiesFor civvies and Sundays,"
sang out Vic. "Now then, ready?"
Vic caught each of us by an arm, and ran us out of hut and home, down the green and daisied meadow at the back of the camp.
In front of us two girls, with bare legs showing under their ballooning Land Army coats, and a third swathed round with a bath-robe, were gambolling like lambs down the grassy path. From behind the alders at the bottom came sounds of splashing and laughter. We followed to where the bank descended under trees to the Welsh trout-stream, brightly clear as a child's eyes, with little cataracts between mossy boulders from which the girls could dive into the wide, smooth pool that reflected them.
Well! It was all the bathroom the camp had. We might as well get in and treat it as a good wash!
Elizabeth, on the pool brink, said:
"N—neither of us can swim, you know—oooh!" she wound up with her little screech. Vic, gently, but firmly, had shoved her under water.
I dipped before she could catch hold of me, while the others shouted with laughter. The first moment was awful. Then came the glorious glow and tingle of reaction, and we felt quite jolly, as Vic promised that she and young Sybil would soon teach us to swim.
"In and out with you today, though," she decreed. "Here's the towel—have a scrub now. I'll rub you down."
Scarified but warm enough, we sat under an alder in our overcoats, watching the others until tea-time or supper-time as we cared to call it. And then—Ah! It was as though one substantial midday meal had never been....
We just legged it ("for the best!" as the Timber girls shouted) back to the mess-table in the Hut!
"Whence came ye, merry Damsels, whence came ye,So many, and so many, and such glee?"—KEATS.
Later Elizabeth and I talked to Miss Easton, who, while the Campites played, read, sewed, or danced as before, told us a little about them all—these girls, who were already less strange to us, and who were all to become our friends.
Miss Easton began with her own story. Her last job had been in a munitions factory, where she'd worked ten hours a day on a skeleton bridge 35 feet up in the air, which had danced and quivered with the heat of a row of furnaces below. She said it always felt like Vesuvius going to break into eruption. Not unnaturally her health had broken down.
At the Labour Exchange she had mentioned "Forestry" as a forlorn hope, and they'd given her a trial—in more senses than one.
She had been set to cross-cut sawing with a hardened "old hand." Twenty-five trees was counted a day's work. Halfway through the twenty-third she had fainted clean off. For a week she'd crept back to her billet, and had just taken her aches and blisters to bed, where she lay like a log until the next morning. Now she could stand anything—climb like a cat or run like a deer.
"I feel finer every day," she told us, smiling.
Then she told us of the others, in order of what used to be called "Social Importance." I suppose Sybil Wentworth came first. She was the country-house girl, who had only known London as the Season, the Park, Hurlingham and Henley. Her own home was lovely, Miss Easton said; there was Georgian wing and a Norman chapel, and it boasted one of those other countless bedrooms where Queen Elizabeth had passed a night.
Now Sybil's mattress was drawn up next to Lil's, who had been maid-of-all-work in one of the million villas that are too small to house and feed a servant decently, but where a servant must be kept because one is kept in bigger houses.
Among Lil's mates were a girl from Somerville, a pickle-factory hand, a student of music, and Vic the Cockney.
In every community of girls is one who will always take the lead by virtue of her vitality and initiative. Here it was Victoria Jelks, the ex-coster girl from Kentish Town, who stood out as one of the handsomest, "goeyest," and most efficient women I have met.
The forewoman took Vic's advice; Sybil deferred to her. Yet she belonged to the class that we have seen blackening Hampstead Heath on Bank Holidays, grimy and anæmic, made ugly by the life and toil of town. The country, the air, the healthy work have beautified them back into the mould that Nature meant; have given them back shapeliness and colour.
I pondered over the miracle, as I saw it now.
For these once-town girls, too, the two great drawbacks of the country did not exist. Dulness, loneliness! How could they feel lonely or bored leading this communal life all set to laughter? No wonder if they found it like the very best bits of being back at school again! With fewer restrictions, too, with what wealth of new ideas, fresh outlooks on life gained by the intermingling of class with class....
Kitchener's First Army was not more of a medley of types!
"Why," Elizabeth asked softly, "have they all joined up?"
"Oh! Different reasons they give," answered the forewoman. "One joins because her pal joined. Lil there was tired of domestic service—I'm sure I don't blame her. Another hears what fun the life is—and it is fun, even if we do have to work hard. We couldn't work so hard if it weren't fun! Another thinks it's a shame if we can't do as much as the Frenchwomen do. Another girl just said, 'I've got six brothers serving.'"
Here a lump came into my throat as I listened. I thought of my own brothers. Jack, who went down with his ship in '15—Guy with his guns—Victor, the youngest of us all, who had just got his wings, and was off to join his air squadron in France. What sort of sister was I to those fighting boys? Unworthy! Poor in physique and grit, I'd been ready to buy myself out of the Land Army almost before I'd given it a trial.
I was still thinking of that after "Lights out," when all the girls were already asleep.
But Elizabeth, from the next mattress, heard.
She crept near in the darkness.
"Joan! What is it? Why are you crying?" she whispered. "Are you cross because I teased you about that wretched Harry?"
"No! Oh, no," I whispered back. "It's only that I—I felt ashamed of myself! There was I—ready to jack up this morning! I won't now. No, not if I never stop feeling stiff again, I shall stick it. I've just made up my mind this minute."
"You made it up before," murmured my chum, wriggling back to her mattress. "You made it up this morning when that young man said——"
"Oh, bother that interfering young man," I interrupted, "I hope I don't see him again."
Elizabeth, as she rolled over again, said drowsily but firmly, "You'll see him again before three days are up."
"I would I were a milkmaid."—TENNYSON.
Elizabeth was right in her prediction. Before the three next days were up I had again encountered this Captain Holiday.
This time it was not in that Augean stable of a cow-house—which, by the way, I had finished cleaning out—thereby earning a word of approbation from Mr. Price, and also hardening my muscles. I no longer felt that my body was full of new bones, all hurting me at once. I felt, already, as if I were gaining a new body.
Quite ready for anything I felt on that late afternoon when Mrs. Price came to me with the two big milk pails.
"Please scald these out," said the farmer's daintily-featured little wife. "You can take your first milking-lesson this evening."
I was delighted as I washed my hands in the back kitchen, scalded out the pails, and followed Mrs. Price in her crisp grey overall into the big cow stall.
Milking! This would be so much easier, as well as more enjoyable, than wielding that pitchfork and bending my back over that heavy barrow to and from that disgusting midden!
How fragrant, after that last job, was the atmosphere of the big stable, where the breath of the cows mingled with the incomparable smell of the new milk that was already frothing and foaming into the pail held between the knees of the Land Girl "Curley"—that straight-haired, smiling brunette.
She was sitting milking the biggest of the seven black-and-white cows that stood tied up in a row. At the stall next to her sat Sybil on a three-legged stool of heavy oak, also milking busily.
"Now, Joan, you shall start away on Clover here. She's the easiest," said Mrs. Price, leading me to a cow at the farther end of the stable—a cow that was snowy white but for the broad band of black that encircled her body and the black tassel of her tail.
The farmer's wife took that tail in her hand and with a twist of straw-rope tied it down to one of the cow's hind-legs.
"That is to stop her flicking you in the eye with it," explained Mrs. Price. "Now Vic always puts the tail to the cow's side and pins it down by leaning her head against it; but you can't manage that yet. Always nervous they are at first, with a stranger. Soon get used to you," Mrs. Price assured me, as the cow looked round, tossed her head, shuffled her little hoofs, and would have twitched that captive tail. "I'll talk to her a little."
Fondling her silky flanks, the farmer's wife spoke to Clover, in soothing, softly-accented words that I suppose were Greek to Curley and Sybil—but I still remembered a little of the language that had been chattered about me in those far-off school-room days, when I'd worn a plait and wandered about a Welsh farm, so differently run from this one.
I'd seen Dad's cowman stand to milk on the steep hillside, where the cows grazed. He had called to his cows just like this.
"Little heart!" cooed Mrs. Price, in Welsh. "Heart of gold! Best white sugar, you are! Little Clover, dear! I'll start her, Joan."
She set the wide-lipped pail under the cow, and with that other small, capable hand of hers began milking where she stood. Sharply and copiously the white spurts ran through her fingers.
"Now, Joan," she said in a moment. "Sit down to it. Take your pail so. Now your fingers like this. Now try."
I tried.
Once or twice I'd been allowed to try at home, long ago. But how I'd forgotten!
Heavens! How difficult it was! If Clover were the easiest cow in that stable, I should have been sorry to try the most unyielding one! It was almost impossible to me at first to squeeze out even a drop of milk.
I worked away, and quite suddenly I realized that it was coming mightily hard on my fingers and forearms, this work that seemed to be no work at all to Mrs. Price, and easy enough to the two other girls.
"Do you know how long it takes to make a milker, a really first-class milker? Three years," declared the farmer's wife impressively. "And even then she has to be born as well as made, like. After all, it's an art, same as playing the piano. But you can learn to milk quite well, quite so that the cows get milked all right, in a month, say. You'll do all right, only work."
I worked without much success, but doggedly. I was sweating with effort under my hat and into my mesh garments, lent by Sybil. I was flushed, but determined; terrified of hurting Clover, delighted when a meagre spurt of milk did reward me, attentive to Mrs. Price's instructions, and afraid I was showing myself up as the completest fool, when—
Yes, this naturally was the moment that that young man's voice made itself heard behind me. He must have come in by the other door farther down the stable.
"Good evening, Mrs. Price!"
"Good evening, Captain Holiday. Have you come to have another look round?"
"You don't mind, I know," said the direct, uncompromising tone, which I could guess was accompanied by that friendly and ingratiating smile.
Intent upon my occupation, I went on struggling. My back was to him; but there are times when one can feel a pair of eyes fixed as surely as one could feel a hand placed on the nape of one's neck.
* * * * * * *
Now, looking back, I wonder at myself.
Was there really that time when I never wished to see him? Was he still nothing to me, then? It seems incredible to me, after all that has come since.
But, that late afternoon, all in the fragrant atmosphere of the milk that rang in the pails, with the sweet grass-scented breath of the cows all about me, he was nothing to me, nothing still but an intruder.
* * * * * * *
With a sigh of exasperation I tugged at the warm, leathery udder of Clover. Strenuous minutes elapsed. Still Captain Holiday stood by, saying no word to me, but always watching.
Always conscious of his presence, I saw nothing of him but his shadow flung before him, clean-cut blue on the yellow-white wall of the stable.
Then I heard Mrs. Price asking him if he were comfortable at the lodge?
So that was where he lived; Vic had told me there was quite a swanky big lodge to the hospital grounds.
He told Mrs. Price that they were very nice quarters. Then came something I hadn't expected. I heard Mrs. Price give a curiously mischievous little chuckle. It ran through her voice as she asked the next question:
"More than enough room there, isn't there, Captain Holiday, for a bachelor?"
This was a hint, I know, smiling and plainly meant! Not only that, but I felt her smile taking in myself as well as him.
She was as bad as Elizabeth. I was glad my back was towards both of them.
Captain Holiday's cool voice replied:
"Quite. That's why I'm having some people down to stay with me. Must have a house-party for the concert. You know we're getting up a concert at the hospital, Mrs. Price. Yes, I'm expecting a wounded pal of mine down in a day or so."
Mrs. Price's soft voice broke in to speak to me.
"Tired, Joan? Rest a minute, just——"
I moved into a more comfortable position, giving a look round before I bent to my task again.
The young "Must-know-all," as the nursery phrase has it, was still watching my fingers. What was it in his slight smile that seemed to prompt me to what I did next?
I squeezed some milk on to my fingers, and then, I know, his smile grew broader. It was as though he'd seen that old trick somewhere, and had egged me on to it. But where had this soldier watched milking before?