"That's coming better now, Joan," approved Mrs. Price. "That's because you wetted your fingers. Look—dip your fingers in the milk, my mother taught me. Easier for the cow and easier for you."
I said:
"Yes, I remember now seeing the man dip his fingers in the pail at Dad's farm. I'd forgotten. Lots of things will come back to me presently."
Here, above me, the man's shadow moved quickly on the wall. It was as though Captain Holiday, still planted there behind me, were listening as intently as he was watching me.
Rather confused, I went on to show that I did know something about this job.
"I saw on the efficiency test papers," said I, "that the examiners from headquarters don't like the wet milking. It said preference would be given to dry milking."
"Cleaner, for some, p'raps," said Mrs. Price. "Fifteen marks, too; but I thought you were no town girl! Doesn't it show now, Captain Holiday?"
A non-committal "Um" came from Captain Holiday as his tall shadow slid away from the wall and out of the farmyard just as Elizabeth and Vic came in.
"Again!" was my chum's laconic comment when we were walking home.
I laughed good-humouredly enough, for I was a little pleased with the way I'd got on with my work.
"Elizabeth, you're getting one-idea'ed," I told her as I strolled along, picking out of the hedge a country nosegay of stitchwort and dog-violets and primroses with one gay pink flower of campion. "I must say I shall be glad when Hackenschmidt the Second turns up——"
"Who?"
"The hefty Brute who's going to tame you, you Man-hater, when the time comes," I explained, putting a leaf of Herb-Robert, pungent-scented and lacy, as frill to my bouquet. "I shall be able to rag you about him then, instead of having to put up with your nonsense. You wait."
"Yes, I'm waiting," nodded Elizabeth grimly.
I said "All things come to her who waits. I expect he'll take atleastseventeens in boots! And throw them at you!"
"A word in due season, how good it is!"—SCRIPTURE.
At the Camp we found the Timber-gang buzzing about what constituted for all of us the great event of the day—the day's mail.
It arrived after the girls were already at work, so that since breakfast they had been looking forward to the letters, wondering about them....
Ah, these letters! Most people realize by this time how much they have always meant to the boys at the Front. They meant as much and more to the war-working girls! You people who "can't be bothered to write much," you correspondents who "forget"—I wish you could have seen that group of uniformed lasses with the green Forestry ribbons round their hats, clustering about the forewoman who held the packet. I wish you could have heard the eager tone of their "Any for me?"
"Two for you, Curley—one from France. Oh! girls, look at the snapshots of me sister's nippers. 'To Auntie Vic, with love from Stan'—all right, ain't it?" cried Vic.
"Only these four for me?" exclaimed the red-haired Welsh timber girl.
"And none for me! Isn't it a cruel shame?" lamented Lil. "Here, Aggie, do let me have a read of yours——"
"I say, this isn't for me. It got slipped in among mine. 'Miss Weare'—who's she when she's at home? Oh! The little new one. Here, Mop——"
Elizabeth took the letter.
I was reading a kind letter from Agatha, my step-mother, who ended with, "Still I hope you will not find that this new venture of yours is a mistake after all," when there was a little sudden laugh and a quick exclamation from my chum at my elbow.
"Joan, I say, Joan!"
"Yes? Who've you heard from?"
"Who d'you think?" she returned amusedly, taking me by the elbow to draw me aside into the porch. "I'll give you three guesses!"
"Man or woman? Ah, I needn't ask. Woman, of course?"
"As it happens, no!"
"What? A man?" I exclaimed. "But you never write to any men——"
"Don't I? I do."
"Only to one landlord," I said. "Only to the ancient Colonel!"
Elizabeth gave her gurgling boyish chuckle.
"Right in one," she said. "It is the old Colonel again. You know I wrote to him last about that loose scullery tap that we had to leave as it was. Well, he's home on sick leave now, he says, and he writes from our flat—his own flat, I mean. Only he's coming down here very shortly——"
"Here?" I exclaimed, glancing round the big hut, with its characteristic grouping of Land Girls off duty.
Some of them were still poring and chattering over their mail; Peggy, with her foot upon a chair, was cleaning her hobnailed boots; Vic, now clad in a bathing costume and her Land Army hat, was sitting on a corner of the table, swinging her legs, whistling, and stitching at a button that had come loose on her khaki breeches.
"This is no place for a dear old gentleman like your colonel! What does he want to come here for?" I added.
"Says he'll be staying with a friend of his in this neighbourhood," explained Elizabeth, handing me the note with the neat, precise handwriting that we had seen on so many business letters, "and that as I was here he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon me if he might. Antediluvian touch, isn't it? And, of course, he won't be allowed to call here, I suppose, even at his age."
"Oh, but I hope we shall meet him," I said, as I prepared to get into bathing-things again for my swimming lesson from Vic and Sybil in the pool. "It will be rather fun, after all our guess-work, to see what the funny old thing really is like."
Now this was vouchsafed to us in a few days from then. And I admit that this, and what it brought in its train, has been quite one of the shocks of my life.
"This is the life,This is the life,This is the life—for mine!"—THE BING BOYS.
We had been at Mr. Price's farm for a week now. In that short time the miracle had begun to work.
Seven bottles of the most powerful pick-me-up could not have worked in that time what was done by these seven natural tonics—fresh air, physical toil, simple, wholesome food, cold water, newness of occupation, laughter with comradeship, and profound sleep o' nights!
"This is pretty awful, you know," we whispered rebelliously to each other half a dozen times a day.
But——
Already we were beginning to enjoy it all! Neither of us admitted this, of course. For my part, I should have felt it was too ridiculously soon to enjoy anything in life again—and such a life!
That rag-time rabble of girls! That lack of civilized comforts in camp! Vic's orders for the day! This routine of jobs only fit for a farm-lad—yet what thrills of pride ran through me at the thought that I, Joan Matthews, was doing them at all, and that soon I should begin to do them quite well!
I had cleaned out a hopelessly filthy-looking cow-house—thrill of pride number one—all by myself—nearly. No rush of work accomplished at the office had ever given me such satisfaction! Then I'd taken three milking lessons, at the first of which Mrs. Price said I'd made a good start—thrill number two. Now Mr. Price had set me and my chum on to a new job—thrill number three—in which he was instructing us himself.
This was to harness his old white mare, Blossom, to the cart, to take it down to the field of roots across the road from the farm, and to fork up roots, which we were presently to pulp into food for the bullocks, which were still being partly stable-fed each day.
Into that big field, bordered by elms, through which we caught glimpses of a faintly purple range of mountains, Elizabeth and I tramped with the farmer; she at Blossom's mild head, I carrying a fork and listening to that gentle giant, Mr. Price.
"When we have got a cart-load I will take you to the grinding-machine and show you how you mash these things up," he told me. "Very handy, the new power-engine! Three belts for shafting I've got from the engine to the machine. Put it in this winter, I did. All done by horse-power before that. Wonderful! What they're getting to do now in the farms! Wouldn't have believed it in my father's time—no, nor that I should have little young ladies like that one to lead the horses for me," he smiled. "Stop her here, missy. Whoa, back! It's up here we'll start."
But before Elizabeth had left the horse's head, before I'd dug my fork more than once into the rich-smelling earth, a "Good morning" sounded behind us, in a deep but gentle voice.
We turned, I saying resignedly to myself in that flash:
"I suppose it's Captain Holiday again—sounds as meek as Moses for once, but he's evidently come to see how the Land Girls get on with their root-digging, and to tell them all about it."
And I found that I was wrong.
The young man who'd been tramping up that field behind us was not Captain Holiday, though he wore khaki and leggings like his.
"Er——" he began with a hand to his cap, and obviously not sure whether he ought to speak first to the farmer or to me. "I—er—saw you from the road there. If you don't mind, aren't you"—nervously—"aren't you the two ladies from London?"
"Yes," I said, standing there rather astonished.
The young officer went on with his eyes on the cart, that shut out any view of Elizabeth.
"Oh, yes. I hope you don't mind, but I thought I'd come up and—er—speak——"
At that moment I thought I had never in my life seen anybody so agonizingly timid. Gazing at the D.S.O. ribbon on his chest, I could only wonder if he had won it whilst he was in a high fever and did not know what he was doing.... Miserably shy, too, he looked to me.
But he didn't go away. He went on talking, though stammeringly.
"You know, I know you both quite well—I mean by name, of course. We've—we've exchanged plenty of letters and all that," he went on stammeringly.
"I'm afraid it's a mistake," I began.
"Oh—er—no," he interrupted. "I'd better tell you who I am—stupid of me. I'm—er—my name is Fielding. Colonel Fielding."
Colonel Fielding!—Fielding?
But that was the name of our landlord! That was the officer from whom we'd taken over our Golder's Green flat!
How we'd talked and talked over the fancy picture that we had made up of him—the white-moustached old warrior of a bygone age, as we had imagined him!
Now, here he stood before us—and could anything be less like our preconceived view of him?
Colonel Fielding in the flesh was a young man of twenty-six, slim-waisted and fair. The white moustache of our imaginings was represented by the merest hint of close-cropped golden down upon his upper lip.
I could hardly believe it.
"Do you mean," I exclaimed, "that you are really the Colonel Fielding who let us his flat?"
"Er—yes. I am." He reddened, actually reddened all over his face as he cleared his throat and added, "Do you mind telling me—are you Miss Elizabeth Weare?"
"No, I'm Miss Matthews," I told him. "That's Miss Weare——"
For it was at this moment that Blossom dragged the cart a step forward, and Elizabeth, calling manfully. "Whoa-back!" in imitation of Mr. Price, reached up to her head again, and pulled her round.
I suppose to the end of his days one man will see Elizabeth as she was at that moment in the field of roots.
It was a colourful and blowy day. The sky, threatening rain, showed capricious clouds, dove-grey and silver-white, tossing across the blue. A mauve screen of Welsh hills, a nearer fringe of budding elms bordered that big field of lush brown-and-purply-green. Set in the middle of it like a giant's toy was the scarlet-painted farm-cart with the white mare; a small, boyish, crop-haired, smocked and breeched Land-girl at her head.
Colour and sunburn suited my chum's small face. The Land Army hat had been drenched by several showers to a becoming softness over her thick hair. She held herself (even in those early days of freedom from skirts) with a new poise. She was as effective as any poster in the Tube! but with no Tube atmosphere about her; no! the strong scents of earth, the wine-sweet breath of Spring wind that tossed the black locks on her rosied cheeks, and flapped in her smock, billowing it out below her belt or furling it above her legs—her legs which were at once sturdy and dainty. Briefly, she looked ripping. And I saw that Colonel Fielding saw it even in that first moment of his greeting her.
It was not much more than a greeting and a good-bye; a word to the farmer about "hoping he didn't mind"—which would appear to be the youthful colonel's pet stand-by of a phrase.
"Er—I might be down for some time probably," he concluded, reddening again. "Perhaps I might be allowed to call?"
Elizabeth, without looking at him, answered in a tone like the shutting of a door:
"We live in camp here. Men aren't allowed there."
"Oh—sorry. I hope you didn't mind. Perhaps," he added—faint but pursuing—"I shall see you again—er—somewhere——"
Elizabeth, stony little wretch, said nothing at all. I think I began to say "Are you staying at Careg?" out of sheer pity, but it was Mr. Price, the gentle Welsh giant, who broke in:
"Yes, sure! Any time you like to see over the farm! I'll show you our shire horses! Interest you, those would. You shall come round with me."
"Oh, thanks. I should love to," murmured Colonel Fielding, with one last glance at my chum before he melted away out of the landscape.
Even as he did so, I saw the expression on that fair, girlish face of the man we'd always nicknamed "Elizabeth's Old Colonel." He was unmistakably, unfeignedly admiring. It made him show, for a second, quite a determined gleam between his long lashes.
But what a waste of time for him to admire Elizabeth—at least if he tried to show it! He was, anyhow, not the sort of person, I decided, that any girl would fall in love with!
Finnicky, I called him. I said so afterwards to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth said she was so busy with the horse she hadn't had time to see what he was like.
Then (as I should have told you) we forgot all about that encounter in the root-field.
For three days we lived the Life Laborious; busy and full, but empty of all young men. Not a glimpse of one.
Then, one evening down at the swimming-pool, I said to Elizabeth, sitting on a mossy boulder and waiting for Vic to come up:
"Do you know we've been here for three weeks now? I feel as if we had been Land Girls all our lives. But the last week has been the quickest——"
"—And the jolliest!" interrupted my chum.
Then we both burst out laughing together.
Pretence was at an end. We agreed that we were simply loving the life and the people, the work and the play.
We agreed that we were simply loving the life and the people, the work and the playWe agreed that we were simply loving the life and thepeople, the work and the play
As for me, I was such a different girl. I hadn't time to think about how different.
"Ready, Celery-face?" sang out Vic, striding from behind the alder where she'd flung off her coat.
A group of girls watched her—the former star of a London swimming-bath—as she took her plunge into the pool.
Then I waded in after her, and, all awkwardly still, swam the dozen strokes that brought me up to her. Panting, I held on to her. An absurdly short little effort—but it was the taste of a new function to me, the beginner. What years I'd wasted in not knowing how to swim! But oh, the joy of it now!
I looked round to see Elizabeth striking out with arms that were, like mine, milky-white to the elbow and then gloved in sunburn.
For by now I must tell you we had got our "Land Girl's complexion." This asset is gained in three distinct stages.
First stage: A scorching and very unbecoming scarlet that spread itself over the face. The recruit from town, seeing herself with a tomato-nose set between crimson cheeks, flies to her old and true friend, the powder-puff. Useless! To powder over that red is like putting a coat of transparent whitewash over a brick wall.
The second stage: Soreness and blisters; a skin that peels off in flakes like the bark of a silver birch. No help for this! Sybil had given me cucumber and benzoin lotion to cool the smart, but the only cure was that which time brought about.
Stage the third: A smooth, even wash of honey-tan over the newly-bloomed roses of the cheeks; the colour of the ripe glow on a sun-kissed peach.
Elizabeth had reached this becoming stage on the day that Colonel Fielding had seen her first at the white mare's head in the field of roots, and I was scarcely a day behind her. I laughed at the reflection in the pool of the girl whom Vic and the others still nicknamed "Celery-face!"
Rosier than ever after our swim, we dressed and strolled together down the lanes. For "the more you have of a thing the more you want it" applies to fresh air as well as to the other essentials of life.
Now that we were working out of doors all day, we found we wanted to stay out of doors in the evening! How unlike town, where, having worked all day in a stuffy office, our one idea of relaxation was an equally stuffy theatre!
But I did sometimes miss the theatre! Upon this very evening I said to Elizabeth:
"The birds are lovely tonight—listen! But do you know what? I would give anything to be going to a revue tonight; just to see some pretty girls' clothes after these weeks of felt hats and breeches! Just to hear some gay tunes from a good band!"
"Yes," agreed Elizabeth, quite dreamily for her. "I would like to hear a little music again just for once. I——"
"Who's saying they want to hear a little music?" It was a merry girl's voice that broke upon our ears. "Here's where dreams come true!"
We looked to the right. On a gate in the blossoming hedge sat the tiny Timber-girl Peggy, she who in the evening always wore a flower pinned by a badge to the breast of her crisply-ironed smock. This evening it was a spray of honeysuckle.
Beside her, leaning his elbows on the gate, stood a blue-suited young soldier from the hospital; he also wore a large spray of honeysuckle in his button-hole, and another in his khaki cap, which was further decorated by a lucky gollywog in pink and green wool! He touched it smiling as we paused beside our little comrade.
"Oh, talking of music, girls," said Peggy, "look what my boy's got for you, for all of us! Show them, Syd."
Syd, who was a sergeant, and had the cheerfullest pink face I have ever seen above a blue jacket, thrust his hand into the pocket of that jacket, and brought out a large envelope which he handed to me. It was unaddressed and open. I took out a sort of illuminated card; its border showed floral designs, a rising sun, black cats, and several regimental crests. In curliest copperplate there was written:
To the Lady Land-Workers,Careg Camp.You are invited to aGRAND CONCERT,to be held atTHE CAREG AUXILIARY RED CROSS HOSPITAL,on the night of June 10.To commence at7 pip emma(Tanks and bi-planes at 9.45.)
"How lovely!" I exclaimed, handing this card back to Peggy. "I heard something about there being a concert at the hospital, but I never knew we were to be asked."
"Yes, miss," said Sergeant "Syd" in a husky, boyish voice. "Captain Holiday himself said the invitation was to go to the camp in good time, so that all of the young ladies might arrange to come. He hoped all of you would, of course."
"Tell him not to worry, we're all for it," declared saucy little Peggy from her gate. "I daresay it'll be a wash-out of a concert"—with a wink at us—"but we'll have to be thankful for what we can get in the Land Army. I suppose you'll give us a solo on the comb? And is your Captain Holiday going to oblige at the concert, Syd?"
"Not him! Says he doesn't know one tune from another," laughed the wounded soldier. "Sitting in the audience with you young ladies, that's the job he's for."
"I'm astonished at him," said Peggy, with a mischievous smile straight at me.
Syd added:
"I tell you who is a very fine singer, now—we could listen to him all night—his voice is a fair treat, and he's going to sing. It's that officer that Captain Holiday's got staying at the Lodge with him. Colonel Fielding, his name is."
I exclaimed:
"Oh! So he's staying at the Lodge!"
Peggy gave me a quick look and said:
"So he's another friend of yours?"
"No," I explained. "We've just met him." Then, thinking it would be silly to make any mystery about all this, I explained about Colonel Fielding being our landlord in London, and I mentioned the business letters about breakages and drains.
"And we're to hear him sing, are we?" I concluded—and again Sergeant Syd enlarged upon what a treat it would be for anybody who liked good music.
"Oh, but I don't know anything about 'good' music," said Elizabeth, carelessly.
We went on, leaving that picturesque group of Land-girl and soldier by that gate in the hedge.
Presently I found myself thinking of the way Colonel Fielding's delicate fair face had lighted up at the sight of Elizabeth, sturdy and muddy and sweet, in the mangold-field.
How obviously he had admired that sight!
He was probably looking forward to seeing it again. Poor wretched young man! For if he imagined that my boyish, independent, man-hating little chum would have a word for him at that concert—whatever he sang like—a bitter disappointment was in store for him, thought I. I had seen Elizabeth before, when men had been attracted. Prickly as a hedgehog she had become in the twinkling of an eye!
While I was thus musing, she was gazing above the hedge at the hills in the gloaming, purple against a primrose belt of sky. A heavenly evening! No wonder Elizabeth wanted to drink in the beauty of country and sky rather than to talk. I felt as she did.
Suddenly Elizabeth spoke, in a matter of fact tone that sounded as if she had just dragged herself back into the life of every day.
"That concert," she said, "won't be bad fun."
"I expect it will be ripping," I agreed, as we took the turning that led us back by a roundabout way to the camp again. "Wasn't that invitation-card for it rather sweet? You know he'd painted all those crests and flowers and things himself."
"He did?" said Elizabeth, "he or Captain Holiday, d'you mean?"
I turned to her a little puzzled.
"Captain Holiday—or who?" I said.
Quickly Elizabeth slipped out—"or Colonel Fielding, of course!"
Then she laughed, and went on quickly: "What rot!" and she turned aside to pull a wild rose out of the hedge above the pond.
"Of course I wasn't thinking about what I was saying. It is Peggy's sergeant who paints those things, isn't it?" she said.
I looked at her.
With her face still turned to the hedge she went on talking rather quickly.
"Yes; Peggy told me her boy was 'very clever at anything in the artistic line.' He does designs for belts, and mats, and cushion covers himself, and they're sold at Red Cross sales; and the most lovely necklaces made out of beads of wallpaper!" pursued Elizabeth, as if she were interested in nothing on earth so much as in the artistic productions of Peggy's boy.
But why had she coupled the names of Captain Holiday and Colonel Fielding as if they were the names uppermost in her thoughts?
How oddly, how aptly she'd slipped out that Colonel Fielding! Could she—could she have been "thinking of him." ...
Oh!
How could I think such a lunatic thing! In spite of all I'd threatened of her getting "tamed" one day!
Not Elizabeth. Anybody else, but Elizabeth—No!
I was sure ofthat.
* * * * * * *
No sooner had Peggy brought in to our forewoman that illuminated invitation to the wounded soldiers' concert than there was little talk of anything else in the Land Girls' camp.
The questions of the hour were who would sing; what they'd sing; what refreshments would be offered; which of the boys was going to make the best "girl," varied with which of us girls could dress up as the best "boy"—given, unanimously, for "Mop," as they called Elizabeth.
These things were discussed in twenty voices before the farm-girls and the timber-gang set out for work in the morning, and after they returned in the evening.
A further burning question was whether we went in uniform or in our civies?
At last Miss Easton, the young forewoman, exclaimed in mock despair:
"I shall feel as if I'd been to the blessed concert ten times over at this rate, before ever it happens! When it does come off it'll fall as flat as a committee report. Whatever did they want to send out the invitations all these days ahead for? 'Tisn't as if we'd so many engagements in this"—she gazed out of the hut window at the pastoral scene of lambs taking their evening scamper round and round a daisied meadow—"in this crowded Metropolis that we had to be booked in advance."
Peggy returned demurely:
"Ah, Miss Easton, dear, that's all you know. Some of 'em at the hospital made up their minds to let all us at the camp know in time, so that nobody should go off on short leave to see their people or anything, by mistake, on the 10th!"
Here Vic sighed stormily, rolled up her eyes in mock emotion, and remarked:
"What it is to be in love!"
The usual laugh went round as at the least of Vic's utterances. Then the talk turned upon the love-affairs of the Campites present. We were given the probable date of Peggy's wedding with her Syd in the autumn. We were told of the disgraceful fickleness of Curley, the straight-haired brunette, who had been engaged to a young gentleman in the Tank Corps, who had shown her photograph to a friend of his, who had taken an enormous fancy to it, and had written to Curley who had broken off the engagement with her first love, and who had been walking out, by letter, with the friend ever since.
"I'm astonished at her," Peggy said severely.
"What's the good of being astonished at anything in war-time?" retorted Curley. "And what's the good of going on writing to a fellow when you are sick and tired of the sight of him before ever he goes to France? Better sense to break it off in time, and see if you like the next one better when he comes home!"
General agreement over this—except from the red-haired Welsh timber-girl who declared in her richest contralto:
"That wasn't love, then, for if you loved a man, it would be for ever!"
A diversity of opinions upon this, ending in a gale of laughter as Miss Easton reminded the red-haired one:
"Well, Aggie! You used to say in the woods that the birds seemed to call aloud the name of the boy one cared for! And in March you said they sang 'Dick! Deeck!' And the other day you said they were singing 'Hugh-ie! Hugh-ie!'"
Aggie, blushing down her milky, freckled throat, retorted with some allusion to some people "getting off with some fat, old, rich timber-merchant, after the war!" To which the young forewoman replied good-naturedly that she didn't mind at all the idea, of settling down with some nice, kind, elderly sort of man!
After the war, and all she'd had to do for twenty odd girls—seeing after every detail of their health, behaviour, outfit, railway vouchers, billets, stripes, rows with landladies, tests, and leaves—she would be glad enough to come in for a bit of "mothering" herself.
"Which," she concluded quaintly, "a girl gets best from a husband who isn't too young!"
Chorus of—
"Ah, bah! An old husband would be awful!"
And then Sybil, who had never travelled without a maid before the war, declared that after the war the best husbands for the girls who had been in the Land Army would be the Colonials, the Overseas men. These splendid-looking outdoor fellows could offer a girl the life—with plenty of hard work rewarded by open-air freedom, and health, and fun—which she had learnt to love.
Hot argument here, following a demand from Lil the Londoner of—
"What's the matter with our own boys?"
Everybody had a word to say on this perennial poignant question of young men and marriage.
I rather dreaded being asked what my views were. Silently I sat, going on with my work; which was shortening Elizabeth's second smock for her. The things are made in three sizes only, and the smallest of them was just a trifle voluminous, and long for the little boyish figure of my chum. As I stitched away at the tuck I was taking in it, I wondered when my turn was coming.
It didn't come.
None of the other girls asked me if I would like to marry a dark man or a fair one, a Colonial or a Britisher.
Then I wondered a little at that. Afterwards, long afterwards, I learnt the rather touching fact that Vic had forbidden the lot of them to tease "young Celery-face" about any young men.... Vic had tumbled to it that, honestly, I didn't like it. And Vic had a good deal of fine feeling, tucked away, upon this subject.
Vic's own love-affair (her "boy" had died in enemy hands, I afterwards heard) had made her sensitive for others.
So, as Elizabeth had gone shopping in the tiny village known to our mess as "the town," I was left to a peaceful Saturday afternoon.
It was on the Monday after that that a queer thing happened to me.
"When I was a farmer, a farmer's boy, I used to keep my master's chickens..."—NURSERY SONG.
At the close of a day largely devoted to the task concerning Blossom, the cart, and the mangolds, I came up to the farmhouse to get their second feed for Mrs. Price's chickens. Of these she had eighty, and I know she set great store by them. She well might! The hens, I heard, cost ten shillings each; one speckled grey cockerel was a guinea!
Some of the hens with their brood clucked about that midden in the yard to which I'd added by several barrow-loads; the rest were in a field that sloped quite steeply up the hill. I had fed the first lot in the yard; I had ascended the hill to the field with the coops dotted about it, and I had shut a brood of restless, fluffy, "peep"-ing chicks into the coop for them to feed undisturbed by their marauding grown-ups, when suddenly there brushed against my leggings the fluffy white-and-golden coat of Captain Holiday's collie.
"Tock, tock, tock!" called the hens about me. And, above me, I heard the captain's "Good afternoon."
I rose, straightened myself from putting down the wire door of that coop, and turned to face him.
A little shock of surprise met me with the sight of him. He was—different. What had he done to himself? I wondered in a flash—in the same flash I realized that it was merely his clothes.
For the first time since I'd met him Captain Holiday had changed out of his accustomed khaki. He was wearing tweeds. A hat that might have done duty on a scarecrow, with a fishing-cast about it, shaded his eyes from the late afternoon sun. His Norfolk jacket was a shaggy, grey-green disgrace to a gipsy's wardrobe ... but it suited him quite well. I wondered why he had never worn these things before.
After this I found myself thinking that I must have seen him in tweeds before now.
Wasn't his figure somehow very familiar—— But no. How could that be?
"Good afternoon," I replied to him in the tone that may be translated, "What do you want now?"
As if in answer, he held out to me the tin pail that he was carrying. With his sweetest smile he barked out, "Rotten careless hen-wife you'd make! I had to bring this along to save Mrs. Price a journey. You forgot the milk to put in the chicks' tins."
"Did I!" I exclaimed, disconcerted. "That was stupid of me!"
"It was," retorted Captain Holiday, still with the smile that might have accompanied the prettiest compliment. Characteristic!
I scarcely looked at him, hoping that he'd go.
He did not. He seemed to expect me to have something to say to him—at all events, he stayed while I filled up those milk pannikins, and followed me round to the other coops.
I said, looking away from him, and with would-be irony:
"You seem as interested in poultry as in the rest of farming."
"Yes," he agreed. "I've always been interested in pottering about with stock of any kind. Always the job I fancied; 'always my delight,' as they say here; so——" He broke off. "What are you looking at?" he asked abruptly. "A penny for your thoughts."
I was looking up beyond the tall, slight figure set against the background of slanting field and stone hedge cutting a purply-grey sky. That part of Mr. Price's farm reminded me of a bit of the old place at home.
How typically Welsh were the hilly green and the grey stones, and the rich shifting colours of the cloudy distance! These brought back to me my Welsh-set childhood.
* * * * * * *
Days of wandering the marshes, waist-deep in meadow-sweet and bog myrtle, dreaming the long, long dreams of little girlhood! Days of sitting curled up like a squirrel in the school-room armchair while the rain lashed the panes and all the world of Every-day was blotted out as I pored over Shakespere, or "Called Back" or "The Last Days of Pompeii" or "Three Men in a Boat"—ah, the omnivorous and profoundly satisfying reading of the early teens! Meals that to a growing girl were banquets of Welsh mutton and jam roly-poly ... tea-parties that were events ... jokes that brought laughter that brought tears to stream down the cheeks convulsed ... quick fierce likes and dislikes ... shames ... delights—ah, over all, delight! Zest in the newness of Life! How many of these things had I left behind in those days-gone-by!
With a breath of the old wild mountain air, fresh and bewildering, bringing unreasoned tears to the eyes, those days were back, for that moment I felt the thick brown pigtail weigh upon my neck as I bent my face down to the face of the whimpering fox terrier pup in my arms. That pup had been given to me by one of my father's farm pupils seven years ago. I was back in that time.
Into my day dream broke a voice that seemed, for a second, part of it.
"A penny for your thoughts!"
* * * * * * *
With a start I palled myself together, glancing now straight at the young man. How strange—yet how well known to me, he seemed! Why? The thought persisted; why? Of what did he remind me so elusively at this moment?
Then an extraordinary thing happened.
I do not know how it was that I said what I did—those five quite unpremeditated words. My voice sounded odd in my own ears as I spoke. Yet it was quite in a normal matter-of-fact voice that I did speak. Standing there on the hill slope where the black and the grey speckled poultry clucked about our feet, I looked up at the young man again and asked him this question:
"Isn't your name Richard Wynn?"
"To talk of Love is soon to make Love."—PROVERB.
After this strange question of mine, there was a moment's pause.
It rang in my ears still, my quick, but quietly uttered,—
"Isn't your name Richard Wynn?"
What on earth had possessed me to say that? The moment after I was as surprised at it as he was himself. Or wasn't he surprised? His face had hardly changed. He looked quite steadily back at me. What did he think? I wondered in a flash. What would he say?
Quite quietly he replied:
"No, no, it isn't. Surely you know my name's Holiday?"
As if I hadn't ever heard it! How absurd I'd been! How idiotic! How wool-gathering!
I pulled myself together.
"Oh, I know," I said quickly and apologetically, as I caught up a handful of the poultry-food. "Yes. Of course, I know that."
"Then," returned Captain Holiday, "why did you ask me if my name was Richard Wynn?"
I laughed a little.
"It was a silly question," I admitted. "It must have sounded quite mad! Only for one minute, seeing you in these clothes, I suppose——"
He looked swiftly down at the shaggy cuff of that quite disreputable Norfolk jacket. "Seeing me in these clothes; yes——?"
"Tock, tock, tock," put in the grey hen.
"Well, you suddenly reminded me of somebody I used to know," said I, and I turned to scatter that handful to those clucking, calling fowls.
Captain Holiday—whose name ought to have been Curiosity—put his hands behind his back, and tilted his head to one side, taking almost the pose of a small boy who is still at the deadly age of questions. Evidently this tall young man had never outgrown it! How simply, but in what a not-to-be-put-off voice he persisted:
"What was this 'somebody' like?"
"I've just said he was something like you, Captain Holiday. That is," I added, "I couldn't really tell you if he were or not."
"What d'you mean by that?" Captain Holiday asked.
I laughed again. One simply could not feel impatient or annoyed with this extraordinarily inquisitive young man. He took one past that! So, as I walked on with my pail to the next coop, followed by the young man and the dog, I said:
"What I mean—if you must know all about it——"
"Yes, I must. I mean I'd love to."
Well! "knowing all about it" must be a sort of mild obsession of his. Perhaps he'd been Intelligence Officer or something. The only thing to be done appeared to be to humour him!
So I said:
"What I mean about that young man called Richard Wynn, your double, is that I can't honestly say I know what he was like!"
"Why can't you?" barked the catechist.
"Because I don't remember."
"You don't remember?" quite sharply from Captain Holiday. "How, don't remember? Why don't you?"
"Because it's such ages ago since I saw him," I replied. "Seven years! And what is the next question, please?"
The next question was a brusque
"How often had you seen him, then?"
"Often? Why, I saw him every day," I replied, going down on one knickerbockered knee to wrestle with the refractory door of a coop. "He stayed at my father's place for six months."
The voice above me decreed:
"Then, of course, you must know what the fellow was like."
Extraordinary, the constant interest he took in subjects which had absolutely nothing to do with him! But I'd said a man was like himself. That was next door to talking about what he was like himself—which Elizabeth had declared was all young men ever did want to talk about!
"I don't know," I persisted, rattling the wire-netted door. "I've forgotten Mr. Wynn's face."
"You can't have 'forgotten' the face of a man you saw every day of your life for six months," Captain Holiday informed me, authoritatively. "You must have been what? Thirteen or fourteen. No girl 'forgets' a man's face like that!"
"She does!" I declared.
"People don't 'forget' faces," he repeated. "It's nonsense."
"It is not," I cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated, as I rose. "People do forget what they've never taken very much notice of, even when it was there! I've no memory at all for faces. I only know what I thought of them at the time."
I thought his next question would be, "What did you think of the young man you imagine was like me?" But this was not what came. He demanded, more casually. "And what became of him?"
"I don't know," I replied. "I never heard. Except——" Here I suppressed a half-rueful smile at the thought of what I had heard, only some weeks ago, from this same long-forgotten Richard Wynn.
"Except what?" took up the Inquisitor.
I sighed elaborately. For a moment I felt almost inclined to tell him deliberately the whole madcap story of Richard Wynn's proposal of marriage to me; but for some reason I didn't.
So, looking straight at him, I adopted a tone of studied and explanatory politeness. I hoped this gentle irony might have the effect of making him a little bit ashamed of all his questions.
"I only heard from this Mr. Wynn once," I said. "Then he did not tell me what he was doing, or what had happened to him all these years. So I can't tell you. And I could not write to him, or ask him about anything, because I'd thrown away his letter."
"Thrown it away?" Captain Holiday exclaimed, quite loudly.
"I threw it away by mistake—with the address. So that was that—and I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that's absolutely all I can tell you about him, Captain Holiday!"
I scattered my last handful, let the last replete and peeping chick out of the last coop. Captain Holiday—perhaps feeling a trifle rebuked—said nothing further. Swinging my empty pail I ran down the hillside. He and his dog followed me through the farm gate and went on.
At the door of the kitchen I handed in my pail. The rosy farm-servant said to me:
"Miss, you'll have to run if you want to catch up your friends. They've been gone some time."
I glanced up at the clock.
"Is it so late, Maggie-Mary!" I exclaimed.
I sped through the yard and on to the up-and-down high road, thinking as I went the question that almost every Land Girl asks herself at some time:
"How did I ever manage to walk at any pace at all in the days when I wore hampering skirts to flap about me wherever I turned?"
Before I could find an answer to this question I found Captain Holiday at my side again!
"Let me walk along a bit of the way with you," he suggested quite nicely. "May I?"
What could I say but "If you like"? My way back to camp did take him past the Lodge, after all.
However, I didn't want another Longer Catechism. So, as we fell into step, walking towards the sunset, down the road with basking green on either hand, I decided to introduce the subject of the forthcoming and much-discussed Hospital Concert!
But I was not in time. It was Captain Holiday who started the conversation, and on lines that I hardly expected, but beginning, once again, with one of his questions!
"Is that little pal of yours engaged to be married?"
Surprised, I replied:
"Elizabeth? Miss Weare? To be married? I should think not! I mean, I don't think she ever means to marry."
"That's good," remarked Captain Holiday, cheerfully.
I stared at him.
"'Good'? Why good?"
He said "Oh!" and fumbled in the pocket of his Norfolk for his pipe.
"Oh, perhaps I meant she'd be all the more company for you down here. People in love are poisonously poor company, I find!" he went on, turning to me as if with a burst of confidence. Then he twinkled, gave me a swift glance, opened his lips as if to ask a question; shut them.
I knew what he meant.
Quickly and definitely I snapped out the answer to the question he hadn't asked.
"No! I'm not engaged either!" I said. Then, carrying this war of questions into the odd creature's country, I added, "Are you?"
"Why? I suppose you mean you find me poisonously poor company?" he asked, with a defiant jerk of the head in that scarecrow's tweed hat of his.
"Not at all," I said politely. "But are you?"
Instead of answering he stopped and glanced to the right. There was a break in the hedge.
"Shall we take this short cut home through the fields?" he said.
I followed him to the narrow, greasy path, if it were a path.
It seemed to me one of those short cuts home that are certainly the longest way round! ... How could I—oh, how could I not have realized already that all I wanted was to be walking anywhere—for any distance—with him!
That realization was not to come yet....
But to go back to the beginning of this ramble, Captain Holiday, striding and smoking beside me, said:
"Am I engaged? Well, I say! May I tell you something about myself?"
"That would be a change! Generally, you want to be told things about other people!" I said.
He gave a short laugh.
"Yes; well, now you can have a bit of your own back. I want a woman's point of view on a certain matter. You're sure it won't bore you? I don't mind if it does," he added quickly, with that quicker smile that always brushed any offence out of his words. "Women are put here to listen to men's grousing. However! Seriously, I want to talk to you. You could help me about this."
"I? Help you?" I said. "D'you mean it?" But I knew he meant it. Sincerity was in his tone. Also a new note—appeal.
I could not help feeling pleased. He did not think me a fool then, even if he had seen me first in circumstances that might have given him that impression. He thought that I could help him in his own difficulty, whatever it was.
This was where I suddenly found I must have skipped whole stages in my acquaintanceship with this young man. He had jumped from being a busybody and a stranger to being a friend—yes! A friend to whom one felt positively motherly—or at least sisterly.
I turned to him as we walked, and said:
"Of course I'd be glad to advise you in any way that would be of any use to you. You tell me first."
"Righto!" said Captain Holiday. "By Jove, here's some more of this wire. Never mind. We'll turn off here—I think I struck the wrong field. Well! You were asking me if I were engaged. I am not. I asked a girl to marry me, though, not so long ago."
He stopped. I said, sympathetically:
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"Are you? Why?"
I couldn't help opening my eyes.
"Why? I mean—sorry she turned you down."
Now Captain Holiday opened his eyes.
"Who said she turned me down?" he asked.
In spite of how he improved upon acquaintance, in spite of his friendliness, his nice smile and ways, he was very difficult to make out.
"You said the girl wouldn't be engaged to you——" I began patiently.
"I said nothing of the kind," Captain Holiday interrupted, contradicting me flatly. "I told you I was not engaged—here, it must have been that other turning after all, we'll go back—not engaged, but that I had asked a girl to marry me."
More at sea than before, I retraced my steps down the path beside him, and suggested:
"Then, if the girl said 'Yes' to you——"
"She," explained Captain Holiday, looking serenely over the evening landscape, "did not say either 'Yes' or 'No.'"
Now I saw his difficulty!
Suspense!
Yes. I understood that. How I understood the chills—and flames—of that fever! Hadn't I suffered from them myself, in the days when I had had to think in turn. "He will," "He won't," or "Will he?"
"That's horrible for you," I agreed warmly to this other young man. "It's bad enough to know the worst. But not to know which it's to be is——"
"Quite so," finished Captain Holiday.
"Still, you needn't make up your mind at once that it will be the worst, need you?" I went on soothingly.
"You think I needn't?"
"Why d'you feel you must give up all hope?" I asked.
"Sometimes I don't," he admitted simply.
I nodded, saying:
"It's the other 'sometimes' that's so awful."
"Exactly," he said. "When I think 'after all, why should any girl like me particularly?'"
"You don't often think that, do you?"
"No, not often," said Captain Holiday serenely again, "only occasionally when I've had a bad night and feel off colour and pippy!"
I couldn't help laughing. The sustaining, intoxicating conceit of men! As Elizabeth says, it's the only thing that could keep them going since the war restrictions!
Then he looked quickly sideways at me.
"You think that's neck," he remarked. "Perhaps you think there is no reason why any girl should like me?"
And for the moment his voice dropped a tone, and there was a wistfulness on his brown face. I stopped laughing. I didn't want to hurt his feelings in any way. Besides, when one came to think of it, he was quite nice enough for a girl to like him—quite much!
Thoughtfully I said:—
"So much depends upon the kind of girl!" and then I asked, "What kind of girl is she?" in a tone as gentle as I could make it, so as to avoid jarring him.
But in quite a matter-of-fact, usual sort of tone the young man replied:
"Oh, well! She's the girl I want."
Helpful, wasn't it?
"I see," said I, not seeing anything, of course, except that, as Elizabeth once said, it's quite impossible to get a man to describe anything or anybody so that you know what they are like.
We walked on for a moment in silence, following our shadows on the goldy-green grass; evening shadows that caricatured a giant soldier man striding across the field beside a giantess of a Land Girl.
I began again:
"She might be the type of girl who honestly did not know herself whether it was 'Yes' or 'No' that she wanted to say," I said. "Some girls simply have to take lots of time to consider whether they care for the man in that way or not—even after he's asked them! They have to think things over. They have to look at the man from every point of view before they know their own minds about him. I've met that type of girl. I can't say I understand her mys——"
"Ah," he put in with a quick turn of the head, "you wouldn't be like that! You'd know at once if you could stand the man?"
"I think so," I said, a little shortly. I didn't want to be reminded of what my own views had been about "the man"—that is, Harry. They had led me into making a fool of myself. Hadn't I liked him at once, disastrously, from his first soft dark-eyed glances at me? What I was "like," myself, was not the question. Also I didn't see how it was going to help Captain Holiday.
He, on the other hand, seemed to think it might throw some light upon the subject.
"You'd know at once if it was all N. G. as far as your own feelings were concerned?" he persisted.
"At once," I agreed.
"That would save the other person a lot of trouble, of course," said the young man at my side. "I think you're right. One ought to 'know' at once, about that sort of thing. You would, you say?"
"Yes, I should. But there are such lots of different kinds of girls, Captain Holiday——"
"Of course, I don't see that."
"No. Because you're in love, you see, and people never do see more than just the one person then."
"I expect you're right again," said Captain Holiday. He looked down at me quite submissively—at me, to whom he'd laid down the law in that hectoring fashion every time he'd seen me! He might be right about cow-houses and the laws of gravity and about stock, as well as about any question in his own profession of soldiering—but at least he saw now that I could teach him something about the ways of human beings!
And I felt no longer a Land Girl who was still months away from earning her first stripe, but quite a woman of the world for once!
Encouragingly I went on:
"Perhaps she is the kind of girl who does mean 'Yes' all the time——"
"And didn't say so?"
"Because perhaps she put it off to make it seem all the more wonderful to you when it came," I suggested.
"Ah," he said. "It would be wonderful then?"
How little he must know about love, I thought, to ask such a question.
"Wonderful?" I said, looking away from him across to the sunset. In the radiance of the level rays a swarm of tiny insects spun enraptured—each thinking, possibly, that the sun had risen and shone only for him and his little winged love, creatures of a day.
"One five minutes of that," I said, as much to myself as to him, "is worth having lived for twenty stodgy years without it. Even if you lose it again it would have been worth it!"
"You think so?"
"Yes! And I do hope that it will happen like that for you," I told him. "I don't mean the losing it again part. I do hope that you will get everything that you want."
"Yes, so do I," said Captain Holiday, in that rather disconcerting way of his. "But, look here—you seem to be able to tell one so much—supposing it were neither of those two things that you suggest that kept the girl from answering, as I want her to? What about that?"
"Couldn't you," I suggested, "ask her again some time?"
He fingered his small, obstinately-growing moustache.
"That's an idea. Yes. Well! Thanks very much. I'll think about what you've said, Joan."
Joan——!
"By the way, I have decided to call you by your Christian name."
"Oh! Er—yes," I agreed, staggered, but feeling that I could not refuse this proof of goodwill to a young man who had just made me the confidante of so much. "H—How did you know it?"
"Doesn't your little pal call you by it? Mine's Dick, you know."
I nodded, not feeling I could use it just yet. If he'd been as abrupt in his love-making as he was in his making friends, there was some excuse, thought I, for the young woman who kept him waiting for his answer.
Then, with equal brightness, he changed the subject altogether.
"D'you know that I'm having a house-party at the Lodge next week? For the concert—yes. You've seen my wounded pal, haven't you? Then I've got a girl from London and her mother coming down to stay."
"A girl—oh! have you?"
And then I could not help it. The question slipped out, as it were, of its own accord.
"Captain Holiday, is she 'the' girl?"
But the exasperating man wouldn't give me a direct answer.
"The girl," he said with a laugh. "Ah, well, I suppose most girls have got somebody who'd consider they were 'the' girl."
"Yes, yes; but I mean is she the girl you've been talking to me about all this time?"
Again he only laughed, and said something chaffing about "curiosity."
Curiosity indeed! From him! Pretty good, wasn't it? And not another sensible word could I get out of Captain Holiday for the rest of the walk.
When we did finally reach the field, however, from which we could see the corrugated iron roof of our hut set in the trees, he did vouchsafe to me one more remark about the girl who was shortly coming down from London. Just after his salute and "good evening," he turned back to me to say:
"I'll tell you this much: she happens to be my own first cousin."
However, he'd said enough—or left enough unsaid. I knew well enough that, cousin or no cousin, she was the girl about whom there'd been all that discussion.
"To maidens' vows and swearingHenceforth no credit give."—GEORGE WITHER.
I ran back to the hut.
So late! I found the tea-supper all cleared away, and most of the Campites dispersed about their evening avocations.
Only Elizabeth the trusty had kept back for me milk, a huge plateful of bread-and-butter, and cold bacon.
I expected that Elizabeth would sit down near me while I devoured my meal, and would spice it with comments on the reason for my lateness. Here I had reckoned without my hostess. Not only did she not have a word to say about my having walked—or loitered—home with a young man; but she hadn't, apparently, got a word to say to me about anything, though we had hardly seen each other all day!
In an abstracted way she glanced at the food disappearing from before me, murmuring absently:
"Mustard? Or don't you take it?" Then, looking at the clock said: "Slow, I'm sure." And then, with a curious look on her small face, she left me and strayed forth into the gloaming outside the hut.
I finished my meal, cleared it away, and went out to find her. No sign of Elizabeth in the field that led down to the bathing-pool. I crossed the tiny bridge over the stream, and wandered into the next field.
Here, through the branches of some hazels growing beside a stone fence, I caught sight of the gleam of a light overall. I went up to it. I found Elizabeth in a nook where it was almost dark under the branches.
"Hullo!" I greeted her. "So this is where you've hidden yourself away, is it?"
Elizabeth, turning, gave a violent start. "Hullo," she said, in what I can only describe as a most unwelcoming tone. To me, her inseparable chum!
I let myself down on a boulder close to her.
"Elizabeth, old thing, what's the matter? Have you got a headache?" I said.
"Headache!" echoed Elizabeth quite pettishly. "You know I never have headaches."
"I thought perhaps you were a little tired."
"Tired! Not in the very least, thanks." My chum's tone was discouraging.
I tried again.
"Look here, my dear, are you stuffy with me about anything? Did I rag you too much about getting tamed by Hackenschmidt the Second, or——"
"Stuffy?" echoed the little Man-hater, her tone getting snappier and snappier. "If I were, Joan, I'd tell you."
"Yes; I should have thought so," said I, feeling perfectly convinced that something was up. "For you know that if there's anything I could do for you——"
Here Elizabeth quite took my breath away by the suddenness with which she spoke.
"There is something you can do," she blurted out through the gloom. "You can just go away, if you don't mind, and leave me alone."
I'd only just breath left to say flatly:
"Oh, righto," and to get up and set off back to the hut.
Elizabeth wanted me to leave her alone! What on earth was the meaning of that?
"To be left alone"—with most girls that means that they have fallen in love and want to pick themselves up before they can assess the damage.
But with Elizabeth? With that genuine Loather of Men?
Never—!
With most girls, to say "I dislike men" means one of perhaps six things.
1. They don't know any men.
2. No men have been known to pay any attention to them.
3. Some man has treated them very badly.
4. They wish to be contradicted and teased.
5. They are fibbing for the sake of fibbing.
With Elizabeth not one of these reasons would hold for a second.
But Elizabeth in love! Reason positively shouted an "Oh, no." ...
Yet a mad little suspicion, whispering within me, seemed to defy that voice of reason. As I walked along in the fast-gathering gloom I remembered I had seen a man look at Elizabeth quite lately. More lately still I had seen Elizabeth most uncharacteristically confused at the mention of that man's name.
Wildly improbable, I told myself. And, as I did so I walked straight into the meaning for Elizabeth's wanting to be left to herself just then.
In fact, I bumped into the young man, who was coming along the path.
"Oh, sorry," said a low-pitched, masculine voice that I had heard before. A hand was put up to a cap. Then the figure which I had run against passed quickly on up the field.
Elizabeth's "old" Colonel! She was meeting him out there!
Him?
There are no words to describe my condition of pole-axed astonishment at this.... Why try to find any?
(Elizabeth——!)
* * * * * * *
In about half an hour she returned to the hut, where the others were turning up again by twos and threes.
Elizabeth, looking about two inches taller than usual, gave a defensive glare round the groups of smiling and gossiping girls. But none of them had seen her except me. The defensive glare was then focussed upon me.
I hadn't meant to say a word to the girl! I really hadn't!
I suppose nobody feels exactlychattywhen they've just fallen out of a balloon?
But Elizabeth, evidently wishful to speak, followed me up to the mattresses when I went to unroll mine for the night.
"Joan! Er—he told me he met you!"
"Oh, yes!" I said, in a voice as ordinary as possible. I didn't want her to think I was going to "rag," or make any sort of fuss about this. Why shouldn't Elizabeth go out for an evening stroll with a young man if she wanted to—just like any other girl on the land or anywhere else?
"He knows some of my people," Elizabeth flung back in that defensive mutter, "and he wanted to talk to me about another tenant for the flat in London, and, as well as that, he's got a mother who's got a friend who's got a daughter who's thinking of joining up for the Land Army. So, you see, he wanted to—talk to me."