PART IV
CHAPTER I
Nell and Timothy lay among thick buttercups. Here and there the shimmering, glazed yellow lifted to circles of pale cowslips. Nell’s russet silk jersey was a splash of deeper colour in all the gold; the spilt pollen trembled on her loosened plaits of hair, the lustreless heavy brown of water densely overhung. Timothy thought he had never seen anyone more beautiful ... and he was flying over to France the next day.
“Nell——”
“Wait a minute, Tim.... I’m thinking.” She dared order him to wait, this fair young hero of hers. Because she had learnt to believe, through a year of wonder, and hesitation, and ignorance shaken into discernment, that he was indeed hers. And with belief came power—oh, what strange new power in her deep look ... young Nell knew everything now—all about feelings and life and colour ... she knew what feelings were when Timothy’s hand lay on her bare arm; and life was—Oh, but she mustn’t tell ... not yet ... you wouldn’t understand, because it’s all got to do with Timothy. And colour was what happened to Timothy if near to him she stirred or brushed his khaki sleeve....
She lay on her back among the buttercups; staring into the sky, and thinking.
“You see,” at last, “it’s such a Great Responsibility.”
He nodded, and echoed her phrase: “Yes—it’s No End of a Responsibility!”
He said this whenever they discussed the subject, and with a more profound air of worry each time. And they had discussed it so often. That New Generation! it really gave a fellow a terrific lot to think about.
“It isn’t as if it were just you and me, Tim. That would be so easy to settle. But—it’s all the others. Just think, Timothy, how many are being beaten down to be miserable just because they dare not walk away, be happy—like Gillian!”
“It’s awful!” Timothy’s eyes were round and solemn.... He was not frightfully keen on the New Generation. Had he been a rollicking youngster, he would have puffed it away in a laugh. But he followed laboriously where Nell led ... and thus got his answer, from the lips of the acolyte and the disciple, to the question he had once put to Blair Stevenson: “Yes, but what’s it allabout? What are they up to, these girls?”
“Look here, Nell.... I do so want to—to marry you. I’ve told you billions of times. Darling ...” he dropped to a whisper; “Darling, I could get a special licence;won’tyou? now that——.” He meant to say “Now that I’m off to-morrow,” but bit back the words, holding to an unspoken pact among the young men who go into the fighting line, that the “last-day-of-all” leverage is not a fair one to use in the shift of a girl’s will.
“Ican’tmarry you, Tim. How could I ever look Gillian in the face again? After she’s been so brave and wonderful ... just to show us all the way ... it’s simply nothing to follow, after someone else has gone first!”
“But——” Timothy stopped, his light thick eyebrows were drawn to a puzzled frown. Then he started off again—“I don’t see whatharmit does anyone, us being married?”
“Marriage—is—obsolete,” said Nell, with absolute dead certainty. “And we owe it to the future, Timothy.”
“Owe what?”
“Not to give in.”
Nell was resolved not to give in. And hers was a nature of such thick obstinacy as Timothy had not even begun to suspect. There was little of Deb’s pliability about young Nell. Impressionable she was, unexpectedly, as in the case of her unswerving, unquestioning devotion to Gillian Sherwood, but she could not be readily diverted this way and that, as could Deb.Thisway—but notthat.
“If we gave in and got married in the old stupid fashion, then dozens of other twos might do it because we did.”
“Would that matter?” Timothy asked unhappily.
She flashed: “Oh, if you’d rather be just anybody instead of Pioneers——” Then reproachfully, “You pretended to agree last time we talked about it. You oughtn’t to pretend, Timothy, because it makes me sort of step on something which I’m quite sure is there but isn’t—like that funny, hateful feelingwhen you go up one stair too much in the dark—d’you know?”
“Yes. But it’s not so bad as when you don’t come down one stair enough.”
“Yes, it is. It’s worse. Your way only makes one fall and hurt oneself ... it’s quite ordinary. But the other way gives you a—an inside feeling ... oh, I don’t know—like a shock!”
“Well, anyway,” said Tim, trying to regain forfeited ground, “I wasn’t pretending. Of course the idea is wonderful about being pioneers, and not minding—and—and going first to clear away the rubbish for the others. And of course I think it no end plucky of Gillian to go and live with the fellow she loves, nor bother a cuss about being married or anything. But—need we?” He added: “You’re different, Nell ... that’s what I mean.”
It was not quite all he meant. But how could he express his sense of her harebell frailty; and his great desire—heritage of two thousand years and more years behind—to act the male, and protect her, and mightily build her round with protection that not a whistleful of cold air could pierce one chink of his protection on to one inch of her sensitive soul.
Nell loved Timothy. On the second of April (she remembered the day) he had kissed her slowly and reverently—and then suddenly, with queer eyes, and cherub’s mouth grimly puckered and set, had strangled her body in his arms till she wondered.... Be sure a girl loves the boy in whose eyes she first sees that special queer look called up by her.
But Gillian still claimed her worship. Gillian she still idealized from footstool vantage. Gillian was a genius, and Gillian was brave, and Gillian had taken careless notice of her, and sometimes even been whimsically tender; Gillian had never laughed at her—the least she could do in gratitude was to regulate her conduct by Gillian’s; to trust and follow her chosen pilot; not let the sacrifice be in vain.... Why, supposing after Gillian had risked her very soul in daring initiative, all her disciples had scuttled backwards from her example ... and ... and got married! Nell’s face burnt with the shame of it; she pressed her hot cheek down among the cool stems.... Funny, how enormous the thicket of buttercups looked above her, viewed right down here amongst their beginnings ... flicker of green and shadow of gold andminute fragments of notched fern and leaf, of weed and moss and wee scurrying insects ... the polished petals bulged close to her eyelids, a bright blue beetle swung like a jewel from the tip of a blade of grass ... below all this stir and hurry and colour—what else was there? Could she get deeper down into it? Deeper and deeper? If she lay quite, quite still, would the earth-life fold her up and cover her over with its smell and its hum ... drowse—that was an earth-word.... Nell repeated it softly ... “drowse ... drowse....”
“Billy Dawson’s number has gone up,” Timothy’s voice, startlingly near and loud, split the little circle of hush she had woven about her. “Saw it in the paper to-day. Poor old Billy—he was one of the best. Brought down three Boches first and then Archie got him. Rotten luck—I liked old Bill. This was his second time out there....”
And all not quite as irrelevant as it appeared. Timothy felt urgently the need of now or never making some special appeal to Nell, a thrust to penetrate all her spiritual mufflers. Because it so literally might be never—after to-day. But he could not say this—there was the bother of it! It simply wasn’t done in the Flying Corps—of course not. But maybe if he just insinuated into her perception that airmen do occasionally get killed—other airmen—especially when for the second time out there—well, no harm in that, surely? Timothy, whose natural blunt honesty did not often lead him into strategy, now viewed himself as a very Machiavelli of subtle craft. He watched her closely for a wash of deeper colour in her neck and cheeks. But Nell rarely flushed ... and he could not see her eyes....
A wind trembled over the top of the buttercups, swayed them from misty gold to a brilliant shining sea of light....
“Oh!” and Nell sprang upright, “I want to get closer to them—oh, how does one get closer andcloser.... I thought to lie in among them, but it doesn’t help a bit....” She began to gather up whole masses of buttercups, not picking each one singly from the stem, but tearing riotously, indiscriminately, an armful at a time, as though she were quenching a thirst.... Timothy, his gaze round with amazement, wondered what was the secret spring of this outburst of passion, venting itself on buttercups, millions of buttercups ... already she had wrenched away more than she could carry; they tumbled from her fingers, and unheeding she stepped onthem and grasped for more ... the long stems clung about her ankles—tripped her to her knees. Timothy leapt forward and clutched her as she fell against him—saw her and held her and kissed her through the sharp-edged little petals—brushed them impatiently away.... “Closer—and closer!” he sobbed—
“Tim—I oughtn’t! We oughtn’t!...”
“It’sright—you said so....” (Timothy had no idea he was being funny!)
The meadow, before these human babes stepped into it, was scooped with the rhythm of a perfect yellow bowl. But now the buttercups which had escaped the handling of Nell’s fever-fury, stood away, aloof and delicate, from those other marred and trampled patches ... buttercups wilting ... buttercups dead.