XXIII
Loiswas present, in a corner, at that last parade at Fortune’s Farm when the new rifles were given out. And, later on, with misty eyes and that troublesome choking in the throat, she was watching the long wavering gray line as it swung gallantly away with skirling pipes and eager faces—en route for the front.
Then she turned to go quietly home to her mother and Uncle Tony, and to wait God’s will in the matter.
She was to live at Oakdene as became Ray’s wife, but her time was to be spent between the old home and the new, and her energies devoted to cheering them both. For both were lonely now and clouded. Of all the merry company that had filled them with such joyousness of youth, she was the only one they could now count upon.
Victoria and Honor were out all day, slaving on Out-of-Work-Girls and Belgian Refugee Committees, organising crowds of willing but in many cases incompetent workers,—arranging accommodation and hostels,—procuring houses, funds, and furniture, and getting them into something like working order.
Noel was only in for supper, bed, and breakfast, and not always that. The Colonel was carrying on a recruiting campaign with a patriotic vehemence much in excess of his years and his bodily powers.
Miss Mitten meekly, and Mrs Dare boldly, did their utmost to keep his exertions within reasonable limits. But to all their expostulations and warnings his invariable reply was,—“We need every man we can get, and since I can’t go out, I must do all I can at home. Better to wear out than to rust out or go under to those damned barbarians.”
“But you’ll do no good by killing yourself,” Mrs Dare had remonstrated, one morning when he looked in as usual in passing, and punctuated his paragraphs with muffled sneezes.
“Oh—killing myself! It’s not got to that yet. (Att-i-cha!) I’m enjoying it, I assure you, Mrs Mother. We got twenty fine (Att-i-cha!)—boys at Greendale last night.”
“Well, do keep your hat on when you must speak outside, I beg of you. The nights are getting cold and you’re not as young as you were, you know.”
“It’s my one com—att-i-cha!—complaint. And it’s only the outer husk that feels it. I’m really wonderfully young inside, you know. I tell you, I was quite put out yesterday when a young fellow insisted on giving me his seat in the train.”
“It was very nice of him.”
“Hmph! Well, no doubt it was,—att-i-cha!—But, hang it all, I don’t look as decrepit as all that, do I? However, I got the better of him by giving it to an old lady—a really old lady—a minute or two later. By the way, Lois had a post-card from Ray this morning.”
“What does he say? Where have they got to?” she asked eagerly.
“Says nothing except that he’s well and very busy. No word as to where, of course.”
“And no postmark?”
“Nothing. They’re behind the war-screen now. We shall know nothing more,—unless through the despatches, maybe. Now we’ve got to live on—att-i-cha!—on faith and hope,” he said meaningly.
“And keep our hats on when we speak outside,” she retaliated.
“That’s all right,” he laughed. “I’ll begin taking you and Auntie Mitt with me, one on each side, to hold it down. I want to wave it all the time nowadays, at thought of having those infernal Huns on the run at last. More good news again to-day. Russia’s smashedAustria into little bits in Galicia. Whurr—att-i-cha!—oo!”
“They were retiring somewhere yesterday.”
“In East Prussia. Quick advance there was by way of diversion no doubt, and now they’ve done their work and are taking up safer positions.”
“When any part of our side retires it’s always a strategic retreat,” smiled Mrs Dare. “But when the Germans retire it’s always a rout.”
“Well—so ’tis,” he laughed, and shook hands and sneezed himself away.
“You’d be very much the better of a couple of days in your bed,” was her last piece of advice as he went down the path.
“When the war’s over. Did you ever manage to keep John in bed for a couple of days?”
“Yes—once,—for about two weeks—when he had pneumonia.”
“Well I’ll stop in bed when I get pneumonia,” and he waved his hand again and marched away.
At teatime, when Miss Mitten and Mrs Dare, and their respective body-belt and jersey, were keeping one another company in friendly silence in the Oakdene parlour, Lois having gone into town to complete her outfit, the Colonel came in looking no more than a washed-out rag of his usual cheerful self.
“I’ve decided to take your advice, Mrs Mother, and lie up for half a day,” he said depressedly. “I ought to be at Northcote to-night, but Penberthy has taken it on instead. He’s a good chap, Penberthy, but unfortunately he can’t speak worth a button.However——”
“The sooner you’re in your bed the better,” said Mrs Dare. “You can’t afford to neglect a cold such as that.”
“I always obey superior orders, don’t I, Auntie Mitt?”
“I’m sure you did, Sir Anthony,”—at which he chuckled, but less heartily than usual.
“Just one cup of tea to cheer me up, and then, if you will be so good, Auntie Mitt, a good big white-wine posset,—oneof your very best, and you’ll send me up a bit of dinner later. Nothing like one of Auntie Mitt’s big white-wine possets for chasing a cold out of the system. Talk about grateful and comforting!”
“I know them. Take my advice and put your feet in mustard and water as well,” said Mrs Dare. “You’ve got a very bad cold on you.”
“I shouldn’t wonder if it’s a touch of influenza,” said Miss Mitten, when she returned from compounding the posset. “They say there’s a good deal of it about. I don’t know that a posset is the best thing for him. He seems hot enough to me. But it’s no good arguing with him. He always does just as he pleases.”
“I thought you agreed that he always obeyed superior orders,” smiled Mrs Dare.
“And so he does, but they’re always his own. When he was in the army I have no doubt he did all he was told and sometimes perhaps a bit more. That’s how he won his V.C. But since he retired he’s been his own master entirely.”
“If he seems feverish in the morning I should send for Dr Rhenius, if I were you. He has been grievously overworking himself of late, and, since he won’t take care himself, you must be careful for him.”
“Yes, I will,” said Auntie Mitt, with a very decided nod and pursed lips. “He forgets his age sometimes.”
Next morning the Colonel was so limp and full of pains that he raised no objection when Miss Mitten suggested the Doctor.
“A stitch in time sometimes saves nine,” quoth she.
“I’ve got ’em already,” grunted the patient.
“Then it’s a touch of pleurisy, I expect,” and she hastened to get advice on the subject.
Dr Rhenius at once confirmed her speculative diagnosis.
“You’re my prisoner, Colonel, till I say the word, or I won’t answer for consequences. You’ve been altogether overdoing it, you know.”
“King and Country need you,” grunted the Colonel in extenuation.
“Well, you’ll be more use to them alive than dead, and you’ve got to knock off now, or you’ll knock out. Besides, they can spare you well enough for a bit. They’re getting all the men they can handle, aren’t they? In fact they don’t seem able to handle properly those they’ve got, according to the papers.”
“Big job, you see, ... machinery hardly in order yet.... Took us unawares, ... but we’re going to see it through.”
“What have you got up to now?”
“What Kitchener asked for.... Half a million or so.... We’ll need lots more before we’ve done with it.... Get me right again as quick as you can.... I’ll go crazy lying here.”
“If you follow my instructions, and keep still, and don’t talk so much, I’ll get you right again. And when I do, just try and remember that you can’t stand as much as you could when you were five-and-twenty.”
The Colonel grunted, since talking set the pain in his side stabbing again. Dr Rhenius wrote out a prescription, gave Miss Mitten very specific directions as to treatment, shook a warning finger at the obstreperous one, and promised to call back in the evening.
“He’ll not be easy to manage,” he said to Miss Mitten, as he went downstairs. “Shall I send you in a nurse?”
“Is it as bad as that?” asked Auntie Mitt, to whom an outside nurse suggested extremity. “If you think it necessary, Doctor, we must have one.”
“No need to be alarmed—as yet. But I know him, and he’ll be a handful. And then there’s the night work, you see.”
“If you think it necessary then.”
But as he went down the path he met Mrs Dare coming up to enquire how things were. And when he told her, she said at once, “Nurse? We don’t need any outside nurse. We’ll manage him between us all right. Lois will be a great assistance.”
“She’s home then? And Ray?”
“They’ve all gone,—to the front, we suppose;—the first Territorials to go. They consider it a great honour. For myself ... it makes me sick to think of it all.”
“Very well, then. The three of you ought to be able to manage him among you. We will leave it so.”
“We’ll manage him all right. Tell us just what you want done and we’ll do it. It will be good for us all and keep our minds off other things.”
No man could have had three more devoted and indefatigable nurses. They spared themselves nothing and put up with the safety-valve growlings of their patient like angels.
The Colonel had had so little illness in his life—apart from wounds, which were quite a different matter—and felt so keenly his country’s need for him to be up and doing, that he took his shelving with anything but a good grace. Auntie Mitt and Lois alone would never have been able to manage him. But to Mrs Dare he submitted—a little grumpily, at times—but still submitted, and exploded all his objurgations on things in general under cover of the bed-clothes.
He insisted on Lois reading all the latest news to him from the morning and evening papers, and forbade her to say a word in her letters to Ray about his illness. “No good worrying him,” he said. “He’ll have his hands full out there without having me on his mind.”
But presently he developed pneumonia in addition to the pleurisy, and the Doctor put a peremptory embargo on all war news, since it invariably sent his temperature up. Absolute lack of news, however, had just as bad an effect, and finally he was permitted to hear from day to day that things were going well, and all the papers were kept for him to read when he got better.
They made much of the fresh loyal offers of help from India, and of the successful aeroplane raid on the Dusseldorf Zeppelin sheds, carefully withheld any hint of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue, and the impudentquarter-of-an-hour’s bombardment of Madras by the lively Emden, and soothed him with assurances that France and Britain were splendidly holding their own along the Aisne, that Russia was forging ahead in Galicia, and that recruiting was quite up to expectations. In fact they played motherly censor to him with the already over-heavily censored news, and permitted nothing whatever of an upsetting nature to reach him; and of course they overdid it,—just as the other censor did.
He grew suspicious of all this cotton-woolling, and at last insisted on Lois holding the paper before him each morning so that he might scan the head-lines. Then he indicated what he wanted read and there was no getting out of it.
Dr Rhenius, appealed to, did his best to break him off it, but the result was disastrous. The Colonel’s temperature went up a degree and a half through suppressed indignation, and he had to be allowed his news.
“Not a da-asht infant,” he murmured. “Can stand it—good or bad. Must know.”
But the fever sapped his strength to such an extent that at times he lay so listless and apparently careless even of news that Auntie Mitt grew apprehensive.
“I don’t like it,” she confined to Mrs Dare. “It’s so very unlike him. I would really be thankful to hear him swear a little.”
“The fever has weakened him. Once the crisis is past he’ll begin to pick up again, and then we’ll tell him you want to hear him swear again.”
“It’s not really that I want to hear him swear, you understand, my dear,” Auntie Mitt superfluously explained, “but that I wish he were well enough to do so.”
“I know. I would like to hear him too.”
To keep the house quiet Victoria was stopping with Honor at The Red House, which was quite to Noel and Gregor’s taste.
They were still doing heavy route-marching almost every day, and on the off-days and Friday, which was pay-day,they mouched about Head-Quarters or put in a bit of drill in Hyde Park.
The pay of three shillings a day—to cover travelling expenses and daily rations—was to Gregor a negligible matter. But to Noel, who had never earned a farthing in his life, it was uplifting. He was actually keeping himself—in cigarettes and amusements,—and in conjunction with Gregor even took the girls to a theatre now and again. It was a grand thing not to be dependent on anyone for his pocket-money, and it made him feel excessively manly.
He and Gregor—who, like a good chum, did his best to keep his purse to the level of his friend’s—made many quaint discoveries in the matter of restaurants where they got a cut off the joint and two vegetables and bread, and choice of cheese or sweets, for the all-round sum of one shilling.
Marching days, however, were lean days with them, when they were dependent on the none-too-filling sandwiches and biscuits, and apples and ginger-beer, of the travelling canteen. And those nights they took home tremendous appetites and were unjovial till they had been satisfied,—a task which they divided about equally between The Red House and the White.
Mrs MacLean rejoiced whenever they went to her, and would have liked them to come every night, and she was never caught short. The girls did their best. But the boys’ movements were as a rule so unforeseeable, and at all times subject to such unexpected alteration on the spur of the moment, that providing for them was no easy matter.
Gregor, at all events, showed no sign of complaint, and doubtless the presence of the girls more than made up for any little defects in the commissariat. Noel expressed himself freely on the subject if occasion offered.
“Wait till we go into camp,” grinned Gregor. “You’ll learn things, my boy. Bully beef and hard potatoes, and mouldy cheese, and jam that’s all the same whatever it calls itself!”
“Rotten! They might at all events feed us properly.”
“It’s a shame,” said Honor. “I should strike, or mutiny, or whatever’s the proper thing to do in such a case.”
“Proper thing is to grin and bear it and buy some extra grub outside to fill up with. If you kicked you’d be taken out and shot at dawn,” said Gregor gravely.
“I don’t think soldiering’s as nice as I thought it was.”
“It’s not,—not all of it. But it’s got to be done since the Kaiser’s said so.”
“The wretch! I wish he would die.”
“Not yet. He’ll suffer a lot more if he lives. At least I hope so.”
“He can never suffer as he deserves to,” said Vic. “I would have all the pain and misery he has brought about visited on his own head, but that’s not humanly possible.”
“He’ll suffer,” said Gregor weightily.
“If we lick him all to pieces, as we shall do,” said Noel, “he’ll surrender to England and be given a palace to live in and a nice little pension. We’re altogether too soft-hearted. When a man’s down we’re always sorry for him, no matter what he’s done, and we sentimentalise over him like a lot of silly schoolgirls.”
“That all you know?” said Honor.
“What about those kilts?” asked Vic.
“Next week, please the powers! Things are turning up by degrees. A lot of sporrans and spats came in this afternoon. I saw them myself.”
“We’ll be getting clothed bit by bit,” said Gregor. “You’ll see us swanking it in one spat and a sporran maybe. There’s no kilts come yet, and as for tunics!—you see there’s more khaki wanted than they can turn out, though the mills are working night and day, they say.”
“And pretty poor stuff it is, from all accounts,” said Noel. “You should hear a song the fellows have about the rotten time they’re taking to give us our uniforms.How does it go now? They roar it at top of their voice whenever the Colonel comesalong,—
‘There’s a matter here to which we call attention,Concerning which we feel a trifle warm,—The days are getting cold, and we’re slowly growing old,And here we are without our uniform.’
‘There’s a matter here to which we call attention,Concerning which we feel a trifle warm,—The days are getting cold, and we’re slowly growing old,And here we are without our uniform.’
‘There’s a matter here to which we call attention,Concerning which we feel a trifle warm,—The days are getting cold, and we’re slowly growing old,And here we are without our uniform.’
‘There’s a matter here to which we call attention,
Concerning which we feel a trifle warm,—
The days are getting cold, and we’re slowly growing old,
And here we are without our uniform.’
“Chorus, Greg!”
‘Sunday we pray we soon may get ’em;Monday, our spirits rise a bit;Tuesday is the day they say they’re on the way, but not a bit of it!Wednesday, we grow a shade mistrustful,Thursday our hopes begin to fall;On Friday we’re despairing,On Saturday we’re swearing,We’ll never get the—er—ruddy things—at all.’”
‘Sunday we pray we soon may get ’em;Monday, our spirits rise a bit;Tuesday is the day they say they’re on the way, but not a bit of it!Wednesday, we grow a shade mistrustful,Thursday our hopes begin to fall;On Friday we’re despairing,On Saturday we’re swearing,We’ll never get the—er—ruddy things—at all.’”
‘Sunday we pray we soon may get ’em;Monday, our spirits rise a bit;Tuesday is the day they say they’re on the way, but not a bit of it!Wednesday, we grow a shade mistrustful,Thursday our hopes begin to fall;On Friday we’re despairing,On Saturday we’re swearing,We’ll never get the—er—ruddy things—at all.’”
‘Sunday we pray we soon may get ’em;
Monday, our spirits rise a bit;
Tuesday is the day they say they’re on the way, but not a bit of it!
Wednesday, we grow a shade mistrustful,
Thursday our hopes begin to fall;
On Friday we’re despairing,
On Saturday we’re swearing,
We’ll never get the—er—ruddy things—at all.’”
“Bravo!” cried the girls. “Encore!”
But just at that point Mr Dare came in, with a tired nod to them all, and Noel’s high spirits seemed to lower at once by several degrees.
“How is the Colonel to-night?” Mr Dare asked Vic.
“He’s just about the same, Mr Dare. The stabbing pain has gone, they say. But he’s very limp. Even good news of the war hardly bucks him up. He seems to want just to lie quiet, and I’ve never in my life known him do that before. It shows how pulled down he is.”
“It’s the crisis to-night, I think, and it’s going to be a wild night,”—as the wind shook the windows as though trying to force its way in. “A bad night for the trenches and a worse on the sea,” and he subsided into the evening paper.
“Lois had another post-card from Ray this morning, father,” said Honor.
“That’s good. He’s all right so far then. Doesn’t say where, I suppose?”
“Gives no clue. Not allowed. Simply says he’s quite all right and awfully busy.”
“Well, we must be thankful for that much. The losses all round are terrible to think of. If it goes on much longer at this rate——” but consideration for the boys cut his Cassandra ruminations short.
“Has the City any views as to how long it’ll last, sir?” asked Gregor.
“Any amount of views but no knowledge. Some are sure it’ll be all over byChristmas——”
“Rotten! I jolly well hope not,” jerked Noel.
“—And some say it will last two years or even three.”
“There’ll be a lot of wastage if it goes on that long,” said Gregor. “And all the countries would be bankrupt, I should say.”
“It’s too ghastly to think of. We’ll hope for better things,” and he took to his papers again.